A note from GHDF: this is the first published account of work the founder funded personally over several years. The fuller story — with the team on the ground, the children’s voices, and the family who runs the home day to day — will be added through 2026 as we travel to Nigeria with media and document the home properly.
When Dr. Fevzi Kortay began funding charitable work in West Africa, the projects that mattered most rarely had names, websites, or fundraising pages. They had people. They had a roof that needed building. They had children who needed a home.
The Blessings Family orphanage in Nigeria is one of those projects.
What it is
Blessings Family is a community-led children’s home in Nigeria, founded and run by a local family who took on the care of orphaned and abandoned children in their region long before GHDF existed in its current form. They did not start with funding. They started with their own house and their own resolve.
What GHDF’s founder did, working personally and privately, was provide the financial support needed to formally open the home as a functioning orphanage — covering the costs that turn a family’s act of love into a sustainable institution. Building works. Beds. Kitchen. The basic infrastructure that allows a children’s home to house, feed, and educate children year after year, rather than month to month.
This work was done before GHDF was rebuilt around its current community-led model. It is the kind of quiet, foundational philanthropy that the foundation now exists to professionalise — so that other donors can fund work of this kind without having to know the people personally, and so that the families running these homes get the recognition, accountability, and continuing support they deserve.
Why we are writing about it now
For most of the last several years, the founder did not publish stories about this work. There was nothing to gain by doing so, and there was no infrastructure to do it well. The work happened because it needed to happen.
We are writing about it now for two reasons.
First, because honest fundraising requires honest disclosure. If the founder has funded children’s homes, scholarships, and surgical interventions personally, donors evaluating GHDF deserve to know that — not as a marketing claim, but as evidence of what kind of organisation this is.
Second, because Blessings Family deserves to be visible. The family who runs the home are not GHDF staff. They are partners. Their work continues regardless of who funds it. By publishing this account, we hope to open a path for additional supporters to back them directly — and to demonstrate the kind of local, community-led partnership GHDF prioritises across all of its programmes.
What we are not claiming
We are not yet publishing photographs. We are not yet publishing the family’s full names without their explicit consent. We are not yet publishing detailed financial figures attached to specific children. All of that is being assembled in partnership with the Blessings Family team, on their timeline and on their terms.
What we can confirm:
- The home exists and is operational.
- It was made financially possible by direct support from GHDF’s founder.
- The family running it is doing so with their own labour and care, day after day.
- GHDF intends to formalise an ongoing partnership through which donors can contribute to its continuing operation.
How to support this work
If you are interested in supporting children’s home work of this kind — either through GHDF’s general programmes or as a designated partner — please write to [email protected]. We will share what is known, connect interested funders with the appropriate local contacts, and provide reporting on how funds are used.
This article is part of a series documenting the foundational charitable work that preceded GHDF’s current programme structure. Stories will be updated and expanded as we travel to programme sites and work with our community partners to share their experience directly.
