Later today, President Bush heads to Africa to visit five countries — Benin, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana, and Liberia. Here at ONE, we are going to watch this trip closely and try to provide you with unique insight and analysis. We’ll have voices from Africa, from Capitol Hill, and from people on the ground providing aid to the African people. We will provide policy briefings for each day of the trip. And ONE will be part of the trip, with our team on the ground in Rwanda and Ghana providing their first-hand views of what’s happening.

This is an exciting moment. In large part because of the advocacy work done by ONE members and other organizations involved in the fight to save lives, President Bush and the Congress have made major strides.

The number of Africans surviving HIV/AIDS thanks to life-saving medical treatment has increased ten-fold.

There are 4.7 million bed nets protecting African children from malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

There are more jobs and greater opportunities, especially for women and families to break away from the cycle of brutal, extreme poverty.

And there are new governments who are working hard to increase democracy and opportunity for their people in countries like Liberia, where President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has made transparency and accountability a driving force in her government reform plan. ONE members played a big part in winning the cancellation of Liberia’s debt by the IMF just a few months ago.

These are major improvements of which we can all be proud. But none of us should be satisfied.

President Bush’s trip to Africa is an opportunity to take a hard look at what still remains to accomplish. Yes, we have achieved a great deal, but 70 percent of sub-Saharan Africans continue to live on less than $2 a day. Experts report that, last year alone, 35 percent of all people living globally with HIV lived in Southern Africa, where 32 percent of all global new HIV infections and AIDS deaths occurred. Tens of millions of people still go hungry each day. In this region alone,13,150 children under age 5 died from preventable childhood diseases and malnutrition.

While in 2000 the U.S. joined 188 other countries to sign onto the Millennium Development Goals, we are falling behind in reaching their 2015 targets.

A few days ago, we asked you to lend your voice to a new challenge for the candidates, calling on them to visit Africa and see first-hand the opportunities and the challenges that people in those countries face. Already, more than 52,000 people have signed that petition, and we are not finished yet. In the next few days, we will take these petitions and deliver them to the presidential candidates, and see if they are willing to step up and make fighting extreme poverty and preventable disease a real priority. If you haven’t signed the petition, add your voice today.

Check back each day as we chronicle President Bush’s trip to Africa. And let us know your thoughts. Join the discussion here on the ONE Blog.

-David Lane, CEO and President of ONE

This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 12:21 pm and is filed under David Lane, Bush Africa Trip. 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.