Help Mothers in Gaza
Pregnancy, birth and holding a household together do not pause for an emergency.
In every displacement site, the person absorbing the shortfall is usually a mother. She is the one who eats last, walks furthest for water, and manages other people's fear before her own. A very large number of these households now have no adult man in them at all.
Women's needs are also the ones an emergency response systematically underfunds, because they are less visible and harder to photograph: menstrual health, prenatal care, a safe place to talk, a way to earn again.
This appeal funds those specific things — dignity kits, maternal healthcare, counselling, and small livelihood grants for female-headed households.
What your donation funds
From what our women's programme currently pays:
- $25 — a woman's dignity kit
- $80 — safe prenatal check-ups for an expectant mother
- $150 — a women's counselling circle for a month
- $500 — a livelihood grant for a female-headed household
Dignity kits, and why they are not a small thing
A dignity kit holds menstrual supplies, soap, underwear, and basic hygiene items. Without them, women and girls manage periods in a shared tent with no privacy, no washing facilities and no way to dispose of anything.
The practical consequence is that girls stop attending classes and women stop leaving the tent for several days each month. A $25 kit removes a barrier that nothing else we fund addresses.
Maternal care, which cannot wait for conditions to improve
Women are giving birth in shelters without prenatal care and without follow-up. Complications that routine check-ups catch early are instead found late, or not at all, and both mother and newborn carry the consequences.
$80 funds a course of safe prenatal check-ups. It is the clearest cost-to-outcome line in our medical work, and it is consistently the hardest to raise money for.
The women in the circle do not come to be counselled. They come because it is one hour where they are not the person everyone else needs.
Livelihood grants, because aid should have an exit
A $500 grant lets a woman restart something that earns — a small stall, a sewing or food business, a service she already knows how to run. It is the only thing on this list that ends a household's dependence on aid rather than easing it.
Grants go with mentoring from local staff, and they are targeted at female-headed households with no other income. Not every grant works. Enough of them do that it is the most cost-effective thing in the programme over a year.