On the nightly news, you've seen images of communities torn apart by natural disasters, food crises, and armed conflict, and asked how you can help. Through GlobalGiving, you can! Support projects that are assisting communities in distress around the globe, from Darfur to Mumbai to New Orleans.

Hurricane Katrina rebuilding

Niger, West Africa food crisis

South Asia tsunami recovery

Mumbai flood reconstruction

Darfur crisis

African poverty

Afghanistan rebuilding

In central Kenya, health workers and citizens must combat malaria, acute respiratory infections, diarrheal disease, and worms. The Sustainable Healthcare Enterprise Foundation (SHEF), a 2005 Marketplace winner and micro-franchise distribution network supported by the Acumen Fund, works to expand access to affordable critical drugs and basic health services.

SHEF's assistance has been crucial to health care workers such as Credence Maina, a woman who began her journey almost twenty years ago, with a small bag of medicine and some training on community diseases. Working diligently to improve the health of villagers, Credence walked great distances to reach her patients. However, most of her profits were used for transport to retrieve replenishment drugs from pharmacies in large towns.

Four years ago, Credence decided to make an investment, sacrificing $200 of her own capital and, with SHEF's help, funding her own Child and Family Wellness Shop. SHEF administered a micro-loan of $800 to cover the cost of initial inventory, furnishings and equipment, as well as training on business and client management and drug administration.

Credence now serves over 1,000 patients monthly and distributes medicines supplied by SHEF. Above all, Credence's work represents successful entrepreneurship: she earns roughly ten times the income that she earned previously. Although she has only a primary school education herself, she has been able to send her own children to college. Her achievements certainly attest to the positive impact that SHEF's micro-loans have had in empowering Kenyans to drive much-needed change in their communities.

Deep in the Tahoua Region of Niger, Manomi Maigomo lives with his wife and children in the tiny, isolated village of Kabima, far from crossroads and local markets. Along with 180 other farming families, Manomi makes his living farming millet, but this year meager harvests have taken a severe toll. Years of poor rainfall and swarms of locusts have devastated crop yields, leaving scarcely enough food to survive and triggering a major crisis in West Africa. Manomi and his family have been forced to search anthills for tiny amounts of millet, and eat leaves that are barely digestible to sustain themselves.

Now, through CARE's deliveries of food to the area, the situation has improved significantly for Manomi's family and other Kabima residents. "Without (it), we do not know how we would have survived. Two days had already gone by without my being able to give anything to the children," says Manomi. He now works one day in his own field and the next as a laborer for more affluent farmers; the food provided by CARE gives him energy to work in the fields.

In addition to receiving emergency food supplies, the villagers of Kabima are benefiting in other ways from CARE's work in the region. "Thanks to CARE, I've been able to plant new crops with the agricultural development project," Manomi continues. "The techniques I've learned allow me to work land that had been infertile...even given this crisis, if this year's rains are good we will have a larger harvest because we cultivated more land thanks to CARE's intervention."

Give now to help stem the food crisis in Niger, and provide longer-term assistance to farmers like Manomi.