The city of Vanadzor was a large chemical production city in the Soviet era. In 1988 there was a huge earthquake in the area that killed tens of thousands of people. The area has not recovered and people are living in extreme conditions. There are many living in ramshackle containers, there are many disturbed and uneducated children and families struggling to survive.

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.

There are many issues in Beni and Bunia, primarily because it is a volatile area with many stake-holders. There is little hope that the major conflicts will end in the near future but even if they do, there are many traumatized people with little chance of resuming life without some form of assistance to do so.

Bukavu is a city of around 1 million people in the East of the DR Congo. It is a centre around which there is a great deal of rebel activity. Many women are left as widows and they struggle to make ends meet and care for their children. ACLUP seeks to identify the poorest Christian women and assist them to establish and operate small businesses so they can become financially independent.

There are many communities near to Bukavu that are in desperate need of safe water. In 2021 BHW partnered with ACLUP to successfully provide water for the Chikera community (DRC08a) and after seeing the dramatic impact this had on that community, they are now keen to continue doing water projects in many more villages.

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.

After living in Burundi for a number of years, in 2015 Paulin Bashombana returned to his hometown of Bukavu, DR Congo, and very quickly realised that there was a big problem in eastern DRC, and something needed to be done. There were large numbers of orphans in the community, living on the streets, so Paulin brought them together, found ways for them to be able to study and has placed some of them in the homes of Christians from their different churches.

Paulin is a man with a vision. He wants to fight against poverty in his community and see his community escape the vicious cycle of poverty they are in.

In the early 2000's MM and her husband started a Bible study for women. They were asked to go to a Christian family's home to pray for the daughter who had converted to Islam. While there, a neighbour came and asked them to pray, then all the neighbours came, and a Bible study began. For the past 20+ years more than 200 women have been meeting weekly.

In this area of Ethiopia there is a large Christian community but very little land available for farming. The Christian leaders are working with the people to obtain land and to train and send young families there so they are able to farm and also to witness to the local people and establish Christian groups.

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 is a pressing need within the network of churches Pradeep is involved with to assist young people gain qualifications so they can obtain decent employment. This project is a scholarship programme for young people who are graduating from secondary school and moving on to next level education. It is not for everyone, just for those who have done well in education and have proved themselves.

The plight of women in India is quite desperate. Many are poorly educated and their husbands are daily workers. Tom and his wife are very keen to help women to flourish in their families.

James is the pastor of a small brethren church in Kolkata. They have established good relationships in the community, have got to know the families of their neighbours, and have discovered a lot of poverty. This sewing programme is designed to continue the development of relationships and to empower women to become more able to sustain themselves and their families.

A group of local men are working along the Bhutan border establishing small groups of Christian believers. They visit small communities and go from house to house talking about the Gospel. As they travel, they find many very poor families and have discovered many young boys who have been abandoned.

They have brought some of these boys together into a home to care for them. Of course, this creates an ongoing need for finance. None of these men have regular support so the cost of keeping their families and all these children as well.

Illiteracy and unemployment is a major drawback for the tribal people along the Bhutan border and so Thadeus and his team desire to empower them by providing a computer training programme, a tailoring training course and a tuition centre.

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.

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.

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.

This project was established to support vulnerable women and children in the Kisumi Village. It currently runs training courses in tailoring and small business development for vulnerable women. Once trained, the women establish and run their own small tailoring businesses which provides them with an income to financially support themselves and their families.

Kutwanana is a small NGO, registered with the Mozambique government set up by the church that Patrick and Grace Mulenga pastor in a poor suburb of Maputo. 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.

Chrissy and Suzen Lukanga are Zambian missionaries involved in reaching out to unreached people groups of the three Northern provinces of Mozambique; Gabo Delgado, Nampula and Niassa, with the love and teaching about Jesus Christ.

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.

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.

In a country like Pakistan, correspondence courses are an effective means of training. It is not easy for people of other faiths to obtain access to the real story. This is also a useful tool for Christian people to be discipled and nurtured in their faith.

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.

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.

Severino has been committed to taking the Gospel to the villages in the Cajamarca province since 1983. God has used him to plant various churches, besides attempting to establish more churches. Severino visits the already established churches as well as the churches that exist that are not a result of his evangelistic work throughout the Cajamarca countryside. He is committed to training, teaching and evangelising.

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.

ECPM seeks to train people in church planting and then sends them out to areas in the Philippines where there are no churches. This partnership seeks to provide financial support for one church planting team.

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.

Masoyi Home Based Care is the response of Florence and her team to the large numbers of people in the community who are affected by HIV / AIDS. Volunteers visit house bound patients to encourage, assist and care for them.

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.

The earthquake that struck Syria on 6th February 2023 caused widespread devastation, leaving many people without homes, basic necessities, and access to education. Children are particularly vulnerable in this situation, as they have lost their homes and schools, and their education has been disrupted. Many of these children have not had the opportunity to continue their education due to the lack of resources and facilities available in their communities.

It is estimated that most hill tribes in Thailand and its surrounding regions are living below $350 annual income. That is less than $1/day. ITDF seeks to help these villages in an holistic sustainable way.

For a variety of reasons the hill tribes of Thailand often do not have the same opportunities as other Thai nationals, therefore making it difficult for them to elevate themselves from poverty. It is with these concerns that ITDF is providing assistance. However, these villagers not only need their physical needs met but also their spiritual needs.

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?

In Koboko there is a group of pastors' wives and widows who are doing business and seeking to empower themselves in a very small way. Life is extremely hard without income and they have started their own very small savings and loan programme.

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.

One of the great challenges Uganda faces is feeding it's people in a sustainable way. We believe the key to making this dream a reality is to teach and train local people to grow their own food. And in the process of doing that, they learn to care for their own families.

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.

There are currently 15 churches in the Faith Harvest Network in the east of Uganda. Many of the people in these churches are poor with few resources or capital to allow them to get out of poverty. In several of the churches they have begun a small loan programme with approximately 120 people. The concept here is to boost this so it becomes available to more people.

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.

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.

Samfya Bible School has been preparing Christian leaders since 1940 and is a key provider of training in the Luapula Province of Zambia. However recently a need has been identifed for a ministry to youth. The extension program aims to teach church leaders about youth programs and how to handle youth, but they had no ministry actually reaching young people.

Fountain of Hope is a faith based organization run by Gideon and Jennifer whose main mission is to combat the spread and reduce the impact of HIV/AIDS on orphans and vulnerable children, women, and the community at large through the provision of orphan care services, HIV/AIDS workshops and community based development projects.

Maunga Farm is a poverty stricken area. People were resettled here by the government in 2002/2002 but no infrastructure was developed. They are peasant farmers and barely make a living in a good year but years of ongoing drought have made life even more difficult. Rodwell Masanga and his family have a vision to see the community transformed and plan to move into the area and become agents of change.