Ten years ago today, at a small press conference in New York, Bono and Bill Gates launched an activist entity called DATA, with start-up funds from Mr Gates, George Soros and Ed Scott.
I was one of the founders, along with Bobby Shriver and Lucy Matthew, and appointed the executive director. Though we started small, our oh so clever acronymic name stood for audacious goals: to campaign on debt, AIDS, trade and aid in partnership with African activists – in return for African governments offering more democracy, accountability and transparency to their citizens. We aspired to be data-based activists with a transatlantic bipartisan strategy, blending pop and policy, so that those with extreme global power would be forced to deal with extreme local poverty – and take the historic opportunity before us to end it.
Senior ONE Adviser Michael Gerson is on the ground in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In this blog post, he writes about the benefits of cocoa crops on the country’s economy.
A farmer from the Greenhouse project in Beni separates raw cacao beans from an opened cacao pod to be washed, fermented, dried, and shipped.
We traveled down dirt roads near the town of Beni, in eastern Congo, close to the Ugandan border. Militias are active in the region, so our group was protected by an armed escort. Interactions at checkpoints along the road are unpredictable. In the town of Beni itself, a curfew is imposed each night at sunset.
As the world’s business, political and media elite made their annual trek to the Swiss town of Davos -– blanketed in more snow than I have seen there for a decade -– conventional wisdom had it they should have all the lightheartedness of a gray, winter, Alpine sky. The Eurozone crisis, the difficulty of getting tough political decisions in the United States, and worries in some of the champions among emerging markets – the chance of a property crash in China, for example, or of runaway inflation in India –- were all said to contribute to a note of pessimism among Davos devotees.
ONE will be reporting live from the Sundance Film Festival in Utah from January 20 to 22. Stay tuned to the ONE Blog for more updates.
I’m here with a crack ONE team shooting a new short film about the beginning of the end of AIDS — what an incredible statement! Think about it: by 2015, we can actually turn the tide on an epidemic that has claimed 30 million lives over the past 30 years. But as with everything we work on, it won’t happen without you ONEers doing some heavy lifting — so stay tuned for what you can do to make the beginning of the end of aids a reality.
We wouldn’t be here without the generosity of our friends at Sundance Channel. They reached out to us a few weeks back and offered us free space to film, right next to where they are conducting there own interviews here at the Sundance Headquarters. Yesterday, I had a chance to chat with Sarah Barnett, EVP of Sundance Channel about the vision of Sundance, the power of community and how storytelling can help change the world. Take a look:
Production is going great. We’ve already filmed Allison Janney, Blythe Danner, Jason Ritter, Richard Jenkins, Julie Mond and many more. One of the real luxuries of my job is meeting so many talented people who believe in ONE and want to do their part to help — and this trip has been no exception.
ONE will be reporting live from the Sundance Film Festival in Utah from January 20 to 22. Stay tuned to the ONE Blog for more updates.
Greetings from Park City, Utah and the Sundance Film Festival! ONE is on the ground in Park City thanks to the great team at the Sundance Channel, who reached out to us recently to invite ONE to be their official nonprofit partner at this year’s festival. We were thrilled to be asked to come out and join the Sundance Channel at their headquarters this weekend, where we’ll shoot a new video campaign that will help raise awareness of our push to get to “the beginning of the end of AIDS” by 2015.
The new campaign won’t be released until late February, but starting this weekend, we’ll be sharing behind-the-scenes photos and other content from Sundance through the ONE Blog, Facebook and Twitter accounts — so keep checking back here through the weekend.
People might not associate rapid technology growth — especially mobile tech growth — with Africa. However, in 2011, Africa experienced a huge growth in tech, especially with mobile technologies. A recent article in The Economist estimates that there are 600 million mobile phone users in Africa, more than in the United States or Europe. Africa’s mobile telephone subscriptions are growing at twice the global average and tablet computers are hitting the market. And that growth is expected to continue in 2012 as investors flock to build technologies in Africa.
As we round the corner to the last stretch before Christmas, here are a few of our favorite “gifts that give back” including a couple from our partners and of course, our very own ONE Store.
Our friends at CARE are letting you put together a customized CAREpackage that will help poor girls and women access the resources they need to lift themselves out of poverty. Whether it’s helping to send a girl in Afghanistan to school for a year or an expectant mother in Peru safely deliver her child, this interactive virtual gift is not only fun to assemble, but will help to empower women and girls all over the world.
ONE is campaigning to ensure that the Congressional budget does not cut foreign assistance programs like Feed the Future that help people break the cycle of poverty and hunger.
The Horn of Africa is experiencing its worst drought in 60 years. More than 11 million people, mostly nomadic pastoralists and farmers in south-central Somalia, north-eastern Kenya, and south-eastern Ethiopia, are severely lacking access to food.
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.
As aid agencies warn more than 9 million people could be affected by a food crisis in East Africa, world leaders are failing to keep their 2009 promises to tackle the causes of chronic hunger and support farmers in the world's poorest countries.
