Starlink to Connect Childcare Institutions in Nine African Countries
SpaceX is extending its Starlink connectivity programme into child welfare, committing 750 satellite internet kits to residential childcare institutions across 16 countries, including nine in Africa. The initiative, delivered through a grant to US-based non-profit Both Ends Believing (BEB), is intended to improve access to digital child-protection systems and support efforts to reunite children with their families.
The grant, estimated at nearly USD 1 million, will cover Starlink equipment, shipping, installation and 12 months of internet service at no cost to participating institutions. After this initial period, facilities will be eligible to continue using the service at a subsidised rate.
The African countries included in the programme are Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. BEB will coordinate deployments through its local teams and government partnerships.
Using Satellite Connectivity to Strengthen Child-Welfare Systems
The programme addresses a data management challenge within Africa’s child-protection systems. Many residential childcare institutions still rely on paper-based records, limiting governments’ and care providers’ ability to maintain accurate information about children, establish family histories, and coordinate individual cases.
“Every child deserves to be visible, protected, and connected to family and opportunity, and reliable internet access is often the missing piece. You cannot reunify a child you cannot find, and you cannot inspect a facility you do not know exists. Across Africa, governments are being asked to reform care systems they cannot yet fully see. We are deeply grateful to SpaceX for ensuring that geography and connectivity are no longer barriers to the future of some of the world’s most unseen and vulnerable children, giving them a pathway to family, education, opportunity, and hope,” Bruce Graham, President, Both Ends Believing.
The scale of the challenge extends beyond residential institutions. The African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACERWC), in its 2023 continental study, estimated that approximately 35 million children across Africa were without parental care. The study also found that more than 70% of African countries lacked explicit, comprehensive policy frameworks to protect children.
To address some of these gaps, BEB will use the initiative’s connectivity to support the deployment of its Children First Software (CFS). The platform enables governments and childcare providers to digitise children’s records, register individual cases, and maintain information that supports family tracing and placement decisions.
“In many of our homes, a child’s information is still kept in paper files that are easily damaged or lost, and sometimes the most important details are missing: who the child is, where they came from, who referred them. When that happens, children become invisible to the very systems meant to protect them. Children First helps homes fix that, but only if they can get online. Starlink removes that barrier. It means records kept up to date, relatives who can be traced, and more children with the chance to grow up in safe, stable and permanent families,” Sandra Chikan, Vice President, Northern Nigeria, ASOHON
Reliable internet access is a prerequisite for institutions to use these systems consistently. In facilities where records are still maintained manually, digitisation can improve the availability and continuity of information used by care providers and government agencies. The programme is therefore designed to address two related constraints: limited connectivity at the institutional level and fragmented child-welfare records across care systems.
A Broader Role for Satellite Connectivity
For Starlink, the initiative extends satellite broadband beyond conventional consumer, enterprise and public-service connectivity. By supplying infrastructure to childcare institutions, the programme shows how satellite networks can support organisations that depend on digital platforms but may be located outside reliable terrestrial broadband coverage.
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The initiative also aligns with wider African policy efforts to strengthen oversight of residential childcare. In 2025, the ACERWC adopted General Comment No. 10 on Article 25 of the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. The guidance emphasises that institutional care should remain a temporary measure of last resort, while calling for stronger registration, monitoring and record-keeping across childcare institutions.
Connectivity alone, however, will not resolve the underlying challenges. The programme’s effectiveness will depend on whether participating institutions consistently maintain their records, whether governments can integrate the information into national child-protection systems, and whether the resulting data supports timely case management and family-based placements. The initiative’s longer-term significance will therefore be measured less by the number of Starlink systems deployed than by the extent to which the connectivity translates into more complete records, stronger institutional oversight and improved outcomes for children.