Our website is finally in its second incarnation. On the face of it you may not think its looks much different. We like that! We liked the old look but this has some new features and this includes a ‘shop’ where people can get our books and posters for free.

We think that it’s a great reward for us to get information about and contact with people who love our work! Please spread the word.

With the website ready we feel ready to ‘get out of our house’ a bit more than we did last year when our website was still being developed. Our plan is to publish a round-up of what we have been up to every 4 weeks or so.

We will have a ‘focus of the month’ and in 10/12 of the months this year, this will be one of our 10 health topics. In January we focused on Topic 1: “Caring for Babies and Young Children”. It is Topic 1 for a reason: it’s the topic upon which all others are built. In most countries in the world, young adolescents play a huge part in caring for younger children in their families and communities, especially girls. Click here to read more.

This month we are focussing on Topic 2: “Coughs, Colds and Illness” and of course our focus is on what young adolescents can learn and share linked to this.

In the first quarter of every year we take time to reflect before launching into the many things that need doing and this year, two things came to the surface:

1. To redouble our efforts to become a part of research project(s) and build academic partnerships; and
2. To engage more deeply with the global movements that focus on adolescent health.

Our work focuses on empowering a 10-14 year old age group (who are often at the top grades in primary schools). These are referred to in a lot of the literature developed by international organisations as ‘young adolescents’. As part of our efforts to engage with these international movements, we have reviewed two strategy documents – Every Woman Every Child and the Global AA HA and you can read more about how we feel Children for Health is positioned to help by clicking those links.

The main work we are involved with over the next two months is our work with the Save the Children UK and with their Diarrhoea Prevention and Control, ‘Signature Programmes’ in Nigeria and India. In March, Clare will be returning to Lagos to train the 4^th and last cohort of teachers. We are bursting with delight at the many photos and comments on our India What’s App group that we are receiving from the Master Trainers in India who we trained in November. Already these trainers are getting on with training groups in their networks – to mobilise 10-14 year olds as health activists.

We are working hard on our annual report. For those who would like a quick fire round-up of 2016, take a look here.

In March, we are planning to launch a crowd funding campaign to fund a new storybook for our library. We need to you to help with this. Being a donor would be brilliant but if you can’t do that – please at least spread the word. Inform your friends on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram about us. Get them to join this community. Please help now if you can. For more on the story books and what we need click here.

Finally, those of you as keen as we are on ‘evidence’ – at the end of last year, we were very pleased to conclude a case study on our work in Mozambique which shows that our work there is extremely promising. We conducted this evaluation alongside the University of Zambezia. We are currently working with the programme on how these efforts can be scaled. Download the case study.