It costs $49 per month to sponsor a girl. This tax-deductible monthly donation provides your sponsored child with access to education, safe water, nutritious food, healthcare and more. You can look forward to getting the first letter from your child in your welcome package. It’s the start of a beautiful and uplifting relationship!

Child sponsorship is the most personal, effective way to fight poverty. When you sponsor a girl, you build a special relationship that encourages her with hope for the future. Your monthly sponsorship donation joins forces with other sponsors’ donations to help lift your sponsored girl and her community out of poverty for good. Along the way, you can watch her grow up, celebrate her successes by exchanging letters and emails and track her community’s progress.

Sponsored children do not receive direct cash benefits. Instead, we pool your monthly sponsorship donation with those from other Canadians who support children in the same area, leveraging them for maximum effectiveness based on the community’s needs. Our local staff works with the community to build a vibrant, sustainable future—allowing people to continue thriving after we’ve moved on to help other communities.

When you become a child sponsor, you will receive a welcome package and letter of introduction from your sponsored girl or World Vision staff working in her community. Each year you will receive an updated photo of your sponsored child and a progress report.

You will also have access to My World Vision, a digital platform that allows you to manage your information, learn more about your sponsored child’s community, meet other children who live there and follow along with their progress.

Community members help identify the most vulnerable children in their area. Then, the families of these children are asked if they’d like to be part of the child sponsorship program, with the understanding that the benefits will be shared by everyone in the community.

At World Vision, we believe that every child is born with the same set of rights. Each child is full of potential and has much to contribute to their families and societies. Every girl and boy deserves to be nurtured, included, supported and empowered to live life in all its fullness.

As a global community, we have almost unanimously agreed that girls and women have the exact same rights as boys and men. Nearly every country on the planet has signed and ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child as well as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The latter is the most broadly translated document in the world and can be found in dialects from Abkhaz to Zulu!

Yet today, gender inequality is still being reckoned with everywhere, even in certain spheres of Canadian life. Gender violence continues to span cultures and social groups, religion and education levels. That violence is deeply rooted in gender inequalities, in cultural norms that assert men’s superiority and power over women and in rigid norms about men’s and women’s roles.

At World Vision, we have learned that promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment is core to effective and sustainable development. Lack of gender equality can be damaging, not only to girls and women, but to their entire societies.

Gender inequality and gender-based violence cost everyone. One in every three women will be beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime. Little boys may come of age, seeing this happening to their mothers and sisters. The cycle can easily perpetuate. In its extreme form, gender-based violence manifests through crimes such as rape and honour killing, and brutal cultural practices such as female genital mutilation and early marriage. In cases where girls and women are harmed or killed, an entire family can be dramatically impacted by the event.

But gender-based violence also manifests in subtler and even more pervasive ways, such as restriction of action and opinion, and control over choices and resources. When a girl is kept away from school, she may not have the support she needs to challenge these approaches and almost nowhere to turn for help in a crisis.