Saving Lives in Niger, Mali & Sahel Region

For most of her life Nana Balki has struggled against poverty and hunger.

The 28-year old mother of seven and her family subsist entirely on her husband’s farming. But the land has suffered from years of droughts and floods, and insects have damaged crops, causing persistent food shortages for Nana and her family.

Nana tells Mercy Corps, “We get very little rain and when we do get rain…there are no seeds to plant.”

Because of drought, food prices have skyrocketed, and access to clean water is minimal. Unable to store crops or purchase food, families like Nana’s are forced to go hungry.

To make matters worse, restrictive gender roles, early marriages and childbirth, and limited nutritional knowledge have intensified the region’s hunger and malnutrition.

But thanks to your generous support, Nana and women like her are acquiring the resources and knowledge to provide their families with healthy meals through periods of drought and flooding.

Nana joined a mother care group run by local health workers and Mercy Corps staff in her village. In this group, Nana receives training about healthy nutrition and childcare practices –information that she shares with other women in her group and her village. Nana has also received emergency food supplements to meet some of the immediate food needs of her family, as well as climate-appropriate seeds and improved farming training to grow more diverse crops in community gardens so that families can rely on their own grown food in the future.

The emergency food supplements meet an immediate need, but the community gardens will allow the women and their families to prepare nutritious meals even during periods of drought.

With the training Nana receives in the mother care groups she teaches other women how to prepare healthy meals for their young children and infants and how to care for them when they are sick.

“There is no greater benefit than learning how to take care of our babies’ nutrition and health,” she says. “The knowledge is a great benefit. The knowledge is in our village and gets spread to even more people in other areas.”

Your help has given these women, their families, and their villages the hope for a healthy and secure future. “The big garden that Mercy Corps helped us start is giving us hope,” says Nana, “but it is only beginning right now. Next year it will give us a lot of food.”

Without your generous contributions, Mercy Corps would be unable to provide communities, like Nana’s, with the knowledge and resources to improve their lives. Thank you for your support. 

You can continue to make a difference by:

• Donating to change a life today. Your generous gift helps women and children become less vulnerable to unpredictable weather and help improve their health and access to nutritious food. Please consider becoming a monthly donor to save even more lives. Every dollar helps. Thank you!