Blog

by Lovisa Demirci, Barnfonden Sweden

The heat is burning in the afternoon in Ziro, Burkina Faso, and every seat in the shade is taken. An excited audience is waiting, while two young men test the microphones. It´s time for the weekly meeting about sexual and reproductive rights issues. The topic for the day: How to prevent HIV/AIDS.

Read the blog.

The ChildFund Alliance EU Office co-organized the debate: “Mobilising partnerships and investment to end violence against children: A multistakeholder approach in fragile and conflict-affected contexts” on 8 June 2017, during the European Development Days in Brussels. Our partners in organizing the event were World Vision, Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children, World Health Organization (WHO), Unicef and the European External Action Service.

Misozi Sambo, a bright young woman from Zambia, is following her dream of becoming a teacher thanks to the intervention of our CEO Michael Kiely and friends back in Ireland who will now support her education.

Youth matter.

That thought has stayed with me in the days since ChildFund International’s second annual Advocacy Day, March 24, when 27 ChildFund colleagues visited Capitol Hill in teams to speak with members of Congress and their staff about issues critical to the well-being of children and youth worldwide.

A billboard-sized sign along the road from Udaipur through the Aravalli Mountains shows two scenes — one is of a burly man with a bandana around his neck reaching out from behind a tree to grab a young girl’s shoulder. She looks away as if to run in the opposite direction. In the other scene, looming shadows of hands grasp for a girl clutching a stuffed bear. The headline in Hindi reads: “BT cotton has destroyed the childhood of children.” Below is the familiar logo of ChildFund India, which is campaigning against child labor in this region.

Early childhood education has been shown to improve school achievement and success later in life. It lowers primary school dropout rates by enhancing children’s preparedness to cope with the formal school environment.

This photo essay shows how ChildFund Rwanda, a program of ChildFund Korea, is making this a reality in several communities.

Far from the spotlight of the media and the world’s attention, a humanitarian crisis is playing out in the small, landlocked nation of the Central African Republic (CAR). A savage civil war has forced tens of thousands of people to seek safety in surrounding countries, and as of 31 August 2016, an estimated 385,750 people are internally displaced. Almost half of the displaced are children. The Commission des Mouvements de Populations^[1] estimates that 61% of the IDPs are living with host families, and 39% are staying in open spaces and camp-like settings such as schools, churches, and mosques.

Youth roles in development—particularly for youth in the developing world—are limited; they are rarely given true agency or helped to build the capacity to direct the very programs from which they might best benefit....That there are no readily available statistics or metrics by which youth are incorporated into program design processes is in itself an indication that a more intentional focus needs to be placed on the issue of their inclusion. Increasingly over the last decade, a great deal of research—such as that undertaken by ChildFund Australia—has centered on the need for such focus.

Read the article on Huffington Post

At least four trains arrive daily in Tabanovce, a Macedonian refugee camp near the Serbian border. But when we arrive, it’s deserted. The place feels eerie and empty, showing the transient nature of migrant camps.

Most migrants coming through here arrived from Greece, their landing point in Europe; they pass through Macedonia to Serbia and then, if they’re fortunate, on to Germany and other western European countries. Others take a route through north-western Turkey, Bulgaria and Serbia. Both roads are well known to smugglers, who often make the journeys possible — at a steep cost.

Since the events described here, in the past week violence has broken out in Idomeni, Greece, because of a bottleneck caused by Macedonia’s new daily cap on the number of migrants allowed into the country, as well as other restrictions. Thousands are now stranded in Idomeni and nearby camps, causing serious tension and questions about what will happen next.