Our Work
LIFE SAVING MENTOR MOTHERS
Every day, in the remote, impoverished rural communities of the Eastern Cape of South Africa, One to One’s Mentor Mothers cover deep and undulating areas of more than 5,000 sq km. Living amongst the people of their communities gives them an innate understanding of the women and children living there. This allows the opportunity to ensure that health care services are provided at a moment’s notice and allows them to build strong relationships with our clients. Mentor Mothers also provide basic healthcare and wellbeing guidance, and ensure, for example, that people stick to their treatment regimens – essential for the effective treatment of HIV.
This gallery provides an immersive dive into the wonderful work of the Enable Mentor Mothers through the lens of Tate award-winning photographic artist, Lindokuhle Sobekwa, who spent two weeks immersing himself in their work, culminating in last year’s exhibition.
THE VITAL FIRST 1,000 DAYS
Numerous studies have shown that interventions in the first 1,000 days after conception have a major impact on the health and life-chances of the child.
In the Eastern Cape, where 24% of pregnant mothers are HIV positive, that impact is all the more critical. Half of all child deaths in South Africa occur within the first month of life. These children are exposed to HIV in utero and are at even greater risk of infection, low birth weight and infant mortality.
Studies of peer-to-peer Community Health Worker programmes like One to One’s Enable project in South Africa, have shown that mothers on such a programme are more likely to attend the recommended four antenatal care visits, to exclusively breastfeed at 3 months, and be less likely to consult traditional healers at 3 months.
In the rural Eastern Cape, our Enable project targets the most vulnerable, expectant mothers and children aged up to 6, with proactive healthcare and door-to-door visits. Through our intensive training, we empower local women, equipping them with the skills and knowledge to deliver health checks, support and referrals to hospitals when needed. Thousands of mothers-to-be, babies and children have already benefited from Enable and, after more than 1,250 births, the stand-out achievement has been an almost zero rate of mother-to-child HIV transmission.
Lasting Impact
Since 2001, One to One Children’s Fund has been pioneering grassroots models that have been replicated, scaled up and adopted by governments when they have proven successful.
We have invested almost £10million in ground-breaking projects in Africa, India, Kosovo, India and Palestine. More than 120,000 people have benefitted from our work and more than 1.2million people have been reached through the scale up of our projects.
Sustainability is at the heart of all of our projects. We build in mechanisms to our projects to allow them to be adopted by other organisations or governments to scale them up and reach even more people. This not only ensures our work is needed and effective, but helps develop the capacity of local organisations so they can ‘put us out of business.’
Our graduated projects continue to bring benefits to thousands of young people.
