CFSI’s Basic Education Project is giving nine-year-old Saira Adam the opportunity to attend school despite the economic hardships facing her family. The Basic Education Project (BEP) - a collaboration between CFSI, Stichting BRAC International and the Philippines’ Department of Education launched in 2012 in 15 conflict-affected municipalities in Maguindanao and Lanao del Sur provinces - is aimed at enabling far-flung communities without access to education to establish preschool and elementary schools utilizing an alternative delivery mechanism.

A year of preschool made possible by CFSI’s Basic Education Project has given Mindanao siblings Sokrie and Hanipa Cosain a new outlook on life and their parents new hope for their children’s future. Eight-year-old Hanipa Cosain and her 14-year-old brother Sokrie both have special needs - Sokrie an eye defect that has left him near-sighted, and Hanipa an enlarged toe resulting from elephantiasis.

More than 1,300 children in some of the areas hardest hit by last November’s Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda) were able to put aside their worries for a time and smile and laugh at a series of . . .

Members of CFSI’s Child Rights Project in the Visayas distributed hundreds of toys sent from the US to children in typhoon-hit Guiuan.

Community and Family Services International is continuing to support the development of Viet Nam’s social-work sector with the signing of a ground-breaking Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on March 12, 2014, that will enable 200 planning and management officials to receive master’s degrees in social work by 2017.

Zamboanga City Mayor Ma. Isabelle “Beng” Climaco presented CFSI with a special "Plaque of Appreciation" on March 18 in recognition of the organisation's ongoing response to the crisis in Zamboanga.

Homonhon Island 1Little was left after Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda) struck Homonhon Island in Eastern Samar province on November 8 last year. The typhoon, which wreaked havoc throughout the Central Visayas region of the Philippines, destroyed all forms of transportation on the island, leaving local communities stranded and isolated.[pullquote]We could not let those communities languish without assistance because they were isolated.

On the second day of February, together with my CFSI colleagues Venus and Edison, and Tukkie from UNHCR, we left Guiuan around five in the morning bound for Barangay Maybunga - a poor community situated on top of a mountain in the municipality of Balangiga in Eastern Samar that was hard hit by Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda), which struck the Central Visayas region of the Philippines on November 8.