Updates

By Yousra Yusuf, Women Deliver

Women operate the majority of small farms and contribute more than 75% of all agricultural work worldwide, yet few of them own the land they cultivate and depend upon to feed their families. Secure land and property rights support economic growth, reduce poverty and provide opportunities for empowerment. Land ownership also provides women with economic access to market institutions and social access to non-market institutions, such as household and community relations. Read more...

By: Smita Gaith, Women Deliver

General Mills and Merck subsidiary MSD India joined forces in 2009 to create the “Join My Village” project to support non-profit organization CARE. They are now due to expand that project from its initial site in Malawi to India.

Join My Village was created to offer girls and women in developing countries a means to access education as a gateway to more economic opportunities and better quality of life. As of December 2011, since launching in Malawi in 2009, the project has released over $1.2 million to CARE. Read more...

By: Jennifer Catino and Alejandra Colom, Population Council; Abriendo Oportunidades (“Opening Opportunities”) is a winner of the Women Deliver 50

Claudia*, a Mayan girl visiting from her village home in El Cerro Grande, arrived at a Guatemala City hospital with severe abdominal pains. After a brief medical exam she was released by the doctor, who found nothing wrong with her.

Claudia belongs to Guatemala’s most disadvantaged group: indigenous young females. Girls like her typically live in isolated rural communities with limited access to basic services like water, sanitation, passable roads, schooling, and health care. Their lives are marked by early marriage, frequent childbearing, social isolation, violence, and chronic poverty. Often they are disregarded by more affluent Guatemalans, like the doctor who examined her. Read more... 

By: Smita Gaith

In rural India, Drishtee is improving health outcomes, one woman at a time. Previously, the organization set up several health kiosks around rural parts of India; now, they are taking them one step further by organizing them as small franchises. Each kiosk is run by local women who are trained in several different areas, such as maternal health, but also in simpler diagnostic testing such as pregnancy and blood glucose level tests. Read more...

By: Janna Oberdorf, Director of Communications and Outreach for Women Deliver

At the Tamlega Dispensary in Chwele, Kenya, pregnant women who arrive for check-ups leave with an unusual prescription: a voucher for sweetpotato vines. The goal is to leverage the untapped potential of sweetpotatoes, a food crop rich in vitamin A, to significantly improve the nutrition, incomes, and food production of farming families in sub-Saharan Africa, especially among impoverished women and children.

The project, “Sweetpotato Action for Security and Health in Africa (SASHA),” was launched in eight sub-Saharan African countries in 2009 by the International Potato Center (CIP), with support from a five-year, $21 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Read more...

By: Joanna Hoffman, Special Projects Manager 

This week, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation released their annual letter from Bill Gates, identifying family planning as a priority area for 2012. When women have access to family planning, Gates explains, poverty is reduced, more children are educated, and governments are better able to meet the needs of their people. This allows governments and citizens to benefit from the “demographic dividend”, referring to decreases in family size resulting in a higher number of educated youth. When these youth reach working age, they boost productivity and economic growth for their country. Read more...

By: Melinda French Gates
Originally posted by: the Impatient Optimists

Melinda Gates and Nick Kristof recently returned from a three-day trip to Bangladesh. She, along with Nick, agreed to answer readers’ questions about development issues in that part of the world. Here is the third and final installment. 

ELAINE HARRIS: Presumably Melinda is visiting Bangladesh to ascertain the needs specifically related to women and children and ultimately providing assistance. What an amazing position to be in. How will the needs be evaluated? How will the women and children of Bangladesh be involved in the solution? Thank you both for engaging in these humanitarian efforts. Read more...

By: Melinda French Gates
Originally posted by: the Impatient Optimists

Melinda Gates and Nick Kristof recently returned from a three-day trip to Bangladesh. To highlight the corresponding development issues, they agreed to answer reader's questions. This is the second installment of their three-part Q&A session.

Q. COSIMA BARLETT: My comments do not in any way detract from the profound admiration I have for you and your Foundation but a simple question: why do you not concentrate more of your efforts on American children who are so lacking in so many important areas as statistics now show? Read more...

By: Melinda French Gates
Originally posted by: the Impatient Optimists

Melinda recently returned from a three-day trip to Bangladesh. She, along with Nick Kristof, agreed to answer readers’ questions about development issues focusing on that part of the world. Here is the first installment of the Q&A session reposted from Kristof's New York Times blog "On the Ground." Read more...

Earlier this month at the mHealth Summit in Washington, DC, the Innovation Working Group, part of the UN Secretary General’s Every Woman Every Child Strategy, and the mHealth Alliance announced 8 winners of grants to support mobile health programs. The grants will fund innovative mobile technology projects that have the potential to improve maternal and child health globally.

The projects are based in low-income countries with high maternal and child mortality rates. They aim to improve evaluation design, enhance health information sharing, and increase the capabilities of technologies that help clinical decision-making. Over the two-year grant period, the grantees will build partnerships, scale up their projects to national levels or extend their reach to new communities. The grant program is generously supported by NORAD, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation, with technical support from the mHealth Alliance. Read more...

By: Madeline Taskier, Strategic Partnerships Associate at Women Deliver

In Egypt, young girls living in rural areas often do not have the opportunity to attend school. Instead, they help their families and are socially isolated due to conservative gender norms. They often marry young and have little access to public life, as they are confined to the home to raise children and take care of their households. These girls have little access to health care, education, or peers in their communities. To break the cycle of this isolation and enable these girls to reach their full potential, the Population Council launched Ishraq  (meaning “sunrise” in Arabic) in 2001. The program brings adolescent girls from Upper Egypt together in youth centers and provides training to improve their educational, health, and social opportunities. Read more...

By: Madeline Taskier, Strategic Partnerships Associate at Women Deliver

Yesterday, in Washington, DC, the Woodrow Wilson Center, the Maternal Health Task Force, UNFPA, USAID Bureau for Global Health, and the African Population and Health Research Center co-hosted the last session of the two year maternal health dialogue series. The partners launched the report, “Delivering Solutions: Advancing Dialogue to Improve Maternal Health,” which captures the strategies and recommendations that emerged from the series.

Since December 2009, this maternal health dialogue series has hosted 28 sessions with over 100 panelists engaging in conversation and debate around some of the most pressing maternal health topics.   A total of over one thousand participants attended sessions on topics ranging from HIV/AIDS and maternal health service integration to family planning in fragile states; new applications of existing communications technologies; and addressing maternal health in urban slums. The series focused on major challenges and opportunities for moving the maternal health agenda forward, and affirmed that solutions for saving the lives of women and girls are plentiful and powerful. Read more...

By: Gary Darmstadt
Originally posted by: the Impatient Optimists

I recently had the opportunity to attend a meeting at the World Bank where global health and development leaders and finance ministers from rich and poor countries met to share experiences and learning about the demographic dividend.

The concept of the demographic dividend is that when fertility rates in a country decline, fewer births take place each year, and the size of the population of individuals who are dependent on the state grows smaller. Read more...