Every Child Deserves Clean Water, Safety, and a Strong Family

Recognizing the Day of the African Child

Each year, the Day of the African Child invites us to listen more carefully to the realities facing children across the continent, and to recommit ourselves to the work of protecting their rights, strengthening their families, and building the systems that help them thrive.

This year’s theme in Sierra Leone, “Ensuring Universal Access to Water, Sanitation and Hygiene for Every Child in Africa,” reminds us of something both simple and profound: children cannot flourish without clean water, safe sanitation, and basic hygiene.

Water, sanitation, and hygiene are not side issues in child well-being. They are central to whether a child can stay healthy, attend school, grow safely, and remain connected to family and community. A child who is sick from unsafe water misses school. A caregiver who must spend hours searching for water loses time that could be used for work, farming, caregiving, or rest. A family without safe sanitation faces daily health risks that can deepen poverty and strain already fragile households.

For Helping Children Worldwide, this theme connects directly to the heart of the work of our allies across Africa and particularly in Sierra Leone. We believe children belong in safe, permanent, loving families, and we know that families need strong community systems around them. That includes health care, child protection, family strengthening, education, safe water, sanitation, and public health support.

We also know that no single organization can do this alone.​

That is why HCW works alongside many public health, child protection, and family strengthening organizations across Sierra Leone. Our role is not to stand in for local leaders, but to help strengthen the networks, partnerships, and systems already working to protect children and support families.

Through the Together for Global Health Network, HCW is connected with Sierra Leonean health and public health leaders who are working to improve community well-being in practical, lifesaving ways. These organizations understand that health does not begin only when a patient reaches a clinic. It begins in homes, schools, communities, water points, sanitation practices, maternal health systems, outreach programs, and the daily work of prevention.

The Sierra Leone members of the Together for Global Health Network are part of a broader movement to strengthen health systems and improve access to care all over the world. Their work helps ensure that children and families are not left to face preventable illness alone. On the Day of the African Child, we recognize the importance of their leadership and the essential role public health organizations play in helping children grow up safe and well. 

HCW also serves as secretariat for the Sierra Leone Coalition for Family Care, a growing network of organizations committed to family-based care and child protection.  Together, these organizations are helping Sierra Leone move toward stronger family care systems. Their work includes family strengthening, reintegration, foster care development, child protection, case management, permanency planning, training, advocacy, and collaboration with government and community partners.

This coalition work matters deeply because clean water and child protection are connected. Public health and family strengthening are connected. Sanitation and school attendance are connected. Hygiene and dignity are connected. A child’s life cannot be divided into separate categories. Children live within families, schools, churches, clinics, neighborhoods, and systems. When one part of that ecology is weak, children feel it. When those systems are strengthened, children are safer.

The Day of the African Child calls us to see the whole child. It calls us to see the girl who needs a safe school and clean water. It calls us to see the boy whose family needs support before a crisis becomes separation. It calls us to see the caregiver trying to keep children healthy with limited resources. It calls us to see the community health worker, the social worker, the teacher, the nurse, the pastor, the advocate, and the local leader whose daily work helps keep children safe. And it calls us to see that universal access to water, sanitation, and hygiene is not simply a development goal. It is a child protection issue, a family strengthening issue, and a justice issue.

HCW is honored to support Sierra Leonean leaders and organizations working every day to build stronger systems of care. We are grateful for the public health partners, child protection advocates, social workers, clinicians, community leaders, and family care organizations who are helping children grow up with the safety, health, dignity, and belonging they deserve.
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On this Day of the African Child, we celebrate their leadership. We recommit to capacity-building support of leaders working in communities across Africa, and we stand with every child’s right to clean water, safe sanitation, good health, protection from harm, and a permanent, loving family.