The Los Angeles Times has a fascinating report– part one of a two part series– from on the ground in Sierra Leone. Scott Kraft looks at the country’s flailing public health system and the potential impact it could have on the region. It’s a really interesting, in-depth look at a complex and deteriorating situation.

I also recommend this corresponding photo gallery, which chronicles Princess Christian Maternity Hospital in Freetown.

Excerpts from Kraft’s piece below, full article here

West Africa is of particular concern to world health officials. With shortages of medicine, trained doctors, reliable electricity, clean water and such basics as sterilized gloves, countries often lack the means to identify and deal with new disease threats.

“As we turn over more and more rocks in more and more places, we find more passages for disease,” said Dr. Scott Dowell, director of global disease detection at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Most aren’t going to be the next HIV or SARS, but it’s pretty hard to tell which ones will and which ones won’t.”

[...] The country has only two pediatricians, and Thorlie is one of four obstetricians. All work at Princess Christian.

Doctors Without Borders set up clinics in Bo, the second-largest city, during the civil war. Now it’s time to begin pulling out and move to other countries in crisis, but Jan van’t Land, the local director, says he’s worried.

“We’re in a difficult situation,” he said. “If we leave, who would take over? It might create another crisis.”

When Koroma took office in 2007, his wife, Sia, launched a global effort to draw attention to the public health crisis. An oil industry chemist before the war, she started a career in nursing during the couple’s years in London. Her evangelical work has brought some help, but she acknowledges that progress has been slow.

“We are faced with so many problems — illiteracy, poverty, youth unemployment and the need for gender empowerment,” she said. “I’m trying to be an advocate for women and children, because they are the most vulnerable.”

Nicholas Kristof’s latest column focuses on Tererai Trent, a remarkable woman from Zimbabwe who overcame extreme poverty and a husband who beat her and will be receiving her Ph.D. from Western Michigan University next month. As Mr. Kristof puts it: “Tererai is a reminder of the adage that talent is universal, while opportunity is not.”

Below is the beginning of her story. You can read Kristof’s full column here.

Of all the people earning university degrees this year, perhaps the most remarkable story belongs to Tererai (pronounced TEH-reh-rye), a middle-aged woman who is one of my heroes. She is celebrating a personal triumph, but she’s also a monument to the aid organizations and individuals who helped her. When you hear that foreign-aid groups just squander money or build dependency, remember that by all odds Tererai should be an illiterate, battered cattle-herd in Zimbabwe and instead — ah, but I’m getting ahead of my story.

Tererai was born in a village in rural Zimbabwe, probably sometime in 1965, and attended elementary school for less than one year. Her father married her off when she was about 11 to a man who beat her regularly. She seemed destined to be one more squandered African asset.

A dozen years passed. Jo Luck, the head of an aid group called Heifer International, passed through the village and told the women there that they should stand up, nurture dreams, change their lives.

Inspired, Tererai scribbled down four absurd goals based on accomplishments she had vaguely heard of among famous Africans. She wrote that she wanted to study abroad, and to earn a B.A., a master’s and a doctorate….

Keep reading here.

Right now, I’m at the Mo Ibrahim Foundation Forum in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania about to announce the 2009 ONE Africa Award winner: “Slums Information Development and Resource Centers” (SIDAREC) of Kenya.

Founded by a group of young people from the slums, SIDAREC focuses on lifting the standard of living of the youth living in Kenya’s slum communities by tapping into their skills and talents. The slums that SIDAREC operates in were spared the violence after the 2007 elections in large part because residents had an outlet for getting their voices heard through SIDAREC. Innovative approaches include the use of drama,
art, and Ghetto 99.9 FM radio to reach residents with development-oriented information.

You can learn more about SIDAREC and other outstanding ONE Award applicants here.

This is our second annual ONE Award-a onetime prize worth US$100,000 designed to recognize innovative African efforts to tackle the Millennium Development Goals. We received 170 applications in total and narrowed the field to eight final candidates, including the winner, all of whom are featured on our website.

-Edith Jibunoh

NBC ran this segment about Alicia Keys and the work she’s been doing in Africa and India with the “Keep a Child Alive” program. The program is “dedicated to providing life-saving anti-retroviral treatment, care and support services to children and families.”

Definitely worth checking out:

In Zambia, a rainy season has raised fears of a cholera outbreak. To help prevent a cholera outbreak, UNICEF and its partners have launched a new advocacy campaign called “Your Life is in Your Hands.”

The key to the campaign’s effectiveness, according to UNICEF, is that it relies on peer-to-peer advocacy, meaning that children and young people become effective ambassadors in spreading the importance of good hygiene to their peers. The campaign is being rolled out “through town–hall meetings for school children, follow-up events in schools, radio public service announcements and a UNICEF cartoon character named SOPO.”

You can read more about “Your Life is in Your Hands” here.

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