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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Grace Abanga has been supporting the elderly and vulnerable women in the Nyamasore area for a number of years now. This project to set-up a chicken layers unit seeks to provide them with another source of income, empowering the women to be self-sustaining and meet their daily needs.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Microfinance is the provision of small loans to those who, because of the effects of poverty, cannot access mainstream finance. These loans are often essential for people to provide for their families' needs. The loans may be as small as $50 but can totally transform a life, a family or a community.

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

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.

The places the hill tribe people of Thailand live in are hard places. They are steep and difficult. The land they use for farming is subject to erosion and drought. They are a long way from towns and cities and they eke out an existence. They have little infrastructure and development. In general, life is tough, very tough.

Water shortages are increasing as a result of global warming and other climatic / environmental factors. Villagers continue to ask for assistance with establishing new systems and expanding old ones, as a consequence of nearby water sources drying up, village population's increasing and/or villages being relocated to new areas. Access to improved water supply is not only a fundamental need and human right, it also has considerable health and economic benefits to households and individuals.

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 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.

Zimbabwe's economy is driven by agriculture and the majority of rural people depend on it for their livelihood. About 80% of the rural population live in regions where rainfall is erratic and unreliable, making dry land cultivation a big challenge. The success rate of rain fed agriculture has been known to be in the order of one good harvest in every 5 years. It is to this backdrop that Fountain of Hope would like to continue to improve the quality of life in these regions of Zimbabwe, one village at a time, through increasing household food security.

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.

The people of this community are rubbish collectors. They pick through the rubbish bins and skips on the streets of Helwan City, take it home and sort it out. They then try to make a living from selling it to recyclers. It is tough work, it is filthy work. Their whole community smells of rubbish. This is where they live, work and die. It is home to thousands of people.

For several years BHW has been supporting the Holiness Movement as they developed a loan programme among their churches. As the leaders of the programme moved around the churches they have discovered other impacts of poverty on their people. A major one is that in many villages where their people live there is a great deal of competition for the young people. Other groups are snatching their children by providing preschool education and they want to respond to this.

The Christian people of Upper Egypt are the poorest of the poor. Generally, they really struggle to eke out a living, to educate their children and if an emergency comes, they have nothing to fall back on. SB and her husband come from Upper Egypt and they have many friends and contacts there.

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.

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.

Gideon and Jennifer have developed many networks and key relationships which has enabled them to have a significant impact in various remote villages in Zimbabwe. Mtshazo village is a village in a new area, approximately 85 kms to the south of Mthombothemba. There is no church there but a strong invitation.

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.

The Christian communities of Egypt have traditionally been poor, especially in Upper Egypt. Most are daily workers and they usually only get seasonal work. Life is tough for them, made more difficult by the fact that they are an oppressed minority. They have few or no resources to fall back on and the church is their community. This partnership is about developing a loan fund from which people can borrow to start up small enterprises and so lift themselves out of poverty.

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.

This is a micro-enterprise fund for small scale loans that will provide employment and income for ministry in the future. More than 80 families are already benefiting from this fund.

The African Powerhouse exists to support the most vulnerable women and children in the Mochengo Village in rural Kenya. The project is currently running a soap making business training vulnerable women in the skill of soap and hand sanitizer making. These are then sold in the marketplace, providing them with an income to support themselves and their families. They also have a women's soccer team and a primary school for the vulnerable children in the area.

There is an acute shortage of clean accessible water in Nyamasore village and the people depend on Lake Victoria as their main and only source of water for all their domestic needs. About 10 years ago the lake was easily accessible and the water was clean enough for human consumption. However, it has now been covered by water hyacinth which makes it hard to access the clean water.

The support of emerging Christian leaders with Operation Mobilization (OM) is the key objective of this project. Without the ability to create a local base for supporting key people, this program will always struggle to survive. Even though the leaders are quite young there are opportunities for this to work. It is not uncommon for both male and female young people to have their own animals. The barrier is being able to get the initial animals as many of the families have huge numbers of children as men have multiple wives. Children are under severe pressure to drop out of school to assist their families economically by herding the cattle or the girls are married off so they cease to be an economic burden. This project will give young people much more control of their own destiny.

There are many communities in Nepal that are not developing and in which there are inadequate facilities and incentives to grow. Nawal Parasi was developed to provide opportunities for agriculture and medical growth by the Ray of Hope Society.

