Norwegian Church Aid has cooperated with local, church based organizations in Cuba since 2001. Today we focus our work on gender based violence.

Gender-based violence

Our partners develop various local initiatives to overcome violence within close relations. This work is run through the church network in local communities in Cuba. They are often met with challenges in connection with alcohol and we support initiatives to help the victims of violence. At the same time we support the promotion of women’s participation in the churches.

Faith-based actors

Norwegian Church Aid support our church based partners measures for dialogue across religious communities internally in churches. We seek to promote participation and cooperation across religious communities and social divisions.

Coordination through ACT Alliance

Norwegian Church Aid is a member of the ACT Alliance’s international network. In Cuba the ACT-members have several joint partners, which enable closer collaboration.

We also acknowledge that our Cuban partners can play a central role in South-South exchange. Therefore we wish to explore the opportunities for cooperation between our Cuban partners and other partner organizations in the region. This could particularly be relevant with Haiti.

More information about Norwegian Church Aid’s work around the world here.

Heavy rains have fallen in the Antofagasta and Copiapo regions in northern Chile, where rain hasn’t fallen for 20 years. 30mm of rain fell within two days, causing floods and enormous damage.

Rivers broke their banks and drainage was hugely inadequate for towns and cities in the region. Local governments have organised evacuations.

The President declared a state of emergency in Antofogasta and Atacama. The ministry of health declared a health warning in several areas.

Twelve people have have been confirmed killed by the flooding, 22 disappeared. 760 people have lost their houses, 5700 are in one of the 23 temporary shelters in the affected region.

The ACT forum in Chile are proposing interventions.

In February and March, heavy rain and floods have hit Acre in northern Brazil, 80,000 people have been severely affected  in particular marginal communities and indigenous people.

According to authorities the Acre River exceeded its highest recorded height of 17.66 meters, reaching 18.40 meters.

The most affected people are communities on river banks and indigenous peoples, especially the Apurinã indigenous people of Pauini, near the Purus River in Amazonas.

Communities are helpless, with no support from government, including the official indigenous body of the Brazilian state.

Immediate action is needed to support 640 families (3,200 people) affected by the last March rain, with food, mattresses, clean water and kits to clean the houses.

The Civil Defence is working in the capital of Acre State and in the other cities, where urban and riverside areas have received some support, but so far, the Aripunã region has not received any assistance.

According to the local partner, the Council of Mission among Indigenous Peoples (COMIN), there are no indications the government will provide any support for the areas identified by the ACT forum.

ACT Alliance members FLD and CESE have provided resources for the affected communities from the February rains, through the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) and COMIN. Now with the March rains ACT members are planning to issue an appeal for the most affected and isolated indigenous communities.

Planned responses include the purchase and distribution of food, water and cleaning kits. Partners CPT and COMIN will work on planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of activities.

ACT member Christian Aid is to make an initial £25,000 available to partner organisations providing emergency supplies in the aftermath of Cyclone Pam which hit the Pacific island chain of Vanuatu on Friday, killing at least eight people, injuring many more, and reducing many houses and shops to matchwood.

The money will go to sister organisations in the ACT Alliance that are best placed to provide immediate assistance to the islands’ 270,000 strong population. The alliance is a global coalition of more than 140 churches and affiliated organisations working together to fight acute poverty.

As well as making money available, Christian Aid says the ferocity of Cyclone Pam must be seen as a stark warning of the kind of disasters that will become more commonplace if the global community fails to take significant measures to combat climate change.

“While it is difficult to attribute any one event to climate change, scientists are clear that it makes extreme events like Cyclone Pam more likely,” said Mohamed Adow, Christian Aid’s Senior Climate Change Advisor.

“The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction revealed earlier this month that 87 per cent of all natural disasters over the past 10 years have been climate-related. That means a significant proportion of the 700,000 people that have died over that period through disasters, together with the 155 million that were displaced and the $1.4 trillion of economic losses that have piled up, are all down to global warming.

“This is a crucial year for tackling climate change, with a UN summit in December supposed to produce an international climate deal to come into force in 2020. Rich countries must put forward in advance their own carbon cutting targets and set out their support for the poorer countries which are already bearing the brunt of climate change to help them cope with further inevitable impacts.

