Vatican summit shared concrete ways to help kids, charity leader says

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Governments have a serious responsibility to care for their nation’s children, but no caring person can stand by idly when children anywhere are starving, said the founder of a private charity working in 16 of the world’s poorest countries.

“All of us who love and care for children want to do what we can to uphold their rights,” said Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, the Scottish founder of Mary’s Meals, which feeds more than 2.5 million children each day.

MacFarlane-Barrow was one of the participants invited to speak Feb. 3 at the International Summit on Children’s Rights, hosted by Pope Francis in the Apostolic Palace at the Vatican. The summit brought together government officials, Nobel Prize winners and leaders of organizations dedicated to defending a child’s right to food, health care, education, a family, free time, and the right to live free from violence and exploitation.

The summit gave participants an opportunity not only to share their concerns about the “appalling” conditions under which too many of the world’s children live, he said, but also to share their concrete responses to those violations of children’s basic rights.

Mary’s Meals, which was founded in Malawi in 2002, focuses on giving children at least one nutritious meal each day at school, which prevents starvation and increases school attendance. The charity also benefits the local community socially and economically by buying food locally and recruiting community members to cook and serve it.

MacFarlane-Barrow told reporters Feb. 4 that his charity receives no funding from any government; instead, it relies on donations from individuals and foundations.

But with the Trump Administration’s decision to pause foreign aid and other governments cutting their aid programs, “it’s a very hard environment in which to raise funds right now,” he said.

And, he said, the cuts “have an impact and a dramatic one on the communities we are serving.”

MacFarlane-Barrow said he is particularly concerned now for children in South Sudan, where conflict and instability have lasted for years, in Haiti where much of the country is controlled by gangs and in Tigray, Ethiopia, where conflict has worsened the effects of a drought.

“Hunger is not the only challenge” in the countries where Mary’s Meals works, he said, “but it is the biggest one.”

Once starvation is averted, the myriad other problems can begin to be addressed, he said.