Help Women & Girls
Despite monumental leaps in gender equality,
women & girls are still disproportionately affected by extreme poverty.
Problem: Lack of Support For Women Entrepreneurs
The world’s very poorest people are caught in a cycle of poverty – especially for women & girls who face many barriers to improve their standard of living. Access to entrepreneurship & job growth is extremely limiting for women & girls in developing countries.
Problem
Women lack access to capital for productive investments, poor information about managing assets & are unable to make risky but potential life-changing choices due to the absence of a safety net or savings buffer.
Solution
Supported Entrepreneurship.
- Give resources to organizations that have proven program to support new entrepreneurs, especially women entrepreneurs.
- Employ group-based approaches that bring together diverse skill sets, spread risk, build social capital & produce cost-efficiencies for all.
- Offer grants, NOT loans, to allow vulnerable people to immediately take the risk of entrepreneurship in order to improve their standard of living.
- Empower women to provide for their familes through entreprenuership.
Cost
Village Enterprise’s program cost is $595 per business. This improves the standard of living for approximately 20 individuals thus translating the cost to improve someone’s life for just $30 per person.
Charities
Problem
When a woman experiences a prolong, obstructed labor during emergency obstretic care, such as C-section, she will likely be in excruciating pain for days. The constant pressure of the baby’s head on the pelvis restricts blood flow to the soft tissue between the mother’s vagina and her bladder or rectum, leaving holes known as “fistulae.” This causes an inability for woman to control her urine and/or feces, suffer chronic infections & constant pain. Additionally, with too little community understanding of fistula and its causes, women are often blamed for their condition & shunned by their neighbors and family. Each year 50,000 to 100,000 women worldwide are affected by this condition, buit fewer than 20,000 corrective surgeries occur annually.
Solution
Cost-Effective, Restorative Fistula Surgery.
- An obstetric fistula can only be treated with corrective surgey. If performed by a skilled surgeon, a woman with fistula can return to normal life.
- The global success rate for fistula repair surgeries is approximately 86% & can be life-changing.
Cost
A life-changing fistula repair surgery & rehab services cost $694 per woman — less than one night’s stay in most hospitals in the US.
Charities
Problem: Obstetric Fistula
Obstretic fistula is a devastating childbirth injury that leaves women incontinent, humiliated and often shunned by their communities. It commonly occurs in poor, rural areas in Africa and Asia.
Problem: Lack of Access for Family Planning
Women and girls in developing countries are often not educated on the family planning options available & face barriers such as religious, social and cultural norms.
Problem
There are 214 million women & girls in developing countries who want contraception, but can’t access or afford it. Without contraception, these women run high risks of complications or death during pregnancy, school drop-out and financially struggle to care for their familes.
Solution
Empower Women & Girls With Proper Health Care Information.
- As younger women reach reproductive age (especially being the largest youth population in history), there is a huge opportunity to teach them about their contraceptive choices.
- Provide resources to organizations using television, radio, print, social media & one-on-one outreach to educate and promote adoption of healthy behaviors.
- Provide long-acting reversible contraceptives (including implants and IUDs), HIV/STI testing & counseling, and test-kits.
Cost
GiveWell estimates that Population Service International can provide, for an average cost of $50, one year of healthy life for a mother & child.
Charities
Problem
Developing countries lack access to essential health care while the world’s poorest people are the ones who need the most care. More than 24% of the global burden of diseases fall on people living in African countries, while only 3% of the world’s health workers operate with less than 1% of the world’s financial resources. Sub-saharan Africa in particular makes up only 13% of the world’s population, yet suffers an estimated 66% of global maternal deaths, 41% of global stillbirths & 40% of global newborn deaths.
Solution
Empowering Community Health Workers (CHWs) to Provide Reliable & Affordable Care.
- Training & educating community health workers to provide affordable & reliable care, along with essential medicines & products.
- Governments need assistance from nonprofits to strengthen and professionalize their community health systems.
- Recruit, train, equip & manage government-recognized networks of local Community Health Workers who go door to door within their neighborhoods, providing health education, diagnoses, medicines & health products.
- Focus training on high-impact areas where CHWs can make the biggest difference at a low-cost, including pregnancy and newborn care, malaria, pneumonia, diarrhea, nutrition, immunization & family planning.
Cost
Funding the compensation, basic medicine/supplies & technology infrastructure for these Community Health Workers costs roughly $3.09 per person served per year.
Charities
Problem: Shortage of Frontline Health Workers
On average there are 2 health workers per 1,000 people in Africa, compared to 24 for every 1,000 people in the United States. Health care “systems” in developing countries are chronically under-funded, under-stocked & understaffed.
