THE PROBLEMS: Nearly one in four children in Mali dies before the age of five. This problem is particularly bad in urban slum neighborhoods. 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.

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 our community committees have started a community center, a community health outreach program, a women's empowerment program, a microfinance program, and a trash disposal system. We will be breaking ground on a clinic to serve 60,000 slum residents in November!

OUR GOAL: Our aim is to enable 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. Sikoroni, Mali is our pilot project. We have been able to mobilize over a hundred thousand dollars in Malian government resources to help this community, and have started four sustainable community committees and six projects with practically no money and a lot of elbow grease. Our next steps are to see these projects to completion, and share our model with others to maximize our impact around the globe.

Invest in us! We need funding to bring this project to the next level. We also need pro-bono volunteers for graphic design, database entry and management, grant writing, English-French translation, publicity, electronic medical records systems, data analysis, and much more.