Opinion | Donate This Holiday Season: Women and Children Need Your Help

This column is part of Times Opinion’s 2024 Giving Guide.

Forget the necktie that will sit in Dad’s closet or the perfume that your sister Sue will soon regift, for I have some better ideas.

This is my annual holiday giving guide, and I think you’ll like the charities I recommend this year — and so will Dad and Sue if you contribute in their names. You can donate and find out more information through my Kristof Holiday Impact Prize website, KristofImpact.org, which I’ve used for the past six years to support nonprofits in my giving guide.

Here’s what your contributions can accomplish this year:

Give a woman her life back! One of the most heartbreaking conditions I’ve reported on is obstetric fistula, a childbirth injury that happens in poor countries when a woman endures many hours of obstructed labor and no doctor is available to perform a C-section. The baby usually dies, and the woman is left with injuries affecting the vaginal wall and the bladder or rectum, so she continuously leaks bodily waste.

These women — sometimes just teenage girls — can feel stigmatized and humiliated, even that they have been cursed by God.

The good news is that together we can help them reclaim their lives, with a corrective surgery that costs just $619 per person. A nonprofit called the Fistula Foundation has financed more than 100,000 surgeries through a network of more than 150 hospitals in more than 30 countries. Yet need remains enormous.

In Ethiopia I once met a girl who was raped at 13 and suffered a fistula; villagers put her in a hut without a door so that hyenas would finish her off. She fought the animals off and the next day crawled away for help. Eventually she was taken to a hospital that repaired her injury.