Meghan Markle's charity work in India and Rwanda with World Vision Canada

Roshni was a 13-year-old girl living in an orphanage in India. In 2017, she made a handwritten thank-you poster for a woman she lovingly called her elder sister. That woman was Meghan Markle, who had traveled from another continent to visit and spend time with children like Roshni.

Long before she became the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle spent two years as a global ambassador for World Vision Canada. This piece is part of our World Vision Canada: Then and Now series. In this series, we revisit the celebrities who once stood behind our mission and check in on where their work has taken them since.

How Meghan Markle became a World Vision Canada ambassador

Markle was an activist long before she became famous. At age 11, she wrote a letter to a dish soap company about a sexist ad line and got the wording changed. She later called it the moment she understood that one person could create change just by speaking up.

In 2015, she stood before the UN Secretary General at a conference on women's rights in Beijing and talked about that childhood letter and what it taught her. This speech enhanced her public reputation around gender equality and education in many lower-income countries. World Vision Canada took notice and named her a global ambassador in 2016.

The Rwanda trip that started it all

In February 2016, Markle flew to Rwanda with World Vision Canada to see a clean water project up close. She visited a school in Kigali Province and met children who walked long distances each day just to fetch unsafe water.

She helped turn the handle on a manual drilling rig to install a new well. Then she taught local students to paint with watercolours using water drawn from a pipeline that had just been built nearby.

World Vision Canada's chief marketing and development officer at the time, Lara Dewar, said, "Meghan is a true humanitarian." The trip centred on a borehole in Kabeza that ended up serving around 1,000 people in the surrounding community.

What happened after the Rwanda trip?

By May 2023, World Vision said it had helped close to one million people gain access to clean water in the districts where it operates in Rwanda, alongside sanitation and hand-washing facilities for hundreds of thousands more.

The push she once highlighted with a watercolour painting session turned into one of the charity's biggest clean water campaigns on the continent.

A second trip, this time to India

In January 2017, Markle traveled again, this time to Delhi and Mumbai. The focus shifted from water to girls' education, and specifically to the lack of bathrooms that pushes many girls out of school once they reach their teens.

She later said that clean water is the key to it all, tying it to safety, schooling and opportunity for women and girls. While in India, she painted murals, planted flowers with students and sat with local women to talk about a subject still treated as taboo in many places: menstrual health.

This is the trip that brought Roshni into the story. After spending the afternoon with Markle, she made her poster and said, "I want to thank Meghan di for meeting all of us. She was very sweet." Di is a Hindi word for elder sister, and Roshni used it as a term of warmth and respect.

After her 2017 trip to India, she wrote an essay for Time about the stigma around menstruation, explaining that many girls feel embarrassed talking about something so basic.

"During my time in the field, many girls shared that they feel embarrassed to go to school during their periods. Ill-equipped with rags instead of pads, unable to participate in sports and without bathrooms available to care for themselves, they often opt to drop out of school entirely," she said.

She went on to say, "When a girl misses school because of her period, cumulatively that puts her behind her male classmates by 145 days."

The piece connected the dots between her Rwanda and India trips: both were really about removing barriers that keep girls out of school.

Where is Meghan Markle now

Markle stepped down as a World Vision Canada ambassador when her engagement to prince Harry was announced. In 2023, the Ms. Foundation celebrated her with a Women of Vision award for her advocacy on gender equity. In October 2025, she and Prince Harry were named Humanitarians of the Year at the Project Healthy Minds gala in New York, for their work on youth mental health and online safety through their Parents' Network.

World Vision Canada's work today

Lara Dewar, World Vision Canada's CMO in 2017, praised Meghan Markle's passion for children and girls' rights after their India trip that year.

"We're deeply grateful for her contribution as a global ambassador for World Vision over the past two years and for helping to raise awareness for the world's most vulnerable children. I personally witnessed Meghan's passion to improve the lives of children and know her heart to advocate for the rights of girls - to hear and amplify their important voices."

World Vision Canada has been operating since 1957 and today works in around 100 countries alongside more than 31,000 staff worldwide as part of the larger World Vision Partnership.

Charity Intelligence Canada, a watchdog group that rates Canadian nonprofits, gives the charity an A+ for results reporting and a five-star rating, and named it a Top 10 International Impact charity in 2025.

That track record is part of why a single ambassador trip from a decade ago still gets attention today.

How you can carry the story forward

Markle's two trips left behind something bigger than one celebrity. They gave rise to wells, latrines and children like Roshni who still remember the day someone crossed continents just to listen to them. Roshni made a handmade poster for a woman she had known for one afternoon. That is what showing up does. It builds a connection of kindness and love.

You can sponsor a child and begin that kind of relationship yourself today.