Two decades of violence in the DRC has left behind millions of deaths, widows, orphans and elderly living alone, and general vulnerability among communities. There are overwhelming numbers of survivors of sexual based violence within communities and church congregations. Recently, the Evangelical Alliance of Congo has identified 90 victims of sexual violence who are living in particularly terrible conditions.

Spread across six different locations in the middle of Sumatra, this organisation supports poor families with loans to establish small businesses, assists young people to obtain an education, has a preschool/kindergarten for 100 children, and run camps and seminars for young people and leadership development.

There are many young people in developing countries with great potential and secondary school education who cannot go on to further training. Because of this, their potential will never be realised and their chance to move out of poverty and become productive citizens and even leaders is gone.

For several years BHW has been supporting Harvest Partnership and their work in the Great Lakes area of Africa and Kenya. One of the ministries that developed was a street kids work in the town of Mariakani, near Mombassa. This work, KENSHA Youth Outreach, grew and now there are about 250 kids engaged every week, being encouraged and mentored.

Kariobangi Outreach Children's Home was opened in 1997 with the objective to cater for orphans and vulnerable children affected by HIV/AIDS.

After their marriage, Robert and Rose Gitau began to serve God by travelling to different villages preaching and helping the poor. Eventually they bought a small plot of land in Nguluni and launched a small church. The church began to grow and they started to not only help the community with spiritual needs but to help economically and physically as well. Robert and Rose adopted many children whose parents had died from AIDS or who had been abandoned.

Lao Vida focuses on language, vocational, and development assistance as pathways to reaching out to people. They serve both educated urban people and rural young people, both of whom live in bondage to superstition and fear of spirits. This business facilitates the building of relationships and connections in the wider community. A significant part of the staff training and development is given over to teaching how to pass on the abundant life to village communities.

The Peace Children's Home was established in 2003 and exists to bring healing to orphaned or abandoned children by providing an environment where they can grow strong emotionally, physically and spiritually, and become healthy adults and productive citizens. The plan is to start an internet cafe as a way of providing funds for the Children's Home.

Christian women in Pakistan face many pressures. Because they are Christians it is almost impossible to gain employment or training. They have little ability to become financially independent. Women are often ostracized and suffer various forms of abuse because of their faith. Sometimes they are forced to marry and cannot break free from bondage.

As everyone knows, there are major issues in Pakistan. It appears to be a country that harbours and produces extremists. However, the majority of the people are not extremists. To help break down barriers between religious groups and foster understanding, Barbara Gill has established a school in Islamabad.

The EGM team are constantly looking for ways to assist the poorest among them to become self-sustaining. They have organised sewing projects in other places but not in their own community. This community is huge, the largest Christian community in Pakistan, with tens of thousands of Christian families.

This project is established to train Christian women and girls to develop a skill and the opportunity for income generation. This area is rural and on the border with India and surrounded by military installations. As with other similar projects this will empower a number of women who are poorly educated and who have few options for anything other than a life of servitude.

The brick kilns in Pakistan are notorious for child labour and human slavery. More than one million children are working in the brick kilns just in Punjab alone. They do not go to school and are illiterate. Many are forced into early marriages, especially the girls. It is a hard life and our partners there want to see things change and set people free. Education is an important part of the solution.

For many years there has been a movement of Afghan people into Pakistan as a result of the ongoing, chronic unrest in the country. Peshawar is one of the main places that Afghan refugees settle. Many of these people are uneducated and unable to fend for themselves, and so become very vulnerable, especially the young women.

After being a volunteer for a year and another year as a part-time staff member at ECPM, Ella is currently the coordinator of the Youth in Missions for Christ (YMC). YMC is the youth arm and a mission strategy of ECPM. She is also handling the Campus Ministry of YMC now going into its second year.

The IN Tertiary Scholarship programme aims not only to place squatter children into university but also to provide a mentoring programme through the context of the local church. For the same price as a cup of coffee a day a Filipino student can attend university.

For more than 2 years Vicente Enriques was a part-time team member at ECPM and he has now taken over Wilson Tayaban''s role, particularly attending most of the training modules and encouraging various church planting teams throughout the Philippines.

