Vulnerable Children in Sub-Saharan Africa
Helping Rural Communities Build Resilience
Helping Rural Communities Build Resilience
The Helmsley Charitable Trust funds holistic programs to help ensure the well-being of children and families in remote communities in sub-Saharan Africa.
Building resilience is at the core of our grantmaking, and we work with rural communities in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Zambia so that villages and towns have the ability to bend without breaking when a crisis hits.
We learn from communities about what they need in order to thrive, and we support the changes that help improve healthcare, particularly for mothers and children, increase access to clean water and enhanced sanitation infrastructure, foster agricultural development, and boost education and economic growth.
We collaborate with our grantees, their local implementing partners, community leaders, and government agencies to ensure that the efforts we support have the endorsement of relevant ministries to help advance long-term success.
To help people create pathways to better lives, leaders need access to the right information to make informed decisions. Our funding of Digital Earth Africa marks our commitment to ensuring governments, entrepreneurs, NGOs, and citizens alike have critical data and up-to-date technology to both monitor and make smart plans related to water quality and management, land use, and agriculture for food security, climate resilience, and more.
Robust healthcare is vital for community resilience, and a cornerstone of our healthcare work in sub-Saharan Africa is eliminating neglected tropical diseases, which affect more than 1.7 billion people around the globe, cause chronic disability, and contribute to poverty. We support the treatment and elimination of onchocerciasis (river blindness), lymphatic filariasis, schistosomiasis, and trachoma.
We support programs that improve prenatal, neonatal, and postpartum care, and improve quality of healthcare services for the whole community. This has included establishing primary healthcare sites for communities, funding diagnostic tools, and expanding training for medical professionals.
We seek to eliminate onchocerciasis (river blindness) and lymphatic filariasis in East Africa, trachoma in Zambia, and schistosomiasis among children in Ethiopia. We support work to accelerate treatment of the diseases, which cause disability, decreased productivity, and caretaker burden.
We support efforts to make essential medicines accessible, affordable, and high-quality, and we invest in the organizations and programs that train physicians and other clinicians.
We support a variety of initiatives to ensure that individuals and families have the chance to thrive. Strengthening rural infrastructure is a key element of the strategy. We fund programs that increase access to safe and sustainable water supplies and sanitation services. In the face of climate change, communities must plan for water management and flood mitigation in order to maintain long-term survival and growth.
We fund trailbridges that connect rural communities to schools, jobs, healthcare, and markets.
We look for opportunities to help smallholder farmers increase their productivity and move from subsistence farming toward cash crop production and agricultural commercialization.
April 22, 2025
January 15, 2025
November 8, 2024
NEW YORK, November 7, 2024 – The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust (“Helmsley”) announced Melissa Crutchfield has been hired as the Program Director for its Vulnerable Children in Sub-Saharan Africa (VCSSA) program. Crutchfield joined the Trust on November 4, 2024. Crutchfield brings over 20 years of experience in global grantmaking, creating and scaling strategic programs, and establishing…
September 6, 2024
Fishing nets. Water bottles. Toys. We all know not to litter, but many of us don’t know that much of the plastic trash from our homes and businesses winds up in the ocean. Researchers estimate there are more than five trillion pieces of plastic waste in the ocean, and this debris collects in five zones in the ocean. The…
June 10, 2024
In honor of World Oceans Day, CBS highlighted The Ocean Cleanup’s mission to rid the world’s oceans of plastic, cleaning an area the size of a football field every five seconds. Plastic in our oceans is an “ecological time bomb,” Matthias Egger of The Ocean Cleanup explained; the materials degrade and become microplastics that harm marine and human health. “We…
June 8, 2024
HONOLULU, June 8, 2024 — In celebration of World Oceans Day, The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust and global non-profit project The Ocean Cleanup are accelerating the scale-up of ocean cleaning efforts. A $15 million grant from Helmsley will support the cleanup of plastic pollution in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, reducing the negative effects of plastic debris,…
March 21, 2024
People in rural areas have always wanted water piped to their homes, the same as urban residents. But it has often been assumed that delivering piped water to rural areas would be prohibitively expensive or that people would not be willing to pay for water.
January 29, 2024
In recent years, infectious diseases like West Nile, Zika, and Covid-19 have dominated global headlines while the ravages of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) have quietly persisted. NTDs, a group of debilitating viral, bacterial, and parasitic diseases including river blindness and elephantiasis, affect 1 of every 5 people around the globe. They cause enormous suffering and often life-altering disability, and…
