Annual Reports

‘Speak Up For Children’ was our clarion call within the reporting year. Aware of the multiple crises in the world today; with children often bearing the greatest brunt of these crises, we sought to demonstrate the need for each of us to play a role in advocating for the rights, dignity, and wellbeing of our children. From children themselves to faith leaders, representatives from Faith-Based Organisations (FBOs) and Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), to government authorities; each of us has a unique responsibility to ‘Speak Up For Children’.

The year 2020 will forever be memorialized as the year of the COVID-19 pandemic and unprecedented global crises in its wake. Suddenly and quite sadly, children across the world had this new unseen monster disrupting every aspect of their lives and, threatening to cast a dark and powerful impact on their childhoods.

This annual report covers our results and impact between April 2017 and March 2018, being the 6th year since End Child Poverty was established. The report includes an overview of our interventions to address child poverty, the results we have collectively realized and the impact we are aiming to achieve.Throughout the reporting year, our work has significantly paid attention to the commitments made during the GNRC 5th Forum in Panama, 2017. These commitments are well anchored on ending violence against children and child Poverty.

Right from the start, End Child Poverty was conceived as an initiative that sits in between other formations. We are a strategic operational initiative of Arigatou International with a specific charge to catalyze faith resources and actions to eradicate child poverty.This report seeks to provide an account of the work that has been undertaken by End Child Poverty in pursuit of the commitment  to end child poverty. We have conceived of this as an outlier account of our key results thus far, a measure of the footprint that we have established in the short time since our launch.

For End Child Poverty, this last year presented an opportunity to endeavor in taking accelerated steps, pushing our boundaries and comfort zones while making sure to remain grounded and focused on our founding objective to end child poverty. As we go forward, we have reason to be hopeful and to expect greater impact by looking forward to intensifying our partnerships to build a genuine and broad based coalition of actors at all levels driven by faith and the power of their conviction to eradicate child poverty.

This year book is in many ways, a narrative of our work and that of our partners in the pursuit of endeavors to respond to child poverty. From religious leaders, to international organizations, to grassroots child rights workers, people on every continent have enthusiastically welcomed these initiatives.We wish therefore to say a very hearty thank you to all those who made tireless effort to make the activities and thoughts reported here possible – and we invite you to read and share widely, these stories of building a better world for children by ending child poverty.

Extreme poverty is one of the most extensive forms of human degradation. Perhaps the greatest moral scandal in the world today is that over a billion people continue to live in squalor and indignity while there are enough resources for everyone. Interfaith Initiative to End Child Poverty is committed to the simple dictum that no child, and no one indeed, should live in extreme poverty.

Poverty is the worst form of Violence, and whilst poverty harms all human beings, it is more threatening to children. It denies them of their right to grow up free from deprivation and want, and develop healthily to their full potential. Arigatou International’s global Interfaith Initiative to End Child Poverty (End Child Poverty) is alive to the fact that eradicating child poverty is not easy, but it is possible. This has been our driving force since End Child Poverty’s inception in 2012. We aspire to achieve a world where every child lives free from poverty. This report provides a summary of our collective work in pursuit of our core commitment – to end child poverty worldwide. It presents our key results and the footprints we have made in the period covering April 2019 to March 2020. This year our main focus was on Child Participation, Partnership Development, and Strengthening as well as Peace Building.