Ghana, West Africa – Akin to the hookworm endemic of the twentieth century in the southern US, , over 1 billion people in 100 countries around the world today suffer from neglected tropical diseases due to lack of proper hygiene and footwear. These parasite infections are especially prevalent in young children, creating larger barriers to education and further entrenching them in poverty.

The World Shoe was born out of the non-profit organization Samaritan’s Feet, which has provided nearly 10 million recipients with shoes via their “Wash and Wear” initiative, an initiative that simultaneously supplies much-needed footwear to individuals while at the same time teaching them the proper hygiene to prevent disease.

Samaritan’s Feet designed the World Shoe, prophylactic and bio-degradable footwear, to address this widely underserved issue and are now working on the construction of a replicable factory model to produce the next-generation world shoe in West Africa. This enterprise solution will not only drastically increase access to footwear and thereby decrease tropical disease in the region, but also generate much-needed jobs for those who need them the most.