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Overview

Each day, 1,500 women in developing countries die from complications of pregnancy and childbirth: one death every minute, half a million every year. Nearly every one of these deaths could be prevented, if well-known, cost-effective maternal health services were available to all.
For over 20 years, Family Care International (FCI) has been working to eliminate this profound injustice, pursuing a vision of a world where no woman suffers preventable death or injury in pregnancy or childbirth. Your gift — for the holidays, a birthday, or in celebration of a healthy mother and her newborn baby — will help to make this vision a reality.

Mission

FCI is dedicated to making pregnancy and childbirth safer around the world. We work to:
• Ensure access to quality maternal and newborn health care;
• Help women and girls to prevent and manage unintended pregnancy;
• Promote the sexual and reproductive health and rights of young people and other underserved groups;
• Reduce the spread of HIV, especially among women and young people.

Program

FCI works to end maternal mortality by

• Drawing global attention to the scope of the problem and encouraging greater financial investment in maternal health
• Enabling women and communities to claim their right to quality health services
• Building the capacity of local organizations to deliver effective maternal health care and testing new and innovative approaches for improving services
• Empowering women, young people, health workers, and advocates by giving them clear and technically-accurate information in culturally-sensitive multilingual publications.

Impact

FCI has been working since 1987 — collaboratively, innovatively, and effectively — to make pregnancy and childbirth safer around the world. When FCI was founded, the world was paying little attention to the millions of women dying each decade in pregnancy and childbirth. FCI was instrumental in persuading 193 countries to commit themselves, by signing on to the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, to a 75% reduction in global maternal mortality by 2015.

Today, FCI fights for the funds needed to achieve this ambitious but urgent goal. On the ground in 18 countries, it equips and empowers grassroots organizations and local agencies to build well-managed clinics with well-trained staff, to mobilize village leaders and women to demand the skilled care that they need, and to design health education programs that help young people learn the way they learn best – from their peers. For all these achievements, in 2008 FCI earned the prestigious UN Population Award.

CEO

Ann Starrs co-founded FCI in 1987, and became its president at the beginning of 2008. Based in Uganda from 1989 to 1992, Ann initiated FCI’s in-country programs in eastern and southern Africa. She subsequently headed FCI’s Africa programs, then became Vice President responsible for FCI’s seminal role coordinating the Safe Motherhood Inter-Agency Group. She has authored numerous publications and scholarly articles on maternal health, and currently serves as co-chair of the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn & Child Health. Ann earned an M.P.A. in development economics and a Certificate in Demography from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

Board

Frederick T. Sai, M.D., Chair of the Board
Ann Starrs, President
James Sligar, Secretary
Noreen Clark, Ph.D.
Hernan Sanhueza, M.D.

Countries

Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Kenya, Tanzania, United Republic of, Bolivia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname

Contact

588 Broadway

Suite 503

New York, NY 10012

Phone: (212) 941-5300

www.familycareintl.org

EIN: 13-3228334


A Gift Card

Health

Adopt a clinic

Maternal care reform

This gift will support the transformation of a dysfunctional rural clinic into one that provides high-quality, life-saving maternal care for women in its community. An FCI program in Kenya and Tanzania works with the managers and staff members in local health centers, equipping and empowering them to bring about urgently-needed improvements. Beyond their clinical skills, they learn how to work with health officials to get...

$500.00

Train a nurse

Maternal care progress

This gift will train one health care worker to understand local cultures and provide better, more sensitive care — so that more women will use life-saving health services. An FCI project in Ecuador and Bolivia trains health providers to make the simple adjustments — allowing relatives to bring in warm drinks for women in labor (which tradition says will bring a healthy baby) or to...

$100.00

Save young lives

Condoms for youth

This gift will provide 100 condoms to young people in Mali, West Africa, as part of a comprehensive, practical educational strategy. Since 2005, FCI has pioneered a peer-to-peer approach to educating young workers. The project has trained 120 peer educators, distributed 16,000 condoms, and empowered 22,000 at-risk young people to pursue their dreams and protect themselves from HIV and unwanted pregnancy. This program is being...

$10.00

Empower rural women

Health care organizing

This gift will pay for a community organizer to work with a remote West African village for 3 months — building relationships with community leaders and providing information about women’s right to lifesaving maternity care. This FCI project teaches women to demand the services that can save their lives, and in the process it transforms families and empowers villages. But there are many villages, and...

$250.00

Reach a village

Community organizing

This gift will cover two weeks’ transportation costs, enabling FCI’s community organizers to reach dozens of isolated villages and empower women to claim the care they need. In West Africa, FCI’s community organizers go into villages, identify community leaders, and train them to mobilize villagers to ensure that every pregnant woman gets the obstetric care that can save her life. But rural roads are poor...

$25.00

Empower youth

Health information

This gift will provide FCI’s youth education handbooks — accurate, culturally appropriate, and in the local languages — for 12 communities in Latin America, Africa, or the Caribbean. FCI’s innovative materials, produced in a dozen languages and now used in more than 30 countries, help young people understand their sexual and reproductive health and rights, and empower them to make smart choices. Right now, demand...

$50.00