Mission Statement
Developing countries face multiple challenges: difficulty accessing clean water and electricity, transportation needs, governmental and environmental issues, little access to health care, gender inequalities, and lack of education. All of these issues are interconnected, but two of them are especially vital to achieving the others: universal education and the empowerment of women.
From a number of angles, educating children helps reduce poverty. It is education that will provide the next generation with the tools to fight poverty and conquer disease. School also offers children a safe environment, filled with support, supervision and socialization. Here, they learn life skills that can help them prevent diseases like HIV/AIDS and malaria. At school they may receive life-saving vaccines, fresh water, and nutrient supplementation.
Educating a girl has shown to dramatically reduce the chance that her own child will die before the age five, and also improves her prospects of being able to support herself and have a voice in society.
Universal education may appear to be a relatively straightforward goal, but it has proved extremely difficult to achieve. Decades after commitments have been made to ensure a quality education for every child, approximately 101 million children are still denied this right.
Description
As a volunteer-run nonprofit we have been working hard on our most recent project: sending 31 Liberian children to school for the first time. More than Me's founder, Katie Meyler, just finished a trip to West Point, in Monrovia, Liberia's capital, to get the children enrolled, work with their parents, and check on our previous scholarship recipients. Our volunteers around the world are working to help children achieve their dream of an education.
