International Day of Families, 15 May 2026
Every year on 15 May, the UN marks the International Day of Families to remind us that the family is an “indispensable foundation of the development process”. This year’s theme, “Families, Inequalities and Children’s Well-being”, sheds light on how profoundly inequality shapes family life and influences children’s futures. It is a message that resonates deeply with our work.
The families we work with could hardly be more different from one another: traditional families, single-parent households, extended families built around grandparents or other close relatives, and families pieced back together after displacement or loss. Each has its own story and internal dynamics, and faces challenges that are never quite the same as those of the family down the road. It is this many-sided reality, in all its complexity, that we seek to understand and support.
These families are dealing with a great deal at once: poverty, limited access to basic services, tensions between genders and generations, and repeated climate shocks. What often strikes us most is not so much a lack of resources as a lack of any sense of possibility. Families exhausted by the daily struggle to get by gradually lose the ability to imagine that things could ever be different, and with it the will to act. Creating a space where a family can take a breath, talk openly, and dream together out loud is often the first step, and the most important one.
We work from a simple belief: every family already holds within it the aspirations and strengths it needs to find its own way forward. Our role, and that of our local partners, is to create the conditions for those to come to the surface. This work depends on local organisations and associations whose trained facilitators, social workers, psychologists and other support professionals, build a space for family dialogue where every member, women, men and young people alike, can have their say. Their deep familiarity with local contexts, languages and cultural dynamics is something no one else can replicate. They are the ones who bring this approach to life every day, right alongside the families they work with.
The approach we developed together with our Burundian partner, the Plan Intégré pour l’Autopromotion (PIA), rests on a firm conviction: helping a family build its own vision of the future means giving it back the power to shape its own life. The results achieved with several hundred families speak for themselves: incomes that have risen significantly, in some cases trebling or quadrupling; greater food security; children attending school; homes repaired and improved; savings groups back in action and becoming springboards for collective initiatives. And each family supported goes on to influence several others around them. That this approach genuinely works is perhaps best illustrated by one particular sign: some of our local partners, having seen these changes unfold before their eyes, have started applying it in their own family lives, proof that it makes sense beyond any specific project or setting, wherever a family, however it is made up, wants to build something lasting together.
On this day dedicated to families, we reaffirm our commitment to supporting them in reaching their goals.
A Rwandan family with their family action plan.