Women & Girls
The Women & Girls Portfolio supports evidence-based, effective charities that improve the lives of women & girls. The focus of these organizations is to empower women & girls from some of the world’s poorest communities by helping them build businesses, plan families and improve their health.
Women & Girls Portfolio
Living Goods
Living Goods employs and trains local people - the majority of whom are women - to sell goods and life-saving medical supplies at competitive prices. Living Goods provides businesswomen and saleswomen with employment and entrepreneurial skills while improving health outcomes in their communities.
Using a micro-franchise model for direct economic empowerment, women sell their goods door-to-door. These women own and operate their own micro-franchises, while distributing invaluable health and medical supplies to their own communities at affordable prices.
Population Services International
Women in the developing world who want contraception, but can’t access it, face dire consequences. They run high risks of complications during pregnancy, even death. They struggle to financially care for their families. They drop out of school and don’t continue their education.
Population Services International (PSI) helps women live healthier lives and plan the families they desire. PSI's primary focus is on modern family planning and contraception, but they also work in the areas of HIV, malaria, water, sanitation and hygiene, and non-communicable diseases (including diabetes, hypertension and cervical cancer).
Development Media International
Development Media International (DMI) runs television and radio campaigns in developing regions to raise awareness for important health and wellness issues. The focus areas of DMI’s educational media for vulnerable communities are nutrition, hygiene and sanitation, malaria prevention, HIV/AIDS, family planning, and child marriage.
Most poverty aid programs focus on the “supply side” of interventions, e.g. training doctors and nurses, supplying equipment and medications, and building healthcare facilities. Unlike traditional aid organizations, DMI works on the critical but much-neglected “demand side,” disseminating basic yet crucial information and encouraging communities and families to make use of the health care services already available to them.
Oxfam
Oxfam works with thousands of NGOs and nonprofits at the local level, to test and implement initiatives tailored to individual communities.
Oxfam’s work provides aid to communities and individuals--including women and girls, sexual and racial minorities--who might otherwise have been overlooked in more targeted anti-poverty initiatives.
Against Malaria Foundation
Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) works to prevent the spread of malaria by distributing long-lasting, insecticide-treated mosquito nets to susceptible populations in developing countries.
Each year, over 200 million people become infected with malaria. Of those cases, the disease will prove fatal for 438,000. Seventy percent of these deaths are of children under five years old, making malaria one of the leading causes of child mortality in Africa. Even when non-fatal, malaria can damage children’s cognitive development. In many developing countries, malaria is the leading cause of death for pregnant women.
