Children in Crossfire celebrates 25 years of changing children’s lives for the better

It may surprise readers to learn that the seeds for Children in Crossfire were sown in the US state of Mississippi in 1992, writes Richard Moore.

I participated in a walk organised by Afri (Action from Ireland), run by Joe Murray and Derry man Don Mullan, in which we re-traced the Choctaw Nation’s Trail of Tears.

The Choctaw had donated money to Ireland 150 years earlier during the Great Famine and this walk gave Irish people an opportunity to show solidarity with them as they faced hard times of their own.

I met many remarkable people during that unforgettable trip, including a priest called Fr Pat Clarke who worked with Brazilian Indians in the Amazon.

He and others left me questioning how I might support disadvantaged and disempowered people myself.

Having been blinded when I was ten years-old by a British soldier’s rubber bullet, my instinct was to help vulnerable children and I felt my own life experience could enable me to do that effectively.

And so it was, after much planning and effort, that Children in Crossfire was ready to roll by 1996.

Our goal was clear and ambitious: to make life better for children growing up in the crossfire of injustice and poverty around the world.

We launched on September 28 with a walk of our own around Derry’s Walls. Hundreds turned up, immediately reminding and reassuring me that the people of our city and the wider north west were global citizens who felt true compassion for the most impoverished in this world.

In our first few years, Children in Crossfire’s principal purpose was to work in partnership with Concern Universal, raising funds for their programmes around the world.

Money we raised supported people in Bangladesh, Colombia, Brazil, Gambia, Kenya, Malawi and Mozambique.

In fact, our 2002 campaign in response to dreadful famine in Malawi, run in partnership with an Irish daily newspaper, raised more than £1million and helped save many lives.

Since then, we have supported many valuable projects including a childhood cancer unit, a disability centre, cleft palate and club foot treatment, malnutrition and emergency feeding projects, education programmes, water and housing provision, a pharmacy and more.

We are still involved in much of that work to this day.

By the mid-2000s, it was clear that a step change was needed to take Children in Crossfire to the next level.

We sharpened our focus on healthcare and education and began building our own capacity in two countries - Tanzania and Ethiopia - where we could deliver lasting impact through long-term partnerships with local communities.

It was the right move.

In Tanzania, our flagship Early Childhood Education programme has grown from modest roots to now national reach.

Over the last ten years, we have become respected leaders in the education sector, consistently producing results that underline the life-changing value of early intervention in children’s lives.

In Ethiopia, we have built enduring relationships that have saved and improved the lives of some of the most vulnerable children in the world.

For more than a decade, for example, we have supported the therapeutic unit at St Luke’s Hospital in Wolisso where around 350 children receive life-saving treatment for severe acute malnutrition every year.

When I first met the Addis Hiwot community, in Addis Ababa in 2008, they were living in a graveyard in the most extreme poverty I ever witnessed.

Children in Crossfire provided those people with housing and education and have supported them ever since.

It is wonderful to see young people who were little children then going into employment and further and higher education now.

That they are beginning to fulfil their potential as human beings fills me with pride.

So, as we arrive at our 25th anniversary, we look to the future with great excitement.

Our Early Childhood Education programme in Tanzania will grow significantly over the next three years and beyond, reaching pre-school children all across that vast country for the first time since we started working there.

Hundreds of thousands of children will get the start in school every child deserves.

We have similar plans for Early Childhood Education in Ethiopia, too, building on our experience and expertise.

In recent months, we launched a new programme in Wolisso, with the long-term vision of delivering the same standard of life-changing education for Ethiopian children over the next decade as we have done in Tanzania.

Everything we have achieved over our first 25 years is down to the people who have supported us, many of whom will be reading this. I am sincerely grateful for all that goodwill.

From the lady in Long Tower parish who gave us our very first donation in 1996 to everyone who has dug deep for us ever since, any success we have achieved has been built on your kindness.

We have much to do to in the years ahead but, with your support, we will be ready for the challenge.