How 5 Girls Are Restoring Hope With an App to Fight FGM
Synthia, a 17-year-old Compassion-assisted student from Kenya, joined with four classmates to develop an app to end female genital mutilation – and won second place at Google’s 2017 Technovation Challenge.
Continue Reading ›Does Compassion Meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals?
Many of the SDGs directly parallel what Compassion does. When it comes to goals and implementation, though, we sometimes take a different approach. Here are the SDGs that most closely match our work, along with ways they overlap and differ.
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WANTED: the Freedom to be a Kid
According to the United Nation’s International Labor Organization, “Child labor is every work activity that children and adolescents do before turning 18 years old, that affects their physical, social, intellectual, psychological and moral development.” And poverty is a key contributor to the prevalence of child labor.
Fewer Children Are Dying
Good news from the government is pretty rare. Good news in the media is even more rare. So when I read this headline the other day, I smiled: “WHO sees good progress on UN health goals for poor.”
According to a recent study by the U.N.’s World Health Organization, good progress is being made on health-related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
- Fewer children are dying.
- The estimated percentage of underweight children under 5 has dropped.
- New HIV infections have declined.
- Existing cases of tuberculosis are declining.
- The world is on track to achieve the MDG target on access to safe drinking water.
Let’s just pause for a moment to let this sink in. We are making progress. Let’s celebrate this!
Of course, this doesn’t mean we can slow down in our fight against global poverty. If anything, seeing progress should motivate us to work even harder. And, as has been mentioned around here before, eliminating extreme poverty is just a matter of priorities.
The annual income of Christian American churchgoers is $5.2 trillion. The amount of money needed to end global poverty is about $74 billion a year. … Basically, 1 percent of our annual income a year is what is needed to end extreme poverty.
So the question is, what are your priorities?
Life in Haiti After the Earthquake: A Changed Perspective
Received from Ken Laura, a member of our Haiti Relief Team working in Port-au-Prince.
Sunday, April 25 — I moved last week and it has changed my situation and my perspective. Instead of sleeping in a tent beside the main road of Delmas listening to trucks roar up and down the street all night, I go to sleep seeing stars, and awaken to bird calls. Some of the birds are roosters, which start crowing at about 4:30, but other than that it is amazingly quiet here.
Whenever the power is out, usually from the morning until 10 p.m. there are very few lights in the area. Although the houses are a million dollars in size, they are only about $100,000 complete.
People do have mortgages here, but many build with the cash that they save from year to year and pay as they go. They don’t owe the bank interest, but they also have to wait a really long time to move into the house.
My new home is at the top of a steep hill in a very nice subdivision with a guard and pavement, mostly maintained. Some friends I’ve met are letting me stay as a courtesy.
Protecting the Children in Our Program
In Indonesia, children’s rights are a critical issue — as in many countries, women and children are often the most vulnerable members of the community. Compassion Indonesia understands the urgent need to address this issue that often remains silent.
