http://50.usaid.gov/infographic-saving-moms-at-birth/savingatbirth-1000/?size=infographicSmall
http://50.usaid.gov/learning-out-of-poverty/4n8b-usaid-final2-2/?size=infographicMedium
Saturday, May 12, 2012
Mothers
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
The D.I.Y. Foreign-Aid Revolution
One of our favorite NYT writers, author of Half the Sky Nicholas Kristof, wrote an article about menstruation challenges in the developing world and some of the work being done by SHE Innovates. The article, entitled The D.I.Y. Foreign-Aid Revolution, is quite long, but I've included some of the relevant highlights below. Feel free to follow the link above if you'd like to read the full article!
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Scharpf was interning in the summer of 2005 for the World Bank in Mozambique, helping local entrepreneurs, when she encountered a business impediment that she had never heard of. It was unmentionable, and thus unmentioned. It was menstruation.
A female boss griped to Scharpf about absenteeism caused by women reluctant to come to work during their menstrual periods. “It was because pads were too expensive,” Scharpf recalls. “I was trying to figure out why I had never heard of this before. This was causing productivity rates to go down.”
Scharpf began asking around, and everybody told her — in whispers — that, yes, of course menstruation was keeping women and girls from jobs.
Back at Harvard, where she was pursuing joint degrees at the business school and the John F. Kennedy School of Government, she began asking friends from Bangladesh, Nicaragua and other countries if they were aware of this problem. Of course, they said. “This spoke to me,” Scharpf recalled. “Hasn’t every girl or woman experienced the inconvenience, the disadvantage and the embarrassment in her life, when her period strikes at the ‘wrong’ time? I think half the world can relate to that. What really struck me was that this was a global issue that seemingly had significant costs. From back-of-the-envelope calculations, it had huge costs. And it could have a simple solution.” She paused and smiled tightly. “I was a little naïve there.”
Scharpf is a mild-mannered policy wonk, but the more she thought about it, the more indignant she became. Girls were missing school because they couldn’t afford sanitary pads? Women couldn’t go to work for lack of pads? And all this was taboo to discuss? Scharpf began to scheme.
Commercial pads turned out to be expensive to manufacture largely because the raw materials were pricey, so Scharpf started from scratch. She recruited a team of like-minded wonks, and they consulted villagers, agriculture experts and professors of textile engineering. What is there that is really absorbent, widely available and cheap? The team came up with five finalists: cassava leaves, banana leaves, banana-tree trunk fibers, foam mattresses, textile scraps. “We brought a blender to Rwanda and started blending things, boiling leaves from potato and cassava, things like that,” Scharpf said. “We would drop Coke on it to measure absorbency.” That was when they had their eureka moment. “We saw, hey, those banana fibers really slurp up the Coke!”
Scharpf accepted a $60,000 grant from Echoing Green, an organization that works like a venture-capital fund to finance people with great ideas. Later she won a social-entrepreneurship fellowship from Harvard Business School, and now her team has engineered a new sanitary pad that she hopes can transform life for women and girls in the developing world. It looks like a regular pad but is made chiefly out of banana-tree fibers, so it is sustainable and for the most part biodegradable. Best of all, it’s cheap: a pack of 10 should retail for 75 cents or less.
Scharpf’s organization, Sustainable Health Enterprises (or SHE), will begin manufacturing pads early next year in a tiny factory in Rwanda. It will be a pilot project, producing some 1,200 pads per hour, but once the kinks are worked out she hopes to have women in other countries franchise the system so that it spreads around the world. SHE has also taken on advocacy, calling on the Rwandan government to lift an 18 percent sales tax on feminine hygiene products so that they become more affordable. Awakened to the issue, the Rwandan Parliament recently appropriated $35,000 to pay for sanitary pads for impoverished girls who otherwise might miss school — a small sum, but an acknowledgment that the problem is important and real. Some Rwandan women Scharpf has interviewed say that the attention has made a difference in their homes: their husbands are now more willing to allow them to spend money on pads.
