Seated on the ground, 13-year-old Ivy eloquently reads a book in her mother tongue as she leans against the wall of a small mudbrick house in southern Zambia’s Moyo community. In the day’s twilight, the sun pleasantly beams onto her face in beautiful gold.

Ivy has mastered reading despite now having to learn on her own due to the impact of the coronavirus. Ivy and about 100 other children in her village used to meet at a reading camp—established with the help of World Vision—where they learned to read, write and play.

The wave of fear remains as the coronavirus continues to impact many lives all over the world. Forty-two-year-old Florence Hachiyona of the Moyo community in southern Zambia likens the COVID-19 era as “facing a double-edged sword.”

“After hearing what the coronavirus can do and that it had reached Zambia, fear besieged me. I started [having] sleep-less nights. I thought it was over for me. Being HIV positive already, I fear contracting another virus because I would die faster and leave my children alone to suffer,” says Florence, a mother of four.

Just after 5 a.m. in the Mweebo community in southern Zambia, Nelly Mulavu began her lonely trek through the middle of thick bush to fetch water from the only stream in area. This was her first daily morning chore.

Suddenly, a strange man appeared from the bush, a few meters away from where she was standing. “The man looked suspicious,” says Nelly later. “My heart froze in fear. I wondered if the man could be up to something, knowing deep down in my heart what had happened to several other women in the past.” Almost immediately he grabbed her, and a serious battle ensued between the two.

“Just the week before [the] lockdown started in our area I filled my store with new goods. I brought mostly the kitchen items like [the] electric kettle, fan, iron, gas stove, and rice cooker. I invested all the savings that I earned from my tailoring store,” says Sahinoor, 35, an entrepreneur and a single mother who is raising her two children Shanta, 15, and Shourav, 7. She lives in a slum in Khulna, a city in southern Bangladesh.

Fozia regrets the stories she made up to avoid going to school. “I mourned [the death of] my relative” or “I had to take care of my feeble grandma,” she would say to the teacher. Fozia is 15 years old and is an 8th grade student at Mariye Junior Secondary School. The school has 45 teachers and 1,134 students that attend in two shifts, one early in the day, and a second group in the afternoon.

The impact of COVID-19 has changed the entire world. In one community in Bangladesh, a Hidden Hero has emerged to help slow the spread. Meet Rumi, a 16-year-old who lives in a slum with her parents and brother Rummon (9) in southern Bangladesh. “I mostly invest my time helping my parents in household chores, playing with my younger brother and messaging my community with my peers. My school and life have greatly changed…now I spend my days at home to stay safe from the coronavirus contamination. I miss my normal days,” says Rumi. She completed high school this year and now disseminates life-saving messages to communities through the Chader Alo (“moonlight”) Child Forum mobilized and inspired by World Vision’s Area Program in Barishal City.

Marcellina is a 16-year-old, grade 10 student at St Joseph Chepterit Girls High School and marvels when she considers how fast life has changed in just three years. She now epitomizes the future of a changed society.

“I grew up in a patriarchal culture that emphasized more on conformity to the norms and practices of the community. Whereas this culture has some positive aspects, a lot of it is negative,” Marcellina shares. “These harmful negative cultural vices such as FGM (Female Genital Mutilation) and child marriages are so institutionalized and no one dares speak against them.”

Marcellina recalls being a grade 7 pupil at Ortum Girls Primary, when her head teacher selected her to represent the school in the first ever County Children’s Assembly.

Mugombwa, a refugee camp in southern Rwanda, currently hosts over 10,400 Congolese refugees. Gabriella, a 7-year-old girl in Mugombwa, smiles every time she washes her hands after using the toilet because she believes good handwashing is an effective way to prevent the spread of diseases, including COVID-19, Ebola, intestinal worms and diarrhea. The camp’s water supply system was constructed last year and has the capacity to serve the entire camp, plus the neighboring host communities.

Ask any mother what she wants more than anything in the world, and she’ll likely say, “for my children to be safe, healthy, and happy.” For mothers living in extreme poverty, this gift is hard to come by … especially now with the threat of COVID-19. But people like Gertrude Jima (pictured right) are at the forefront of giving moms what they want most – access to knowledge and resources that empower them to care for their children.

THE COST OF HOLDING WOMEN BACK

Although women make up almost half of the agricultural workforce across Africa — and perform 80% of the labor on smallholder farms — millions of them don’t have access to financial services, training, and other opportunities that could help them escape poverty.

These inequalities don’t just hurt women — they cripple entire nations, holding back about half the population from participating in a society’s economic growth. It’s estimated that if women in these communities could afford productive resources like business training, seeds, and fertilizer, up to 150 million fewer people would go hungry every day.