Delivering Essential Services

Delivering Essential Services With Global Volunteers
Delivering Essential Services With Global Volunteers
Delivering Essential Services With Global Volunteers

Global Volunteers mobilizes and engages short-term volunteers to help developing communities deliver all the essential services every child needs to reach their full potential. We’ve organized 12 Essential Services into three broad categories to better visualize and leverage their impact:

Eradicating Hunger – providing school and household gardens, child nutrition, micronutrient supplementation and improved stoves.

Improving Health – offering nutrition, hygiene and physical and mental wellness education, infectious disease prevention, de-worming, and hands-on care.

Enhancing Cognition – promoting general education, girl’s education, potable water and sanitation facilities, and psycho-social support.

The Essential Services are applied comprehensively within community development projects where local leaders request them. They are the foundation of the Tanzania Reaching Children’s Potential (RCP) Program; a child-focused, parent-driven, community-led, and volunteer supported effort. RCP begins with pregnancy, and continues through children’s 18th birthday, with a focus on the first 1,000 days of life, conception through the second birthday. In Tanzania, stunting increased by 35% between 2016 and 2022 in the Iringa region, but during the same timeframe it decreased by 42% among families participating in RCP. Volunteers helped parents achieve this remarkable and unprecedented result by:

Teaching nutrition, hygiene, food preparation, child development, and how to have a healthy pregnancy to through parent workshops.
Helping establish household container vegetable gardens using EarthBox® technology for pregnant women, infants and toddlers.
Distributing nutritious meals, micronutrients, toothbrushes and toothpaste, hand sanitizer, and other needed supplies to participating RCP families
Demonstrating proper handwashing with soap and water.
Building handwashing stations, chicken coops, fuel-efficient vented stoves, and rainwater catchment systems.
Supporting women’s co-ops and entrepreneurial ventures.
Promoting mental and physical wellness and providing professional health care assistance at Global Volunteers’ Ipalamwa General Clinic (IGC).
Training teachers in pedagogy and creating supportive classroom environments.
Initiating school feeding programs.

⇐ ⇐ WATCH HERE: Short video clips of volunteers helping to deliver essential services on service programs including:

How to install, use and maintain handwashing stations with clean water and soap.
The distribution and preparation of fortified meals for pregnant women, new mothers and babies.
The value of economic empowerment programs for village women.

Cook Islands

Help repair and improve classrooms, libraries and other learning spaces.

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Malaysia

Empower teachers and parents in fostering an inclusive and supportive environment where individuals with special needs can thrive.

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Nepal

Help repair a children’s home and provide psycho-social support to resident children.

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Peru

Help build and repair classrooms and dormitories, teach nutrition and hygiene and nurture children.

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St. Lucia

Improve classrooms, and provide psycho-social support to pre-school students.

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Tanzania

Serve 740 families in the RCP Program by improving health, eliminating hunger and elevating cognition.

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HOW DO MY SKILLS HELP?

Parents and caregivers are responsible for ensuring their children’s futures, but volunteers provide the necessary information, appropriate technology and ongoing support. Volunteers from all backgrounds, professions and experiences provide catalytic assistance and material resources to help families access the 12 Essential Services – so children have sufficient food and nutrition, are protected from infectious disease, and can exercise their full intellectual capability through education. In this way, volunteers help children become fully functioning local leaders and global citizens. By helping to provide integrated essential services, short-term volunteers are a vital component in the broad framework of community development.

Simple concepts and readily available technologies can launch innovations that engage parents, teachers, children and volunteers alike. Volunteers “build a bridge” to resources for local people in developing communities, and help ensure their children have a chance to reach their full potential.

Meanwhile, as “agents of progress,” children themselves often are energetic adopters of new ideas and behaviors; exerting significant influence on their families. Working with children, volunteers’ positive influence ripples through the community – paving an avenue to lasting change. You can have a dramatic impact on what may otherwise seem to be intractable socio-economic global problems.

Faunista Manista, Ukwega, Tanzania

Mother of two, enrolled in Global Volunteer’s Reaching Children’s Potential Program (RCP), Faunista said the hand-washing station her family received changed their health. “I was very happy when I learned about proper handwashing and the hand-washing stations at the RCP Center because I discovered that I was not doing things right. Before the workshop, we took washing our hands as a minor issue. We used to suffer from stomach fever almost every month and we couldn’t discover the reason for it. After attending the hand-washing workshop, I shared the knowledge with my husband at home, and I started to teach my son Ebenezer as well. Ever since we started using the hand-washing station, we stopped experiencing diarrhea. I also use the hand-washing station to clean my little one when she gets dirty so that she can be aware that she has to be washing her hands many times. This is a very good practice for everyone in the community to adopt.”

“Ever since we started using the hand-washing station, we stopped experiencing diarrhea.”

VOLUNTEER STORIES: DELIVERING ESSENTIAL SERVICES

Fueling the Future: The RCP Program’s School Feeding Project

Partnership Improves Nutrition, Eliminates Hunger in Tanzanian Villages

Reaching Children's Potential Tanzania

Access to Quality Healthcare in Rural Areas is Life-Changing for RCP Families

“Human connections, the face-to-face interaction between volunteers and villagers as they work alongside each other on projects is particularly beneficial because it allows for the exchange of best practices, cultures and perspectives which fosters personal growth and improvement in the way we do things.”

Chemida Popo – CoxSt. Lucia Country Manager

“What I saw those two weeks were children who are happy, playful, receptive to instruction and learning important skills from both us and those who run the orphanage. Their lives may be very different from ours, but I am confident they will do well in life with the continued support of Sagrada de Familia and those who participate with Global Volunteers.”

Thomasina TafurPeru volunteer

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