Despite the fact that Rwanda is more developed than most African countries, there is still great poverty and a violent, abusive underbelly. Those that suffer the most in this environment are the young people, especially the young women. Youth Renewed Ministry plans to help these girls by providing scholarships for them to attend a vocational training school and obtain a skill.

South Sudan has been gripped by civil war almost continually since it achieved nationhood in 2013. Hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of refugees have fled to neighbouring countries, including Uganda. Uganda now hosts some of the largest refugee camps in the world (near Yumbe and Koboko in the north) and the numbers of refugees grows daily.

For a number of years Touch Africa Now has been developing ministry in the Nyakagando area. This is an area of great need, most of the local people are DR Congo and South Sudanese refugees, and the girls and women are vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. They want to develop small income generating activities for the most vulnerable.

In 2014, Efrain was involved in establishing the Camiri Trades Training Institute, an auto-mechanics technical school run as part of the Bible School. He is also very involved at the Bible School, lecturing, and providing technical and administrative support.

The Rehema Ministry seeks to select needy orphans and vulnerable children within the church setting in the town of Bunia and to provide them with education assistance.

Foundations for Farming is a programme used by Bright Hope World partners that challenges mindsets and traditions related to using land and growing crops.

This project springs from the Bright Hope World sponsorship of three agricultural workers from DOVE Africa to attend an intensive Foundations for Farming seminar in Zimbabwe. Building on the initial demonstration garden at Eshel Garden in Karen, Nairobi (KEN07a), DOVE are now seeking to establish a further training centre in Got Osimbo.

Kutwanana is a small NGO, registered with the Mozambique government set up by the Mchava church that Patrick and Grace Mulenga pastor. The community is huge, no one knows the figure but it is hundreds of thousands of people. The programme has 35 volunteers who visit around the community finding the needy and trying to help them. More than 200 orphan children are being cared for.

There are some places on earth that are hard places, hard to get to, hard to enter and hard to work in. The land of the Koti people is one of those places on earth. The Koti are a group of people with a very basic lifestyle on the coast of Mozambique. Their children grow up in poverty, living in the sand and eating fish.

For a number of years BHW has been partnering with Tarikhi ya Haakhi with their church planting work around Angoche. The work is growing and significant numbers of Koti people are becoming Christ followers. Many of the Koti people cannot read their own language or Portuguese so it makes leadership development difficult.

Chak no 74 is a small village in Faisalabad district with approximately 5,000 families living there, only 300 of whom are Christians. Most of the population is uneducated with parents preferring their children to work instead of study so many young boys and girls are sent to work at an early age due to poverty. In particular, parents are not sending girls to college after school because of a lack of finances and transport issues so girls stay home and wait to be married. Any sort of skill is therefore a great blessing for them and a sewing course can have a huge impact in a girl’s life.

Rahab rescues girls from prostitution in the bars of Bangkok and helps rehabilitate them through training and education.

As Timothy and Janepher Kakooza began to plant a church in Katosi, they very quickly found that the village had many children, few schools and many orphans.

The Christian Fellowship Churches (CFC) and Child Care Ministries (CCM) in Busia, Uganda, offer holistic ministry leadership training and care to people in their local communities. In the recent past, these communities have experienced wars, hostile nomadic tribe invasions, HIV/AIDS, disease and poverty. Although matters have been improving some of these issues remain everyday realities for them. They offer the Good News of Jesus while showing and practicing His love.

In the heart of Lira, a large town in Northern Uganda, there is a remarkable story of resilience and recovery. At Hope Restoration Centre two sisters, Penninah Okello and Anna Ocen, provide refuge and support to a group of 29 children who have emerged from the shadows of a tumultuous past.

For a number of years Joyce Lubari was concerned with the number of young people in their community who leave school and who cannot get employment. Many young people manage somehow to complete secondary school, but what then?

Over the lake from Samfya, in the Northern Province of Zambia, lies a little village almost totally dependant on fishing. "It is a poor village, as poor as I have ever seen in Africa." says the BHW Africa Director. The seven churches in the village have got together and identified 230 orphans and vulnerable children who need assistance, especially with schooling.

