We are proud to present our first Amazing Africa guest post from Andrea Burk. She has been a missionary to the Dagara people group in Dano, Burkina Faso for 9 years, and is now pursuing a career as a photojournalist. Enjoy her photos, and find her on Twitter at @BurkAndrea.
Educating children is the key to a country’s future. Burkina Faso is making progress, yet still struggling in this respect. In talking with a few people about their experiences, it was very obvious that Burkina is on the cutting edge of change, but that many are impatient and unhappy with the speed of that change.
Please welcome Kelsey Finnegan to the ONE Blog. She is the winner of our ONE Act a Week blog post contest on advocacy and the holidays. In this piece, she writes about her perception of Africa before and after her time in Ghana.
Sometimes I wonder what life would’ve been like if I’d never gone to Africa. I would have probably existed in a world that was simpler, where my thoughts didn’t reach beyond the boundaries of my university, where things were the way they were just because that was the way things were. We have all seen the sad ads with fly-bitten children’s faces flickering across the television screen. In those portrayals of Africa, it made the continent seem like a dark and curiously lost place, hopeless and wild.
I began my work in Africa at 19, as a volunteer teacher for two months in Ghana. I came across Happy Kids Orphanage, a beautiful but struggling place where the children slept on urine-covered cement floors and never experienced the luxury of a full meal. I saw it as a place that could be receptive to change, and in the years since, we’ve been able to build a dormitory, two classrooms and start a nutritional food program. In my favorite project, I partnered with a fair-trade company, Della, to start the Happy Kids Sewing Program.
When I received this third and final video blog from ONE member Katie Meyler, I immediately hit play to watch Katie tell Abigail’s story. Katie tells it best, but it struck me how Abigail’s story is really about how poverty robs a girl of more than an education -– it robs her of her childhood. Abigail is now in school and at the top of her class because of More Than Me.
Check out the amazing video by the What Took You So Long foundation:
ONE has big asks ahead of the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF-IV) in Busan, South Korea, starting on November 29th. Making donors accountable for where their development assistance goes through increased transparency will improve the effectiveness of aid across the board, or in this case –- across the chalkboard. In February 2011, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) released a new education strategy, called “Opportunity Through Learning.” The strategy contains some great examples of how donor agencies can translate aid effectiveness principles, which can often seem abstract and obtuse, into effective development strategies.
Katie Meyler’s childhood wasn’t easy. She was poor growing up in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. She didn’t have the money to fit in and escape her sometimes traumatic home life. Then, she went to Central America and experienced real poverty. She met “kids with big smiles with no shoes” and was inspired to do something about it. When she was nervous about starting her own organization, More Than Me, her friends encouraged her to “get over herself” — because it isn’t about her, it’s about them. Watch Katie’s amazing story in her exclusive video for ONE:
For last week’s ONE Act a Week, we asked you to write a personal note to USAID Administrator Raj Shah and call for a US pledge of $375 million for the Global Partnership for Education at Tuesday’s replenishment in Copenhagen.
In just three days, we received 130 awesome messages from our ONE members. We sent those messages to Administrator Shah on Monday afternoon in this tweet:
Yesterday, representatives from 52 countries met in Copenhagen, Denmark for the first-ever replenishment of the Global Partnership for Education. You may have read about it on the ONE Blog, taken action with our ONE Act a Week or tweeted @USAID to encourage the US to make a pledge. If you did -– thank you!
Right now, some of the world's biggest oil companies are fighting to keep some of their deals with foreign governments secret. Let's tell big oil we won't be bullied.
Cuts to poverty-fighting programs won't balance the budget, but they will set back progress on Canada's development priorities and risk jeopardizing existing investments.
2011 marks 30 years since the first cases of AIDS were documented. Take a closer look at the specific, achievable goals we must hit by 2015 to make this year the beginning of the end of AIDS.
