After school program in middle school in Oudomxay province, Lao P.D.R.. Photo: A Child’s Notebook
In the pursuit of achieving Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) – Quality Education, A Child’s Notebook, an organization dedicated to empowering rural villages in Laos, stands as a shining example of commitment and innovation. Their multifaceted approach, centered on partnerships, infrastructure development, and complementary programs, is not only transforming the lives of thousands of children but also addressing some of the most pressing challenges in the field of education.
(Seattle, WA – November 16, 2023) Global Washington (GlobalWA), a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization whose mission is to support the global development community in Washington State, announced today that Pat Garcia-Gonzalez, Chief Executive Officer of The Max Foundation, will be recognized as the 2023 Global Hero.
Global Washington’s Board of Directors bestows a Global Hero award each year to an individual who has made a significant contribution to the global development community in Washington state. This is considered a life-time achievement award. This award is given to one person in our GlobalWA community who has shown years of dedication to improving lives in low- and middle-income countries.
Since 2011, GlobalWA has annually recognized Global Heroes for their dedication and achievement. Past Heroes have included Bill Gates Sr., Chris Elias, Jerilyn Brusseau, and Bill Neukom, amongst others.
“Your extraordinary dedication to cancer survivors and overall health equity is a shining light and inspiration to others. The Max Foundation has thrived under your leadership and determination to reach those in need with practical approaches and cutting-edge innovation,” stated Kristen Dailey, Executive Director of GlobalWA.
Under her leadership, The Max Foundation has provided life-extending medication, treatment, and care to more than 100,000 patients for more than 20 years. Pat is known for her passionate advocacy and dedication to providing access to treatment and diagnostics for people, especially the most vulnerable, living with cancer worldwide. Since its establishment in 1997, the foundation has grown from a website offering resources into a global model for providing access to diagnostics, treatment, medication, care, and social support. The Max Foundation today channels over 10 million doses of life-saving cancer treatment to patients each in 77 LMICs, partnering with a worldwide network of more than 500 physicians and 200 hospitals and medical institutions, as well as several local NGOs and patient associations.
For questions about this announcement, please email Joel Meyers, Director of Communications of GlobalWA at comms@globalwa.org.
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ABOUT GLOBAL WASHINGTON
Global Washington supports non-profit organizations, businesses, foundations, and academic institutions in Washington state working to improve lives in low- and middle-income countries. We connect, promote, and strengthen our members, increasing their impact and advancing a vibrant, innovative, multi-stakeholder network. Our work is driven by the desire to create a more equitable, healthy, and prosperous world. Learn more at globalwa.org.
ABOUT THE MAX FOUNDATION
The Max Foundation is a leading global health nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating health equity. For 26 years, Max has pioneered practical, scalable, high-quality solutions to bring life-extending treatments and patient-centered health care to more than 100,000 people living with cancer and critical illness in low- and middle-income countries. Max believes in a world where all people can access high-impact medicines, where geography is not destiny, and where everyone can strive for health with dignity and with hope. Learn more at themaxfoundation.org.
The World Food Programme estimates that 345 million people are facing acute food insecurity in 2023, and that the proliferation of armed conflict and civil unrest are the main drivers. Tragically, this will only increase in the coming months with recent wars and long-standing political instability in countries around the world. Critical emergency food relief will be needed as the first step to get communities on a path to food security defined in Sustainable Development Goal 2 of Zero Hunger.
Several Global Washington members work in conflict regions on immediate humanitarian issues and longer-term programs to create sustainable systems for health and nutrition. Other members are addressing food security through programs that leverage local systems and indigenous knowledge. Please read more about these interventions and others below in this month’s issue brief and featured articles. This month’s Organization Spotlight on the S M Sehgal Foundation was written by our Communications Director, Joel Meyers, and features pictures and videos he took – we hope this also helps convey the incredible type of work our members do.
I also hope you can also join us at our Annual Goalmakers Conference. Our virtual day will be on November 30 and our in-person day will be December 7 in Seattle. This is a wonderful opportunity to come together with peers to learn and re-charge for 2024. Our theme is “Advancing Transformative Philanthropy” as we build on last year’s conference about co-creation for better and more equitable programs in global development. More information can be found here.
One Step at a Time: Targeted Community Engagements to Combat Food Insecurity
By Aneesh Chatterjee
Children eating a meal at their school; Ghana. Photo: Bill Wegener/Unsplash
For Mebrhit Hailay, a 28-year-old resident of Shire, Tigray, providing at least one meal a day for her three children had proved to be the exception, not the norm. A BBC investigation into the region’s hunger crisis published in August 2023 shed light on the catastrophic effects of rampant starvation on Mebrhit and others like her – people affected directly by prolonged drought, civil conflict and the increasing scarcity of aid deliveries to the region. In its sixth consecutive year without adequate rains, Ethiopia sits at number two on the International Rescue Committee’s 2023 Emergency Watchlist; an estimated 28.6 million people in the country are in need of humanitarian aid, with 20 million of them suffering from food insecurity. The 2022 Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC) categorized over 400,000 Ethiopians under Phase 5 of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), designated as “Catastrophe/Famine” – the most dire of the IPC’s classifications for measuring food insecurity in a region, and the highest number of people to be placed under Phase 5 in the history of the GRFC.
Although one of the most extreme, food scarcity in Ethiopia is just one example of a widespread global crisis. In 2021, the GRFC estimated that up to 193 million people across 53 countries and territories were in IPC Phase 3 or higher (ranging from meeting bare minimum food requirements to extreme starvation). As of 2023, the World Food Programme estimates that up to 345 million people across the world are grappling with prolonged hunger crises, with military conflict being the largest catalyst for exacerbated food scarcity, followed closely by climate change impact and skyrocketing agricultural costs. The Global Hunger Index predicts that, even with efforts undertaken to meet Sustainable Development Goal 2 (Zero Hunger), the SDG’s 2030 target for eliminating global hunger is, at the moment, far from feasible.
Even so, institutions working to address hunger are targeting the issue at every level of engagement – from innovating systematic resilience to providing on-the-ground aid relief. The following GlobalWA members are bringing high-impact changes through grassroots interventions in affected communities.
Relief in Crisis
While the growth of communities is dependent on sustainable self-reliance, some members conduct interventions to stabilize victims of war and communal violence, displaced and without access to basic necessities. UNICEF conducts interventions across a range of sectors to address child nutrition. In Sudan, UNICEF has delivered 2,300 megatons of health and nutrition supplies to displaced populations as a result of war and kept 80% of malnutrition centers in Sudan operational. Beyond providing medical supplies, WASH assistance, building safe spaces for children, and keeping child protection as a priority, UNICEF’s interventions for food security ensured the safe delivery of 1,440 cartons of Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food to over 300 children at an orphanage in Khartoum.
Mercy Corps is also a leader in critical relief programs through emergency responses. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the SAFER project brought vital food assistance to over 9,500 families cut off from access to their farms after escaping communal violence in the towns of Nyankunde, Komanda, and Makayanga. The SAFER project, in accompaniment with a transitional assistance program called PHASE, helped families stabilize and meet their nutritional needs while regaining access to their fields, learning alternative farming methods, and accessing markets with provisioned vouchers at organized food fairs.
Communities Building Self-Reliance
Launched in 2014, the Urban Slum Health Action Programme (USHA) by Sukarya USA works to identify and treat malnutrition and anemia, with a focus on mothers and children up to five years of age. Targeting 22 slums across Delhi and Gurugram, Sukaraya collaborates with Wipro Cares, Fidelity International, and OYO Cares to address infant mortality and maternal health, and build community awareness regarding nutrition. The USHA program holds cooking demonstrations with nutritionists to encourage sustainable eating habits and teach frugal meal-planning.
Alongside nutrition, the program focuses on immunizations, holds sanitation workshops to promote personal hygiene and WASH best practices, and conducts regular in-house visits to ensure that communities are benefiting from the program’s activities. Prioritizing the health of mothers and children, the 2021 Rural Health Action Program (RCHA) continues to address anemia and malnutrition in Haryana and Rajasthan, with support from Bird Group. Across their programs, Sukarya teaches low-cost, nutritional recipes, distributes necessary supplements (e.g. iron, folic acid, calcium, and vitamin A), sets up medical camps for blood tests, counseling and maternal support, promotes health and nutrition awareness in schools, organizes Self Help Groups (SHGs) with women for processing cereal, and conducts regular nutrition demonstrations in targeted communities.
In Sri Lanka, UNICEF provides cash to eligible families to fortify their buying power and build resilience against hunger; this provision accompanies information on breastfeeding, infant nutrition practices, and advice on how to best ensure the child’s dietary needs. UNICEF also facilitates the provision of meals to over 18,000 students across 652 preschools in Sri Lanka with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In Uganda, UNICEF conducted information sessions and cooking demonstrations for mothers, using infographic charts to teach the proper and timely identification of signs that their children may be malnourished. The outreach program acknowledged that mothers play a critical role in ensuring child nutrition and encouraged the involvement of local mothers themselves in ensuring the program’s reach and impact.
