Ministry team members visiting a family at home, the children holding books

Relief · Ministry area

Family Support

The family is the first place where reconciliation is practised

Relief · Today

Why this matters

Strengthening households so children can stay with the people who love them.

Most children who end up in institutional care are not orphans. They are there because their family became too poor, too ill or too overwhelmed to cope. That is a solvable problem, and solving it is far better for the child.

Family Support exists to keep families together where it is safe to do so — and to make them stronger, not merely intact. That means money, but it also means parenting support, mediation, and someone checking in when things get hard.

Reconciliation is not an abstract idea in this work. It looks like a father and son speaking again, or a household learning to handle conflict without violence.

What we do

The work in detail

Specific activities, delivered by partner churches and community leaders.

Household economic strengthening

Small grants, savings group membership and income support targeted at families at risk of separation, so poverty alone never forces a child out of the home.

Care for children and their caregivers

Support for grandmothers, aunts, older siblings and foster carers raising children who are not their own — including school costs, food and respite.

Parenting and caregiver groups

Peer groups covering child development, positive discipline, nutrition and handling stress, led by trained facilitators from the same community.

Family mediation and reconciliation

Careful, voluntary mediation where relationships have broken down — between spouses, between generations, or between a family and its neighbours.

Safeguarding and child protection

Clear referral routes for children at risk of harm, trained focal points in every partner church, and follow-up that does not stop after the first visit.

Support for widows and single parents

Practical and legal help for those who have lost a spouse or are raising children alone, including support securing land and inheritance rights.

How we work

Principles specific to this ministry

Keeping a child safely with family is always the first option we pursue.
Caregivers are treated as partners in a plan, not recipients of a service.
Every partner has a safeguarding focal point and a written reporting route.
We follow up over years, not weeks.

What we look for

The change we are actually after

Children remain with family through periods that would previously have separated them.
Caregivers report less isolation and more confidence.
Households handle conflict without it escalating.
Widows and single parents hold on to land and property that is rightfully theirs.

These are described qualitatively on purpose. No statistics have been invented for this website — verified figures will be published in our annual reporting.