Empower a woman, Strengthen our world.

As the world hurtles into 2019, it’s gratifying to reflect on our accomplishments at WomenStrong in the past year.

We certainly have results to be proud of!

In education,

• More than 10,000 children and adolescents participated in our Girls’, Boys’, and Teens’ Clubs in Ghana, Haiti, India, and Kenya, where they studied reproductive health, mutual respect, communicating clearly, financial literacy, and the importance of standing up for their rights.

In health,

• In India and Ghana, more than 10,000 women and girls received preventive health screenings from WomenStrong partners DHAN Foundation and Women’s Health to Wealth, with all those found to have illnesses treated or referred for treatment.
• In the first half of the year alone in our Ghana program, 2,685 struggling newborns were successfully resuscitated by the 900 midwives trained by Women’s Health to Wealth, ensuring their safe births.
• Our India partner DHAN Foundation borrowed a good idea after visiting our Haiti partner, H.O.P.E., and set up Mothers’ Clubs where pregnant women now learn about good prenatal care, nutrition, hygiene, and infant care.

On gender-based violence,

• WomenStrong partners in Kenya, India, Haiti, and Ghana have conducted dozens of community meetings, focus groups, training, and workshops on domestic and gender-based violence, putting in place effective response mechanisms and instilling a sense of responsibility among community members for each other’s safety and wellbeing.

On economic opportunity,

• More than 24,000 women and girls participated in savings and loan programs run by WomenStrong partners in India, Kenya, and Ghana.
• In the last six months, WomenStrong’s India partner DHAN has trained and organized 300 women into worker cooperatives, ensuring them greater bargaining power and linkages to markets as vendors, tailors, household cleaners, and computer programmers. This new pilot program will be scaled in 2019, enabling many more women to harvest more value from their hard work.

Publications:

• WomenStrong has just published our first comprehensive technical resource, drawing on field-based knowledge straight from our partners’ own programs: a beautiful new Strong Girls Make Strong Women Girls’ Club Handbook that offers a guide to setting up a Girls’ or Boys’ Club and a full supportive curriculum to help young people build the life skills they will need in order to thrive. Strong Girls Make Strong Women will be easily downloadable from our website in early 2019 for any organizations wishing to use it.
• A second field-based resource, our Mobile Women’s Health Clinics Manual, designed to guide organizations in providing much-needed health care to underserved women and connecting them to institutional care, is well underway and will be published and disseminated in 2019.

Given these many successes, and with so much expertise and experience in working with women and girls, in 2019 WomenStrong International will be creating a Learning Lab dedicated to sharing what works in the areas we have found to be key to women’s and girls’ empowerment. Over the months to come, we are excited to share effective tools and resources regarding girls’ education, women’s health, violence reduction, and women’s economic opportunity, and to convene a series of workshops, webinars, and other knowledge-sharing events in each of these critical areas. Through our Learning Lab, organizations eager to share and learn will be able to do so, thereby enabling so many more girls and women to benefit, accelerating human development in so many more parts of the world.

Please help us jumpstart our WomenStrong Learning Lab in 2019. In doing so, you make it possible for thousands more women and girls to lead healthy, productive lives and realize their fullest human potential.

How can that not make our world a stronger, more just and peaceful place?

Empower a woman: build a just and peaceful world.