Landesa works to legitimize land ownership in rural communities as a way to combat food insecurity. With their Land Rights for Sustainable Development II Project in Liberia, Landesa is facilitating the formalization of land, consulting on legal and policy-making matters, and building awareness of land ownership laws and rights within communities through radio broadcasts following the passing of a land rights law in 2018 that sought to recognize and protect the rights of up to 3 million Liberians. Landesa also conducts advocacy and consulting projects in Tanzania and Zimbabwe, prioritizing legitimate land ownership as a vital defense against food scarcity.
Another organization focusing on land ownership is Argos International. Prioritizing the effective utilization of land as a core defense against the hunger crisis, Argos also teaches communities sustainable practices to build independent resilience. In San Jose City in the Philippines, Argos has assisted families by teaching them drip irrigation, demonstrated the efficacy of greenhouses and other sustainable farming technologies, and enabled them to earn their land ownership rights, securing long-term income and food security. With families acquiring land rights in as little as three years, the intervention in San Jose is one of Argos International’s most successful projects.
The Hunger Project (THP) conducts widespread interventions in communities across Africa, South Asia, and Latin America to address hunger. In Benin, for example, THP has promoted their Epicenter Strategy to mobilize rural communities, enabling them to better pool their resources, and allow greater representation for the local government. Beyond systemic changes, THP implements Soil Protection and Rehabilitation (ProSOL) in Benin, teaching farmers sustainable agricultural practices to prevent reductions in crop yield. Their Early Childhood Nutrition and Development Project (PNDPE) provides emergency food relief for children, reliable meals for school students to encourage greater nutrition and more consistent attendance, and advocating for policies with greater attention to childhood malnutrition. The Epicenter Strategy is also used in Mozambique, Senegal, Uganda, Ghana, Malawi, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, and Zambia.
In Mexico, THP has partnered with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to bring multiple micronutrient supplementation (MMS) and essential nutrition action (ENA) interventions to the states of Puebla, Estado de México, Yucatán, Chiapas, Oaxaca, and San Luis Potosí. Alongside an initiative to promote and preserve traditional cuisine practices in partnership with Starbucks, THP uses these interventions to provide nutritional needs for mothers and children under five.
Innovation for Food Security
Aside from direct interventions to engage with communities, other members have brought critical innovations in technology, machine learning and data utilization to strengthen targeted communities against food insecurity.
Developing specialized technological solutions for idiosyncratic issues is a strategy adopted by Mercy Corps. To relieve residents in rural Uganda of the arduous acquisition of firewood for cooking meals, the Technology Development (T4D) team at Mercy Corps designed a solar-powered cookstove in collaboration with Pesitho, called ECOCA, bringing the product to the Bidi Bidi settlement in Uganda, housing over 270,000 Sudanese refugees. With enough battery power for three meals a day, and equipped with portable lights and USB charging ports, the ECOCA eliminates the long hours required for firewood gathering and allows locals to focus their efforts on community engagement, socialization, or work.
Another Mercy Corps initiative in Uganda is the digital needs wallet, developed in association with Sempo, enabling residents to make purchases with digital currency using their phones and facilitating greater access to food markets through participating vendors. Furthermore, the digital wallet enables faster and more secure transfer of funds for financial assistance programs, reducing the risks associated with using tangible cash. The wallet takes advantage of widespread mobile phone usage and broadband network coverage in Uganda; 65.7% of Ugandans use mobile phones, and 80% of the country receives coverage. Due to low usage of smartphones in the region, the digital needs wallet is built to be operable on older device types as well.
Leveraging the importance of understanding systems when addressing food insecurity, DE Design + Environment delivered workshops on agricultural risk mapping for the Inter American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), targeting Trinidad, Tobago, and Guyana. From the identification of risk factors and hazards to their specific implementations in the targeted regions, the four-module workshop provided the IICA with impactful, applicable insight on the challenges facing the agricultural sector. Risk maps developed for each region emphasized the importance of building resilience against hazards to fortify agricultural success and long-term food security. For Guyana, DE analyzed the country’s main agricultural sectors (i.e. fisheries, livestock, produce, sugar, and rice), identified specific risk factors faced by these sectors (e.g. flooding and heavy rains leading to overflow as a result of poor drainage and irrigation systems), and provided data-backed risk maps for each hazard listed for every agricultural sector in all three targeted countries.
Grow Further also brings technological innovation in building resilient food security. Targeting the agriculture sector of Tanzania, the program seeks to address significant losses in the country’s maize and bean yields due to crop diseases and pests, two of the region’s staple ingredients. By using machine learning and building an accompanying mobile app, Grow Further aims to develop a system that can identify at a much earlier stage the probability of crop disease, allowing farmers to identify potential hazards early and enjoy more stable yields, greater income, and bolstered food security. The project aims to provide data-driven identification assistance to 400,000 farmers within two years, and up to 5 million farmers in 20 years.
Members display sharp focus and cultural sensitivity in their grassroots engagements, developing solutions that are best suited for the specific needs of their given target regions. Direct interventions, whether they be critical aid delivery in crisis, raising awareness about best nutritional practices, or the development of technologies to strengthen a community, are the first and most important move in changing the grander state of food security across the world.
In addition to the above organizations, the following GlobalWA members are working on SDG 1 No Poverty and SDG 2 Zero Hunger to establish Food Security through their programs in communities where they work.
Threats to food security come from a variety of social, economic, and environmental factors that must be consistently monitored to create evidence-based policies to support sustainability. The SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) and various MEAs (Multilateral Environmental Agreements) are in place to demarcate collectively agreed upon targets and indicators to support sustainable development and food provision. DE is an internationally recognized company that specializes in environmental data acquisition, analysis, processing, and reporting for sustainable development, whether it be for national progress on MEAs and SDGs or corporate sustainability performance (ESG). The DE team works extensively in the Caribbean and Latin America with SIDS (Small Island Developing States) to support their national sustainability governance and alignment with global targets.
DE was founded in 2005 and has steadily built a reputation for innovative and creative solutions to environmental challenges with information analysis and design as well as software design. Clients include the United Nations, World Bank, Global Environmental Facility, CARICOM, the IISD (International Institute for Sustainable Development), and several national governments and NGOs. The goal with all DE work is to pursue the company mission to “Solve problems using design and environmental science”.
Future of Fish believes new models and approaches are desperately needed in order to deliver coordinated fishery transformation at scale. That’s why they work to generate systemic change in fisheries through a progression of coordinated activities developed in collaboration with stakeholders whereby stocks are managed more sustainably, fishery communities maintain resilient economies, and fishers and seafood workers benefit from improved social equity and livelihoods.
The mission of Grow Further is to empower farmers, scientists, and individuals to create a food-secure future. We put out open-ended calls for agricultural R&D grant proposals, seeking the best ideas from around the world to help smallholder farmers adapt to climate change and improve nutrition and farm income. We select proposals with the best strategies to reach a large number of farmers per dollar invested. We listen to farmer needs, and engage our individual and corporate donor members, who come from different professions and parts of the world, in the value judgments around choosing among the finalists. For scientists, we support projects that other funders have overlooked in areas like neglected and underutilized crops and IT in agriculture. For donors, we provide an answer to the simple question, ‘I want to support the future of food security. How do I get involved?’ We’re currently supporting CSIR-Savanna Agricultural Research Institute in Ghana in farmer engagement, breeding, agronomy, and strategic partnerships to develop the first ever commercial variety of Bambara groundnut, a nutritious and climate-resilient bean with great potential. We’re also supporting NM-AIST in Tanzania in developing a machine learning-based app for smallholder farmers to identify maize and bean diseases early.
Heifer International is ending hunger and poverty in a sustainable way by working with farmers to improve productivity, diversify their businesses and increase incomes. With a living income they can provide quality food for themselves and their families.
Landesa champions and works to strengthen land rights for millions of those living in poverty worldwide, primarily rural women and men, to promote social justice and provide opportunity. Secure rights to land encourage smallholder farmers to invest in sustainable practices—like irrigation technologies, terracing, fallowing, and agroforestry—that conserve soil and boost crop yields to feed the world, growing the path toward zero hunger.
Formal land rights increased agricultural productivity by an average of 40% in a meta-analysis conducted across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In Kenya and Rwanda, Landesa is laying the foundation for millions of smallholder farmers—women and men—to break free from the cycle of poverty and hunger. Through the Agricultural Systems Change Initiative, a partnership with One Acre Fund and Co-Impact, we seek to strengthen land rights for 6 million rural households and transform the agricultural sector so smallholder farmers can increase their productivity and income. The initiative simultaneously works to shift gender norms and ensure equitable access to agricultural markets for women, who produce a significant portion of the world’s food yet often lack the same resources as men.
