I just got back to my hotel after a long but exhilarating day at the World Social Forum in Nairobi, Kenya. The day began with the official launch of this year’s dates for global mobilization against poverty and culminated in a spontaneous round of late night cross-cultural karaoke. I was going to crash but Josh assured me that I should make these posts brief anyhow, so I pulled my blackberry back out to write this quick post.

Some highlights from today:

• 
  In a GCAP (Global Call to Action Against Poverty) press conference this morning, it was announced that this year’s White Band Day will take place on October 17, 2007.

• 
  Campaign leaders from across the globe talked about their roles in last year’s mobilization of 23.5 million people (the largest single movement of people in a 24 hour period on any issue ever) and everyone committed to mobilizing even more people this year.

• 
  To point out that it wasn’t the only day for joint action, I, and others from G8 countries, talked about our plans to influence the G8 Summit taking place in Germany on June 7.

I was reminded of how important this work will be when two incredible singers from the slums of Nairobi performed their song “G8″ linking the poverty they’ve experienced to global debts and broken promises. I talked to them afterwards, because I knew it would be something you would love to hear, and now they are working on getting us a special version for our ONE podcast.

There is much more to say, but I’ll keep my commitment to Josh and make this brief, but I will be sure to send along more highlights tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 22nd, 2007 at 6:30 pm and is filed under The ONE Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.