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By Root 1017 0

a health care system from the grass roots up, with an emphasis on prevention and primary care delivered by community health workers through a network of local clinics and district hospitals. (They even have a basic national insurance plan with 97 percent enrollment!) What NGOs do here, as in poor countries everywhere, is fill critical gaps in services, education, and product delivery where the government and private sectors are lacking. Governments often have little if any infrastructure, yet magically those fizzy soda pop drinks are ubiquitous, as are mobile phones. Hence, PSI focuses on markets—those consumer goods prove they exist—employing private sector techniques to make markets actually work for poor people. The same networks that make cigarettes available in every corner of the earth can be leveraged and grown to make healthy products and behavior-change communication accessible to hundreds of millions of people. In this way, positive development contributions are made to local economies, increasing employability by adding to job experience. Plus, the initiatives and campaigns appeal to local folks, because they are generated by locals.

Below the PSI office building is a garage/warehouse for our medical products, many of which bear the proud stamp of USAID, and it is from here we begin to distribute them to clinics and pharmacies and sometimes directly to the poor people who need them. The warehouse staff here, as in most of the sixty-five countries where we have programs, include formerly prostituted women whom we have been able to reach via peer education. As a result, many have been able to exit from prostitution altogether. I visited women who have created a co-op in which they pool their money to buy supplies in bulk, bringing down their individual costs. They make wonderful crafts to sell, and the two sources of income have allowed them to improve their lives substantially, progressing them along the continuum from exploited, informal work to more dignified, formal work with a measure of security and social protections. Plus, they increase their business savvy, allowing them to identify further entrepreneurial opportunities for income generation. There are many reasons to marvel at the “ingenuity of the poor.” It is fascinating to see poverty reduction solutions in action and how one good action opens the way for yet another.

By late afternoon, I was ready to crash in my hotel room. A familiar crispy, burning fatigue had set in, the kind that feels like grit in my eyes and an aching in my joints, the end product of jet lag and grief. To my surprise, because I am an experienced “rester” but not necessarily a talented “napper,” I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.

I roused a couple of hours later to meet Zainab Salbi, founder and director of Women for Women International (WFWI), who was visiting Rwanda for a conference on gender-based violence. I had a pot of green tea ready when she arrived at my door, resplendent with chic cropped hair, black silk shirtwaist dress, and fabulous enormous beaded necklace. I’ve been a longtime supporter, and I was eager to meet the elegant and dynamic Zainab. She is a survivor of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and a human rights activist who founded Women for Women out of the ruins of the rape camps in Bosnia in 1993. Since then, the group has helped some 250,000 women rebuild their lives during and in the aftermath of war. The organization offers immediate food and medical support for women in conflict zones, then lifts them up with counseling, jobs, civic participation and empowerment training, literacy education, and microcredit loans and savings to create leaders out of victims. They work in the toughest places, from Afghanistan to Darfur. The strong women-to-women alliances that emerge during the course of a woman’s one-year program participation is one of the greatest assets a woman gains.

Zainab is an intense and rapid talker, and I was content to sip my tea and let her school me in the recent history of the region and hear about the group’s work in Rwanda and