Today at 2:00 P.M. CT at the 2012 World Food Prize Borlaug Dialogue in Des Moines, Iowa, CARE President and CEO Helene Gayle will join USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah and three other distinguished panelists for a discussion about the U.S.'s Feed The Future program to tackle global food insecurity.

The panel focuses on the importance of strong partnerships between governments, businesses, universities and NGOs. And the panelists will also explore the crucial role of women's empowerment in successful global food security strategy.

CARE's experience makes clear that empowering women is essential to improving food security and overall nutrition in the developing world. For example, CARE's SHOUHARDO program in Bangladesh reduced child stunting (a measure of child malnutrition) at double the rate of typical food security programs. An independent scientific analysis of SHOUHARDO found that the program's women's empowerment initiatives were the single most important factor in the program's enormous success. And this year CARE launched its Pathways program to improve the food security and long-term resiliency of women smallholder farmers and their families. Supported by the Gates Foundation, Pathways will use the success of CARE's Village Savings and Loan Associations as a platform to enable women farmers to access the skills and services they need to promote sustainable agriculture in their communities and reduce poverty and hunger.

The full day's events are being webcast live at WorldFoodPrize.org. The panel featuring Dr. Gayle begins at 2:00 P.M. CT.

While you wait for the webcast to start, watch this inspiring video on CARE's remarkable SHOUHARDO program.

Today at 1pm at the XIX International AIDS Conference in D.C, CARE CEO & President Helene Gayle is co-chairing a session titled "Leadership in the AIDS Response for Women". 

This high-level special session is on leadership in the HIV response, with a focus on the critical role of leadership in improving the HIV response for women, their families, and their communities. The panel will consider an 'AIDS-Free Generation' and how that key shared goal cannot be reached without the empowerment of women at local, community, national,and international levels. Speakers will address topics such as the centrality of democracy and human rights in the HIV response, and the powerful synergies of linking HIV efforts to other important health efforts for women, including breast and cervical cancer.

Leading the panel with Dr. Gayle is Gracia Violeta Ross Quiroga, an expert on sexual and reproductive health rights and the founder of Bolivia's first advocacy organization for people with HIV.

Joining them on the panel are former First Lady Laura Bush (who was in the news yesterday defending U.S. foreign assistance) and Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi (who's in the news pretty much every day).

"But I'm not in D.C.," you say.

I had a feeling you'd say that.

The discussion will be streamed online. Look for the "Media Widget" on the conference home page.

In advance of expected rains Fatima Adam, 46 and two of her four children, her son Abderrahaman, 14 and Hawa, 11 plant millet seeds in a field at the edge of Torgo village. Early planting is a gamble. It must rain within 15 days of planting or the seed will not grow, according to Fatima Adam. © 2012 CARE/Brendan Bannon

Writing in Mediaplanet's latest "Investing in Africa" supplement in USA Today, CARE President and CEO Helene Gayle says the food emergency gripping the Sahel region of West Africa should not have caught anyone off guard.

Like the drought and subsequent hunger crisis that killed tens of thousands of people in the Horn of Africa last year, the Sahel emergency did not need become a disaster. The emergency wasn’t just predictable, it was predicted.

The Sahel's rainy seasons have become shorter and less predictable in recent years. In chronically poor and undeveloped communities that rely on local harvests for food and income, unpredictable rains lead to a predictable result: hunger.

Predictable, but not inevitable.

Gayle urges governments, aid groups and donor groups to take a more proactive approach to food security.

CARE is in the Sahel helping farmers improve their irrigation and water storage techniques. We're providing access to drought tolerant varieties of grain that can grow from seeds into food even during shortened rainy seasons. And we've helped build hundreds of community-led savings groups that help entire towns collect and grow their asset base to be better prepared when emergencies arise.

If a slew of proactive solutions to food emergencies sound too idealistic or pie-in-the-sky, consider this:

In 2005, former UN Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland famously noted that it cost $80 per day to treat a child suffering from severe malnutrition, but only $1 per day to prevent malnutrition in the same child. Put another way, understanding the “new normal” in the Sahel and across Africa means understanding that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, then acting accordingly.

If you've read this far into this blog post, you're probably the sort of person who would enjoy reading the entire "Investing in Africa" supplement. In addition to Dr. Gayle's introduction, there are great contributions from Liberian President (and Nobel Laureate!) Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, some of CARE's great peer organizations, and, of course, the great staff at Mediaplanet.

To learn more about the food emergency in the Sahel and CARE's work there, click here.

This Thursday, Americans will celebrate Thanksgiving, a celebration of harvest. Thanksgiving has come to be a wonderful time to gather with family and friends, and to reflect on the things for which we are most grateful. It also has an interesting history. In 1621, the English colonists at Plymouth Plantation (near Boston, Massachusetts) in the "New World" joined with the indigenous Wampanoag people to share an autumn harvest feast.

Helene Gayle, president and CEO of CARE, reflects on her trip to Kenya.

During the past few days we've learned a lot, visited various sites, dividing into three groups going to communities and through urban areas.

When reflecting on visits to countries like Kenya, I'm always impressed and encouraged by the enthusiasm of the people I've met along the way. In the case of the recent Kenya Learning Tours trip, it gave me great hope to witness health workers, mothers, people with HIV and youth express their commitment to solve health problems and work to overcome extreme poverty. Their names, faces and powerful stories will always be with me to drive my work.

As co-chair of the CSIS Commission on Smart Global Health Policy with Admiral Bill Fallon, we hosted this trip to Kenya to learn and bring back messages to U.S. policy makers on global health solutions. Much can be drawn from Kenya to be applied more broadly as we look to enhance awareness and commitment to health issues around the world. We are seeing improvements but we aren't where we should be. Clearly, there's no quick nor easy fix to get there.