The Ray of Hope Society has been at work in Nawal Parasi providing opportunities for the community through agricultural schemes and medical facilities. This partnership focused on the development of a 3,000 bird poultry farm to provide sustainable income and employment for local families, access to cheaper eggs for the community, and a means to generate funds for use in other evangelistic endeavours within Nepal.

The Books Reading Cafe is a fusion of books (both a library and books to buy), an internet facility, and a coffee and food cafe in a peaceful environment. It is a place where ROHS can meet people and share the gospel and where discipleship can happen naturally. There is a real lack of good cafes in Kathmandu where people can study and also enjoy healthy food.

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.

For two years BHW has been supporting sewing training courses near to Faisalabad. This project is to enable the women who have been trained to sew to earn a better living for their families by sewing garments for sale.

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.

Edward Qasar and his father, Pastor Manzoor Jalal, have had a long term vision to establish a sewing factory in Lahore to both provide employment for local people and generate income for their ministry in Pakistan. The plan is to develop this factory so that eventually it will employ around 300 people.

There are more and more young people moving into the Chaklala area as the community develops. There are many issues associated with you people, especially drug use. There is little for the local youths to do and our partners there want to provide something positive for them that will help them with their education as well. Hence, the computer centre.

The church at Centro Christiana Vida is currently running a trial chicken farm in Cajamarca. The purpose is to generate some profit to fund church planting in the Cajamarca region. The intention is to expand the chicken farm to fully fund Jorge Asto and his family as church planters. The chicken farm should be self supporting in six months.

Kelabo and Arou towns are in the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. They are rural communities that are struggling with the huge increases in food prices, especially of rice. The churches in these towns have realised they can do something to assist their communities so they sent selected people to attend a training programme to learn how to grow rice. They then returned to their communities and have grown rice as a model. A mill will be put into each village to encourage the development.

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.

Largely on account of its isolation, Hauna village and the Wokoma area of the Sepik Valley have suffered from benign neglect. Consequently the 3,000 people (approximately) who live in Hauna and the surrounding villages are facing big financial difficulties now.

Many Thai church planters are working in small villages where the new church is not able to fully support them and their families. Mushroom cultivation has proven to be an effective means of providing partial support for pastors and church planters as it does not require full-time commitment to working on the project.

Thomas and Joyce Lubari lead a church in Jinja, Uganda which comprises of some of the poorest people in Uganda. They have a real heart for these people and this micro-loan programme is an exciting development to enable them to offer a helping hand to the people in their congregation.

This area is known in Uganda as a cattle and dairy farming area. It is fertile and there are many very large farms and ranches. Using dairy cows to generate income therefore has good potential to support the key people financially and to assist the poor in the area to become self-sustaining.

BHW has been partnering with Emmanuel Mission for a number of years and various programmes have been initiated. They have proved to be a very reliable partner and they have worked very faithfully in the various endeavours. This partnership is to establish a loan fund in Uganda to develop various projects from there, rather than for each one of them to have to come back to BHW for approval and facilitation.

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.

KERO farm has been set up to provide employment for people and support the orphans in Beracah Orphans. This year requires the purchase of some equipment to change this from being a small scale peasant farm into a commercial operation: an ox cart, a solar irrigation pump, barbed wire, 7 animals and 1,000 banana plants. The plan is that by 2010 the place will be self sustaining.

In recent years, Chaba has struggled with the impacts of overfishing and is finding it harder to make a living from this traditional trade. As a whole the community is finding that they must become more reliant on agriculture production and diversification as a means of providing food and income for their families. The goal here is to increase the standard of living in Chaba by investing in local agriculture infrastructure.

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.

Gideon and Jennifer have developed many networks and key relationships which has enabled them to have a significant impact in various remote villages in Zimbabwe. Chirogwe is not far from Mandiva and is very remote and arid. There is a church of about 80 people in the area and the people are pretty poor.

Nemauzhe is a community in Chivi district of Masvingo province which was influenced by the community of Mandiva (ZIM02d) to consider practicing farming God’s way as a way of breaking the cycle of poverty. It is one of the largest communities in Chivi with many villages. As they have done in other communities like Makamure (ZIM02c), Fountain of Hope will slowly move from one village to another until the whole community has been transformed to be able to change their situation and circumstances.

