I’m helping bring clean water to Afghanistan
Geoffrey Risch, Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations
The Gates Foundation Afghanistan Projects
A $1 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is enabling CDC scientists to initiate two critical projects to improve maternal and child health care in Afghanistan - a program to establish community-based maternal and perinatal health care surveillance systems, and a program to provide a low-cost technology for producing safe drinking water for pregnant women, new mothers and their families.
Until recently Geoff Risch didn’t know much about Afghanistan. But through his work with CDC, he has learned a great deal about the urgent need for improved maternal and child health care – including safe drinking water – in the war-ravaged country. Now he is using his expertise in partnership building to help address this important problem.
Risch’s skills and desire to make a difference helped secure a $1 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help rebuild the health care infrastructure for women and children in Afghanistan.
“The only way this project could have happened was if the Gates Foundation had agreed to do it,” says Risch, director of corporate and foundation relations for the CDC Foundation. “The CDC Foundation was the vehicle to make it happen.” Risch explains that he had to interview everyone who would be working on the Afghanistan project, pull together a proposal, revise it substantially to meet the Gates Foundation’s requirements and serve as the facilitator among all parties.
“There were the needs of the Gates Foundation to consider, the interests of the Department of Health and Human Services to be taken into account, and CDC’s existing programs in Afghanistan to work within. All of these elements had to be addressed in a cohesive program proposal,” he says.
“It was an extremely complex process, but the idea that I was helping CDC change lives and history was exciting.”
A world away, CDC medical epidemiologist Pavani Kalluri has seen firsthand how Afghan women and children desperately need the services the Gates Foundation grant will provide.
“There is a profound lack of access to clean water sources and extremely high rates of diarrheal disease,” she says. “We were in villages where not a single house had a roof. In a place like Afghanistan, you have to seize the moment. Without the CDC Foundation, this project would never have happened with the same efficiency and speed. What our CDC Foundation colleagues have been able to do is brilliant – both in terms of advocating for funding and mobilizing those funds so quickly.”
A $1 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is enabling CDC scientists to initiate two critical projects to improve maternal and child health care in Afghanistan – a program to establish community-based maternal and perinatal health care surveillance systems, and a program to provide a low-cost technology for producing safe drinking water for pregnant women, new mothers and their families.