One out of 3 children live in a home without their biological father. Whether children lose their father from divorce, death, abandonment or detachment, losing a parent can affect their lives in multiple ways. Studies show children from fatherless homes are more likely to become involved in drug and alcohol abuse, lowered academic performance and suffer from health and emotional problems.

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“They told me that at the Ebola hospital they would kill me and take away all my organs,” says 11- year-old Tonhon. She is the only one, so far, who has survived the recent Ebola outbreak in Guinea. But the rumours could have taken her life too.

For the last three years, I’ve been working to make Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net (PSNP) both more nutrition sensitive and better connected to health services. PSNP is the main tool to help forward Ethiopia’s Social Protection Policy and Strategy, which provides regular cash or food transfers to over 8 million people in need.

Girls are scared, they don’t understand what is wrong with them, they think of many awful things and they don’t know what to do.

Some girls suffer so much that in some cases even commit suicide. Why?

Because they are having their period for the first time. In Kyrgyzstan, many young girls are not aware of menstruation, nobody talks to them about this and they are left alone with their fear.

While we don’t personally know the famous men unmasked in recent months as pedophiles, we all know someone a bit like them. And now we won’t be letting our children have sleepovers at their friends’ houses.

When Ali and his family fled their home in Syria shortly after the war broke out, they had nothing but the clothes on their backs and hope for a better future.

Five years on, that hope has turned to despair.

Now in Lebanon, none of the family’s six children attend formal schooling, and 15-year-old Ali and his younger brother must work to support their family, digging potatoes for just US$4 a day.

Bahir is one of tens of thousands of unaccompanied children who have crossed the Mediterranean Sea since the beginning of 2015 to seek safety and protection in Europe. Today, he's living with the Petrovics, a foster family in Serbia, while he waits to be reunited with his family.

In a small town in Serbia, a teenage boy with a baseball cap paces the front yard of Petar and Petra Petrovic’s* family home. He is wearing headphones and quietly singing while listening to rap music. 

It’s hard to think of a crime whose victims are more faceless and vulnerable than victims of child sexual abuse. In most middle and low income countries, the subject of child sexual abuse remains largely taboo, without a social imperative to report suspicion of the crime within the community and with no ready help for children.

In Chad, the Daresalam refugee camp hosts more than 5,000 refugees from Nigeria and Niger. Here, every individual has fled atrocities and violence that plague their countries. The camp’s school is the only place where Yande Tchari, 17 years old and in first grade, feels safe. “Only in class am I able to take my mind off things. School gives me the opportunity to learn always something new,” she says.

Nawwar and his family made the difficult journey from their Syrian home to Germany, with the assistance of some imaginary friends. Find out how he’s doing now that he’s back in school.

How does a child deal with a dangerous sea crossing as his family flees the Syrian Arabic Republic in search of a safer life in Europe? For 7-year-old Nawwar, it was a group of imaginary friendly polar bears, floating on ice, that protected his family as they travelled in a crowded raft across the sea from Turkey to Greece.