During the winter holiday season, many communities work hard to raise money or collect gifts to make things better for children in need.

At the same time, international aid organizations are working to make things better for needy children all over the world.

Each year at this time the United Nations Children’s Fund, known as UNICEF, issues a detailed report on “The State of the World’s Children,” and aid groups like the ONE Campaign and the DATA group (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa) seek support for poor nations.

This year, as Americans face economic problems at home, world aid groups have particular concern about poverty and related problems in Africa.

As difficult as things are now in developed countries, the aid groups stress, conditions are worse in developing nations. More than 70 percent of Africans who live south of the Sahara Desert live on less than $2 a day. Nearly 50 percent live on less than $1 a day, and 200 million go hungry every day.

This year alone at least one million Africans, most of them young children, died of malaria. Two million died of AIDS.

Meanwhile, money that could be used to build schools and hospitals in African nations must be used to make payments on debts piled up from years of borrowing from other countries. And the epidemic of AIDS has caused health care costs to soar.

Solving these problems is a huge job. But it is not an impossible job, aid groups report. In fact, progress is being made.

Because some nations have canceled debts due by African nations, 29 million children are going to school this year for the first time ever. In the last three years, programs like the Global Fund and America’s emergency AIDS plan have provided life-saving AIDS drugs to 1.3 million people, most of them in Africa.

Groups like Oxfam International have created gift programs so that people can buy and donate chickens, goats or other livestock for poor families; school supplies or uniforms for children; or disease-preventing materials like malaria nets.

Education plays a huge role in fighting poverty in developing countries. Education attacks poverty at its roots, aid groups say, and strengthens individuals, families and communities.

Yet around the world 77 million children cannot go to primary school because their parents cannot afford fees, books or uniforms for all their children, DATA reports.

With help from the world’s wealthier nations, progress is being made toward the United Nations goal of providing primary education for every child by the year 2015.

Primary school enrollment in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, jumped by 29 million children in just five years from 2000 to 2005.

Helping Africans help themselves, the ONE Campaign asserts, could save lives and change the way wealthy nations are viewed by poor nations.

Most important, it could reduce the need “to fight the war on terror with tanks and guns,” ONE leaders have said, because “we could fight it with medicine, free schooling and freedom of thought.”