This past week I was thinking about the time I spent in Nepal with Coca- Cola to see the devastation after the earthquake and the global brand’s response to it. The April 2015 4.5 magnitude earthquake upended lives and left cities in rubble. I saw much of it during our travels through Kathmandu and its surrounding towns. NGOs worked with their partners in the field … Continue reading Women’s Empowerment Program Update Four Years On
When I was in Zambia I saw ways in which nurses treat cervical cancer in low resource settings. Women who do not benefit from the HPV vaccine and still develop cervical cancer are often subject to visual inspection of the cancer typically with a digital camera followed by cryotherapy to freeze the diseased part of the cervix. Some researchers question whether this approach to cervical cancer treatment is effective in low-and-middle income countries. Globally, the cervical cancer burden falls disproportionately upon women in low and middle-income countries. In fact, approximately 90% of deaths from cervical cancer occur in these countries like Bolivia, Guinea, and Swaziland. Rates are highest in Central America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Melanesia.
Continue reading “Radiotherapy will be required to treat cervical cancer in low-and-middle income countries”
As I have written many times before postpartum hemorrhage (PPH) or excessive uterine bleeding after childbirth is the leading cause of maternal mortality in low-and-middle income countries. The recommended drug to prevent PPH according to the World Health Organization (WHO) is oxytocin. When administered in its recommended dose it causes little to no side effects. Oxytocin, the WHO’s current gold standard therapy, however, must be refrigerated and administered by skilled health workers posing two obstacles to its wider use in low resource, tropical settings.
Some countries have approved misoprostol, an oral drug, to prevent PPH, but there are several concerns that its use can be misappropriated for abortions instead of used solely for PPH. The World Health Organization has listed misoprostol as an alternative to oxytocin if it is not available.
Now, another PPH preventative drug, carbetocin, has been added to the latest updated 2019 WHO Essential Medicines List. The announcement was made last week. Unlike oxytocin, even at high temperatures carbetocin remains effective. The recommendation is that carbetocin can be used when oxytocin is not available or if its quality is uncertain. Additionally, the cost must be comparable to oxytocin.
Continue reading “NEW: Drug That Prevents PostPartum Hemorrhage Added To WHO Essential Medicines List”
Maternal mortality continues to be a major problem the world over. The United States is the only developed country where maternal death rates are increasing especially for non-Hispanic black women. And in low-and-middle income countries, approximately 830 women die each day from pregnancy-related, preventable causes.
Maternal health organizations are working diligently to save more mothers’ lives, but one death is still too many especially when it is likely preventable. I like to list organizations that you can support with donations in order to help them keep more women and their children alive on the local level and make sure mothers are a part of their families’ lives.
This list highlights local organizations that help some of the most vulnerable communities in countries with some of the highest maternal mortality rates. And, in the cases of the United States and Australia, the organizations help the communities that experience the most maternal deaths. Each site allows direct donations that go directly to maternal care and/or advocacy.
Continue reading “11 Maternal Health Organizations to Support This Year”
I am always happy when World Breastfeeding Week rolls around each year. It gives me a chance to hear about the latest programs that are working around the world to increase breastfeeding rates. This year I learned about how World Vision is promoting breastfeeding in the Philippines through its 7-11 Core Intervention Framework which includes 7 interventions for women and 11 for children 0 – 24 months of age.
The way in which we discuss breastfeeding is different depending on the country and the context. While in the United States we talk a lot about infant feeding choices, in other countries, especially those that have thousands upon thousands of yearly infant deaths caused by diarrheal diseases, infections, and sub-optimal feeding, the context changes. In these cases, it is nearly always critical that mothers breastfeed their children up to two years of age.
In the Philippines, parents spend $240 million on breast milk substitutes and multinational formula feeding companies spend $100 million on marketing in the Philippines alone. Those numbers account for the fact that only 34% of infants under the age of six months are exclusively breastfed. While providing the best start in life for infants, many mothers are convinced that formula is better and easier for their lifestyles. But, often times women in low-and-middle-income countries like the Philippines do not always have access to clean water for formula. Dirty water can cause deadly diarrheal diseases that kill infants.
Continue reading “How World Vision Promotes Breastfeeding in the Philippines”
Last year I was happy to see women in Nepal benefitting from Coca-Cola’s 5by20 program. By 2020 Coca-Cola has pledged to help five million women entrepreneurs around the globe by allowing them to earn money through its value chain. That could mean teaching women valuable business skills as I saw in Kathmandu to providing women with opportunities to support their families through creating products with Coca-Cola products and packaging to helping women start their own small businesses.
For Mother’s Day, I was delighted to receive this tulip from Coca-Cola made by artisans who work for Mitz, a Mexican nonprofit where women devote 8 to 30 hours a week to create handmade products. Mitz creates jobs for women, funds kids’ scholarships and reduces waste.
Continue reading “Coca-Cola Celebrates Mother’s Day With Women Artisans #5by20”
Women in low-and-middle-income countries need clean birth kits in order to stave off deadly infections in themselves and their newborns. This is the case not only during home births with midwives but also in institutionalized settings. Zubaida Bai, founder of Ayzh, a social enterprise that creates clean, safe birthing kits for women as well as reproductive, newborn and adolescent kits, discusses how she included women’s voices in … Continue reading [Featured Video] Simple Birth Kit for Mothers in Developing World
Every day 800 women die during childbirth or from pregnancy complications. This startling statistic represents women who not only live in sub-Saharan Africa where most maternal deaths occur but also throughout the world. In order to reduce the number of maternal deaths in low- and middle-income countries across the globe design teams, social entrepreneurs, innovators, and NGOs are creating innovative ways in which to save more … Continue reading 5 Maternal Health Interventions That Save Mothers’ Lives
Today is World Malaria Day. This year’s theme: End Malaria for Good. While 6.8 million malaria deaths were averted between 2000 – 2015, there are still 3.2 billion people who are susceptible to contracting the disease every day and a half million children die from malaria every year. There is a long way to go to save more lives especially for children under the age … Continue reading 3 Ways You Can Help On World Malaria Day
PET bottles, one of the most widely used materials in the world, are used to package foods and drinks from soda and juices to salad dressings and cooking oils. It is also completely recyclable. In the United States alone, 1.5 billion pounds of PET bottles are recycled annually.
