As a constituent and on behalf of ONE I had the opportunity recently to meet with Peter Braid, Conservative Member of Parliament for Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario.

Mr. Braid had recently returned from a trip to South Sudan as part of his role as the vice chair of the Canada-Africa Parliamentary Association, the main purpose of which is to discuss trade, aid and strengthen ties with African parliamentarians. During this trip, and on previous trips to Africa, Mr. Braid has seen firsthand the benefits of Canadian foreign aid. We discussed my involvement in the Griot Project, and my recent trip to Washington this past December to participate in #ONErocksDC, a lobby day on Capitol Hill and the White House with ONE.

SEE ALSO: #ONErocksDC on Capitol Hill and in the White House

I provided Mr. Braid with a Living Proof brochure and ONE armband and shared some of the issues that ONE is very passionate about including encouraging the governments of both Canada and the US to NOT make any cuts to their foreign aid budgets, the benefits of childhood vaccinations and ensuring that no child is born with HIV/AIDS by 2015. I directed him to the recent petition on the ONE website in which Canadians are encouraged to ask Prime Minister Harper to protect the Canadian foreign aid budget –- you can sign the petition here.

I expressed my pride as a Canadian that my own government has been supportive of these issues as evidenced by the $1.1 billion in funding for the Muskoka Initiative on Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, in addition to pledging to maintain current funding levels of $1.75 billion over five years for similar initiatives. I expressed my concern for any threat to the foreign aid budget and my desire that Prime Minister Harper would honor his commitment to the world’s poor and most vulnerable and not make any cuts to these important programs. Mr. Braid was appreciative of the work of the ONE Campaign and expressed his support of our endeavors.

-Sarah Stone, ONE member

Extreme poverty, the kind that deprives hard working people of their full potential, is an immediate reality for many. It is a real thing, gripping the lives of billions of people. The number is so massive that, for most of us, it loses meaning. Truth is, these are billions of individual human beings with their own unique hopes and aspirations, no different from you or I.

Members of Engineers Without Borders Canada (EWB) take to the streets of Ottawa

The realities of poverty force decisions upon people that I find unfathomable — decisions that for me would be an affront to my most basic expectations of a good life. It forces people to choose between buying medicine for a sick family member or paying school fees for a son or daughter. These are real decisions for many people.

With this in mind, last week over 600 members of Engineers Without Borders Canada (EWB) took to the streets of Canada’s capital city Ottawa, braving the snow and freezing temperatures, to send a clear message to the Government of Canada: let’s not turn our backs on the world’s poorest by cutting foreign aid spending.

Hundreds marched past Parliament Hill holding white balloons, en-route to Ottawa’s Byward Market. Each balloon kept afloat a handwritten note expressing why foreign aid is important to them. Once we’d gathered at the busy market, our team popped their balloons in unison, symbolizing what Canada and our developing country partners would lose if we cut our contribution to international development.

Canada’s foreign aid is facing the prospect of deep cuts — upwards of 10 percent — that could result in a reduction of $500 million dollars in foreign aid. That’s a huge amount of resources — resources which, when used effectively, can spark a transformative process as people work to lift themselves out of poverty. But what does a loss of that much aid actually mean?

It means that Canada will be investing less in smart approaches to health and agricultural challenges in the developing world, such as training for thousands of rural health care workers in Tanzania. It means turning our backs on the true champions of development — local leaders — who possess in abundance the passion, intellect and perseverance required to strengthen their communities, but often lack adequate resources to do so. And it means tarnishing our own position of leadership in the world — a position that is not only a beacon for Canadian values in the international community, but also serves to develop strategic, non-aid relationships with developing economies in order to maintain Canada’s own position of global prosperity.

At a time when Canada is navigating the global financial crisis better than almost all rich countries, EWB and ONE members are united in saying: now is not the time to balance our budget on the backs of the world’s poorest.

Please join us today in calling on the Canadian government to protect critical international development funding.

At around just 2 percent of the annual federal budget, Canadian foreign aid is achieving real results in the lives of the world’s poor. From providing life-saving vaccines and treatment for deadly diseases, providing food aid to reduce starvation, to investing in agriculture and farming to fight poverty and hunger, it is making a massive difference.

But Canada’s spending on international development has been frozen for some time, and there are now discussions to cut that budget even more as the government looks for ways to reduce the deficit.

Please join me in calling on the Canadian government to protect critical international development funding.

The petition reads:

Dear Prime Minister Harper,

As you make what are difficult choices for the 2012-2013 federal budget, please protect critical international development funding that saves lives and helps the world’s poor pull themselves out of poverty.

