80 years of CARE

CARE International has been working to provide lasting solutions to poverty and responding to disasters and emergencies since the 1940s.

CARE's history

CARE International is one of the world’s largest organizations dedicated to saving lives and fighting poverty. We help provide relief to people hit by emergencies, and contribute to economic empowerment that strengthens livelihoods over the long term.   

What is now a global network of partners working around the world started with a simple emergency relief package, delivered over eight decades ago.  

CARE in a box

Known then as the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe, CARE consisted of 22 American charities of civic, religious, cooperative, and labour backgrounds. 

The first CARE Package™ arrived in Le Havre, France, in May 1946. It was the first in a wave of responses to millions of people in need of food and relief supplies at the end of World War II.  

In 1948, as Soviet troops blockaded Berlin, CARE chartered its own planes to participate in the historic Berlin airlift, providing about 60% of all private aid to the beleaguered city.   

An illustrated graphic of a CARE Package that reads "CARE - United States of America - 1945"

Power of a Box

From remittances in Europe to relief everywhere

With Europe on the road to recovery, CARE found itself increasingly involved in Asia – first in Japan and then in the Philippines, Korea, India, and Pakistan.  

By the early 1950s, operations had been established in a number of Latin American countries, followed by Africa in the early 1960s. CARE at this time also began providing medical services as well as assistance to people in war-torn areas.   

In many places around the world where humanitarian relief was needed, CARE and our partners were present. In recognition of increasingly global work, CARE changed its name in 1953 to the Cooperative for American Relief Everywhere.  

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, CARE expanded its remit beyond immediate and short-term relief to long-term, people-centred development assistance. Following the establishment of the Peace Corps by US President John F. Kennedy in 1961, CARE began to train volunteers and help manage the Peace Corps’ first projects.  

We continued to help provide food in the aftermath of humanitarian crises, but also started innovative projects to help communities better provide for themselves.  

From CARE to CARE International 

CARE opened an office in Canada in 1946. However, it was not until the mid-1970s that the organization truly started to become an international body.  

CARE Canada (initially Care of Canada) became an autonomous body in 1973. In 1976, CARE Europe was established in Bonn following the successful fundraising campaign "Dank an CARE" (Thanks to CARE). In 1981, CARE Germany was created, and CARE Europe moved its headquarters to Paris.  

CARE Norway followed in 1980, and later that year CARE offices in Italy and the UK were also established. The popularity of CARE offices in Europe was attributed to the fact that many Europeans remembered receiving CARE assistance after World War II.  

In 1979, planning began to establish an umbrella organization to coordinate and prevent duplication among the various national CARE organizations. This new body was named CARE International. It met for the first time on January 29, 1982, bringing together representatives from CARE Canada, CARE Germany, CARE Norway, and CARE USA. 

CARE International would expand significantly during the 1980s, with the addition of CARE France in 1983; CARE International UK in 1985; CARE Austria in 1986; and CARE Australia, CARE Denmark, and CARE Japan in 1987.  

Beginning the focus on women and girls

In the early 1980s, CARE’s longer-term development programs increasingly began focusing on ways to improve the status of women and girls and encourage their greater participation. We were seeing that empowered women and girls improve not only their own lives, but also that of the communities around them. 

When women earn, everyone benefits. This was CARE’s guiding vision when we launched our first Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs) in Niger in 1991, still today one of our flagship programs for women's economic empowerment.  

VSLAs are inspired by the ancient African practice of group savings, in which community members pool their resources to create a kind of village bank. The method provides an effective strategy for women to save small amounts, see their collective savings grow, and borrow money in times of hardship, such as droughts or illness, or to invest in setting up a small business.  

From the civil war in Rwanda to the Gulf War, CARE International and our partners were there providing relief to millions of people in need.   

In 1993, to reflect the wider scope of our programs and impact, CARE changed the meaning of its acronym to Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere. 

Two girls stand in the middle of the road, each holding food in one hand. One of the girls has her arm around the other's shoulders and is resting her head on hers. The second girl is bringing up her hand up to her mouth as she smiles.

Empowering women and girls

We help women and girls empower themselves to overcome poverty, focusing on education, economic empowerment, and promoting their voices.

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CARE in the new millennium    

In the early 2000s, CARE applied its proven approaches to emergency relief and recovery to a series of major humanitarian crises. Initially this included the Indian Ocean tsunami, major earthquakes in Pakistan, Indonesia and Haiti, and later the displacement of more than 2.5 million people in the war-torn region of Darfur, Sudan.  

Popular pro-democracy uprisings across much of the Arab world followed in 2011, but the Arab Spring gave way to several protracted civil wars that had devastating consequences for millions of people. CARE mobilised in Syria and Yemen to deliver emergency aid, support displaced people across the region, and provide protection and livelihood services to women and girls who were hardest hit by the violence and upheaval, but also shouldering new responsibilities that had previously been the exclusive domain of men. Working together with local and women-led organisations in Syria, CARE saw the need to tailor programs to understand and address the changing needs of women and girls and developed the Rapid Gender Analysis tool that is now widely used across the humanitarian sector.     

