About Us

Since 2003, ASAP (African Solutions to African Problems) has reached over 21,000 children in the deep rural Eastern Cape, restoring the agency of far-flung communities that formal development has often passed by. We arrive with a question rather than a plan: what do you already have to work with?

That question is where Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) begins, and ABCD has shaped our work for over two decades. It starts from the knowledge, land, relationships and leadership already present in a village, rather than from what is missing.

Why the child is at the centre

No child thrives in a village where families are hungry and unsafe. So rather than running programmes for children in isolation, ASAP works on the whole village around a child, so that it can heal from trauma and connect its people to skills and opportunity.

When a community can care well for itself, it cares well for its children, and that care outlasts any single grant or programme.

What holistic means, in practice

Poverty in these villages is never just one thing. A household without food is often also a household with no documentation, no nearby ECD (early learning centre), no safe path to justice after violence, and no say in the decisions made about their own village. So our programmes are built to work together:

Holistic Child Development: so every child has the care and nurture they need to develop optimally, from the first 1000 days, to ECD and across childhood

• Capacity Building: so local women become the professionalised, paid backbone of their community’s Child Development as ECD practitioners, and of GBV survivor services as Community Care Workers, moving themselves out of poverty as they do it
• Food Sovereignty: to reduce household and community food insecurity so no child goes hungry and can learn and develop, and women and youth farmers build agricultural enterprises to improve livelihoods
• GBVF Justice & Safety: so villages are physically and emotionally safe places to grow up and survivors can access justice and healing
• Documentation: so every child has a birth certificate and every adult has an ID, opening access to grants, healthcare, schooling and belonging, and freeing time and resources spent on bare survival to start healing and building a way out of poverty

What impact looks like

• 80% reduction in food insecurity among 1,536 people we worked with in 2025
• Over 4,500 people now have access to fresh, local produce through community farms and household gardens
• 3,281 people directly engaged in GBV awareness and prevention work in 2025, including 50 tribal and initiation leaders, and 67 youth during a successful pilot initiation ceremony
• Clean household water through two large borehole community water projects (Lufefeni and Pamlaville) in partnership with HCI Foundation, ECET and Innovation Africa in 2026
• Investing in proactive leaders across 11 villages across the Alfred Nzo District in 2026
• 353 adults and children obtained IDs and birth certificates since 2022, another 281 are in process.

Recognition

• 2023 iF Social Impact Prize, for our commitment to ‘A Bright Future for Every Child’
• 2024 Rural Development Agrarian Women Entrepreneur Award, awarded to one of our woman farmers

ASAP is a compliant NPO with a 100% Black beneficiary base, and a track record communities themselves have helped build.