How It Began
Our Story
It started with a small grant and a big bet: that opportunity, given early enough, changes everything.
Kids Without Borders began with a small grant and a big bet: that real economic opportunity could change the trajectory of a young person’s life faster, and more durably, than any awareness campaign ever could.
In 2023, with a founding $10,000 investment from the Kathryn Davis Foundation, we launched Project JEKA A Davis Projects for Peace initiative in partnership with Pora Health, a Zimbabwean nonprofit tackling health inequality and poverty in disadvantaged communities. The program responded to a clear crisis: rising youth unemployment and substance abuse in Zimbabwe’s high-density urban communities, fueled by a lack of real pathways into stable work.
JEKA empowered young people with 21st-century skills, computer programming and entrepreneurship, while educating them about the consequences of substance use and misuse. The results confirmed our bet. Within six months of completing the program, participants had secured paid full-time or freelance work, or had begun selling products and services on their own.
That success raised a defining question for us: if opportunity makes this much difference at eighteen, what could it do at eight? Kids Without Borders was born to answer it, by bringing that same belief in young people to children at the very start of their lives, long before the question of employability ever arises.
Founding investment from the Kathryn Davis Foundation.
Project JEKA launched in partnership with Pora Health.
Participants secured jobs or began selling within six months.
If opportunity makes this much difference at eighteen, what could it do at eight?
Why We Exist
Our founder, Adrian Chimboza, grew up in Zimbabwe as the child of two teachers who never lowered the bar for him. Instead, they challenged him to rise to it.
When he applied to U.S. colleges, he did it alone, with no money for SAT prep or private counselors, relying instead on research, networking, and persistence to navigate a system no one had explained to him. He carried one lesson out of that experience and into every classroom he has taught in since: ability is everywhere, opportunity is not.
That belief is what Kids Without Borders exists to correct.
What We Do
Through our partnership with Plan International, we sponsor children like Princess, a six-year-old girl in Zimbabwe, providing food, school supplies, school fees, and healthcare. This is the foundational stability without which education cannot take root.
We have learned that you cannot hand a child a textbook and call it opportunity. Opportunity is dignity, consistency, and someone choosing, deliberately and repeatedly, to invest in a child’s future.
What We Believe
Every child, regardless of where they are born, deserves the chance to discover how far they can fly. That conviction lives in every school fee paid, every healthcare visit funded, and every skill taught.
Be part of the story
The next chapter is written one child at a time. Help us keep writing it.