The chaos unleashed by these civil wars contributed to the rise of extremist groups like ISIS, which gained territory and power across swathes of the Middle East and Africa. For millions of people in regions such as the Sahel and the Lake Chad Basin, climate induced disasters like prolonged drought meant they could no longer produce the food to feed their families, and the resulting social tensions, displacement and instability left them vulnerable to exploitation and recruitment by extremist groups. It became clear to organisations like CARE that only larger and more complex responses would enable these vulnerable communities to overcome the many challenges they were now facing.  

We began to work with both displaced and host communities in affected areas to meet people’s immediate need for food, shelter and healthcare, whilst also supporting them to build the skills they would need to open a small business, more sustainably farm their land, or set up a savings group to build community self-reliance.  

By 2018, CARE had tripled the scope of its emergency response work in five years. We were working in the Azraq refugee camp in Jordan with people who had escaped the civil war in Syria; at Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh, to assist Rohingya people who fled mass violence in Myanmar; and partnering with local women’s organisations in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru to support vulnerable women and girls fleeing upheaval in Venezuela.  

In 2019, we responded to the devastating impacts of Cyclones Idai and Kenneth, two of the strongest storms to ever hit Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe. We published a series of Rapid Gender Analysis reports that drew attention to the need for specially designed programmes and services for impacted women and girls to support their economic recovery and protect them from heightened risks such as domestic violence, sexual exploitation and abuse, or early and forced marriage.    

The same year, CARE’s advocacy – especially from teams in Asia and Latin America – contributed to the adoption of a new ILO Convention aimed at ending violence and harassment in the world of work, an important milestone on the journey to advance women’s economic empowerment and lives free from violence. 

Responding to COVID-19 

In 2020, CARE adapted our programming again to respond to COVID-19 in more than 60 countries worldwide. Within weeks of the global shutdown, CARE began to publish a series of national, regional and global Rapid Gender Analysis reports that showed that the virus was disproportionately impacting women and girls, exacerbating pre-existing inequalities with men and boys. CARE’s analysis predicted and later confirmed an increase in gender-based violence due to movement restrictions, loss of household income, and women’s reduced access to support services like shelters.  

CARE used these findings to advocate for women and girls to be at the centre of national COVID responses. We called on governments to collect and use sex- and age-disaggregated data to tailor their responses, bring women into leadership roles, and provide specific support to frontline health workers, most of whom were women in low-paid or volunteer roles. In addition, our global response efforts included distributing health and hygiene kits, installing handwashing stations in public places, providing clean water, and helping ensure vaccine access through our Fast and Fair Vaccine campaign.   

Responding as conflicts multiply and aid budgets shrink  

COVID took a massive toll on global health, economies and politics across the world. But it hit fragile and conflict-affected countries hardest of all, leaving the poorest and most marginalised people even more vulnerable. Rather than heeding the UN Secretary-General's call for a global ceasefire so all resources could be focused on defeating the pandemic and reducing widening global inequality, the post-pandemic era has witnessed a record number of active conflicts and an intensity of violence not seen since World War II. Perhaps most shocking of all has been the growing disregard for the laws of war by many who wage it, some of whom are resorting to starvation and sexual violence as weapons of war and targeting civilians and humanitarian workers.  

As conflict has proliferated, CARE has mobilised and broadened its network of local partners, including more women-led and women’s rights organisations. In 2022, we scaled up efforts in Eastern Europe to respond to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and began working with a network of partner organisations to support women and children displaced within the country and refugees fleeing to neighbouring countries, including Poland and Romania. A year later, brutal conflict returned to Sudan, unleashing a ‘war on women and girls’ and triggering the world’s largest displacement and hunger crisis. Together with local medical partners, CARE provided vital health services to pregnant women, treatment for child malnutrition, support to survivors of sexual violence and a range of other lifesaving services. During the recent war in Gaza, local partners’ deep community ties and trusted relationships meant they could get aid to people in areas that were inaccessible to CARE due to security challenges and infrastructure damage. For example, even though CARE opened a primary health clinic in Deir Al-Balah in mid-2024 to provide maternal and reproductive health, nutritional support, and other services to women and children, in other parts of Gaza, we relied on local partners to organise the safe distribution of medical supplies in hospitals and clinics.  

As the threats to global peace and security have risen, many governments have decided to direct more resources to their military budgets and the defence of their borders, slashing their aid budgets. This has forced aid organisations like CARE to scale back or close life-saving programs, exacerbating already high rates of malnutrition in Somalia, collapsing maternal care in Sudan, and reducing healthcare access in Ukraine. If this funding gap is not closed, there is a risk that millions of preventable deaths could occur over the next five years due to extreme poverty, hunger, and disease.  

As CARE reflects on 80 years of service, we are mindful of the fact that we must meet these challenges head on and in collaboration with the partners and communities that we stand alongside. Together we have the capacity to develop the solutions, mobilise the resources and do the work that will save lives and defeat poverty for decades to come. But experience has taught us that when we invest in women and girls, we are investing in humanity, and everyone stands to benefit.  

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