When you have a few minutes, I highly recommend this video produced by the New York Times. It tells the story of 37-year-old Mohamed Aden who for the last year has served as the leader of the small town of Adado, Somalia. He only recently returned to Somalia after spending roughly 16 years in Minnesota where he earned a college degree at Minnesota State, while supporting himself by parking cars and working in a factory.

His return to Somalia, and his attempts to maintain a fragile peace and support development efforts in his village are truly fascinating. You can watch the full video by clicking the image below:

ONE’s Co-Founder and Executive Director Jamie Drummond writes about his personal journey to Ethiopia:

Twenty five years ago, like many of my generation, I was called to action by images of drought and starvation – and by a couple of shaggy-haired, Irish rock stars with whom I’ve now been working for a decade. The Ethiopian famines and the world’s response through Band Aid and Live Aid have shaped the image of Africa for a generation and spurred concerted action to fight extreme poverty. A quarter of a century on, it is perhaps a good moment to ask how the aid that has flowed has worked and how the model of celebrity-led advocacy is faring.

A few weeks ago, I returned to Tigray in northern Ethiopia to look again at the impact of funds raised by Band Aid and the work of the World Food Programme. I travelled through this region in 1995 and visited a village called Daereda. Drought and a desperate population had denuded their valley of trees and greenery; fertile top soil had been eroded by seasonal flash floods. Back then, many of the villagers were grateful for the food aid they had received and quick to thank the western public and a far-off thing called Geldof. But they wanted more than handouts – they wanted to take matters into their own hands and heal the physical damage to their lands.

The food aid helped them do just that. It was being given through “food for work” programmes. Teams of thousands set to work planting trees, contouring steep hillsides to conserve soil and water, digging ponds and building check dams, all to raise the lands fertility. Today, the results are astonishing. The valley is lush and green; the river flows all year round; the land is more fertile and productive.

This success story is echoed in valleys across Tigray. The region receives many expert visitors to see how it was done. And in spite of the images of starvation we’re currently confronted with, it’s not the only positive story to have come out of Ethiopia in the past decade. The country has also halved malarial death rates through widespread use of insecticide= treated bed nets, and doubled school enrolment. Economic growth has been over 5% for a decade, 7% on average for the last three years.

But parts of the country, and region, are still on the verge of starvation. This could lead some quickly to assume that 25 years on nothing has changed. No serious investigation can lead to the conclusion, but it is still not acceptable that 14 million Ethiopians today rely on food aid and that for some rations are being cut.

The answer as ever is complex. Climate change is causing more frequent droughts, impairing rural communities’ coping mechanisms. Not enough has been spent on rural roads and the government hasn’t permitted mobile phones or developed local markets. But above all there has been insufficient global attention paid to agriculture. Spending on agriculture went down from 17% of global aid in 1980 to just 3.8 % in 2006. It’s stunning that after the famines of the 1980s we didn’t increase investment in long-term regional food security and agricultural productivity. The World Bank and IMF even counselled against it as part of their notorious structural adjustment programmes. Tough questions must now be asked about the international development business and how this was allowed to happen.

At last this year the G8 countries agreed to invest $20bn in agricultural productivity. (more…)

At the start of the year, Nora Coghlan from our policy team wrote about the education crisis in Zimbabwe. After a heated conflict between school teachers and the Zimbabwean government, it was feared that “2009 will be another lost year for education in Zimbabwe.”

Today, CNN.com has an article examining the state of education in Zimbabwe. While they note signs of the education system fighting back to normalcy, the price of education and continued lack of funding still make it incredibly difficult for families to send their children to school.

Watch this corresponding video that CNN ran a few weeks back:

Excerpts below, full piece here:

The country’s education minister in the year-old power-sharing administration believes it could be decade before standards are back up to Zimbabwe’s good past record.

According to the education department, 20,000 teachers have left the country in the past two years and half of Zimbabwe’s children have not progressed beyond primary school.

Many parents today are too poor to send their children to school. Rural schools — where pencils, desks and books are luxuries — are hardest hit.

