ActionAid is one of the UK's largest international development charities, helping poor people in over 35 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. Child sponsorship is key to our work.

If we all sponsored a child in the developing world, imagine the difference we could make. The world’s poorest people would get a chance to create a self-reliant future. Poverty could be a thing of the past.

Child sponsorship helps a child’s whole community by providing access to safe, clean water, healthcare, education and an escape from a life of hardship and disease. Sponsors will see how their money is working through regular updates from local fieldworkers and personal messages from the child they sponsor.

In the UK we often take our human rights for granted - without realising that others don’t enjoy the same freedoms as we do.

Amnesty International is the world’s largest and most influential human rights organisation.

For over 45 years Amnesty International have campaigned for the release of people imprisoned solely for their peacefully held beliefs, to end torture and to protect our universal human rights. In 2006, Amnesty reported on human rights violations in 153 countries.

By promoting awareness of human rights through their education programmes and opposing abuses by campaigning and lobbying governments, Amnesty International gives ordinary people a voice in which to stand up for humanity and human rights and protect individuals wherever justice, fairness, freedom and truth are denied.

Amnesty International UK Charitable Trust is a registered charity no. 1051681.

As the nation’s heart charity, the British Heart Foundation are totally committed to preventing people’s lives being devastated by heart disease. This June they need to raise £1.5 million so that they can continue to fund their life-saving research.

What can you buy for 16p a day?

• You might think "not much these days" but a gift of 16p a day (that’s £5 per month), can provide basic essentials like clean water and healthcare and life-changing opportunities like education and small-business training to the people who need them most. For just a small donation each month, look at how you can transform the lives of those living in poverty:

• £8 each month - can buy a mosquito net. Helping to save lives by preventing the spread of diseases like malaria and yellow fever.

• £10 each month - can pay for three textbooks for school children in Zambia. Over a year, £10 a month can buy 36 textbooks, educating children to give them a brighter future

• £20 each month - can feed a child orphaned by AIDS in Malawi for three and a half months.

• £50 each month - can pay a trainee teacher's salary in Kenya for five weeks. Education gives people the skills they need to work their own way out of poverty.

• £100 each month - could pay for seven water pipes. Give Oxfam £100 a month and in a year we could bring clean, safe water to people in 84 villages.

• £250 each month - can pay for a cow for a dairy farmer in Malawi . Over a year £250 a month can provide 12 families with a cow, that can produce milk to sell and generate an income which could be used to fund their children’s education.

Oxfam Donations

Oxfam Unwrapped: choose from 50 great gift ideas from the Oxfam Unwrapped alternative gift catalogue.

Here are some examples of how a gift can help:

• Feed children’s hungry minds. Buy 100 school dinners. £6

• Build a toilet and help prevent the spread of deadly disease. £30

• A camel is the most versatile of animals. Camel. £95

• Expertise to tap into water sources and distribute it to where it’s needed most. Irrigate three plots of land for a year. £300

• Set up an office to exchange essential information and get the right aid to where it's needed. Mobile Office. £1000

These are just a few of the great gifts you can give to your family and friends while helping overcome poverty and suffering around the world.

Practical Presents - for people struggling to think of the perfect present for the person who has everything.

Practical Action works hand in hand with local communities for the purpose of providing sustainable solutions to poverty that go on working for years to come.

Practical Presents is a range of 15 gift ideas that offer you a chance to buy a unique gift for someone, but also make a real, long lasting difference to communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The gifts range from £10 right up to £5,000. They include a goat, a bicycle ambulance, a bee-keeping business as well as training to help farmers. Each one of the 15 different gift ideas will truly help transform the lives of people in the developing world.

In some developing countries poverty kills 1 in 3 children in their infancy. World Vision, one of the world's leading relief and development agencies is working to help stop this.

Through Child Sponsorship, World Vision can help to change the entire course of a child's life, working together with the local community to provide safe drinking water, basic healthcare, enough food and education.

Become a child sponsor! Together we will make a positive difference to children and their communities. Thank you.