name: Norwegian Church Aid
text: Norwegian Church Aid became a well-known name in Norway at the end of the 1960's when Elias Berge led fundraising and aid work for Biafra, Nigeria. But the organisation was founded many years before.
  
  "Menighetspleiens Landsforbund" was founded in October 1945 to coordinate the social aid work that the Norwegian church faced in a new era. After World War II, media reports painted a picture of a Europe with millions of people living in extreme poverty. The organisation immediately started providing aid for people in need. The same year, aid was provided to Norway from Sweden and Denmark. This was the beginning of Norwegian Church Aid. 
  
  The board of Menighetspleiens Landsforbund decided in October 1947 to begin a fundraising campaign for suffering people in Germany. After a while, they also decided that churches in Norway would become engaged in aid work among refugees in Europe and the Middle East. 
  
  This campaign was named Norwegian Church Aid, and the actionâ€™s name later became the name of our organisation. The aid was carried out in cooperation with The Lutheran World federation and Wolrd Council of Churches. 
  
  And so Norwegian Church Aid became an independent organisation, with its own policies, at the Menighetspleiens Landsforbund meeting in 1953. 
  
  After a while, Norwegian Church Aid's work was extended to bring help to the many refugees in Hong Kong (1949), the people of Algeria after the earthquake, war-torn Congo, flood victims in India and so forth. Aid for people in developing countries has, ever since the Aid for Europe campaign, been the main part of Norwegian Church Aidâ€™s field of work. 
  
  In the early days, Norwegian Church Aid worked exclusively with catastrophe work. With time, however, it became increasingly evident that huge parts of the worldâ€™s population live in permanent distress, and Norwegian Church Aid embarked upon itâ€™s first long term development projects. The first one took place in Abakaliki in Nigeria in 1962. 
  
  The real breakthrough for NCA as a development organisation came in 1966, with famine in Biafra in Nigeria. Norwegian Church Aid entered a Nordic cooperation and began its humanitarian work in areas not controlled by any recognised state, and therefore in areas where the traditional humanitarian organisations attached to the UN and the Red Cross had to remain passive. 
  
  Several years later, the biggest development project in Norwegian history was started in South Sudan. Norwegian experts in the fields of agriculture, health, education, road construction, water supplies etc. were sent there to teach the natives to construct a society, modelled after our own. 
  
  In 1971, Asia was once again of interest, with the liberation war in Bangladesh. In 1976, the involvement expanded to Latin America. The background was the Norwegian Church Aid involvement after the earthquake catastrophe in Guatemala in March the same year. 
  
  
  The district development program in South Sudan, which had been started in 1972, became quite dominating. Until the mid-eighties, the program had annual expenses exceeding 40 millions Norwegian Kroner. Bigger projects in Ethiopia, Mali and Eritrea were started in the eighties. Norwegian Church Aid and Norwegian Refugee Council also started an aid project among Afghan refugees. The biggest effort was the aid for the liberated areas of Eritrea from 1978 to 1993. Initially, it was purely an Norwegian Church Aid project, however, after the creation of Eritrean Relief Desk, it became a co-operating project, growing steadily, with Norwegian Church Aid in charge of the implementation of the entire, international, ecumenical aid. 
  
  In the nineties, Norwegian Church Aid came back to its geographical roots, as the organisation increased itâ€™s work in Europe. Norwegian Church Aid was heavily engaged in aid after the dissolution and crisis in the former Yugoslavia.
  
  http://english.nca.no/