The Third World Group is a national voluntary non-governmental and not for profit organization based in Malta that is committed towards Third World issues and people who live in "depressed" areas in Malta and abroad. In 1997, the Government of Malta awarded the Third World Group the first prize in the second edition of the prize known as “National Recognition: Youth in Society”

The group came together in 1974, by a number of students who where inspired by Mother Theresa’s speech at the University during her visit to our country. Mother Theresa’s way of thinking was highly influential in forming the values of the first few members of the group. After her speech these students approached Mother Theresa and asked her what they should do to in order to act against the injustices she had talked about. She aptly replied that her Sisters of Charity had just founded a children’s and old peoples’ home in Palermo and needed volunteers to help them in their daily activities.  

The experience in Palermo was just the beginning. Since then the Third World Group helped teams of volunteers to go and work within homes run by the Sister’s of Charity all over the world. Besides Palermo the group organized summer camps in Reggio-Calabria (Italy) where they worked with gypsies, London (England), Cairo, Alexandria and Moquattam (Egypt), and recently Jimma and Alamatta (Ethiopia). 
 In the summer campaigns of the 1980s the group used to send up to six teams, with fifteen to twenty volunteers in each team, in different localities.

During all these experience the volunteers worked with the Sisters of Mother Theresa to help emarginated people. But while in Italy, England and Egypt the group worked mainly with those children coming from families with social problems, in Ethiopia the volunteers worked mostly with the sick and those hospitalized in the Sisters’ homes.

Inspired by their experience in the Group, many members of the Third World Group have done voluntary work in many parts of the world on their own personal initiative, in countries like Peru, India, Brazil, the Philippines, Ethiopia, Albania, Uganda, and Guatemala.

During the first years the group worked with the poor abroad through these summer experiences, however after a few years, the group started to look at Malta and what can be done here. The idea behind their work was the presence within the community. Thus they picked places where there was a high concentration of social problems and where no group was yet present to help the emarginated.