Healthy Communities Vital to Development

A survivor of the October 2005 earthquake in northern Pakistan receives a shot from a Mercy Corps doctor. Photo: Cassandra Nelson/Mercy Corps

Good health is the foundation for long-term development. In more than a dozen countries, Mercy Corps partners with a variety of local actors — from village-level committees to nonprofit health groups to government ministers — to improve people's well-being. Our programs emphasize cost-effective, sustainable and scaleable approaches to improving community, household and individual health.

Our health initiatives don't take place in a vacuum. They are an integral part of other development activities, such as farm programs, civil-society initiatives and economic-enhancement initiatives. They seek to address health disparities at the community level, at local and regional health facilities and in national and international policy circles. Our efforts help those most impacted by poverty, social and political marginalization and displacement.

Mercy Corps' health programs build on core strengths in the following areas:

Maternal, Child and Newborn Health
Healthy mothers ensure healthy families. And healthy newborns have a better chance to become healthy children. Since 1997, Mercy Corps has measurably improved maternal and child health and survival rates in Azerbaijan, Honduras, Guatemala, Pakistan and Tajikistan. We teach women to practice good nutrition before and during pregnancy, help mothers learn how to best feed their newborns, infants and young children, and show families how to recognize and seek medical care for high-risk illnesses during pregnancy and early childhood -- the most vulnerable time for women and children.

Child Nutrition
Malnutrition is responsible for up to 60 percent of child illnesses and deaths, according to the World Health Organization. Mercy Corps addresses both acute and chronic malnutrition by emphasizing better child-feeding habits, and by strengthening monitoring and response by local and national health officials and other community-health groups.

Mercy Corps and partnering communities have restored to normal weight thousands of malnourished children in Pakistan, South Sudan, Eritrea and Indonesia, and staved off malnutrition in others by supporting changes in household child-feeding habits. We've also lent support to governments developing nutrition monitoring and child-development services in Eritrea, Guatemala, Honduras, Tajikistan and Indonesia.

Infectious Diseases
Two million people a year die from tuberculosis, a contagious but curable disease. Our efforts to combat the disease in Pakistan have demonstrated the efficiency and effectiveness of using community health workers to deliver medications and observe treatment regimens in patients' homes. Our efforts mesh with the UN-led campaign to reverse the spread of TB by 2015, and they led the Government of Pakistan to recognize us as a leading partner in the fight against the disease.

Mercy Corps engages local partners to fight the health consequences of HIV/AIDS. In Honduras, Mercy Corps' local partner, Protecto De Global (PAG), has delivered training in HIV/AIDS counseling to its own staff and to government health workers. In both Honduras and Guatemala, Mercy Corps health providers deliver HIV/AIDS information as part of a broad range of community health programs. In Tajikistan, Mercy Corps equips community-health workers with information they use to increase knowledge and help prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS.

Emergency Response
Ensuring people's physical and psychological health is fundamental to the agency's emergency response to disasters, conflicts and calamities around the world. In these instances, our health programs build on individual and community resources to foster resiliency, recovery and transformation.

To date, we have provided crisis support to survivors of the devastating 2004 earthquake in Bam, Iran; in displacement camps in Darfur, Sudan; and in response to the October 2005 earthquake in northern Pakistan.

Our emergency-response efforts in Sudan and Afghanistan focus on improving water sources, ensuring a foundation for better health for all affected communities. In Niger, Mercy Corps responded to drought and famine by helping local clinics better recognize and treat child malnutrition.

Water and Sanitation
More than ever before, water is a central issue in global development and conflict. According to UNICEF, more than 2.6 billion people -- 40 percent of the world's population -- lack basic sanitation facilities, and more than one billion lack access to safe drinking water. As a result, thousands of children die every day from diarrhea and other diseases caused by dirty water.

Clean drinking water and effective sanitation are the foundations of human health. Without them, sustainable development is simply not possible. In recognizing the increasing importance of water, Mercy Corps has made an institutional commitment to address water-related health issues more aggressively in its development work.

Today, Mercy Corps promotes good hygiene in all of our child-health projects, and undertakes water and sanitation projects in both emergency responses and development programs. We engage communities by forming water committees or working groups that help determine optimal water points, and by mobilizing community members to lead education campaigns around good hygiene and illness prevention strategies.