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The Week 15 Club

The evidence is clear that cash, timed right and targeted well, saves lives. The Week 15 Club provides a $300 USD cash transfer to pregnant mothers on or before Week 15. Mothers then receive another $300 USD after their child receives their second rotavirus vaccine.

THE PROBLEM

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THE SOLUTION

The mechanism is straightforward: when mothers have cash they rest more, eat better and access healthcare when it matters most

THE EXPECTED IMPACT

The core argument is that this is not just “cash for its own sake.” It is a targeted, time-bound boost designed to move a specific bundle of behaviors and outcomes that we know matter for maternal and child health. Over the next 2 years the Week 15 Club will follow 60 pregnant mothers. If we want to give babies a better start to life we have to invest in their mothers. Unconditional, direct cash transfers to mothers and families when they need it most. The consequences of childhood poverty extend far beyond the immediate material hardships.

When a child experiences poverty from birth, their entire developmental trajectory is affected in profound ways. The chronic stress of scarcity rewires developing brains, with research showing measurable differences in brain structure and function by age three. This toxic stress disrupts attachment, emotional regulation, and cognitive development during critical periods when children should be building foundations for future learning.

Meanwhile, parents struggling to make ends meet often work multiple jobs with unpredictable hours, limiting crucial bonding time and consistent caregiving. The science is settled: poverty doesn't just limit resources—it fundamentally alters how children grow, learn, and develop their potential.
 

Arc Institute

District-level budget diagnostics for Indonesia's health system

Indonesia spends an average of $147 per person on health each year. In parts of NTT, that figure drops to $25. When resources are this constrained, every line item has to work — there is no room for waste, guesswork, or budgets built on last year's assumptions rather than this year's needs.

Arc Institute works from inside district health offices, the level where Indonesia's health budgets are actually designed and spent. With 514 districts nationwide, this is also where policy becomes real: where community health worker roles get formalized or stall, and where a rotavirus vaccine shipment either reaches a clinic on time or doesn't .

THE PROBLEM

Indonesia spends an average of $147 per person on health each year. In parts of NTT, that figure drops to $25. At that level of scarcity, there is no margin for error — every line item in a district health budget has to work, because there's nothing left to absorb a mistake.

Yet Indonesia's 514 districts, where health budgets are actually designed and spent, are where this thin math breaks down most often. Decentralization put real budget authority in the hands of district health offices, not the national ministry or the province. That means district officials are simultaneously the planners, the implementers, and the ones accountable when something fails — whether that's a rotavirus vaccine stockout or a community health worker position that's funded on paper but never staffed. Most maternal and child health organizations work downstream of this problem: training health workers, running clinics, distributing supplements. Almost no one works on the budgets themselves, which means the administrative machinery that determines whether any of that frontline work gets funded, staffed, or supplied in the first place goes largely unexamined.

THE SOLUTION

Arc Institute works from inside district health offices to fix that machinery directly. It runs a diagnostic on a district's existing health budget, identifying where allocations don't match real needs, where planning assumptions are stale, and where money is set aside for programs that have no realistic path to implementation. It then provides direct technical assistance to the health office itself, helping officials rebuild their budget so it holds up under actual conditions rather than best-case ones.

THE EXPECTED IMPACT

Arc's diagnostic-plus-technical-assistance model produces a measurable chain: better budget execution, then better service delivery, then better health outcomes. In the district where Arc works, the near-term signal is a budget that spends closer to what it appropriates — national nutrition spending execution has fallen as low as 62%, and Arc's fix is designed to close that gap district by district. That shows up first as fewer rotavirus vaccine stockouts and community health worker positions that get filled rather than sitting funded on paper.internationalbudget

Over a longer horizon, that operational fix compounds into the outcomes a $25-per-person health budget is supposed to produce but rarely does: lower stunting rates, better TB and malaria case detection and treatment completion, and more consistent maternal and child health coverage. Because the fix is built into the district's own planning process, it should hold beyond a single budget cycle — the same office keeps producing a workable budget after Arc leaves, rather than reverting once outside support ends.
 

Barbers & Tattoo Artists Against Malnutrition

We train barbers and tattoo artists to spark open conversations about malnutrition. Because barbers and tattoo artists spend close personal time with dads in a safe environment, they act as effective community messengers to break down health taboos.

