Health
fighting poverty by improving health
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 their development, 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: 1) developing healthy habits and 2) connecting children with the health services they need, when they need them.
There are four main components of our health programs:
Health
Services
When needed, we provide direct health services, in addition to medical referrals, lab tests and results, medications and other health interventions — ensuring children have access to the curative and preventive health care they need.
Strengthening
Local Services
Through community participation and shared responsibility, a social accountability program ensures that providers, users and entire communities work together to boost and improve health services.
Comprehensive Health
Education (Prevention)
Two programs provide information, tools and training to adolescents aged 10 to 18 on sexual, physical, mental, nutritional and relationship health.
Health
Promotion
We provide information on self-care and disease prevention, as well as education about when and where to access local health services.
Emotional well-being is a critical component of a healthy, fulfilling life, and that’s why we offer psychosocial support as part of our Health Equity Program. Effective tools and information are provided to children, youth and families that help them manage psychological adversity, achieve emotional well-being and be positive agents of change in their communities.
These interventions consist of:
Psychological
Services
Our professionals provide therapy sessions; external services are available when needed.
Parent and
Family Training
This is a family program that helps parents and other primary caregivers develop more positive parenting skills.
Emotional
Well-Being Tools
Classes and programs provide comprehensive information on managing emotions, resilience, self-control, self-calm and self-care.
Health equity is achieved when all individuals can reach their full potential for health and well-being, regardless of where they are born or their economic situation. We partner to improve both health access and health systems in the areas where our families live, making it possible to provide everyone with an opportunity to achieve their ideal level of health.
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.
Handwashing 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.
Emotional Well-Being
Practicing self-replenishment, emotion identification and self-calming skills.
Why: These skills help children manage stress and maintain mental health.
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.
Accessing health services
When we are unable to partner with others to provide available, affordable health care, we operate our own health and dental clinics at Children International community centers, ensuring all our sponsored children and youth have access to the health services they need.
Medical services
We provide access to medical care through direct primary care, referrals and payment for outside services, health care education and emergency financial support.
Why: These services help level the playing field for underserved communities that lack health care coverage.
Dental services
We provide access to dental services, including screenings, direct care, dental education and financial assistance.
Why: These programs help combat the number one global health condition: tooth decay.
Specialty programs
We run smaller projects that target issues such as obesity, tuberculosis and other illnesses.
Why: These programs provide health services to address specific diseases that limit our children’s ability to thrive.
Did you know?
Each year, 2 million children die from preventable diseases like diarrhea and pneumonia because families can’t afford treatment.
More of the story
Each year, doctors and dentists provide hundreds of thousands of free medical and dental exams to children and youth. Our nutrition rehabilitation program and anti-parasite and TB campaigns improve the health of thousands more.
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 behaviors is a life and death matter. Each year, 2 million children die from preventable diseases 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 gangs, 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 behaviors and provide life-changing access to health care programs, medicines and early education about hygiene, nutrition and more.
Our health programs support the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030. No. 3 is: Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all ages. Learn more about SDG #3 here.
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 our 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.
Fast Fact: After completing our Nutrition Rehabilitation program, 50% of caregivers reported they felt more confident in keeping their child at a healthy weight. Learn more about malnutrition.
Results in Action
Oral Health
At the end of our Oral Health Program, 100% of children and youth own a toothbrush and toothpaste and 98% can demonstrate correct brushing technique, and 96% say they now brush twice a day — that’s something to smile about.
Handwashing
In 2018, 33,926 children and youth completed our Handwashing & Safe Water Promotion program. Before the program, just 38% knew when they should wash their hands. After completing the program, 89% of our children and youth demonstrated correct handwashing (with soap and water) and reported washing before eating and after playing outside, using the toilet and handling the garbage.
Adolescent Health
Our Adolescent Health Program led to a big reduction in the amount of youth who self-reported substance use, including a 49% decrease in the number of adolescents abusing drugs. Reducing adolescent substance abuse leads to further positive life choices, reduces risky behaviors and increases life expectancies. We saw a 66% increase in the number of youth who are comfortable discussing and purchasing contraceptives after taking our program.
Obesity
After participating in our nutrition programs, 35% of participants decreased their BMI, and there was a 20% increase in parents who reported healthy home-environment behaviors.
Dental
In 2018, 95% of children and youth in our program received the dental services they needed and 83% utilized services provided by our program.
Did you know?
Each year, 2 million children die from preventable diseases like diarrhea and pneumonia because families can't afford treatment. Check out more facts about poverty and health issues here.
Programs tailored to fit the need
Around the world, every community has distinct needs and suffers from its own set of obstacles. In Mexico, the saturated job market makes it difficult for uneducated adults to find stable employment. While in Zambia, one of the most marginalized places on Earth, poverty is so widespread that unemployment is a generational problem with lasting deficits. Our in-country teams assess the conditions in every country we serve and coordinate with local employers to deliver the insight, education, skills and opportunities most needed in each community’s job market.
How will your support help?
Children enrolled in our program have access to the right mix of resources, based on location, age and life circumstances. Through sponsorship’s foundational programming, children and youth gain the skills and confidence they need to create promising futures. The last step on a young person’s path out of poverty is employability training that equips them with the knowledge they need for sustainable employment and financial stability.