Oxfam’s mission is to fight inequality to end poverty and injustice. That’s why they work with women small-scale farmers, local food entrepreneurs, and Indigenous Peoples to strengthen local food systems and to steward precious natural resources that agriculture relies upon. Oxfam advocates for stronger governmental policies that protect the land and rights of smallholder farmers, small business owners and workers, and women who are often responsible for food in the home. And they tackle the tremendous power and influence held by large food and beverage companies that play an enormous role in the health and equity of our food systems—with massive implications for food security.
Spreeha’s work ending hunger and ensuring healthy lives
In alignment with Bangladesh’s priority areas around SDG 2: Zero Hunger, Spreeha aims at ending all forms of malnutrition, especially in under-5-years old children, adolescent girls, pregnant and lactating women, and elderly people from underserved communities both in urban and rural Bangladesh.
As an empathy-led high-impact organization, we are committed to chart a path toward empowering communities to transform and live a healthy and secure life.
Growth monitoring of U-5 children quarterly, providing nutrition education, connecting severely malnourished patients with doctors and nutritionists are regular activities conducted by Spreeha in all its project areas in Dhaka. Spreeha works on ensuring healthy and nutritious life for adolescent girls, pregnant and lactating mothers through community clubs where we emphasize nutrition education, healthy lifestyle choices, and treatment. We also focus on breaking gender stereotypes and busting myths about women’s health, food, and nutrition.
Spreeha’s high-scale food security project started during COVID-19 response supported ultra-poor families dealing with the surge in malnutrition and meal cuts due to income loss and disrupted supply chain during prolonged lockdown. The project served 50,000 people through monthly food support, nutrition screening, nutrition education, and treatment.
The Hunger Project is committed to creating a world without hunger. We facilitate individual and collective action to transform the systems of inequity that keep hunger in place. Through holistic and integrated programs, Hunger Project participants lead change in their communities and our world.
Investments in the resiliency of communities are key to addressing food security. Climate change, conflict, economic shocks and growing inequalities are putting pressure on our food system’s capacity to produce and distribute nutritious and affordable food. We work with smallholder farmers to strengthen their production capacity, decreasing reliance on external inputs, and diversifying livelihoods. We are working with farmers to reintroduce indigenous crop varieties and foods into their businesses. The inputs for these crops are often more accessible and they tend to be resistant to local diseases and pests.
We are also working with local leaders to educate communities about nutrition, particularly for maternal and childhood health. Through advocacy through our Right2Grow program and a partnership with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Humanitarian Efforts, we facilitate training workshops about nutrition for both children and mothers and the importance of pre- and postnatal care, as well as facilitate opportunities for on-going child health and weight monitoring.
S M Sehgal Foundation: Food Security, Women’s Empowerment, and Rural Sustainability
By Joel Meyers
Shashank Devra (left) with his implementation colleagues and farmer (second from right) in Nuh, India for the agriculture intervention demonstration. Photo: Joel Meyers
I was blanketed by the humid, 92° F day as I stepped out of the air-conditioned white SUV onto the rutted and sun-dried path. Shashank Devra, program lead for the Implementation Team at S M Sehgal Foundation (Sehgal Foundation), guided me toward his colleagues, who arrived in another SUV and a couple on motorbikes, and the local farmer we were scheduled to meet with for my visit.
We were in the rural sub-district of Nuh in the state of Haryana, India, about an hour and a half drive south from Sehgal Foundation headquarters in Gurugram (Gurgaon). Gurugram is a planned city, 30 kilometers SW of Delhi, a modern complex of glass, chrome, and brushed metals that houses some of the most influential tech companies in India, including offices for the likes of Google and WeWork. However, Nuh was mile after mile of smallholder farms, small brick-and-mud storage huts, massive piles of organic debris, and a peppering of small trees with the occasional shrub, all accessed by paved and rutted dirt roads.
According to Shashank, the Sehgal Foundation team chose Nuh for this particular farming project because it is the most “underdeveloped district in the State of Haryana” based on government criteria of income, health, and other factors. The region is considered an “aspirational district,” which the Sehgal Foundation team considered an ideal place to implement the agricultural interventions and economic empowerment programs they had arranged for me to see, based on my question, “Are there projects local to Delhi that will demonstrate how Sehgal Foundation is addressing the challenge of food insecurity?”
I only had one day, and I am glad they brought me here.
Shashank Devra, program lead for the Implementation Team at Sehgal Foundation talks about farmer school interventions with a smallholder farmer and Sehgal Foundation colleagues. Video by Joel Meyers
Rooted in social impact for 24 years
S M Sehgal Foundation was founded in 1999 by visionary entrepreneurs and philanthropists, Dr. Suri Sehgal and his wife Edda Sehgal. The foundation promotes sustainable rural development that respects human dignity, protects the environment, and promotes social justice by working with rural communities in India to help them achieve self-reliance and build their capacities.
Sehgal Foundation has 300 employees and partners with hundreds of corporate, government, and academic institutions and individuals. Their work has impacted over four million people in 12 states, in more than 2,000 villages. They have expanded their reach by 40% in the last five years and have the goal to keep expanding.
I spoke with Anjali Makhija, Trustee and CEO of Sehgal Foundation, earlier that morning at their energy-efficient headquarters in Gurugram. Anjali has been working in rural development for the past 23 years, since she joined the Sehgal Foundation.
“Local participation and partnership with these local communities is critical for the sustainability of any program,” she said.
Anjali Makhija (center), Trustee and CEO of S M Sehgal Foundation, Pooja Oberoi Murada (left), Principal Lead for Outreach for Development, and Joel Meyers, Director of Communications for GlobalWA.
She continued, emphasizing the goal of Sehgal Foundation to “empower communities and farmers who are confident citizens who make smart decisions” about farming techniques, farm mechanization and technology (ICT), and soil nutrition.
“We work to help people help themselves. We work with the people, not for.”
Sehgal Foundation’s Agriculture Development Program, a key and crucial component for ensuring food security and sustainability in India, has “interventions” to build capacities of farmers, including women farmers, and improve agricultural practices. Additionally, the agriculture program trains farmers and helps them implement new technologies that increase crop yields, conserve water, and improve soil fertility.
India is becoming a model for sustainable food production driven mainly by the National Food Security Act of 2013, which starts with the premise: “The basic concept of food security globally is to ensure that all people, at all times, should get access to the basic food for their active and healthy life and is characterized by availability, access, utilization, and stability of food.”
In fact, Anjali pointed out that India has become self-sufficient for food production, seeing a six-fold increase for food production from 1950–2020, and has become a net food exporter.
But, according to Anjali, the challenge is how to sustain this trajectory, especially with climate change. “Climate change is a real challenge—how do we keep up food production and enumeration, as well as keep the farmers interested?”
Their local farming and empowerment programs strive to address this, and, from what I was witnessing this day, they are succeeding.
Through the agriculture interventions, Sehgal has helped farmers understand water conservation, efficient drip irrigation and micro-sprinkler techniques, proper soil nutrition with locally available fertilizers, thus increasing yields 40-50% which also allows increased economic savings. These model demonstrations spread naturally through word-of-mouth through the community of local smallholder farmers. Photo: Joel Meyers
Creating strong women leaders
Empowerment of women is a key aspect to all their programs. “We have programs to empower women to be leaders for water in farming and farming techniques, in governance, in schools, and in leadership positions,” Anjali said.
I was able to visit one of these communities of empowered women in Nuh later that day. Nine women from Nuh and neighboring villages gathered to meet with me and talk about their experience.
Shashank and local women farmers; Shashank talks about the women empowerment program and how the program trains women about leadership, public speaking, supporting the local farmers, including animal husbandry. Video by Joel Meyers.
Shashank informed me that “these women are selected based upon their willingness to work with the [male] farmers and be active participants, then we provide them with leadership training. We start the training with confidence building and communication so they can communicate with other farmers, other villages. We then train them in agriculture techniques such as laser leveling, crop demonstrations, soil micronutrients, animal nutrition and benefits, based upon the season and needs. They then assimilate this information to fellow farmers and farmers in other villages.”
With this new confidence and knowledge, they are empowered leaders who can provide ongoing support, in essence becoming leaders in their communities.
I was invited to sit with the local community women farmers. Photo: Shashank Devra
Expanding knowledge to smallholder farmers
At the farm in Nuh, Shashank introduced me to his team, and the farmer, who smiled in shy pride. Shashank led me along a pathway bordering a trellis of lush zucchini vines with row upon row of black PVC tubing along the plants’ stems, interconnected and culminating at a junction at one end of the field. He spoke to me, with translated comments from his colleagues and answers from the local farmer, of these rural smallholder farmers’ need for more efficient watering methods—exactly what Sehgal Foundation had introduced here.