Will banana-fiber sanitary pads succeed? No one knows. It is entirely possible that Scharpf will find that even if manufacturing goes smoothly — a huge “if” — there is simply not much of a market for sanitary pads in poor countries. Families may consider a 60- or 70-cent pack just as unaffordable as a $1.10 pack. Or suppose for a moment that everything goes perfectly, and pad franchises spread and families buy packets of pads for girls who are now missing school because of difficulties managing menstruation. Will those girls now stay in school? We can’t be sure of that either.
-------------------------------------
This article was written in 2010, so check out the SHE Innovates blog for updates on their work, which we're excited about because it complements our education work so well!
-----------------------------
Scharpf was interning in the summer of 2005 for the World Bank in Mozambique, helping local entrepreneurs, when she encountered a business impediment that she had never heard of. It was unmentionable, and thus unmentioned. It was menstruation.
A female boss griped to Scharpf about absenteeism caused by women reluctant to come to work during their menstrual periods. “It was because pads were too expensive,” Scharpf recalls. “I was trying to figure out why I had never heard of this before. This was causing productivity rates to go down.”
Scharpf began asking around, and everybody told her — in whispers — that, yes, of course menstruation was keeping women and girls from jobs.
Back at Harvard, where she was pursuing joint degrees at the business school and the John F. Kennedy School of Government, she began asking friends from Bangladesh, Nicaragua and other countries if they were aware of this problem. Of course, they said. “This spoke to me,” Scharpf recalled. “Hasn’t every girl or woman experienced the inconvenience, the disadvantage and the embarrassment in her life, when her period strikes at the ‘wrong’ time? I think half the world can relate to that. What really struck me was that this was a global issue that seemingly had significant costs. From back-of-the-envelope calculations, it had huge costs. And it could have a simple solution.” She paused and smiled tightly. “I was a little naïve there.”
Scharpf is a mild-mannered policy wonk, but the more she thought about it, the more indignant she became. Girls were missing school because they couldn’t afford sanitary pads? Women couldn’t go to work for lack of pads? And all this was taboo to discuss? Scharpf began to scheme.
Commercial pads turned out to be expensive to manufacture largely because the raw materials were pricey, so Scharpf started from scratch. She recruited a team of like-minded wonks, and they consulted villagers, agriculture experts and professors of textile engineering. What is there that is really absorbent, widely available and cheap? The team came up with five finalists: cassava leaves, banana leaves, banana-tree trunk fibers, foam mattresses, textile scraps. “We brought a blender to Rwanda and started blending things, boiling leaves from potato and cassava, things like that,” Scharpf said. “We would drop Coke on it to measure absorbency.” That was when they had their eureka moment. “We saw, hey, those banana fibers really slurp up the Coke!”
Scharpf accepted a $60,000 grant from Echoing Green, an organization that works like a venture-capital fund to finance people with great ideas. Later she won a social-entrepreneurship fellowship from Harvard Business School, and now her team has engineered a new sanitary pad that she hopes can transform life for women and girls in the developing world. It looks like a regular pad but is made chiefly out of banana-tree fibers, so it is sustainable and for the most part biodegradable. Best of all, it’s cheap: a pack of 10 should retail for 75 cents or less.
Scharpf’s organization, Sustainable Health Enterprises (or SHE), will begin manufacturing pads early next year in a tiny factory in Rwanda. It will be a pilot project, producing some 1,200 pads per hour, but once the kinks are worked out she hopes to have women in other countries franchise the system so that it spreads around the world. SHE has also taken on advocacy, calling on the Rwandan government to lift an 18 percent sales tax on feminine hygiene products so that they become more affordable. Awakened to the issue, the Rwandan Parliament recently appropriated $35,000 to pay for sanitary pads for impoverished girls who otherwise might miss school — a small sum, but an acknowledgment that the problem is important and real. Some Rwandan women Scharpf has interviewed say that the attention has made a difference in their homes: their husbands are now more willing to allow them to spend money on pads.
