UPDATE: The charity changed their name to Safe Child Africa and no longer collect these puppets. Pattern will stay up for free so enjoy for your own use!

Knit a puppet for charity!

Stepping Stones Nigeria (SSN) is a UK based child rights charity working to transform the lives of vulnerable children in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. With high levels of malnutrition, poverty, persistent violent conflicts and disease, increasing numbers of children in the Niger Delta are being forced to the streets putting them at risk of abuse, rape and trafficking. SSN works with Nigerian partner organisations to ensure these children get a proper education, healthcare, food and protection.

SSN are working on an ambitious 2-year project called the Read and Write Now initiative to drastically improve the literacy rate of children in the Niger Delta. We will be training thousands of teachers in synthetic phonics - a fun, accessible and and very successful way to learn to read and write.

This is where you come in! With very limited resources your knitted hand puppets will be invaluable as they will be used by teachers in Nigeria to engage and teach vulnerable and disadvantaged children. Becoming literate will transform the lives of these children as it will drastically improve their chances for employment, income, health, status and housing.

We’ve developed patterns for a bee, snake and mouse puppets and would love it if you would consider knitting one or passing the patterns onto friends. You can then post them back to us (our address is in the patterns) and we’ll send them to our Nigerian teachers.

If you’re not ready to knit a puppet just yet but want to help, a great way to start is to sign our petition to Prevent Abuse of Children Today (PACT)

To find out more about our PACT campaign please visit www.makeapact.org

To find out more about SSN please visit www.steppingstonesnnigeria.org