Cuts to programs that fight global poverty won’t balance the budget, but they will risk slowing progress on Canada’s international development priorities and the success of existing programs that make a real difference to people in developing countries.

Please join me in taking action today.

Thanks for all you do.

From December 15 to 16, IFAD member countries will meet in Rome and make pledges to cover the next three years of IFAD operations and lending. ONE supports robust “replenishment” pledges to IFAD for three main reasons:

Its mandate. Holding dual status as a UN agency and an international financial institution, IFAD focuses on small-scale farmers exclusively, thus playing a unique role in the global food security architecture. To date, IFAD has empowered more than 370 million rural poor people to make better lives for themselves and leveraged US $19.7 billion in co-financing for its projects. In 2010 alone, IFAD reached 43 million rural poor people.

Its effectiveness. According to a recent report, IFAD has strong monitoring and evaluation, aligns its aid with national development strategies, and performs very strongly in financial accountability and transparency. Additionally, because IFAD projects coordinate multiple donors, IFAD 9 gives donors an avenue to maintain their commitments to strategic coordination and the improvement of multilateral institutions. All this means that IFAD is one of the most effective agencies out there working on agriculture.

Its efficiency. In the Center for Global Development’s 2011 QuODA database, IFAD ranked in the top four aid institutions globally on indicators related to “maximizing efficiency.” Additionally, IFAD has continuously improved its already efficient model of operations. Likewise, the ratio of its overhead expenses has improved recently, shrinking from 16 percent in 2008 to a projected 12 percent in 2012. In times of tight donor budgets, countries should prioritize efficiency when investing resources.

For these reasons, the Cannes G20 Summit called on countries for a successful 9th replenishment of IFAD. In ONE’s view, donors should make pledges at or above the levels of those made during its last replenishment. This will ensure that some small-scale farmers continue to get the support they need to farm their way out of poverty.

During the last replenishment (IFAD 8), donors recognized the important role that IFAD plays in global food security, and they made substantial increases in their pledges. We must keep those up. The leading replenishment pledges in IFAD 8 were:

1. US ($90 million)
2. Italy (EUR 53 million)
3. Netherlands (EUR 49 million)
4. Sweden (SEK 460 million)
5. Canada (CAN 75 million)

Although many donors, including the US, are currently struggling to meet domestic obligations, they must not forget the world’s poorest, who often live in rural areas and suffer from what Roger Thurow has called the “tragic truism” of hungry farmers, i.e. those that grow food should not go to bed hungry. IFAD can help right this tragic truism and move us closer to meeting MDG 1. Thus, ONE calls on IFAD member countries to replenish IFAD at or above IFAD 8 levels next week in Rome. And we’ll be watching to see if they do.

Harper also used his time on the podium to urge leaders at the UN Summit to focus on accountability to existing commitments, rather than making new agreements or “lofty promises.” He highlighted the G8’s G8’s accountability report (which was launched at the Canadian-hosted summit this June) as a critical new tool in helping to ensure donor accountability. He also said that the Canadian-spearheaded Muskoka Initiative would ensure that maternal and child health promises made at this summer’s G8 will be delivered through a rigorous accountability framework.

While the Prime Minister’s focus on accountability is a welcome one, the fact that many of the details on the Muskoka Initiative are still outstanding (read about them here) suggests that we still need clarity on what accountability means or else it will just become the new buzzword at this year’s summit.

Prime Minister Harper also said that Canada would be increasing its pledge to the Global Fund in October, another welcome announcement. But with only two weeks until the Global Fund’s replenishment, the pledge is still too vague to determine whether or not the Fund will have the resources it needs from 2011-2013.

The initiative (which includes a $5 billion in funding from G8 countries, $2.3 billion from non-G8 donors and a handful of qualitative principles and targets) was unveiled by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper on the first day of the summit and outlined in an annex of the final G8 communiqué. Harper specified that the $5 billion commitment from the G8 would be “additional” funding and that Canada would be contributing $1.1 billion in new resources over the next five years. Advocates and experts alike were disappointed by the G8’s lack of ambition (with $5 billion representing just a fraction of the estimated $30 billion needed from donors to meet maternal and child health targets), and without details on individual country commitments, it was also impossible to applaud the clarity of the announcement.

