Help CARE provide mothers in 11 of the poorest districts in rural Bangladesh training on key health practices, as well as connect them with health counselors.

Why we care: Poor care during pregnancy and after childbirth can endanger the lives of mothers and newborns and the stability of their families.

How we’re solving this: Building relationships with pregnant women and mothers through educational courtyard sessions, linking mothers and their families with health and nutrition welfare services to alleviate threatening effects of poverty on rural communities.

Mothers are trained on health and nutrition topics such as birth planning, newborn care and growth monitoring. CARE’s comprehensive set of health, hygiene, nutrition and sanitation packages help families care for themselves and their children to promote healthy growth and stronger bonds in the community.

The project will help part of CARE’s SHOUHARDO (pronounced shoo-HAR-doh) program in Bangladesh, which empowers women and girls by promoting female entrepreneurship, participation by mothers in their kids’ schooling and by building women’s community groups that develop real-world solutions to problems like child marriage and violence against women. Detailed studies show that children of women who participated in CARE’s empowerment programs were growing healthier and taller than kids outside the groups.

Funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Government of Bangladesh, and your donations, the SHOUHARDO program is an investment of approximately $130 million, and is one of the world’s largest non-emergency food security programs and plays an influential role in Bangladesh’s poverty alleviation efforts.