5) Description of health product/service offering: Despite growing international attention to the burden of disease in developing countries, infection rates of the three largest killers worldwide, HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria, continue to rise, as do the leading culprits of child mortality: diarrhea, malaria, and malnutrition. Mali is one of the poorest countries on the African continent, with an average per capita income of less than $350 per year. In this context, simple health literacy campaigns aimed at influencing the risky behavior of individuals have been an insufficient response to these health crises. Communities disempowered by lack of access to education, economic opportunities, health services, and infrastructure require more than basic health information to proactively address current and future health threats. To address these greater issues, what is needed is a fundamental transformation of social and economic vulnerabilities.

Project Muso Ladamunen works to empower communities with little access to formal education, health care, and employment in urban Mali. Through an integrated women’s education program, participants develop the capacity to prioritize, study, and develop innovative solutions for the most dire health problems they face in their community. Participants learn about health problems, and learn teaching and community organizing skills so that they can become community health teachers in their communities. Through an Organized Diffusion strategy, participants teach

1. their families, 2. their friends 3. their entire communities

how to effectively prevent and treat the most prevalent diseases they face.

Project Muso reaches still deeper than this, empowering participants to transform the conditions of poverty at the root of the health crises they face, through training in organizational and financial management, and skills in revenue generating activities.

6) Description of innovation: Many health education interventions focus singularly on distributing health information. However, information alone is insufficient to empower women living in settings of extreme poverty to mobilize and proactively promote health in their communities. Project Muso’s innovative approach affirms that, to sustainably promote health, all members of a community must be empowered to actively fight both disease and poverty.

Project Muso uses an innovative integrated approach to women’s health education: in addition to health skills, participants develop organizational management, financial management, and professional skills to help them combat the conditions of poverty that lie at the source of the health crises they face.

Participants also learn teaching and organizing skills to mobilize their entire community to proactively promote community health. For example, participants are learning how to prepare oral rehydration fluid to save their children from dying of diarrheal disease. But they don’t stop there. They are also learning how to organize and teach the rest of their community how to make oral rehydration fluid, and developing professional skills so that they can afford nutritious food that will prevent many cases of potentially deadly childhood diarrhea.

To complement and support the efforts of participants in the women’s education program, Project Muso also forms a Community Action Committee. This Committee, composed of community leaders and activists, prioritizes community health problems and collaborates with women in the education program to develop and launch new community health initiatives.

In this way, Project Muso helps women make deep, grassroots transformations in their lives and in their communities, to create sustainable health solutions.

7) Operational model: Project Muso’s women’s education program consists of three phases:

Phase I, 4-6 months: Participants immerse in an integrated health literacy program, 10 hours each week. Each class begins with an image about a community health problem, which participants analyze, discuss, and explore solutions for. This process then culminates in literacy exercises based on the health discussion, to develop participants’ reading and writing skills. Participants also train in basic math skills for practical application. Throughout this phase, participants apply new health skills in the home, teach health, literacy, and math skills to friends and family, and create and perform original theater pieces to teach the entire community about health promotion techniques.

Phase II 4-6 months: Participants continue with a second stage of more advanced health-literacy and math skills learning. In parallel, participants learn about organizational and financial management, and each class begins to establish itself as an autonomous women’s savings and credit association. Participants also begin learning artisan craft professional skills that will allow them to launch new small enterprises through their associations.

Phase III 4-6 months: Each class has become an autonomous women’s savings and credit association. Each association launches small enterprises and organizes an action project to benefit the entire community. Women in each association continue reviewing and learning health literacy skills independently. Project Muso continues to supervise and support each women’s association to assure a smooth transition to full autonomy.

By the end of the education program, each student graduates a health educator, and each class graduates as a financially and organizationally independent women’s association.

8) Human resources: Project Muso Ladamunen is a partnership between Brown University alumni and students, Malian doctors, and Malian medical and education students, who have founded a Malian Association and a 501c3 Non-Profit Organization to collaboratively run Project Muso. Five Malians and four Americans currently coordinate the pilot program of Project Muso Ladamunen in the community of Yirimadjo. Over the course of several months, Project Muso has trained 3 facilitators from Yirimadjo to teach a total of 4 women’s education classes. More information on the Project Muso team can be found on our website at http://projectmuso.org/WhoWeAre.htm

9) Key operational partnerships: Project Muso Ladamunen benefits from the partnership, guidance, mentorship, and organizational support of numerous organizations. The Goldman Sachs Global Leaders Program Social Entrepreneurship Fund selected Project Muso as a promising new initiative for creating sustainable social change. The financial support and partnership of GSGLP has played a crucial role in the growth of Project Muso since its inception.

