When Janet Aqua’s 11-year-old son, Ray, became ill with malaria, Janet wasted no time in taking him to a nearby clinic. In the rural Ghanaian town where Janet lives, malaria strikes often and wreaks havoc on lives and livelihoods. Janet knows firsthand how fast malaria can take the life of a child. She has already lost two children, a four-year-old daughter and a six-year-old son, to malaria. When Ray became listless and developed a fever, she closed down her street-side kiosk-her family’s primary source of income-and took him straightaway to the doctor. Janet also asked for an insecticide-treated net from the clinic’s free distribution program. Unfortunately, clinic supplies were running low and the clinic nurse said Janet could only have a net if she had a child under the age of one. Read more …
There are two numbers that drive Freedom from Hunger-1.2 million (the number of very poor women served by our program partners around the world) and the number 1 (the individual woman whose self-help efforts are supported by Credit with Education and our other service innovations). One by one, these women lift themselves and their families out of poverty and ignorance so deep they were chronically hungry. One by one, they tell us their stories. As much as we’d like to, we can’t listen to all 1.2 million stories. Instead, we use research methods of sampling and measurement and statistical analysis to verify our progress. We select a representative group of women, listen to their stories and draw conclusions about the experience of all 1.2 million. This is difficult, but very important work. Read more …
Safeguarding health helps families feed themselves.
When Freedom from Hunger’s Credit with Education program came to her rural town in Ghana, Dorcas Aidoo was one of the first women to join a group and take a loan. ”I wanted to free myself from poverty,” she said. Dorcas was one of the 800 million people surviving on roughly one dollar or less per day and facing chronic hunger for herself and her four children. Eight years later, she has made solid progress. She now earns enough money to feed her children nutritious food and send them to school. She has expanded and improved her roadside stand to sell more products, and she even sets aside $56 per month in savings. Read more …
These days, everyone is looking at the bottom line and cutting back. Freedom from Hunger is no different as it considers where to apply scarce resources for greatest impact. For us, that means focusing even more on what we do best for the people who need us most-like Kadia Cissé, who lives in rural Mali. She is one of the “chronically hungry poor” who cannot reliably feed her family enough good food every day. She has three children and no husband. Her home-based business is earning her just a dollar a day. She and her children have health problems that prevent her from earning more money. Read more …
My colleagues and I often say or write that “microfinance alone is not enough.” Others counter that microfinance, by helping the poor do microbusiness to get more income and assets, must surely be a wonderful way to give a boost up a rung or two of the ladder out of poverty. Yes, it is a wonderful boost, but consider how easy it is slip and fall off the ladder back into the depths of poverty. Take just one problem other than lack of money which is faced by the poor (by all of us, in fact) - ill health. It is a major cause as well as effect of poverty. In the 2002 World Bank study, Dying for Change, illness was the most commonly cited reason for “a downward slide into poverty… ahead of losing a job, which took second place. The poor are more likely to be exposed to health risks because their work is physically demanding and often dangerous. But they are least likely to be able to afford health care when they are injured or fall ill.” Read more …
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