Our Work

Agriculture and Food Security

Through Feed the Future, we work with the government to increase food security and promote economic growth by focusing on four key agricultural products: rice, maize, millet, and fish. Our programs improve productivity, harvest and collection, processing and delivery. Taking into consideration long-term needs, we strengthen higher education and agriculture research institutions and encourage policies that enable private-sector investment.  We are increasing the capacity to adapt to climate shocks by providing climate information services to increase the resilience and productivity in farming, livestock and fisheries.

Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance

We coordinate with other members of the international community to continue supporting reforms and the consolidation of democracy. We also integrate principles of good governance into our activities, promoting government-wide transparency and accountability. Our work is aligned with the Government’s National Program for Good Governance and includes commitments to control corruption, improve service delivery and accountability and protect human rights.

Education

Great strides have been made in the past decade to achieve universal education access. However, we still need to ensure all children receive 10 years of quality education, especially girls and vulnerable children. Working with the government, teachers, parents, students and businesses, we helped 500,000 children attend school, 300,000 of whom are girls. We also built or restored more than 100 schools, donated over 3 million textbooks, and provided internet access for 20,000 students. We worked with the Ministry of Education to establish higher-quality standards for education and a national curriculum that is sensitive to gender, ethnicity and social standing.

Global Health

Since 1990, child mortality has declined more than 40 percent, and in contrast to other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the adult HIV/AIDS rate has remained below one percent. In addition to fighting major diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, we strengthen national and local health systems, support family planning programs to allow women to have children when they want to, and help communities plan and finance their own health services. With our support, in 2012 the country became the first in Africa to adopt a continuous Demographic and Health Survey, supplementing the traditional survey that was conducted every five years.