Last week, an official “methodology document” shed some light on the numbers behind the initiative, with details on how the G8 had calculated their current spending on maternal, newborn and child health (i.e. their collective baseline). To anyone familiar with the tedious business of tracking DAC purpose codes and calculating imputed percentages of multilateral organizations like the Global Fund and the World Bank, this analysis is both incredibly thorough and extremely valuable for advocates and recipient countries.

Yet some of the most critical details on the $5 billion G8 commitment are missing. It’s still unclear what each country is contributing towards the initiative and whether their commitments are truly additional to current spending. The United States, Germany and France have announced their contributions (though not necessarily their baselines) and some additional details have been unofficially reported.

For those of us accustomed to following international summit processes, this story is all too familiar: a vague commitment is made, advocates respond with tepid applause (and a reminder that more is needed), and the following year is spent haranguing governments to clarify what they promised to ensure that it is eventually delivered (if you haven’t seen my colleague Erin Thornton’s recent post on tracking G8 commitments, check it out here).

This year felt different though. Prime Minister Harper put accountability squarely on the summit agenda back in January, and one week before the summit the G8 released a self-evaluation of their progress towards meeting development commitments with the Muskoka Accountability Report. Although the G8 promised to “ensure follow-up” on the conclusions and recommendations of the report, they shunned the first opportunity to actually implement them through the development of a robust, transparent and accountable Muskoka Initiative.

The G8 would argue that advocates can now calculate each individual donor’s baseline using the agreed methodology- a somewhat painful exercise, but certainly not impossible. But by failing to offer up these details themselves, the G8 are not only allowing some countries to hide flimsy, potentially dishonest commitments behind a collective promise, they are missing the bigger picture on accountability.

And everyone loses in this scenario. Advocates are still ill-equipped to hold their governments accountable, recipient countries face another hurdle to planning their budgets for next year, and, in a critical year when the changing global architecture and emergence of the G20 is grabbing the lion’s share of media headlines, the G8 has missed another opportunity to flex their muscle and demonstrate their relevance.

Wondering what the NGO community thought of the G8 and G20 Summits in Canada? Here’s a great round-up of responses from a host of our partners and friends from the online news source The Sherpa.

The G8:

http://www.sherpatimes.com/g8/179-g8-summit-ngo-responses.html

The G20:

http://www.sherpatimes.com/g8/185-ngo-responses-to-the-g20-summit.html

You can watch the clip here.

Ottawa-based ONE member Kirika Bussell attended the screening, and sent us this great photo and blog update:

People often advocate for a cause because of a direct link to a situation, or because we know someone who has been affected. It was her health scare following the birth of her first child that prompted Christy Turlington-Burns to learn about and then advocate for maternal and child health. She survived a common post-partum complication because of timely access to quality medical treatment, but not all women are so fortunate. It was this experience that inspired No Woman, No Cry.

ONE member Kirika Bussell and Christy Turlington-Burns at the event in Ottawa

Every minute a woman dies from preventable complications during pregnancy or birth. What is stopping us from keeping these preventable deaths occurring again and again? If the answer lies in education, compassion and understanding, then Ms. Turlington Burns has made the job of spreading the message more accessible, and more importantly, she has put a human face on what could simply be seen as another sad statistic.

At the screening I was fortunate enough to speak with Christy Turlington Burns about the concept that we all have a stake in the future of maternal and child health. She agreed that it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or woman, a father or mother, or if you’re childless- this is a universal issue.

When I volunteered to assist with the ONE’s screening at the National Gallery, one of my goals was to help maximize the opportunity to generate interest and keep the issue moving. Reflecting on this event after the fact, I can say my interest in this issue has only grown the more I’ve learned. I hope other ONE members come to feel the same way. Everyone’s reasons to act are different, but when we do act, together we can act as ONE voice for proactive, comprehensive change. The future is ours, but the choice to act is yours.

Kirika M. Bussell, Ottawa, Canada

If you’d like a sneak peak at Christy’s documentary, visit www.everymothercounts.org.

To sign ONE’s petition to the G8 for 3.5 million new health workers go to: http://www.one.org/us/actnow/g8healthworkers/

“Canada holds a special place on the world stage. Not only are we hosting the G8 and G20 summits in Canada this month, but, as our Prime Minister rightly reminds us, we are also the G8 nation which best survived the economic crisis. That puts us in an excellent position to lead by example.”

As the report shows, Canada has made impressive progress on several of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), including hunger reduction and gender equality. But it’s still behind on half of its promises, including universal primary education, maternal health, and foreign aid spending. And if the Canadian government sticks to its recent decision to freeze aid spending, this could jeopardize all 8 MDGs.

To take a look at the entire report, click here.