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Our 7 Favorite #NGO Vine Videos of the Year
There were really powerful and poignant Vine videos that were published by NGOs, foundations, and nonprofits this year. Even though adding Vine into their social media repertoire hasn’t hit a tipping point within the nonprofit community yet, we still believe Vine is an effective medium to convey short, but impactful messages. Here are our seven favorite Vine…
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Our Top 10 Most Read Posts of 2014
Over the course of this year we have shared a great deal of global health news and information, reports from the field in Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Tanzania, and the Phillipines, and have broken down some of the most pressing global health documents. That said, some of our posts received many more reads than others. Here is…
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Our Top 10 Recommended NGO Videos of 2014
Effective video making is a powerful form of storytelling. Videos, when done well, get to the heart of the matter quickly and leave people wanting to know more, do more, and donate more. These videos encompass all of those things and also made us want to delve more into not only their messages, but also…
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How Heifer International Creates a Movement of Change for Families
This holiday season gifting animals to families in need in low-income countries can mean the difference between them living in abject poverty or being self-sufficient. I interviewed Cindy Jones-Nyland, Chief Marketing Officer of Heifer International about how they work with families around the world and transforms their lives. When people buy animals as gifts for…
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5 Maternal Health Organizations to Support Now
Every day 800 women die due to largely preventable causes during childbirth. That number is mentioned everywhere maternal health is mentioned and championed, but it always bears repeating. Until the drastic maternal mortality numbers decline the data must remain front and center. Mothers’ lives depend on us knowing the facts. Over the past few decades maternal…
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How Mother’s Loving Support Encourages Breastfeeding in Zambia
Mother’s Loving Support is a non-profit volunteer organisation borne out of the founder’s desire to encourage and support women as they breast feed their babies while continuing to work outside the home. In Zambia, breastfeeding a child is a socially accepted and encouraged step with the coming of a child, but many women in urban…
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Photos: Why World Toilet Day Matters
The first time I saw open defecation was in a slum in Delhi. I was taken aback. I had always heard about open defecation, but until that point I had never seen it and couldn’t imagine it happening in an overly crowded urban area. It was also at that moment that I knew I had to…
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7 Facts About Premature Births You Might Not Have Known
Photo: A premature baby is shown in the postnatal ward at Cama Hospital, a major hospital for women and children, in Mumbai, India. UN Photo/Mark Garten Premature births are now the number one killer of babies globally. Of the 6.3 million children under five who died last year, 1.1 million of them died due to complications from premature…
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Looking at Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision in the Field
Amos Emmanuel Kakere really wanted to undergo voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC). A slight young man who looked far younger than his mere 24 years, Kakere, who is married and lives in Mhango village in Tanzania’s Shinyanga region, opted to undergo the procedure after seeing a large VMMC mobile field clinic near his village. The…
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How PSI Reinforces Positive Reproductive Health Messaging Through Branding, Edutainment
In Tanzania, orange has increasingly become the recognized color of family planning and reproductive health services. Population Services International’s orange Familia brand is quite common in most regions of this coastal country of 49 million. PSI, a global non-profit organization dedicated to improving the health of people in the developing world, has consistently and effectively…
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A Day in the Life of a Family Planning Health Worker
Salasala, Tanzania — It took over an hour in notoriously congested Dar es Salaam traffic and gingerly moving through winding, narrow, dirt roads to visit Blandina Mpacha. Mama Blandina, as her community affectionately calls her, is a PSI health worker who teaches women, men, and whole families about the importance of family planning. This isn’t…
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Traveling to Tanzania With PSI, IntraHealth International, and Mandy Moore
Over the years I have had the distinct privilege of meeting health workers around the world from Ethiopia and Kenya to Tanzania and South Africa to India and Brazil. Health workers, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, are the unequivocal backbone of health systems that can oftentimes be severely taxed due to the overwhelming number of people…
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Why Secondary Education for Girls Reduces Child Marriage, Early Pregnancies
UNESCO just released its report, Sustainable Development: Post 2015 Begins With Education, that takes a look at the critical importance of education on the post-2015 agenda. The core stance in the report portends that without greater access to education poverty eradication will become increasingly difficult to achieve by 2030. The betterment of women’s and girls’ lives…
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Why Getting Women to Deliver in Health Facilities May Be Harder Than We Think
Every day 800 women die from preventable causes during pregnancy and childbirth. That is 292,000 women too many each year. One of the ways in which this statistic can be reduced is by simply encouraging women in low- and middle-income countries to deliver in health facilities with skilled health workers. That sounds simple enough, but…
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805 Million People Still Remain Malnourished According to New Report
The State of Food Insecurity in the World report, a collaborative report from Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization, World Food Program and International Fund for Agricultural Development, was released Tuesday. According to its topline data, there are now 805 million people around the world who are chronically malnourished; that is a steady decline of 100 million people…
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New Report on Child Mortality Trends Released
Today a collaborative report on trends in child mortality was released by the World Bank, UNICEF, the United Nations and the World Health Organization. According to the Levels and Trends in Child Mortality report, child mortality has dropped by 49 percent since 1990. Even so, Millennium Development Goal 4 (MDG 4) has yet to be reached.…
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Introducing Our Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health Correspondents
As our work continues to expand globally especially as the MDG deadline nears in 2015 we want to ensure that international voices are the cornerstone of our coverage of maternal, newborn, and child health worldwide. We are beginning with three correspondents: Winfred Ogdom, a nutritionist from Uganda, Maryanne W. Waweru a motherhood blogger and journalist from Nairobi, Kenya,…
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Logistics Team Visits South Sudan to Assess Road Conditions Amid Looming Famine
Last month, a United Nations team travelled to Western Equitoria, Central Equatoria, and Western Bahr El Ghazal in South Sudan to assess road conditions, an important task when famine looms in a region that is mostly agrarian. Without passable roads it is impossible for lifesaving, critical health supplies, health workers, aid agencies, and most importantly food…
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Exclusive Breastfeeding Rates in Kenya Still Low
By Maryanne W. Waweru, Kenyan motherhood blogger and maternal/child health journalist based in Nairobi. As Kenya joins the rest of the world in marking the World Breastfeeding Week, health experts in the country are calling on more stringent efforts to be put in place that will encourage more women to exclusively breastfeed their babies. Though…
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Photo of the Week: Frontline Health Workers Count #Zambia
I walked quickly beside Dismus Mwalukwanda on a sandy path bordered by overgrown shrubbery leading through the bush to rural homes outside of Lusaka, Zambia’s capital. Mwalukwanda, 43, is a frontline health worker for the Njovo Village and took me to visit a family whose young children he has treated often for malaria. Mwalukwand is…