Micro sprinkler systems provide more efficient and consistent irrigation for the smallholder farm. Photo: Joel Meyers
With Sehgal Foundation’s help, and a small investment by the farmer, the farmer selected and purchased the piping and valves to provide concentrated, specific plant-stem watering to take the place of traditional flood irrigation. Flood irrigation is a method of watering, allowing the monsoon and/or piped water to flood the planted fields—a rough and imprecise method that often washes the away the seeds; and after the rain ends, the soil dries out too quickly. Using the drip irrigation of cistern-caught rainwater instead, this farmer had experienced a 40% greater yield and cost savings. (He used his new savings to purchase, plant, and water new fields in this new way.) At the field of zucchini, they showed me how having the vines elevated, and by putting down long rows of plastic sheeting the stems grow through, that the shade and plastic drastically inhibits water evaporation through the soil.
Shashank explains the new farming techniques, pointedly the drip irrigation, the savings gained, and increased production. Video by Joel Meyers
Along with this new low-cost and efficient watering technique, the Sehgal Foundation team teaches farmers how to locally source the materials as well as new macro- and micronutrients for their fields. This keeps the economies local; empowers farmers to take care of their land, using knowledge backed by science and data; creates greater yields; increases farmer family savings, and influences other farmers to learn based on these local successes.
A path guided by data and analysis
India and the world are fraught with changes in the climate and the ensuing challenges for farming and food production; these factors threatens food security that ensures their communities are fed with sustainable and nutritious crops. Sehgal Foundation is a model organization that is not only guided by governmental and UN principles, but also, and primarily, their foundational mandate of social impact. Their programs empower women, farmers, and local communities to be self-sustaining, and the work is backed by community dialogue, impact assessments, data gathering, and data analysis—all especially important as conditions continue to evolve with climate change. Rural India has a true partner with Sehgal Foundation.
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S M Sehgal Foundation has been a GlobalWA member since 2022. Sehgal has been working since 1999 to improve the quality of life of the rural communities in India. As a rural development NGO, established as a public, charitable trust, Sehgal Foundation has a skilled and dedicated team that creates sustainable programs to address rural India’s most pressing needs: Sehgal Foundation has five main program areas: Water Management, Agriculture Development, Local Participation and Sustainability, Transform Lives one school at a time, and Outreach for Development. These programs are supported by a skilled research team that engages in participatory research, impact assessment, and interactive dialogues to determine informed actions to achieve sustainable results. Read more about Sehgal Foundation
Gilbert Kamanga, National Director for World Vision Kenya, has a lot to be grateful for. Born in a small village in Malawi, Kamanga grew up in a family of six. As he puts it, poverty was not a stranger in his community.
“But I thank God that through education, I was able to get some employment.”
With faith as his motivator, Kamanga pushed himself to achieve more. He studied at the University of Malawi and went on to earn his masters in Rural Social Development at the University of Reading.
Kamanga started his nearly 30 year journey at World Vision, a Christian humanitarian relief and development organization, by “growing within the ranks from a field officer to the executive level where I am now.”
Before becoming the National Director for Kenya, Kamanga was the National Director for Tanzania, Malawi, and Uganda. As the National Director, Kamanga ensures that the strategy for World Vision in Kenya is developed, financed and implemented effectively.
“But the key to the role is to ensure that as World Vision will remain true to the cause,” says Kamanga. “When I see children from very humble families living a better life, this, to me, gives me hope.”
“And,” Kamanga adds, “the fact that World Vision does not just come and go in a community also gives me hope. Because we believe that development requires going alongside the people and takes long time. And to me, that’s what motivates me to keep going.”
For Kamanga, the issues closest to his heart are the empowerment and uplifting of women and children in communities.
“I started thinking a long time ago, if you want to change society today, in Africa or anywhere, it sounds like a cliché, but it’s not a cliché, it’s a reality: focus on women and children.”
Drawing from his own experience, Kamanga remembers how his mother worked hard to ensure the family had enough to eat.
“To achieve a critical mass, work with women and youth, because if you have a critical mass, you cannot ignore what is in front of you.”
Throughout his long career at World Vision, one program stands out to Kamanga as a point of pride, and a goalpost for the future: THRIVE.
Developed by World Vision in 2013, the THRIVE program is aimed at building both improved and resilient livelihoods for smallholder farmers in different countries around the world.
Kamanga was there for the first large scale test model that launched in Tanzania and then expanded to Zambia, Malawi, Rwanda and Honduras. The program served about 375,000 people in about 75,000 smallholder farming families in those five countries.
THRIVE is World Vision’s livelihoods model that uses a multifaceted approach, with a focus on shareholder farmer communities, to help families lift themselves out of poverty.
One area is the business aspect of farming, which includes for example, understanding markets, utilizing sustainable conservation methods, but even some ideas not directly related to farming, like organizing communities into savings groups.
The program also uses education to teach the natural resource management systems of farming, and develop situational awareness to prepare for environmental shocks like plant disease and climate change.
But the foundation of the program, according to Kamanga is the ‘empowered worldview’ pillar, a biblically-based approach that addresses the problem of disempowerment and fatalism by tackling the issue of personal “agency”: helping people understand that they do have the capacity to control their own lives. The curriculum also addresses stewarding natural resources, providing compassion to people within your own family and community, and envisioning a powerful future for yourself and your family.
“So unlocking the positive aspects of various components of their faith, was, for a lack of better term, the ‘secret sauce’ of THRIVE,” says Kamanga.
“Because we have seen that in Africa, where faith is a central part of daily life, when you start discussing with people issues of their faith, and how that relates to them, it gives them hope, because then they see who they are in the bigger scheme of things.”
A recent evaluation conducted by TANGO International on THRIVE showed that over the course of the seven year study, THRIVE household annual incomes rose from $138 a year to $1,370 a year, and that “families used the money to improve their children’s education, housing improvements, medical care, and investments in their businesses.”
40% of families participating in THRIVE reported more food security, reporting that they could provide for the basic needs of all children in their families.
Now, World Vision is seeking to expand the THRIVE model to reach 10 million people in 11 countries by 2030. The focus is on helping the extreme poor—those who earn less than a dollar a day—rise up out of poverty and build improved and resilient livelihoods.
Kamanga and World Vision believe it is completely possible to end extreme poverty within our lifetime. In 1982, over 36% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, now, it’s 9% and falling.
For Kamanga, the path to ending extreme poverty is shorter than we think. With 2 of every three people living in extreme poverty in the world today being smallholder farmers, the best question to ask is, “How do we help smallholder farmers make a lot more money in agriculture?” And it begins with faith, commitment, and collaboration.
“So what am I saying is that if we commit today, at an individual level, to contribute to ending extreme poverty, we will end it. Because we have the tools. We have the knowledge. We have the expertise to do it.”
Please welcome our newest Global Washington members. Take a moment to familiarize yourself with their work and consider opportunities for support and collaboration!
Delta Air Lines
Delta Air Lines, one of the world’s oldest airlines in operation, operates over 5,400 flights daily and serves 325 destinations in 52 countries on six continents. Delta’s charitable giving program – marking $50.5 million in 2022 – adjusts to meet ongoing societal needs, from dedicated programs to protect the environment, pursue equity and expand education to relief support in natural disasters, humanitarian crises and health emergencies. esghub.delta.com/charitable-giving
Perennial
Perennial’s work sits at the intersection of leadership, social justice, and human development. Our mission is to support global social leaders in rejuvenating and sustaining themselves within the frameworks of their communities, leadership roles, causes, and personal lives. With close to two decades of engagement spanning Africa, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East, and having impacted thousands of individuals, Perennial has discerned that in these intricate and demanding times, a leader’s paramount skill lies in their capacity to resonate internally with their purpose and externally with the individuals and communities they are dedicated to serving. perennial.org
Worldwide Fistula Fund
Worldwide Fistula Fund is a global health nonprofit that provides free, surgery, treatment, prevention and rehabilitation programs and services to women and girls suffering from obstetric fistulas in sub-Saharan Africa. Worldwidefistulafund.org
Sulesa, of Ikongosi Village, Mufindi District, Tanzania, received her land certificate through a program supported by Landesa and her local government. Photo by Landesa.
For communities across the Global South, the impacts of climate change are not abstract projections but concrete realities that threaten their land and food security. The final installment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) assessment points to grim consequences should the world fail to meet the 1.5 degrees C target for warming—and even a 1.5 degree pathway would leave nearly 1 billion people experiencing increased risk of drought. The recent World Food Day on October 16 held grim significance for the millions already experiencing climate-related food insecurity.
