Shakira Testifies for Education For All Act

As part of Global Education Week, I wanted to highlight that Columbian pop star Shakira spoke to NPR yesterday after testifying on the Hill for the Education for All Act.

You can listen to the interview here.

Shakira explains that in order to enroll boys and girls in schools, we need to do at least four things: Hire qualified teachers, provide uniforms and text books, abolish school fees and provide school meals.

She says: “I grew up in a country where unfortunately education is sometimes seen as a luxury, as a privilege, and not as a human right. This always bothered me. So this is personal to me. In the developing world, people who are born poor will die poor, and that is because of the lack of opportunities, opportunities that come from education. Education can actually save lives.”

If the Education For All Act passes, it would increase U.S. funding from $465 million to $3 billion by 2012 and help 77 million children around the world have access to education.

-Virginia Simmons

World Malaria Day - the cycling crusader

Todd Jennings from PATH continues to send in daily updates about World Malaria Day from Zambia.

The impact of malaria goes beyond the chills and the sweating, the dizziness and even death. It devastates families, communities, economies. Take a world map showing where malaria is common and overlay it on one showing the world’s poorest regions: it’s the same really, a wide belt of suffering around the equator.

One figure heard often is that Africa loses more than 12 billion dollars each year due to malaria. I don’t know how that was calculated, but I do know that the disease shackles growth and development. If your child is sick from malaria, she isn’t attending school, and a parent must miss work to care for her. From a parasite delivered by a mosquito, a family bears a loss in education, work and income.

Peter Chintu will never forget January 13th, 1997. He came home from traveling to find his four-year-old son, Abraham, not feeling well. Peter knew it was serious so he slung his son on his back with fabric and bicycled to the hospital in Mazabuka, about seven miles away. In a few hours Abraham was dead.

At 45 years of age, Peter is now the elder statesman in the 2008 Zambia Race Against Malaria from Serenje Livingstone. He is committed to sharing his experience with others so they and their families will protect themselves from the disease. Peter can recite the measures by heart: sleep under a treated bednet every night, allow your home to be sprayed, seek immediate diagnosis and treatment if you have the symptoms of malaria (fever, chills, sweating, loss of appetite…) He sat down with me in Lusaka after today’s grueling 122-mile ride (only 300 miles to go!). In this audio clip, he describes the cruel intersection of malaria and poverty.

-Todd Jennings, Advocacy Officer, Malaria Control and Evaluation Partnership in Africa (MACEPA), a program at PATH, Lusaka, Zambia. Photo credit: Jesper Lublinkhof.

Zoellick Calls For a “New Deal”

World Bank President Robert Zoellick has a guest op-ed in today’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer calling for a “New Deal” to confront the growing hunger crisis.

“The disturbing images should spur the global community to action: riots in Haiti, protests in Egypt and violence in many other countries, sparked by the rising price of food…

To help those who will be hit the hardest, the World Bank Group is calling for a New Deal for Global Food Policy. This New Deal should focus not only on hunger and malnutrition, access to food and its supply, but also the interconnections with energy, yields, climate change, investment, the marginalization of women and others, and economic resiliency and growth…

To be most successful, we will need to integrate and mobilize a diverse range of partners including the Gates Foundation, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Food Program, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development; other Multilateral Development Banks; agricultural research institutes; developing countries with great agricultural experience; and the private sector.

A New Deal for Global Food Policy will contribute to inclusive and sustainable development. People in poor, middle-income and developed countries will benefit together. Income gains from agriculture have three times the power in overcoming poverty than increases in other sectors, and 75 percent of the world’s poor are rural, with most involved in farming. Working together, we can ease the burden of high food prices on the world’s most vulnerable.”

Read the full op-ed here.

-Virginia Simmons

World Malaria Day — the view from Zambia

Friday, April 25 is the first-ever World Malaria Day, commemorating the global effort to control malaria and reduce the toll it takes on individuals, families, and economies in endemic countries. Malaria is a top killer of children in Zambia, where I live and work, but the country is making progress against the disease by making proven malaria prevention and treatment methods available to the people who need them most.

A week of World Malaria Day events started today in Zambia, where a nationwide Prayer Night took place this evening in churches across the country. My wife, Anne Jennings, attended and photographed the vigil in Lusaka, where a candlelight procession and choral music filled the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, the capital city’s largest church.

A 920-km cycling race also started today and the week holds many more events to raise awareness about malaria. Watch the ONE Blog and check my journal on path.org for more all this week.