In 2010 Roy and Sarah Nyirenda were challenged by the number of deaf children in the community where they live who were being dumped by their parents. They decided to adopt some of these children as their own, as they had nowhere else to go.

Gideon and Jennifer have developed many networks and key relationships which has allowed them to have a significant impact in this community. This partnership focuses on feeding the most vulnerable children in the community, providing goat loans to families of vulnerable children so they can afford to send their own children to school and training local communities in Foundations for Farming methods and mind sets.

Tino was one of the founders of a Bright Hope World funded dairy farm in Bolivia and for many years was co-manager of the farm project. Currently he and Nelda are fully involved in the Bible Institute, as managers of the Institute, teaching some of the modules and mentoring the students.

There are many vulnerable children in the Katanga Province of the DRC, in particular in Likasi, a mining city of about half a million people. A group of Christians have decided to care for as many of these abandoned children as they can with their own resources. Currently there are about 50 children being assisted.

Young people in Cairo have many issues to deal with and in general find it very difficult to gain employment. This Vocational Training Centre enables them to develop skills that will give them an advantage when seeking employment.

There are huge numbers of poor in Cairo. It is a hub for the poor and for countless generations for refugees. They are spread right throughout the city.

Soul Salvation Church in the city of Assiut is one of the largest, most influential churches in Upper Egypt. It is non-denominational and has many ministries including a vocational training centre. The two aspects involved in this partnership are a sewing centre and two education tutoring centres.

Sowers International is an organisation that trains churches to evangelise in their communities by using the method of open air preaching. They have a well developed, five level training programme that sees thousands of team members a year trained, hundreds of open air messages preached, many people counselled and hundreds of new churches a year planted in Africa.

Mathare Valley compound is a shocking place. Yet amongst all the noise, filth, confusion and chaos live thousands of beautiful young children. Without the intervention of Mathare Community Outreach (MCO), few of them would ever get a chance at a normal life, safety and education. This partnership is about educating as many young people as possible to give them a chance to become significant and productive.

Every year around 50 children graduate from the Mathare Valley Secondary School.These young people are living in a squalid, unsafe environment and during the 9 month gap between sitting their exams and starting their training many of them fall into trouble. Camp Moriah is a six month discipleship programme which takes these young people away from Mathare Valley.

Lean on Me was established by Jacklyne Ogutu who had a vision to create change in her family village, Nyatike Division, Migori County. This partnership consists of a number of different projects including the production and distribution of reusable sanitary pads, and health talks to keep girls in education. They also have their own all girls’ soccer team to empower the young women involved. In addition, Jackie is passionate about table banking and trains and mentors members of the community in the programme.

This partnership sees the establishment of a fund to assist high performing students get other forms of post-secondary school training. Many Christian young people finish school with good grades but because of poverty at home or not knowing the right people they struggle to get jobs. This programme is to bridge that gap, to get them into good institutions and to the front of the employment line.

Saul and Clara are involved in training programmes, teaching, counselling and discipling. He also takes students to the mission field to live with different people-groups as part of their cross cultural experience, working mainly in the jungle areas.

ECPM has started a new training programme designed to reach high school and college students in partnership with the local churches that are situated near school campuses. The thrust is to help churches establish campus ministry and at the same time assist them in training their youth leaders. This is a one-year and two-year training programme for teams of youth campus leaders composed of 2 to 3 members. The prospective team members are Christian students studying in the target school.

Prasert leads the Top Kids programme and Heart of Mercy ministry with children from the slums of Bangkok. She is a strong and influential leader who is capably training and making a significant difference in the lives of others.

Top Kids is an evangelistic and teaching programme for children held every Saturday. The "Through the Bible" curriculum, written and illustrated by Prasert Taksin and her team, is used to lay a foundation to present the gospel. Around 80 children have been converted and are being discipled through this programme.

Since 2004 Chuenjit has been working with highly 'at-risk' young people (14-17 year olds) in the Youth Detention Centre north of Bangkok. She visits three times per week and conducts Bible studies as well as teaching them basic life skills.

Mbale village was formed by internally displaced people from the city of Mbale. They are poor and trying to eke out a living from fishing. There is a great deal of drunkenness, abuse and very few children were going to school. Timothy and Janepher wanted to do something so sent some teachers to this village to start a school.