SPCM operates as an umbrella organisation for Sowers International in the DRC and for ACIS, a Christian ministry to deaf people. This project will provide employment and an income for people from both organisations who will work in it.

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.

The Cula river remains the only water system close to the population of Chikera town. During the rainy season the river overflows, sweeping away everything in its path, and presents a high risk of drowning for adults and children who go there to fetch water.

Robert Gitau and his late wife Rose have been instruments of transformation for many years in the Tala / Nguluni community. They chose to go and live there to plant a church. Finding great poverty caused them to start a school as well and over the past years have mentored and assisted many families and individuals.

Food production in rural Kenya isn't easy. Robert and Rose Gitau live in an area where there is little rain and poor soil and they need to feed many people. BHW is working with them to help them grow food, to provide for themselves and the hundreds of children they care for.

This partnership involves developing a dairy farm as an income generating activity to generate funds for Mathare Community Outreach (KEN01b) which seeks to educate vulnerable children living in the Mathare Valley slum.

Eshel Garden is a Foundations for Farming demonstration garden where training seminars will be held to create awareness of improved farming methods in an effort to enhance food security and reduce poverty in this area of Kenya.

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.

Kenya's forests are in terminal decline so the Kijani team are developing a plan to get a long term, sustainable reforestation programme underway. They are establishing a tree planting and agro-reforestation initiative and plan to use Foundations for Farming techniques to achieve this.

Nyamasore is a sandy area and nothing much grows there without irrigation. People were struggling to live and survive so Grace Abanga began a small loan programme. The impact has been incredible. Farmers are now growing vegetables and earning a living from their gardening.

This project is a small scale income generation activity to support the vulnerable in the community in which Pastor Bob lives and pastors a church. The church has been assisting vulnerable widows and children to get to school and start up small businesses with some success but they desire to start their own income generation to increase the resources available.

Poverty is a huge issue in Myanmar and even more so amongst Christians there as often they are expelled from their communities and struggle to survive. One of our partners there is seeking to address this issue in his area. This partnership involves providing a one-off amount for him to buy a Chinese tractor.

MCTS is a training centre just outside Yangon, Myanmar. But this partnership is not just about theological training, it's about empowering and equipping a generation of Christ followers and community leaders. The plan is to develop a chicken broiler unit to generate profit which would be used to support the operating costs of MCTS and to support key agents of change in their communities.

A large number of villages in Myanmar still do not have access to clean water and sanitation facilities. And, because they are poor they do not have the knowledge/experience in design and construction to establish such facilities. The Integrated Tribal Development Foundation (ITDF) is seeking to do something about this situation.

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.

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.

South Sudan is a country that has emerged from a traumatic civil unrest that has left 90% of the population in utter poverty. The majority of the south Sudan population live in a pitiable situation of poverty. The introduction of a micro-loan programme to the South Sudanese will be a great relief to boost the businesses of the self employed.

The people in South Sudan are in a desperate state. There seems to be a real lack of hope, or ability to see what they have going for them. Many people are just lying around, being idle with maybe one family member eeking out an existence for the extended family.

Mazingara is a village wracked by intergenerational poverty. More than 1,000 people live in the area and there is no safe water. People collect ground water from more than 5 kms away for all uses. The water is contaminated and unsafe and the people just never wash. There is rampant sickness and disease from poor hygiene and little food in the village. The previous rainy season the village houses were all severely damaged by floods and the people are too poor to rebuild them. The primary need here according to the leaders of the village is for water.

Frog farming is a very viable income-generation project that will result in church planters and their families being totally self-supporting.

Vision Thailand is the coordinating body for a growing church planting movement among the poor and unreached in Thailand. They are focused on training and long term mentoring of new national leaders who build small, largely self-sustaining churches that replicate themselves.

Many refugees in Uganda live in extreme poverty, made worse by the fact the homes they are allocated are in the rockiest places meaning they are unable to grow crops.

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.

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.

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.

The pressures of 12 years of national mismanagement and the impact of HIV / AIDS has ripped the heart out of the community of Norton. There are now large numbers of widows that are HIV+ and many, many orphans and vulnerable children. It is these vulnerable women and children that are the focus of this partnership.

The heart of this partnership is to start a commercial vegetable production unit to generate resources that will make it possible to fund the existing beneficiaries of Tariro Support Group and grow to help more people into the future.