October 15th is International Day of Rural Women.

International Day of Rural Women was launched as an empowerment and educational campaign in 1995 during a UN Conference on Women.  It is now celebrated in more than 100 countries around the world. In honor of this day, I’ve created an album to recognize the women of the rural communities with which Goods for Good works.

Click HERE to check it out.

Some interesting points from a WomensWatch article about the critical role rural women play in their communities and the challenges they face:

• 428 million women work in the agricultural sector around the world.
• In sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, women produce over  80% of foodstuffs and in Southeast Asia, women account for up to 90% of the labor that goes into rice cultivation.
• Women in agriculture are less likely than men to have access to land, equipment, training, credit, and other tools that could help them significantly improve their food securities and livelihood.
• Because many of the tasks these women perform (clearing land, sowing seeds, hauling wood, etc.) are difficult to quantify and due to longstanding biases which undervalue their work, many  of their essential contributions go unnoticed.
• This lack of recognition often leads to other problems such as a loss of livelihood when sexual violence leaves them afraid to return to the fields.
• “Narrowing the gap between the general perception of rural women and their actual contributions and needs is essential to reducing hunger and improving lives in rural, developing areas, which are home to 70 percent of the world’s poor and hungry men, women and children,” says Eve Crowley, Principal Advisor in the Gender, Equity and Rural Employment Division.

This NYT article profiles Question Box, an innovative nonprofit telephone hotline that connects people from rural areas to the information they need. 

The concept behind Question Box is that barriers such as lack of computers and internet connection keep many living in the developing world from accessing important information available on Web search engines, thus putting them at a disadvantage for economic development. Rose Shuman, creater of Question Box, decided to bring information to these people in a way that is most convenient for them: cell phones. While internet connection in rural areas is both costly and slow, cell phones abound, especially in Africa. Cell phone use has more than tripled in the last 3 years with more than 300 million African having cell phones.

Each day, workers form rural areas dial into Question Box’s call center, located outside of Uganda’s capital, to ask questions on behalf of the locals. Operators at the call center will look up the information and relay it to the workers, who then pass it along to the villagers. 

Nathan Eagle, who has researched cellphones and development in Africa, said that while these services can be helpful, they must listen to the needs of their users. “We can’t sit in our offices in America and decide what is useful to people and what is meaningful in their lives,” he said. “The services only add value if they are open-ended.” 

Ms. Shuman said that this is precisely what Question Box aims to do. The service is first and foremost a tool for economic development. In Uganda, where over 80% of the population works in the agricultural sector, receiving accurate and timely information about crop prices and  planting techniques is hugely important.  “In this way we are helping farmers make decisions regarding where to sell, what to plant and how to best take care for their crops,” Ms. Shuman said. “It’s all about giving communities the ability to help themselves.”

“Most of Uganda’s rural agricultural communities are simply too remote to make it cost effective for Internet providers to offer service there,” said John Gosier, chief technolgoy officer at Question Box.  “Even in the next 10 years I don’t think you’re going to see areas like this being wired. That’s why Question Box will continue to be an important tool for getting people in these areas the information they need.”

The global effort to improve children’s chances for survival has reached a milestone: the number of children dying before their fifth birthday has fallen to an all-time low, according to data released by UNICEF on Thursday. Child mortality rates have declined more than a quarter in the past two decades because of more widely distributed vaccinations, anti-malarial mosquito nets, a rise in breast-feeding and philanthropies like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that have donated billions of dollars towards the effort.

Malawi, though one of the world’s poorest country, has experienced one of the most extreme drops in child mortality rates. For every 1,000 Malawian babies born, 125 more survived to their fifth birthday in 2008 than in 1990. Malawi’s success in reducing child mortality is not a given, but the result of their ability to find creative preventative measures and cost-effective treatments. South Africa by contrast, the richest and most developed country on the continent, has experienced a rise in child mortality, many would say because of their flawed political leadership and health-care policy.

One powerful weapon that Malawian has against child mortality is their 10,000 high-school educated village health workers who are trained to diagnose childhood killers, dispense medicines, and give injections, tasks that only doctors and nurses can perform in other countries.

Mr. Mwaraya, a village health worker who earns $90 a month, has a box in his home containing birth control injections and treatments for the most common childhood killers: otrimoxazole, a low-cost antibiotic, against pneumonia; oral rehydration salts for diarrhea; and Coartem, medicine for malaria. “My interest was to assist my fellow Malawians who were falling sick but never had treatment at the village level,” he said.

“Malawi is changing for the better,” said Doris Hebuye, a Malawian woman who listened while her daughter Fanny, a new mother, was counseled by a health-worker on breast-feeding, the danger signs of sickness, and choices for birth control. Mrs. Hebuye had lost two of her seven children for reasons she never fully understood. “In those days, people gave birth without advice. These days, women are assisted in many ways.”

Click here to read the full NYT article.

Goods for Good matches excess from the United States with the needs of vulnerable children in the developing world.