Will banana-fiber sanitary pads succeed? No one knows. It is entirely possible that Scharpf will find that even if manufacturing goes smoothly — a huge “if” — there is simply not much of a market for sanitary pads in poor countries. Families may consider a 60- or 70-cent pack just as unaffordable as a $1.10 pack. Or suppose for a moment that everything goes perfectly, and pad franchises spread and families buy packets of pads for girls who are now missing school because of difficulties managing menstruation. Will those girls now stay in school? We can’t be sure of that either.
-------------------------------------
This article was written in 2010, so check out the SHE Innovates blog for updates on their work, which we're excited about because it complements our education work so well!
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Why invest in women?
Thought we should share this great infographic from USAID. Notice the discussion of education, its challenges, and the benefits of educating girls!
Friday, December 30, 2011
Grow.Learn.Give. in Uganda
Marissa Patterson, a university student, worked in Uganda for several months teaching women and girls health. She used the Grow.Learn.Give. materials and graciously wrote about her experience for us!
My experience in Uganda: life-changing
In June, 2011, my husband and I embarked on an exciting adventure – the most adventurous thing either of us has ever done – we went to Uganda.
Backing up a little, Richard and I had wanted to do a humanitarian trip for years, even before we got married three years ago. We finally started doing research on where to go, and what organization to go with in the summer of 2010. In my research I came across the Grow. Learn. Give. blog, and as I perused its contents, I learned about a major problem that women and especially girls all over the world deal with: a lack of education and resources. The thing that really hit home for me however, was something I had never even considered – that most girls and women do not have access to clean, disposable menstrual pads.
The knowledge of this problem fueled my passion for women’s empowerment through education. It is what motivated me to put in all the time and effort in planning and fundraising to go to Uganda and work to change lives. It is what made me work so hard for two and a half months in Uganda to change the lives of the women there.
A few weeks before I left for Uganda, I e-mailed Patty Liston, hoping that I could get some teaching materials to take with me and use there. She more than came through for me – she brought a draft of the teaching manual that they are writing called “Health for Girls,” along with some other teaching materials, and we had a great talk about what I could expect when I went to Uganda. I never realized how useful the “Health for Girls” manual would be to me and so many of the people I worked with, but I ended up using it in almost all of the classes I taught, and other volunteers from my team borrowed it for their lessons too. It was a wonderful resource to have, and made it very easy to teach girls about important health topics.
The following is a summary of the groups that were impacted by the lessons in the “Health for Girls” manual:
I taught three women’s groups – one was in a rural village called Bunoboyoka, and the other two were women’s groups in Namatala (the largest slum in Mbale). In these women’s groups, we (a group of five other girls and I) taught about prenatal health, breastfeeding, and reproductive health/family planning. I taught the last topic – reproductive health and family planning, and used a lot from the manual, mainly about anatomy and the fertility cycle.
I was amazed at how many questions the women had, especially about things that I learned about as a 4th grader in elementary school. They had questions like “why do I feel pain when I bleed?” or “why do I bleed each month?” Most of them had no idea when they were fertile, and did not understand ovulation. I don’t share this to point out flaws in these wonderful women by any means. I simply share this to make a point that women in Mbale, much like the millions of women in developing countries worldwide, are in dire need of education. It is absolutely essential to their and their families’ wellbeing.
Additionally, I taught five different groups of pre-teen and teenage girls while I was there. Two of the groups were in rural villages, and the other three were in secondary schools. I focused on maturation and menstruation, and used a lot of material from the manual. I made different lesson plans each time, based on the needs of the groups,
Additionally, I met with different women who worked for local NGO’s and taught them the lessons we had been teaching all summer, and then gave them the lesson plans. This way, they can continue to teach the women they work with now that we are gone.
