Religions for Peace has joined a coalition of organizations in an extraordinary initiative that provides vital assistance to millions of African children orphaned by AIDS. The Hope for African Children Initiative is confronting, on a pan-African scale, challenges such as the increased risk of malnutrition, illness, abuse and sexual exploitation faced by orphans; the high costs of caring for sick family members that often fall upon children, who are left impoverished or forced to work rather than attend school; the stigma and discrimination often associated with HIV and AIDS, which often deprives children of basic social services and even the support of their extended families; the lack of home-based care for sick parents, insufficient medical responses to the opportunistic infections that follow the onset of AIDS, and the high percentage of babies who contract HIV from their mothers.

Responding to a crisis of such enormous scale, the Initiative allows each of the partner organizations - Religions for Peace as well as CARE, Network of African People Living with HIV/AIDS (NAP+), PLAN International, Save the Children, World Vision, and the Society for Women and AIDS in Africa to achieve far more than any other one of them could on its own.