Breaking the Cycle
Your love is changing futures for our neighbors in Nepal like Laxmi Chaudhary and her daughters. Look inside to learn more! YOUR IMPACT 2025
POVERTY IS A CHALLENGE MADE OF CHALLENGES
In 2025, extreme poverty is defined as living below $3 per day. But the problem of poverty goes deeper than access to cash, and it has many root causes.
War, drought, flooding, lack of education and poor health care are just a few of the challenges that trap people in poverty. And the more of these challenges you face, the harder it is to break free.
Poverty is complex because each of the contributing factors has its own causes and effects. To break the cycle of poverty, we have to break the smaller cycles that fuel it.
A CYCLE WITHIN A CYCLE
Hunger is one example. While hunger is often a symptom of poverty, it can also be a key driver that keeps the cycle of poverty in motion.
For example, babies born to malnourished mothers are more likely to experience stunted growth and developmental delays. Studies show that children who are stunted — meaning they fail to reach their full height or cognitive potential — make significantly less income as adults than those who develop normally.
That means the nourishment you receive in the womb not only affects your lifelong health and well-being; it also affects your ability to provide for your future children. And that’s how the cycle of hunger can begin, even before you are born.
But why is the mother malnourished? As you’ll see in this report, lack of money is not the only reason a family might go hungry. Some lack knowledge about nutrition or the skills and tools they need to grow a variety of nourishing foods. Others were unprepared for the flood or drought that ruined their crops.
These are the barriers we need to address in order to stop hunger in its tracks.
CREATING POSITIVE DISRUPTIONS
When you love your neighbors through Lutheran World Relief, you address the barriers that prevent people from thriving, and you create opportunities for people to stop these cycles from continuing.
We call these actions positive disruptions. In this report, you’ll read about ways you’re helping your neighbors overcome the cycles of hunger, trauma, discrimination and powerlessness that destroy their hope and keep them trapped in poverty.
Read on to learn how you are the life-changing disruption they needed to reclaim their power, plant seeds of hope and overcome poverty in sustainable ways.
BREAKING THE CYCLES
DID YOU KNOW?
More than 14,000 community health workers have been trained to recognize malnutrition and teach families how to prevent it. Your love is on the move!
ABOVE: Nurse Tangiza weighs Kholoma during a checkup. After teaching the child’s family about nutrition and gardening, he hopes this will be the last time she needs treatment.
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO
Kholoma Fandji, 4, spent half her life chronically malnourished. When her weight dropped too low, she would receive treatment at the health center. There, the nurses would feed her a fortified peanut butter paste called Plumpy’Nut. She would regain her strength only to relapse as soon as she returned home.
Kholoma’s sister Milomba says the entire family struggled with hunger. After a long day of working in the fields, she and her mother would make fufu, a dough-like dish, out of cassava and maize flours. That is the only meal they would eat all day.
Then your generosity brought critical training to health workers in communities where malnutrition is high. These health workers are trained to recognize malnutrition, identify the causes and teach people how to prevent it. Often, a lack of knowledge about nutrition and gardening is what keeps families hungry.
Empowered to help his neighbors, nurse Tangiza Tangiza is helping families break the cycle. He says, “We are raising community awareness that the Plumpy’Nut won’t last forever. The community must know that they can have gardens at home. If we check [the ingredients] in Plumpy’Nut, there are peanuts, there is maize, there are beans — it’s the food that we produce ourselves here in our community.”
“ All you need to do is raise awareness, repeat.”
- Nurse Tangiza Tangiza
“ We are all united by the same disaster. We share our pain and empathize with each other.”
- Alina Kravchenko
DID YOU KNOW?
Nearly 15,000 Ukrainian neighbors received mental health care, therapy and other support services at LWR’s Womens’ Centers last year.
ABOVE: Alina Kravchenko and her daughters Olexandra and Sofia have endured so much. Your compassion ensures they have the strength and support to move forward.
UKRAINE
One week after the war began, Alina Kravchenko’s husband was sent to the front lines. Days after that, Russian troops invaded their family’s village. After two months of terror and constant shelling, Alina and the children could finally flee.
Alina’s hands still tremble as she describes her insomnia and weight loss, her fear for her husband and the trauma her daughters endured. For a while, both little girls stopped speaking. The future seemed impossible.
Thankfully, the comfort of your compassion met them at the shelter where they had found refuge. Today they are finding peace through art therapy, support groups and counseling at one of LWR’s six Women’s Centers in Ukraine. The centers’ psychologists provide safe spaces for women and children to process their grief, fear and trauma in a supportive community environment.
The girls’ flashbacks have since faded, and today they are talking and playing again. And although the future remains uncertain, the family knows they will not face it alone.
Alina says, “We are all living here with our neighbors as one big family, helping each other.”
NEPAL
Laxmi Chaudhary’s father sold her into indentured servitude when she was 7 years old because he only wanted sons. For years, she did household chores for a wealthy family instead of attending school. In exchange, her father received groceries and cash payments. Laxmi earned nothing.
She finally gained her freedom as a teenager, when indentured servitude was outlawed. Although life has never been easy, today she has a supportive husband and two daughters, whom they lavish with the love Laxmi never received as a child. She also has a small grocery store that she operates out of their one-room home.
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It was hard to make ends meet until your love found her. Laxmi belongs to an indigenous community that is often discriminated against, and being a woman with little education further limits her opportunities.
For vulnerable neighbors like her, you provide training and support to increase their incomes. Laxmi received kitchen supplies, plastic tables and three months of training in food preparation and business management to expand the offerings at her store.
As a result, Laxmi has doubled her income — and she’s breaking the cycle by making sure her children are well loved, well fed and enrolled in school.
My father used to discriminate between sons and daughters, but we won’t do that.”
- Laxmi Chaudhary
DID YOU KNOW?
Our programs in Nepal seek out the most vulnerable: former indentured servants, people with disabilities, widows and single mothers, marginalized ethnic groups and others most in need.
ABOVE: Laxmi faced discrimination as a woman from a marginalized tribe. She is determined that her daughters Anuja and Anuska will have a better life.
LEFT: Zoungrana Balguissa started her flock with 5 hens and one rooster. Today she has 120 chickens.
DID YOU KNOW?
The war in Ukraine has consequences beyond its borders. Farmers in SubSaharan Africa are also suffering because Russia is the largest exporter of fertilizers they depend on.
BURKINA FASO
Millet and beans were all that Zoungrana Balguissa and her husband knew how to grow. They could barely produce enough to eat, let alone pay for their medical needs or their children’s school fees.
They were also powerless against the external forces that affected their farm. The war in Ukraine, for example, caused global fertilizer costs to skyrocket by 100% in 2022. Changing weather patterns have also increased damaging droughts and flooding.
Your love is helping vulnerable farmers gain more control over their livelihoods. Since you empowered Zoungrana to add poultry to her farm, her family’s income
The project used to help us, and we are now helping ourselves.”
- Zoungrana Balguissa
has increased exponentially. Zoungrana’s confidence has grown, her children are attending school, and she and her husband have reinvested some of their profits to expand their chicken coop.
“Before we started the poultry farming, we were suffering a lot,” she says. “Now we are able to solve our problems.”
Until your love reaches every neighbor.
