Happy Holiday Season

This year, we have decided to thank you differently for your continued trust in LGT Capital Partners. Our holiday seasons gift to you is a donation to the three organizations Aangan Trust, India, Last Mile Health, Liberia and Mara Naboisho Conservancy, Kenya. Please find more details on the respective initiatives below.

We wish you and your loved ones a happy holiday season and hope you can enjoy some well-deserved time off.

Context

Approximately 60 million children in India are victims of child labor, human trafficking, physical abuse or homelessness. Lack of awareness, attention and capacity of local authorities results in insufficient response to the problems. Mistrust of the community in local authorities hinders transparency and poses challenges to stopping abuse and violence against children.

Solution

Aangan Trust runs prevention, post-harm and advocacy programs that work with vulnerable children, adults and state authorities towards the creation of a protective environment for children in India where all rights are secured:

• Ensuring support to families (e.g. mentoring on the topic of abuse) that are affected by the lack of security or well-being of their children
• Advocating for changes in laws, social practices and norms
• Building capabilities and resilience of the individual child
• Enabling children and communities to access protective and essential services
• Training and catalyzing existing protective services (children’s institutions, police, statutory bodies, protection officers, district officials, community and local authorities) to be proactive about children’s well-being and safety

Context

• 50% of the world’s 7.3 billion people lack access to essential health services
• Of those, one billion live in rural communities, where the gaps are most alarming (e.g. infant mortality rates up to 21% higher)
• Compounding this crisis is a massive shortage of healthcare workers (18 million by 2030)

Solution

• Investing in community health workers (CHWs), alongside more nurses and doctors, can help close this gap.
• The Office of the UN Secretary General’s Envoy for Health Finance and for Malaria found a 10:1 ROI from investing in CHWs through increased productivity, reduced risk of epidemics, economic impact of increased employment
• Last Mile Health (LMH) is an NGO working in Liberia with a mission to put a high-performing CHW in every remote community
• LMH recruits and pays village-based healthcare workers that are medically equipped and supervised so that they can effectively perform home-based care, saving people from the most common, preventable causes of death
• Drawing attention from the Government of Liberia for the impact of its work, LMH advised the government in launching the National Community Health Assistant Program (NCHAP), an effort to scale the CHW model nation-wide
• LMH also started the Community Health Academy, which partners with ministries of health to strengthen the clinical skills of CHWs and the capacity of health systems leaders in order to build higher quality community health systems worldwide

Context

Three problems are faced in the Maasai Mara (one of the largest game reserves in Kenya):

• Threats and damages to the ecosystem (wildlife and vegetation) due to fencing, overgrazing and increased farming activities.
• Poverty of the local Maasai population in the surrounding areas as the pre-existing conservancy models provided only few local economic benefits in terms of land-lease payments, employment and grazing land.
• Exclusion of the local Maasai population from decision making regarding conservation and tourism related activities on their land.

Solution

• Most tourism conservancies in the Mara are run solely by tourist operators. Mara Naboisho Conservancy (“Naboisho”) has developed a unique conservancy model in which both tourism operators and the local Maasai landowners are equally represented on the conservancy board and involved in decision making.
• The model empowers the Maasai also economically through income from land leases and employment in the tourist camps within Naboisho. The local population (both land and non-land owners) also benefits from other projects initiated by Naboisho such as access to schools and hospitals.
• Naboisho enables the Maasai to continue their traditional way of life as it allows for controlled grazing within the conservancy during periods of drought. This limits overgrazing and maintains the longevity of livestock farming- a significant activity of the Maasai culture.