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A series of four manuals produced by the World Council of Churches (WCC) Ecumenical HIV and AIDS Initiatives and Advocacy were launched on 1 May in Nairobi, Kenya. The manuals address ecumenical needs for faith-based resources to treat and prevent the spread of HIV along with education on gender issues.

More than 70 African ecumenical leaders will take part in training seminars for diakonia and development, improving human resource development capacities of churches across all regions of the continent.

As the 4th UN Environment Assembly concluded in Nairobi, Kenya on 15 March, faith leaders at the gathering urged action beyond the resolutions, while warning that the current ecological crisis, if not urgently addressed, could grow to a catastrophe.

On the sidelines of the UN Environment Assembly in Nairobi, top UN officials, religious leaders and environmental experts underlined the role of faith communities in tackling climate change, a phenomenon that threatens to annihilate humanity.

For HIV-infected people in Nairobi, the Eastern Deanery Aids Relief Program makes a difference. By providing a quarter of the antiretroviral therapy care, it helps around 26,000 HIV-infected people in the Kenyan capital to live normal lives.

Dozens of acts of compassion, overflowing patriotism and individual courage have marked the responses to a Nairobi terrorist attack. The country’s faith leaders strongly condemned the violence.

The WCC general secretary, Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit, denounced the terror attack in Nairobi, Kenya, on 15 January and mourned the loss of life, extending prayers for the victims and their families and friends.

In Nairobi, faith leaders, children and adolescents joined efforts to mark World Children’s Day, for action together on HIV and TB.

The voices of young people will ring through the Ecumenical Centre in Geneva on 21 November as part of global celebrations for World Children’s Day linked to other events involving the World Council of Churches (WCC) in different places.

The WCC’s executive committee has welcomed recent reconciliations in Ethiopia and Eritrea. In a statement issued from its 2-8 November meeting in Uppsala, Sweden, the committee also invited further support from member churches for further efforts there.

WCC moderator Dr Agnes Abuom was awarded the Plaque of Saint Eric by Church of Sweden primate Archbishop Antje Jackelén on 3 November.

“Having a sponsor.” “Prostitution.” “Rape.” Those are three among many grave issues that high school students face daily in Eastern Africa. Yet they have little or no safe space in which to share with adults or within churches.

As churches worldwide focus on the “Action Week for Food” in October, increasing numbers of people going hungry due to violent conflicts, failed harvests and rising food costs are compelling faith-based organizations to offer urgent intervention.

Are church schools in Kenya engaging with youth the best way they can? The WCC-EHAIA programme helped 22 principals, education secretaries and church leaders ponder this question when they met at St Julian’s Centre in Limuru.

Thirty years ago, the founders of the Ecumenical Decade of Churches in Solidarity with Women were searching for ways to not only help women across the globe seek justice but also highlight their contributions to churches and the world.

Each year students from all over the world arrive at Bossey near Geneva for a three-month language training course to pave their way for ecumenical studies that follow on straight after. “The title captures the goal of the course,” says Father Lawrence Iwuamadi, the Nigerian priest who studied at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and is academic dean of the Ecumenical Institute.

As part of their work to care for creation, Kenyan church leaders are backing a government effort to restore the Mau Forest, a vital ecosystem in the Rift Valley region.

In a letter addressed to the prime minister of Ethiopia Dr Abiy Ahmed, on 13 August, Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit, general secretary of the World Council of Churches (WCC), conveyed heartfelt congratulations in the decisive role played by Ahmed to ensure the reconciliation of the two synods and unity of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church after 27 years of separation.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is the largest of the Oriental Orthodox Christian Churches, one of Christianity’s oldest and has been in Africa since 330 AD, so there was joy and celebrations when on 27 July it declared an end to a 27-year-old schism that had torn it apart.

“Where is God?” Evoking the desperate cry of a South Sudanese girl stranded in a refugee camp far from home, WCC moderator Dr Agnes Abuom opened the Central Committee’s biennial meeting on 15 June with a stirring yet clear-eyed cry for deeper engagement by the WCC and its member churches to counter the world’s most intractable problems through nurturing hope and empowerment.