Starting today, you may begin seeing our new ad ‘Thank You’ airing on major networks. We wanted to take the opportunity to pause and reflect on a great year for ONE and ONE Vote ’08, none of which would’ve been possible without dedicated people like you. So enjoy the ad and from all of us here at ONE, thank you for your hard work and commitment in the fight against extreme poverty.

PS- Thank you to Switchfoot, who also participated in this year’s Music Builds Tour, for loaning us their music.

-Chris Scott

Another big item on the agenda at this week’s High Level Group meeting in Oslo is financing for basic education. Education for all by 2015 is only possible if developing countries and donor governments dedicate the financial resources and political will required to make it happen. It was this spirit of mutual commitments that led to a deal between donors and developing countries at the 2000 World Education Forum in Dakar: If developing countries committed the political will and domestic resources to achieve universal primary education by 2015, donors would provide the technical know-how and extra funding to support them.

The Dakar agreement gave rise to the first ever global compact on education, the Education for All-Fast Track Initiative (FTI), The goal of FTI is to “fast track” countries seriously committed to achieving universal primary education by providing coordinated and increased donor support. Under the FTI framework, developing countries produce national education plans and mobilize domestic funding to finance them. Once their plans have been technically vetted and endorsed, donors step in to provide coordinated and increased financial and technical assistance to help implement them.

Where developing countries and donors have delivered on their promises, remarkable progress has been made. UNESCO points to Ethiopia as an example- international aid helped Ethiopia increase its education spending from 3.6% of GNP in 1999 to 6% in 2006. Over the same period, the number of Ethiopian children out-of-school was cut nearly in half, dropping from 7 million to 3.7 million. Statistics also suggest that the FTI model is working on a broader scale- in its annual report released this past Monday, FTI announced that African FTI countries alone had seen 15 million more children go to school for the first time between 2000 and 2006, a 52 percent increase. This is compared to a 23 percent increase for non-FTI African countries.

To date, 36 countries have answered the call from Dakar by developing FTI-endorsed education plans and mobilizing over 70% of the financing to implement them. Donors, however, have not kept up their end of the bargain, and as a result many countries are struggling to fully implement their education plans. Aid to basic education has stagnated at $4 billion per year, less than half of what is needed to achieve universal primary education and only one-quarter of the $16 billion required annually to realize all the Education for All goals. Estimates are that FTI countries will face a resource gap of $1 billion in 2009. This gap will grow as more countries are endorsed- by 2010, if all thirteen expected countries receive endorsement the gap could grow $2.2 billion.

Participants here in Oslo are hopeful that the discussions this week will inject new momentum into financing education for all. There have been some signs in recent months that some donors are committed to doing this: at the launch of the Class of 2015 partnership in September, $4.5 billion in new commitments were announced by different donors. Here in the U.S., President-elect Obama has committed not only to capitalizing a $2 billion Global Education Fund, but also to endorsing the Education for All Bill (championed in the Senate by Secretary of State nominee Hillary Clinton) which would put $10 billion into basic education over 5 years.

The need to revive the global education compact is more critical than ever in the current financial climate. As poor countries begin to feel the effects of the global economic crisis, the temptation to cut spending on education will be high and some of the recent progress made in getting children in school could be threatened. If the world stands a real chance at education for all by 2015, donors need to renew faith in the global education compact by keeping up their end of the deal and standing by their commitments to basic education.

-Nora Coglan

Earlier this year, malaria experts, prime ministers, presidents and celebrities joined together in New York to launch the Global Malaria Action Plan. This plan, if followed and funded, is supposed to lead us to a world without any deaths from malaria by 2015. This year, close to 900,000 people will die from the disease – 85% of them will be children under five in Africa.

In development, we can get a bit cynical about these big plans – there are many commitments made by donors that are not kept. But, the fight against malaria has a lot of momentum. Funding has increased significantly in the past few years; victories across Africa are showing that success is possible; and perhaps, the most significant step yet, a vaccine now looks possible.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (and their grantee, PATH’s Malaria Vaccine Initiative) and GlaxoSmithKline have worked together on a vaccine candidate that has now been shown to cut illnesses in infants and young children by more than half. These results were published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine. The Gates Foundation has spent more than $100 million supporting this initiative thus far. Though the vaccine still has to go through phase III trials, if all goes well, it could be ready for approval in 2011.

Having a working vaccine could change the map for malaria. Billions of people across the world live in areas that put them at risk for the disease. The possibility of a successful vaccine is reason for hope that the real progress being made fighting malaria will continue.

