OurStoryandImpact

Rev. John Deng Ater, our founder, was orphaned by South Sudan's civil war as a child, and it was that loss which first taught him what it meant for a child to have no one left to call family. In 2011, he returned to then-autonomous Southern Sudan on a mission trip and was moved by the stories of orphaned, street, and abandoned children he met along the way. Those encounters were impossible to walk away from, and that same year, he initiated the Orphans' Scholarship Program to provide education and care for South Sudanese children living in refugee camps in Kenya and Uganda. In 2013, that program was extended into South Sudan itself, and Nile Orphan Care was formally established to bring the mission home.

From its first headquarters in Yei, Central Equatorial State, the organization was forced to evacuate to Juba following the 2016 political crisis, when insecurity cut the city off from humanitarian aid and left the organization with no choice but to relocate the children and their caretakers to safety. Juba remains home for the children in our care today, and it is where the mission has grown roots deep enough to hold a family together through hardship.

What began as one man's response to loss has grown into a community of caregivers, educators, medical staff, and partners walking alongside vulnerable children every day, a family that now spans classrooms, an on-site clinic, farmland, and the homes where these children finally get to just be children. Every program we run today, from education to nutrition to healthcare, traces back to that same conviction John carried in 2011: that no child should have to face the world alone.