Today, November 20th, is World Children’s Day. It felt like a good time to publish this article I’ve been preparing for the past few months. To set the context, we need to go back about two years. This blog was starting to get a bit of traction, and I began wondering what to make of it. While I’d lie saying I never considered going all-in, turning it into a professional gig, that was never really on the table. I quickly landed on the idea of supporting a worthy cause, contributing a bit of visibility and doing some fundraising. After all, the watch hobby sits pretty high on Maslow’s pyramid. It seemed appropriate to try and hack some of the time and energy spent on it to benefit something more fundamental.
Finding the right cause
As we all know, choosing a cause to support is never easy. The list is endless, and it’s hard to establish a hierarchy between so many urgent, critical situations impacting millions of human beings. While I have the utmost respect for the largest organizations, such as MSF or the Red Cross movement, I also felt that the modest support I could provide through this blog would never have any material impact at their scale. Yet, I didn’t want to choose one too small. The organization has to be set up for success and generate enough credibility and trust with readers (yes, that means you).
While I have some experience in the non-profit sector (I co-founded a small educational organization in Senegal right after university, and have been involved with a few international aid players, including the WHO, through work), I’m mostly ignorant about the intricacies of this complex world, especially nowadays. So I turned for advice to one of my closest childhood friends, Alexis Ottenwaelter, who has worked in the NGO sector for the past two decades as a logistics specialist – and happens to be the one who co-founded the project in Senegal with me, 21 years ago!
From Chad to Iraq, from Yemen to Venezuela, Alexis has pretty much seen it all when it comes to humanitarian aid. Now at HULO, the first humanitarian logistics cooperative, he was in an ideal position to give me meaningful advice with the bird’s eye-view. After I explained my goals, and the topics that resonated with me the most – health and Africa, where I lived for 8 years – he quickly recommended Terre des hommes. The fact that they’re Swiss, like the watch world I write about, was a welcome bonus.
Meeting Terre des hommes
After I reached out via Instagram, it turned out that the Content Strategist for the Lausanne-based organization lives a few minutes away from me in Bienne! It seemed like it was all meant to be. The coffee I had with Isabel Zbinden a few days later at the Farel Bistro – an iconic cafe in our city – finished confirming the impression.
Founded in 1960, Terre des hommes is the largest Swiss organization for children’s rights. With about 2,400 employees worldwide, it focuses on health, migration and access to justice. To give you a concrete example of their impact, below are a few highlights from 2023.
That year, Terre des hommes provided support to 339,000 children & youths going through migration or forced displacement. The organization also supported 77,400 children in their right to be treated fairly by justice systems, which sadly in many places cannot be taken for granted. A last example: Terre des hommes provided healthcare to 3.3 million children and their mothers last year. Those programs were rolled out mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, North Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe, where the war in Ukraine has recently created a humanitarian crisis.
At HQ, in Lausanne
To better understand what Terre des hommes does and how, I was invited to visit the team at their Lausanne HQ back in July. The new office is super modern and pleasant but at the same time low key. No incongruous exuberance, just a solid baseline of what you need to attract talented individuals and work efficiently. The meeting rooms, equipped with videoconferencing technology to interact with teams around the world, are named after places where Terre des hommes is active such as Kiev, Gaza and Ségou.
After walking around and (briefly) interrupting people from their life-saving work to say hi, we gathered in a meeting room. To go beyond scratching the surface, Isabel had suggested we do a deep-dive on one of their projects. When she asked if I had a preference, I couldn’t resist wanting to find out more about their maternal digital health work in Guinea. Not only is digital health in Africa a topic I tried to tackle a few times in my professional life, but my wife’s family is originally from Guinea, so it all felt very close.
Zooming in on maternity & post-natal care
Sitting with us at the conference table was Kallol Mukherji (pictured below with Isabel Zbinden), who leads Digital Health for Terre des hommes. He’s worked across the globe for the past 15 years on digital health topics, starting in the private sector, with GE Healthcare, and joined Terre des hommes almost seven years ago. To kick off the discussion, he made a statement that may seem obvious but that I’d never thought of in such terms: “Health is a very core right of a child.” That resonated. “Mental and physical health is the foundation for children to have a ‘meaningful life,’” he added. In the case of the program we were about to discuss, IeDA Maternity, the other focus is on the “source” of a child’s existence, and health: the mother. “If we take care of a child, we cannot leave the mother out.”
