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.

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.

In the absence of a strategy, USAID has gone ahead with water, sanitation and hygiene programs, but much of the effort and dollars have not gone to benefit the poor. Only 33 percent of USAID funding for water, sanitation and hygiene in fiscal year 2010 went to low income countries based on the most recent State Department report to Congress. International organizations and advocates would like to see that figure closer to 70 percent.

SEE ALSO: Water, sanitation and bipartisanship

Why doesn’t the money go to the poor? It’s a complex question, but at its heart is likely the tension between aid for geostrategic priorities and aid for the benefit of those in need. In this case, Congress was clear. The law states that priority countries should be those in which the need is greatest and where assistance will have the most impact.

In September 2010, the Government Accountability Office did an analysis of how aid for water, sanitation and hygiene was being targeted and found that the choice of high priority countries was “not linked to verifiable analysis.” In other words, USAID is likely responding to political and geostrategic priorities rather than need or expected impact. And this problem is only being compounded by the lack of a strategy to spur concerted targeting.

We can hope that the release of a strategy in the near future will resolve some of these issues. In the meantime, to obey the spirit of the law USAID should:

By taking these steps, USAID can ensure that US investments under the Water for the Poor Act are in fact benefiting the poor.

Note: ONE together with a coalition of over 40 organizations, is supporting Congressional co-sponsorship of the Water for the World Act, a bill that will strengthen implementation of the Water for the Poor Act and spur US leadership.

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.

Why are CSOs important?
Civil society organizations are a valuable resource and an effective tool in delivering assistance in developing countries. Getting CSOs involved in the design, monitoring and evaluation of development projects can help to ensure that objectives are delivered effectively and equitably. Involving organizations that understand a project’s context, including the needs of intended recipients, should produce more transparent and effective programs.

What does the World Bank have to do with social accountability?
The World Bank has projects in virtually every developing country. In 2011, the World Bank provided $46.9 billion for more than 300 projects. The World Bank views the proposed Partnership as a way to leverage its unique reach to strengthen capacity and support for CSOs already working on accountability and transparency in developing countries.

How does the Partnership intend to strengthen CSOs in partner countries?
Building on feedback received through country-level consultations last year, the Partnership aims to strengthen CSOs in three main ways:

What’s next in the development of the partnership?
Currently, the World Bank is holding public consultations. The deadline for first stage comments is March 3. ONE will be making its voice heard by raising a series of important questions, including how the proposed Partnership would be governed and implemented.

If you are at the frontline of development, working for or with CSOs in a developing country, it’s time to make your voices heard, too. The Global Partnership for Enhanced Social Accountability is riding a welcome wave of support for increased transparency and accountability in development. Important questions remain about the design and implementation of a fund to support civil society, but the timing is right for such an initiative. We’re excited to see how the proposal evolves. Keep an eye out for updates here on the ONE Blog.

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.

This little unit evolved into ONE, and in partnership with others helped catalyze the Make Poverty History campaign, the Live 8 concerts and (RED), enabling tens of millions of people to take effective action against extreme poverty. Curiously, hardly anybody knows what all this, and the huge Jubilee Drop the Debt movement where we cut our activist teeth, really achieved.

Some think it achieved nothing or even backfired. So by telling you now the aim is not to blow our own trumpet but to sound a loud alarm, because if people don’t get to know about the wild successes of these struggles, as well as lessons learned from some big failures, they won’t get what’s at stake if progress stalls and programs get cut back.

The statistics of success seem staggering. Maybe that’s part of the reason that people don’t know what’s been achieved; the super-sized statistics drown out more human-size stories. For example, since we and partners ramped up our campaigning for access to life preserving anti-AIDS medication, access increased – from only 50,000 people in Africa receiving the life-saving anti-retrovirals in 2002 to over five million people receiving the drugs in 2010. Such huge inhuman numbers have millions of human faces. Grace and Agnes are two HIV positive Ugandan activists who, when we first met them a decade ago, weren’t able to get the drugs they needed to keep them healthy. Their friends were dying in droves; surely they would themselves depart soon. They had formed a solidarity group, the AIDS Support Organization, to sing to each other and find strength in the face of this daily struggle, and spread a hopeful message of AIDS prevention to those not yet infected. I recall our fury that these brilliant people would die so prematurely, leaving a generation of AIDS orphans. Yet just two weeks ago – ten years to the day after we first met them – we hung out with Grace and Agnes again, as the equatorial sun set on a veranda overlooking Lake Victoria. They are so alive and beaming with pride as they told us how, with a little help from their friends like Presidents Bush and Clinton, they’ve helped get nearly 300,000 more HIV positive Ugandans on to life-preserving, orphan-preventing medications.

