Partnership with WTA Foundation to Urge Action on Women's Health and Nutrition – Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
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ST. PETERSBURG, FLA. and SEATTLE (March 8, 2024)—At this time, on Worldwide Ladies’s Day, the WTA Basis and the Invoice & Melinda Gates Basis unveiled Ladies Change the Recreation, a brand new marketing campaign uniting the facility of ladies’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 World Ladies’s Well being Fund. With an inaugural donation from WTA Tour title sponsor Hologic, in its first yr, the Fund will deal with a key facet of preventive care: It goals to help at the least a million ladies with prenatal nutritional vitamins in low- and middle-income nations the place entry to satisfactory vitamin for maternal health is proscribed.
“All through my life, tennis has given me a pathway to pursue my goals, 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 Ladies’s Day and past, I’m proud to shine a lightweight on ladies’s well being and vitamin within the hopes that every one ladies can attain their full energy and potential.”
Ladies spend 25% extra of their life unwell than males, in keeping with a 2024 report by the World Financial Discussion board. This vital well being hole impacts ladies’s high quality of life and limits their means to have interaction within the workforce and earn a living for themselves and their households. And within the face of world crises—humanitarian disasters, conflict, and local weather change—ladies and ladies undergo the worst penalties.
“Each lady and woman deserves an equal alternative to be her finest—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 ladies in want, as a result of after we champion one another, all of us win.”
At this time, more than 1 billion ladies and ladies lack entry to the nice vitamin and wholesome diets they should survive and thrive, with dire penalties for themselves and their kids. Internationally, the gender vitamin hole is worsening. Ladies and ladies are 50% more likely to undergo from malnutrition than boys and males. Whereas nearly all of expectant moms in high-income nations take prenatal nutritional vitamins all through their pregnancies, most ladies in low- and middle-income nations 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 susceptible, and so they enhance ladies’s well being.
“It’s unacceptable that so many ladies and ladies don’t have entry to satisfactory vitamin and fundamental care,” stated Melinda French Gates, co-chair of the Invoice & Melinda Gates Basis. “The WTA Basis was based on the thought of equal alternative, and that’s precisely what Ladies Change the Recreation is about. Nowhere is it extra vital to degree the taking part in subject than ladies’s well being.”
Ladies Change the Recreation will have interaction international audiences via 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 ladies and ladies. A important element of the marketing campaign is the brand new WTA Basis World Ladies’s Well being Fund, which is able to mobilize assets for lifesaving ladies’s well being and vitamin services which are available in high-income nations however are tough to entry or altogether unavailable in low- and middle-income nations.
The marketing campaign options inventive property, together with video, digital, and social content material, that elevate the voices of elite ladies athletes in service of ladies’s equality and higher well being and vitamin for ladies worldwide. A sequence of activations throughout the Hologic WTA Tour will have interaction company sponsors, tournaments, philanthropic companions, athletes, and followers to boost consciousness and funding for ladies’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 World Ladies’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 prime medical expertise innovators targeted on enhancing ladies’s well being and well-being. Collaboration on the Fund marks the most recent growth of the WTA’s and Hologic’s complete, multiyear alliance to raise ladies’s well-being. The Fund leverages information insights from sources just like the Hologic World Ladies’s Well being Index, which reveals the interlocking significance of preventive care, entry to satisfactory meals and shelter, sturdy instructional alternatives, and different important assets for ladies 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 ladies dwell longer and higher,” stated Stephen P. MacMillan, chairman, president, and CEO of Hologic. “As the primary donor to the World Ladies’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 hitch us on this essential motion of enhancing ladies’s well being.”
For at the least the primary yr, each greenback raised via the Fund can be directed towards the UNICEF-led Child Nutrition Fund, a worldwide initiative geared toward ending youngster losing led by UNICEF, with help from the U.Ok. authorities, the Youngsters’s Funding Fund Basis, the Invoice & Melinda Gates Basis, and different companions. UNICEF, a pacesetter in international well being and vitamin, has the worldwide footprint and native partnerships essential to carry services straight into the arms of ladies in want world wide.
For extra details about Ladies Change the Recreation and the WTA Basis’s World Ladies’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 ladies’s skilled sports activities. The WTA is without doubt 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 match titles. The Hologic WTA Tour is comprised of over 70 occasions and 4 Grand Slams, spanning 30 nations 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 ladies’s skilled sport globally, the WTA Basis empowers women and girls to dwell totally and helps our WTA communities worldwide via initiatives selling equality, training, management, and well being and wellness.
Guided by the idea that each life has equal worth, the Invoice & Melinda Gates Basis works to assist all folks lead wholesome, productive lives. In creating nations, it focuses on enhancing folks’s well being and giving them the prospect to raise themselves out of starvation and excessive poverty. In america, it seeks to make sure that all folks—particularly these with the fewest assets—have entry to the alternatives they want to achieve faculty and life. Primarily based in Seattle, Washington, the inspiration is led by CEO Mark Suzman, below the route of Co-chairs Invoice Gates and Melinda French Gates and the board of trustees.
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