Venture Strategies is a nonprofit organization working to improve the health and well-being of people in low resource countries, by (1) reducing barriers that inhibit women from having access to options about their childbearing; (2) supporting the availability of promising health technologies that have potential for large scale impact around the world; and (3) increasing understanding of the feasibility of slowing population growth within a voluntary, human rights framework.

Misoprostol was our initial focus when, at the request of three leading African obstetricians, we facilitated in 6 countries, starting with Nigeria, drug regulatory approval of this off-patent tablet for saving mothers’ lives from hemorrhage after childbirth.  Having now spun off a partner organization Venture Strategies Innovations, which is continuing to implement most of our misoprostol work in 14 countries (see Projects), we are focusing on:

1) International Population Dialogue

We are using research to help governments and policy makers understand the feasibility of slowing population growth by purely voluntary means, and the importance of the population factor in development, health, education, food security, and environmental sustainability.  We are also clarifying the wide range of unnecessary barriers to standing between women and their ability to manage whether and when to have a child.

2) Health Policy

In many of the less developed countries both health care and family planning are constrained by unjustified barriers in the form of medical rules often inadvertently put in place by government ministries.  We are building the case for shifting many medical tasks to people the community level where doctors and nurses are scarce.   In addition, we feel strongly that poor women should not be exposed to the dangers and exploitation of unsafe abortion. 

3) New Philanthropy

Since Venture Strategies was created in 2001, we have been redefining how a U.S. nonprofit working internationally should function, and what it should be able to achieve by leveraging donor funds.  In our work in New Philanthropy we have been sorting out the effectiveness of different types of donor support for international projects, clarifying the benefits of selecting specific pathways to achievement under a variety of circumstances.

To qualify as a venture strategy, a project must have reasonable odds of achieving helpful systemic change in one or more developing countries on a significant scale in the near term, using opportunities offered by existing market structures. In doing this, a venture strategy is creating, implementing and/or expediting a selected lever on change.

• We focus on opportunities for achieving sustainable systemic change.
• Scale and cost effectiveness are of overriding importance.
• We concentrate on barriers to progress that can be minimized in the near-term.
• Our work is organized around a scientific evidence base.
• Where a product is involved, prices for the poor must not contain costs in the U.S. or Europe.
• We are committed to staying administratively compact.