“But all we have seen so far is a deeply worrying lack of ambition on the part of rich countries. Short-term emergency measures are no longer sufficient. Massive adaptation programmes commensurate with the projected level of warming are needed.

“At the same time, Governments have got to slash their carbon budgets, undertaking to move speedily away from fossil fuels for energy generation and investing instead in renewables if the global temperature rise is to be kept below 2oC, the point beyond which scientists predict climate chaos.”

Speaking today at a UN conference on disaster risk reduction in Sendai, Japan, Vanuatu’s president, Baldwin Lonsdale, said the storm, which virtually wiped out Vanuatu’s development, was directly linked to climate change.

“We see the level of sea rise …The cyclone seasons, the warm, the rain, all this is affected. This year we have more than in any year … Yes, climate change is contributing to this,” he said.

As well as making extreme weather events such as cyclones more powerful, climate change has also triggered rising sea levels which means the tidal surges that accompany storms are stronger, deeper and more lethal.

Peter Rottach, Chair of the ACT Alliance Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) Community of Practice, speaks from the 3rd World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction (WCDRR) taking place in Sendai, Japan (14-18 March 2015). He highlights, on the back of the devastating cyclone that hit Vanuatu on 14 March 2015, the urgency of action needed to help communities build resilience to extreme weather events as the impacts of climate change continue to increase.

Cairo, Egypt is one of the largest urban refugee centres in the world. Over 255,000 refugees call Cairo home. Unlike refugee camps like Kakuma or Dadaab in Kenya, refugees in Cairo are not all congregated in one place, but live as they can throughout the city.

In the last few years, the Sudanese and South Sudanese refugees who were the bulk of Cairo’s refugee population have been joined by tens of thousands of Syrian refugees fleeing the violence in their home.
Since 1987, Refuge Egypt, a ministry of the Episcopal Diocese of Egypt based in All Saints’ Cathedral in Zamalek, Cairo has been working to support refugees in the city.

ACT member PWRDF has supported this work for over 20 years through two children’s clinics operated by Refuge Egypt. The Well Baby and Well Child clinics provide health care, health education and nutrition support to children aged 0-5 and their families.

Staff at the clinics focus on monitoring the growth of the children, as well as ensuring their vaccinations are up to date, and checking them for malnutrition and disease. When a family brings their child to the clinic, they receive a food basket with milk, rice, cooking oil, biscuits, cheese and peanut butter.

These food packages motivate the parents to bring their children in, and they also provide the opportunity for staff at the clinic to talk with the families about proper nutrition to help ensure their children’s growth is not stunted due to malnutrition.

One newborn baby came to the Well Baby Clinic when he was 29 days old. After weighing and measuring him, the staff determined he was underweight (under the 3rd percentile), and then referred him to the malnutrition clinic. At the clinic, his mother learned about the importance of breast feeding and of her own diet while she is lactating.

One month later, his weight had improved, and his mother was happy to see her baby growing and being more active.

PWRDF has just announced a grant of $39,352 to Refuge Egypt – an increase of $21,000 over our previous grant, in order to provide food baskets to the families of Syrian refugees who are flooding into the city along with the already existing African refugee population.

Since the war in Syria began, over 160,000 Syrians have fled to Cairo, and this huge influx of refugees has strained the capacity of Refuge Egypt’s clinics.

PWRDF’s additional grant will help to provide thousands of children and their families with food to help keep them healthy and strong.

Photo: ACT/Sean Hawkey

Latin America is the most unequal region in the world and this inequality affects half of the continent’s children. In order to help feed their families, many children begin working before they reach age 10. The International Labor Organization estimates that there are approximately 9 million children and youth exposed to forced labor in the region.

Some children and youth go out to work to escape drug use and violence at home, only to be exposed to the same on the streets, where they often end up living. These children are particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse, exploitation and other forms of violence. Despite the fact that violence affects some 6 million children it is an issue still largely ignored by the public and government officials, making its eradication all the more difficult.

CWS in the region

CWS works with local organizations to protect vulnerable children from all forms of violence and to expand opportunities to at-risk youth in some of the poorest and most violent communities of Haiti, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Brazil and Uruguay. The five countries involved represent four of the major sub-regions and political and socio-cultural contexts of Latin America-Caribbean.

