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We work with communities almost everyone else in the world has forgotten. They face great challenges – and we seek to be innovative and pioneer new approaches to support them. For example:
- We have introduced birthing facilities that incorporate the cultural needs of indigenous people, without which local women would not be able to use them.
- We have taken health education to remote areas through award-winning radio soaps, one of which has become the most popular radio programme in Rwanda.
- Targeting the poorest has led us to become particularly skilled at reaching remote areas, especially in fragile states, and working with cultural minorities.
A holistic approach
As well as improving health services and immunisation programmes, we target other areas such as nutrition, water, sanitation and income generation.
Health education, when made culturally accessible, is also a very effective tool – promoting safer motherhood, sexual and reproductive health and helping prevent life-threatening diseases such as HIV, malaria, TB, diarrhoea and other dangerous infections.
Giving people a voice
Perhaps above all else, poor and marginalised communities suffer because they lack an effective voice. Health Poverty Action helps them identify their needs and rights and negotiate with local authorities. We help them acquire the skills, knowledge, confidence and opportunities they need to assert their right to health.
Campaigning and advocacy are increasingly important elements of our work, helping build a global movement for health. By campaigning we can help improve the health of poor and marginalised people everywhere, not just in those areas where we have programmes.
Changing policies
There is no justifiable reason why so many should be denied their right to health, but it happens primarily because policies and practices make it happen. There is much that Health Poverty Action can do to change them – and they must be changed.
Mass poverty is a scandal. It is arguably the worst stain on human history the world has known. But it’s not true that it will always be here, certainly not on this obscene current scale.
We as a generation, in partnership with those most affected, have the power and the responsibility to end it.
