Archive for February, 2008
Late Tuesday night, bipartisan cooperation in the House Foreign Affairs Committee moved us one critical step closer to approving the 5-year expansion of the “President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief” or “PEPFAR.”
The legislation they passed yesterday, “The Lantos-Hyde US Global Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, TB, Malaria Act” would transition PEPFAR from an emergency response to a sustainable response program, and provide for expanded training for 140,000 new health care professionals and community care workers. The bill also strongly focuses on prevention and includes comprehensive efforts that place a special emphasis on women and on the underlying factors which make them vulnerable to HIV infection, including a focus on violence against women.
In all, the U.S. would provide lifesaving treatment for at least three million AIDS patients; prevent 12 million new infections; provide care for five million AIDS orphans; and train and support 140,000 new health professionals. The bill also provides $4 billion for the treatment and prevention of tuberculosis and $5 billion to fight malaria.
Although the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s action this week marks a critical momentum shift for PEPFAR’s reauthorization, the full House must continue to uphold this commitment to bipartisanship and pass the the bill (protecting all provisions) during a House floor vote.
-Virginia Simmons
The 100,000 “Visit Africa” petitions have been delivered and we’ve heard back from the candidates.
After you check out the candidates’ responses, take a few minutes and write a letter to the editor of your local paper. Writing a letter to the editor is your chance to talk about the poverty-fighting successes highlighted on the recent presidential trip to Africa – successes ONE members have helped make possible – and our campaign urging the next president to visit Africa in his or her first term.
-Aaron Banks
For Americans, and especially our next president, President Bush’s trip to Africa last week wasn’t a victory lap. It’s a starting line. A challenge. The opening, not the closing, of a legacy in which medicine and health diplomacy serve as a currency for peace.
The trip demonstrated for the next president, whoever that may be, the tremendous opportunity that awaits in Africa. Yes, there is much work to do, and we are still confronted by staggering realities: More than 24.7 million people still have HIV/AIDS in Africa alone; thousands still die from malaria each day, and more than one billion people worldwide still don’t have access to clean water.
But never before have we had the tools we now possess to do this vital work – the medicines and technologies that are saving lives as you read these words have never been so inexpensive and so readily available. When you think about it, it’s amazing that AIDS drugs now cost as little as $1 a day . . . that a mosquito net can now protect a child from malaria for five years for $5 . . . that a well can provide clean, safe drinking water for 20 years at a cost of only $20 a person.
And never before have we had so many answers to the doubts of the past, the criticisms that dominated the debate over the effectiveness of American foreign assistance for a generation. Many of the old presumptions about Africa and other developing regions have been proved wrong, addressed through transparency and accountability, or dismissed by new approaches and 21st century technologies.
Last week President Bush visited some of the HIV-positive men, women, and children in poverty-stricken communities who are living today because of American-funded medicines. To date, around 1.4 million Africans now receive anti-retroviral pills through the president’s AIDS initiative.
Want to see health diplomacy making a difference? Want to see medicine serving as a currency for peace? Stare into the eyes of a mother whose daughter is alive thanks to America.
Critics once said that investing in Africa was worse than throwing money away, that the dollars would find their way into corrupt leaders’ bank accounts and perpetuate poverty. But the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) has changed the way America provides foreign assistance, attacking corruption head on by engaging leaders to take the difficult steps toward government reform, accountability, and transparency.
Just last week the president signed the largest MCA grant ever, a $698 million agreement with Tanzania. More than merely sending dollars, the MCA ensures that American assistance not only reaches those it’s designed to help, but that it’s setting structures in place – the rule of law, freer economic policies – for African countries to thrive on their own.
Last week we saw what American compassion and leadership can look like when invested in proven, effective solutions we know work.
I hope our next president is paying attention. I hope he or she sees the power of American health diplomacy, of using medicine as a currency for peace: the power to save lives, to lead under the guiding principles of compassion and human dignity.
We have the science. We can afford the pills and bed nets and wells. We have answers to the classic criticisms of the past. The question that remains is simple: Do we have the will to employ all this know-how, all these answers to help countless people throughout the world?
That sounds like a question for our next president.
-Former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, M.D.
Last weekend, at an event called “International 10 for the 10th”, Congressman Mark Kirk honored 10 people in his district who have made a difference in the world.
District residents were invited to come and hear what their neighbors had done to (among other things) empower Afghan women; build clean water wells and promote education in Africa; and to help health care systems in Mexico.
ONE was also given the opportunity to let the people in the 10th Congressional District in Illinois know how they could join the fight against extreme poverty and global disease. Volunteers Ryan Steel and Dana Salmond were on hand to answer people’s questions about ONE, and Ryan took advantage of the opportunity to invite Rep. Kirk to a ONE event he is planning at Libertyville High School in April!
-Annisa Wanat
On Saturday, Britain’s International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander called on the World Bank to focus more on fighting poverty in Africa.
From Reuters:
“We want a stronger focus on poverty reduction, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, and the gender issues of poverty. I have seen myself today the female face of poverty,” Alexander said after visiting a packed clinic near Makeni in Sierra Leone.
He administered polio vaccine to a baby and medicine to its mother — a gesture of help in an area where health workers said there are just two doctors for 321,000 people.
“The clinic is so tight (crowded) we have to use the ground for deliveries. It is not hygienic,” said Nabinta Koroma, a maternal child health worker, pointing to the filthy tiled floor covered in urine from a crowd of children waiting for checkups.
Britain sent troops to shore up Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown against a rebel threat in 2000, and then helped rebuild its security forces after a decade-long war fuelled by gems dug from the mud of its rich eastern diamond fields. British aid is now turning more to development projects than security in a bid to help the country’s poor, Alexander said.
Read the full piece here.
Since September, campuses across the country have been creating ONE chapters and spurring global poverty action as part of the ONE Campus Challenge (OCC).
In just 12 hours after launching OCC, 1000 ONE Chapters were formed. Today, there are now more than 1,400 student-led ONE groups covering all 50 states.
Throughout the competition, colleges earned points for actions – like hosting speaking events, creating public displays on campus that raise awareness, contacting members of Congress and overall recruitment. All in all, these students made more than 10,000 calls to Congress, 2,000 calls to presidential candidates, provided needed support for the Jubilee Act, and successfully helped urge the IMF to honor their promise to provide debt relief to Liberia.
Finally, late last week Erin and Weldon announced the top ten point-earning schools:
Brandeis University; Campbellsville University; George Washington University; Hofstra University; Kansas State University; Princeton University; Sacred Heart University; University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Western Kentucky University; and Wilmington College, Wilmington, Ohio.
Each of these schools are receiving a $1,000 grant from ONE to craft their own poverty advocacy project.
I’m looking forward to learning how they use them – and will let you know when I do.
-Virginia Simmons
Just a heads up that tomorrow the Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations will be analyzing President Bush’s Fiscal Year 2009 budget request and the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC).
Check back to our Feb 4 post for intel on president’s 2009 budget request.
And see Michael Gerson’s Feb 18 post here on the ONE Blog for more on the MCC.
-Virginia Simmons