-Todd Jennings, Advocacy Officer, Malaria Control and Evaluation Partnership in Africa (MACEPA), a program at PATH, Lusaka, Zambia

US Charities Struggle With Food Crisis Overseas

Am important article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy today details the struggles of US charities in trying maintain services despite rising food cost.

Some have even been forced to scale back services. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, in New York, dropped 25,000 people from a food and medical-assistance program in the former Soviet Union after expenses jumped by 20 percent.

“We’ve lost $4-million in buying power,” said Steve Schwager, the group’s chief executive officer. “We’ve had to cut off the least needy to ensure the most needy can still get food….

Action Against Hunger, the Pan American Development Foundation, and many other charities are trying to raise awareness about the need for long-term solutions, such as increased spending on agriculture. The eight wealthiest nations plan to add the topic to their agenda when they gather this summer for the G-8 summit, a move promoted by the ONE Campaign and other organizations.

Read the full piece here.

G8 to Discuss Global Hunger Crisis!

Japan’s Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, who is chairing this year’s G8 meeting, wrote a letter to the heads of the G8 countries as well as United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and World Bank Group President Robert Zoellick stating that the soaring world food prices would be part of this year’s agenda.

You can read an outline of the letter.

It was copied to the World Food Programme Executive Director Josette Sheeran, Food and Agriculture Organization Director-General Jacques Diouf, International Fund for Agricultural Development President Lennart Bage, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and Chairperson of the Commission of the African Union Alpha Oumar Konare.

In the letter, Prime Minister Fukuda states:

“Soaring food prices are posing imminent and serious global challenges. Threat of hunger and malnutrition is increasing, and the high prices have also brought about social unrest.

As the Chair of the G8, I firmly believe that this issue must be a subject of our in-depth discussions with a strong sense of urgency at the Hokkaido Toyako Summit in July. I intend to consult with my G8 colleagues, so that the G8 could collectively send a robust message.

You can read the full outline of the letter here, and more about the world crisis here.

-Virginia Simmons

ONE is Running through NH

ONE member Sarah Archer of Mont Vernon, NH held a ONE Run yesterday to raise awareness of the plight of the world’s poorest people. Sarah organized a 5K run, a 5K walk, and a 1 mile walk, that attracted over 70 local New Hampshire residents at her high school.

The weather in New Hampshire was beautiful and although we were a continent away, participants wore ONE bands and some wore ONE shirts to show support for ONE and the world’s poorest people. Sarah created a fun and healthy way for people to spread the word about ONE and draw attention to the emergency crisis of global poverty.

Over a billion people in the world live in extreme poverty and die by the millions from preventable and treatable disease, or lack of clean water. But our nation is taking new and great steps to fight extreme poverty and save lives. By joining ONE and taking action by writing letters, sending emails and making phone calls to your leaders, and by building local awareness events like this ONE Run, we can raise our voices and make sure that our country is taking even bigger are greater steps to make poverty history!

Way to go Sarah!

-Matthew Bartlett

Poverty-Fighters Networking in Boston

The Millennium Campus Network held a conference this past weekend to discuss global poverty and health. ONE’s former intern, Sam Vaghar, helped create this new network of Boston area colleges and universities, and their conference hosted over 700 students and included top global health experts like Ira Magaziner, Dr. Paul Farmer, as well as an event with musician John Legend and Dr. Jeff Sachs.

I attended the first day of the event at MIT and immediately noticed a few ONE shirts and many, many ONE bands. After opening statements and a very good speech by Sam, the keynote address was given by former presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards. In his speech, Sen. Edwards spoke about his travels to Uganda and the extreme poverty he witnessed in Africa. He spoke about the need to fight AIDS and malaria to help bring stability to poor nations and citied America’s moral standing in the world.

After his speech, I was able to briefly speak with Sen. Edwards and thanked him for raising the issues of global poverty while on the campaign trail. We even talked about the global poverty speech he gave in New Hampshire.

From the campaign trail to the colleges campuses, people everywhere are organizing and realizing that in today’s world, that we have the resources to fight global disease and end extreme - less than a dollar a day - poverty.

-Matthew Bartlett

New UN Task Force

Yesterday, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon pledged to set up a task force to address the world hunger crisis.

“One thing is certain, the world has consumed more than it has produced” over the last three years, he said.

Ban blamed a host of causes for the soaring cost of food, including rising oil prices, the fall of the U.S. dollar and natural disasters.

He said he would put together a special task force to help deal with the problem and called on the international community to help. He said the U.N. World Food Program plans to raise $750 million per year to help feed 73 million people in 80 countries.

“We need a real world and not the world of economic theories,” Ban said. “I will work on this right now with a sense of urgency.”

Read the full AP story here.