I have gained such a love for teaching girls and women about their health and their bodies; having that knowledge is so important for them, and can be life-changing. I truly believe that knowledge (whatever the subject may be) is power!
My experience in Uganda: life-changing
In June, 2011, my husband and I embarked on an exciting adventure – the most adventurous thing either of us has ever done – we went to Uganda.
Backing up a little, Richard and I had wanted to do a humanitarian trip for years, even before we got married three years ago. We finally started doing research on where to go, and what organization to go with in the summer of 2010. In my research I came across the Grow. Learn. Give. blog, and as I perused its contents, I learned about a major problem that women and especially girls all over the world deal with: a lack of education and resources. The thing that really hit home for me however, was something I had never even considered – that most girls and women do not have access to clean, disposable menstrual pads.
The knowledge of this problem fueled my passion for women’s empowerment through education. It is what motivated me to put in all the time and effort in planning and fundraising to go to Uganda and work to change lives. It is what made me work so hard for two and a half months in Uganda to change the lives of the women there.
A few weeks before I left for Uganda, I e-mailed Patty Liston, hoping that I could get some teaching materials to take with me and use there. She more than came through for me – she brought a draft of the teaching manual that they are writing called “Health for Girls,” along with some other teaching materials, and we had a great talk about what I could expect when I went to Uganda. I never realized how useful the “Health for Girls” manual would be to me and so many of the people I worked with, but I ended up using it in almost all of the classes I taught, and other volunteers from my team borrowed it for their lessons too. It was a wonderful resource to have, and made it very easy to teach girls about important health topics.
The following is a summary of the groups that were impacted by the lessons in the “Health for Girls” manual:
I taught three women’s groups – one was in a rural village called Bunoboyoka, and the other two were women’s groups in Namatala (the largest slum in Mbale). In these women’s groups, we (a group of five other girls and I) taught about prenatal health, breastfeeding, and reproductive health/family planning. I taught the last topic – reproductive health and family planning, and used a lot from the manual, mainly about anatomy and the fertility cycle.
I was amazed at how many questions the women had, especially about things that I learned about as a 4th grader in elementary school. They had questions like “why do I feel pain when I bleed?” or “why do I bleed each month?” Most of them had no idea when they were fertile, and did not understand ovulation. I don’t share this to point out flaws in these wonderful women by any means. I simply share this to make a point that women in Mbale, much like the millions of women in developing countries worldwide, are in dire need of education. It is absolutely essential to their and their families’ wellbeing.
Additionally, I taught five different groups of pre-teen and teenage girls while I was there. Two of the groups were in rural villages, and the other three were in secondary schools. I focused on maturation and menstruation, and used a lot of material from the manual. I made different lesson plans each time, based on the needs of the groups,
Additionally, I met with different women who worked for local NGO’s and taught them the lessons we had been teaching all summer, and then gave them the lesson plans. This way, they can continue to teach the women they work with now that we are gone.
I have gained such a love for teaching girls and women about their health and their bodies; having that knowledge is so important for them, and can be life-changing. I truly believe that knowledge (whatever the subject may be) is power!
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Great Video
A partner of ours, Steven Wrigley of Global Outreach, posted this video...we love it and hope you do too. It shows how culture and experience colors all of our lives. At Grow.Learn.Give. we understand that we can't take our Western ideas and simply transport them to another country and culture. We rely on local people who best understand what will work.
Check it out at http://www.wimp.com/culturaldifferences/
Check it out at http://www.wimp.com/culturaldifferences/
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
BIG MONTH FOR GROW.LEARN.GIVE.
1. Come and meet us and hear about Grow.Learn.Give. and celebrate International Women's Day all at the same time. A full day of service and celebration scheduled at UVU in Provo, Utah on March 12th. Here is all the info reachandunite.com
2. AND......OUR WEBSITE IS UP!!!!!!! GROWLEARNGIVE.ORG
2. AND......OUR WEBSITE IS UP!!!!!!! GROWLEARNGIVE.ORG
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