See It: The Community being helped

THE PROBLEMS:

Slum residents have few rights. Most are squatters who receive little help from their governments.Communities refuse to pay taxes until the government provides services, and the government refuses to provide services until the communities pay taxes. This deadlock continues indefinitely, leading to terrible infrastructure, crippling poverty, and poor health. Nearly one in four children in Mali dies before the age of five.

OUR SOLUTION:

Mali Health Organizing Project (MHOP) acts as a catalyst to bring slum residents and their governments together.MHOP has a unique system of four tools to break down the slum deadlock; accountability, communication, seed funding, and health organizing. People care strongly about health, so we use health as a tool to organize communities. When community committees (CCs) learn to design, implement, and evaluate their own projects, they invest in health and ask their governments to do the same. To date we have a community center, a community health outreach program, a women's empowerment program, a microfinance program, and a peer health education program.

OUR GOAL:

Our aim is to allow slums to create their own health care solutions, and ultimately see both the government and the slum invest in health and development without outside assistance.