Rotary makes high-quality health care available to vulnerable mothers and children so they can live longer and grow stronger.
We expand access to quality care, so mothers and children everywhere can have the same opportunities for a healthy future. In 2020, an estimated 5 million children under the age of 5 years died, mostly from preventable and treatable causes. Approximately half of those deaths, 2.4 million, occurred among newborns (in the first 28 days of life). The leading causes of death in children under 5 years can all be prevented or treated with access to affordable interventions in health and sanitation.
How Rotary makes help happen
Rotary members train community health workers, provide education, immunizations, birth kits, and mobile health clinics, and work with local ministries of health. Women are taught how to prevent mother-to-infant HIV transmission, how to breast-feed, and how to protect themselves and their children from disease.
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Quality care
In Nigeria, Rotary members work with the ministry of health to improve health seeking behavior and quality care for pregnant women.
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Sustainable programs
Rotary programs improve women’s access to skilled health personnel: doctors, nurses, midwives, and community health care workers.
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Clean births
Rotary members distribute clean birth kits and train health workers in safe delivery of babies.
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Keeping children alive during their first year
Rotary members teach mothers how to breast-feed, promote immunizations and regular checkups, and distribute insecticide-treated bed nets.
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Telemedicine
Through the use of technology, doctors are bringing health care to women and children living in rural Nigeria.
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Lifesaving Hospital Equipment
Clubs in Japan and Brazil used a Rotary Foundation global grant to equip a hospital with lifesaving neonatal equipment.
Our impact on the lives of mothers and children
The Rotary Foundation reaches mothers and children in need by giving communities the help and training they need to take control of their own maternal and infant health care.
Rotary makes amazing things happen, like:
Community health worker capacity building
Through the Rotary Healthy Communities Challenge, Rotary members are strengthening community health systems and increasing the capacity of community health workers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Zambia.
Cervical cancer prevention
In Sri Lanka, Rotary members collaborated with the ministry of health to support policy change an improve cervical cancer screening protocols. They advocated for HPV vaccination which is now part of the national immunization program.
Preventing diseases with vaccines
Rotary members are working to immunize 100,000 children across nine remote Pacific Islands by working with the local health system to create sustainable delivery of vaccines.
“If mothers are empowered and healthy, so are their families, leading to an alleviation of poverty and hunger.” Robert Zinser, co-founder of the Rotarian Action Group for Population and Development and retired president for Asia at chemical giant BASF
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Telemedicine brings health care to rural Nigeria