The right to health is a fundamental human right and is one of the essential conditions for exercising other human rights. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) defines the right to health as everyone’s right to enjoy the highest attainable physical and mental health. This includes the right to health and physical control, the right to privacy, and the right to health care systems that provide equal opportunity to enjoy the highest level of health obtainable.

However, in reality, the right to health is currently not available for everyone to enjoy. Many people including pregnant women and children are unable to access crucial health services, which leads to high maternal mortality, child death and various infectious diseases. Every day, 830 women die from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth, and 99% of all maternal deaths occur in developing countries. Furthermore, less than half of all births in lower and middle income countries were assisted by skilled health personnel.

In addition, millions of people suffer from poor life conditions and health from drinking unsanitary water because no clean and sufficient water sources are available.

Disasters lead to human and economic loss, and damages in infrastructure. Especially the effects of accelerating climate change escalate the frequency and magnitude of disasters, widening affected areas where we thought were once safe. Communities that do not have proper resources to prepare are the most vulnerable against disasters, and the a great majority of victims are children, women, and the poor.
Disasters recovery is critical but often neglected. Emergency support can enable people to overcome immediate problems, but increased vulnerabilities such as damaged infrastructures, broken livelihoods and collapsed safety nets bring about an another disaster. In the end, communities are not able to sustain themselves and will collapse.

Tens of millions of refugees who have left their homes due to natural disasters and conflicts have been scattered all over the world. The rights they deserve are not guaranteed, and even their lives are too often in danger. They lose hope in deprivation.

We focus on three different aspects of emergency relief: first we focus on building the capacity of the community to prepare for disasters; second we support those who suffer from disasters with appropriate assistance for their recovery and third we support refugees to enjoy their rights and strengthen their self-reliance.

Education is an essential human right that enables individuals to develop their own abilities and improve their quality of life. However, gaining access to quality education remains a challenge to those vulnerable within the society, especially girls. Globally, less than 40% of countries provide girls and boys with equal access to education and girls are more likely to never enter primary school than boys.
Children with mothers who are educated, are more likely to have higher levels of education and better health. It is estimated that a child born to a mother who can read is 50% more likely to survive past the age of 5. Therefore, the more women are educated, the greater the likelihood that their homes and communities are free from poverty.

There is also the issue of adults lacking basic literacy skills such as reading, writing or numeracy skills essential for everyday life due to the lack of education at an earlier stage in their lives. There are still 750 million illiterate adults in this world, two thirds of whom are women. We assist these people to gain basic life skills so that they can make proactive decisions in everyday life.

Globally, one in nine people in the world today (795 million) are undernourished. The vast majority of the world’s hungry people live in developing countries, where 12.9 per cent of the population is undernourished. Poor nutrition causes nearly half of the deaths of children under five, which is around 3.1 million children each year.

Hunger is not a result of lack of food. Food production is globally sufficient to feed everyone adequately, yet millions of people are denied access. Why? They simply cannot afford the cost. Food goes to the markets where the price is high, and not to where people need it desperately. Furthermore, the malfunctioning market places raise price tags on food for poor people because they lack alternative sources of food. Hunger impacts small-scale farmers in many countries because they do not have enough yield for their living. Lack of capacity to obtain good seed and fertilizer and no opportunities to learn productive and sustainable farming techniques leave them in hunger and poverty. We work to assist people to gain resilience and prevent malnutrition, by enhancing food security.

In order to make ‘the world a place without hunger, where people live together in harmony’, we need to promote not only social empowerment but economic empowerment. People can only begin to think about the future when they are free from everyday survival. We do not believe that economic poverty is caused solely by the laziness and incompetence of the individual. Rather we consider socio-economic factors, such as structural inequality, lack of social safety nets, collapsing markets, which put many people into a vicious cycle of poverty.

Our initiatives focus on breaking this vicious cycle of poverty. Since the start of our international development activities in 1994, we have made it our principle to work towards promoting self-reliance not just providing unidirectional aid. In order to develop self-reliance among the poor, we have supported various income generation activities throughout the world. Based on this experience, we adopted social economic activities as one of our main priorities in 2014. Since then, we have been promoting economic self-reliance through income generation groups, cooperatives, and social enterprises.