By Halima-Tus-Sadia, Head of Growth and Karishma Tahsin, Communications Manager at Spreeha Foundation
Mother feeding her children in the community. Photo: Spreeha Foundation
“My son Rizbi is three and a half but he didn’t look like one, he was severely underweight. He used to fall sick, frequently. Since the COVID-19 happened, our income reduced significantly. I was at a loss about what to feed my son and how to help him. Then I took him to Spreeha healthcare center. We also got food support from them. Now, my son is better than ever…”
– says Rizbi’s mother Nipa. Her son is no longer malnourished since she joined Spreeha Nutrition Program in Dhaka
In the bustling heart of Rayerbazar, Dhaka, a once-underdeveloped area faced a troubling dilemma – undernourished children, reduced incomes due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and food insecurity. The story of Rizbi, a once severely underweight 3-year-old, reflects the transformative impact of Spreeha’s Nutrition Program. Through dedicated community health workers, monthly food support, and guidance on nutrition, children like Rizbi are now on a path to better health.
Grow Further founder and CEO Peter Kelly, center, surrounded by researchers at the CSIR-Savanna Agricultural Research in Ghana. Photo: Kwekwe Photography
At Grow Further, we “connect people and ideas for a food-secure future.” But what does this motto mean?
For an individual or company, the answer is simple. When they ask us, “I want to support the future of food security; how do I get involved?” we have a very clear answer for them. You can not only support agricultural research and development projects with potential for outsized long-term impact, but also engage, learn, and participate in our work if you so choose.
Shipra, a Sukarya volunteer for 25 years, showing a nutritional lentil blend, safely packaged and well-labeled. Photo: Joel Meyers
“Food systems are defined by political decisions and the differential power of actors to influence those decisions”
– Olivier de Schutter, UN special rapporteur on the right to food from 2008 to 2014
The food system needs to become a public health priority. Developing policies and regulatory frameworks should be an integral part of the country. This will be ensured by establishing and implementing effective food safety systems.
A safe food system can ensure that the food supply is of high nutritional quality by enforcing regulations that promote nutrition, nutritious food, and accurate labeling, and consumers should be well informed to make the right choices for safe food handling. When consumers have confidence and appropriate knowledge of the food they consume, they are more likely to choose a balanced meal.
This year, the world is coming together to chart a path toward a more sustainable and equitable food system — a system that can meet the demands of our ever-growing population and is resilient to environmental shocks.
Having spent my career working on food systems, I can easily say that never before have we seen such an outpouring of global engagement on this important topic. Typically, conversations about improving food systems focus on complex, commercial agricultural systems, delivering products from farm to table, often across borders. Nearly six billion people around the world find nourishment from these complex, commercial food systems, dominated by global agribusinesses that are responsible for producing a massive amount of food for our planet’s people.
Now in its ninth year of conflict, Yemen remains the largest humanitarian crisis globally, with 24 million people out of the population of 30.5 million in need of humanitarian assistance. The conflict has left 4 million people, including 2 million children, internally displaced, and at least 500,000 public sector workers have been without salaries for over six years.
Sustainable Development Goal 8 aims to create lasting, inclusive economic prosperity and decent jobs for everyone. Achieving this goal advances other important goals, such as reducing poverty, improving quality education, and creating sustainable cities and communities. However, we are not on track with creating sustained economic growth in many countries around the world. We are at a moment of time to prepare for the future and train youth in jobs that will provide a decent wage and allow communities to thrive.
GlobalWA members are addressing barriers to economic growth on various levels, including skill development, investments in entrepreneurs, and community support. Reaching full and productive employment for all is the primary aim of SDG 8 and our GlobalWA members are working with partners to achieve this goal. Read more about this work in this month’s issue campaign.
Technology is often essential in preparing for future jobs, both in the Global South and in the U.S. Our GlobalWA members are starting to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance their ability to deliver services. GlobalWA will have a members-only event in October about AI and one of our keynote speakers at our Goalmakers Annual Conference will address this issue. We will email members more information about the October event soon and registration for the annual conference is open to all. You can register for our Goalmakers conference here. We hope you can join the conversation.
Training for Prosperity: Transforming Workers and Communities from Poverty to Self-Reliance
Ethiopian farmers at market. Photo: Erik Hathaway/Unsplash
By Aneesh Chatterjee
Building a system of sustainable economic prosperity and employment opportunities afforded to all, the core of Sustainable Development Goal 8, is a process designed to impact other sectors of development in tandem – such as the alleviation of poverty, the promise of Goal 1. With global unemployment projected to reach 208 million in 2023, alongside accelerating costs of living, solutions that empower workers with skills and opportunities can not only address the goal of sustainable economic growth, but actively raise underprivileged groups out of poverty.
2021 insights revealed by Our World in Data’s SDG Tracker show that on a global scale, despite recorded annual growth rates in GDP per capita across many nations, the annual changes in real GDP per employed individual – a measure of how well a country’s resources are being utilized by their labor force to maximize productivity – shows mixed results, with more instances of reduction in some countries. The Tracker also reveals rising unemployment rates, even in countries that reported substantial growth in their GDP. The effective utilization of the world’s workforce remains one of the greatest roadblocks – and opportunities – for enterprises seeking to manifest the tenets of SDG 8 and opens pathways to escape poverty.
GlobalWA members display steadfast innovation and care in their strategies to build systems of economic success, starting with people themselves.
Training the Future: Skills Development Vital for Goal 8
Members have built high-impact enterprises to deliver solutions across a myriad of sectors and focus areas. A common priority is providing people around the world with the high-demand skills and entrepreneurial flexibility that economic prosperity demands. Across sectors, our members have prioritized the inculcation of valuable skills, and the pursuit of connecting people with resources, as powerful forces of change in economically underprivileged communities.
Microsoft, supporting over 250 nonprofit organizations worldwide, addresses the goals of SDG 8 through high-value skills training, STEM platforms for developing solutions to crises, investing in digital infrastructure, promoting workers’ rights through social accountability, and joining forces with impactful partners to maximize efforts toward economic resilience.
Microsoft’s Skills for Jobs program aims to teach digital sector skills to nearly 10 million people by 2025, partnered with the African Development Bank to train local labor forces and enable them greater career flexibility. With up to 220,000 youth having benefited from training, the enterprise also offers a Digital Ambassador program with 500 trainees. Beyond Skills for Jobs, Microsoft partners with UNESCO alongside other contributors to facilitate the Global Skills Academy, an enterprise that provides vocational and technical training across 150 countries, in an effort to provide millions of potential graduates with opportunities in education, employment, and financial freedom. The Academy aims to equip large sections of the global workforce with skills fit for a more sustainable, diverse and robust global economy by 2029. Other training initiatives supported by Microsoft, such as the i.c.stars initiative to provide low-income adults with skills and education in tech-oriented career fields, and the gener8tor program, providing digital skills training to low-income people of color across the US, exemplify Microsoft’s dedication to inculcating a resilient and adaptable workforce across nations and sectors. Involved in 40 partnerships to deliver education and training resources, Microsoft works alongside other enterprises to fortify the capacities of governments in enabling access to learning resources for local communities.
While organizations like Microsoft work through motivated partnerships to support a plethora of cross-sector initiatives, other members adopt specialized focuses in select industries to maximize their impact and engage intimately with the communities in their target regions.
Transformative Education: Specialized Approaches
One organization working to develop economic resilience at the individual level is the S M Sehgal Foundation. Focused on developing the agriculture sector, Sehgal’s diverse considerations span across water infrastructure, community engagement, crop technologies and beyond. Through engagement and training in 2,061 villages across India, Sehgal directs communities and individuals, not just away from financial struggle, but toward long-term economic prosperity.
Reaching people in communities isolated from resource access and encouraging greater participation in local infrastructure is one strategy deployed by Sehgal. Their Local Participation and Sustainability Program aims to build the foundations of economic resilience and autonomy in rural communities in India by engaging directly with locals and connecting them with regional agencies and government programs that they may not be aware of, enabling them access to resources otherwise unreachable. With an additional, specialized focus on empowering women in these communities, the program provides a discourse platform for women to bring up and address community issues, learn valuable leadership and communication skills and become more autonomous in their abilities to access resources and government services.
Sehgal’s Agriculture Development Program promotes capacity-building; by training farmers to develop their income streams through diverse entrepreneurship skills, locals are taught to implement more lucrative business models, build resilience through food security measures, and introduced to more effective cultivating techniques for greater yield and subsequent income. Field demonstration sessions are conducted to train farmers first-hand on the benefits of pesticide control, soil testing, seed-sowing, biofuel usage, and other sustainable practices designed to mitigate risk and maximize potential yields.
For Mercy Corps, access to training and resources is equally critical for personal growth and economic stability. The Gaza Sky Geeks program, funded by USAID and established by Mercy Corps, grants a platform for tech sector skills development and education in Palestine, working toward sustainable and prosperous career opportunities for Palestinian youth. Gaza Sky Geeks offers comprehensive coding courses, freelancing opportunities, digital marketing training and a startup incubator program, leading to substantially increased access to economic growth: a cumulative $5 million in earnings reported by program graduates, and a 99% success rate for program-trained job applicants.
