It’s hard to believe that it’s been nearly 19 months since many of us, who were fortunate enough to do so, started working from home due to Covid. Unfortunately, many people lost their source of income entirely as lockdowns shut down several service sector jobs. In low and middle income countries, those in the informal economy were hit the hardest and lacked access to government assistance. It’s estimated that in 2020, the global economic impact of Covid led to 97 million additional people in extreme poverty.
However, I am inspired by those in the Global Washington network who have adapted out of necessity and created profitable, resilient sources of income. It also reflects a process of rebuilding for equity that could be a model to replicate around the world. Below are articles focused on inclusive growth for the future. The organizations and people mentioned are great examples of this through the ways they are evolving and innovating, forging pathways to be even stronger and more adaptable.
The past 19 months will be remembered as a time of massive global disruption and upheaval. Yet, 2022 promises to be the year of rebuilding and reimagining new systems for a more equitable future. On December 8 and 9, Global Washington will convene our virtual 2021 Goalmakers Conference to chart a new course in the years to come. We have some amazing speakers lined up with many interactive sessions and breakouts. I hope you can join the conversation. More information can be found here.
Jobs Have Been Hit Hard By the Pandemic, Yet Some Orgs Are Learning How to Rebound Even Stronger
By Joanne Lu
A year and a half on from the World Health Organization’s official declaration of a global pandemic, the world is still learning how to adjust to our new reality. On many fronts, the pandemic has made it clear that the world we lived in before is not one we want to return to – without a robust response to health emergencies, without sufficient safety nets for marginalized communities, and without justice and equity.
Few understand the need for change more than the world’s most vulnerable and the organizations working to help them. Although the pandemic has been devastating for many organizations, there are many that have also taken the opportunity to evolve, become more resilient and build the resilience of the communities they work with.
Still, it has been far from an easy task. The pandemic created in 2020 the deepest global recession since World War II, according to the International Monetary Fund. Unsurprisingly, the impact was greatest in the poorest areas of the world. By World Bank estimates, the pandemic led to 97 million more people being pushed into extreme poverty (measured as living on less than $1.90 a day) in 2020. It’s a devastating number, and it represents enormous shifts in livelihoods and pathways out of poverty for millions of families living in under-resourced areas.
Screenshot of World Bank blog.
The pandemic hit informal workers, who make up about 70 percent of the global workforce – particularly hard. These include household workers, street vendors, waste pickers and other daily wage earners. Lockdown measures not only put most of them out of work, but they were also mostly excluded from relief packages, like stimulus payments and unemployment insurance.
For organizations to adapt appropriately to the needs of the communities they serve, they must listen to their constituents and monitor the situation carefully. That’s why Global Partnerships (GP), an impact-first investment fund manager, has been diligent about staying in close communication with their social enterprise partners and the clients they serve. Through mobile-based surveying, end-clients have expressed reliance on savings as a coping strategy, but also a deterioration in their financial position and heightened food insecurity. This feedback reaffirmed GP’s commitment to supporting high-impact social enterprises that provide basic goods and services that foster economic resilience and enable people to earn a living and improve their lives.
In August, GP launched its ninth fund, the Global Partnerships Impact-First Growth Fund, LLC, which is designed to support high-impact social enterprises that are well-positioned to not only survive the pandemic but also grow and scale impact. As of its first close, the fund had $45.5 million committed, and it has the ability to scale to $100 million.
The decline in nutrition has prompted many other organizations to launch new relief initiatives. Spreeha Foundation and Spreeha Bangladesh, for example, works to help people break out of the cycle of poverty through health care, education, skills training and employment opportunities (note: Spreeha is not an investee of Global Partnerships). In the early days of their operations, Spreeha also provided one meal a day through their education program, but due to a dissipating need in the community, they ended that service. However, the pandemic reignited that need in an alarming way, prompting Spreeha to provide food and nutritional supplements.
Photo credit Spreeha. Pregnancy time counselling.
Another GlobalWA member, Awamaki, which provides opportunities for artisan weavers in Peru through sustainable tourism, had to make a sudden shift to food relief as well. This was a big change for Awamaki, which has always been focused on providing opportunities and training. But their model was upended overnight. With the help of small and large donors, Awamaki has been able to provide their partner artisans with monthly food baskets during this trying time.
Like many organizations, technology has also been critical to Awamaki’s adaptation during the pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, they never designed goods for online sales. They didn’t have to, as their store in Ollantaytambo, near Cuzco, made about $80,000 a year from tourists. Without that store, they had to start selling online. They received a grant to specifically design products, particularly home goods, for online sales, and they also partnered with Amazon to host virtual shopping tours. Through a beta platform called Amazon Explore, shoppers can book virtual visits to their store.
Screenshot of Amamaki’s virtual store on Amazon.
Spreeha Foundation has also noticed local resilience. For example, even though Spreeha had to pause most of their vocational training programs because of lockdown measures, several women from their sewing training groups took the opportunity to launch their own sewing businesses during the pandemic. Others, particularly young people, have used the skills they gained through Spreeha’s training programs to move away from daily wage jobs to higher-skilled work, like cell-phone repair.
For organizations like these, the pandemic has been an opportunity to lean into the challenges and changes of these unprecedented times. The pandemic exposed many of the injustices that marginalized communities face. But it has also revealed what true resilience, sustainability and equity should look like. And perhaps, it’s given us a clearer roadmap for how to build back better.
The following Global Washington members are helping with job creation and economic development in low and middle income countries.
ACT for Congo supports humanitarian work without creating dependence. We work with organizations that are locally conceived, owned, and operated to help them build their capacity so that we become unnecessary for their success. Our role as outsiders is primarily to support locally-driven initiatives led by competent and wise leaders.
Over the past eight years we partnered with a Congolese start-up that built a vocational school now recognized as a Center of Excellence (HOLD-DRC). Our partnerships include Congo Nouveau, who provided civic education in 19 cities, and POLE Institute, who conducts vital socio-economic research in DR Congo. Our newest partnership is with AGIR-DRC who supports refugees in pathways out of internally displaced camps, provides clean water for children in schools, whose partners provide training and advocacy for domestic workers, and fuel urban gardeners and reforestation in Goma and eastern Congo.
Over 1400 women graduated from HOLD with state-issued certificates in vocations. More than 900 are employed or have their own business.
Awamaki teaches women’s artisan cooperatives in the rural Andes how to start and run their own businesses in sustainable tourism and fair trade crafts. Awamaki connects artisans to global markets and provides training in product development and business management. Their highly-skilled artisan partners create alpaca accessories, woven bags, and home goods, blending contemporary design with traditional techniques and motifs. Awamaki supports 180 artisans who are lifting their families towards prosperity.
Capria is a global venture capital firm with expertise investing in fintech, edtech, jobtech, logistics/mobility, agtech/food, and healthcare in the Global South. Capria invests in regional soonicorns — startups with enough revenues and growth rates to be unicorns soon — and also backs local and regional fund managers with capital and strategic support. Capria and its global network deliver profits with scaled impact aligned with United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Capria has offices in Seattle, Bangalore, Nairobi, Santiago and Washington D.C.
Chandler Foundation helps to build strong nations, vibrant and fair marketplaces, and flourishing communities. We imagine a world in which nations are well governed, principled businesses drive economic growth, and all people have the opportunity to flourish. Through patient, long-term, system-changing investments in trusted partners, we can help build thriving economies that work for everyone.
Because in a world where talent and creativity are unleashed, the impossible is possible.
More than 800 million people around the world live on less than $1.90 a day. Concern Worldwide believes that number can and should be zero. That’s why our mission is ending extreme poverty, whatever it takes. Our approach to ending extreme poverty is rooted in the understanding that the cycle of poverty is fueled by a combination of inequality, vulnerability, and risk. Our livelihoods programs address some of the underlying problems experienced by people trying to earn a living while also dealing with the challenges and setbacks of extreme poverty.
In 2020, we reached 4.4 million people through our livelihood programs. These programs aim to provide participants with the tools needed to ensure they are able to earn a sustainable living, learn new skills, improve the productivity and nutritional value of their crops and set up small businesses to generate more income. However, even with a job, 8% of the world’s workforce still live in extreme poverty, which is why we take a “targeted, time-bound, holistic, and sustainable” approach to breaking the cycle of poverty. For example, our Graduation Program uses a multi-pronged approach to giving families the education, training and funding they need to achieve financial independence. In other words, the program helps participants to “graduate” out of extreme poverty – once and for all.
Respect for the legal and customary rights of communities to land and natural resources is a principal objective of Earthworm Foundation’s work in global supply chains. We partner with companies making strong commitments to these rights, and then provide tools and practical training needed to see them realized. A central focus is helping ensure that land development for commodity production only occurs with the requisite Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) of local people.
Supporting the economy and resilience of smallholder farmers is at the heart of our work. We began our efforts to strengthen farmer resilience in 2011, and today we work with farmers in 15 countries. We promote crop and income diversification so that farmer households have more secure livelihoods. With strategies tailored to their needs, approximately 3,000 farmers have diversified activities and their average household income increased by 20%.
We also focus on promoting safe work environments and labor rights. In 2017, Earthworm launched a labor rights and workers’ welfare program, training thousands of workers in over 60 companies. Our projects promote the welfare of children in oil palm plantation regions, ethical recruitment of migrant workers, the rights of casual and temporary workforces, and improved wages for agricultural workers.
Heifer International believes ending global hunger and poverty begins with agriculture. Operating in 21 countries across Africa, Asia and the Americas, Heifer provides farmers with technical assistance and opportunities to strengthen essential skills, including finance and business management. Farmers receive expert support to improve the quality and quantity of the goods they produce, as well as connections to markets to increase sales. As Heifer works to build sustainable food systems, it engages women and youth across value chains, ensuring they have the knowledge and tools needed to increase their incomes and support their families. Recently, Heifer published “The Future of Africa’s Agriculture: An Assessment of the Role of Youth and Technology,” a report based on a survey of 11 African countries, that identified challenges preventing youth from fully engaging in farming as a source of future jobs. In response these issues, Heifer launched the AYuTe Challenge which awards up to US$1.5 million annually to the most promising young entrepreneurs who are using technology to reimagine farming and food production across Africa. For the 2021 competition, the AYuTe Challenge selected Cold Hubs and Hello Tractor as winners, supporting them as they scale their businesses to help more farmers to overcome long-standing challenges.
Mercy Corps works in over 40 countries helping communities forge new paths to prosperity in the face of disaster, poverty, and the impacts of climate change. Mercy Corps’ approach to protecting and strengthening economic opportunity ensures crisis-affected households can maintain their businesses and wage incomes in the midst of crisis, while laying the foundation for greater market participation and inclusive economic growth in the future. Throughout the pandemic, Mercy Corps has worked closely with people living in vulnerable areas to meet their most urgent needs by providing cash while also implementing long-term solutions to ensure businesses can recover and continue to provide employment opportunities.
In Jordan, Mercy Corps channeled 13,000 JD ($19K) in emergency cash to three gig platforms to help them continue to provide essential services to gig-workers and also provided 90 workers with a cash transfer of 150 JD ($210) each to meet immediate basic needs and selected three start-ups for further technical and funding support as they demonstrated high potential to recover and grow beyond COVID-19 and continue to employ hundreds of gig workers.
Microsoft – Building Skills for the digital economy
We’re living in a changed world. As economies continue to reopen, more jobs will require digital skills. This is not just about technical jobs, but an increasing number of jobs across industries that will become ‘tech-enabled.’ Now, and in the future, all people will need to learn digital skills to pursue in-demand roles, but access to the resources to learn these skills is inequitable.
Microsoft is focused on supporting those who have been excluded from opportunity because of race, gender, geography, displacement, or other barriers that prevent them from attaining the skills needed to thrive in a changing economy.
Our programs, partnerships, and resources are designed to meet people where they are on their skilling journey. From a young person learning computer science in the classroom, to a job seeker earning technical certifications, to employers focused on building skilled, inclusive workforces, we are committed to helping people gain the foundational, role-based, and technical skills to gain jobs and livelihoods.
To achieve this, we invest in supporting communities in building equity, building nonprofit capacity and scale, and mobilizing collective action, funding, and impact by working with others to advance sustainable, scalable change.
Learn what steps we’re taking and how you can help support: aka.ms/skills
At Opportunity International, we are proud and honored to be a part of achieving this first Sustainable Development Goal, along with many of the other SDGs that are focused on improving the standard of living for families in poverty. Together with organizations and initiatives around the world, we spend each day helping amazing people break that barrier of living on $1.90/day. And, in the wake of the pandemic, we are more committed to this goal more than ever.
We invest in entrepreneurs, helping them create or sustain jobs for themselves and their neighbors. Also, we have created tailored tools for farmers, addressing many of the challenges faced by the rural, agrarian majority of those living in extreme poverty. We work to connect them to markets, give them access to inputs, and help them move from subsistence to commercial agriculture – radically transforming their farms and their futures. We realize our goal is the same as that of the U.N. as we are actively working to end poverty in all its forms everywhere.
Opportunity International’s core programs continue to enhance and expand upon our continuous work on behalf of women and girls in low- and middle-income countries. We reach out to financially excluded populations, especially less literate and rural women, to deliver knowledge and skills that help them use financial services as fuel for their journey out of poverty. Financial services are key for women to create their own livelihoods, who are often excluded from formal economic opportunities. When women can create their own economic opportunities, they become powerful agents of change and some of our greatest weapons in ending extreme poverty.
Remote Energy
Remote Energy believes that access to reliable sources of sustainable energy is a fundamental requirement for the advancement of education, healthcare and quality of life. It is also a critical step in promoting sustained, inclusive, economic growth. As solar energy (PV) grows exponentially, so does the fast growing need for a trained solar workforce. Remote Energy has responded by developing and implementing regionally appropriate, customized technical capacity building programs and developing hands-on, practical learning opportunities for solar technicians and instructors in marginalized communities worldwide.
Remote Energy’s Native American Programs partner with tribal vocational and technical schools to provide scale able, accessible PV training opportunities for Native Americans in their own communities. Programs focus on the development of hands-on skills specifically designed to give aspiring instructors and technicians the marketable skills required for employment in the fast-growing PV industry and inspire communities to move towards energy independence and sustainable development.
Remote Energy is also committed to gender equality and support the belief that women’s talents and leadership are vital to maintain a diverse, sustainable, PV industry and critical in promoting economic grow. Remote Energy’s Women’s Program is designed to develop women decision-makers, end-users, technicians, and educators and offers customized, women’s-only courses and mentoring opportunities with professional female instructors. Click Here to learn more about our upcoming, online women-only PV class.
Upaya Social Ventures fights extreme poverty from the ground up by building scalable businesses, dignified jobs, and long-term prosperity in the world’s most vulnerable communities. We identify early-stage businesses in India with the greatest potential for job creation in the most vulnerable communities. Through our investments and accelerator program, we partner with early-stage entrepreneurs to grow their businesses and create jobs that lift families out of extreme poverty. Our vision is for everyone to have the opportunity to earn a dignified living and pursue their dreams. We believe in a hand-up, not a hand-out, and that access to sustainable, dignified jobs can be the bridge from poverty to prosperity.
West African Vocational Schools is a Christian skills development organization that trains and equips youth in one of the least developed regions in the world. Each year, WAVS training centers prepare more than 200 youths for work so that they can earn a livable income and provide for their families for the rest of their lives.
World Concern prioritizes economic empowerment of families and economic development in communities we serve through diversified livelihoods, village savings groups, microfinance, vocational training for youth and adults, education, rice banks, and farmer groups.
