Church initiated Aid and Development

For over 100 years the Baptist Churches of New Zealand have been committed to poverty alleviation where they have worked - Asia, South Asia, South East Asia, Oceania, Africa and Europe. This has included:

• Relief, rehabilitation and medical assistance - responding to chronic poverty, especially following floods, cyclones and other natural disasters and seasonal shocks.
• Small scale rural agriculture - re-establishing farmers devastated by floods with more secure land tenure, new crop development and diversified farming.
• Sustainable rural development - ‘Sustainable Garden and Village Livestock Project’, improving human health through better protein food, providing village small business opportunities, and enhancing environmental protection (Papua New Guinea).
• Cottage industries - ‘Chandpur Cottage Industries’ (CCI), in association with ‘CORR (Christian Organisation Relief and Rehabilitation) - The Jute Works’, focusing assistance to rural poor women through the production of jute based handcrafts (Bangladesh).
• Revolving micro-finance - group formation and access to savings and credit (Bangladesh).
• Educational activities - adult literacy, home-work tutors, and educational grants focusing on poor village children (Bangladesh, Tripura – India).
• Schools and hospitals - establishing local educational and medical infrastructure (Bangladesh and Tripura).

These projects were run as a part of the wider work of tranzsend. In obedience to the biblical command to "Love God with all your heart, and love your neighbour as yourself", humanitarian action to help the poor has always been a Christian imperative. However a concern to have a more focussed approach to development issues led to the formation of BANZAid as a separate organisation in 1997.

In 2006 BANZAid began investigating support for the TCDC projects of Baptist Aid-BBCF in Bangladesh. A baseline survey for a new TCDC project was carried out in 2007, and the project was approved for KOHA-PICD funding from NZAID in 2008.

• Integrated rural community development - ‘Total Community Development Centres’ (TCDC) - sustainable development through social, economic and environmental activities (Bangladesh).