By Improving Health, You Fight Poverty
Elizabeth Warren
The cycle of poverty is an interconnected mix of factors that imprisons entire communities for generations.
While it’s difficult to unwind every element of poverty, one thing stands out — health conditions and access to health care play a huge factor in a community’s poverty rate. Children in impoverished communities live without access to basic health necessities such as clean water and sanitation, ushering in preventable diseases or worse.
Health issues often cause children to fall behind in school, and a lack of education leads the way for drug use, early pregnancy, and gang affiliation.
Your gift, or sponsorship, helps children in our communities by providing health programs that focus on two important things:
Give a lifetime of healthy habits
We don’t just address the symptoms of poverty. We battle the root cause by providing education on preventable health issues and offering basic health and dental necessities to children in our communities. Join us in this important effort to create healthy behaviour’s that last a lifetime.
Programs tailored to fit the need
Around the world, every community has distinct needs and suffers from its own set of obstacles. In Zombo district one of the challenges besides the lack of well-established medical facilities is the Poor health seeking behaviours and attitudes of the local community. The people only seek professional health services often when it is too late for an individual child with underlying health condition. As a result, there is still a high infant and maternal mortality rates.
TOUCEO seeks to address some of the existing challenges by providing educational resources that would create awareness of the importance of seeking early medical help as soon as a child has been identified not to be well. Do read bellow the “What, Why and How” we are involved on this particular focus area of health bellow.
Education around healthy behaviors
We help children and youth establish and reinforce healthy behaviors through the following areas of focus:
Oral health:
Reducing sugar intake and increasing tooth brushing to twice daily. Why: These behaviors can protect children from dental disease, the most common global health condition — and one that affects up to 90% of school children.
Hand washing and safe water:
Increasing handwashing and implementing household water treatment and safe storage. Why: Handwashing helps prevent the transmission of diarrhea and pneumonia — two of the leading global causes of death in children. Safe water treatment and storage reduces the risk of malnutrition, diarrhea, malaria and other water-borne infectious diseases.
Adolescent health: Reproductive health education, reducing alcohol, tobacco and drug use. Why: Reproductive health helps reduce early pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Reducing adolescent substance abuse reduces risky behaviors and later health problems and increases life expectancies.
Nutrition rehabilitation: Our program supports moderately to severely undernourished children. We also work to reduce risks of chronic disease from obesity in children and educate caregivers on nutrition practices. Why: Malnutrition is responsible for almost half of all deaths for children under 5 and keeps millions of others from reaching their full potential.
Access to health care
Our plan is to operate our own health care and dental clinics and pharmacies at our TOUCEO Community Hubs to ensure all of our children and youth have access to health care where it’s not otherwise affordable or available.
Did you know?
Each year, 2 million children die from preventable diseases like diarrhea and pneumonia because families can’t afford treatment.
Volunteer with us:
If you are a doctor, dentists or in any medical practice and interested in short term volunteer placement to provide free medical and dental exams to children and youth. You can get in touch with us at admin@toucaoucao.org or click here to fill in the volunteer form
Why focus on health?
Wash your hands, brush your teeth, eat right, see the doctor if you feel sick — these seem like routines we take for granted every day. But for children in poverty, teaching and reinforcing these healthy behaviours is a life and death matter. Each year according to WHO, an estimated 5.2 million children under 5 years die mostly from preventable and treatable diseases. Children aged 1 to 11 months account for 1.5 millions of these deaths while children aged 1 to 4 years account for 1.3 million deaths. that could be solved by simple practices like hand washing and safe sanitation. Health issues are often the main factor plunging families into poverty. Living in poverty can mean inadequate health and dental care, chronic malnutrition, poor hygiene and unsafe sanitation conditions, a lack of education about reproductive health and mental health, and preventable diseases going untreated.
As children struggle with illness, they fall behind in school, drop out and many times turn to a life of drugs or alcohol, leading to a life imprisoned by poverty. By investing in a child’s health, you’re helping them envision a future they never thought possible. Our programs teach children healthy behaviours and provide life-changing access to health care programs, medicines and early education about hygiene, nutrition and more.
What gets measured? (In other words, how do you know it’s working?)
When trying to achieve healthy behaviors, here is what we measure
Increased knowledge: You don’t know what you don’t know! We track what children and their caretakers know before our programs and what they know afterward. This helps us measure what they’ve learned about behaviors that impact their health.
Improved attitude: You can know the facts but not believe they are relevant to your life. We measure how children and their caretakers feel about the healthy behaviors we’re encouraging before and after our programs. Do they believe those behaviors are important? Increased self-efficacy: Knowledge and attitude mean nothing without follow through. Sometimes things in children’s and caretakers’ environments hinder their ability to make healthy changes. Sometimes they just need confidence to carry on. We measure whether they believe they can stick with these healthy behaviors.
When it comes to the use of health services, we look at these results
Improved availability: Ensuring children can get to nearby providers when they are open and at times that work for their families.
Improved affordability: Removing financial roadblocks for families so children can get the care they need.
Increased accessibility: Educating families to help them understand when to see a health care provider and how to find the services they need.