Moses wants to be a doctor and help save lives in his community.

Being sponsored at seven gave Moses the opportunity to go to school. With his sponsor’s support, Moses’ family received livestock and training to support their children with school fees, school shoes, healthy food, and all the essentials they needed to grow up smart and strong. Now Moses is determined to achieve his dream of becoming a doctor.

Mwila isn’t forced into marriage and can support her family.

In Nyimba, Zambia, one out of every three girls gets married before they become an adult. Supported by her Australian child sponsors, Mwila signed up for a four-month tailoring class. She started to make dresses in beautiful prints and patterns, which became sought-after all over town. Mwila can now support her family with food and household bills and is saving up to study.

Eleni Kallianiotis started sponsoring a child with World Vision when she finished high school. "I really wanted to do something good – and I wanted to sort of pay it forward," she explains.

As a mother of two small children, she appreciates that it also brings something very special to her family. 

“I’m able to share this experience with [my family], especially my son who’s four now,” Eleni says. “It’s teaching him kindness and giving, and having someone on the other side of the world that he can write to.”

The conflict in Ukraine sparked the world’s fastest growing displacement crisis since World War II. To date, more than two-thirds of children from Ukraine have been displaced from their homes. Millions of Ukrainian boys and girls have had their education disrupted for more than two years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. To help fill this critical education gap, we’re providing children with safe places to play and learn. Over the 2022 European summer, we worked with local partners to run 34 summer camps for children aged 5-17 in Ukraine where they enjoyed a much-needed reprieve from the challenges of living in a war-torn country.

Days after conflict broke out in Ukraine, our CEO Daniel Wordsworth led World Vision’s first aid convoy into Ukraine and continued building partnerships inside the war-torn country. Daniel’s insights into what it was like for children and families caught up in the conflict were captured in interviews with some of Australia’s highest rating print, broadcast and digital media outlets.

This media focus helped drive our concerted advocacy effort to encourage everyday Australians to use their voices (for example, by emailing their local MPs), to urge the Federal Government to provide funds to support children displaced by the conflict.

We asked the government to direct $10 million of aid to child-focused projects for Ukrainian refugees run by non-government organisations. And they delivered it. World Vision received $5 million of this amount to support our work with children.

The Australian NGO Cooperation Program (ANCP) is an annual grants program administered by the Australian Government through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. We are thankful and proud to be the leading recipient of ANCP funding. The ANCP enables World Vision to deliver impact across all aspects of community development, often in fragile contexts and to reach the most vulnerable people. During the 2022 financial year our ANCP-funded projects reached 327,514 people across Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Almost 41 percent of these people were children.

In 2022, Elgeyo Marakwet County in Kenya’s Central Rift Valley was crippled with drought. While many families in this region watched helplessly as their crops withered and livestock perished, Joyce and her husband Edward had plenty of food to eat and enough hay for their animals. That’s because for the past six years they’ve been practising Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) on their land. FMNR is a simple technique to regrow trees from stumps with living roots through careful pruning and protection. It helps to restore soil fertility on degraded land so farmers can grow more food. It also promotes grass growth that can be used as animal feed.