Building financial resilience in the Pacific Islands is Rise Beyond the Reef, through their Traditional Contemporary Arts & Crafts Program. By helping women and girls generate income from traditional artisan products, especially those in particularly isolated communities, the program connects skilled workers with reliable markets, teaches leadership and autonomy, and builds financial independence for women facing gender-based marginalization in the realm of income opportunities. Operating across nine islands, the program offers a viable alternative source of income for families dependent on traditional agriculture; with goods ranging from handmade jewelry to canvas prints, home decor, clothing and a myriad of other artisan products, crafters now have access to tourist markets.
The Arts & Crafts Program pays workers at rates between 55-65% of Fiji’s minimum wage, working to ensure that cash transfers are handed over individually, tracked with receipts and remain consistently inclusive of labor costs and raw material expenses. Beyond paying workers, the program invests in every area of the supply chain: training workshops for villagers, production equipment, product development consulting, marketing for artisan goods (including paid social media ad campaigns), reliable tagging and shipping of orders, and subsidized transportation of products to relevant markets. Rise Beyond the Reef exemplifies comprehensive and culture-conscious economic empowerment, building reliable systems for long-term financial prosperity.
The Hunger Project (THP), founded to free struggling regions from poverty and starvation, conducts high-impact interventions to grow the financial capacities of individuals and communities. Operating in 12 countries across Africa, South Asia and South America, projects focused on the poverty crisis prioritize women for skills training and connect them with credit sources, building up their abilities to stimulate local economies. Novel income streams like sewing and cow-fattening are introduced to help diversify cash flow, providing workers with tangible routes to alleviate financial burdens.
In tandem with capacity-building for labor forces, members acknowledge the importance of technology in transforming a workforce. For a more sustainable and dynamic global economy in the near future, training the workforce with adaptive technologies in mind is proven essential by GlobalWA members.
Versatile Technology: Adapting through Barriers
Understanding that economic prosperity demands that solutions be adapted to the capabilities of digitization, financial inclusion is another development priority for Mercy Corps. With over 1.7 billion adults in the world without legitimate bank accounts, Mercy Corps recognizes the value of technology in connecting people to valuable financial resources – particularly when increasing access to banking services has correlated with reductions in dire poverty. A study of financial inclusion tactics in Jordan brought to light the JoMoPay (Jordan Mobile Payments) Mobile Wallet, a method of connecting Jordan’s population – over 60% of which is unbanked – with formal financial services, legitimizing their incomes and increasing resource accessibility. Mobile wallet alternatives have also been deployed in Syria, where they’ve helped to bridge the separation of traditional financial freedom from marginalized groups.
Incorporating training with technological innovation is the Global Mentorship Initiative. Their fully remote mentorship program, accessible worldwide, connects students with industry professionals to foster versatile, transferrable soft skills across multiple sectors, generating a talented and adaptable workforce. With a 76% success rate for students finding employment after graduating the program, a large number of testimonials from past students demonstrate the value of the program, both in the realms of career success and personal development.
In the realm of education, a similar project is Mercy Corps’ MicroMentor. A platform connecting upcoming entrepreneurs with volunteer mentors, MicroMentor facilitates vital access to assistance with business development and helps mentees implement and grow their enterprise effectively – a venture with resounding success, according to their 2022 Impact Report. By partnering with Verizon Small Business Digital Ready and Grab Indonesia, MicroMentor has attracted 95,000 new entrepreneurs and 21,000 mentors in 2022. By partnering with Grab, a mobile app providing versatile services, MicroMentor was able to reach over 9 million users in Indonesia with opportunities to develop their trade and access entrepreneurial possibilities. Their partnership with Verizon also helped them reach over 140,000 prospective and established entrepreneurs in the US. As of 2023, the platform is the recipient of a $1 million grant from Google.org, with full-time developmental support to build MicroMentor’s first proprietary mobile app, enabling unparalleled access to millions of users across the world.
The aforementioned Agriculture Development Program by the S M Sehgal Foundation also develops agricultural practices through technology. With subsidized prices, farmers are provided machines that can reduce manual labor input, increase reliable consistency in yield and performance, and eliminate uncertainties. Farmers are trained on safe machine operation and encouraged to develop their income by renting out machines as well.
Other members have developed resilient and innovative products to fortify communities. The Talking Book, developed by Ampilo, is a robust device built to deliver educational content to remote regions, providing people with vital opportunities for literacy. A cost-free option with hours of audio content in multiple languages, Ampilo’s product breaks barriers to education access for underprivileged groups.
While some members use industry-leading technology solutions for delivering training and education to labor forces, others prioritize developing the regional infrastructure of target communities to be legitimized, well-represented and best-equipped for the future economy.
Philanthropy and Representation: Legitimizing Infrastructure
Infrastructure development is a key priority of the S M Seghal Foundation. Through the empowerment of farmer-producer organizations, Sehgal promotes stronger, more reliable access for farmers to credit, supply chain management, resources and technologies that ensure the most fruitful output. Beyond finances, Sehgal trains farmers on water conservation through multiple practices, ascertaining an approximate reduction in water consumption by up to 85% in some communities – a vital improvement in regions where water scarcity poses a crippling challenge to basic infrastructure.
Adopting a similar strategy, the Rural and Agricultural Finance Program (RAFiP) by The Hunger Project, successfully completed in Ghana in 2017, empowered rural workers with access to micro-financing and built representational legitimacy by organizing farmer groups into cooperatives. The program organized 60 cooperatives, connected 876 people with bank loans and facilitated training on agricultural methods and microfinancing for 14,774 farmers. The infrastructure of community banks were fortified with software upgrades and computers, and 22 credit unions were legitimized through registration with the Credit Union Association of Ghana.
Beyond legitimizing workers through cooperatives, THP also prioritizes the inculcation of independence. Their Epicenter Strategy seeks to empower communities by inculcating sustainable self-reliance, implemented in nine African countries. By prioritizing the empowerment of women, encouraging collective effort and fostering connections with local governments, a community’s transformation toward self-reliance is measured through comprehensive data collection and evaluation of set indicators. Established THP epicenters provide progress reports that demonstrate a community’s efforts to meet specific targets, ensuring data transparency with regular community meetings. Since the establishment of the strategy in 2008, 68 epicenters across Africa have met the criteria for self-reliance and economic independence.
Another organization taking on broad sector development to drive economic growth is the Ventures initiative by Mercy Corps. Aimed to support and scale startups with capacities to benefit up to 3.3 billion disadvantaged people, Ventures has raised nearly $400 million for 43 startup enterprises since 2015, focused on building resilience for at-risk communities across a variety of developmental sectors – including agriculture, climate-smart technology, finance and food security. Bypassing traditional roadblocks to financial support, Ventures adopts decentralized cryptocurrency distribution with partner companies to ensure that recipients receive the funding they need.
A product of Mercy Corps’ Resilient Future Thesis, the Ventures program sees the climate-driven disruption of conventional systems of operation as a nascent opportunity to restructure processes into more sustainable methods, growing cross-sector resilience for a future certain to face the increasing complexities of climate change. By investing in sustainability-focused startup enterprises, Mercy Corps encourages further growth in climate-conscious industrialization, enables financial flexibility for new organizations in underdeveloped regions, and grants individuals the economic freedom to not only grow out of financial struggle, but apply their skills to further the development of their respective communities. Fund II, the next Ventures initiative, aims to invest in 30 startups working to develop resilience against climate change.
Utilizing the same approach is Capria, an investment enterprise working to stimulate entrepreneurship in the Global South. The Capria Ventures Global South Fund II aims to assist 20-25 startups across cities in India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Vietnam, Brazil, Mexico and Kenya, reaching close to their funding target of $100 million. Focusing on a broad range of sectors from climate development to fintech, logistics and healthcare, Capria’s beneficiaries will incorporate artificial intelligence to fortify their operations.
GlobalWA members demonstrate the value of approaching issues at every level of engagement – from multi-sector philanthropic partnerships, to industry-specific skills development and community legitimization. Understanding the requirements for Goal 8, organizations have prioritized the inculcation of in-demand skills, the unhindered access to education and mentorship, opening routes to funding opportunities to encourage entrepreneurship, and encouraging enterprises to adopt sustainable practices in every step of their mission.
In addition to the above organizations, the following GlobalWA members are working on SDG 1 No Poverty and SDG 8 Decent Work through their programs in communities where they work.
No poverty? Big scope, yet our partners have been working on this topic in Goma, eastern DRC, for twenty-plus years. Poverty is related to cultural practices, to land tenure, to education, to government, to a justice system based on rule of law, to peace–or lack of any of it. Goma has been an epicenter of conflict since 1992, off and on.