A respected leader in Savings and Loans for Transformation (SALT) programs, World Concern improves the lives of thousands of women and men who are trained in money management and entrepreneurship through SALT groups. These groups enable members to save and borrow for business or family needs, which are repaid with interest and add to the group’s account balance.
Stable income means parents can give their children the proper nutrition they need to thrive, provide medicine when they are sick, and send them to school. Entire communities thrive when families are financially secure and able to give back.
As COVID-19 continues to ravage poor communities, World Concern has seen that members of savings groups show greater economic resilience and ability to cope with hardships than those who are not members. Instead of selling their assets to survive, SALT members have been using their savings to buy food and pay for medical expenses. Others have borrowed money to start innovative income generating activities.
Photo credit Spreeha. Students receive computer training.
Spreeha. It means “zeal” in Bengali – a fitting name for an organization that was born out of a passion to break the cycle of poverty in Bangladesh and beyond. Over the last decade and more, it’s been a long journey for Spreeha, listening and adapting to needs as they arise, and culminating with the unprecedented challenges of COVID-19.
Spreeha’s founder, Tazin Shahid, grew up in Dhaka, witnessing extreme poverty first-hand in the city’s many slums. When he ended up working at Microsoft, he decided he wanted to give back to his hometown. It was in one of the slums that he used to walk by everyday where he opened his first mobile health clinic.
At first, it was just Shahid and his friends who supported the clinic, but Shahid wanted to scale up. In 2012, Spreeha Foundation was officially launched in Seattle, followed shortly by Spreeha Bangladesh to implement a global program in accordance with the Bangladesh government’s rules and regulations, and in partnership with other local organizations.
Today, Spreeha Foundation has three U.S. chapters, in Seattle, Boston, and Dallas that are responsible for raising support for the program in Bangladesh as well as helping local underserved communities. Meanwhile, in Bangladesh, what started out as a health-care program now spans the cycle of poverty, with education interventions, job and life skills training, and support for economic opportunities.
As Spreeha’s CEO Ferdouse Oneza explains it, Spreeha has identified the key points in people’s lives where intervention is most effective. When a mother is pregnant and a child is born, their immediate needs are health care. Then, that child is in need of education – which is why Spreeha offers preschool and after-school programs for children. As children get older and become adults, they’re in need of skills training. These skills include leadership training for women and girls to advocate for their rights, computer skills and other life skills for young people to advance in school and work, as well as vocational skills.
“Our vision has been to empower people to break out of the cycle of poverty,” says Oneza. “We learned while working, but we also took time to deconstruct the problem to identify the root causes of poverty.”
Spreeha still operates one health center in a geographic area with 25,000 households, but their telehealth services reach three additional remote areas. In addition, their multi-use community resource center is home to their preschool and after-school programs and many training programs. There are also 15 schools through which Spreeha runs their leadership programs. Spreeha trains the teachers, and the teachers in turn guide the students.
Photo credit Spreeha. Telehealth.
One aspect of Spreeha’s after-school program is helping kids dream about what they want to become one day. These are kids whose everyday realities are entrenched in poverty and whose parents are daily wage earners. Last year, two students from the Spreeha community graduated from university. And this year, another student was admitted into medical school. This is exactly what Spreeha means when they say they’re empowering people to break out of a cycle of poverty.
Economic opportunities are the newest component of Spreeha’s programming, added just a few years ago. Since their inception, Spreeha has created jobs for local community members by hiring them as community health workers. But they wanted to go beyond that and help place people in jobs. So, based on a list of training sectors identified by the government of Bangladesh and the U.N. Development Programme as sectors with job growth, Spreeha began to support vocational training through scholarships and apprenticeships. Some of these sectors include baking, sewing, mechanical repairs. Spreeha’s computer training center, in particular, has drawn enough people that Spreeha could start charging a small fee to make the operation of the center self-sustaining.
Then, the pandemic hit. According to Oneza, 70 percent of the members of the community where Spreeha works lost their jobs. Most of them were daily wage earners, like household workers, rickshaw pullers and construction workers. Malnutrition among children increased 18 percent. More young girls were suddenly sent into early marriages. The effect was devastating.
Photo credit Spreeha. Bring School to Home program.
But Spreeha listened, watched and adapted – as they always have. They began emergency food distribution and partnered with other organizations to deliver nutrition supplements to children in the community. They also piggy-backed off the door-to-door community health services they already had and expanded that system to create a program called Bring School to Home. Teachers delivered school supplies and materials to the homes of students to keep them engaged. Doing so decreased the chances of parents sending their kids to work and never returning them to school.
Similarly, some of the life skills training for girls and adults were continued through door-to-door services in slum communities, while in more remote areas, Spreeha partnered with local organizations to conduct training outdoors.
Photo credit Spreeha. Outdoor training.
Prior to the pandemic, Spreeha already had a telehealth network, so they have leaned into that even more. And as schools have begun to reopen, Spreeha has also resumed its leadership training programs for teachers online.
In a way, Spreeha’s reliance on technology during the pandemic to deliver some of their essential services has actually helped them scale up during a crisis that forced many organizations to shut down. Thankfully, Oneza says, they’ve also been able to sustain all of their employees, many of whom are community members.
There’s also been a shift in employment opportunities in the community. Some seasonal jobs like pulling rickshaws will never go away, says Oneza. But she’s seen young people turn toward more skilled jobs and apprenticeships, like motorcycle or bicycle repairs or even cell phone repairs. And even though Spreeha had to temporarily close their sewing training center during the pandemic, Oneza says many of the women were able to start their own sewing businesses in the meantime.
The resilience of these community members and Spreeha’s own resilience over the last year and half have inspired the organization to keep growing, even beyond Bangladesh.
“The pandemic has shown us that we don’t have to sit back,” says Oneza. “We can innovate. We have been adaptive, and we have seen what can happen.”
New Mercy Corps CEO Takes the Helm as Covid-19 Makes the Organization’s Mission “More Urgent Than Ever”
By Tyler LePard
Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, Chief Executive Officer of Mercy Corps, has worked with farmers in Africa and with world leaders like President Barack Obama and Bill and Melinda Gates. She has grounded her career in the simple belief that, no matter where someone is born, no matter where they live, they should be able to lead a thriving and successful life.
Tjada grew up in Washington, D.C., and Stamford, Connecticut—“very much a mid-Atlantic Northeast gal.” Her parents came of age during the civil rights movement; they surrounded Tjada with Black history and raised her as part of the Black American community. Tjada’s parents taught her that what she did reflected on her community and that Tjada should work for the betterment of her community. Tjada knew from an early age that her ancestors had come to this country as enslaved people and that many people had fought for the progress that has enabled her to be where she is today.
Tjada took those values to heart and expanded her community to encompass the global diaspora and people everywhere who are suffering.
“I think I’m where I was always meant to be, but I didn’t know the contours of how I’d get here or what I’d be doing … I always felt the draw to Africa and felt the desire to give back … I knew I liked leading people. I knew I wanted to have a career that had a positive impact in people’s lives. I knew I liked the ideas behind business and how things worked. I knew I had a deep affinity for giving other people opportunities just as so many other people had paved the way for me to have the life that I have.”
Skills for social good
Her career path is impressive—she went to Harvard for college and graduate school. Tjada earned an MBA with the intention that she could apply those skills to social good at some point in her career. The organizations where Tjada thrived have all had strong shared values and a sense of cultural identity, they gave her room to learn, and allowed her to serve the greater good.
Tjada’s early career was really about learning. As an analyst for McKinsey & Company, she learned problem-solving skills. When she went to work for one of her clients in agribusiness, she learned how to mix business with social good. After business school, Tjada worked for American Express and General Electric, learning general management and how to get things done in large organizations.
Tjada’s work in agribusiness, working in Africa with smallholder farmers, was a dream job, but she didn’t think she had a future there. So when she woke up one morning listening to NPR and heard about the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s investment in the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), it was a pivotal moment. She thought: “That’s exactly what I was doing in agribusiness, but Gates actually has the mandate and the funds to go make huge investments there.” She flew to Seattle for interviews two weeks later and was hired before she left the building.
“I took a huge leap of faith, and I loved every minute of it. And I’ve loved every minute since.”
Tjada spent more than a decade working to end world hunger in roles with the Gates Foundation and then with the U.S. Agency for International Development. She set up and ran Feed the Future, President Obama’s signature global hunger and food security initiative. That was a great complement to Tjada’s earlier work in agribusiness and she learned how to work with really diverse groups of people and how to motivate people without authority. “That was the most transformational experience in my career.”
Tjada’s work on food security ties in strongly with SDG 1 (ending poverty) and SDG 8 (sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all). Her entry to that sector was the result of her corporate work—thinking about markets and how to help other people to self-actualize. The freedom to be economically mobile is so important because economic needs underpin so much of people’s lives.
“I have always seen myself as looking for sustainable solutions and environments where people can make a living and thrive—really self-actualize, really pursue what they’re meant to do.”
“The most vulnerable first”
She was the Chief Operating Officer for Habitat for Humanity and then for CARE, and in October of 2020, Tjada became the CEO of Mercy Corps, an iconic international nonprofit organization. Mercy Corps, headquartered in Portland, Oregon, has a global team of 5,600 humanitarians working in more than 40 countries to alleviate suffering, poverty, and oppression by helping people build secure, productive and just communities.
The COVID-19 pandemic has only heightened Mercy Corps’ beliefs in sustainable economic growth, markets, and systems. It has made their work more urgent than ever. But their focus on resilience—giving people the tools to self-actualize and bounce back from terrible situations—has been helpful in an ever-changing environment. COVID-19 has been the ultimate resilience test for everybody. Mercy Corps staff had to figure out how to keep working in the community while staying safe and making sure the people they work with are safe. They had to shift to digital tools in markets where that wasn’t always easy.
The World Bank is predicting that the number of people who live in extreme poverty is going up because of COVID-19. “A lot of people have lost the gains we’ve spent the last 15-20 years developing. The vulnerable groups who are served by Mercy Corps are especially impacted.” Mercy Corps works in many fragile environments that have been deeply affected by climate change, conflict, and, now, COVID-19. “Any shock makes the competition for resources greater and leads to more people being disaffected. COVID exacerbates everything. Hunger is worse because people can’t buy supplies. The global food chain is disrupted. The global community needs to think about the whole system, not just getting shots in people’s arms.”
“What we’ve seen, in the U.S. too, is that COVID takes every inequity you have in society and makes it worse. We have to structure vaccine outreach, information, and dissemination to be applicable in an inequitable place. You have to reach out for the most vulnerable first. You have to think about the communities that are most remote and hardest to reach … People who are left behind in their communities are even more left behind in emergencies. And with COVID, you can’t afford to leave anyone behind … None of us are safe until all of us are safe.”
Tjada’s team is doubling down on helping people build resilience and come together with their communities in order to thrive. They are focused on how to improve social cohesion, which refers to the strength of relationships and sense of solidarity among members of a community. Mercy Corp is figuring out how to give people access to opportunities digitally and to help keep their communities cohesive and strong.
Mercy Corps has many projects that address digital innovation, unemployment and social cohesion:
In Northern Nigeria, Mercy Corp developed a tool to track COVID-19 rumorsand then used volunteer “truth champions” to correct misinformation.
MicroMentor is an online platform Mercy Corps created to connect promising entrepreneurs with experienced business mentors; they created a COVID-19 Mentor Task Force and recruited mentors with experience dealing with severe economic downturn and post-disaster recovery.
Youth Impact Labs worked with 29 partners to create more than 8,000 work opportunities for youth in Kenya and Jordan. During the pandemic, Mercy Corps pivoted to provide working capital to participants to help navigate the crisis, technical assistance to grantees, and cash transfers to people to help stimulate local economies.
Mercy Corps has a digital program called AgriFin that helps smallholder farmers access bundled digital products like market data, financial services and information about pests and where to get quality inputs. They adapted AgriFin to help 16 million farmers adapt to the shock of COVID-19 and even developed a new citizen reporting tool to help warn farmers where the desert locusts were when the largest desert locust invasion in decades threatened farmers in East Africa.
During the pandemic, Mercy Corps has pivoted and tailored many of their existing programs to meet the moment, but there have also been great opportunities to bring new partners or new platforms together to serve people.
A global citizen “trying to do the best I can”
Now that we’ve all been living through a global pandemic that has been hard for everyone, Tjada hopes that more people will feel connected to others around the world.
“The American people have now suffered this big shock. We’ve seen food lines here and we’ve seen unemployment worse than before. If there is a bright spot to come out of COVID, my hope is that we will feel more connected to other countries who are facing the same things we are and who don’t have the resources we have.”
Tjada loves that Mercy Corps is a Global Washington member and part of the Northwest ecosystem of major actors that are having a big impact in the world. She is a humble and conscious global citizen who is proud of who she is and what she’s achieved.
“I’m proud to be the CEO of Mercy Corps. I’m especially proud to be one of the few Black women to be the CEO of an INGO, and as a mother of two young children. I want to expand people’s imagination of what a CEO can look like, where they can come from, and what stage of life they need to be at. I’m hoping to attract more people from diverse backgrounds into this space. I hope people like me in positions like this won’t be rare. I feel really privileged to be able to do the work I do … I’m just focused on helping Mercy Corps have the strongest impact we can for the most people.”
By Mark Horosowski, MovingWorlds
With Kate Cochran, Upaya Social Ventures
The United Nations General Assembly is this week, and quite frankly, I’m not looking forward to it. It’ll be another circuit of high level meetings and catchy headlines telling the world that we’re falling even further behind in our attempt to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (sadly, we are… and corporations aren’t doing nearly enough).
Governments will point fingers at each other and the private sector. The private sector will blame governments and consumers. Financiers like Blackrock will fund catchy PR campaigns that will distract us from the fact that they are creating the very issues they are claiming to be solving.
Pundits, “thought leaders”, and global executives will write compelling op-eds claiming that if only they were given more resources, they could solve all the problems. Then, as quickly as it came, the debates will pass and we’ll return to a state of normalcy, perhaps with just a little more frustration with our global policy makers and international institutions. Continue Reading
By Laura Baerwolf, Director of Operations, Mona Foundation
The year 2020 will forever be associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. It brought the world to a halt in a matter of months, changed the way we live, work and play, and made clear that what impacts one impacts all. As of this writing, more than 4.4 million people have lost their lives to COVID-19, millions more have been pushed into extreme poverty, and millions of students are without access to continuing education.
“What started as a public health catastrophe became an economic crisis, a food crisis, a housing crisis, and an educational crisis … any of the gains made in the past 25 years across development indicators poverty, health, equality, and education — have been lost.”
— Melinda Gates, Co-chair, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
For Mona Foundation, a nonprofit that supports grassroots educational programs in economically disadvantaged communities around the world, 2020 began with great uncertainty and concern for the staff, students, and families of our partner organizations, many of which are based in areas where social distancing is impossible and access to healthcare is non-existent. But as we began to witness their resilience in mobilizing to face a devastating pandemic and their indomitable resolve to contribute to the social good, we were also uplifted, moved, and inspired. Our long-term partnerships, focused on building the capacity of local communities through the twin engines of education and gender equality, had prepared them to create all that was needed to sustain their trajectory towards a better future. Continue Reading
by Meera Satpathy, Founder & Chairperson of Sukarya
Ranju is a 14-year-old rag picker who supports her family’s income by selling scrap. Her father is an alcoholic. She studied till class IV and dropped out. Her anger issues got her into frequent fights with other children. When Sukarya’s outreach team met her and told her about the Education on Wheels (EOW) project for out-of-school children, her eyes lit up. However, she was not sure if her father would agree to her attending classes. Also, her home environment was hardly conducive to studying. The team spent a few weeks counselling her family members. Today, Ranju is 18 years old and has taken her class X exams and is integrated into mainstream formal education. As part of the EOW and adolescent girls’ program she is now confident of carving out a future for herself. Her mother, who had several miscarriages and was weak and malnourished, attended Sukarya’s health camps where doctors and nutritionists helped her address her medical ailments. She is now working in domestic help and has assured Ranju that she will help her fulfill her dream of becoming a nurse.