Brown University has provided support and mentorship for members of the Project Muso team through The Royce Fellowship and The Swearer Center for Public Service.

Tostan, an international non-profit organization, has provided important mentorship and training, by facilitating the training of the Community Action Committee and providing the Organized Diffusion Model based on their groundbreaking model for community empowerment.

Project Muso is grateful for the active partnership of World Education, particularly for their help in providing curriculum materials, which we have adapted for our peer education program.

The Malian National Directorate for Functional Literacy and Applied Linguistics (DNAFLA) actively supports Project Muso by providing curriculum materials and training for our peer educator program.

The Malian National Program for Renewable Energy for the Advancement of Women (PENRAF), funded jointly by the Malian government and UNDP, has partnered with Project Muso to train participants in solar-powered produce drying as a revenue generating activity.

10) Financial Sustainability

          • Fees charged to clients?: No

          • Earned incomes as a percentage of operating costs: 20

          • Other funding sources: A central goal of our program is to enable groups of women to establish sustainable independent savings and credit associations and to launch small enterprises, so that they can achieve greater economic independence. So while the training itself is not profitable or self-financing, it produces financially independent, sustainable women’s associations.

          • Strategy for long-term sustainability: Project Muso is designed so that participants graduate from the program with the skills and organizational support to continue to promote community health for the rest of their lives. We have recently launched a fundraising campaign to expand this model to new communities and meet the overwhelming demand of our already overflowing waiting list.

11) Current and Future Impact

          • Total number of clients: 1200

          • Clients in the past year: 1200

          • Percentage of low-income clients: 100

          • Impact: Women in the education program teach and apply the health skills they are learning with their families, friends and community. For example, following their discussions of vaccinations, participants took their children to be vaccinated. They also taught their peers about vaccination, and created a theater piece about vaccination, which they performed for about 700 community members. Health skills taught and applied include techniques to prevent malaria, AIDS, diarrheal diseases, and parasitic diseases, and approaches to promote child health through prenatal consultations, breastfeeding, nutrition, and vaccinations. The figure of 1200 impacted clients is highly conservative, accounting only for the 120 participants and their family members (10 average) who would be most deeply impacted.

          • Overall "market": Even within the community of Yirimadjo, Project Muso Ladamunen is in overwhelming demand. At the launch of Project Muso’s women’s education program, the waiting list of women who wanted to participate already numbered over 1000. Since then, our Organized Diffusion model has created a natural system of tiered and expanding outreach, and has greatly fueled demand for the program. Project Muso aims to expand its program to other resource poor communities in Mali in the coming years.

12) Scaling up strategy

          • Stage of the initiative: Start Up stage.

          • Expansion plan: The first four groups of participants in Project Muso are scheduled to graduate from Phase III of the program in early 2007. By the beginning of 2007, Project Muso aims to extend within Yirimadjo to 6 new groups of women (180) in total. This new set of 6 groups would complete the three phases of the women’s education program by mid 2008. With a population of over 8,000, the Project Muso team considers 6 new classes a necessary complement to ensure that the program deeply impacts all regions of the community.

In 2008-2009, Project Muso plans to enroll another 6 groups of women in Yirimadjo while launching its activities in two neighboring communities. Through the Organized Diffusion model, current participants in the program will organize health education performances in neighboring communities, introducing the program and facilitating the launch of the program in these new communities.

13) Policy change: Project Muso’s health needs assessment research identified water infrastructure development as a policy change priority. Water borne diseases are among the primary causes of illness and death in Mali. Project Muso supports communities in identifying and realizing policy change priorities. Community members in Yirimadjo have already prioritized water health as their primary concern and made significant strides toward solutions to the local water crisis. Participants in the women’s education program have taken action by creating a petition and organizing a demonstration to express the impact of the water crisis on women’s lives. Collaborating with the National Ministry of Water, the Community Action Committee has researched several potential solutions and elaborated a plan to branch municipal tap water into the community.

14) Origin of the initiative: Project Muso Ladamunen began in 2005 as a collaboration between Malian and American students, based on an understanding that informational campaigns alone are insufficient to create real health change, and based upon the conviction that a deeper and more comprehensive approach to health education and empowerment is possible.

Contact Information:
Ari  Johnson
Vice President, Project Coordinator
Under the Baobab Tree, Inc. : Project Muso Ladamunen
(NGO)
c/o Whitney Braunstein, 295 East 3rd Street #5B, NY NY 10009
United States
Tel: 917.386.8378
Email: info@projectmuso.org
Website: http://www.projectmuso.org