Our partners have targeted specific groups over the years: women with fistula, teen moms, domestic workers, internally displaced people. They have developed a team and integrated approach that begins with individuals being listened to, recognizing their own trauma, and growing a new community by being in a support group. It takes time to develop trust. Information is introduced gradually: how to prevent disease, sexual and reproductive health, small business practices, literacy, vocational training, saving circles that grow into credit/loan associations.
ACT for Congo accompanies our partners as they define and carry out their own vision for their community in Congo—Goma and Beni, in ways that respect individuals, encourage peace, and develop capacities in people to support themselves and their families. Our collaborations foster health, empower women and cultivate community.
Fundación Future of Fish Chile (FoF Chile) works to elevate convenience and innovation within the responsible seafood movement while “achieving higher levels of economic productivity through diversification” (SDG 8) in Chilean caletas, or small-scale fishing communities. When initiating work in a community, FoF Chile conducts extensive research to better understand the target fishery, with much emphasis placed on identifying and building alliances with local stakeholders in the region’s artisanal fishing sector. Through these partnerships, several tenets of SDG 8 are also advanced such as promoting formalization, a focus on value-added products, and the broader decoupling of economic growth from environmental degradation.
In this way, fisherfolk, aquatic food harvesters, and divers from different parts of Chile are encouraged to venture into responsible fishing— generating locally sourced value-added products, creating their own alternative markets, and identifying new and innovative ways to reach clientele. FoF Chile simply facilitates the stakeholders’ ideas and ensures that project specifications are in line with the principles of responsible fishing—that no IUU fishing takes place and that their harvest methods generate the least possible ecological impact. Equally important to FoF Chile’s work is promoting positive social outcomes, such as providing a fair income and advancing formal and transparent seafood trade throughout the value chain, including logistics, marketing, and gastronomic services. FoF Chile also believes that making stories visible to consumers, through storied fish with accessible technologies, our efforts are brought full circle and increase the growing movement of responsible seafood production and consumption throughout Chile.
Give2Asia’s steadfast commitment to poverty reduction is undeniable. Since 2001, they’ve channeled over US$535 million to empower 2,500 local charities in 30+ countries. Give2Asia grants span myriad facets of poverty alleviation, from supporting disadvantaged women in India with entrepreneurship opportunities to enhancing early childhood education in rural China to promoting sustainable natural resource management to livelihood farmers in Cambodia. Moreover, Give2Asia’s DisasterLink program, spanning 20 disaster-prone locations, unites more than 50 pre-positioned community-based organizations to support the most vulnerable populations when disaster strikes and promote disaster preparedness and resiliency.
GMI prepares underserved students and refugees to get their first job after graduation. This is accomplished through a structured, short-term, online mentorship with a business professional enhanced through the power of AI.
GMI has over 9,000 students and mentors registered, and we partner with 45 universities and youth associations in 92 countries. In 2024, GMI will add over 5,000 new students for mentorship. Microsoft has provided more than 700 mentors for the GMI program in the past year.
The mentorship program is designed to make it easy to be a great mentor without a significant time commitment. And it’s built to give students a consistent, high-quality experience.
Students learn how to present themselves to the business world, how to speak with confidence, and they are building a business network through LinkedIn. They learn how to set smart goals for their careers and how to think like a job recruiter.
GMI’s mentorship program introduces AI to graduating students to use in all stages of their job search. This includes preparing their resume/CV, building their LinkedIn profile, communicating with job recruiters, and interview preparation.
Global Partnerships (GP) is an impact-first investment fund manager dedicated to expanding opportunity for people living in poverty. Since GP’s founding in 1994 and the launch of its first fund in 2005, GP and its affiliated funds have invested in sustainable solutions that empower people to earn a living, provide basic necessities for their families, and improve their lives.
The investments aim to deliver clear and compelling impact in four dimensions:
Broadening opportunity across different facets of poverty including, but not limited to, economic opportunity, education, energy, health, housing, sanitation, and water.
Deepening inclusion of poorer and underserved people, including women and the rural poor.
Serving millions through sustainable and scalable solutions that can positively impact the lives of millions of people.
Improving lives by empowering people to earn a living and meet their basic needs.
GP does this while seeking to preserve capital with a modest financial return for all fund investors.
The SG Foundation has always supported SDG #1 – elimination of poverty. Over time since the establishment of the SG Foundation in 1984 we have come to focus on children and education as the best means of tackling poverty. Education, of course, does not simply entail getting children into school. It means having access to clean water, nutrition, and healthcare. It also connects with SDG #8 – decent work and economic growth. Jobs and income are much needed components to not only get children to school but keep them in school. In Central America (where SG works), many families depend on children to help in the fields or household or otherwise generate income. Staying alive necessarily trumps school. SG Foundation accordingly supports non-profits that help farmers, small businesses, etc., to generate family incomes. We favor working with women who are inclined to be more enthusiastic about educating their children, but our work is not exclusively with women.
We are excited to be a part of the Global WA program where we can connect with like-minded organizations seeking to make our world a better place.
Upaya Social Ventures is building a dignified economy by providing investment and support to early-stage businesses creating sustainable livelihoods for people living in the most extreme poverty. At Upaya, we believe that dignified jobs are a human right, and that dignified work has a catalytic impact on families, communities, and economies. That’s why we invest in early-stage social enterprises that are creating safe, stable, inclusive, and rewarding job opportunities for people living in extreme poverty.
Since our founding in 2011, Upaya’s portfolio companies have created over 30,000 dignified jobs across India.
World Vision is committed to ending extreme poverty. One of the markers for positive change is World Vision’s livelihoods model, Transforming Household Resilience in Vulnerable Environments (THRIVE) in Tanzania. THRIVE is designed to equip families to lift themselves out of poverty through building improved and resilient livelihoods that enable significantly better incomes, food security, and child well-being. A recent evaluation conducted by TANGO International on this program showed significant improvements when comparing endline data (2020) to baseline data (2013).
THRIVE household annual incomes skyrocketed to a reported $1,370 a year from $138 a year— 9.93 times higher than at baseline. Families used the money to improve their children’s education, housing improvements, medical care, and investments in their businesses. 40% of families participating in THRIVE were more food secure than control households at endline. The percentage of THRIVE households reporting that they could provide for the basic needs of all children in the household increased from 46.8% at midterm to 60.2% at endline. At endline, 85.7% of THRIVE households reported they could obtain a loan if needed, compared with 13.8% at midterm. THRIVE households who engaged in on-farm natural resource management grew from 24.7% at midterm to 45% at endline.
Now in its ninth year of conflict, Yemen remains the largest humanitarian crisis globally, with 24 million people out of the population of 30.5 million in need of humanitarian assistance. The conflict has left 4 million people, including 2 million children, internally displaced, and at least 500,000 public sector workers have been without salaries for over six years.
The war has exacerbated food prices for a country that imports more than three-quarters of its food needs. YRRF has multiple projects to enable poor and vulnerable families in Yemen to generate income in a sustainable way to improve their food security, self-reliance, and dignity in a time of severe deprivation. In 2022, YRRF distributed 585 sheep, 600 egg-laying hens (with 1 rooster per family), and 140 beehives. Livestock serves as a source of protein, nourishment, and income to families in need.
YRRF is currently supporting 20 girls from 3 governorates who are completing a three-year midwifery diploma. In June, YRRF provided a training course for 1,500 women and girls. This 45-day training course provided instruction in nursing and first aid, handicraft production, sewing, and hairdressing. Additionally, in January 2022, YRRF distributed 35 sewing machines to women in need and conducted sewing training.
Dalberg Advisors: Global Perspectives Rooted in Local Realities
By Tyler LePard
African farmer. Photo: Dalberg
Dalberg Group is “a global group of changemakers working to build a more inclusive and sustainable world where all people, everywhere, can reach their fullest potential.” Dalberg is the largest advisory firm globally dedicated to social impact, and its work with over 2,000 clients over the past two decades has spanned the waterfront of global development issues. The mission-driven firm has a deeply rooted presence in the Global South, with approximately 800 staff based in 30 offices across the world and serving clients in more than 90 countries. This gives them global perspectives that are firmly rooted in local realities.
Origin Story & Evolution
Dalberg was started in 2001 by ex-management consultants who wanted to dedicate their careers to purpose-driven work. The founders saw an opportunity to apply hypothesis-driven problem-solving processes common in the private sector to intractable issues in the global development arena. Dalberg brought data-driven strategies and a high pace of execution to decision support and strategy development to major institutions like the World Bank, United Nations, USAID and others.
Over the past two decades as the global development landscape has changed – including with the creation of major organizations like the Global Fund and GAVI, as well as the increased scope of private investment seeking opportunities in emerging markets – Dalberg has adapted its offerings. More recently, the firm’s climate practice has been busy supporting a range of clients with the development of new approaches, investments, and initiatives to address climate change across a range of country and sector contexts.
