What if children, not funding, were our starting point?

What if children, not funding, were our starting point?

What would change if every decision we made started with one question: What does this mean for a child’s life, not just this year but years from now?

After many years working alongside communities through crisis, recovery and fragile stability, I’ve learned that children are often named as the priority yet rarely used as the design reference. Too many systems are still organised around projects, timelines and institutional convenience rather than children’s lived realities.

When children are genuinely at the centre, accountability feels different. It becomes less about activities delivered and more about whether a child is safe enough to learn, nourished enough to grow and supported enough to hope even when conflict, climate shocks or displacement disrupt daily life.

Listening to children has been one of the most grounding parts of my work. They don’t speak in sectors or strategies. They speak about needing food to stay in school, peace to feel safe and stability to imagine a future. Their lived experience exposes why integration across education, nutrition, protection, climate action and peacebuilding is no longer optional in Ethiopia’s context. It is essential.

This also reframes responsibility. Child well-being cannot rest only with NGOs or social programmes. It is shaped by national policy, local systems, markets, culture and collective choices. When children are the lens, coordination becomes a duty, not a recommendation.

If we are serious about children being at the centre, the question is not whether we care. It is whether we are willing to redesign our systems to prove it.

Tomorrow, World Vision Ethiopia launches its new five-year strategy. And the world will know whether we are ready to become what this moment demands.

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By Lilian Mumbi, Food and Cash Programming Director, World Vision Ethiopia