Photo credit: Sukarya.
According to India’s National Sample Survey, as of date, more than 32 million children have never been to school. Nearly 80% of migrant children across seven Indian cities lack access to education near worksites even as 40% children from seasonal migrant households are likely to end up as child labor in the unorganized sector instead of being in school, according to the UNESCO’s 2019 Global Monitoring (GEM) report. The report also cites the lack of schooling and a structured environment as a key reason for these children being exposed to exploitation, abuse and trafficking. It is not uncommon to find many children from urban slums getting sucked into a life of crime and delinquency. Also, poverty, unemployment, and large family sizes pushes them towards acute malnutrition, anemia and other deficiencies which impact their adolescent and adult lives. Continue Reading
“Communication is really the first and most important thing to think about when a health crisis emerges.” — Dena Morris, former president and CEO, Washington Global Health Alliance
Photo credit: UNICEF Ghana. Community health nurses played Talking Book message during antenatal clinics.
How do you reach and communicate with people with low- or zero-literacy skills who live in last-mile communities where there’s no infrastructure, electricity, or internet? How do you get your message across if they only speak a local language? This is a challenge under normal circumstances, but what happens in a pandemic?
Since 2007, Amplio has been providing an inclusive digital solution for sharing knowledge with low-literate people in rural, remote communities. Early on, our Talking Book audio device was field-tested in schools in Ghana. More often learning takes place outdoors—ideally, under a tree for shade. Today, our partners use Talking Books to address cross-cutting issues and sectors, including agriculture, health, and gender. With the Talking Book, they can deliver hours of targeted content in a community’s local language, with multiple topics and playlists. Continue Reading
As the start of school for my kids approaches, I am reminded of the importance of education with good teachers and the proper infrastructure to ensure my children are safe and well taken care of during their school day, including meals, adequate staff, and appropriate learning materials. COVID has forced not only my school district but just about every school district in America to provide alternatives to education delivery – and we could. We were provided laptops, access to online lessons and learning management systems – and we already had internet access in place to manage this continuity of learning. While it had its challenges, we were privileged to have an online option.
Millions of children across the globe have not been so lucky. For them, education abruptly stopped. Schools closed. Teachers moved back to their villages. Technology, such as smartphones and laptops, were not available. The infrastructure was not in place to be able to manage such a drastic change.
Many of GlobalWA member organizations have responded to this upheaval of their educational programs through adaptation and experimentation. It is wonderful to see how many of these children now have access to some form of continued education. The August Issue Brief examines how Ashesi University provided laptops and stipends for food to allow students to keep learning from home, how Alliance for Children Everywhere supports the whole family structure to allow the space for the children to keep learning, how Opportunity International provided financial support through their EduFinance program to ensure teachers and schools could maintain their programs, and more.
Our hope is that through these examples, other global education organizations can learn and adapt. Education is the backbone of successful, thriving societies and we all have to work together to weather this pandemic.
I’m also thrilled to announce that registration for our 2021 Goalmakers Conference on December 8 and 9 is now open! The first day of this event will be virtual and the second day will be in-person in Seattle. The in-person event will be a homecoming after a long stretch of only online communication. As always, we will monitor public health guidance and make contingencies, but we are hopeful that we can gather again in-person to spark those connections vital to your work. I hope you can join us!
COVID Forces Rethinking of Education Strategies and Tactics
By Joanne Lu
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the world was not on track to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education. Being able to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all by 2030 was going to require a global concerted push. And then, with the global COVID pandemic, came the school closures and the economic aftershocks that have effectively ended the educational prospects of millions of children around the world. That is, unless we can do something about it.
Image credit: Statista
The world could limit its educational recovery response to just returning enrollment and learning to pre-pandemic levels. But many experts see the pandemic as an “opportunity to reset education.” The world was not on track to achieve SDG4 by 2030 because of glaring inequalities in the global education system. COVID-19 highlighted and exacerbated those challenges. The question is, since we have to rebuild education anyway, shouldn’t we do it in a way that’s more inclusive, more equitable and of better quality? Experts say that if we don’t, not only will we still fail to achieve SDG4, but we will be setting ourselves up for another crisis down the road when another major disruption strikes. In a world with increasing climate disasters, it seems all but inevitable.
Empty classroom in Burundi
Most wealthy countries adapted to the COVID shutdowns by moving their classrooms online. While not an ideal learning environment for many students and their families, it at least allowed most students to continue learning. But this shift also highlighted the massive digital divide between wealthy and under-resourced contexts.
In Ghana, Ashesi University has done their best to keep their students on track with online classes. But to do so, they’ve had to provide laptops to students who indicated they couldn’t otherwise access classes. They also provided monthly data bundles to all their students. Additionally, students on full scholarships, which covered meals on campus, were given stipends to support them at home, and those with tuition arrears were allowed to defer payments and continue classes without disruption. Still, a few students had to defer their classes because they live in locations with weak internet infrastructure.
These types of barriers prompted a Mona Foundation partner in India to launch a phone-based program for students in poor, remote communities. Under this program, schools loan select students a smartphone through which those students can access online classes and also facilitate learning for other students in their neighborhood. Mona believes that in order to address the root obstacles that are preventing us from achieving SDG4, we have to raise the capacity of local organizations – like the one that launched the smartphone program – to solve their own issues. Grassroots organizations, Mona believes, are the ones who can make sure that gaps in education and beyond are addressed contextually and sustainably.
Photo Credit: Study Hall Educational Foundation/Mona Foundation
This is especially important as we think about achieving inclusive and quality education for all, because if COVID has taught us anything, it’s that education is critical for the future, but it doesn’t exist in a silo. If families don’t have money, they won’t send their children to school. If children are hungry, they can’t learn. If a major crisis, say a global pandemic or natural disaster strikes, classrooms will be closed. That’s why the Alliance for Children Everywhere (ACE) takes a whole family approach to child welfare, with food relief, economic empowerment programs as well as free community-based primary and secondary schools. For children who cannot remain with their families, ACE also facilitates fostering and adoption. But the pandemic’s disruption to their schools has prompted ACE to question the conventional schooling model entirely. Instead, ACE is exploring whether learning can be more evenly dispersed between households, communities and classrooms so that future crises will not cause as big of a disruption.
In Afghanistan, Sahar Education for Afghan Girls is in the process of building a boarding school for girls so that they will have at their fingertips all the resources they need, including internet access, to complete their education. However, the pandemic slowed those plans. Then, in light of recent insecurity following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Sahar had to pause construction of the boarding school as well as its other programs that support girls’ education (Digital Literacy, Early Marriage Prevention and Men as Partners in Change). They’re hoping to resume construction and operations by the fall.
Photo credit: Sahar Education
Of course, all these initiatives take financing, which is where organizations like Opportunity International come into play. Opportunity’s Education Finance (EduFinance) program partners with financial institutions to support local private schools, teachers’ salaries and parents. This, in turn, leads to jobs and economic growth for entire villages. When the pandemic hit, EduFinance became a critical safety net for many of these schools, teachers and students. They extended grace periods for loan repayments, increased teachers’ salaries and helped digitize lessons to keep schools open.
Amid all the harm that the pandemic has wrought on education around the world, it has also forced us to reevaluate what inclusive, equitable quality education looks like. Perhaps some of the adaptations that this crisis has forced educators to make will, in the end, accelerate progress toward SDG 4. Regardless, it is clear that the pre-pandemic model was neither resilient nor effective enough. So, as the world braces for third and fourth waves of the virus, our work is cut out for us – not for a return to normal, but rather to build back better so that every child can have access to quality education by 2030.
The following Global Washington members are helping with education in middle and low income countries.
Alliance for Children Everywhere’s mission is to bring orphaned and vulnerable children into secure families, schools, and communities. We prioritize child safety and permanency in a stable, loving family environment. That means: safety first, and family as soon as possible. Children without families face lifelong risks. We help provide physical and emotional protection for children in crisis, reintegrate children with their biological family members and find alternate homes through fostering or adoption for children without available family. Our vision is a permanent, secure, and loving family for every child. There are over one million orphaned children in Zambia. While institutions can provide them life-saving rescue, they cannot replace the love of a secure, permanent family. ACE protects families in crisis; restores orphaned children to family; and strengthens communities through economic empowerment and education.
A Child’s Notebook believes all children deserve a quality education and partners with rural communities to invest in the lives of children in Southeast Asia. With Lao People’s Demographic Republic having one of the highest poverty rates in Asia, A Child’s Notebook selected this country to improve education as first . As many as 34 percent of the primary schools lack both water supply and latrine facilities, and most schools are poorly constructed with unsafe and unhygienic condition. It is not uncommon for students to study in a building with a dirt floor, no windows, and no toilets or running water. Since 2018, A Child’s Notebook has partnered with five villages to remodel or build new schools and dormitory serving over 600 students. This approach has been successful because the communities have been active partners by providing volunteer labor, sourcing local materials, and leadership of the projects. Despite the many challenges the people of Lao PDR face, including the recent COVID-19 pandemic, these communities show an enormous commitment to education and believe it is the vehicle to improve the lives of their children, families, and community.
Ashesi is a private, non-profit liberal arts university located in Ghana. Its mission is to educate a new generation of ethical and entrepreneurial leaders in Africa; to cultivate within its students the critical thinking skills, the concern for others and the courage it will take to transform their continent. Ashesi Foundation in Seattle builds a global community for Ashesi University.
buildOn’s global mission is to break the cycle of poverty, illiteracy, and low expectations through service and education. buildOn partners with rural communities in developing countries, empowering locals to build schools, enroll out-of-school children, and educate adult learners. We work in eight countries, including Burkina Faso, Guatemala, Haiti, Malawi, Mali, Nepal, Nicaragua, and Senegal.
buildOn’s School Construction Program uses a participatory methodology to ensure each community is leading the project. buildOn contributes engineering, materials, and skilled labor. Each community provides land, local materials, and the volunteer labor it takes to build the school. Every village also promises to send girls and boys to school in equal numbers.
Once a school is completed, communities participate in two additional programs. Our Adult Literacy Classes teach women and men literacy and numeracy through the lens of health, enterprise, and relevant life skills. Our Enroll Program identifies school-age children who aren’t currently enrolled in school and works with their families to ensure they can start learning.
Since 1991, buildOn has constructed 1,993 schools worldwide, with more than 299,400 children and adults attending these schools every day.
ChildFund International serves in 24 countries to ensure that children and their families have access to educational and livelihood programs to further their education. To ensure the continuing sustainability of educational programs, ChildFund designs contextually and culturally appropriate programs with a gender equity lens that include greater participation of girls in school, aiding in the rehabilitation, construction, and equipping of community schools, assisting families with indirect costs, including books, uniforms, and educational kits containing school supplies, teacher trainings to improve the quality of teaching and learning, and working with parent-teacher associations to ensure that schools are safe and healthy learning environments for children.
Days for Girls International is an award-winning NGO that works to shatter stigma and limitations associated with menstruation for improved health, education and livelihood outcomes. To date, Days for Girls has reached more than 2.2 million women and girls in 144 countries on 6 continents with quality, sustainable menstrual care solutions and health education.
Knowledge is power, especially when it comes to menstruation. Access to timely, accurate health information is critical to shattering the stigma around menstruation and building a more equitable world. That’s why Days for Girls washable pads are always paired with comprehensive menstrual health education – for menstruators, families and entire communities. Check out our Ambassadors of Women’s Health Training and Men Who Know curriculum to learn more about the impacts of these of these life-changing programs. Visit daysforgirls.org today to get involved.
Girl Rising uses the power of storytelling to change the way the world values girls and their education. We ignite action for girls’ education and gender equity by changing attitudes and harmful gender norms through programming and campaigns reaching families, communities, corporations, governments and the general public.
Our work builds voice, agency and confidence in girls so that they can persist in their education; fosters a more inclusive learning environment that leads to improved education outcomes for girls; and changes attitudes and social norms.
In the wake of COVID-19 and its wave of shadow epidemics, our work has taken on new urgency. In addition to the 130 million girls who were missing from classrooms around the world before the pandemic, an estimated additional 11 million girls may never return to school. Girl Rising has been working closely with our local partners in 12 countries to adapt our programming and continue to reach girls in the wake of the crisis. We are supporting our partners with at-home learning resources, and in some cases emergency funds, as well as pivoting to new on-line platforms including radio programming and low-tech solutions such as WhatsApp.
Heifer International embraces education across its programs, providing a wide range of training covering animal management, financial literacy, nutrition, and much more. It works alongside communities to assess their needs and deliver appropriate support as they develop food and farming business that provide sustainable living incomes. In Orisha, India, poultry farmers have received training to use low-cost biosecurity measures to improve the health of their birds and increase resilience to the conditions created by the pandemic. Using detailed record keeping, business owners build plans for the future and grow their businesses. In Kenya, many small-scale dairy producers lack the technical knowledge they need to earn a living income. Lockdowns and movement restrictions have made in person training sessions impossible. Heifer Kenya is working to bring training to digital extension services to rural communities using technology.
The Hunger Project (THP) envisions a world where every woman, man and child leads a healthy, fulfilling life of self-reliance and dignity. Part of our multi-sectoral approach includes supporting access to education which is why a core pillar of our work is to “start with women.” The pandemic exacerbated educational challenges for adolescent girls in India, increasing high rates of child marriage, extreme poverty and familial responsibility.
With the pandemic closing schools, THP learned holistic action was most effective in reducing challenges to continued education in India. THP distributed Food and Creativity Kits that included nutritional food, basic stationary, sanitary pads and packets of information on governmental resources. These provided resources and information, fought boredom and included basic tools needed for learning and exam preparation. Thousands of girls are also engaging civically, leading online support groups, sharing governmental resources and ‘how to guides’ on negotiating the right to continued education. This work was designed to provide resources to reduce extreme poverty, which often leads to child marriage and more familial responsibilities, and increase educational motivation, even without a school setting.
THP observes that this holistic approach to COVID-19 is working as girls aren’t dropping off the radar and that school remains a viable option.
Mission Africa provides Nigerian children in remote villages with quality education primarily through two programs.
High School Diploma Program: Since 2008 the Mission Africa has awarded a six-year financial scholarship to 50 underprivileged high school students in the villages of Nigeria. The scholarship covers the full year cost of tuition, 2 school uniforms, school supplies and a backpack. The scholarship winners receive these benefits for 6 consecutive years until they graduate. Once they graduate a new 50-student scholarship cohort will be selected to receive scholarships.
Books for Africa: Since 2010, Mission Africa has donated approximately four million books to countries in Africa. In most African countries, schools must have approved libraries to be accredited for their national high school diploma exams. Mission Africa accepts donations of books from school districts, libraries, organizations and individuals for students in Africa who have no books. These books are picked up by Mission Africa volunteers, sorted by subjects, inventoried, packed and shipped in 40 feet container loads to Africa. The books are then donated to village schools and libraries.