Rosemary Daka and her late husband Lonard have been church planting in this area of Zambia for about 35 years. As they developed churches they were swamped by the needs of the vulnerable children and their guardians. They started 'Chifundo' to care for the children, to resource and encourage the guardians, to get the children into school and assist the community.

Kamatipa, a small rural village of several hundred located in the Copperbelt of Zambia, is home to many orphaned children who are in desperate need of food, clothing, bedding and assistance with school fees. Kamatipa is on the outskirts of Chingola and is in a very remote area. Many children are unwell due to lack of food.

Rebecca Kaumba is s retired lady who lives in Chivuma. In the church she used to attend in Chingola, Lulamba CMML, she has a number of friends. One of them, Elizabeth Palata, mentioned to Rebecca that there were a lot of vulnerable children in her neighbourhood and she encouraged her to get them together and try to help them. She did and found there were more than 20 children. Bright Hope World now assists these children to go to school.

OM Zambia is a missions training centre that is equipping potential missionaries and the churches that send them. It is particularly aimed at mobilising the African church for the task of missions. It is based at a strategic location and produces good quality graduates.

Disabled people are often an unreached people group because they are usually thrown out of home due to the belief that they are cursed and will bring a curse to families. Normally the father will leave the family and the mother is left to look after these children but they have no ability to look after them well in terms of finance or skills so often children are just left alone.

At the end of 2005 BHW received an emergency call from one of our partners, Andy Patching from Isubilo in Zambia. He knew a person in Solwezi, Zambia who was caring for 60 orphans and vulnerable children. Joseph Kampelembi and his wife had been sending them to school but could not afford it for 2006. We therefore gave them the funds to get them going and asked them to make an application for the following year.

The team at GLO Bible College realised there was a need to re-evaluate the way they relate to the local church and their vision is to "Equip the church for the future".

The rural areas around Chipata are very poor and have increasing issues each year as the climate seems to be getting drier and drier. The HIV/AIDS pandemic there has also created a number of orphaned children in the area.

Living in a low cost housing area of urban Africa is not a pleasant thing. When your suburb has many hotels and beer halls it places you in the midst of poverty and everything associated with that. That is where Titus Mambwe and some of his friends live and they have decided to do something about it.

Gideon and Jennifer have developed many networks and key relationships which has allowed them to have a significant impact in this community. This partnership focuses on getting the most vulnerable children in the community into school and feeding them once a day, providing goat loans to families of vulnerable children so they can afford to send their own children to school and training local communities in Foundations for Farming methods and mind sets.

A Trades Training Institute has been set-up in association with the Camiri Bible Institute to provide practical training for the students so they can support themselves as they work to grow the church in towns and villages throughout Bolivia.

There are a number of key people involved in the development of new churches in Northern Ethiopia. It is important to continue developing and encouraging them so 3 to 4 training sessions per year are organised for the church planters and for existing and emerging church leaders. These give them new skills and develop them so they can be more effective in the difficult circumstances in which they live.

There are many young people in Ethiopia whose sight has been severely compromised. There are many reasons for this, poor eye care, rural accidents, mineral deficiencies and congenital problems. All the ones on this programme developed eye issues as children or young people.

BHW has been involved in a number of partnerships in Ethiopia since 2005. The intention has always been to develop some form of income generation there to enable these programmes to become self-sustainable.

Nguluni is a small town east of Nairobi. It is open grassland, very dry and short of water. Many of the people are very poor and resort to collecting ground water for their needs. By the end of the dry season only mud is left in the pools, the water is contaminated, crops have failed and the people are even more hungry. Like many parts of Kenya, HIV/AIDS is rampant. Many schools are substandard.

Ambovombe Androy is deep in the South of Madagascar on the coast. It is regarded as one of the poorest places on the country. The majority of the people depend on relief and are deeply entrapped in inter-generational cycles of poverty.

Many young Nepalese, in fact most young Nepalese, see their future outside of Nepal. From an early age their sole ambition is to leave the country for education and for employment. They do not like Nepal and they are attracted to the lifestyle outside the country. Their dream is to get to the West and if that fails, to get to India. However, most do not make it and their dream dies. They have few opportunities in Nepal and they are unmotivated to attempt anything.

