LAST MILE4D
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Mission Statement
Our mission is to mobilize resources to ensure that women and girls everywhere and particularly in remote Last Mile communities have access to information about their rights to health and safety and their right to be free of gender-based violence.
About This Cause
Last Mile4D is a non-profit based in Washington, DC that designs and implements education and training programs with a focus on the health and safety of women living in the most remote and under-served areas of the developing world, known as “Last Mile” communities. LM4D’s solution is to design and implement innovative community-centered health and rights-to-health programs for women and girls by engaging local partners. We believe that by including local communities in the design process, we achieve lasting and measurable change for women and girls’ access to health and safety in Last Mile communities. Last Mile4D builds its projects from the periphery in, and applies its community-designed, "high tech/high touch" solutions to a variety of fields, including but not limited to health and rights-to-health and safety. Use of VPack mobile technology, integration of solar cells, computers and online platforms enable LM4D and its partners to reach and inform women and girls living in Last Mile communities about their rights to health and safety. Our approach is to work with local partners in Last Mile communities to ensure women and girls have the knowledge, access to information, human capacity and agency to exercise their rights-to-health and safety. We use community-centric training and easily accessible information on our secure online platform to enact impactful change with sustainable results for women and girls living in the most remote parts of the developing world. Our unique approach brings information, services and resources to women and girls in remote communities so they ultimately can connect to mainstream development solutions working from the Last Mile in. In Kenya, LM4D has used this bundling of technology and programming to help eradicate the brutal practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). In Kuria, Kenya – in collaboration with ChildsLife Kenya, and GOCESO Women Network – we used VPack technology and innovative teaching methods to create awareness, training and outreach to at-risk women and girls. Going forward, our trained field officers will use these methods to identify girls at risk for being cut – FGM – from ten schools, record their findings and put intervention measures in place to rescue these girls. LM4D plans to scale-up beyond this Kenyan community and the thousand girls already targeted for intervention. Supported by Grand Challenges Canada, LM4D used the Mobikit to address the rights of HIV+ women and their babies to health, nutrition and economic opportunity. Our integrated technology solution of community engagement, population-responsive education combined with nutrition/urban gardens, and the use of Mobikit, in Kenya’s Kibera slum delivered health care to HIV+ women and their babies. LM4D works closely and collaboratively with the ChildsLife Kenya. Building capacity of civil society organizations (CSOs): Last Mile4D designs and delivers regional conferences, trainings, and workshops in the Caucasus, Central Asia and Middle East on public health issues impacting the health, rights-to-health, and safety of women and girls. But LM4D’s secret-sauce is the action-planning that takes place at the conferences and workshops, and the follow up work that takes place after these events to ensure that action plans become actualized. These activities are designed to build the capacity of women-led civil society organizations, as well as provide continuous mentoring and online and in-person training. These training sessions tie into our broader and more sustained mentoring processes. They also allow us to help trouble shoot around obstacles that our local partners encounter in adapting LM4D’s programs to the needs of local communities. Moreover, these sessions help us assess the capacity of those we train to then train others in the area of women and girls’ rights to health and safety. Health, Economic empowerment and Rights (HER): Key components of advancing the cause of women’s health are promoting awareness of their rights to health and safety, as well as giving them a voice for advocacy in their homes, local communities and countries. We believe women and girls’ access to health and safety is a fundamental cornerstone of their economic empowerment. Based on this belief, we are focused on Health, Economic Empowerment and Rights (HER) in the Caucasus, Central Asia, Middle East and East Africa. In these areas we provide ongoing training and mentoring to women and civil society leaders who can help advance the cause of Women’s health and safety, and their economic wellbeing. Given the close connection between access to health/safety and economic empowerment, our training and awareness modules cover both of these closely related issues so critical to the well-being of women. We use distance e-training and mentoring through local partners and their trainees to advance the health and financial independence of women. This is of particular importance for women caught in the vicious cycle of violence. We supply our local partners in remote areas with VPack, to improve the reach of our HER – health, safety and economic empowerment – programs to some of the most remote areas of the globe. This combination of health, safety and economic empowerment programs has had proven successes in central Kenya, where girls graduating from high school gained access to job-related educational content.