We believe a successful life is an engaged life—and the key to staying engaged is staying curious. Our faculty inspires students to continually ask questions, to remain open-minded about outcomes, and to see connections in the world at large. In turn, students are prepared not just for college, but to live with meaning and joy—wherever life takes them. We are a diverse community of people who challenge each other to learn in a healthy, creative, and collaborative atmosphere of respect for ourselves, others and the environment.
We graduate students with historical, scientific, artistic, and global perspective, enabling them to think and act with integrity, believing they have a positive impact on the world.
In support of student and faculty well-being and continued learning during COVID-19, Northwest School faculty designed a Remote Learning Program for students 6-12. For details about the Program, please visit our Remote Learning Program page.
Opportunity International designs, delivers, and scales innovative financial solutions that help families living in extreme poverty build sustainable livelihoods and access quality education for their children. We equip families with the tools and training they need to build their businesses, improve their harvests, provide for their families, send their children to school, and break the cycle of poverty. Opportunity International’s Education Finance program (EduFinance) helps parents access the resources necessary to send their children to school and helps affordable private schools provide quality education to students.
At Rwanda Girls Initiative, they know that education is the key to gender equality. They believe that investing in girls education, especially secondary education, is one of the most powerful levers one can pull to spark systemic change. When girls receive an education, they are more likely to lead healthy, productive lives, earning higher wages and participate in decision making in their community. Girls education fosters economic development, peace, and reduces inequalities between boys and girls. Still today, there are more than 132 million girls left out of school worldwide and only 25 percent of countries have achieved gender parity in upper secondary education.
As an all-girls boarding school in Rwanda, they have removed the most significant barriers to education for their students. Rwanda Girls Initiative is one of the most socio-economically diverse schools in Africa, with 100% of their students receiving some amount of financial aid. Their teachers and staff support an environment of academic excellence, problem solving, leadership and service; ensuring that graduates will become tomorrow’s leaders. To date Rwanda Girls Initiative has graduated 705 students; future scientists, entrepreneurs, advocates and thought leaders, who will bring insights and solutions to the biggest global challenges we face.
For 20 years, Sahar’s mission has been to provide safe spaces for girls to receive a quality education. Sahar partners with the Ministry of Education and Afghan-based organizations to build public schools and implement educational programs for girls, empowering and inspiring children and their families to build peaceful, thriving communities. Each academic year, 25,000 girls attend the thirteen public schools built by Sahar. The organization also provides a range of programs including: early marriage prevention, teacher training, digital literacy, and building gender allies to improve the achievement gap between girls and boys. In order to address this disparity, Sahar developed and implemented the Early Marriage Prevention program in 2015. Since its founding, 1,473 students have graduated from the program. In this program, girls are introduced to the importance of continuing their education, leadership skills and professional development.
As U.S. troops withdraw from Afghanistan, Sahar’s Board of Directors and staff have reaffirmed an enduring commitment to providing education in northern Afghanistan.
Sukarya’s “Education on Wheels” project mainstreams out-of-school children into the formal school system. The brightly coloured mobile bus is a familiar feature in Gurgaon and Delhi’s slums. COVID-19 hit children hard. They lost their routine of attending classes. Sukarya’s team was quick to introduce them to digital learning so they could later transition to physical classes.
The primary concern was to reduce drop-outs. Students were enrolled in EOW after lot of discussion with parents and seeing them opt out would reverse gains made by the project. A strategy using virtual study space with handholding support, counselling and tele-conversations was initiated.
Online classes saw student leaders engaging with those unfamiliar with Android phones. Activities enhancing interactivity and self-worth like recitation, storytelling, play acting and craft were taken up. Online monitors sensitized classmates on COVID protocols, nutritious food, turning watchdogs and reporting cases needing attention so that Sukarya could provide relief. These zoomed enthusiasm and got students to join online classes.
Food shortage and acute hunger was a big concern. Sukarya distributed food and hygiene kits in these homes regularly. EOW has resumed visits and is ensuring minimum damage to children’s academic progress and overall wellbeing.
Sukarya USA in Seattle supports the cause of Sukarya for educating and empowering marginalized children and adolescent girls in India.
Save the Children, the global leader in providing education to children in emergencies, is driving hard to combat the largest education crisis a generation of children worldwide is experiencing – the COVID-19 pandemic. Of the staggering 1.6 billion students who were out of school in 2020, millions have yet to return to classrooms as COVID-19 variants surge in countries. Child marriages and teen pregnancies are up, as more girls can’t go to school. Families who’ve fallen deeper into destitution are taking children out of school and forcing them to work. Our research points to over 112 billion days of lost learning in the past year. COVID-19’s immense disruption to learning will reverberate for generations to come.
Safe Back to School is our commitment to support distance learning and safely return 150 million marginalized girls and boys to school. We will make education systems more resilient and advocate to influence decisions on policy, legal, system or public investment to meet children’s right to an education.
Reversing COVID-19’s damage to learning is our top global education priority through 2024. We are uniquely suited for the challenge – we work in over 100 countries and have delivered quality education to over 273 million children in the last decade, which is more than any other global development organization. You can learn more about Safe Back to School here.
Schools for Salone expands access to quality education in Sierra Leone by building schools, training teachers, and empowering girls to stay in school.
Our organization was created in response to the destruction caused by civil war in Sierra Leone. Countless schools were reduced to rubble, leaving a generation of people without education and employment skills. Because Sierra Leone is one of the poorest nations in the world, it is even more difficult for communities to overcome barriers to education that continually arise – leaving children, their families, and their communities in a cycle of need.
We work with local partners to significantly increase the number of educated children in Sierra Leone by aiding and assisting communities to build schools and improve existing school infrastructure; by preparing teachers through a comprehensive teacher development strategy, and by conducting reproductive health education to keep girls in school and support their healthy growth and development.
Despite the challenges brought about by the COVID pandemic, we continue to make substantial progress in our goals of improving education opportunities for girls and women in Cambodia. With our superb on-the-ground partners, along with more than 20 grassroots local NGOs in and around Siem Reap, we are able to carry on with substantial support – all focused on continuing to educate the most vulnerable kids in Cambodia. This has taken on a variety of forms – all driven by the most pressing needs identified by the local communities and our partner NGOs. Specifically, over the past 18 months we have supported:
Expanding internet connectivity
Phone top-ups
Teacher training for distance learning
Creating new, on-line curricula
Printing workbooks and homework assignments
Mobile libraries
Economic support to keep students engaged
Sanitation and hygiene training for when in-person classes are possible
Building community so local NGOs can support each other
Food relief
And many other locally driven projects
Nobody ever expected this pandemic to create such havoc in the educational sector. Nevertheless, thanks to our dedicated in-country staff and partner NGOs our work has continued to make an important difference in the lives of thousands of marginalized kids.
The Special Olympics Unified Champion Schools program is a school-based program for pre-K through university offered in more than 180 schools throughout Washington. Globally, the program is offered in 193 countries.
Unified Champion Schools is aimed at promoting social inclusion through intentionally planned and implemented activities affecting systems-wide change. With sports as the foundation, the three-component model offers a unique combination of effective activities that equip young people with tools and training to create sports, classroom and school climates of acceptance. These are school climates where students with disabilities feel welcome and are routinely included in and feel a part of all activities, opportunities and functions.
This is accomplished by implementing inclusive sports, inclusive youth leadership opportunities, and whole-school engagement. The program is designed to be woven into the fabric of the school, enhancing current efforts and providing rich opportunities that lead to meaningful change in creating a socially inclusive school that supports and engages all learners.
Alliance for Children Everywhere: ACE is Truly an Alliance for Children Everywhere
By Joanne Lu
FaithWorks classroom. Photo credit: Alliance for Children Everywhere.
The story of Alliance for Children Everywhere (ACE) is one of evolution, learning, and adaptation. The organization as it exists today barely resembles the one that Virginia “Jennie” Woods founded in Arizona more than five decades ago. Yet, at the heart of it, ACE has always been – and always will be – a champion for the world’s most vulnerable children.
In 1969, Jennie Woods was moved to act when she saw a need for emergency rescue and childcare for orphaned and vulnerable children on Apache and Navajo reservations in Arizona. At the time, institutional care (e.g. orphanages, children’s homes, etc.) was the prevailing model for orphan care, so that’s what Jennie and her team provided. Out of that response, ACE was born.
Eventually, their faith-based ministry expanded to Guatemala and Peru. But by then, things had begun to shift within ACE. They started to lean more on local community leaders to implement and guide their programming.
Then, in the early 1990s, the HIV/AIDS epidemic hit Zambia hard, leaving the country with an unemployment rate of 70 percent and the highest per capita rate of orphans in the world. The country’s two existing structures for orphan support were quickly overwhelmed. In response, the Zambian government broadcast a global appeal for help from people and organizations with child welfare experience.
Family preservation. Photo credit: Alliance for Children Everywhere.
ACE once again sprang into action, lending support to local churches, leaders, the government, and community organizations. With its team of local social workers and staff, ACE launched two crisis nurseries for orphaned and abandoned children. And they also watched, listened and learned. They realized that many children who were coming to their crisis nurseries actually had living family. This is true for 80 percent of children in orphanages worldwide. For reasons like poverty, these families feel compelled to turn their children over to orphanages rather than try to keep them at home. Again and again, mothers told ACE partners and staff, “I would keep my baby at home if I could feed him.”
In response, ACE began to work toward that very goal. Realizing that family care, not institutional care, is the best environment for children, they launched programs to support the family unit, including food relief and economic empowerment programs for parents and caregivers. Those programs include skills training, savings groups, and seed capital for launching small businesses.
For children in need of immediate temporary care, including those who have been referred by the government due to issues like abuse or neglect, the crisis nurseries are still available. However, ACE’s goal is always to reunite the children with their families. If reintegration into their own families is not an option, then ACE facilitates fostering and adoption within Zambia – including outside of tribal lines. When ACE first began its work in Zambia, adoption outside of tribal lines was a relatively taboo subject. But with the help of local church leaders and social workers, ACE has been able to help normalize fostering and adoptions beyond one’s own tribe.
“We’re able to communicate that together, from our various tribes, our various backgrounds, we all belong within God’s family, and so do these children,” says Stephanie Johnson, ACE’s Director of Development and Communications.
It was also through conversations with local leaders that ACE realized they needed to take their prevention efforts one step further – to include education. Food relief and economic empowerment were well and good, but education would be the key to building up the next generation of parents and caregivers, and strengthening communities.
FaithWorks classroom. Photo credit: Alliance for Children Everywhere.
In 2001, ACE opened its first free community-based school. Today, ACE serves around 2,500 kids a year through its seven FaithWorks primary schools throughout Lusaka, as well as a secondary school. The primary schools are hosted in local church buildings and are open to all children in those neighborhoods whose parents cannot afford government schools. Some of the children are also single or double orphans, and for a number of the children, the school’s free lunch is their only daily meal. In light of these circumstances, the teachers are also trained to provide emotional and social support to guide their students through their life challenges and help them reach their goals.
For one student, Francis N’guni, that goal was to reinvest his education into the next generation of children in his community. Today, Francis is a head teacher at a FaithWorks school. Not only is he providing his neighbors’ children with a quality education, but he’s also mentoring them through the same challenges that he himself experienced as a child and student.
Of course, the pandemic has brought massive disruptions not only to ACE’s community schools, but also their other programs. That’s why they are holding discussions in real time about ways their work and schools can become more resilient to crises. For example, they’re exploring whether households and other community members can participate more in schooling so that in the event of another disaster, the disruption to children’s education will be minimal.
Moving forward, they’re also excited about expanding their influence beyond Zambia, but without a physical presence. ACE no longer works domestically, and its programs in Guatemala and Peru have long been handed off to local organizations. So, when it comes to programming, ACE is firmly rooted in Zambia. However, their decades-long evolution has taught them valuable lessons about child welfare, particularly how to move from institutional care to a holistic family support model. As it turns out, other organizations around the world are eager to learn from them. That’s why in 2020, ACE launched a consulting arm, called ACE Transition Partners, to guide institutions toward family-based care for tens of thousands of children in Africa and beyond.
It’s fitting, because after all, ACE is an alliance for children everywhere.
Atul Tandon Went From the Streets of Delhi to Wall Street. Now He’s a Banker for the Poor.
By Tyler LePard
Photo Credit: Opportunity International
There are moments in your life that cause you to reassess everything. They offer a chance to step away from your daily routine, stop thinking about your never-ending To Do list, and ponder the big question of what you really want to do with your life.
Atul Tandon was 39-years-old and running one of the world’s largest international banking efforts when he was faced with news of a serious health crisis. He had grown up on the streets of Delhi and ended up on Wall Street. But this moment caused him to pause and ask himself what would bring him the most joy. His answer? Help people have a better life. Atul decided he wanted to use the skills he learned through his career in financial services—how to see and unlock the potential in each one of us—to help people thrive, especially the ones who have been left out, like the people he grew up with.
A major career shift from international banking to humanitarian work wasn’t a hard decision for Atul. The hard part was to change his thinking around what counts as success. “It’s hard to go from an organizational culture and a career focused on the bottom line to a career and focus of life that was focused on people. It’s far more than the bottom line.” Atul shifted his thinking from the return on investment on dollars to matters of both the head and the heart.
Atul’s career change brought him full circle to where his life began.
A #2 pencil may seem like an insignificant object to many of us. For Atul as a child, it was so much more. He grew up in a family of limited means in India and his mother was determined to see him and his brother do well. This meant sacrificing to make sure they could attend school and get an education.
“I had this tremendous gift of my mother who loved me and who, at the same time, expected a lot of me,” Atul shared. “We didn’t have much, so my one gift a year was a box of #2 pencils and a sharpener. That was a constant reminder of my mom’s presence in my life, what she was giving in my life, and what those pencils could help me achieve. Even today when I see a #2 pencil, I get choked up.”
Atul finished school, got a Master of Business Administration, and built a successful career with Citibank, first in India and then in the United States. He learned how to manage enterprises and people and how to take ideas from their inception to tremendous impact. In India, Atul introduced services such as ATMs, credit cards, mortgages, consumer loans, and remote banking for the first time in the region. Those things may seem ordinary now, but in the 1980’s these were life-changing tools for millions of people.
Now, Atul is committed to addressing the question of “How do you lift up people at the bottom of the pyramid so they earn more income to invest back in themselves and their families, educate their children, and live thriving lives? … Most of humanity is at the bottom of the pyramid. Of the 7 billion people on the planet, about 3.5 billion are working adults and two billion are in the informal economy. They typically earn less than $3.50 a day and don’t have a defined means of income. That’s the human condition.”
Atul in Nicaragua. Photo Credit: Opportunity International.
These days, Atul calls himself a banker to the poor. “Now I have the great opportunity to go back to my friends who are bankers to the rich and say ‘Ok, what are we going to do together?’” He believes that both sides of financial services, serving the rich on one side and the poor on the other, are important. “We must treat everyone as if they have enormous potential. Talking about equality isn’t enough. The training I got at Citibank is what made me successful in the humanitarian sector.”
When asked what the thread throughout his career is, Atul said, “I’m a builder of people and of institutions. I’ve had the great fortune to build some of the world’s greatest financial institutions, nonprofits, and now to address extreme poverty. How do you build people and organize them into institutions to do more, with excellence on one side and a drive for real impact on the other. The most important thing is the people—both those who are impacted and the people who are doing the work so they thrive while doing it.”
