a) The Global Food Crisis has and still is impacting our country. There are two main contributing factors to this: high prices of fuel precipitated by the Ukraine war, and poor food harvest due to delayed rains. Due to high increase in fuel prices, in-country transportation of food products as well as cost of transportation for imports and exports skyrocketed.

b) There are many challenges, but I will mention few: food prices; natural disasters; aggravated poverty resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic; school dropouts. Before COVID-19 pandemic, our frontline church partners [FCPs] had thriving caregiver income generating associations, but they were adversely affected by the COVID-19 lockdowns especially the off-farm businesses. In partnership with the FCPs and other strategic partnerships, we are supporting them to have their businesses rejuvenated. The FCP leadership also invested a lot of energy and time to enable children who had dropped out of school re-instated and social emotionally rehabilitated by taking them through counselling sessions. Many children had gotten jobs and girls got pregnant and having babies. These were given support and majority went back to school.

a) As a national office, we have many areas of strategic priority programmatically as reflected in our strategic plan. However, we are currently putting in place a martial plan to intentionally graduate the participants' families from poverty. We realize that children can't be released from poverty meaningfully when their parents and siblings are not strategically given utmost attention. End of June 2023, we plan to have finished caregiver household profiling. And in FY24, we will start with a pilot of 16,500 households. All said, we are not going into this exercise alone, FCPs and government are our key strategic partners.

b) Sponsorship program is indispensable, it has supported meaningfully in releasing hundreds of thousands of children from poverty in our country, we have countless testimonies. However, we are doing programmatic enhancements to make sure that the sponsorship funds we secure from sponsorship are optimally utilized. For example, the income generating associations I mentioned were and are still supported by seed money from funded proposals. We are systematically moving away from issuing handouts to strategically implementing transformational programs.

All the beautiful programmatic initiatives which are successfully being implemented can't succeed without the invisible hand of our good Lord. Just to mention few flagship examples, in January 2020, in partnership with Frontling Church Partners (FCPs), we conducted a campaign against substance abuse among the youth. And the outcome was amazing: 57,000 plus youth and adults accepted Christ as their Lord and Savior and 9,000 plus youth and adults denounced drug usage and decided to follow Jesus. When we saw the amazing results, we agreed with the FCPs to make it an annual event. We received a lot of support from government, too.

In August 2022, a similar campaign took place. And this time round, the number of youth and adults who accepted Christ doubled to 111,000 plus, 25,000 plus youth and adults denounced drug usage. Government Is currently requesting FCPs to make the campaign a bi-annual event, isn't it amazing? We are also seeing many FCPs moving out and seeking strategic partnerships with organizations and government. FCPs have fully understood the importance of raising resources locally.

As earlier mentioned, sponsorship program is indispensable. Hundreds of thousands of youths and their families have been released from poverty. As we all know, our mission is to release children from poverty in Jesus' name but in the process, their families are released from poverty as well. Let me mention some successes:

1) Children living in poverty were able to access quality education and today, they are God fearing leaders who are valuably contributing to the social and economic development of our country.

2) The curriculum the participants participate in on Saturdays at FCPs impacts them immensely in the 4 areas: social emotionally; cognitive development; physical (good health); spiritual growth. The holistic development they acquire from the Saturday curriculum implementation is very vital. In the absence of the Compassion sponsorship program, it would be impossible for children from poor families to accesses this quality, transforming curriculum.

3) The FCPs are empowered to run children ministry. We have also trained the FCPs to craft strategies and strategic plans. Today, they can execute their strategic plans and annual implementation plans. 4) As earlier mentioned, we also put a lot of emphasis on empowering FCPs to enable them improve caregiver livelihood. To date, all caregivers belong to at least one income generating association. The IGAs have had a multiplier effect: domestic violence and child abuse cases have reduced immensely among caregiver families because they are each other's keeper. They also support each other in the area of house renovation. They build the foundation and elevate walls and FCPs through strategic partnerships and the funds generated through complimentary intervention support in roofing. We used to spend a lot of money on house renovation but today, many caregiver houses are renovated with very little support from complimentary intervention funds. These are few out of many initiatives on the ground.