Health and education

Every day in developing countries, teachers, doctors, nurses and community health workers are changing lives, often working against the odds to provide quality education and health care.

Yet each day more than 72 million children - many of them girls - still miss out on school; 1,400 women die needlessly in pregnancy and child birth; and only 5.2 million people living with HIV who need treatment get the medicines they need (UNAIDS 2010).

This lack of education and health care robs millions of people of their futures.

Education, especially for girls, massively improves children's chances of escaping poverty, but poverty is the main reason why they miss school. Many parents cannot afford the fees, books and uniforms, and many communities do not have the money to run a school.

It's a similar story with health care. Fees are too high, hospitals and clinics are too few, many do not have the medicine people need, and there's a lack of medical staff. Millions of people face the stark choice between low-quality care or none at all. It means unnecessary suffering and ever-deepening poverty, as illness affects people's ability to work.

We help people build and equip schools. And we train teachers to staff them and fight against attitudes and beliefs that prevent girls from completing their education. We also help communities lobby for government support to get more children into local schools, and to hold governments accountable on the delivery of quality education.

We work to improve standards of health care. In rural Georgia, for example, we helped local people establish low-cost clinics to serve 27 remote communities. And in Sierra Leona, our campaigning helped bring free health care to mothers and children under five.