Over 16 years, Atul joined World Vision, led United Way Worldwide, and then founded and served as the CEO of the Tandon Institute. In 2016, he joined Opportunity International as Chief Executive Officer and now he can’t imagine doing anything else. “I’m excited to be leading an organization singularly focused on helping families financially and helping children get an education.” Opportunity International is a global nonprofit organization that creates opportunities for entrepreneurs to build their businesses, children to go to school, farmers to feed their communities, and families to end the cycle of generational poverty. “If you can give people the financial resources, skills, and support they need, each person is perfectly capable of earning a living and getting out of poverty.”
“It’s important for mission-driven organizations like ours, whose purpose is to see poor households do better, to know enough about the financial sector, how to use banks and financial services, and package services for the poor so that they have positive outcomes,” said Atul. Opportunity International staff have learned to identify what the poor need, translate what the private sector has to offer, and help people find and use the services that will work best for them. If those services don’t exist, Opportunity International and their partners build them. “For 50 years we’ve been in the business of innovating financial solutions to serve the poor and deliver them at scale. We’ve built trust groups, banks for the poor, insurance programs, lending for the poor, education financing, and agriculture financing. We keep our focus on the poor, understanding what they need, and figuring out how to build them up so they have assets and income. We also learn how to use technology to bring down the costs of delivery and develop better services and solutions.”
Education is a pathway out of poverty, as Atul, #2 pencils in hand, found in his own life. “I’m here because I had access to good quality education. My parents and the Indian government gave me that opportunity.” Opportunity’s Education Finance (EduFinance) program partners with financial institutions to help independent local schools provide affordable, quality education. At the same time, it helps parents access the resources necessary to send their children to school. By connecting private sector finance to education providers in low- and middle-income countries, they are tackling the global education crisis and helping more children attend better schools. With help from the U.S. government and others, Atul aims to double the number of children in schools around the world.
Opportunity International also works with educators to increase education quality. They have developed training programs with schools and teachers in 25 different disciplines. Atul’s team helps them learn things like how to set up restrooms for girls that are secure and how to recruit and train teachers.
As Atul said, “This work fits well with the public sector. In most of the developing world, the government itself doesn’t have the financial capacity to provide a quality education to the population.” In Uganda, one of the places Opportunity International works, almost half of the population is under the age of 15, representing one of the youngest populations in the world. Only 53 percent of children in Uganda complete primary education. Forty-one percent of the people there live in poverty (on less than $1.90 a day).
Atul at United Nations. Photo Credit: Opportunity International.
Atul and his team believe that we can end extreme poverty in our lifetime. Helping households earn a better living and children earning an education are the key to achieving this. “When you bring those two things together you create lasting granular change at the bottom of the pyramid and the tide rises up for everybody. We have the means today—the financial, the economical, and the social networks, to accomplish both of those things.”
“I look forward to the day when all of us can go to bed on a full stomach,” Atul said. “We are called to love the least amongst us. I have the opportunity to work with a lot of good samaritans. They do the work. We provide the kindling. All of us can celebrate together.”
Please welcome our newest Global Washington members. Take a moment to familiarize yourself with their work and consider opportunities for support and collaboration!
National Museum and Center for Service
National Museum and Center for Service is a center for people to gather and be inspired to provide a hand up for their communities. Nmcfs.org
By Jennifer Butte-Dahl, Senior Director and North America Lead for APCO Impact, APCO Worldwide
Photo credit Jennifer Butte-Dahl
My youngest daughter – the fearless, smiley, increasingly opinionated one – turned two this month. The moment got me thinking, as birthdays tend to do, about progress and goals and the passage of time. How is she already two?What values do I want her to embrace? Am I being intentional about how I help to instill those values and draw her attention to the most important things in life?
That night I wrote her a letter. It was a long one, filled with my ideas on what truly matters in this world, the skills and curiosities I hope to nurture in her on this journey, and the commitments I am making to her about the mom I am going to try my best to be. The letter is a tradition I began with my oldest daughter. It’s a promise. It is also a guide and touchstone for me throughout their lives that will keep me focused on what is most important. Continue Reading
Over twenty years ago, I worked for an organization doing microcredit for women in Central America. The research to support microcredit showed that giving loans to women, rather than men, to create microbusinesses and manage their household income, resulted in greater investments for their children’s education, the family’s healthcare, and overall well-being.
Today, there is similar evidence to demonstrate the positive impact of women in leadership and decision-making positions at the community and country level. In India, for example, communities with women-led councils had 62% more drinking-water projects than those with men-led councils. Yet, 61% of countries have never had a female leader and we have a long way to go for gender equality at all levels of society.
I am encouraged by the trends of women-centered development and recent investments announced at the Generation Equality Forum in Paris. Several Global Washington members are at the forefront of this approach for gender equality. I hope you will take the time to read more about this issue and our members in the articles below.
Also, this month Global Washington facilitated small group gatherings of over 60 female-identifying members to discuss gender equality and strengthen the network of females working in global development. This builds on our conversations from the Fall of 2020 about the Sustainable Development Goal #5 on Gender Equality that revealed the need to create more meaningful connections and allies across organizations and disciplines to promote gender equality. We’ll be producing a summary of recommendations coming out of these conversations in August.
I’m also thrilled to announce that registration for our 2021 Goalmakers Conference on December 8 and 9 will soon be open. The first day of this event will be virtual and the second day will be in-person in Seattle. The in-person event will be a homecoming after a long stretch of only online communication. As always, we will monitor public health guidance and make contingencies, but we are hopeful that we can gather again in-person to spark those connections vital to your work. I hope you can join us!
Perhaps the Ambition of Gender Equality Will Finally Become a Reality
By Joanne Lu
Photo credit: UN Women/Fabrice Gentile
At a time when the world is grappling with the urgent consequences of crises like climate change and the global COVID-19 pandemic, gender equality advocates say we need more women in leadership than ever.
That’s why, on July 2, the Generation Equality Forum Paris, hosted by UN Women, concluded with historic commitments – including nearly $40 billion of confirmed investments – from governments, philanthropies, corporations, civil society, and youth organizations to accelerate gender equality over the next five years. It’s an effort to put concrete action behind the intentions that were set in 1995 at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing and the goals that were specified by Sustainable Development Goal 5.
“The Generation Equality Forum marks a positive, historic shift in power and perspective,” said Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Executive Director of UN Women in a press release. “Together we have mobilized across different sectors of society, from south to north, to become a formidable force, ready to open a new chapter in gender equality.”
The Paris event was preceded in March by a two-week-long kickoff gathering in Mexico City, where UN Member States adopted a set of Agreed Conclusions that recognized the need to significantly increase women’s full participation and leadership at all levels of decision-making in government and the public sector. It recommended, for example, setting targets and timelines to achieve gender balance in government through quotas, appointments and training, changing laws and policies that hinder women’s equal participation in public service, measures to eliminate, prevent and respond to all forms of violence against women and girls, measures to support young women’s participation in public life, and reinforcing women’s presence and leadership in all places where climate change-related decisions are made.
The Generation Equality Forum in Mexico was closed on March 31, 2021
Such changes are especially relevant as COVID-19 has exacerbated pre-existing gender inequities, resulting in problems like increased violence against women and worse economic impacts for women. Indigenous women, women of color and youth have experienced compounded risks and barriers. And yet, women have mostly been excluded from governments’ pandemic task forces, composing only 24 percent of the 225 task force members in 137 countries, according to the UN Development Programme’s COVID-19 Global Gender Response Tracker.
Screenshot of Global Gender Response Tracker
That’s not the only disturbing statistic on women’s participation in leadership and decision-making. Only 22 countries have women Heads of State or Government; 119 have never had a woman leader. Four countries – Rwanda, Cuba, Bolivia and the United Arab Emirates – have 50 percent or more women in parliament in single or lower houses. And globally, women under age 30 make up less than 1 percent of parliamentarians. Yet, there is growing evidence that political decision-making processes improve when women hold leadership positions. In India, for example, communities with women-led councils had 62 percent more drinking-water projects than those with men-led councils. Other studies have found that countries in which women enjoy greater social and political status produce fewer carbon dioxide emissions and have lower climate footprints.
But the work of getting more women into leadership begins with the basics, like ensuring that they have access to quality education. Globally, 130 million girls remain out of school. That’s why Sahar Education for Afghan Girls is working hard to provide girls in war-torn Afghanistan with schools that provide quality teaching and are designed with their needs in mind. Sahar also has a Digital Literacy Program that opens doors for girls to higher education and job skills through technology. They are currently serving 1,500 girls a year through their computer labs.
Photo credit: Sahar
Similarly, Rwanda Girls Initiative (RGI) founded a STEM-focused upper-secondary boarding school for girls in Rwanda. In addition to STEM subjects and English, the Gashora Girls Academy of Science and Technology offers extracurriculars that empower students to develop political leadership skills, such as Community Service, Leadership, and Mentoring where they’re encouraged to change the politics of Rwanda in their generation, and the exceedingly popular Debate and Seminars club. The debate team in fact made history by being the first all-girls school to win Rwanda’s annual Youth Entrepreneurs Debate Competition. Since then they’ve also competed on regional and international levels.
For many girls around the world, acts of violence like early marriage are keeping them out of school and preventing them from thriving into positions of leadership. That’s what CARE’s Tipping Point Initiative is working to address. Based on the premise that “major change only occurs when those who have been excluded from power organize collectively…to challenge existing systems and their impact,” Tipping Point facilitates adolescent girl-led activism against early marriage in Bangladesh and Nepal. Through the initiative, they’ve strengthened their organizing skills, they’ve connected with government officials, religious leaders, teachers and others, and their voices have been elevated to the national level.
Care’s Tipping Point Initiative targeting child marriage in Bangladesh and Nepal
Girl Rising is also amplifying the voices of adolescent girls, especially in advocating for their right to education. But their most recent Future Rising initiative works at the intersection of gender equity and climate justice because, according to the ND-GAIN Index, every additional year of schooling a girl receives correlates with a 3.2-point improvement in her country’s resilience to climate disasters. One piece of the initiative is a fellowship that supports 10 young people (mostly girls) who work in their communities on these issues. These fellows are creating projects like short films, comic series, essays, and grant applications that will illuminate the urgency of the crisis and change cultural narratives around climate and gender.
There are also several organizations working within the legal framework to end violence against women and other barriers to gender equality. These include Every Woman Treaty, which is advancing the creation, adoption, and implementation of a global treaty to end violence against women and girls. And, Women’s Link Worldwide, which works in and beyond courts to promote social change that advances the human rights of women and girls, especially those facing multiple inequalities.
Screenshot of Every Woman Treaty website
The LGBTIQ community is especially familiar with multiple inequalities. Since 1990, OutRight Action International has been a leader in fighting for the human rights of LGBTIQ people globally. In addition to monitoring and documenting human rights violations, they help develop effective advocacy and capacity building for LGBTIQ rights and provide training to community members and allies. They also convene key stakeholders to exchange information on best practices related to ending violence based on sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression, or sex characteristics.
It’s clear that even with limited resources, civil society organizations like these have been doing the hard work of advancing gender equality for decades. But now, with action commitments and investments from all sectors, like those pledged at the Generation Equality Forum in Paris, perhaps the ambition of gender equality will finally become a reality.
The following Global Washington members are helping with gender equality and women empowerment.
APCO
APCO is the world’s largest independent and majority woman-owned advisory and advocacy communications firm. A passionate belief in breaking down barriers, challenging the status quo, and advancing equality has been in our DNA since our founding in 1984. APCO Impact is an advisory group that sits within APCO Worldwide and supports clients across business, government, and philanthropy. Our work helps clients be catalysts for progress and address the key issues of our time, including corporate purpose, ESG, climate and sustainability, racial and gender equity, and social justice.
Concern’s approach to ending extreme poverty is rooted in the understanding that the cycle of poverty is fueled by a combination of inequality, vulnerability, and risk. The greatest form of marginalization, and a force multiplier for other types of discrimination, is gender inequity. Women invest up to 90% of their income back into their families (compared to the average 30-40% invested by men), meaning that when there is financial equity at home, families are more likely to break that cycle, and whole economies change for the better. However, there are many factors that hinder this progress for women and girls, including barriers to education, healthcare, sustainable livelihoods, and a seat at the decision-making table, as well as gender-based violence.
All of Concern’s programs are implemented through a gender-transformative lens. Concern critically examines and challenges the harmful gender norms and dynamics in each community where we work in order to build the equity necessary to sustainably end poverty. They engage women as agents of their own future through skills training, psychosocial support, and healthcare solutions. Concern also actively engages men as accountable allies. Finally, they pay special attention to the intersecting inequalities that leave many women further behind, including caste, ethnicity, and health. Learn more at: https://www.concernusa.org/what-we-do/gender-equality/.
Every Women Treaty is a diverse coalition of more than 1,700 women’s rights advocates, including 840 organizations, in 128 countries working for a safer world for women and girls worldwide. Every Women Treaty envisions a world where every woman and girl everywhere lives a life free from violence. The Every Woman mission is to advance the creation, adoption, and implementation of a global treaty to end violence against women and girls.
Girl Rising’s mission is to ensure that girls around the world are educated and empowered. Girl Rising works with local partners by providing customized tools and curricula to build confidence and agency in girls and to change attitudes and social norms so that entire communities stand up for girls and against gender discrimination.
Their story-based tools and curricula engage, energize and motivate young people to see beyond their borders, value their education, understand their rights and believe in their capacity to change their lives, communities, and even the world.
The Global Leadership Forum strengthens globally oriented social-purpose leaders through a 7-month peer cohort program that addresses leadership, management, and organizational development topics. In this trusting peer community, creative problem solving and real-time application of topics results in personal and organizational growth. More than 75% of the over 100 alumni of GLF are women. 100% of GLF participants experienced statistically significant growth in felt leadership skills and competencies. They strengthened connections with others in the development sector, solved thorny workplace challenges, and made career transitions that seemed impossible before GLF. Mid-career cohorts build a pipeline of leaders into the sector, and senior level cohorts provide space for renewal and clarity for leaders to sustain their impact. Alumni of the program form an enduring community who support each other to improve lives in communities worldwide.
Kati Collective provides experienced, strategic, and pragmatic action focused on three of the most important drivers of change: gender, data, and partnerships. Using data as a tool to unlock solutions at every step of the development lifecycle, we align resources from across our network with global and local expertise to provide clients with targeted, cost-effective project resources.
We provide multi-national and multi-level clients and partners with the perspective and experience to navigate complex global health and development challenges, as well as the strategies and tools needed to improve data-driven health outcomes on a global scale – all with a gender equity lens firmly in place.
Kati Collective is a woman-owned and staffed organization built on the belief that achieving gender equity will change the world. Starting with our small core team, for each engagement we pull in diverse, international professionals with the talent and knowledge to provide the right skills at the right time to the right project.
We strongly believe that the community perspectives of women and girls must be included at all levels of stakeholder engagement and that by insisting on rigorous data science in the global ecosystem, we will advance gender equity.
Mona Foundation aims to alleviate global poverty so that no child goes to bed hungry, is lost to preventable diseases, or is deprived of the gift of education due to lack of resources. This can only be achieved when women and girls are able to equally participate in all aspects of socio-economic activity and fully contribute to the betterment of their communities.
Gender equality and education for all are strategic development priorities as well as birth rights. Nearly all of Mona’s 19 partner organizations in 12 countries work to educate and empower girls. The results have been dramatic. In India, the Barli Institute (Indore) educates illiterate rural young women and has graduated 8,500 “change agents” from 800 villages. All are driving sustained positive change in their communities as health workers, teachers, and independent entrepreneurs; 94% contribute to the income of their family. The Aarohini Girls Empowerment Program (Lucknow) teaches girls to resist and overcome gender injustice and educates boys to champion gender equality. As a result, child marriages dropped from 54% at risk in 2016 to 0% in 2019.
