“Power is about what you control. Freedom is about what you can unleash.”

Why read any further?

Prosperity is a function of institutions - the building blocks on which the economy, polity, and society rest. Without the right institutions, resources cannot be seeded, nurtured, grown, and, ultimately, allocated to their most productive uses. Without the right building blocks, markets fail, companies self-destruct, and entire economies tremble. And that should sound suspiciously familiar. - Umair Haque

Africa is home to 70% of the ‘bottom billion’. Provide them with franchise; business facilities and partner with them and together they will fuel an enormous new economy. It would be truly stupid to ignore or disenfranchise even one of those of the 700 million people who are potential producers and consumers and even venture capitalists of the future. What with the West and East poisoning the very space they live, in Africa has the potential to become the worlds economic food basket.

Poverty, the chasm that separates the world's rich and poor is unnaturally wide.  International Agencies and NGOs struggle with a daily burden of providing basic aid for millions who face malnutrition, AIDS, displacement, disease, conflict and illiteracy. It isn't chance or bad luck that keeps their clients hopeless; it’s bitter unrelenting poverty that sucks these people into its paralysing grasp.

It's not just man-made factors like a depraved global trade system and its self serving ideological clash with corruption; it’s not just foreign debt so great that it suffocates any chance of recovery or insufficient and ineffective aid. It’s lack of sound business opportunity and active empowering globally connected social networks in local communities.

Poverty paralyses entire communities. To war orphans and AIDS affected orphans in Africa human rights take on a different meaning - they are a matter or life and death for countless single infants and children who have no identity because they have no living family members whatsoever.

In the developed world the average person has no idea what it’s like to live without fully equipped community systems, systems that protect our human rights and provide all the ‘givens’ that define civilisation.

We know Africa is not full of stupid people, it's full of opportunity, and they already know how to catch a fish. Disrespectful? We don’t think so. By way of example, teach a community how to farm fish and sell fish and fish products, how to grow organic produce in a desert, and then we are talking business; then you have created real opportunity and delivered the components of real empowerment.

That being said, many of you are anti-poverty activists, millions give generously and contribute to charity, while others lobby for funding. Aid keeps millions from starving and dying every minute of the day, however there is a glaring issue. Traditional aid, as in ‘filling a begging bowl’, has yet to provide any community with an economic solution - it promotes dependency, period.

So What Is Missing?

To wipe out poverty and consign it to history requires many contributors and to truly bring about real change, someone and something needs to be the contribution. To us the real opportunity lies far beyond passively or actively contributing; the real opportunity lies in being the contribution – being the contribution is about starting something that becomes the big idea that empowers communities that changes the world.

One important cause of unequal access to technology and modern community systems is the historical lack of joined up community access.  It is this very lack of ‘a place to start’ that discourages many people and global companies from creating holistic solutions.

So how do we Start?

First I would like you to imagine a Community Campus In a Box - imagine a campus that is franchise based, ethically, ecologically and environmentally sound and economically self-sustaining; a campus that supports and provides an entire living environment for 144 kids, kids who are AIDS affected and war orphans. Imagine proving these folks with a home that sustains their human ‘givens’ from cradle to career, by providing an integrated systemic approach to housing, pastoral care, water and sanitation, food, education, economic development, health, safety and community building.

So Where do we Start?

Oh you mean the place - I want to start this in Namibia, the country that I was born and grew up in - and we will start by serving a relatively ‘stable’ and known area of poverty - a microcosm of the issues facing communities all over the developing world: we will begin with providing a ‘home’ environment for AIDS affected and war orphans in Southern Africa – with an initial focus on Namibia followed by Angola and Southern Africa – followed by the world.  

What can You do to make this happen?

Two things

1.)    Help me start-up the Happy Orphans Project - help me to raise €25Million and establish a foundation and fund the first 3 pilot COMMUNITY CAMPUS IN A BOX orphanages – then if you are still on board – help me make the world a better place – one community at a time.

