Brooks Keene, policy adviser for CARE’s Water Team, makes the argument that foreign aid should benefit the poor first and foremost.
In 2005, Congress passed the overwhelmingly bipartisan Water for the Poor Act, sending a strong signal to the Administration that both parties believe that water and sanitation for the poor is a strategic priority for US foreign policy. The Administration was to come back with a strategy within 180 days.
Photo credit: Josh Estey/CARE
As we approach World Water Day on March 22, CARE, NRDC and WaterAid have published a report card on how well the Act has been implemented seven years down the line. The bad news is that a strategy has still not been released. The good news is that there are signals that it could be released soon. Leadership from Secretary Clinton and USAID Raj Shah has given new life to solving one of the world’s great crises.
An introductory look at the World Bank’s Global Partnership for Enhanced Social Accountability, currently under construction and inviting comments on how it can help civil society organizations hold their governments to account for more effective development.
What is the Global Partnership for Enhanced Social Accountability?
In April 2011, World Bank President Robert Zoellick addressed the Peterson Institute for International Economics about the implications of the political revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa on how we should think about development. He focused specifically on the importance of citizen action and civil society: “An empowered public is the foundation for a stronger society, more effective government, and a more successful state,” he said. The World Bank is currently developing a proposed Global Partnership for Enhanced Social Accountability to support civil society organizations (CSOs) in developing countries to hold governments accountable and improve development outcomes.
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.
Ian Gary, senior policy manager for extractive industries at Oxfam America, takes a look at the facts and figures of corruption in Africa. This piece was originally published on the Politics of Poverty blog. This is a part of a larger blog series on transparency in the extractives industry. Stay tuned for more updates on this topic.
1504 : Section in Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act requiring companies to disclose taxes, royalties, and other payments made to the US and foreign governments
1.5 billion: People living on less than $2 a day in “resource-rich” countries
$30 million: Value of Malibu mansion owned by Teodoro Nguema Obiang, son of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea’s dictator
1: Number of white crystal-covered “Bad Tour” gloves in Teodoro’s Michael Jackson memorabilia collection valued at $3 million (See “US vs. One Crystal-Covered ‘Bad Tour’ Glove” court filing.)
Check out this great news on rotavirus, courtesy of Candace Rosen at PATH (from PATH’s RotaFlash newsletter), which you all helped to support with your advocacy for GAVI last spring!
Diarrhea is the third biggest killer of children under five years of age in Zambia (40 per day; 15,000 each year), and rotavirus, the most common cause of severe and fatal diarrhea in young children, is responsible for nearly one-third of those deaths. As in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the region with the highest rates of rotavirus mortality worldwide, rotavirus contributes heavily to the tremendous drain on the health and economic resources in Zambia:
Approximately 41 percent of young children hospitalized for severe diarrhea are infected with rotavirus.
An estimated 4,506children under age five die from rotavirus diarrhea annually.
Vaccines are the best way to protect children in Zambia and the rest of the world from severe rotavirus diarrhea and the deadly dehydrating diarrhea that it causes.
ONE member and Peace Corps volunteer Brandon Green will be sharing his experiences in Burkina Faso with ONE Blog readers in the series, “Back to Africa” over the next few months. We look forward to hearing about all his adventures!
Me and my students at our HIV/AIDS talk
At one of my English Clubs — a place for students to practice their English — last Tuesday, 140 7th and 8th graders crammed into a classroom that shouldn’t be able to hold more than a third of them. They were there to learn a few English words and watch the American put a condom on a wooden penis. I was there to teach them about HIV/AIDS. The class started by discussing what HIV/AIDS is and how it affects the human body. Then, I showed them some statistics about people living with HIV/AIDS worldwide. I told them that sub-Saharan Africa has the highest number of infections, and that 1.2 percent of the population of Burkina Faso is currently living with HIV/AIDS.
Life happens here at the Tema Clinic in Accra, Ghana. Babies trade a death sentence for life. Mothers transform their sickly skeleton figures to healthy, able bodies. Tema offers hope in a place that was once hopeless and ravaged by AIDS.
Funded by the Global Fund through financial support from Product (RED), Tema Hospital cares for 2,200 people living with HIV. We recently visited their facility again –- their work never ceases to amaze me. The Global Fund make it possible for the hospital to provide ARV treatment and PMTCT (prevention of mother-to-child-transmission). Thanks to these interventions, only 4 percent of babies at Tema with HIV-positive mothers are born with the virus.
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.