Gender equality is a reality of our humanity. Mona works to ensure this spiritual reality finds lasting form in every community.
Oxfam America’s work to advance gender justice is multifaceted and tailored to the people Oxfam serves. In some countries, Oxfam is the largest and most prominent organization to take a stand for women and gender-diverse people, and alongside them, often supporting the infrastructures of burgeoning movements. In other countries, like Sri Lanka, Oxfam helps rethink entrenched systems and remap biases to shift attitudes and overcome barriers. In all places, Oxfam strives for sustainable change. Oxfam does so first by acknowledging women, girls, and feminist actors as effective social change agents who must have a hand in ensuring their own rights and in the development they most want to see – development that will transform their families, communities and countries.
At Rwanda Girls Initiative, they know that education is the key to gender equality. They believe that investing in girls education, especially secondary education, is one of the most powerful levers one can pull to spark systemic change. When girls receive an education, they are more likely to lead healthy, productive lives, earning higher wages and participate in decision making in their community. Girls education fosters economic development, peace, and reduces inequalities between boys and girls. Still today, there are more than 132 million girls left out of school worldwide and only 25 percent of countries have achieved gender parity in upper secondary education.
As an all-girls boarding school in Rwanda, they have removed the most significant barriers to education for their students. Rwanda Girls Initiative is one of the most socio-economically diverse schools in Africa, with 100% of their students receiving some amount of financial aid. Their teachers and staff support an environment of academic excellence, problem solving, leadership and service; ensuring that graduates will become tomorrow’s leaders. To date Rwanda Girls Initiative has graduated 705 students; future scientists, entrepreneurs, advocates and thought leaders, who will bring insights and solutions to the biggest global challenges we face.
For 20 years, Sahar’s mission has been to provide safe spaces for girls to receive a quality education. Sahar partners with the Ministry of Education and Afghan-based organizations to build public schools and implement educational programs for girls, empowering and inspiring children and their families to build peaceful, thriving communities. Each academic year, 25,000 girls attend the thirteen public schools built by Sahar. The organization also provides a range of programs including: early marriage prevention, teacher training, digital literacy, and building gender allies to improve the achievement gap between girls and boys. In order to address this disparity, Sahar developed and implemented the Early Marriage Prevention program in 2015. Since its founding, 1,473 students have graduated from the program. In this program, girls are introduced to the importance of continuing their education, leadership skills and professional development.
As U.S. troops withdraw from Afghanistan, Sahar’s Board of Directors and staff have reaffirmed an enduring commitment to providing education in northern Afghanistan.
Starbucks commitment to ensuring a sustainable future of coffee for all starts with strengthening the communities that grow coffee and tea around the world. Women play key roles in these communities for their households, farms and businesses. We believe that investing in women and girls in coffee- and tea-growing regions makes a significant impact for both families and their broader communities. The Starbucks Foundation’s Origin Grants help these communities continue to break down barriers to education, promote clean water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) and create economic opportunities for women and girls. On International Women’s Day in 2018, The Starbucks Foundation announced a goal to empower 250,000 women and girls in origin communities by 2025. To date, The Starbucks Foundation is more than halfway towards achieving this goal, having reached more than 125,000 women through programs around women’s leadership, access to finance and healthy homes in coffee- and tea-growing communities across Africa, Asia and Latin America. This includes collaboration with other GlobalWA members, such as Mercy Corps empowering women in Indian tea communities as leaders around COVID-19 awareness. Learn more about the impact here.
Tostan’s three-year holistic Community Empowerment Program brings about positive social transformation for improved gender equality, which is manifested through improved voice, agency, and leadership for women and girls. Using participatory, culturally relevant educational techniques, the human rights-based curriculum provides new knowledge and skills in democracy, health and hygiene, literacy and numeracy, and project management and encourages communities to define their own vision for well being, review their current practices and adjust outdated social rules. Community Management Committees, with at least 50% female membership, advance community priorities and manage Community Development Funds that stimulate women’s economic empowerment.
Gender equality is reinforced through the program’s curriculum which incorporates dialogue, skills, and information that leads communities to reexamine women’s roles within their communities and beyond. The Community Management Committees provides women members the opportunity to practice leadership skills and act as role models for future generations. Increasingly, the program is grooming new women leaders who run for local and higher government positions. As women gain confidence and visibility in new roles, this strengthens new gender norms, making it possible for qualified women to more openly represent their interests and improve government institutions for all.
Girl Rising: Harnessing the Power of Storytelling to Ignite Change
By Joanne Lu
What happens when a group of filmmakers and journalists set out to answer the age-old question: How do we end global poverty? It turns out they harness the power of storytelling into a global movement to educate girls, called Girl Rising.
It started in 2009 when reaching out to experts across the development spectrum, says Christina Lowery, CEO of Girl Rising. They spoke with people who worked on HIV/AIDS, maternal and child health, agriculture, clean water, and other aspects of development to ask what are the best ways to reduce poverty.
“No matter who we spoke to, somewhere in their list of top five things that needed to happen to improve outcomes in their sector and address poverty was, ‘Well, really, you have to get girls in school and keep them there,’” says Lowery.
They dug into the data and found a “mountain of evidence,” as Lowery puts it, on what happens when you educate girls and when they go on to become leaders:
A girl with one extra year of education can earn 10 to 20 percent more as an adult.
If India enrolled 1 percent more girls in secondary school, their GDP would rise by $5.5 billion.
Girls with 8 years of education are four times less likely to be married as children.
And for every additional year of schooling a girl receives, her country’s resilience to climate disasters improves by 3.2 points as measured by the ND-GAIN Index.
Yet, very little money is invested into girls’ education and more than 130 million girls remain out of school.
“As filmmakers and journalists, we thought this was the story of a lifetime,” says Lowery.
The result was a feature-length film, released in 2013, that told the true stories of nine girls – in Haiti, Cambodia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Nepal, India, Peru, Sierra Leone, and Afghanistan – and the obstacles they overcame to get an education.
But alongside the making of the film, Girl Rising also created a strategy to use the film in educational settings to change minds, to use it in mass media to grow the choir of people engaged in educating girls and to use it to help change policies around the world. That work has snowballed into the organization that Girl Rising is today.
Today, Girl Rising works in 12 countries, reaching 5 million youth through various content and curricula, as well as tens of thousands of educators and parents to change how they teach and support girls. About 80 percent of the people Girl Rising reaches with their content fall under the low income bracket, including communities that are below the poverty line, earning less than $1.90 a day.
In all of the 12 countries where Girl Rising has a presence, they have deployed their core curriculum into direct learning environments to meaningfully impact the lives of adolescent girls, as well as engage educators and boys. Depending on resources and opportunity, they have also expanded their “circle of influence” in some countries into the community environment (families, caregivers, and community influencers), structural environment (institutional support and government policies), and cultural environment (mass media).
At the heart of their work, they’re still telling girls’ stories – creating educational resources, films, books, and television and radio programming. They also collaborate with more than 130 local partners, including educators, schools, community organizations, businesses, and non-profits to create locally-adapted programming and expand their reach. Finally they activate their audience – whether families, communities, corporations, governments, or the general public – to take action for girls’ education and gender equity.
Image credit: Girl Rising
In India, for example, Girl Rising is partnering with the Ministry of Women and Child Development to change the government’s policies toward girls. They’ve also created content specifically for the ministry to disseminate across the country, including in hard-to-reach communities. Additionally, Girl Rising has converted its film into “behavior-change tools,” says Nidhi Dubey, Girl Rising’s Country Representative in India. These include a facilitator’s guide to use at screenings of the film as well as materials that bundle the nine stories in the film into chapters that focus on specific behavior changes, like how fathers and brothers can support their girls or how girls can stand up for themselves.
According to Girl Rising, stories that change mindsets and stir behavior change help girls to gain a voice and agency. With voice and agency, they can articulate their dreams and aspirations and then do something about it. Those are some indicators of empowerment that Girl Rising looks at, besides tracking the number of girls enrolling and staying in school. But they also evaluate the empowerment of girls’ families and communities, their health and rates of early marriage and pregnancy, among other indicators.
Image credit: Girl Rising
Unfortunately, a lot of the progress in girls’ education and empowerment that has been made globally over the last couple decades has now been lost amid the pandemic.
“Because of deeply rooted gender norms, girls remain hurt first and worst by this pandemic,” says Virginia Terry, Girl Rising’s Head of Development. “Schools are often the only safe place an adolescent girl has to learn, be with peers, and get a meal and health and hygiene products, and then that was taken away. So, this past year has been all about adaptations to these disruptions.”
But Terry says that because of Girl Rising’s deep relationships with local partners, they’ve been able to adapt quickly, nimbly, and appropriately to what’s happening in local contexts. In Guatemala, for example, they quickly converted their program to a radio program and home delivery of education materials. In India, their partner Slam Out Loud turned to low-tech media like WhatsApp. Terry says these are adaptations that Girl Rising can carry forward into the post-pandemic world.
Image credit: Girl Rising
Looking ahead, Girl Rising is also excited about their newly launched Future Rising initiative, which addresses the intersection of girls’ education and climate change through storytelling, social action, and education. Part of the initiative is a fellowship that supports 10 young people between the ages of 17 and 25, who are working in their communities on these issues. Their proposed work include projects like short films, essays, or grant applications. One young woman in Nigeria, for example, will be creating a series of graphic novels that show the effect of drought on early marriage in her community. It will be an ongoing fellowship with a new cohort every six months that will focus on one specific topic under the umbrella of climate change, such as water shortage, sustainable agriculture, or civic leadership.
“We feel a great responsibility to help amplify and support especially young people and young girls telling the stories of their work in their own communities,” says Lowery. “They’re proof of concept that if we can ensure girls are educated and supported, they will, in fact, address some of the most serious problems in their communities and around the world.”
For Kirthi Jayakumar, Ending Domestic Violence Against Women is Deeply Personal
By Joel Meyers
Photo credit: Kirthi Jayakumar
Kirthi Jayakumar has been advocating to end domestic violence since she was 25, initially in Chennai, India (where she grew up) yet shortly after across the globe. She founded a non-profit, she has created a mobile app and Facebook chat bot to help victims of domestic violence, she is a passionate speaker, and a passionate proponent of ending gender violence wherever it exists. Most recently she is a graduate of Every Woman Treaty’s 1000 Voices Fellowship, a program to train women on international laws that address gender equality, women’s rights and ending violence against women. “Every experience in my life has pointed towards responding to this issue [of gender-based violence] one way or the other.”
Kirthi was quite young when she fell victim to domestic violence: “I was age five when somebody who was supposed to take care of me turned heel and winded up becoming my abuser, and that [turned into] 13 years of abuse.” Kirthi tolerated it in silence – she internalized the trauma as she thought she deserved the violence. “I am finding an answer for little Kirthi – the young woman who faced what she shouldn’t have faced – I’m looking for justice for her.”
Kirthi’s mother, a therapist working with survivors of gender-based violence, has been a tremendous positive influence in her life. “What my mum did is very unlike what a typical Indian mother does. She didn’t silence me, she didn’t cry, she didn’t decide to marry me away immediately – these are stories one hears of – instead she told me I can own my story, and reclaim control of my life, my body, my mind, or I could just go ahead and grieve, and whichever option I would pick, she would have my back.”
Kirthi found her voice when she was 25 “…when a horrific incident happened in New Delhi on 16 December 2012 when a young woman was brutally gang raped, and that incident in some ways helped me access a sense of solidarity. This was my first understanding that I thrive in an environment where there is solidarity, and in an environment where there’s nurture, which I would eventually find again in the 1000 Voices Fellowship.” Six months later, Kirthi, with tremendous help from her mother (and a strong influence from her grandmother who taught her the value of lifelong learning), founded a non-profit in Chennai called the Red Elephant Foundation. “The idea was to paint the elephant in the room red so people would speak about issues they simply weren’t.” She quickly follows: “It’s not that these conversations were not happening in India at the time – there were several great feminists, several great activists doing this job – the fact is the critical tipping point hadn’t yet come in for my generation.”
Domestic violence in India is certainly not a new phenomenon, though it has not been until this last century that it has been pushed into the light of political and cultural discourse. It wasn’t until the 1970’s with the women’s movement when the issue of gender began to gain traction and visibility as an issue separate from other concerns. But there is still a tremendous amount of work to be done. In a survey conducted by the Thomson Reuters Foundation in 2018, India was ranked as the world’s most dangerous country for women among the 193 United Nation member states. Today, according to UN Women, roughly 25% of women in in India are victims of some form of domestic violence, and of those the numbers may not even represent the full extent of the problem since as per National Family Health Survey (NFHS) 2015-16, roughly 77% of women who experienced domestic violence didn’t ever mention it to anyone and even less than 1% of the women actually sought help from the police(1).
Photo credit: Kirthi Jayakumar
“When I found my voice, I was able to use what I had learned at that time for speaking out, and I taught myself a lot of ways I could channel that into action at the community level. I pursued degrees in peace and conflict studies and gender studies at the same time in the hope of using peace education as a way to get young people to normalize nonviolence over violence.” Kirthi received her Bachelor’s degree in Law from the Ambedkar University in Chennai, India, an MA in Peace and Conflict Studies from Coventry University, and a second MA from UPEACE (also in peace studies).
Seven years after founding the Red Elephant Foundation she closed its doors because of the COVID pandemic, “…because money was hard to come by and my modality was to teach at schools; they went online and I couldn’t get the time to teach.” Her lifelong learning practice and desire for positive change was channeled into developing an app called Saahas, which means “courage” in Hindi. “I taught myself to code and created a mobile app and Facebook chat bot with resources that listed help for violence survivors across 196 countries, to find help wherever they are, whenever there’s an emergency. Legal help, medical help…all kinds of resources.” Via the app and her personal capacity as a liaison for survivors, her efforts have helped 40,000 violence survivors – “women, yet any individual facing domestic violence.”
And then she was introduced to Lisa Shannon, CEO of Every Woman Treaty. “Lisa renewed my belief that the future can be changed. She has made me feel welcome in ways very few have, and that is amazing.” Kirthi readily enrolled in the second cohort of the 1000 Voices Fellowship, an “intense 2-week training program that brings activists from the front lines from all over the world in a cohort of 20-25 people to train on international laws that address violence against women and women’s rights.” The Fellowship, she continues, “also includes a media training component that helps fellows shine the spotlight on violence against women through the local and international media. The program is a powerful catalyst to work with leaders from all over the world to share stories and best practices – something you don’t find very often. This program makes accessing this pool of talent possible from the comfort of your own home: it is a perfect mix of knowledge and intersectionality, and peer to peer learning.”
“The biggest thing I am looking at now is to find a path to ending violence against women – and to me at the moment it looks like getting the Every Woman Treaty in place and having the world’s women benefit from its existence.” To her, there is no other option. “Part of making [domestic violence] go away is pattern breaking. Change will not come without a catalyst – that catalyst is that treaty. It takes every hand on deck to make domestic and gender violence go away.” Through her involvement in Every Woman Treaty, she hopes to engage in conversations at both the country level in civil society as well as with people in power to support the treaty in passing. She will also continue to work with women in India, especially women with COVID.
Photo credit: Kirthi Jayakumar
Kirthi is a humble activist that keeps looking to the future and the positive change that can be achieved. “I personally refrain from identifying with one incident as an accomplishment as there is a chance I may put a ceiling on myself. And there is a chance I may compare everything thing else that is to come with that threshold and may not enjoy what’s to come.”
