Case Study: Vulnerable Children Program
Tackling Neglected Tropical Diseases
The END Fund is training Angola communities to improve water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) practices to help reduce neglected tropical diseases.
The END Fund is training Angola communities to improve water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) practices to help reduce neglected tropical diseases.
WaterAid is building new water infrastructure at schools in Zambia, where five million people lack access to clean drinking water.
Working with grantee World Vision, a rural region in Ethiopia devastated by annual flooding took action to prevent disruption and build resilience.
With their holistic approach, grantee SHOFCO is improving health outcomes and changing lives for people living in poverty.
Digital Earth Africa is building the world’s largest free platform that encompasses four decades’ worth of satellite data and, as a result, captures Africa’s changing ecosystem.
Helmsley’s Vulnerable Children in Sub-Saharan Africa Program is dedicated to ensuring the overall health and well-being of children by ensuring the health of their parents and by strengthening community resilience. We focus on particularly underserved areas of Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Zambia.
With this goal, our Program invests primarily in:
The Program works mainly in select, remote communities that face challenges accessing healthcare, including a shortage of trained health professionals. These specific communities often lack safe water, children are malnourished, and there are few if any options for school. All of these challenges diminish children’s chances for a healthy life and keep communities from flourishing. Life-threatening communicable diseases and increasing rates of non-communicable disease also make health precarious for many people in these communities – and when parents aren’t healthy, it’s harder for their children to thrive. Helmsley funds effective NGOs and organizations that tackle these issues collectively.
To have positive impact, we believe a number of interconnected challenges must be addressed.
Therefore, building resilience is at the core of the Program’s grantmaking. At the community level, resilience is the ability to bend but not break when a crisis hits, which is intertwined with the health and well-being of families and community members. Helmsley’s support to NGOs and local organizations is focused on longer-term, holistic solutions to increase communities’ resilience. To achieve this, we learn from communities what underlying, connected problems are impeding progress, and support the changes to turn that around – which always includes healthcare for children, and other opportunities to help them learn and grow into strong adults. We strive to solve problems today that will lead to a better tomorrow – for children, their families, and their communities.
We know that working together is vital to creating positive change. We value partnering with the communities we serve, their leaders, government programs and agencies, and implementing organizations.
We work hard to ensure that the efforts we support have the endorsement of the relevant government ministries to maximize the likelihood of success and wider uptake of proven approaches.