There are many young people in Pakistan who struggle to gain significant employment. To gain an advantage over others in the competitive market it's important to be as well trained in computers as possible. Information technology is a very important field in which to be proficient.

The Christian Leaders Training College (CLTC) has been runing a rice growing training programme since 2006 and as part of this programme they were keen to install a rice mill so trainees could also learn how to mill the rice.

Marumba Christian School is a community school located in the village of Marumba. It has been established to help less privileged children attain a better quality of education and to be imparted with spiritual values.

KERO farms has been set up to support the orphans in Beracah Orphan Care and to provide employment for people in the local area. The local chief has granted Bright Hope 300 hectares in three locations.

For a number of years BHW has been supporting a partnership in Chisasa, ZAM15. This involves the support of vulnerable children and getting them into school. The leadership also want to develop self sustaining programmes to start generating their own funds and have a number of plans to do that.

Mandiva is located in Masvingo province of Zimbabwe, one of worst regions for low rainfall. The rainfall they receive every farming season is below normal and the soil is very poor for farming which leaves the people of this region in dire need of food almost every year.

Rehema Ministry currently focuses its ministry to equip vulnerable children with basic education at primary school level. While the present support programme is extremely valuable to the parents/caregivers and children, offering a secondary school chance for these vulnerable children would be an incredible help as it will lead them to a vocation that will sustain them in life and keep them away from the danger of going onto the street where their future may be completely ruined.

The dream is that Centre Amani ("Peace Centre") will be a safe space, where children and young people in Bweremana, Democratic Republic of Congo, have the opportunity to consider and begin to fulfil their potential.

For many years Manara International has been attempting to assist Iraqi refugees. Much of it has revolved around helping them with food, shelter and encouragement. This project is about empowering the women, teaching them sewing and embroidery skills, which will help them in both the short and long term, wherever they end up.

The Fame Children's Home cares for 53 children from nearby villages. The majority of their homes are poverty riddled and HIV/AIDS affected with one or no biological surviving parents. The home provides a secure Christian environment for these children, providing good nutrition and a stable learning environment.

Halisi Trust is a not-for-profit, Christian organization that believes in transformational development - change from the inside out. Halisi Trust believes that in empowering youth through alternative education they will be providing an opportunity to come together and solve root problems thus inspiring long term values based solutions.

Some of the older children in the Kutwanana programme have now graduated from secondary school. They are the future leaders of the work and in the local churches. Without some assistance, they face the struggle of not being able to get training and move into serious employment. The purpose of this is to give scholarships to key young people to assist them with their post secondary school training.

The town of Rawat is the gateway to Islamabad and is an old historic town. Because of the Muslim domination all the Christians are very poor and no Christian from Rawat has finished high school. This partnership seeks to provide hope for these people by teaching women to sew and thereby giving them a way of gaining worthwhile employment and financially supporting their families.

The rural people in Pakistan are mainly poor peasants and daily labourers. Most Christian people in these areas are at the bottom of the food chain, the poorest of the poor. This partnership seeks to help them by training women to sew thus enabling them to increase their household income and at the very least to save money on their costs.

When a woman has a skill like sewing they are able to make a large contribution to the family economics. They are able to save a lot of expense buying clothes and often they are able to even earn some money, all while staying at home.

For a number of years Azam and Barbara Gill have been working with poor communities, trying to help them become better educated, helping women to train so they can earn an income and helping families to grow strong. One of the great barriers they face is illiteracy amongst the adults. In the past, education has not been valued and this is now creating much poverty.

The inability of people in rural communities in Pakistan to read is having widespread consequences. Young people are especially affected as they are not equipped to gain employment and they are then left in the villages with little incentive and few skills to become self sustaining.

For a number of years BHW has been supporting a sewing programme in Rawat township. Many women have been trained to sew and now are able to support their families because of this. As well, at the request of the community, adult literacy classes were run, mainly to help the local Christian adults to learn to read. On the back of these two successful programmes the young people in Rawat have asked for a computer training programme.

Azam Gill has been involved in full-time ministry in Pakistan since 2002 and is very passionate about the gospel. He is fearless and travels around a lot encouraging, mentoring and training people. He sees the need to equip people to become self-sustaining educationally and economically.