When CNN visited a Mathabisana primary school in Umguza, in the southwest of Zimbabwe, headmaster Nonkululeko Ndlovu said that at one point teachers used charcoal as a substitute for chalk.

“There are no textbooks to talk about at the moment because I remember the last text books were bought sometime in 2000 or so, when we were still getting government grants but now we don’t have anything.

“Those text books have reached their shelf life. An aid organization donated 32 text books which we really appreciated and we are using those text books right across the grades, trying to impart knowledge to the kids.”

As part of the Living Proof Project, which we’ve covered extensively here on the ONE Blog, the Gates Foundation has posted this photo gallery following women at the Osu Maternity Home in Accra, Ghana. It’s part of a larger discussion about the benefits and techniques of breastfeeding, which were also examined in this infographic.

Check out this guest post from Indego Africa volunteer Sarah Dunigan. For more Indego Africa stories, check out their blog, Social Enterprising:

I am often asked what drives me to volunteer in Africa. I find it hard to put into words, but sharing a story often helps.

For the past two months I have had the pleasure of volunteering for Indego Africa, an innovative social enterprise empowering hundreds of women in Rwanda to lift themselves out of poverty by selling their fair trade handicrafts and returning 100% of profits to fund training programs in business management, entrepreneurship, microfinance, computers and literacy. Until recently, Indego Africa’s cooperative partners, Cocoki and Covanya, had never sold their handicrafts in the local Rwandan market. Instead, orders have always been picked up at the cooperatives by Indego Africa and shipped to the United States. But last Friday, at the U.S. Embassy Holiday Crafts Fair here in Rwanda, everything changed.

The cooperatives were in full preparation mode in the weeks leading up to the fair. The foot-powered sewing machines at Cocoki whirred as the artisans created their unique textile products. Rows of women lined the floor at Covanya weaving and individually signing the tags on their brightly colored baskets. They even requested that Indego Africa lead extra training sessions on business English, product pricing and accounting.
When the day of the fair arrived, the women were still feeling a bit unsure of themselves. Upon arrival at the market, we even discovered that other handicraft organizations were, unfortunately, not represented by their artisans. But the women took a collective deep breath and got to it – and the customers responded!
Covanya nearly cleared out their entire inventory of baskets, and Cocoki’s yoga bags and laptop sleeves were flying off the table. The women’s English rapidly improved as they answered questions about pricing and styles. They handled the money, wrote out receipts, and even balanced their receipt books against their cash drawer at the end of the day to make sure they matched.

This was a defining moment for the women of Indego Africa. They were learning by doing and the result was a dramatic increase of confidence in their capabilities as independent businesswomen. As the number of products dwindled, Daphrose, a master weaver at Covanya, turned to me and said through a huge smile, “This gives us courage!”

-Sarah Dunigan, Indego Africa Volunteer in Rwanda

Here’s another partner post for our Food Security in Focus series, this time from USAID’s West Africa Trade Hub. The West Africa Trade Hub works directly with West African companies, helping them become more competitive in the world market by linking them to buyers who assist in product development. The post below is from Paully Appea-Kubi , the founder of Ebenut, a company that produces dried fruit mixes in Accra, Ghana. With help from an American food distribution company, Ebenut will soon introduce dried jollof rice and dried gari foto dishes to U.S. supermarkets. Her story demonstrates the importance of market access and agricultural value chains in establishing food security.

-Kara Arsenault

I started Ebenut by myself in 1996. I have a food science background and I like to experiment with food. I asked a farmer if he could supply me with pineapples and it was a good match: he needed a market for the pineapples that he did not export or were rejected, but were still fine for drying. I had one dryer and I used my own money to start Ebenut. After six months, I added two people. Eight months later, I hired five more.

Today, I have 35 people. I’m getting mangoes from 15 farmers, pineapples from 12, papayas from 2 and I have four suppliers of coconuts. The farmers are expanding and their workers are better paid because they have a reliable market for their fruits—they know there’s a constant buyer.

