The American climbers who founded and staff the dZi Foundation redevoted their energies from scaling high peaks to serving the most inaccessible and impoverished communities in the Khotang and Solokhumbu districts of southeastern Nepal. Their "Revitalize a Village" program recruits and trains community councils to identify local assets and needs, plan projects, secure volunteer labor, and apply for small grants. Residents dig wells and irrigation systems, establish community centers, and build schools with new Parent Teacher Associations assembled in partnership with Boston-based World Education. A five-year, organizational capacity-building grant from AFF helped enable the dZi Foundation to restructure and expand its program four-fold.

In Nepal there is no lower status than being a widow in the Dalit "Untouchable" caste, and widows abound given the past decade of civil unrest. Illiterate, unskilled, and excluded from social contact, Dalit women and their children are the most destitute in the poorest country in Asia. International Development Enterprises, with help from AFF, enables such women in the community of Lalitpur to gain self-sufficiency and self-esteem. Using tiny micro-loans, women's groups buy $4 drip-irrigation tubes, receive training to grow mini-gardens, and learn how to sell their surplus in local markets – generating nutrition and income to support themselves and their children.

Imagine a world where every time a pregnant woman eats a chapatti or tortilla she reduces by half the chances of her unborn child being born with a debilitating or fatal birth defect. In rural areas villagers tend to grow their own grains and mill them in small community mills. Project Healthy Children, with support from AFF, is engineering a micronutrient feeder device that would add vitamins and minerals to grain during the milling process, thus fortifying the diets of people who never buy centrally processed food. When disseminated in other countries, the feeder device may help transform diets and reverse devastating birth defects throughout the developing world.

By banning girls from school and sequestering women in their homes, radical Afghan leaders have stripped females of opportunities to develop into leaders who could rebuild their society. Although a door has recently opened for women to start NGOs many women lack the basic administrative skills and confidence to run programs effectively and secure financing from the West. Afghan Women Leaders Connect has engaged Afghani professionals to train women leading seven NGOs in strategic planning, governance, monitoring and evaluation, and finance. As one woman leader has said, "We need to change the mindsets or we will not change the systems."

Photo credit: Afghan Women Leaders Connect, Afghanistan

A leading voice among aid agencies, Oxfam is shining a spotlight on the links between poverty and conflict in Afghanistan. "Around 90% of Afghanistan's public spending comes from international aid, yet too much of that aid from rich countries is wasted, ineffective, or uncoordinated. And total spending on tackling the problems of poverty is a fraction of what is spent on military operations," says Oxfam America's policy advisor in Kabul. His position is partially funded by AFF.

The average Afghan woman gives birth to six or seven children and one in seven Afghan women will die in the process, leaving their children bereft. With support from AFF, CURE International Hospital in Kabul is reducing these alarming numbers by training female OBGYN doctors to provide First World care, including Cesarean sections and fistula repairs, and by operating the first-in-the-nation neonatal intensive care unit. Coupled with OB/GYN training for nurses and midwives and a General Practice Residency program, CURE has helped increase the numbers of women who receive trained assistance during childbirth from 8 to 19% and women receiving antenatal care from 4 to 32%.

More than three decades of war have decimated the health care system in Afghanistan. Using an innovative low-cost and participatory model endorsed by the National Health Policy, Shuhada Organization trains volunteer community health workers to help families prevent disease, diagnose childhood illnesses, practice family planning and ensure safe pregnancies. A collaborative grant from AFF and another donor enabled Shuhada to train 30 volunteer workers in Bamiyan province, an area where most women never see a doctor in their whole lives. Shuhada Organization, the largest Afghan-woman-led organization, runs one of only three hospitals in Bamiyan covering a population of four million people.

With only 15-20% of Afghanistan's women literate in 2001, how could they learn, teach, work, vote and lead their country to stability and self-sufficiency? A grant from AFF helped Afghan Institute for Learning train 70 female literacy teachers in Herat Province to educate women on a fast track - and make up for a lifetime deprived of schooling. Together, these teachers will reach 2,100 students per year not only with reading skills, but problem solving and critical thinking skills - a radical departure from the rote memorization required in traditional classrooms.