2.)    Get involved, I need an active empowering globally connected social network system of Entrepreneurs, Bankers, Lawyers, Auditors, Technologists, Educational masterminds, Agriculture innovators, telecommunications visionaries, Construction movers and shakers, Security and Safety, New world economists and of course special people with those special skills that don't have titles.

What Opportunities are in it for the Us who live in the first world?

Fabulous opportunities abound, opportunities beyond many a person’s wildest dreams. You are not being expected to give up the good life. This project goes way beyond just good enough, this project is about franchise, it’s about creating a good life for those who would otherwise never had a chance at all. On the contrary – this The Happy Orphans Project is about creating a better life for everyone whose lives are touched by this project.

There are 100‘s of experts who ‘know’ what is good for Africa - sadly, many of them simply contribute by giving talks and telling audiences and the media and various social media forums what is wrong and what should and shouldn’t have been done.

Sadly another common theme  “du jour” is an over-hyped and depraved generalisation stating that Africa doesn’t need more money or aid, (followed by egotistical rants that bang on about how ‘things should be done”).

To be truly frank I feel that there is a lot of merit in providing financial relief and aid to homeless orphans, and that relies on money and benevolence in the form of aid. Those of us who have been involved in raising children know foremost that there is a tremendous cost attached added to which there is a lot of effort.

The global economy drives almost everything today, it is an enabler; for education, for food, for health services, for research, for energy, for communications, for getting to places where upliftment is deeply needed, and for people who work at making the world a better place.

The Happy Orphans Project is about really doing something practical to actually change how the world is - to change lives and how we live. The real opportunity lies not in passively contributing; the real opportunity lies in being the contribution, being the contribution is about starting something that eventually becomes the way things happen.

It starts when you take someone's hand someone you someone have become responsible for, someone you may not even have met - then you begin to create something so special that your own very existence  begins  to represent something that requires way more than one lifetime .

The power to change is not really in the hands of faceless policymakers, anonymous bureaucrats and corporate Goliaths, neither is it in the hands of the self styled or self appointed Africa experts; it’s largely in the hands of you and I once we get fired up enough to drop the little stuff and reinvent ourselves and the way things are done in this space.

This is about re-inventing how the world supports orphans. It is a gigantonourmous idea and it requires gigantonourmous people. It’s not for everyone - it’s for you that can do something truly cataclysmic, to make the world of difference. It’s not a one way trip as in educating the third world it’s a systemic relationship that  will educate and change the whole world and the way things work.

The opportunity economics will become immediately apparent as the various components of each pilot COMMUNITY CAMPUS IN A BOXs is installed and implemented. This is about enrichment for those that will do and those communities they serve, it’s about ensuring the ultimate trust relationship and it’s about making the world a better place on a cataclysmic scale

We have no forecasting pretensions here because it goes without saying that each hand picked participant in the pilot will occupy a very special seat - a seat at the table that represents a humanity changing event. There are also further economic opportunities that we haven’t even dreamed of yet, because this project is about enrichment in it’s purest sense.

If you are serious about making the world a better place and are looking for opportunity – let’s talk.

The Project

The task of this project is for every participant to personally provide for continuing opportunity and equity for those most in need.

To make a personal ongoing philanthropic contribution to the vulnerable.

To help to make someone else’s world a better place one kind deed at a time.

 

The Mission

To provide for the basic humanitarian assets directly to live projects in Namibia.

 To provide for food and health services directly to live projects in Namibia.

To provide educational foundation grants to live projects in Namibia.

To provide financial services directly to live projects in Namibia.

 

The Values

Everyone alive has equal value - there are no exceptions.

The First Objective

Raise Euro 25 Million and build the first full service THOP franchise by September 2011.

The 2020 Objective

Establish 144 THOP franchises by September 2020.

  

"No kind action ever stops with itself. One kind action leads to another. Good example is followed. A single act of kindness throws out roots in all directions, and the roots spring up and make new trees. The greatest work that kindness does to others is that it makes them kind themselves."  

Amelia Earhart