Jollof rice is very common in Ghana—we use it at our parties, we eat it for lunch, we serve it at weddings and funerals. We use a spicy pepper, oil, tomato and local seasonings. We then mix it up with rice and cook it. I took the recipe from there, drying it in order to preserve it and make it easy to prepare. Gari foto is very much like jollof, but instead of rice we use gari, or cassava, that has been dried. It’s very convenient—you just add water and a prepared tomato sauce.

I’m working with a rice factory in the Volta Region. They buy from about 100 growers. So I work with those farmers indirectly, creating a market for their grain. I’m also working with rice growers in the north, where rice farming is done mostly by women.

Last year, I met Jim Thaller of Talier Trading Group. He told me that he wanted a locally prepared dish to go on to the U.S. market. I developed a dried jollof rice dish (reported in Tradewinds, the Trade Hub’s monthly newsletter) and a dried gari foto for supermarkets across the U.S. It was important to have Jim’s help. While we were telling his group about the local dish, they tasted it to see whether it would be suitable for the market. The names, the packaging design—these were all very important. He encouraged us. My fear was that we would spend all this money, invest all of this time and then it wouldn’t go very well. Jim had high hopes.

I know Americans like foods that are easy to prepare and are tasty. It’s very colorful and the fact that you can serve it with other foods makes it versatile. It takes about 5 minutes to make it and it’s very nutritious. I think they’ll really like it. It’s an exciting time for me.

-Paully Appea-Kubi

The New York Times and other media outlets are reporting that Zimbabwe Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai is openly boycotting cabinet meetings as a means of protesting President Robert Mugabe’s party. NYT characterizes this as the “biggest breach yet in the new transitional government.”

More details below, read the full report here:

The catalyst for this step was the jailing Wednesday of Roy Bennett, Mr. Tsvangirai’s deputy agriculture minister-designate, a white farmer who is scheduled to stand trial Monday on three-year-old terrorism charges that his party, the Movement for Democratic Change, says are fabricated. But even after Mr. Bennett was grantedbail Friday after the news conference, officials in his party said their decision to disengage did not change.

“This is the time for us to say enough is enough,” said Thabitha Khumalo, a spokeswoman for the M.D.C.

Mr. Tsvangirai laid out a broad array of grievances. He accused Mr. Mugabe’s party, ZANU-PF, of selectively using the law as a weapon to punish his parliamentarians, putting 16,000 of its youth militia on the government payroll, and remilitarizing the countryside on bases used in last year’s discredited election to organize a campaign of terror against his supporters.

While he stopped short of quitting the government, Mr. Tsvangirai warned that if the crisis were not resolved and a working relationship restored he would call for United Nations-supervised elections.

Our friends at the ONE Germany office just returned from a very successful trip to Tanzania to study the progress being made in the fight against poverty. Carola Bieniek chronicles the trip in vivid detail (and great photos):

Last week ONE Germany organized our first ever Africa trip. We took actress Minh-Khai Phan-Thi, actress and singer Jana Pallaske and musician Rea Garvey to Tanzania. Despite all the differences between the 48 countries South of the Sahara we think that Tanzania can be considered as a good example for much of Africa: the economy has shown steady growth, which is in part due to good governance; child and maternal mortality have dropped; Tanzania has made enormous progress in primary school enrollment. Only a few days after the German general elections and before the new government has been formed we wanted to show our guests how important targeted and effective development assistance is.

We started out on Tuesday morning in Arusha at two local health centers. In Tanzania medical treatment for pregnant women and children under five is free. So we wanted to find out what this meant for the women. At the first clinic we were astonished by the sheer lack of things: there were almost no supplies and even the lab’s only equipment was an old German microscope. But we also met Agnes, a mother of two, who benefitted from the government’s efforts to eradicate deaths through malaria. The clinic informed her of the disease and handed her a voucher to replace the family’s old net. At the second clinic we saw hundreds of women waiting for pre-natal examinations, birth, vaccinations for their newborns, contraceptives or HIV meds. We came to chat with a couple of the women and Dr. Solomon Ole, the district’s Health Coordinator.