The good news is we know the kinds of things that make health systems work from procurement of medicines to training health workers to good policies that make efforts sustainable. And, as more evidence-based data is collected and analyzed, it will help drive priorities. Moving forward, as we look to solve health problems and increase access to health services, it's important to not solely think about the technical interventions. Donor integration and coordination is also extremely critical. Increased flexibility of investments will be a major driver of success. Ultimately, our goal is to allow governments and communities to use this platform to take on more of an ownership role and make it sustainable. The bottom line is that we need to get this strategy right and efforts should not be about political advantage but rather on the health and well-being of the people, like the one's I've met in Kenya and in so many other developing countries I've visited over the years.

A woman in Siaya District (Nyanza Province), Kenya. (2009 Allen Clinton/CARE)

Helene Gayle, president and CEO of CARE, blogs from her trip to Kenya.

August 10, 2008

Well, we arrived last night to Nairobi around 9 p.m. and settled in. Most of the Learning Tours group ended up on the same flight to Nairobi from Amsterdam, which was great as it gave us a bit of time to connect with each other and get focused on the Learning Tour trip.

This morning after a breakfast briefing we loaded up in a van and headed to a drop off point to get to Kibera Tabitha Clinic. Kibera is a densely populated "informal settlement" or slum area of Nairobi. Population estimates for Kibera are as high as 1 million people. It's probably the largest and most studied slum in Africa – nearly the size of Manhattan's Central Park. From our drop off point at the top of a hill, it looks like a corrugated sea of rusted tin roofs and open sewers.

Reaching the clinic involves walking through a maze of muddy walking paths as there are no streets. While there we were briefed by Dr. Rob Breiman of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), who is a former colleague from my days at CDC, and the clinic's director, Salim Mohammed. The clinic took two years to build and was completed this year. The bricks to build it were all carried by hand down the same narrow, windy path to the site and was built by the community.

The clinic partners with the CDC to identify trends in infectious diseases and develop programs to meet the highest priorities for improving health. They also integrate HIV training, reproductive health and antenatal care. About 150-200 people visit this clinic every day.

Staff also do home visits to households every other week, asking questions to identify possible health issues. For example, if someone has a cough or potential complications with a pregnancy, it initiates a specific set of questions to help determine the whether there is a problem that needs attention. I had the chance to go on a home visit to meet with a woman named Cynthia, a mother of five. It was interesting to see how the local health worker, Jaciuta, gathered surveillance information on Cynthia's family that was logged on a handheld PDA – technology put to good use. This allowed the home health worker to go back to the office and upload household health information on a daily basis. Sure beats old fashion paper record keeping!

From there, we walked through another part of Kibera to meet with a group of women. They told us about the daily struggles they face as well as some of the support they receive from a woman named Judy, a retired nurse who started her own organization that CARE supports as a local partner through our Local Links program. Judy helps the women start small businesses, like selling vegetables, to earn their own income.

The story of one woman, Mwinza Mwema, especially impressed me. She has seven children and two orphans in her care. Her vegetable stand was burned to the ground during the post-election violence in Kenya last year but she didn't give up hope. She takes on jobs washing clothes and dishes, making a little over a dollar a day. It never ceases to amaze me the resilience of women like Mwinza, who continues to have a positive attitude despite the hardship she faces. This is a woman who survived home childbirth, cutting the umbilical cords herself because she couldn't afford to go to a hospital. She was lucky to have survived and that her children still have a mother. She mentioned other women she knew who didn't survive home childbirth, a common practice in poor areas. Hopefully as more clinics like Tabitha go up, more people will start accessing health and family planning services.

During lunch we spoke with Peter Anyang Nyong, minister for medical services, who noted health challenges in Kenya, and how improving infrastructure and human resources are critical to the country's development.

(L to R: Admiral Fallon, Minister for Medical Services Peter Anyang Nyongo and me at lunch)

From there we drove to Pumwani Maternity Hospital for our final visit of the day. According to the director, Dr. Charles Wanyoni, it's the busiest maternal health hospital on the continent. This year, he said they've experienced seven maternal deaths for some 11,000 deliveries. He noted that "when it's this busy you can expect complicated cases." The hospital has two operating rooms, one antenatal clinic, family planning services, services to prevent mother-child transmission of HIV and comprehensive care. Because it's located right next to Kibera, many women and girls who deliver there have to work out with a hospital committee how they will pay for services – approximately $40 for a normal delivery and double that if a caesarean-section is needed.

(Here I am visiting the Pumwani Maternal Health Hospital's neonatal unit.)

Because the hospital was built in 1926, it was obvious they've have to expand, which is a constant struggle when facing high demand and low funding. It was good to see that the CDC is supporting the hospital with a laboratory, and it also receives PEPFAR (the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) funding. The hospital staff has aspirations for developing their infrastructure during the next five years to include things like a new water system and more skills training workshops for staff.

I really hope for the day when poor women can focus on getting the care they need without putting themselves in precarious financial positions that deepens their poverty. This is what I will continue to push for: more investment in maternal health and family planning. These issues really need to become a priority, not just in Kenya, but  on a global scale.

Tonight, I have to brush off the dust from today's trip to wear another hat: meeting with health leaders and key donors at the residence of U.S. Ambassador Ranneberger. More tomorrow!

We’ll be watching the film “A Powerful Noise” and participating in a live town hall discussion with panelists Madeleine Albright, Natalie Portman, Nicholas Kristof, Christy Turlington Burns and Helene Gayle. Can you imagine – being able to discuss women’s empowerment and fighting poverty with the likes of them?