At Year's End, News of a Global Health Success

Everyone knows how to stop the epidemic of teen pregnancies in Tanzania, where one out of every four babies is born to a woman under the age of 18. It is one thing that politicians, teachers, sisters, priests, imams, police officers and activists all agree on. And its success has been proven by plummeting teen pregnancy rates everywhere it has been implemented.

Students in Scottish schools, colleges, and universities will now be able to access free sanitary products. This eliminates the indignity of “period poverty” and helps students avoid missing school due to being unable to afford sanitary products.

School districts don’t usually operate homeless shelters for their students, run food banks or have a system in place to provide whatever clothes kids need. Few offer regular access to pediatricians and mental health counselors, or make washers and dryers available to families desperate to get clean. But the Jennings School District — serving about 3,000 students in a low-income, predominantly African American jurisdiction just north of St. Louis — does all of these things and more.

Homeless and impoverished kids still have the chance to receive a college education, they just need to have the confidence that they can do so and a little pushing from outside forces. The author shares her own story of accomplishing just that.

Women around the world are coming together to form “mommunes,” which are communes for single mothers to live under the same roof and share the load of child care, bills and housework. There are even platforms, like CoAbode, which have emerged to make finding other single mothers to live with much easier. CoAbode alone has had about 300,000 single mothers create profiles on the platform to find a home-share match.

The Center for Children's Health Education, Orientation and Protection, or CEE-HOPE, works to address the challenges young girls growing up in poorer neighborhoods face, including lack of education and skills development and high child marriage rates. The organization helps these young girls access education and shelters for those experiencing abuse, helping to better themselves and turn them into advocates for other young girls.

AMURTEL Greece offers support for immigrant women from pregnancy until their babies are two years old. AMURTEL offers one-on-one appointments with midwives and infant feeding consultants, group classes, and peer-to-peer support groups with people from similar origins. Midwives can visit mothers in their homes or refugee camps. Breastfeeding support is an important focus of the organization, since many new mothers who would breastfeed in their home countries feel discouraged to do so by Western doctors.

After experiencing a high rate of drownings among children due to the number of rivers and ponds in the country, a non-profit organization in Bangladesh has been offering swim lessons to children in rural areas that are more susceptible to encountering dangerous waters. Since the program started, the rate has decreased nearly 50 percent while the confidence of the participants has increased.

Researchers and public health experts across the world are turning to "wastewater-based-epidemiology" as a practice that could help trace and track the spread of COVID-19. This methodology has already proved successful in helping mitigate diseases such as polio in Israel and track the usage of illicit drugs in Australia. Most recently, in both France and the Netherlands, early sewage samples have revealed useful data about the coronavirus outbreak.

Several programs have cropped up throughout California to help former foster youth navigate what has been identified as the biggest challenge of aging out of the foster case system -- housing. NextUp and other initiatives at community colleges provide counseling and financial support to students who lack a built-in support network.