Save the Children was first established in 1919 to help children affected by the First World War. Today, they reach 50 million children in 120 countries around the world—including Mozambique. By 2030, they aim to inspire the following breakthroughs in the way the world treats children:
They opened programmes in Mozambique in 1986 at the height of the Mozambican civil war. Their early work targeted children and their families in some of the most marginalized communities affected by the conflict. Today, Save the Children Mozambique (SCIMOZ) has a mixed development and humanitarian portfolio, and offices in six Provinces: Gaza, Manica, Maputo, Nampula, Tete, and Zambezia. 561 full-time staff work in close partnership with government ministries and civil society organisations at the national, provincial, district and community levels. In 2017, 1.6 million children (1,021,373 girls and 589,864 boys) and 2.9 million adults directly benefited from their activities. Indirectly, their activities reached more than seven million people.
Their current (2016-2018) strategy focuses on education, health and nutrition, child protection, child poverty, and child rights governance (CRG). In addition, SCIMOZ has long-standing experience in emergency programming, ranging from humanitarian assistance to preparedness activities. An overview of the activities they implement in each sector will be provided in later sections. Although they have sector-specific interventions, they ensure crossthematic integration to the extent possible. To make schools a safe place for all children, for example, they combine education activities with child protection and disaster risk reduction (see section on the Safe Schools Approach). Likewise, CRG-elements feature in many of their projects to assure child participation and accountablity to children.
