Our vision is a world where all women, children and young people can survive and thrive. Our mission is to empower local communities to take action on the biggest health challenges facing them. Find out how, with your help, you can enable us to support more women and children.
Women, children and young people face problems that kill them, harm them or hold them back.
We believe local communities have the answers. Yet too often they are told what to do, treated as the problem or ignored.
Not by us or by our supporters.
Since 2001, the charity has been supporting local communities to take action to address the health challenges facing them.
We have set-up community health groups, focussed around maternal and newborn health. The groups use our rigorous Participatory Learning and Action group approach, known as PLA, and have reached over 12 million people, saving over 6,500 lives.
We can do more. Our ‘Prepare, Position, Power-Up’ Strategy for 2022-2024 sets out our roadmap for continuing to support women and children in some of the world’s most rural and remote communities.
As guardians and champions of the PLA approach, Women and Children First will take the lead in leveraging its enormous potential to benefit those most in need.
To achieve this, over the next three years we will focus on positioning PLA groups for scale-up by establishing and strengthening the pre-conditions for the approach in Ethiopia, Malawi and Tanzania.
This will include conversations, advocacy and working closely with national governments and their partners, supporting them in confirming its potential at national level.
In support, we will offer a comprehensive package of training, assistance and knowledge that can help them institutionalise this amongst policymakers and community health workers nationally – not just in one region.
Working closely with communities for over 20 years has shown time and time again the incredible changes they can make.
This has inspired us to explore other innovations that communities can use to take action on their priority health and development concerns.
This includes testing the use of the PLA, community group-based approach, to address other health issues facing women and children.
In recent months this has included our pilot project in Bangladesh, seeing if groups can work to address injuries and accidents among young children from problems such as burns, drowning and electrocution.
It will include upcoming work in Uganda supporting those with disabilities to get access to the health care and support they need.
This also covers work with teenagers and adolescent women in Malawi, with the use of radio soaps and programming addressing issues including sexual and reproductive health.
These innovations also go beyond community groups alone.
The charity is seeking to further test and develop our personalised healthcare calendars, supporting women to attend their antenatal care and vaccination appointments.
Later this year the charity will be testing the use of health messaging in early learning toys.
Women and Children First is continually striving to identify and develop effective, sustainable and scalable approaches to support women, children and young people.
Currently the charity is supporting projects in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi and Tanzania.
Women and Children First also has active partnerships in India, Sierra Leone and Uganda.
Our supporters will play a vital role in enabling this to happen. By making donations, you are empowering us to support more women and children to survive and thrive.
Your help trains more inspirational women to run community groups. It helps us champion the work with governments. It allows us to test new ideas which have incredible potential.
At scale, PLA-MNH groups could save the lives of 350,000 mothers and babies every year.
The calendars and adapted toys could contribute to saving the lives of over 2.5 million more women, children and young people per year and enabling millions more to thrive.
Thank you for joining us, for being part of this journey and helping so many women and children to survive and thrive.