It gives us great pleasure to announce that Care International and Lend with Care will be our official charities this year. CARE has a long established presence across Asia and has been operating in India for more than 60 years and is currently working in 16 countries across the continent.
CARE is an international humanitarian organisation fighting global poverty and social injustice, with a special focus on working with women and girls to bring lasting change to their lives and communities.
It works with communities to help overcome poverty by supporting development and providing emergency relief where it is needed the most. In the past five years CARE’s work to improve poor people’s income across Asia has reached nine million people – increasing the annual income of almost 2.7 million poor and marginalised people in Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Vietnam by an average of 117%.
Through their education initiatives CARE reached almost two million people in the last five years throughout Asia, this includes more than 100,000 children in remote areas of Afghanistan (two-thirds of whom were girls). The charity also recently announced that their innovative micro-lending initiative lendwithcare.org is now operational in Pakistan, through their partner organisation Akhuwat.
Lendwithcare.org allows you to lend directly to people setting up small businesses in poor communities around the world. The entrepreneur will then repay the lender using the income from their growing business. Once repaid, the lender can then choose to recycle the loan to support another entrepreneur or even withdraw their money.
Entrepreneurs from Pakistan featured on lendwithcare.org can access interest free, Islamic microfinance loans, while approximately one-third of loans provided by our partner in Pakistan go to women. Lendwithcare.org is also active in Cambodia and the Philippines as well as Togo, Benin and Ecuador.
The Asian Media Awards are leading the way in highlighting ground breaking work that puts human rights and issues affecting race relations in the media spotlight and CARE is proud to be associated with the event in its first ever year.