Indonesia's malnutrition response is built almost entirely around mothers, but mothers do not control the household alone. Fathers shape spending, food choices, care-seeking, and whether a child gets to the clinic on time — and the evidence backs this up directly: father involvement during pregnancy is associated with earlier antenatal care, higher exclusive breastfeeding rates, more complete immunization, and lower rates of stunting. Mothers whose partners are engaged are 1.5 times more likely to get prenatal care in the first trimester. Yet almost no program in Indonesia is built to reach fathers where they actually are. The men who see fathers most consistently — barbers and tattoo artists in places like Flores, who see the same men every few weeks in settings where real conversation happens — are entirely absent from the malnutrition response.

THE PROBLEM

Indonesia's malnutrition response is built almost entirely around mothers, but mothers do not control the household alone. Fathers shape spending, food choices, care-seeking, and whether a child gets to the clinic on time — and the evidence backs this up directly: father involvement during pregnancy is associated with earlier antenatal care, higher exclusive breastfeeding rates, more complete immunization, and lower rates of stunting. Mothers whose partners are engaged are 1.5 times more likely to get prenatal care in the first trimester. Yet almost no program in Indonesia is built to reach fathers where they actually are. The men who see fathers most consistently — barbers and tattoo artists in places like Flores, who see the same men every few weeks in settings where real conversation happens — are entirely absent from the malnutrition response.

THE SOLUTION

Train barbers and tattoo artists to deliver a few clear, practical messages to fathers and fathers-to-be during the routine conversations they're already having: get your partner to antenatal care early, support her diet during pregnancy, resist the formula trap, show up for breastfeeding support, don't skip growth monitoring or immunization. This isn't a novel delivery channel — barbershops have already been used as a public health platform in HIV prevention trials, precisely because they're trusted, recurring, credible spaces where difficult topics can be raised without a lecture. For $150, a donor funds one full unit of that influence: a share of barber training, the prompts and materials used in the shop, and the follow-up needed to confirm the conversations are happening.

THE EXPECTED IMPACT

This is a priced, testable mechanism, not an awareness campaign. Success is five specific, trackable shifts: fathers' knowledge of the first 1,000 days, fathers' concrete support during pregnancy (transport, accompanying ANC visits, better food), earlier and more complete maternal care-seeking, improved maternal and infant nutrition practices, and higher uptake of child health services like growth monitoring and immunization. The underlying evidence base predicts that moving these five levers should show up downstream in the outcomes that matter most — higher breastfeeding rates, more complete immunization coverage, and, over time, lower stunting in the households these men go home to. If those five indicators move, $150 has bought a documented change in a child's first 1,000 days, at a cost per unit of influence far below almost anything else in the malnutrition toolkit.
 

Fix Abandoned Water Programs in Villages fringes of Komodo National Park

Sixty percent of government water projects in Indonesia are abandoned within two years of completion. Solar Chapter rebuilds them with the community. Thirty-four projects are running across NTT today. When you think of water in the most rural and remote places, think Solar Chapter.

THE PROBLEM

Clean water access in East Nusa Tenggara isn't a convenience gap — it's a health and time crisis with over a million people affected, many of whom walk three to four hours a day just to collect water. That time comes directly out of the hours available for antenatal visits, breastfeeding, childcare, and income generation. And the water itself is often unsafe, which matters because repeated diarrheal illness and infection from contaminated water is one of the direct physiological pathways to stunting — a malnourished child fighting constant infection can't absorb the nutrients needed to grow, no matter how good the food is. Most malnutrition programs treat this as someone else's sector; almost none treat water infrastructure as a maternal-health intervention in its own right.

THE SOLUTION

Solar Chapter builds solar-powered water pumps with the villages it serves, turning a multi-hour daily walk into a local tap. It doesn't parachute in infrastructure and leave — it partners with communities to build systems the village co-owns and maintains, pairing the physical build with education and women's community-development programming (its "Chapter Two" and "Chapter Three" work). By 2024, that model had scaled to 23 water programs reaching more than 20,000 villagers, with average household income up 119% as hours once spent walking for water were redirected into livelihoods and childcare.voaindonesia+2

THE EXPECTED IMPACT

The theory of change runs through time and disease burden, not just liters delivered. Reclaiming three to four hours a day gives mothers more time for antenatal visits, breastfeeding, and childrearing, and safe water directly reduces the diarrheal and waterborne infections that are a documented driver of stunting. Solar Chapter's own reporting already shows household income more than doubling in program villages — a leading indicator that families have more resources to spend on food, care-seeking, and health. The expected downstream effect, tracked alongside Black Licorice's broader malnutrition metrics, is fewer infection-driven growth setbacks in children under five and more consistent care-seeking in villages that go from a multi-hour daily errand to a functioning tap.