Reach Initiative Summary

More than 1,000,000 children die every year from causes related to mild and moderate malnutrition. With such a variety of high-quality self-help programs being implemented throughout the world by hundreds of well-meaning organizations, why is progress so slow? Freedom from Hunger is creating faster, more efficient pathways for the delivery of self-help programs that can save millions of lives.

Reach: A Breakthrough in Delivering Self-Help Solutions

Freedom from Hunger’s global innovation is being developed in India, Mexico and West Africa.

The Problem…

There are more than 800 million people suffering with chronic hunger and poverty. Freedom from Hunger, along with its colleague organizations in the field of international development, can offer proven high-quality, high-impact self-help services to bring health, hope and dignity to these families.

The demand for help is there – and so is the supply of solutions that can make a difference. But distribution of these self-help solutions is caught in a tangle of old thinking about charity, limited outreach to rural areas and claims on who should take credit for impact.

…Freedom from Hunger Responds

We’re thinking about this problem in a new way.

Reach is a global innovation that breaks through old ways of thinking. It gathers the most effective self-help programs from around the world and makes them available to local organizations that serve the rural poor. It establishes regional service agencies as social enterprises to train thousands of these local organizations to deliver high-quality programs sustainably. In short, Reach breaks the bottleneck between supply and demand to deliver proven self-help services to the people who need them.

The Essence of Reach: Mission

Reach brings knowledge, lifeskills, and linkages to massive numbers of poor rural women to build futures of health, hope and dignity for themselves and their families. Reach does this by leveraging the power of groups and the dynamism of private enterprise to deliver proven services brokered from an array of global development organizations.

Reach seeks to

  • Gather and broker proven self-help services produced by Freedom from Hunger and other development organizations.
  • Strengthen the capacity of local organizations to provide poor groups of women and their families with proven, high-impact self-help solutions (like savings, credit, insurance, health education and training, and other critical needs) and facilitate linkages to complementary services provided by other institutions (like health clinics).
  • Cover its own operating costs at the regional level to reduce dependency on subsidies.
  • Improve the lives of vast numbers of poor rural women and their families.

Reach is being piloted in three very different and populous areas of the world: India, Mexico and West Africa. Each of these areas has large numbers of poor rural people who suffer from chronic hunger; each has a large, informal network of self-help groups of women who are served in limited ways by local organizations.

GlaxoSmithKline, a major funder of Reach India, produced this short film about its partnership with Freedom from Hunger and our special efforts to teach women in India about AIDS through safe and supportive "Learning Conversations." Click here to watch the video.

To learn more about how Reach is being developed for each region or how Freedom from Hunger is supporting it as a global initiative, please contact the Director of Reach Global, Sean Kline.