Five years ago, we asked for your help with our appeal, "Education Needs Food", to support those children who do not get enough food at home due to the poverty of their families. Now, in 2023, the issue is, unfortunately, more relevant than ever.

In countries like Georgia and Ghana, people with disabilities receive little support. Please help with your donation to maintain the therapeutic educational and social facilities, and thus important pioneering places of life and encounter.

In the Kenyan village of Sirende, the Humane School has been going through ups and downs for 15 years. After the loss of its last location, the school is starting anew with a few small kindergarten groups on a plot of land purchased especially for it.

Donations that have not been allocated to a specific Waldorf school by our donors regularly flow into the International Waldorf Fund of the Friends of Waldorf Education. Nana Goebel explains how important these free donations are.

The Corona crisis brought many Waldorf schools, Waldorf kindergartens and therapeutic education institutions around the world into great distress . As a general rule, the schools and centres do not receive any state support, and those who had less income due to the pandemic received no public financial support either. Those parents and families who might have been able to pay small contributions to the school before were no longer able to do so. The consequences for the institutions were devastating in many cases.

The Cosmos Centre, a therapeutic education facility in Dormaa, in western Ghana, has been in existence for over 20 years. Here, 22 children and young people with severe disabilities - only one of them can walk independently - are currently cared for and taught. They receive three warm, healthy meals a day, which are prepared by the Mmas living at the centre and a cook. The team of colleagues, consisting of the teacher Ayala, the manager Owuso, the Mmas and the support teacher Patrice Reinhardt from Aachen, have wished for some time that the "big ones" in the Cosmos Centre could pursue a meaningful occupation and, for example, work as craftsmen in their own workshops. Until now, the centre lacked the space for this, but now - via some detours - the property directly opposite could be acquired.

Qedeli offers 31 people with disabilities a place to live and work. There are several workshops that are geared towards self-sufficiency: gardening, bakery, woodwork, wool-crafts, and also a laundry. They graze their own cows in the surrounding meadows. However, not all costs can be covered; the community depends on donations. In January, founder and director Lali Khandolishvili told us about the challenges and successes of the past year.

Enabling children to receive an education is one of our noblest tasks. There are many reasons why even today, millions of children are not able to go to school, and thus remain permanently excluded from social life. Of course, children have rights, but they are not respected everywhere. We work to ensure, practically, that especially disadvantaged children get their right to education.

Escola Waldorf a Oliveira was founded 15 years ago and in the course of its development, it has had to spread over three different locations near Lagos. Now it has finally been possible to acquire a plot of land in the neighbourhood of the kindergarten, where the school's nine classes have space together.

The Tashi Waldorf School was able to regain some reliability and regularity last year after several crises, some of which were caused by the pandemic. The small school in Kathmandu is currently attended by 64 children in two kindergarten groups and grades 1-3. Teacher Dil Maya Adhikari reports on the challenges and successes of 2022 in her annual report.