IeDA stands for Integrated eDiagnostic Approach. It aims to address a shocking reality, as described by Iveth Gonzalez, who leads the Health program at Terre des hommes: “Today, nearly half of all children under 5 worldwide die at birth or in the first days of life. We need to focus our efforts on delivery and first aid for the baby, but also work on the health of the mothers, because it is very much linked to the health of the baby.”
IeDA Maternity is an application, developed by Terre des hommes with the Burkina Faso Ministry of Health. After a successful deployment in Burkina Faso, where it’s already used in more than 2,200 primary healthcare centers, the program is now being deployed in Guinea. Nigeria, Niger and Mali are next.
So how does it work? And, more importantly, how does it help? The application is loaded onto a tablet, itself given to the healthcare workers. It is then used during each consultation, to keep a consistent medical record for each patient, ensuring the right questions are asked, the answers adequately captured and ensuring that the right diagnosis is made – with the appropriate medication prescribed. Five forms are used, depending on the patient’s circumstances: antenatal care, birth and delivery, postnatal care (for mothers and newborns), family planning and post-abortion care.
The data itself is analyzed, through an algorithm developed by Terre des hommes, detecting recurring errors and malfunctions at the macro, systemic level. Beyond immediate patient care, the technology also has a key sustainable benefit: it trains the local professionals on the ground, both through their daily use but also e-learning modules in local languages. One aspect Kallol Mukherji mentioned, that may sound anecdotal but is in fact a key success factor: “Compared to a piece of paper, health workers have told us that the tablet adds credibility, reassuring the patients, incentivizing them to come in, and follow the guidance they are given.”
How we can help
Back to my original goal… How can this little blog be of any help? Even if Terre des hommes is not one of those humongous NGOs where you feel that, unless you’re Bill Gates, it’s hard to materially contribute, it’s still a significantly sized organization, with an annual budget just over 100 million CHF. Still, speaking to Isabel, I realized that it truly takes a village, and that every contribution counts. So the question became: how to best use the Time Files platform to help?
The first step is in raising awareness about Terre des hommes to the Time Files audience. With this article, the few thousands of you who regularly read the blog will hopefully discover what Terre des hommes is up to. According to a poll I ran last year, roughly half of you are watch industry professionals, and the other half watch collectors. In other words, you are a valuable audience for an organization that highly depends on individual donations. To help spread the word, I will continue to share Terre des hommes updates on the Time Files Instagram account, as I have for the past year. In addition, this article will be permanently and prominently featured at the top of the Time Files landing page, to make it easily discoverable for new readers, and keep Terre des hommes top of mind for the rest of us.
The other way I’ll be trying to help is through some fundraising watch sales. I started last year with a little auction for a MoonSwatch Neptune, the one with the gold hand. After 32 bids, it reached a pretty decent amount. This year, I’m aiming for something a bit more ambitious, with a Watch Sale in Bienne on Sunday, December 8. The idea is that people can donate great watches they no longer wear often, so that someone else can enjoy them, with all proceeds from the sale going to Terre des hommes. The donor will also be able to deduct the value of the sold watch from their taxes. Focus for this edition will be on privately donated watches, with a value under 1,000 CHF. So far, 30 very cool watches have already been donated, which is already more than I expected! I’m really looking forward to the event.
Final thoughts
I often say that my greatest reward from writing this blog is the people I get to meet. In the case of Terre des hommes, it could not be more true. It’s humbling to get to know them and understand what they’re up to, and an honor to be able to modestly contribute to supporting their work. If you’ve read so far, I can already thank you for having joined me in this effort. If you’d like to find out more about Terre des hommes, you can visit their website.
Photo credit: Terre des hommes (aside from the 2 much less good pics at their HQ in Lausanne, which I took!)
Thank you for bringing Terre Des Hommes to our attention, the work they do sounds impressive and much needed. I look forward to hearing more. Best of luck with the watch sale!