Fighting poverty
A country’s economic and social prosperity depends on the health of its people.
Poverty breeds disease; disease, in turn, breeds poverty. The cycle is pernicious and tenacious. Without parallel interventions addressing both economic stability and physical wellbeing, the problem that goes untreated threatens to undermine interventions targeting the other.
AMREF’s commitment to improving health in Africa necessitates a complementary strategy to address poverty. In our regions of outreach, our services promote wealth- and heath- potential.
AMREF's work to tackle poverty
In sub-Saharan Africa, nearly 50% of the population lives on less than $1 a day. Employment opportunities are scarce which makes it extremely challenging to afford basic needs and services, like food and rudimentary health care.
AMREF trains locals as career peer educators and care providers and offers a range of culturally-relevant business and vocational skill development courses. Alongside scaling up health systems and bringing them closer to communities, we enable people to afford them by generating jobs, introducing new service industries, and promoting entrepreneurialism.
Preventable childhood illnesses kill at an alarming rate – 5,000 children die of diarrhea every day amounting to over 1.5 million fatalities each year. Children who suffer from chronic or successive illnesses fail to progress in school and often are forced to drop out, comprising their long-term economic prospects. Those parents who stay home to care for their children lose income.
By fighting diseases like diarrhea and malaria that disproportionately affect children, AMREF ensures children stay healthy and in school. This enables caregivers to maintain a steady income and allocate those funds towards meeting basic needs, like food and clean water that curb disease.
Over one billion people in the developing world lack safe drinking water; 2.4 billion lack adequate sanitation. Annually, 4 billion people contract water-related illnesses which account for as many as 5.4 million deaths. Women are charged with the daily duty of collecting water for their families. In under-resourced regions, women will walk for hours in pursuit of water – putting them at risk of rape, abduction, and dehydration. The time investment in retrieving water makes it impossible for them to engage in income-generating activities. Additionally, girls, upon reaching puberty, will drop out of schools that do not offer functioning latrines because of the shame and inconvenience of menstruating.
AMREF educates communities about safe-water and hygienic living practices. In order to bring water to high-need communities, AMREF works with locals to create clean and sustainable water sources. Our clean water initiatives create job opportunities by training male and female locals as professionals in water supply creation and preservation as well as sanitation system development. In Tanzania alone, AMREF is responsible for 117 shallow wells, 21 bore holes, and 25 rainwater-harvesting systems that enhance the lives of 32,000 people.
Women who find themselves in low-income-earning circumstances often have to resort to sex work to make a living. In cultural contexts where women are deemed social, economic, and sexual inferiors, they are not empowered to demand that their partners practice safe sex. This puts women, like those in Uganda’s Kawempe slum, at the greatest risk for contracting HIV/AIDS and other STIs.
In addition to offering sex safe education and STI treatment and counseling, AMREF develops business and vocational trainings that target women. In Kawempe, tailoring and hairdressing workshops provide women with safe and higher-income-generating alternatives to sex work.
AMREF projects and stories
- Water and sanitation project in Kechene slum, Ethiopia
- Dagoretti child in need project, Kenya
- Mkurange water project, Tanzania
- Kabale youth empowerment project, Uganda
- Kawempe community health development project in Uganda
- Joseph’s story: 16-year old boy receives tailoring skills training from AMREF
89 % of our expenditures go directly to our life-saving programs in Africa. 