Khaliq Nager is like a rural village in the middle of Lahore. This community has about 17,500 people. Many are poor, most are illiterate and place no value on educating their children, especially the girls. There is no school, no clean water, no medical or health center and most of the families have no toilet in their homes. The EGM team has a vision to transform the community and a strong component of this is to empower uneducated women by training them to sew.

Four missionaries have been sent by the mission group Segadores to the town of San Fausto in Peru to start church planting in the area. Macedonio Huamani and Gerardo Huyacallan, both Peruvian, and Marcus & Adina Dumitru, from Romania lead the work there. They want to put in a solar panel to assist with development in this area which is very remote.

Elvin Buenviaje is the Executive Director of Empowered Christians in Partnership & Ministries (ECPM). He is on the full time staff of ECPM directly overseeing the operation of church planting activities and at the same time is involved in teaching church planting teams. He also visits church planting teams on the mission site to provide pastoral care and to coach the team in implementing the church planting programme.

Num Nueng Children's Hostel was started by Takberg Church under the leadership of Pastor Ponchai Banchasawan so that Hmong tribal children on Takberg mountain could get an education that was not available in their home village. This hostel means these highly at-risk children have the chance of an education to break out of the poverty trap.

Pangani is an extremely undeveloped area with few schools. A local church has been established and is growing strongly with more than 100 people baptised in the last two years. The community has asked for a school so the leadership of CFC-CCM have decided to develop one despite having few resources.

Oliver Mulenga and a few of his close friends became concerned at the number of children that were living on the streets of Kalulushi, a town in the Copperbelt of Zambia, so he took action.

About 65 kilometres into the bush from Kalulushi is the town of Katembula. It is the main town in a growing area and there are many very poor people. There is little infrastructure in the community. A number of children are being helped into school, and the children are visited to ensure they are doing well. Our partner is also training key community members in Foundations for Farming, so that they can start to train and disciple the community.

Dick Mumba, his wife Anita and their family run a Christian school for 23 street kids in a house in Chipata, Zambia. The programme includes feeding the children and giving them spiritual guidance.

Charles Chibale Chola lives in the remote rural village of Kaishe where they formed an association to care for the vulnerable children in their community. There are six churches in six small villages covering about 5 kms of the road. They originally discovered 193 orphans and registered them into the organisation.

There are few opportunities for school leavers in the Kaishe area. Bright Hope World has worked with the community of Kaishe to establish a Skills Training Centre.

Samfya Bible School is a key provider of training in the Luapula Province of Zambia. Every year they train about 30 people who become pastors, evangelists, church planters and change agents in their communities. They produce high quality graduates, many of whom are making a huge impact on their communities.

Maplehurst Farm has been purchased in Zambia for the purpose of generating funds in Africa. The idea is to use the funds to support existing projects. It will also become a base from which to operate in Zambia and to train local people. Maplehurst Farm is a serious attempt to address the issues that face southern Africa in an appropriate way; in a way that creates a number of side benefits.

Along with providing a place for training, especially training in sustainable farming methods, the Maplehurst Centre also generates income for BHW Zambia partnerships by renting various accommodation buildings at the Centre.

There are many children in Kabwe whose guardians and parents are so poor that it is impossible to send the children to school. The children are keen to learn but have little or no opportunity to excel. Opportunity has come up for BHW to become involved in assisting more than 120 children in Kabwe to go to school.

Currently the majority of Bright Hope World partnerships in Zambia are predominantly focused on getting HIV/AIDS orphans into school by supplying school fees, stationary and uniforms. The orphans are still looked after in the community by relatives or neighbors. However hunger is a huge issue and is potentially going to get worse. Bright Hope World has been challenged by this need and is now seeking to run kitchen garden training programmes and micro-enterprise loans in an attempt to improve household nutrition and food security as well as to kindle a spirit of self-reliance.

At Vimbai Primary School in Norton is a resource unit for 27 physically and intellectually challenged children. The children are not well treated by the other children or even the teachers. They have few resources, many need wheelchairs and other specialised equipment and the parents are not well able to provide it.