Dalberg Advisors is one of the Dalberg businesses. They are a strategic advisory firm that “combines the best of private sector strategy skills and rigorous analytical capabilities with deep knowledge and networks across emerging and frontier markets.” Dalberg works with three broad categories of clients: (1) global development institutions, (2) companies seeking to generate positive impact and growth, and (3) philanthropies and nonprofits big and small, local and global. They address sector issues like access to finance, improving access to healthcare services, and access to energy solutions that meet people where they are. They also serve clients with a functional lens such as strategy, organizational effectiveness, and finance.
No Poverty and Economic Growth
Much of Dalberg Advisors’ work relates in some way to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) #1: No Poverty and Sustainable Development Goal #8: Decent Work and Economic Growth.
“No Poverty is SDG #1 for a reason. Poverty and the absence of economic opportunity is a fundamental driver of other issues and constraints on people’s ability to live the life they want. Economic opportunity is core to the whole development enterprise. It’s all related,” said Greg Snyders, Partner, Dalberg Advisors. “Many of the clients we’re serving are working on issues related to economic well-being across the board.”
Indian businesswoman. Photo: Dalberg
Dalberg helps countries and regions develop inclusive growth agendas and programs where all people can benefit from, and participate in, economic growth.
One example focuses on decent work and economic livelihoods. Over a few years, Dalberg Advisors helped a major funder with strategy across 10 countries in Africa related to accelerating opportunities for young people and the transition from education to employment pathways. There was a significant gap between what educational institutions delivered and what the market needed. And, left unchecked, this problem would only increase. In the next 30 years, it’s estimated that the populations of more than half of Africa’s countries will double. An absence of opportunities for young people to work and to support their livelihoods creates problems for society. Within the 10 focus countries, the Dalberg team tailored the strategy for the country context and to design programs that would persist over the long term. This strategy helped the funder identify the significant issues, organize their work, and allocate resources appropriately.
Financial Inclusion
Another common issue that Dalberg works on is financial inclusion. An estimated 1.4 billion adults globally lack access to formal financial services like bank accounts. Dalberg helps clients identify opportunities to expand access and accelerate usage of financial services. This helps more people have the security and convenience of digital payments for school fees or to support relatives, rather than carrying large amounts of cash over long distances. It helps people build wealth through savings accounts. Farmers and entrepreneurs can get access to fair and lower-cost credit. Dalberg also helps their clients make sure the right market structures are in place and break down some of the digital financial barriers.
Remittances. Photo: Dalberg
Get Involved
Dalberg provides services to clients, from strategy to execution, such as providing new ways to frame problem statements, better information for decision making, and identifying new investment or programmatic opportunities.
Increasingly, Dalberg is supporting the development and co-creation of solutions and initiatives that they think would be useful for the ecosystems in which they work. “We love helping–not just supporting clients on specific problems, but we love helping groups of people to co-create new solutions that would be impactful for the world,” said Greg Snyders, Partner, Dalberg Advisors. “So many issues are cross-cutting. There’s rarely a single point of view from a sector that is going to be adequate to address the scope or scale of a problem. We encourage clients to think from a systems lens.”
Dalberg also continues to find opportunities to grow their geological footprint. They just opened an office in Vietnam. They also have a new office in Bogota, expanding their Latin America presence.
Greg Nelson, Chief Technology Officer, Opportunity International
By Amber Cortes
Opportunity Knocks: Pioneering Digital Transformation with Optimism
Greg Nelson spent most of his career witnessing (and participating in) historic digital transformation. Now, he’s bringing it to the global development world.
Nelson started out at Microsoft in 1995, “which was basically when the internet as we think of it was just beginning,” he says.
At Microsoft, he managed to work in almost every department of the company in a wide variety of roles: engineering, partner and business development, marketing, and sales.
But in 2020, after 26 years at Microsoft, Greg Nelson was ready to close that chapter of his career and move on to other challenges.
So he pivoted to an interest developed back when he was a Rotary Scholar in Cape Town, South Africa, working with an organization that specialized in micro lending. It was the first time he had heard of microfinance, an approach to financial inclusion started in the 1970s by founder of Grameen Bank Muhammad Yunus.
It made an impression on him.
“This is helping people create their own livelihood. You give them training, you give them a little bit of capital to start their business or run their farm, and off they go.”
After retiring from Microsoft in the middle of COVID, Nelson joined the board of Opportunity International, a nonprofit formed in 1971 to help uplift people out of poverty. Nelson wanted to bring his 26 years of experience in the tech world to help build the organization’s digital capacity across its programs and help team leaders “re-envision the ways that we deliver services to our clients and our partners.”
“But I quickly realized that, once we got through the envisioning and the initial strategy for digital transformation, we also needed to be able to operationalize it.”
Board members visit a school in Africa. Photo: Opportunity International.
Nelson rolled up his sleeves and joined Opportunity as their new Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to jumpstart the process, help build the right team, attract donors and supporters, and get the work underway.
Nelson and his team at the Digital Innovation Group (DIG) use human-centered design, a discipline established at the Stanford Design School and firms like IDEO, to develop personas of clients that Opportunity International serves. Not just unique to tech, human-centered design can be applied to everything from architecture and healthcare to new businesses and startups.
“And I certainly believe the right way to think about the challenge—or the opportunity—is to start with the people,” says Nelson.
These personas are based on real-life research into Opportunity’s demographics. There’s Faustina—a smallholder farmer in rural Ghana with a limited educational background who owns a smartphone, and Kojo, a day laborer looking for work. Both clients, says Nelson, can benefit greatly from relatively simple and inexpensive technology that can help locate seed prices, find work at a fair rate, check the moisture and nutrient levels of soil, and more.
African with mobile phone. Photo: Opportunity International
When it comes to innovation as a concept, Nelson summons a quote from science fiction writer William Gibson: “the future is already here, it’s just not equally distributed.”
“It is unbelievable, even compared to five years ago, the amount of power and capability that is available to us – but also to Faustina and Kojo. And the delivery of that power is right there,” says Nelson.
“There’s no reason that a farmer in Nairobi should be farming in a fundamentally different way than a farmer in Nebraska.”
And Nelson and his team aren’t stopping there. They’re also utilizing the “game changing” power of AI to create a ChatGPT-type platform specific to the needs of Malawi farmers.
Nelson’s time at Microsoft afforded him the leeway and resources to imagine a better world and build solutions, and trained him to look at the world through a technology lens.
“And it’s a fundamentally very optimistic lens,” he adds.
Beyond the operational practices Nelson brings with him from the tech world lies something a little more intangible, but no less real, that impacts his work at Opportunity.
“The people I worked with, the teams I was on, the leaders I learned from and how I was able to help people learn and help them build their own careers, that’s the legacy from my point of view – more than all the products I shipped and all the projects that I worked on.”
To that end, Nelson has brought together a team of experts from places like Meta, Google, and Microsoft to form a Tech Advisory Council for Opportunity International to “help us find the sweet spots, where the needs of our clients and the capabilities of tech are meeting in the same place.”
Nelson acknowledges that nonprofits can have a harder time developing and executing digital transformations, compared to big tech companies where checkbooks fly open at the drop of an app.
“I mean, Microsoft’s a Big Idea Factory. It’s this amazing kind of wonderland of ideas with a huge number of resources to go chase those ideas,” Nelson says.
Even strapped-for-cash nonprofits can level up their big ideas in the fundraising game by working on their elevator pitch, and Nelson was able to hone his own elevator pitch – in an actual elevator – with elevator pitch master Steve Ballmer from Microsoft.
Photo: Opportunity International
“I think the ability to take a complicated challenge and idea and distill it into fifteen seconds, that’s the skill. And I think every nonprofit out there, every worthy 501c3 organization is built on some big ideas. But can you distill them down in a way that other people will want to hear and get excited about? You’re working there for a reason, you’re passionate about it. But can you engage and recruit other people into that vision?”
Another challenge that Nelson observes in the NGO world is fragmentation—a scarcity mentality of nonprofits believing they are all competing for the same resources. It’s better to see a potential partner as a potential collaborator.
“Donors will be excited by that. And then the money is going further, being spent more efficiently. You’re each bringing your own expertise, your own capabilities in a collaborative way. That’s what the donors want. I mean, I’m a donor. That’s what I want.”
Collaborating and building partnerships and bridges between people who use the SDGs as their north star is the only way, Nelson says, that the ambitious goals of the SDGs will ever be realized. And of course, bringing that sense of optimism that comes with dreaming big.
“The technology, the ability to deploy it, the ways that we can reach people, that data we can collect to drive learning loops. I’m incredibly optimistic about how we go after poverty in our lifetime.”
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Save Kids Trust (SKT)
SKT India provides healthcare to numerous slum communities in Jaipur India. At SKT US, we help with fundraising, web and admin support. Savekidstrust.org
(Seattle, WA – November 16, 2023) 
Greg Nelson spent most of his career witnessing (and participating in) historic digital transformation. Now, he’s bringing it to the global development world.
