UK Charity, Penny Appeal, ‘Regrets’ Gambia ‘Child Abuse’ Incident

Founder, Adeem Younis, meets children at the Penny Appeal Orphanage in Yarambamba, Gambia in 2018 (Photo cropped from a video)

A branch of the UK-based charity, Penny Appeal, said it regrets reports of child sexual abuse and exploitation that allegedly occurred in an orphanage it provided with children and funds in The Gambia.

 

On Wednesday, the Penny Appeal orphanage in Yarambamba, Gambia’s west coast region, which was inaugurated by its founder Adeem Younis, a British-Pakistani philanthropist in 2018, had its operations shutdown by the government.

 

The government said it is investigating allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation children which allegedly took place in July this year within Penny Appeal orphanages in the country.

 

Penny Appeal UK, which operates in more than 30 countries worldwide, did not respond to Eye Africa TV’s email inquiries. However, the acting Director of Penny Appeal Gambia, Buba Saidykhan, said “the incident is regrettable”.

 

“We regret everything that has happened, and that was not our intention. Our intention is to take care of the children, poor and needy people,” Saidykhan said via phone.

 

In January 2020, Penny Appeal Gambia sub-contracted the Anasuroon orphanage in Kotu, 14 kilometres from the capital, Banjul, to take care of 285 children. It also provided funding for their upkeep for a period of eight months. The children are expected to return to the Penny Appeal orphanage by the end of August.

 

Penny Appeal had in its own orphanage in Yarambamba, 23 kilometres from the Banjul, a hundred children who were being supported to receive Qur’anic education and other basic needs. These are children whose parents have died and are in need of support.

 

While Saidykhan could not tell who was responsible for sexually abusing the children, he said “the incident occurred at Anasuroon, and not at the Penny Appeal centre in Yarambamba.”

 

In 2018, Adeem Younis and international boxing champion Amir Khan, inaugurated a new orphan village complex in The Gambia Penny Appeal said was “state-of-the-art”.

 

That orphanage was operating illegally, according to Gambia’s minister of women, children and social welfare, Fatou Kinteh, because it wasn’t registered with the department of social welfare which is responsible for granting permits to child-care centres and orphanages.

 

Saidykhan agreed. “As an orphanage, we were in the process of registering with the department of social welfare before this incident,” he said.

 

Photo taken from the New Asian Post

Lamin Fatty, national coordinator of the Child Protection Alliance (CPA), said initial investigations found accommodation for children in some of these orphanages were bad, and that funding was inadequate.

 

“Penny Appeal receives 160 pounds for every child every quarter and gives 50 pounds to Anasuroon... If you are using children to generate funds and the funds are not fully utilised to the welfare of those children it amounts to exploitation,” Fatty said via Skype.

 

“They don’t even have proper accommodation. We have seen videos where children [sleep] on bare floor,” Fatty said.

 

The CPA is part of a government-instituted task force investigating the matter. Fatty said the two institutions, Penny Appeal and Anasuroon orphanages, have a duty to protect children under their care under Gambia’s child rights laws.

Penny Appeal’s intervention in The Gambia include building mosques, giving out food during Ramadan and Muslim Eids, building horticultural gardens, supporting eye-care through vision tests and provision of eyeglasses, and financing orphanages.

 

• An audiovisual version of this story first appeared on Eye Africa TV on August 13, 2020 on The World Today (TWT) News Broadcast.  
  

 

Written by Modou S. Joof 

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