Throughout my travels to low and middle-income countries I see PET bottles thrown haphazardly in fields and streams clogging waterways and dirtying sidewalks and walking paths. In countries such as Nepal (where I visited last year with Coca-Cola), there are concerted educational efforts by environmentally focused NGOs to change behaviors around discarding PET bottles. There are recycling centers in Nepal, but not enough to completely clean its streets and countryside. It seems to be a sisyphean battle to combat PET bottle waste, but there are some who are using the bottles in innovative ways.
Continue reading “2 Innovative Uses of PET Bottles in Low-Income Countries That Benefit Women”
I was in Nepal with Coca-Cola for a very short period of time earlier this month, but we did and saw a lot in the days we were there including:
On Day 3 we visited a PET (plastic) bottle recycling center run by the Himalayan Climate Initiative where we sat down with women waste workers who sort the bottles to be recycled. It was heartening to learn about the innovative ways HCI is providing benefits and dignity to the women waste workers who will remain in Nepal’s lowest caste for the rest of their lives.
Nepal, while being a hotbed for adventure seekers, trekkers, tourists, and mountaineers, faces many economic struggles that heavily plague low-and-middle income countries. The vast majority of Nepal’s economy is based on remittances with 25 percent of its working population living outside of the country. Additionally, with an average population age of 23, Nepal has a dismal 50 percent unemployment rate. These systemic economic struggles, of course, disproportionately affect women and subsequently their children and families. Couple that with a stringent caste system and some Nepali women remain inherently stuck on the lowest rung of the class ladder and are subject to some of the basest forms of work available to them.
The Himalayan Climate Initiative (HCI), a youth-driven environmental NGO based in Kathmandu, is working with some of these women whose only other economically viable life option may be selling themselves sexually to the nearest customer, working in the illegal scrap waste trade, or going abroad to find work and then enduring whatever fate awaits them. HCI employs socially discriminated women waste workers at its PET Bottle Recollection Social Enterprise (Nagar Mitra) allowing them to create a livelihood beyond what might traditionally befall them.
Continue reading “5 Ways This NGO is Helping Nepal’s Women Waste Workers”
During my recent trip to Nepal I said time and time again how surprised I was about the country. It was honestly nothing like I had expected. I thought (since it shares a border with India) that it would be a carbon copy of it southern neighbor. That, however, couldn’t be further from the truth. Nepal is very different from India. The food is completely different and definitely not as spicy. That’s not to say you can’t get great Indian food in Nepal. It’s just to say their cuisine is very, very different.
Even though Kathmandu is a crowded city, it never felt overwhelming like Indian big cities where you can drown in people and your senses go into hyper overdrive. I glean that Nepal is just a lot more laid back as a country and its people are more relaxed. I loved that about being in Nepal.
Day 2
On our second day, we went to the Bottlers Nepal Limited (BNL) campus where we learned a bit about Nepal as a country from the Director of BNL, Puneet Vatshney, and also took a tour of its bottling plant. We couldn’t take photos inside the plant, but suffice it to say that it was fascinating to see how Coca-Cola’s beverages get mixed and bottled and the steps it takes to get to the final product. Everything is precise, measured, and exact on the soda’s assembly line to maintain the quality of the drinks.
Continue reading “Day 2 Dispatch: In Nepal With Coca-Cola #NepalNow”
This article originally appeared on Huffington Post.
The world of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) is vast and growing if you live in Nepal. Some experts estimate there is a whopping 50,000 registered NGOs (PDF) in the country, a steep increase since an NGO registration change in 1992. With that change, groups of individuals joined together in droves to create organizations to fight the languishing poverty in Nepal, a country that has been classified by the United Nations as one of the world’s least developed countries since 1971. Experts also attribute the increase of Nepalese NGOs to the country’s small private enterprise sector. Most Nepalis believe the only way they can make money is through civil society where tens of millions of dollars flow through Nepal’s civil sector every year.
While many organizations follow the safe blueprint of how NGOs should operate, there are some that are devising innovative ways in which to help communities at their most basic level, especially after the earthquakes that rocked the landlocked country caused nearly 9,000 fatalities nationwide last year. The earthquakes shocked the country and exposed immense disaster relief vulnerabilities of the government as well as the throngs of NGOs that were not prepared to handle a major natural disaster.
Continue reading “After Earthquake, Nepal Sees NGO Paradigm Shift”
The energy and enthusiasm was palpable as we walked into a room full of eager women entrepreneurs role-playing the everyday dynamic between business owners and their customers. While the room was loaded with fun and laughter during this exercise, its importance was not lost on any of the women who had come to the campus of Coca-Cola Bottlers Nepal Limited’s (BNL) 5by20 training, an initiative to empower 10,000 women business owners across Nepal by 2020. Even though these women are already a part of Kathmandu’s bustling community of urban shop owners, they had come because they realized there are more business skills to learn, hone, and improve. And, as women in micro-enterprise the more skills they learn, the more they can earn for their households in a country where men overwhelmingly dominate the private sector.
Continue reading “Nepali Women Increase Earning Potential Through Business Training #5by20”
Social Good Moms 