Our partner organizations have been chosen because of the quality of their programs and their commitment to the defence and promotion of children´s rights. Each has demonstrated its ability to leverage local resources and participation. Their services are holistic, address the root causes of problems, and are closely linked with local advocacy.

They exercise leadership and influence in their communities and their local networks and at the same time are open and generous about sharing their insights, contacts and methodologies, which is a key to the success of the exchanges and other regional initiatives CWS promotes.

Until 2012 these organizations were part of a CWS Regional Children’s Program. You can read the 2011 report here or visit this link to find out about its main achievements.

ACT member HEKS has been working in Albania since the beginning of the nineteen-nineties. By networking with strong partner organisations, including one of the four biggest NGOs in Albania, HEKS is succeeding in improving the lot of marginalised groups who are particularly adversely affected by the weak state and who are denied access to education, health care and earning opportunities.

One of the biggest challenges is the high level of migration, encompassing both internal movement to conurbations (Tirana, Durres, Fush Kruja) and migration abroad. Due to the adverse economic situation a third of the working population is forced to live abroad, often in poor conditions as illegal immigrants. Their absence opens the floodgates for a spate of social and economic problems. HEKS intervenes in strategic ways in an attempt to alleviate the welfare situation for those who stay behind and to improve the future prospects for migrants in Albania.

Whereas HEKS has concentrated on the urban centres in the past because of the high level of internal migration and the consequences this brings, it will increasingly move its focus to marginalised groups in rural areas in the coming years. The regional towns will also be included, however, particularly those in central and north Albania, as these are also adversely affected by the loss of skilled workers.

Aims, Points of Focus, Initiatives:

Over the next four years (2009-2012) HEKS would like to improve the social and economic conditions of marginalised sections of the population in Albania, such as the Roma community, migrants and women, who suffer under the patriarchal regime, but also of children and young people from socially disadvantaged families, especially in the regional towns and in rural areas. HEKS also intends to intensify its collaboration with church groups which promote tolerance.

The following aims are being pursued with the aid programme:

To encourage the rural population but also some marginalised urban groups by developing access to education, health and creating earning opportunities
To further civil society and the peaceful co-existence of the different people groups
To support the sustainable development of the partner institutions
To support the church partners (Interchurch Cooperation mandate)

HEKS is working in the following areas:

Facilitating access to loans and funds, and promoting vocational integration, education and state health care
Developing job opportunities, community centres and welfare services for marginalised groups and the rural population
Social and professional training with the focus on youth, women and Roma
Strengthening the local partner institutions, their capacities and fundraising strategies
Boosting the capacities of the Orthodox Church of Albania, its work and of a Protestant church still to be selected
Total programme cost 2015: CHF 65 000.

As a result of the Crimean crisis and the armed conflict in Eastern Ukraine the humanitarian situation arising from this conflict has lately deteriorated dramatically.

There are alarming reports from conflict-affected areas that thousands of people are highly vulnerable and in need of assistance. Along with financial problems, many lack the ability to buy essential food and medicines and are living in frigid winter conditions.

The rise in numbers of refugees and internal displaced persons (IDPs) in the past month coincides with a recent deterioration of the situation worsening law and order, fear of abductions, human rights violations and the disruption of state services.

Winter is making life difficult

Most IDPs are currently accommodated by relatives or in temporary shelters: schools, recreation and cultural centres that are not suitable for habitation, especially in winter.

Local authorities are making efforts to winterize these premises, after it became clear that IDPs would not be able to return to their homes before winter.

Currently, they receive assistance from government sources, local authorities, local and international non-governmental organization, in particular – food, water, medical supplies and clothing, but this is not enough.

Host families are over-stretched

However, families and friends hosting refugees in Russia and Ukraine cannot be expected to keep providing the necessary assistance for a longer period. Resources are limited. The living standard of refugees/IDPs-receiving families and communities has dropped significantly.

Both in Ukraine and in Russia an economic crisis is developing. Production declines, jobs are cut, inflation is rising. In 2014 the local currency was devalued significantly.

ACT Alliance has issued an appeal for emergency assistance to refugees from Eastern Ukraine in Russia & Ukraine. The appeal target is US$ 332,766. ACT Alliance members Russian Orthodox Church and Hungarian Interchurch Aid are currently working to assist IDPs in seven regions of Ukraine.

Primarily large families with three or more children are receiving food, hygienic and baby packages.