Misean Cara at 20
Looking back at 20 years of support to Ireland's missionaries
“Centuries before a free and independent Irish nation sent her first ambassadors around the world, we were privileged to have the best unpaid ambassadors in our Irish missionaries.”
President Mary McAleese
Nairobi, Kenya, 2001
Misean Cara's 20th Anniversary
In 2024 Misean Cara celebrates a significant milestone – our 20th Anniversary.
Misean Cara’s foundation in 2004 grew out of a vision by the Irish Government to ensure dedicated support to Irish missionaries and their centuries-long tradition of serving the poor overseas, by setting up an organisation dedicated to channelling Irish Aid funds to their work. Originally named the Irish Missionary Resource Service, Misean Cara was set up at that time to administer aid funds from Irish Aid directly to individual missionaries applying on their own behalf.
Where We Are Today
Over the years, Misean Cara has evolved into a membership organisation with a focus on funding projects that align with the UN 2030 Strategic Development Goals as well as and our own strategic goals to uphold rights and empower vulnerable and excluded people to envision a better quality of life.
Now, at 77 members strong, Misean Cara represents an extensive network of missionary-led development organisations with exceptional reach across the globe. Our members have established missions in over 50 countries, partnering with vulnerable communities to arrive at development interventions that create pathways to climate-resilient, sustainable livelihoods; access to quality education and healthcare, and support to advocate for human rights. Throughout its 20 years, Misean Cara has continued to receive generous funding from the Irish Aid Programme.
In 2023, Misean Cara’s members reached 1.9 million people in 52countries, through 321 development projects that helped transform the lives of the poor and furthest behind.
While supporting missionary development through funding is a critical part of what we do, Misean Cara also supports our members through access to capacity development resources and promoting the sharing of best practice learning between our members to gain added value and perspectives from each other’s approaches and projects. We accompany our members along every step of the project cycle by providing mentorship and guidance in nurturing their project teams, and establishing robust policies, procedures and systems to ensure adherence to good development practice.
Misean Cara is unique in that it funds only the work of missionary development organisations, whether that work is implemented by religious or lay missionaries. Likewise, the Missionary Approach to Development Interventions is unique, reaching people and communities in some of the hardest to reach places including conflict zones and remote rural areas, where other organisations are unable to maintain a presence.
20 Years of Support to a Centuries-Old Tradition of Irish Missionary Work
Over the past 20 years, Misean Cara and our Irish Missionary members have made a significant contribution to Ireland’s overseas development goals in livelihoods, education, health, and human rights. But Irish Missionaries have been agents of development for much longer than 20 years, establishing schools, medical facilities and social care in poorly served and hard to reach communities in some of the poorest parts of the world for well over a century.
It’s hard to sum up in better words than those of former President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, the extraordinary, rich and inspiring history of Irish missionaries and their contributions to lifting up the lives of the world’s poorest people. In her foreword to the 2011 book ‘A Road Less Travelled: Tales of the Irish Missionaries’ by Aidan Clerkin and Brendan Clerkin, she observed:
“Ireland’s sad history of poverty, famine and conflict gives us a special empathy with those experiencing these same harsh realitites today and our missionaries embody the keen sense of social justice which is the hallmark of the Irish people. Our official development aid programme, Irish Aid, which targets its assistance to the world’s poorest people, is inspired in many ways by the efforts of generations of Irish missionaries and stands on the foundations laid by them. Today’s Irish missionaries continue in that tradition of selfless service. We can measure their contribution in terms of numbers of schools built or clinics opened but what is much more difficult to measure is the real life-enhancing impact they have on the lives of communities throughout the developing world.”*
Though written almost 15 years ago, those words are no less true now of today’s Irish missionaries at work around the world, but also the work being carried out in ever greater numbers by non Irish-born Sisters, Brothers and Fathers who are taking on the leadership of projects carried out in the charism of the Irish missionary tradition.
*A Road Less Travelled: Tales of the Irish Missionaries, Aidan Clerkin & Brendan Clerkin, Editors; 2011 Open Air (an imprint of Four Courts Press)
Misean Cara 20th Anniversary Church Leadership Visit to Kenya
