As an international NGO, we address issues that transcend national borders, surpassing governmental efforts to overcome them. We work with problems such as education, health and food security: fundamental building blocks that, if missing, can undermine national capacities and lead to instability.
Our solutions lend speed and flexibility to societies' efforts to heal themselves, and our focus rests primarily on efforts that stimulate broad social change, such as human resources development. Foundation-funded scholarships and fellowships have reached roughly thirty thousand of the world's best and brightest, providing them with the tools to lead their countries and regions away from strife and suffering. These programs reach all levels, from university students on grants from the Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund, to a network of intellectual leaders researching each other's countries on our Asian Public Intellectuals Fellowship Program. In places where the needs are more basic, we are reaching even broader groups with the construction of hundreds of elementary schools.
Health is another basic issue with a vast impact on a nation's strength. We have worked in this field since the 1970s, striving for example, to eliminate leprosy and its concomitant stigma. As a result, the vast majority of nations where it was once endemic now have it under control. Similarly, our work in disability has had a deep impact. We have developed programs that enable the blind and deaf in developing nations to pursue education at the same level as the general population. We have provided 30,000 prostheses in Vietnam. Further, we have trained roughly 200 specialists to build these artificial limbs, providing freedom of movement to countless people in Southeast Asia. We strive to craft our programs to cultures' specific needs, as with our Mongolian medicine box program, which addresses the basic health needs of a nomadic population with portable sets of traditional remedies.
Nothing leads more directly to conflict than hunger. Here too, we have been working for over twenty years, training farmers how to not only feed themselves, but to produce surplus to sell, thus raising their living standards and boosting the local economy. This work reaches regions such as sub-Saharan Africa and the rocky highlands of Southeast Asia—places that are vulnerable to famine, but have the potential to produce much more.
By addressing these fundamental problems at the root, we are opening the possibility for a brighter future, generating broad, long-lasting change.