About Worlds Vision

World Vision aspires for a world where every child has an opportunity for life in all its fullness.

World Vision is a Christian relief, development and advocacy organisation dedicated to working with children, families and communities to overcome poverty and injustice. The organisation’s global campaign, “it takes a world to end violence against children,” aims to create a movement of people committed to making this happen.

Operating for 70 years, World Vision works to guarantee the sustained well-being of children, especially the most vulnerable, and takes a holistic approach to transforming lives. Working in over 90 countries spanning six continents, the primary areas of focus are in health and nutrition, water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), faith and development, child protection, disaster management and food security, livelihoods and economic development.

Through integrated emergency and development programming, World Vision builds the capacity of the Ministry of Health staff, provides quality of care for mothers during pregnancy and deliver, improves health and nutrition knowledge, prevents and treats childhood illness and communicable diseases within communities and provides mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS).

World Vision in action

The onset of the COVID-19 outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) prompted World Vision to review good practices and lessons learned from their response to the Ebola crisis in North Kivu Province. In 2019 World Vision embedded psychosocial support in its community engagement and risk communication efforts. This included integration of MHPSS approaches with outreach, awareness and case identification at the community level as well as at Ebola Treatment Centres and health facilities. They expanded their Channels of Hope (COH) initiative to build the capacity of faith leaders in risk communication, stigma reduction and support for community care and support. 750 faith leaders (Christian and Muslim) were trained in COH for Ebola and Psychological First Aid. The Channels of Hope action teams in Beni, Butembo and Kalunguta worked to raise awareness about infection prevention control methods. Together with 95 trained community psychosocial helpers supervised by 8 local psychologists, they worked together to ensure coordinated contact tracing, and community outreach programmes.

Parallels to the COVID-19 pandemic are clear. Learning from how stigma, fear and isolation impacted the population is critical to understanding the current COVID-19 pandemic and future outbreaks. Leveraging the learning from this survey in their response to COVID-19, World Vision partnered with the Petra Institute to provide psychosocial support to children and to support community-based faith leaders to provide faith based Psychological First Aid to children and families, through guided play and storytelling. Five trained faith leaders (Muslims and Christian) have, to date, reached over 200 faith leaders and 600 children at household level. Parents have embraced the skills acquired to facilitate play and storytelling and have shared what they learned with their neighbours.

As a result of lockdown measures to control the spread of COVID-19, World Vision is seeing that girls and boys are exposed to physical, sexual and often emotional violence and experiencing increased risk of psychological distress, violence, neglect, and social exclusion. As highlighted in the COVID-19 Aftershocks report, the indirect effects of Ebola on children are likely to impact children similarly in the COVID-19 context. “Ebola and COVID-19 can erode the social fabric of the community,” Phiona Koyiet, MHPSS specialist at World Vision DRC notes, “we partner with DRC African Bridges to implement community-based socio-therapy to strengthen social supports to families impacted by COVID-19 and increase community resilience.” By jointly addressing COVID-19 and the associated protection and mental health risks, World Vision is able to raise awareness about prevention and treatment of COVID-19 together with signs of violence or distress, creating a more sustainable community-based referral system.

The Channels of Hope programme from the Ebola response has also been adapted for the COVID-19 response in DRC and in over 70 countries, involving over 90 000 community health workers and over 90 000 faith leaders in a mix of face-to-face and mobile technology approaches. Lastly, World Vision responded to gaps faced by the DRC Ministry of Public Health and donated medical supplies including masks, gloves and infrared thermometers

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