Asked what they’d need most we received different answers – a building to protect the women from the weather, an ambulance, an incinerator. And I somehow understood why it’s called development corporation: it takes a good government to set plans to defeat disease and unnecessary deaths but it also takes donors to fulfill their promises to realize these.

In the afternoon we took a tour of Tanzania Pharmaceutical Industries. The company ventures to break Tanzania’s dependence on foreign pharmaceutics. Together with the NGO action medeor they’re building a new plant to produce ARVs.

Day 2 was rather hectic: (more…)

Last week I spoke to 4-year-old Ercilia in the village of Muzingane Bairro 3. As she played with her friend Carlos on the swings at their preschool, Ercilia told me how much she loves her new playground. She smiled and laughed as Carlos pushed her high up into the air on the swing.

Nothing is more thrilling than the sight of a happy child like Ercilia. And we at Save the Children in Mozambique have seen a lot of joyful children lately — all of them laughing, playing and hanging out with friends at brand-new playgrounds outside of our preschools.

Here in the rural communities where we work, children had few amenities, much less new see-saws and jungle gyms. These new playgrounds, built with funds raised by the 2007 Idol Gives Back television special, add a whole new element of excitement to our early childhood development program. They also give children another reason to look forward to going to school every day.

The response from Americans to Idol Gives Back (video above) is a testament to the power that people can have when everyone works together to support a cause, much like we all do through the ONE campaign. With the opening of 31 playgrounds this summer and 42 preschools last summer, Americans have made it possible for over 3,000 Mozambican youngsters to learn and to play. I know that the kids are more excited than ever to go back to school this year.

The playgrounds were designed by three local Mozambican artists and the jungle gyms, seesaws and tire swings were all built with locally available and environmentally sustainable materials.

MACHALUCUANE, MOZAMBIQUE – JULY 15: Children play in the newly built ‘Idol Gives Back’ playground supported by Save the Children in Machalucuane, Mozambique on July 15, 2009. The village is located about 18 miles outside Xai-Xai, in Gaza province in Mozambique. The villagers have about 7 miles to the nearest hospital and secondary school. (Photo by Per-Anders Pettersson/Reportage by Getty Images for Save the Children.)

Aside from being a great addition to our schools, the playgrounds have created an opportunity for communities to come together and support education for their children.

Community members volunteered their time this summer to help build the structures and local auto mechanics donated used car tires for swings.

Through our work with the ONE campaign, we can continue to advocate for support for basic education, including early childhood development programs like the one in Mozambique, providing communities with the tools they need to improve the lives of their children.

-Domingos Mahangue, Field Operations Manager, Early Childhood Development Programs, Save the Children in Mozambique

In the IFC-World Bank Doing Business 2010 report released yesterday, for the first time a sub-Saharan African country—Rwanda—was named the world’s top reformer of business regulations, based on the number and impact of reforms implemented. Doing Business is an annual report that ranks economies based on 10 indicators of business regulation that record the time and cost to meet government requirements for starting and operating a business, trading across borders, paying taxes, and closing a business.

In Rwanda, it now takes an entrepreneur just two procedures and three days to start a business. Imports and exports are more efficient, and transferring property takes less time thanks to a reorganized registry and time limits. Investors have more protection, insolvency reorganization has been streamlined, and a wider range of assets can be used as collateral to access credit.

Mauritius, ranked 17 globally, is the top sub-Saharan economy for the second year in a row in terms of the overall regulatory ease of doing business.

However, despite these advances, more reforms are needed in Africa. The average rank for sub-Saharan African countries remain the lowest of any region.

Globally, the report shows that despite the financial and economic crisis, a record 131 economies reformed business regulations between June 2008 and April 2009. Singapore is the top-ranked economy on the ease of doing business for the fourth year in a row, but most of the action occurred in developing economies. Two-thirds of the reforms recorded in the report were in low- and lower-middle-income economies.

-Mikiko Imai