How do charities help?

Charities work on a number of issues that directly affect women. Some charities focus on improving women's health by running programs to reduce deaths or complications resulting from childbirth. Others seek to empower women by increasing their financial capacity through microcredit (providing loans) or job training. Some organizations focus on education, providing scholarships or financial assistance to girls so that they can attend school. Some organizations seek to combat sexist attitudes that may result in domestic abuse and other problems. And, finally, some organizations try to combat sex slavery and trafficking.

In line with our research into international aid in general, we believe that programs focused on health offer donors the best opportunity to accomplish good with their donation.1 Programs focused on economic empowerment or education may work, but past programs have a spotty track record.2

We believe that the goal of "gender equality" is a worthy one, but trying to change attitudes in a very different culture is an uphill battle, and women, themselves, value other things more highly.

What are the challenges of finding a great charity?

Complications relating to childbirth are one of the primary health issues affecting women. A woman in a developing country is 97 times more likely to die as a result of pregnancy than a woman in a developed country. Unfortunately, even though the developed world has made great progress in making childbirth safer, there have been no consistently successful programs for extending these gains to the developing world, and some prominent failures.3

For example, from the 1970s to the 1990s, the WHO recommended training traditional birth attendants (TBAs) in order to reduce deaths during labor. TBAs are not medically trained, but instead are women who acquire their skills through experience and apprenticeship rather than through the formal training that doctors, midwives, or nurses receive. The notion is that TBAs can encourage expecting mothers to access appropriate pre-natal care (both regular and due to unforeseen needs) and seek specialized care during labor.4

Unfortunately, there's little reason to believe that training TBAs is an effective program for reducing maternal mortality. Now, the WHO no longer recommends training TBAs as an effective program for reducing deaths during childbirth.5

The TBA program is just one case study, but its failure may illustrate part of the challenge of combating maternal mortality. Reducing deaths during childbirth may require significantly improving health services across the board. That means improving access to nutrition and counsel during pregnancy; access to midwives (for regular births) and specialists and surgeons (for complicated births); and access to new, improved life-saving equipment. Trying to solve the broad problem by fixing one link in the chain just might not work.

See our review of programs aiming to reduce maternal mortality for more information.

Where should you give?

Given the checkered history of interventions focused narrowly on maternal mortality, we support two charities that take a different approach.

• Population Services International, which promotes and distributes condoms that reduce unwanted pregnancies, ultimately reducing the number of maternal deaths during childbirth. Condoms have the additional benefit of preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS. For more, see our full review of PSI.
• Partners in Health, a group that provides comprehensive health care to individuals in the developing world by creating and managing hospitals, health centers, and a network of community health workers. We believe that full-service hospitals are among donors' best options to comprehensively prevent maternal deaths during childbirth. PIH's work has the additional benefit of improving health more broadly for the communities they serve, including treating HIV/AIDS, malaria, and pnuemonia, other significant causes of ill-health in the developing world. For more, see our full review of PIH.

1. 1.

   See our overview of international giving and our overview of developing-world health for reasons why.

2. 2.

   See our overview of economic empowerment and our overview of developing-world education for reasons why.

3. 3.

   See our report on maternal mortality for more information.

4. 4.

   See our discussion of training programs for traditional birth attendants in our report on maternal mortality for more information.

5. 5.

   See our discussion of training programs for traditional birth attendants in our report on maternal mortality for more information.