Partnership with WTA Foundation to Urge Action on Women's Health and Nutrition | Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
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ST. PETERSBURG, FLA. and SEATTLE (March 8, 2024)—Right this moment, on Worldwide Girls’s Day, the WTA Basis and the Invoice & Melinda Gates Basis unveiled Girls Change the Recreation, a brand new marketing campaign uniting the facility of girls’s tennis and philanthropy to raise women’s health and nutrition as a worldwide precedence. A key element of the marketing campaign is the first-of-its-kind WTA Basis International Girls’s Well being Fund. With an inaugural donation from WTA Tour title sponsor Hologic, in its first yr, the Fund will concentrate on a key side of preventive care: It goals to help at the least a million girls with prenatal nutritional vitamins in low- and middle-income international locations the place entry to sufficient vitamin for maternal health is restricted.
“All through my life, tennis has given me a pathway to pursue my desires, and I do know first-hand how vital it’s to have entry to the proper well being care and vitamin,” stated Caroline Wozniacki, former WTA World No. 1 champion, and mom of two. “On Worldwide Girls’s Day and past, I’m proud to shine a lightweight on girls’s well being and vitamin within the hopes that each one girls can attain their full energy and potential.”
Girls spend 25% extra of their life unwell than males, in line with a 2024 report by the World Financial Discussion board. This vital well being hole impacts girls’s high quality of life and limits their capacity to have interaction within the workforce and earn a living for themselves and their households. And within the face of worldwide crises—humanitarian disasters, battle, and local weather change—girls and ladies endure the worst penalties.
“Each girl and woman deserves an equal alternative to be her greatest—whether or not in class, at work, or on the tennis courtroom,” stated Naomi Osaka, four-time Grand Slam singles champion and new mother. “We’re stepping up for girls in want, as a result of once we champion one another, all of us win.”
Right this moment, more than 1 billion girls and ladies lack entry to the nice vitamin and wholesome diets they should survive and thrive, with dire penalties for themselves and their youngsters. The world over, the gender vitamin hole is worsening. Girls and ladies are 50% more likely to endure from malnutrition than boys and males. Whereas nearly all of expectant moms in high-income international locations take prenatal nutritional vitamins all through their pregnancies, most girls in low- and middle-income international locations lack entry to this straightforward, lifesaving useful resource. Prenatal nutritional vitamins present key vitamins that dramatically cut back the chance of stillbirth, toddler mortality, and infants born small and weak, and so they enhance girls’s well being.
“It’s unacceptable that so many ladies and ladies don’t have entry to sufficient vitamin and fundamental care,” stated Melinda French Gates, co-chair of the Invoice & Melinda Gates Basis. “The WTA Basis was based on the concept of equal alternative, and that’s precisely what Girls Change the Recreation is about. Nowhere is it extra vital to degree the taking part in area than girls’s well being.”
Girls Change the Recreation will interact international audiences by tennis—translating the facility of elite athletes on the courtroom into elite affect off the courtroom—to tackle a number of the most urgent and pressing points for girls and ladies. A crucial element of the marketing campaign is the brand new WTA Basis International Girls’s Well being Fund, which is able to mobilize assets for lifesaving girls’s well being and vitamin services which are available in high-income international locations however are tough to entry or altogether unavailable in low- and middle-income international locations.
The marketing campaign options inventive property, together with video, digital, and social content material, that elevate the voices of elite girls athletes in service of girls’s equality and higher well being and vitamin for girls worldwide. A sequence of activations throughout the Hologic WTA Tour will interact company sponsors, tournaments, philanthropic companions, athletes, and followers to lift consciousness and funding for girls’s well being and vitamin. The marketing campaign drives audiences to womenchangethegame.com to have interaction on the problems and donate.
The fundraising element of the partnership is the International Girls’s Well being Fund, with the kick-off donation of $1.5 million coming from Hologic, title sponsor of the WTA Tour and one of many world’s high medical expertise innovators centered on enhancing girls’s well being and well-being. Collaboration on the Fund marks the newest enlargement of the WTA’s and Hologic’s complete, multiyear alliance to raise girls’s well-being. The Fund leverages information insights from sources just like the Hologic International Girls’s Well being Index, which reveals the interlocking significance of preventive care, entry to sufficient meals and shelter, sturdy academic alternatives, and different crucial assets for girls and ladies of all ages.
“Whether or not it’s prenatal nutritional vitamins for expectant moms or routine screenings for breast and cervical cancers, we all know that early intervention is pivotal to serving to girls stay longer and higher,” stated Stephen P. MacMillan, chairman, president, and CEO of Hologic. “As the primary donor to the International Girls’s Well being Fund, we’re teaming up with the WTA Basis and the Invoice & Melinda Gates Basis in urging others—companies, foundations, governments, tennis followers—to affix us on this essential motion of enhancing girls’s well being.”
For at the least the primary yr, each greenback raised by the Fund can be directed towards the UNICEF-led Child Nutrition Fund, a worldwide initiative aimed toward ending little one losing led by UNICEF, with help from the U.Ok. authorities, the Kids’s Funding Fund Basis, the Invoice & Melinda Gates Basis, and different companions. UNICEF, a frontrunner in international well being and vitamin, has the worldwide footprint and native partnerships essential to deliver services straight into the palms of girls in want world wide.
For extra details about Girls Change the Recreation and the WTA Basis’s International Girls’s Well being Fund, go to www.womenchangethegame.com.
Based by Billie Jean King in 1973 on the precept of equal alternative, the WTA is the worldwide chief in girls’s skilled sports activities. The WTA is likely one of the world’s most recognizable and high-profile sports activities organizations, consisting of greater than 1,600 gamers representing over 80 nations, all competing to earn WTA rankings factors and prestigious event titles. The Hologic WTA Tour is comprised of over 70 occasions and 4 Grand Slams, spanning 30 international locations and areas throughout six continents with a worldwide viewers of greater than 1 billion. Additional data on the WTA might be discovered at wtatennis.com.
Serving because the philanthropic arm of the main girls’s skilled sport globally, the WTA Basis empowers women and girls to stay totally and helps our WTA communities worldwide by initiatives selling equality, training, management, and well being and wellness.
Guided by the assumption that each life has equal worth, the Invoice & Melinda Gates Basis works to assist all folks lead wholesome, productive lives. In creating international locations, it focuses on enhancing folks’s well being and giving them the prospect to elevate themselves out of starvation and excessive poverty. In the US, it seeks to make sure that all folks—particularly these with the fewest assets—have entry to the alternatives they want to reach faculty and life. Primarily based in Seattle, Washington, the inspiration is led by CEO Mark Suzman, below the course of Co-chairs Invoice Gates and Melinda French Gates and the board of trustees.
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