Ensuring vulnerable children and families, especially those in the Eastern Europe and Central Asia region, have access to life-saving prevention and treatment is at the top of World Vision’s agenda during the International AIDS Conference in Vienna, July 18-23.

Channels of Hope training sessions challenge religious leaders to find ways to help people living with and affected by HIV and AIDS. “The workshop was an eye opener,” says Pastor Arthur Turytunga. (On World Vision's Africa website)

“Everywhere you go in our village, you find hundreds of mango trees that produce fruit four months per year,” says Pauline Tideita, a widow and mother of five children, who lives near the city of Doba, Chad. “We would eat the fruit when it was ripe or just sell them at a throw-away price because we did not know how to keep them for a longer period of time.

Hope is in the air. Huts are under construction in Acholiland. More people are returning to their homes from displacement camps. (On World Vision's Africa website)

With help from World Vision, one woman led her community in transforming an empty field into a shared community vegetable garden, run by the women in the community and owned by the community's women's group. They plan for the programme to soon be fully self-sustainable. (On World Vision's Africa website)

At the age of only eleven years, Irene was forced to run away from her home to escape what the community made her believe was a traditional obligation - female genital mutilation.

World Vision’s tsunami response in Thailand helped more than 50,000 people across five provinces. In an ongoing effort to tackle poverty and enhance children’s well-being in tsunami-affected areas, World Vision is implementing new development programmes assisting around 4,000 children and their families.

Thousands of ordinary people in Africa sacrifice their meagre resources to make the world a better place in the face of HIV and AIDS. World Vision highlights the outstanding stories of these otherwise unheralded heroes and heroines. PDF: 5.91 Mb

Many reports have been written about life in the hamlets, villages, displacement and refugee camps in Africa. Those reports are incomplete without these two words: child deaths.

Thirteen schools in nine villages in western Georgia’s Imereti region have joined an education project established by World Vision. (On the World Vision Middle East / East Europe website)

Rural communities in Baidoa District, Somalia have improved their children's health through localised nutrition solutions with the support of World Vision.

Ten years after AgroInvest dispersed its first loan in Montenegro, the World Vision-affiliated microfinance institution is now providing services to more than 40,000 clients across Serbia and Montenegro with a focus on improving the lives of the rural poor.

Eight-year-old Amal Mohamoud Nour and other students are used to studying under trees instead of in classrooms. Despite the trees' shade, the scorching sun makes difficult to concentrate and occasionally, lessons are interrupted by roaming animals. All this is starting to change with help from World Vision.

See photos from the harvest in communities that World Vision is helping in Uganda (on the World Vision Africa website).

Change takes time. In one village in India, a family rejoices in the modest changes that World Vision has brought so far, but much more needs to be done.

“At first we had our apprehensions as to World Vision’s intentions. A Christian organisation trying to work in majority Buddhist communities will normally raise questions. But gradually, we came to understand their honest intentions to help,” 49-year old Kluam Chupang remembers with a smile.

Ratnabhon Sanesomsri, now 16, used knowledge about HIV that she learned from a youth group partnered with World Vision to help her family come to terms with her uncle's illness. Click to view this story on World Vision's Asia/Pacific site.