More on Every Woman Treaty 1000 Voices Fellowship
1000 Voices builds the capacity of coalition members through coordination and support, the creation of national coalitions, and diverse, culturally-appropriate expert peer-to-peer training in media, advocacy, fundraising, and public policy. Upon completion of this program these leaders will be further equipped to foster significant influence on policy makers, media, and diplomats, leading to increased security for all women and girls in their nation. 1000 Voices prioritizes emerging world leaders, including coalition members from marginalized communities, including indigenous people, people experiencing disability, and widows, as well as advocates in low- to middle-income countries, and countries with the highest rates of violence.
Please welcome our newest Global Washington members. Take a moment to familiarize yourself with their work and consider opportunities for support and collaboration!
Concern Worldwide US
Concern Worldwide USA is a global community of humanitarians, partners, community members, supporters, donors, and volunteers who share a common vision of a world where no one lives in poverty, fear, or oppression, and all can exercise their rights to a decent standard of living, can have access to the opportunities and choices essential to a long, healthy, and creative life, and can be treated with dignity and respect. Concern Worldwide US are innovators who have been at the forefront of engineering transformative approaches to the treatment of malnutrition, maternal & child health care, mobile cash transfers, disaster recovery and more. Concernusa.org
Results Educational Fund
RESULTS is a movement of passionate, committed everyday people who use their voices to influence political decisions that will bring an end to poverty. results.org
Special Olympics Washington
Special Olympics was started by Eunice Kennedy Shriver in 1968 as a way to provide people with intellectual disabilities a place to play, and feel included. Today, her vision has become a Global movement with over 4.7 million athletes competing in 169 countries. Through programming in sports, health, education and community building, Special Olympics is changing the lives of people with intellectual disabilities. Special Olympics is able to remove barriers and stigmas that people with intellectual disabilities face, and to share with the community the gifts and talents they possess. specialolympicswashington.org
October 2021: Global Leadership Forum Mid-Career Cohort, Applications are being accepted now. Email team@glfglobalorg to join a virtual info session on July 22nd 10-11am, or August 4th 12 – 1pm.
Gender equity is not an add-on. It is not a “nice” or “not necessary” element of a plan. Though there are many strong leaders and inspiring initiatives in the global health community who are outspoken and actively advancing gender equality, there are still organizations that are not considering gender equity as an integral element when undertaking new initiatives and programs and when reviewing existing work. This isn’t because they don’t care – it’s because they think gender equity doesn’t apply to their particular issue. Continue Reading
When people think about NGOs working in low and middle income countries, most people think of issues such as food security, healthcare, or emergency relief. However, several NGOs also provide essential support to build societal cohesion, safeguard human rights, and bolster the rule of law. The elements of a healthy and thriving civil society are fundamental to achieving each of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and are directly foundational to SDG 16 Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions.
Global Washington members such as the World Justice Project and the Chandler Foundation work to strengthen civil societies around the world and are featured in the articles below. This month, we also pay tribute to Rose Berg who was an icon in the global development community and tragically passed away in May. She will be deeply missed. We honor her and others who advocate for social justice around the world in our focus of SDG 16. Read more in the articles below and join us on June 24 for an event on this topic with Patners Asia, Tostan, and OutRight Action International.
I am also thrilled to welcome Joel Meyers as GlobalWA’s Director of Communications. Many of you already know Joel because he has been a GlobalWA member, attended almost every Global Washington annual conference, is a Global Leadership Forum (GLF) alumni, a Sahar Education board member, and promotes Tech4Good in many aspects of his life. If you are a GlobalWA member, you’ll be hearing from Joel often as he works to promote your organization. Welcome to the team Joel!
Creating Healthy Societies Requires Diligence, Grassroots Commitment, and Upholding Human Rights
By Joanne Lu
Partners Asia prioritizes increasing skills and confidence of women in the ethnic states of Myanmar. Photo credit Partners Asia.
The constant work of building peaceful, inclusive societies is one of the most challenging aims for civil society organizations. It’s often thankless work in increasingly challenging environments. Even before the pandemic, many experts described widespread “democratic backsliding” around the world – in Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe and North America. On some continents like Africa, there are now fewer democracies than 20 years ago, now replaced by autocratic regimes. Other powers, like Russia and China, are actively working to undermine democracy, while leaders in some well-established democracies, like former U.S. President Trump and India’s President Modi, have adopted authoritarian-like rhetoric. Since the pandemic, some governments have used the pandemic to drastically expand their powers.
Policymakers often prefer to adopt approaches that are more visible and appear to initiate change faster – such as supporting foreign leaders that align with democratic values and pouring billions of dollars into short-term interventions. Of course, national leadership plays an important role in good governance and peaceful societies, but local community groups, activists and individuals are often the ones moving the needle day-by-day toward Sustainable Development Goal 16: “Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all, and build effective, accountable, and inclusive institutions at all levels.”
Local groups not only understand the present and historical context in which they live, but they also know what their communities need most urgently, are trusted by community members, and are the first to respond to events. However, these civil society groups often lack funding, capacity, political support, and recognition.
That’s why Partners Asia focuses all of their work on supporting local leaders who serve the needs of “invisible populations” along the Thailand-Myanmar border, including refugees, migrants, ethnic minorities, and LGBTQI individuals. Through grants and leadership support, they are investing in grassroots civil society that promotes migrant and ethnic minority education, gender equality, community development, women’s financial inclusion, leadership, and cross-border cooperation. For example, they trained one local partner, Fortune, on research techniques for their mobile phone app. Fortune’s app helps refugees and migrant workers in rural Thailand navigate the path to citizenship so that they can have access to health care, education, justice, worker’s rights, and freedom of movement – basic human rights.
Partners Asia supports partners focused on education of Rohingya children in refugee camps in Bangladesh. Photo credit Partners Asia.
Similarly, Pangea Giving also supports community grassroots organizations in Myanmar and five other countries around the world through grants and long-term partnerships. Because Myanmar experienced a military coup in February, Pangea Giving no longer publishes details about their partners there in an effort to protect them. However, their work and partnerships continue, and they’ve also begun hosting webinars with other NGOs to discuss ways to support civil society, community groups, and democracy movements in the country.
Civil society also plays a critical role in providing sustained support to communities that are experiencing protracted violence and humanitarian crises. Yemen is the gravest example of this – a country that has been named the world’s worst humanitarian crisis and suffered the largest cholera outbreak in modern history since a political conflict broke out in 2014. When news cycles move past these crises and political will wanes, groups like the Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation (YRRF) are still there, advocating for support. Specifically, YRRF works to increase the awareness of U.S. policymakers and the public about Yemen’s humanitarian crisis, it supports relief and reconstruction efforts through fundraising, advocacy, and material support, and it facilitates campaigns to bring an inclusive and just peace to Yemen.
YRRF supports relief and reconstruction efforts in Yemen. Photo credit YRRF.
But, as mentioned before, the space for civil society is shrinking. Venezuela is just one example of a country in which civil society is increasingly being repressed. On March 30, the Venezuelan Ministry of Interior and Justice published a new mandate that requires all NGOs and nonprofit organizations to disclose sensitive information about their activities, including the identities of individuals and communities that they serve. According to a statement signed by 85 organizations, including Women’s Link Worldwide, this measure is “the latest in a string of actions intended to restrict and intimidate civil society organizations, especially those that receive support from international donors.”
Women’s Link Worldwide advances the human rights of women and girls through advocacy, litigation, and the development of new legal theories and strategies, particularly ones that highlight women’s rights violations that are undocumented or neglected. For example, in 2019, Women’s Link Worldwide won a groundbreaking case in which the Supreme Court of Colombia ruled that “Venezuelan migrant girls and women, due to their vulnerable status, cannot be denied healthcare.” By representing a teenage girl, who had migrated from Venezuela, became a victim of sexual assault, and was denied access to desperately-needed medical services, Women’s Link Worldwide paved the way for more migrant women and girls to get the sexual and reproductive health services they need. Additionally, they helped to build up key infrastructure for democracy, like a more robust and inclusive legal institution and access to health care.
Unfortunately, a country’s journey of democracy usually isn’t straightforward. Ethiopia’s democracy, for example, is at a crossroads as the pandemic-delayed elections are scheduled for June. Since last November, Ethiopia’s government – led by a Nobel Prize-winning prime minister who promised massive democratic reforms – has been embroiled in conflict with forces loyal to the former ruling party, composed of members of an ethnic minority group, the Tigrayans. There have been reports of major human rights abuses and civilian massacres by both sides, as well as attacks on independent media and arbitrary arrests by the government.
Among those watching is the World Justice Project (WJP), an independent, multidisciplinary organization working to advance the rule of law around the world. Through survey research and engagement activities, the World Justice Project updates an annual index that ranks 128 countries according to how the rule of law is experienced and perceived. Such indices can be an important tool for mapping progress or decline and advocating for change. “Effective rule of law reduces corruption, combats poverty and disease, and protects people from injustices large and small,” WJP says. “It is the foundation for communities of justice, opportunity, and peace—underpinning development, accountable government, and respect for fundamental rights.”
Reinvigorating the push for global democracy is a centerpiece of President Biden’s foreign policy. So much so, he promised to host a global “Summit for Democracy” during his first year in office to renew countries’ commitments to fight corruption, defend against authoritarianism, and advance human rights. Although COVID-19 might force Biden to postpone his widely anticipated Summit into 2022, there seems to be a renewed determination to push back, because as civil society groups know all too well, persistence is the only path toward peace, justice, and inclusive societies.
The following Global Washington members are helping build peaceful, inclusive societies.
Chandler Foundation The Chandler Foundation’s mission is to promote good government, fair marketplaces, and flourishing communities through investments and partnerships. The foundation invests in social purpose organizations that are working with government, civil society, and the private sector in the areas of: Transparency, Accountability and Anti-Corruption; Evidence-Informed Policy Making; Business Enabling Environment, Land Governance, and Digital Identification—all towards improving opportunity for all.
Covenant House International Covenant House International is the largest charity in the Americas serving and advocating for youth facing homelessness and trafficking. The organization builds a bridge to hope for these young people through a continuum of care that includes shelter, education, job training, medical care, substance-use treatment, parenting support, and legal aid in 31 cities and 6 countries: Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Canada, and the United States. Covenant House sites in Latin America have provided training for thousands of agents of each country’s national police forces as well as lawyers, judges, and civil society organizations on understanding, identifying, and preventing human trafficking and on defending human rights for youth. In Guatemala, the organization played a key role in creating a special prosecutor’s office on trafficking within the national government (Fiscalia contra la Trata de Personas) and in securing passage of a national migratory code with a human rights lens rather than a solely security lens. In Honduras, Covenant House’s Child Rights Observatory documents the violence and trafficking committed against youth in Honduras. Their reports are published and circulated widely to international governments and organizations, and their staff present regular testimony to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in Geneva.
Landesa Landesa champions and works to secure land rights for millions of rural women and men experiencing poverty, to promote social justice and provide opportunity. Gender-equal and socially inclusive land rights are a foundation for expanding economic opportunity, creating social and economic empowerment and growing prosperity for women, men, and communities. And more prosperous communities lead to more peaceful societies.
Landesa is working alongside the Government of Liberia and civil society to implement the landmark 2018 Land Rights Act, which strengthened land rights for historically marginalized groups, including women, youth, and rural communities. The Land Rights for Sustainable Development project partners with Liberian CSOs Development Education Network – Liberia (DEN-L) and Foundations for Community Initiatives (FCI) on programming to build awareness of the new law, improve community engagement and inclusive leadership in land governance, and strengthen alternative dispute resolution practices to peacefully address disputes over land. The project also includes robust training and capacity building resources for DEN-L and FCI to carry out their vital missions to improve lives and livelihoods for Liberians. In Liberia and elsewhere, access to justice, dispute resolution and rule of law are foundational to Landesa’s global land rights work. Learn more about Landesa’s work in Liberia.
Northwest Immigrant Rights Project Northwest Immigrant Rights Project has been defending and advancing the rights of immigrants in Washington State since 1984. As the largest legal-services organization serving low-income immigrants and refugees in the Pacific Northwest, NWIRP believes that all people deserve access to justice, protection from violence, and the opportunity to stay together with family, no matter where they were born or how much money they have. Each year, NWIRP serves over 10,000 community members through direct legal representation, community education, and systemic advocacy throughout their four offices in Seattle, Granger, Tacoma, and Wenatchee.
Oxfam America Oxfam America views protecting civic space as a critical component of all of their work across programmatic and advocacy areas. They define “civic space” as the oxygen for citizen’s voices—it is the set of formal and informal conditions that determine whether and how citizens are able to speak out and act based on their global universal rights. When present, civic space forms the background for civic activity and exercise of fundamental rights to free expression, assembly, and association. However, when the supply becomes constricted, the absence of civic space becomes an existential threat to free and open societies where citizens can exercise power over decisions that affect their lives. The ability of people to organize and speak out without fear is critical to shifting the balance of power that reinforces inequality and injustice. Oxfam works to influence attitudes towards the role and value of civil society and civic space in all our work, contribute to civil society partners’ resilience and effectiveness, build political support for positive legal frameworks or reforms in national and global multilateral spaces, advocate for protections of advocates under threat, and cultivate champions and more prominence for civic space in discourses from regional and global institutions and actors.
Pangea Giving Pangea Giving is a robust community of members and supporters who invest their financial and human resources and are passionate about helping others in developing countries. The contributions of individuals are pooled to collectively make a significant impact through our member engagement and grantmaking program. Pangea invests internationally in social change and dynamic leadership in grassroots organizations. They stand in solidarity with ethnic minorities and indigenous communities in the face of marginalization in their own countries.
Partners Asia For over 20 years, Partners Asia has taken a trust-based approach in their relationships in and along the Myanmar/Burma border. They invest in community-led solutions supporting invisible populations, support coalitions & communities of practice for investing in local leaders, and advocate for a shift in philanthropic practices towards equitable partnerships.
Partner Asia’s current work in Myanmar illustrates how they work: they strongly believe that the best way to support Myanmar’s fight for democracy and justice is to continue to connect, resource, and support local organizations and their leaders as they respond to the ever-changing situation to meet both immediate needs and longer-term strategic aspirations. It is vital that partners know that they are not alone, despite the threats around them, and that they have access to the kinds of flexible funding that enables them to serve their communities in protecting basic rights and assisting the most vulnerable to stay safe. As a result, they feel more secure in otherwise tenuous circumstances, and to remain strategic, resilient players in the bigger picture: building a better, freer future for the peoples they serve. And when it comes to those who invest in Partner Asia’s work, their donors see themselves as allies in shifting power and deconstructing systems that perpetuate injustice and marginalization.
PeaceTrees Vietnam PeaceTrees Vietnam is a humanitarian demining organization dedicated to peacebuilding and addressing the legacy of war in Vietnam. Since normalization between the US and Vietnam in 1995, PeaceTrees has removed more than 110,000 items of unexploded remnants of war and cleared over 3,000 acres of land. Working alongside communities in central Vietnam, PeaceTrees returns safely cleared land to productive use by investing in education, accident assistance, community building, and agriculture. Importantly, PeaceTrees also invests in citizen diplomacy travel, bringing delegations of travelers from the US to Vietnam to build friendships, plant trees, and celebrate together in the spirit of peace and reconciliation.
