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.

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.

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.

Many women in this network are coming to faith. They are pretty much all very poor and many are abused or abandoned. A small business loan programme has been commenced but the number of women coming into the movement is overwhelming the resources available. This programme is the establishment and boosting of a loan project to empower women and help them support 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.

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.

The work in the north of Mozambique is growing. Several people from the work of Chrissy and Suzen Lukanga have been trained in various places and are moving into rural communities as agents of change. This project is assisting them to establish small scale enterprises so they have a reason to be in the community and to provide an income for their families.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Anna Ocen has been working with a group of widows and single mothers in Mbale where she lives. These women have set up a small loan programme but are needing additional funds to take their businesses to the next level.

NCEC is a mother church for many small churches in small towns and villages around Cairo. The church has strong relationships with these churches and to support them has set up a social committee and a loan programme. They operate separately and attempt to meet the needs of the poor in these churches.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bob Abdalla pastors a church on the outskirts of Kisumu and invests much of his time helping the vulnerable in his community. With the help of Bright Hope World he was able to purchase a tuk tuk and run a transport service with it. This project generates income to financially support Bob and his family enabling him to more effectively serve and minister to the community. This project also provides employment to a member of Bob’s congregation who works as the driver.

Namana is the Malagasy word for friend, and expresses our desire to come alongside the socially and economically isolated poor of Madagascar to give them a better future through micro loans. They will also be trained in entrepreneurial skills, Biblical values and basic economics.

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.

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.

For a number of years Niranjan and Sonu Adhikary were very concerned about the dependence that a lot of Christian ministry in Nepal had on outside funding and resources. They subsequently developed a Nepali way of doing and funding ministry and have been encouraging people to think differently. Part of this was to establish a Resource Centre to provide loans for members to establish businesses to support themselves and also generate funds to support church planters. This project is an extension of that and provides larger loans to a few key people.

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.

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.

This was set up to support Jose Isabel Ayay's missionary work (PER03a) and enable him to do more frequent evangelism visits. They are hoping to purchase more equipment to make the shop more productive.

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.

ECPM is looking to start a business refilling printer ink cartridges as an income generation activity to start the process of self-sustainability.

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.

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.

In the East of Uganda two existing loan programmes have been successful and a number of participants now want to take out larger loans that have extended repayment periods.

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 micro-loan programme assists local women, widows and single parents to support their families by establishing and growing their small businesses.

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.

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.

Life has never been easy in the Great Lakes area of Africa. The team based here works under the banner of Harvest Partnership but this group has diminishing resources and have a desire to see their key people become bi-vocational and self-sustaining, and not dependent on external resources for their living.

Bob Abdalla is a church planter/pastor in the west of Kenya near Kisumu. In the post-election violence in 2008 his wife's tailoring business was destroyed therefore taking away their only income source.

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.

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.

For a number of years BHW has been partnering with Samuel Thang. He is a pastor and leader and cares for many vulnerable children. This micro-loan programme will seek to enable church pastors to become self-sufficient, provide employment for the older youth at Peace Children's Home and empower poor rural Christians.

Poverty is rife in the suburbs of Yangon. Many people cannot make ends meet, even people with jobs struggle to clothe, feed, house and educate their families. Along with that, a number of recent climate events have added pressure onto families who have little to fall back on economically.

Vicente Enrique has been supported by BHW for a number of years. He is a key person in the ECPM training programme. Victor wants to be self-supporting and this is an attempt to help his family achieve that.

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.

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.

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.

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.