Save the Children

Thanks to generous donations like yours, Save the Children is able to help children and families around the world. Here is one of their stories:

Edmine*, aged 8, lives with her grandparents in a village in Mananjary district, Madagascar. Due to the lack of money to pay school fees, she could not enroll in school until she was 8 years old (school year 2021-2022). 

Edmine and her family were among those hit by two cyclones, Emnati and Batsirai, in 2022. Due to the strong winds and heavy rains, Edmine's house collapsed and many of the family's belongings were damaged or destroyed, including kitchen equipment, important paperwork, and school supplies used by Edmine and her older brother Nantenaina*.

After the cyclones, the family struggled to earn money. As a result, Edmine and her brother were forced to drop out of school because her grandparents could not provide for the family's daily needs, including school fees.

Save the Children, along with our local partner, are working on an emergency project in the area where Edmine and her family live. Edmine and Nantenaina were given school kits, which included school bags, school supplies, and notebooks to replace the ones that were ruined in the cyclone. The family received household kits including essentials like cooking utensils, soap and buckets, as well as cash transfers for four months to help them meet their daily needs. 

We followed up with Edmine in January 2023, when she told us how she and her family have been since we last met her:

“With the help of Save the Children, in those few months, our lives improved...we are able to eat well with the money we were given.”

Now Edmine spends her time playing ‘kitranotrano’ (a typical Malagasy game) and dolls with her friends in the village. She was very happy to receive the school kits from Save the Children because, according to Edmine, "now my dream of going to school has come true." 

Thank you for helping kids like Edmine by supporting Save the Children! 

*Names have been changed for privacy and protection.

Links:

• Save the Children - Emergency Response

Somalia is facing one of the most severe emergencies in the worst global hunger crisis this century. As the Horn of Africa faces its worst drought in 40 years, 1.5 million children in Somalia – or one in five - could face deadly forms of malnutrition without immediate action.

With the support of donors like you, Save the Children is on the ground in Somalia, working around the clock in 17 of 18 regions of the country to help children and their families survive and cope with the extreme effects of the drought and food crisis. We are providing emergency water supplies, treating children who are malnourished, running health facilities and providing cash and livelihood support to the most vulnerable.

Thanks to giving people like you, our work in Somalia is making a difference! Istar*, age 2, is just one of the many children in Somalia supported by our programs. Suffering from severe malnutrition, she was hospitalized at a stabilization center established and equipped by Save the Children. She was weak and sick with diarrhea, vomiting, and had a cough and fever as well as poor appetite.

After 10 days of treatment, her health was improved and Istar started to smile again. Now back home with her family, her follow up care at the Stabilization Center will continue for about six months.

We couldn't help children like Istar without the generosity of our donors, including you. Thank you for your support! 

*All names changed for privacy and protection.

Links:

• Save the Children - Somalia
• Save the Children - The Hunger Crisis

Across the U.S., the experiences shaping children’s lives are starkly different.

Many children in rural communities experience higher rates of poverty and food insecurity. While poverty affects millions in the U.S., its strongest grip is most often in rural communities. Children growing up in these places face higher infant mortality rates, lack essential educational resources and proper access to health care, miss out on nutritious meals, experience higher teen-pregnancy rates and are caught in the crippling opioid crisis.

One in seven children in America lack consistent access to enough food for a healthy, active life. The pandemic exacerbated child hunger, with food insecurity rates tripling for households with children. Child hunger is worse in rural America – 90% of the counties with the highest percentage of children at risk for food insecurity are rural.

Hungry children are more likely to have lower math scores, repeat a grade, come to school late, or miss school entirely.

Our work in the U.S. began in 1932 by providing hot lunches to schoolchildren in Harlan County, Kentucky during the Great Depression. The impact of this program was immediate. Undernourished children were better fed, grades rose and school attendance increased.

In order to give children living in rural poverty in America today a chance to succeed, we have to give them a fair chance to learn and learn early. Our proven educational programs help children start school ready to learn, reach their 3rd grade reading and literacy benchmarks, and maintain their academic gains over the summer.

Here are summaries of our programs, made possible through support from donors like you:

Head Start: Federally-funded Head Start and Early Head Start programs reach children in poverty from birth to age 5. Since 2011, we have led Head Start programs that had struggled to achieve quality or continuity. We hire and train the most qualified staff, improve facilities, provide research-based curriculums and classroom materials, and use home-based Early Head Start to reach pregnant women, infants and toddlers. We lead Head Start programs in Arkansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Tennessee.

Early Steps to School Success:We support language, literacy, and social emotional development in children under age 5 through home visits and equip parents with the knowledge to support their children’s development.

