Health

mothers2mothers

Research summary, last reviewed May 2026. South African NPO 930000109; UK Charity Commission no. 1119721; US 501(c)(3), EIN 30-0545760. Official site.

Independent recognition: Charity Navigator 4/4 stars (95%) · BBB Wise Giving Alliance accredited · Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship 2008 · Kravis Prize for Nonprofit Leadership 2012

Headline outcome: Over 12,000 jobs created for women living with HIV since 2001

What does mothers2mothers do?

mothers2mothers (m2m) was founded in 2001 at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town by Dr Mitch Besser, an obstetrician who noticed that the medicine for preventing mother-to-child HIV transmission worked, but many women who tested positive in pregnancy were too frightened by stigma to come back to the clinic. His answer was to recruit women who had already walked that path, given birth to HIV-free babies on treatment, and to train, pay and embed them in the clinical team as peers.

Those Mentor Mothers are the whole model. They work inside public-sector clinics and go door to door in surrounding communities, supporting pregnant women through HIV testing, treatment adherence, safe infant feeding and paediatric testing, and increasingly broader maternal, child and adolescent health. Crucially, they are paid professionals, not volunteers: the programme is simultaneously a health intervention and an employment programme for women who face severe exclusion from the labour market. m2m has created more than 12,000 such jobs since 2001 and currently employs Mentor Mothers across roughly ten African countries.

Why did EveryDrop choose it?

m2m passed our four-stage vetting assessment: a clearly aligned charitable purpose (advancement of health, saving of lives, relief of poverty), no evidence of undue private benefit, no public disbenefit, and services that are free at the point of use with no filter on religion, ethnicity or politics. The one identity-based criterion, that Mentor Mothers must themselves be women living with HIV, is the constitutive feature of a peer-support intervention, just as it is in peer-support cancer care.

Independent coverage is solid on governance: a 4/4-star, 95% Charity Navigator rating, BBB Wise Giving Alliance accreditation across all 20 standards, audited accounts in three jurisdictions, and a clean regulator record. The model has also won serious peer recognition, including the Skoll Award and the Kravis Prize.

How effective is it?

On m2m’s own reporting, the HIV transmission rate from mother to child among its enrolled clients has been below the UN’s 5% “virtual elimination” benchmark for ten consecutive years, reaching 2.1% in 2015 and averaging as low as 1.6%. The underlying intervention class, community health workers delivering prevention-of-mother-to-child-transmission services, is supported by WHO guidance and peer-reviewed literature, including a 2019 analysis of m2m’s Uganda programme data on keeping mother-baby pairs in care.

We deliberately do not headline m2m’s largest cumulative figures (such as total people reached since 2001), because the strongest evidence here is the year-by-year transmission outcome and the employment model, and because of a measurement question we explain below.

What are the open questions?

We publish what we are monitoring as well as what we like. In 2012, GiveWell published a critique of m2m’s then-headline statistics, arguing that its cornerstone impact study suffered from selection bias and that some reported figures reflected double-counting of clients across visits. That critique is now fourteen years old and predates m2m’s current quarterly impact reporting, but no evaluator has since published a fresh independent impact review, and Charity Navigator scores only m2m’s accountability and finance, not its impact. So we treat m2m’s outcome numbers as the organisation’s own reported figures, and frame them that way.

Two newer items are on our watch list. The 2025 US foreign-aid cuts hit m2m hard as a major PEPFAR-funded implementer, and a Lesotho sub-partner has publicly disputed the closeout terms that followed; m2m strongly refutes any suggestion of unfair behaviour and frames the situation as forced by the US stop-work order. Neither is a regulator finding, but both are exactly the kind of thing an annual review should re-check, and ours will.

Sources

This summary is derived from EveryDrop's internal vetting dossier, prepared under our four-stage assessment framework using public, verifiable sources. Assessments are re-checked every twelve months. If you spot something we should know, email [email protected].