Tostan Tostan empowers communities to develop and achieve their vision for the future and inspires large-scale movements leading to dignity for all. Tostan’s human-rights based Community Empowerment Program (CEP), a three-year, holistic education model has already engaged more than 5 million people in eight African countries. Tostan’s Peace and Security Project, which is part of the CEP, first strengthens peace-building at the community level by reinforcing vital conflict prevention and management skills. Participants learn improved communication and problem-solving skills and also work to peacefully resolve community and familial conflicts by identifying the root of the problem and engaging in deep listening, and creating an action plan together. Involving religious and traditional leaders is also part of the process and is leading to unprecedented results.
Community partners also learn and apply strategies for fostering peace and human security across their social networks, which often cross national borders. Tostan connects grassroots communities and their larger social networks with regional and international institutions. This increased collaboration helps regions and nations work together to identify barriers to the peace and security of their area and create solutions for addressing those barriers.
Women’s Link Worldwide Women’s Link uses the power of the law to promote the human rights of women and girls, especially those facing multiple forms of inequality (poverty, race, sexual identity, migrant status and more), in contexts throughout East Africa, Latin America and Europe. We take on legal actions with the potential to address systemic rights violations and that can lead to the elimination of barriers that women and girls face in accessing their rights – particularly access to justice, sexual and reproductive rights and the right to live free from gender-based violence. We design tailored legal strategies that we execute in coordination with national civil society groups. These partnerships support and deepen the impact of our legal efforts and strengthen in-country capacity to implement resulting standards or decisions. The legal actions we undertake serve as platforms to complement and bolster the work civil society is doing to push public debate, build movement and achieve policy wins, as well as contribute to creating sustained changes in the legal, political and social environments required to uphold women’s human rights.
Vista Hermosa Foundation The Vista Hermosa Foundation seeks to resource organizations in the United States, Mexico, East Africa, and India to build healthy, flourishing communities. They work in places where history and experience have taught people either to act individually and look out for one’s own survival, or that they have nothing to offer. These lessons tear at the social fabric, leaving civil society weak and ineffectual. Their partners heal the roots of human connection – to self, others, God, and creation – to build a strong foundation for a civil society that works for every member of the community.
In Haiti, years of environmental and humanitarian exploitation, and the urban concentration of power means that farmers and rural communities struggle for resources and perceived as backwards and unvalued in society. Partenariat pour le Développement Local (PDL) brings men and women farmers together to heal their relationships through sustainable agriculture, elevating the important role and responsibility of farmers, and farmer-to-farmer education and support. As a result, PDL’s farmers have been able to attend regional development meetings and advocate for their vision for their communities. PDL’s founder Cantave Jean-Baptiste declared this might be the first time development officials ever heard farmers’ voices!
All Vista Hermosa Foundation partners work to empower local leaders and build up communities to see that they have inherent value and worth, and that they are capable of flourishing if they work together. At Vista Hermosa, they believe that only when each person sees their role and value in the Dream of God can we build peaceful and inclusive societies.
World Justice Project The World Justice Project is an independent, multidisciplinary organization working to advance the rule of law around the world. Effective rule of law reduces corruption, combats poverty and disease, and protects people from injustices large and small. The World Justice Project conducts survey research and engagement activities in 125 countries and maintains a global network of strategic partners
Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation The UN calls the situation in Yemen the largest Humanitarian man-made crisis in the world. Over 16 million people are food insecure and 2.5 million are under 5 years of age. Outbreaks are rampant including the largest cholera outbreak in recorded history, dengue, diphtheria and sever acute respiratory infections including COVID19 with the highest fatality rate. Asymmetric warfare complicates humanitarian assistance. Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation (YRRF) through an informal network with hundreds of Yemeni volunteers negotiating passage through competing armed checkpoints focused on concrete, lifesaving action. YRRF, working through this informal network of indigenous volunteers, and civil societies has successfully provided services to address the major issues including food, education, health, water, and income generation to many areas, especially those hard to reach in remote villages and internally displaced families. In 2020, YRRF has succeeded in delivering various relief activities throughout Yemen. Yemen has multiple combatants within its territory, with competing systems for aid distribution and healthcare delivery. YRRF has developed an efficient and cost-effective technique for managing those complex environments while delivering care to fragile, and often displaced, populations in a war zone.
World Justice Project: Promoting Accountable, Just, and Accessible Government
By Joanne Lu
Workshop participants at WJP’s 2019 World Justice Forum in The Hague. Photo credit World Justice Project.
The mission of the World Justice Project (WJP) is to advance the rule of law worldwide. It sounds like a tall order, especially in this global political climate, with increasing authoritarianism, human rights violations, and attacks on democracy. But what is “rule of law,” exactly? Why does it matter? And how does WJP promote it?
What exactly is “Rule of Law”?
Although politicians routinely exploit the term to justify repressive and oppressive measures, rule of law, properly defined, doesn’t actually permit those kinds of abuses. Instead, Ted Piccone, WJP’s Chief Engagement Officer, describes rule of law as a “durable system” with four key elements – 1) accountability to the law; 2) just law, meaning laws should be clear, publicized, equitable, and protect fundamental rights; 3) open government – How are laws written and enforced? Is it fair, efficient and accessible?; and 4) accessible and impartial justice delivered by competent authorities.
According to Piccone, these elements are “drawn from centuries of human experience, back to the [ancient] code of Hammurabi,” and are the result of many years of consultations with experts from around the world. Although it is internationally recognized as a necessary principle of good governance, unlike human rights, there are no treaties on rule of law at the international level, and inadequate understanding of this means we need a more comprehensive definition.
That’s why Bill Neukom, former president of the American Bar Association and general counsel at Microsoft, founded WJP in 2006. Recognizing that rule of law is the foundation of peace, justice, equity, and economic development in communities, he thought the best way to advance it was to bring together people from diverse sectors to develop pragmatic solutions to rule-of-law challenges.
Bill Neukom, 2017 GlobalWA Global Hero Award Recipient speech.
WJP’s Rule of Law Index
WJP is best known for is its annual Rule of Law Index, which ranks countries based on how rule of law is experienced by average citizens and expert practitioners. For example, do people have access to court? Do authorities adhere to due process? Is corruption effectively controlled? Getting this data in the hands of policymakers, donors, academics, business leaders, media, and civil society actors helps those people identify challenges and solutions. It also, to some extent, generates pressure on political leaders to improve.
The Rule of Law Index is just one tool that WJP uses to engage with people from various sectors to promote change. This last year, for example, the pandemic illuminated gaps in rule of law globally and, in many cases, exacerbated them. In terms of accountability, many governments issued a slew of strict emergency orders and provided little opportunity for legislatures to ratify those restrictions and for courts to adjudicate them. When it came to fundamental rights, marginalized groups around the world, including Asians in the U.S., faced discrimination, xenophobia, and racist attacks. Access to justice, legal services, and remedies were restricted. And, while some governments threw huge amounts of money at a pandemic response, few safeguards were put in place to ensure the money wasn’t corrupted or misspent
“The COVID-19 crisis really brought home how far away we are from strong rule of law societies,” says Piccone.
WJP spent the last 15 months closely tracking these impacts of the pandemic on rule of law around the world. Then, they designed a competition: the 2021 World Justice Challenge. They asked practitioners in the field to submit their solutions to these challenges, with a $20,000 cash prize for six of the best projects. Altogether, they received 425 submissions from 114 countries. Thirty finalists had the opportunity to promote their work on WJP’s website and at regional showcases and engage in cross-learning. Then, in May, a panel of judges chose five winners, with an additional winner by popular vote within the WJP network.
Thirty finalists from around the world were selected in the 2021 World Justice Challenge, drawing on 425 submissions from 114 countries. Projects were chosen for their impact in advancing the rule of law in four thematic areas affected by the COVID-19 pandemic: access to justice for all, accountable governance, fundamental rights and non-discrimination, and anti-corruption and open government. Image credit World Justice Project.
The winner in the Access to Justice for All category, for example, was a project by Justice Defenders, which provided prisoners and prison staff in Kenya and Uganda online training to become paralegals so they could defend themselves and others. They also linked prisons to courts so that judges could hold virtual hearings during COVID-19 when courts were closed.
Another winner, of the Ruth Bader Ginsberg Legacy prize, was a project called Inua Mama Fua by the Dhobi Women Network in Kenya, which took a multidisciplinary approach to defending the rights of informal women domestic workers in the suburbs of Nairobi. During the pandemic, the women have been unable to fend for themselves and have been arrested law enforcement officers for loitering and littering, as they sit around neighborhoods in hopes of getting a day’s worth of work. The project provided emergency social services, like counseling, food and cash transfers, and helped educate police officers on the hardships the women face.
In Honduras, the winner in the Anti-Corruption and Open Government category audited $80 million of national emergency purchases, including COVID-19 tests, ventilators, biosecurity gear, and mobile hospitals. Their investigation led to the arrest of a government official for misuse of public funds.
“These are projects that have real impact on the ground,” says Piccone. “That was one of the criteria for picking the winners, along with their potential for scaling and replication.”
Although this year’s competition is now closed, WJP plans to continue examining the effects of COVID-19 on rule of law around the world. It expects to analyze those dynamics in the next edition of the Rule of Law index in October, which will include 140 countries, up from 128 last year.
Looking Forward
WJP also plans to continue the discussion of the pandemic’s lessons for governing at the next bi-annual World Justice Forum on May 30 – June 2, 2022 in The Hague. They will take stock of how the pandemic has led to a regression on global progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially SDG 16, which is about peace, justice, and strong institutions. And they plan to dig deeper into the root causes of the systemic injustices that we saw during the pandemic, including unequal protection under the law for some people and lack of equal access to government services.
“The pandemic unveiled a range of rule of law problems,” says Piccone, “and we have to get to the root cause of them.”
Rose Berg-Fosnaugh is Leaving a Lasting Inspirational Legacy
By Joanne Lu
Rose Berg-Fosnaugh is the definition of a changemaker. Throughout an impressive career that spanned various roles, Rose fought for equity and social justice in Washington and around the world. She did so most recently as the Director of Advocacy and Communications at the Chandler Foundation. And she did so up until the moment her life was tragically cut short by a brain aneurysm on May 13.
A Seattle-area native, Rose’s career began in journalism as a local radio editor and reporter. In 1991 she watched law professor Anita Hill testify before Congress during the confirmation hearings for Justice Clarence Thomas, whom Hill accused of sexual harassment. In that moment, she decided she needed to do more to create change for women in the world and made the switch to politics to get women’s voices into leadership. In 1992, she helped “mom in tennis shoes,” Patty Murray, win her first term in the U.S. Senate. Nearly three decades on, Murray is still a U.S. Senator representing Washington. She will be running for her sixth term in 2022.
It was also in the early ‘90s that Rose met Bill Gates, Sr., and her personal mission entered the global stage. She helped set up the Gates Foundation’s communications and advocacy programs in its early days and continued to work with them as a consultant for more than 20 years. During that time, she also ran her own firm and held senior leadership positions in several large international public relations agencies, including APCO Worldwide, Edelman, and Weber Shandwick. At Weber Shandwick, she ran the firm’s West Coast Social Impact practice and became the inaugural recipient of the Ranny Cooper Award for Exceptional Leadership.
It was a rewarding chapter in Rose’s career as she worked on issues that included water, sanitation and hygiene, vaccine equity, and financial services. But by Rose’s own account, working toward change in those large organizations was a difficult and slow process. She was ready for something new.
In September 2019 she met Tim Hanstad, CEO of the Chandler Foundation. The foundation had stepped out from complete anonymity just a few years prior and rebranded in 2018. Tim was looking for someone to elevate the brand and lead the foundation’s advocacy and communications work. But his was a tall order: He needed someone who could set up strategy, was entrepreneurial, who could work on a small team, and hold a very senior position.
“As they sometimes call it in the human-resources field, I was looking for a purple squirrel,” says Tim. He found all these qualities and more in Rose.
The Chandler Foundation was also exactly what Rose was looking for – a smaller, more nimble organization that could work quickly to create systemic change. She was excited to work on the root causes of societal challenges. She loved connecting with partners in governments across the globe, making them more accountable to people, and rebuilding people’s faith and trust in government.
Rose officially joined the Chandler Foundation in November 2019. She helped move the foundation from having close to zero public presence to becoming an active participant and thought leader in global philanthropic circles. She developed the foundation’s Thought Leadership Plan and Communications Manual, organized events that reached tens of thousands of people, launched a growing social media and digital presence for the foundation, and led the development of Social Investor magazine into what it is today.
The idea for Social Investor was conceived by the foundation’s living donor, Richard Chandler, who wanted to inspire other philanthropists to give more thoughtfully and strategically. Rose helped with the second issue, published last year. But the upcoming third issue in many ways will be a tribute to her legacy, honoring her vision and input. At the direction of Rose, the magazine will have a strong focus on equity, including racial equity, gender equity, and vaccine equity. It will feature more storytelling to make very technical issues more relatable and accessible to people, and it will be disseminated more widely in print and digital form.
According to Tim, the Chandler Foundation would not have the influence it does today without Rose. “Her expertise and rich relational network was key to the very fast progress that we’ve made,” he says.
Rose is often described as a connector, who made strong impressions quickly, even over Zoom.
“I’ve only met Rose in-person twice,” says Leslie Tsai, Chandler’s Director of Social Impact, “because she started with us shortly before the pandemic started. But she quickly became the fourth person on my speed-dial after my husband, my mom, and Tim. She was full of warmth, humble, and connected with others naturally. She was always eager to make conversation and to get to know somebody beyond just that professional encounter.”
Rose often shared about her life on Bainbridge Island, her husband of 40 years, her children and granddaughter, her book club, and her personal passion – riding horses. In fact, on the day she had her aneurysm, she was preparing to ride her horse. “She was getting ready to do what she loved,” says Leslie.
“She just exudes warmth and light and calmness that draws you in,” says Tim. “She had this gift of human connection that often made people say, ‘Wow, she could be my best friend’ after meeting her for the first time.”
Without a doubt, Rose has left a legacy that not only spans continents but also continues to inspire the people around her. She created partnerships, encouraged philanthropists to be more thoughtful, and used her voice and position to be a champion for others.
As she often told her interns, whom she so loved to work with, “You’re going places, my friend.”
Please welcome our newest Global Washington members. Take a moment to familiarize yourself with their work and consider opportunities for support and collaboration!
NetHope
NetHope empowers committed organizations to change the world through the power of technology. This consortium of nearly 60 leading global nonprofits unites with technology companies and funding partners to design, fund, implement, adapt, and scale innovative approaches to solve development, humanitarian, and conservation challenges. Nethope.org
Sukarya USA
Sukarya helps educate and empower marginalized children, adolescent girls, and women by giving them access to non-formal education, primary healthcare, and economic opportunities while ensuring gender equality at the grassroots level through Sukarya’s programs in more than 600 villages and 100 slums in Delhi, Haryana, and Rajasthan in India. Sukaryaus.org
Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, Chief Executive Officer of Mercy Corps, has worked with farmers in Africa and with world leaders like President Barack Obama and Bill and Melinda Gates. She has grounded her career in the simple belief that, no matter where someone is born, no matter where they live, they should be able to lead a thriving and successful life.
The United Nations General Assembly is this week, and quite frankly, I’m not looking forward to it. It’ll be another circuit of high level meetings and catchy headlines telling the world that we’re falling even further behind in our attempt to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (sadly, we are… and 
Rose Berg-Fosnaugh is the definition of a changemaker. Throughout an impressive career that spanned various roles, Rose fought for equity and social justice in Washington and around the world. She did so most recently as the Director of Advocacy and Communications at the 