-Josh Lozman, Deputy Policy Director, ONE

Last week, ONE members and faith leaders from across the country got together for a conference call on ONE Sabbath, which along with companion programs ONE Seva and ONE Sadaqa is rallying believers of all faiths, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and others, to learn and take action on behalf of people living in extreme poverty and dying from preventable diseases.

We’ve got full audio from the call online here and I hope you’ll take a few minutes to listen.

On the call, we talked about successful ONE Sabbath events that have already happened and how ONE members can host their own ONE Sabbath events within their faith communities. We were joined by a great group of faith leaders, Kim Steitz, Director for International Policy at the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, Rick Pelay, from the Jubilee Community Church in Miami, FL, Herley Jim Bowling, a member of the Church in Ocean Park, Santa Monica, California, and Pastor Michael Hidalgo of Denver Community Church.

This call was focused on our Christian ONE Sabbath supporters, but we’re looking forward to launching similar efforts through the Jewish ONE Sabbath, ONE Seva and ONE Sadaqa programs, soon.

If you’re interested in getting your faith community involved in ONE Sabbath, make sure to check out the call, and sign-up to receive more information:

Listen to the call here.

Learn more about ONE Sabbath here.

-Adam Phillips, ONE Faith Relations Manager

ONE recently prepared a set of transition documents for President-elect Obama’s transition team. These documents essentially represented ONE’s best effort to put in writing a set of recommendations for how the Obama team could put its vision for development into action after taking office. The booklet included issue specific recommendations that could be implemented both in the short and longer term.

All of these recommendations are meant to fit into Obama’s broader vision for fighting poverty and making the Millennium Development Goals America’s own goals for development. In order to do so, President-elect Obama also committed to double U.S. spending on development assistance by $25 billion. In an effort to tie the two together, ONE’s transition document includes a section outlining the annual expenditures necessary to reach this goal over five years. It lists each of Obama’s existing commitments to development and added those priorities that ONE recommended to fulfill the overall vision. All of these things can be accomplished with an increase of $23.96 billion by fiscal year 2013.

While this increase sounds large, it still only represents less than 1% of the U.S. federal budget and can provide significant assistance to countries struggling to meet the Millennium Development Goals. Some of the priorities and commitments we include are:

• Fully funding PEPFAR, tuberculosis and malaria as authorized in the Lantos-Hyde act passed this year
• Create an initiative to build long-term agricultural capacity
• Work toward universal primary education by signing and funding the Education for All Bill
• Create and small and medium enterprise fund to support economic growth in Africa

These are just a few of the ideas mentioned in the briefing.

The scale up acknowledges that the United States is currently facing a difficult economic crisis and that therefore the new Administration will have to strategically choose which priorities to invest in immediately and which will have to be initiated a year or two down the line. Ultimately however, despite the difficult budget environment facing the U.S. in this upcoming year, ONE hopes that the Obama administration will begin the scale up with a total increase of $4 billion over the spending level in fiscal year 2008 so that those most critical initiatives can begin their scale up. Delaying the effort will only make annual increases required in future years more difficult to achieve. You can view the chart showing scale-up here.

-Erin Thornton, Policy Director, ONE

Guardian—Don’t neglect Aids crisis in Zimbabwe, warn health workers
Health workers in Zimbabwe are warning that international alarm over the spreading cholera emergency is overshadowing the AIDS crisis, which is killing as many people every three days. The rising death toll from cholera, more than 1,000, has become the most visible sign of Zimbabwe’s implosion. But cholera and the failure of the sewerage system are symptoms of the wider collapse of the country. Aid workers speak of a silent catastrophe in which people are dying of AIDS by the hundreds every day for want of medicines and sufficient food because the government has blocked foreign aid workers from reaching many of the most vulnerable. The UN says AIDS kills more than 400 Zimbabweans each day.

Reuters—WTO members consider early cotton deal
Developing countries yesterday called at the World Trade Organization for an early deal on cotton, now that chances of an overall agreement in the Doha round have been put back well into 2009 at the earliest. A deal on cotton is a litmus test of the WTO’s ability to create a fairer trading system for developing countries, experts say. West African cotton producers, backed by other developing nations, are leading the charge against trade-distorting U.S. subsidies which they say squeeze their own poor farmers out of the market.

Financial Times—Africa offers intriguing prospects
As global financial markets continue their downhill slide, investors are increasingly looking to Africa as a place to put their money. The IMF’s most recent outlook for the sub-Saharan African region says growth is likely to slow from 6.5 percent in 2007 to 6 percent in 2008—a slight slowdown that compares favorably with western markets in deep recession. However, while the IMF report highlights the region’s relative insulation from financial volatility in global markets, it also urges caution surrounding Africa’s immediate economic future, noting that aid and overall private capital flowing into the continent will likely slow.

