Outside Oprah's school, a growing frustration

WASHINGTON -- Oprah Winfrey's unveiling of a luxurious $40 million boarding school for 152 girls in South Africa earlier this month, coming in the midst of burgeoning interest in Africa's orphans from churches, philanthropists, and celebrities, has sparked frustration among African charities over the failure of some donors to spread their money more widely to achieve a greater impact.

Some leaders of grass-roots organizations said that they are helping thousands of orphans with budgets of only tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and that Winfrey's school was a prominent example of a project that fulfills an outsider's vision and not a community's.

Winfrey, the TV show host who is rapidly expanding her reach into philanthropy, is one of numerous powerful figures ranging from Madonna to American evangelical leaders to billionaires such as Bill Gates and Warren E. Buffett who have zeroed in on Africa's growing problem of impoverished children. The continent has an estimated 53 million orphans, including 12 million who have lost one or both parents to AIDS. Just 15 years ago, only about 300,000 children had lost a parent to AIDS.

Winfrey, who has said that former South African president Nelson Mandela urged her to build a school, said in a statement to the Globe yesterday that she planned to build more schools around Africa like the one she just opened, calling it a "model for other schools and . . . a launching pad for influencing education around the world. This is just the beginning."

But for Africans and Americans who work with AIDS orphans, Winfrey's gift ignored a time-tested path to succeeding with development aid: Communities themselves must identify ways outsiders can help, not vice versa. But many grass-roots activists in Africa say that donors often dictate terms of projects and that recipients, even if they disagree, march to orders.

"We Africans are in need, so we just follow what the donors tell us. But they don't find out what we want or what we need," said Jane Wachila , 36, a mother of two girls who runs a Catholic AIDS Action program in Katima Mulilo , Namibia, in the country's northeast tip.

Wachila runs a program for 1,500 orphans and other vulnerable children, providing school uniforms, twice-a-week meals, and after-school programs in a community that has one of the highest HIV prevalence rates in the world -- 43 percent among adults. Wachila and others also frequently visit the children's homes to make sure the environment is stable. Her budget last year was $80,000.

She had heard about the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in Henley-on-Klip , 25 miles south of Johannesburg, and said she could not understand why Winfrey spent so much for so few. The school, whose first students are 12- or 13-year-old girls from homes earning less than $800 a month, plans to expand to 450. Winfrey helped select the first 152 from more than 5,500 applicants, a 4 percent acceptance rate.

"If you take only a handful of girls, what about the rest of them?" Wachila said.

Winfrey spent five years designing and building the school, and when it opened on Jan. 2 she defended what some called excesses, such as the inclusion of a beauty parlor and a yoga studio.

"I understand that many in the [South Africa] school system and out feel that I'm going overboard, and that's fine," she told reporters. "This is what I want to do."

In her statement to the Globe, she said: "Around the world, there are millions of girls in developing countries who will not have an education or even get to secondary school. What I wanted to do is give an opportunity to girls who were like me, girls who were poor, who had come from disadvantaged circumstances, but girls who had a light so bright that not even poverty, disease, and life circumstances could dim that light."

Winfrey, whose financial worth is estimated at $1.5 billion, has given hundreds of millions of dollars to other projects in the United States and around the world, including many related to education. But her South African project seems to have touched her the most. She called the students "my girls" several times during the school's opening and said at one point, "I see myself in them."

She included luxury elements such as fireplaces in every building and white duvets for each bed. But she told CNN that she does not want her students to lose sight of their roots. "The idea is to allow these children an opportunity so that they would go back to their families and their communities and lift their communities and families up," she said.

But some grass-roots activists said they are worried that the atmosphere of privilege will separate the children from their communities.

In Rwanda, a tiny landlocked country in central Africa just 12 years removed from a genocide that killed nearly a million people, Mary Balikungeri , director of the Rwanda Women Community Development Network , said donors should be helping communities as much as individuals.

"I think the initiative of individual Americans like Oprah are very welcome, but they need to do much more research locally to be able to see the most effective way of reaching out to many," said Balikungeri, whose organization helps support 40 grass-roots groups that look after more than 50,000 orphans. Her budget is $300,000.

Balikungeri said her objection to Winfrey's school goes beyond the per-student cost, which is well into the tens of thousands of dollars. She said she worried that the school experience would disconnect them from their families and friends.

"We look to communities to be the foundation of everything," she said. "Education must go beyond books, beyond academic learning. It has to be connected with their communities. My fear is they end up being part of the elite and don't value the masses."

Kerry Olson , president and founder of Firelight Foundation , a Santa Cruz, Calif.-based group that helps children orphaned or affected by HIV and AIDS, said there are many cost-effective projects helping vulnerable children in Africa, but few Americans know about them. Her group published a guide for US faith-based groups that emphasized support for community projects, as opposed to building more orphanages, a favorite of church groups.

Olson said she worries that publicity surrounding Winfrey's school, as well as Madonna's plea that more Americans adopt African children, as the performer herself did last year in Malawi, will overshadow efforts started by African communities. Her foundation has given $6.4 million in the past six years to 200 organizations that help hundreds of thousands of orphans in 12 African countries.

"The problem with donors in general is that they see a mud hut and a child in rags, and then they see an orphanage and a child with a roof over their head and that looks so much better," Olson said. "What they don't see is the grandmother in the back of that hut who loves the grandson and the connections that child has with the community."

Nonetheless, Jim Yong Kim , the former head of HIV and AIDS programs at the World Health Organization and now a Harvard professor, said Winfrey should be praised for opening the school.

"You look at a school like that and have to say, 'Well, if I had $40 million, that might not be what I would do with it,' but I'm so glad she went with her vision," Kim said. "She will learn from the engagement with the school and the huge number of other issues that need to be tackled. I hope she builds on this experience, feels really good about it, and thinks, 'Wow, I could take my next $40 million, and instead of focusing on depth and extraordinary quality, I'm going to focus on breadth.'"

Kim also said that other donors, including Bill and Melinda Gates, sharpened their focus as they gained perspective. The Gates Foundation endowment stood at $35 billion at the end of 2005, and last year Buffett pledged to add $31 billion to it. Kim said the Gateses have expanded from supporting vaccines for children to a broader set of goals, including the implementation of community-based programs.

"The most important thing is they are totally engaged and want to learn," he said. "Bill Gates now understands the 14 steps of the production cycle for second-line antiretroviral drugs and knows the names of sex workers in India enrolled in his programs to protect themselves from getting HIV."

But for Grace Mnguni , director of the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Association in South Africa, a non profit that focuses on human rights and health programs, Winfrey took the wrong direction in setting up her school. The association spent $77,440 last year on 240 orphans, providing school uniforms, school fees, and meals.

"How do these students now adjust back to their communities?" she said. "How do they identify with the real problems of communities when they are no longer part of them?"

Mnguni said she resents the arrogance of outsiders who pursue their own visions without consulting local people. "You can't come from somewhere else into my community and tell me what the problems are," she said.

To read Oprah Winfrey's entire statement to the Globe, go to Boston.com/Globe. John Donnelly can be reached at Donnelly@globe.com.