In-school literacy and math support: Our school-age programs focus on measurable academic outcomes for at-risk children and are designed to reduce the achievement gap between students most impacted by inequality and their more affluent peers. Our literacy, math, and Healthy Choices nutrition and fitness components provide the training, tools and support schools need to accelerate growth for struggling students, kindergarten through sixth grade. The centerpiece is the Literacy Block - an hour of activities supporting increased reading achievement, including guided independent reading practice, fluency-building support and listening to books read aloud. Mathematics activities provide a foundation for future success in the math field. Our school-age programs have achieved greater literacy gains than their national peers during the COVID-19 pandemic based on an external evaluation that analysed 3.3 million children between fall 2019 and spring 2021.

KinderBoost: This a two-week summer program teaches children academic, social emotional and behavioral skills that are critical to their success during their first year at school. We familiarize children and their families with teachers and staff at the school, the school building and daily school routines to lessen anxiety on the first day. In the summer of 2022, we provided KinderBoost at 117 sites in seven states.

Taste of Kindergarten: At 13 sites in four states, we reached children and families not able to participate in KinderBoost. This half-day event provides incoming Kindergarten children and their families with support for a successful transition.

SummerBoost: Each year, millions of children are left without opportunities for summer learning and are at risk of the "summer slide." That's when kids lose some of the achievement gains they've made during the previous school year. SummerBoost gives girls and boys opportunities to improve their math and reading skills in a fun, summer camp format. In the summer of 2022, we ran camps at 80 locations in rural America.

Addressing Rural Child Hunger

As the leading national organization dedicated to serving children in the rural U.S., Save the Children understands the challenge that rural hunger presents. We are leveraging our network, resources, advocacy and expertise to ensure children have the food they need to succeed. With our school and community partners, we work to identify new solutions and develop scalable models to combat rural child hunger.

In 2021, we directly reached more than 837,000 children, supported the distribution of 22 million meals and provided $2.4 million in school and community feeding grants. Projects distribute healthy food through drive-through meal distributions at schools and community-based organizations; neighborhood pop-up pantries; school food pantries for children attending summer school; and backpack meal programs to give children access to nourishing food on weekends.

This summer, in our effort to help close the summer hunger gap when children are out of school, we provided approximately $2.3 million to support the distribution of meals to children in partnership with schools, food banks, and other local organizations in 16 states. We supported the start-up of several mobile learning and feeding units that bring learning resources, programs, and nutritious meals to the hardest-to-reach families.

Links:

• Save the Children U.S. Programs

Thanks to supporters like you, Save the Children is able to support children around the world. Your donation helps make a difference in the life of kids like Angelis, 13. 

Venezuela’s spiraling political and economic crisis has had a huge effect on every aspect of life there: the ability to find and afford food, access safe water, receive critical health care services, and beyond. For Angelis – who is currently living with her mother, Cynthia, and four younger siblings in an informal settlement in Colombia’s border town of Maicao – one of the hardest parts about the situation back home in Venezuela was that she was no longer able to keep going to school. “I really like to go to school,” she says, “so this was really difficult for me.”

Before the crisis began, the family lived well in Maracaibo, the coastal capital city of Venezuela’s Zulia State. But as the economic situation got worse and worse, Cynthia lost her job and could no longer provide for her children. Unable to survive any longer in Venezuela, the family eventually relocated to Colombia.

Since relocating to Maicao a few months ago, Angelis has been unable to formally enroll in school. However, she attends the Save the Children Temporary Learning Center (TLC) in the informal settlement where she’s living – and she is a star pupil. Her tutor says she is curious, diligent, studious, and always ready to learn.

“I love it,” Angelis says of the TLC. “I learn a lot. They teach us a lot of educational things, like math and reading, and also about all of our rights. Like, the rights that we have as children… They teach us a lot of things we didn’t know before.”

Cynthia has also noticed the impacts the TLC has had on her daughter. “It’s nice for the children to have a space to just be kids,” she says. It’s definitely helped them a lot, you can see it.”

As for Angelis, she hopes to continue studying so that she can achieve her dream of becoming a lawyer someday. “I want to help people,” she says. “I am going to be someone really important, someone really special. I think I already am.”

Links:

• Save the Children - Venezuela

Saving lives through Community-based Management of Acute Malnutrition

Adut* (1.5) lives with her mother Jane* (39) and five siblings in Bor, a large town in South Sudan hit hard by conflict, floods and inter-communal fighting. Her father works outside the town and only visits a few times a year.

Adut and her family were displaced by the conflicts. Where they live now, recent flooding has impacted their ability to grow their own food, leading to issues of malnutrition among the childlren. Adut was also born prematurely, and has long had health complications.

In 2021, Jane joined Save the Children’s Mother to Mother support group where she was trained on breastfeeding and dietary/meal preparation for her children. Save the Children also supported Jane’s family with basic needs, such as relief food and hygiene kits. 

With the training on breastfeeding and cooking, along with the provision of basic suppiles, Jane said, she is able to better take care of her children, especially Adut. “All of them are now healthy - even the one born before 9 months is healthy and I am still breastfeeding her up to two years or beyond,” said Jane.

Thanks to your support, Save the Children can provide life-saving help to more kids like Adut! 

*All names changed to protect identities.