Washington Times—LARSON: Madness in Zimbabwe
In a Washington Times op-ed, professor Charles Larson adds to the chorus of outrage at the situation in Zimbabwe, writing that the cholera outbreak is simply the latest example of President Robert Mugabe’s inability to face reality. Larson says it’s time for the West to take more dramatic action. He proposes measures to shut down Mugabe’s government through cutting off government bank accounts and limiting Mugabe’s ability to travel freely.

-Steve Wilson

Last week over 10,000 people from more than 160 countries gathered in the old industrial town of Poznan, Poland to try to advance talks for a global treaty on climate change. But at the UN climate change conference, which ended in the wee hours of the morning Saturday, negotiators didn’t shown the urgency and political will needed to fight climate change and keep millions of people safe.

Global warming threatens the lives and livelihoods of millions – if not billions – of people. The poorest, most vulnerable communities are being affected directly – first and worst – despite being least responsible for the crisis.

Already, the impacts of climate change are making their mark. In Bangladesh, increased floods are washing away homes and crops, while changing weather patterns in Uganda mean farmers are gambling with to sow seeds, risking having them wash away in torrential rains or dry up in drought. And it’s only going to get worse. Across Africa, 75 million to 250 million people could face severe water shortages by 2020. Action is needed now.

Developed countries, those most responsible for climate change, arrived in Poland empty-handed and unwilling to engage in constructive discussions to move further towards a global deal in Copenhagen next December. Poor countries put forward important proposals, including Mexico’s bold announcement of plans to halve its emissions by 2050. But the EU, Australia and others seemed asleep at the wheel.

Some important progress on the Adaptation Fund, which was created to help vulnerable communities adapt to climate change, was achieved, but this is only a small part of the overall solution that poor people require.

A deal in Copenhagen next December is still possible, and more urgent and necessary than ever. In the coming year, developed countries must stop floundering and demonstrate commitment and leadership at the highest levels. Let’s tell them to get busy soon!

-Laura Rusu, Oxfam America

Associated Press: UN agency: $5.2 billion needed to provide food aid
The U.N.’s World Food Program says it needs $5.2 billion for urgent food aid and is calling on countries to contribute a fraction of what they are proposing for financial rescue packages.

Global Media: Agricultural investment needed to quell the mounting food crisis
This week the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) projected a rise in malnutrition in developing countries over the next decade, which could result in 16 million more undernourished youth by 2020. IFPRI’s report recommended three policy actions: (1) promote pro-poor agricultural growth, (2) reduce market volatility, and (3) expand social protection and child nutrition action.

Wall Street Journal: Defeat Malaria? Yes We Can. (opinion)
Jean Stéphenne, president and general manager of GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals, discusses the success of his companies’ most recently vetted vaccine. He says that supplying this vaccine is the right thing to do, and that creative thinking and effective partnerships are key to its successful implementation.

-Chandler Smith

Greetings from snowy Oslo, Norway, where government ministers, campaigners and education experts are currently gathered for the High Level Group meeting on Education for All. The conference is the eighth annual since the historic World Education Forum in 2000, which set forth the Dakar Framework for Action, a roadmap to achieve quality education for all by 2015.
 
Participants here in Oslo are acutely aware that halfway towards the target date set for achieving the goals set out in Dakar and the MDG targets on education, the world remains seriously off track: according to new statistics published a couple weeks ago in UNESCO’s annual Global Monitoring Report (GMR), there are still 75 million primary-school aged children out-of-school around the world, 35 million of whom are living in sub-Saharan Africa. 55% of these children are girls, and over one-third live in fragile states. If current trends continue, 29 million children will still be out of primary school in 2015.
 
Another common thread in many of the discussions here is (more…)

This year, ONE worked with the U.S. Global Leadership Campaign (USGLC) in their efforts to garner Congressional support for bipartisan letters asking President-elect Obama to make greater investments in diplomacy and development. Today the USGLC announced that a record 217 members of Congress signed on to the letters pledging their support for a robust U.S. International Affairs Budget. This includes 51 Senators and 166 Representatives (you can see the full list here).

As we keep you updated on day-to-day developments in the Obama team’s transition process, strong grassroots support will be needed to ensure Congress and the president-elect provide greater foreign aid. With the help of ONE members and activists across the United States, the USGLC has mounted a very successful campaign to seek broad bipartisan support from our elected officials in the fight against extreme poverty.

You can read more about today’s news here.

-Chris Scott