Scale this up to 5 million across Africa, and 6.6 million globally, and we see an achievement on an epic scale. It is one of humanity’s greatest recent endeavors. Yet it is a tale rarely told. The story is similar in the spread of bed nets and medications to beat malaria, which have cut death rates in half in 11 African countries. It is similar for education, with 46.5 million more children in school across Africa, in part because of dropped debts. It is similar for vaccinations: 5.5 million deaths have been averted through investments in the GAVI Alliance for simple childhood immunizations. And it is similar for AIDS, TB and malaria, with the Global Fund, also set up ten years ago, saving over 100,000 lives every month from these three killer diseases.

It is hugely humbling to see a campaign you work for catch fire, shift from the margins to the mainstream and know that for each of the millions of lives changed, there are a million others on the other side of the planet across seemingly vast divides, who reached out in partnership. Real people believing in each other and working together to change the world.

But there is no room for smug self-congratulation as the struggles against disease, inequality and illiteracy are far from over, and especially as we learn the lessons of three scandalous oversights: on food security, on trade, and on support for African civil society and their drive for improved transparency and accountability.

Firstly, we were all far too late to campaign for increased investments into food security until the price of food spiraled out of control, hitting the poorest hardest. Still nearly a billion people go hungry every day. Thankfully, the combined leadership of Kofi Annan, Bill Gates and President Obama has put the importance of food security back on the map. But there’s still much, much more to do.

Secondly, we never got going on trade. Despite repeated efforts, the Doha Trade Round is dead, and the often promised Development Round has delivered nothing. Yet steps can – and must – still be taken, for example to support intra-African trade and integration, and provide greater access to all developed markets for African goods, quota and duty free. The better news is on investment as word of Africa’s booming economies has transformed perceptions. Ten years ago the Economist called Africa the “hopeless continent”. In December, the Economist wrote of an “Africa Rising”.

Thirdly, calls from African civil society for greater transparency and accountability have often been paid politically correct lip service, but real support was scarce. Now we’re trying to make up for lost time, in particular by backing activists’ calls for oil, gas and other extractive companies to “publish what they pay” governments for the right to extract natural resources. This will allow citizens to scrutinize official accounts and reduce space for corruption. Indeed, all public finances must be made more transparent and all projects more rigorously monitored for impact, especially by the marginalized – the very people these projects are intended to help. In the last ten years new technologies – led by the mobile phone and social media – make it now much more possible to turbocharge such transparency drives.

It’s an understatement to say that the world has changed utterly this last ten years, in some ways better, some worse. We’ve witnessed serious failures of political and corporate leadership bring on a devastating financial crisis. We’ve also seen that it is leadership from the people that is more often what inspires. From the Arab street to the millions of people delivering lifesaving support to each other on an epic scale we, as citizens and as organized global civil society, can change the course of history. In the face of such progress, and so many remaining challenges and opportunities, the abiding lesson must be that cynicism is unacceptable, apathy is the enemy, to care can be cool. There are grounds for optimism, for hope – for when we work together as one, across political divides, oceans, ethnicities, and beliefs we’ve seen we can achieve awesome results. With so much more to do forgive us if we celebrate – for it’s the best way to accelerate.

This post first appeared on the Huffington Post UK website

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.)

270: Days after enactment that Congress required the SEC to issue a final rule (regulation) to implement the law

559: Days since Dodd-Frank enacted into law by President Obama

289: Days that the SEC has been in violation of the law

13: Months after Dodd-Frank that the European Commission issued a legislative proposal that would place a similar requirement on oil and mining companies

0: Host country laws oil companies have been able to cite that would prohibit disclosure of payment information as required by Dodd-Frank

3: Commissioners eligible to vote on the final rule (Chairwoman Schapiro and Commissioner Paredes are recused because of conflicts of interest.)

$50 million: Estimated amount Exxon says that it would cost to comply with law, even though it provides no backing data for the estimate and presumably already collects and tracks payment information

$41 billion: Exxon’s 2011 profits — a 35 percent increase over 2010

$100,000: Cost Barrick Gold, world’s largest gold producer, says it would cost them to comply

$1.2 trillion: Approximate combined assets under management of investors who have told SEC to issue a strong final rule

3: Companies and industry associations (Shell, Exxon and API) who say that payment disclosure “could allow terrorists” to target a project

2: Nigerian oil workers unions who say it would actually make them safer

5: Companies who met SEC Commissioner Gallagher on December 2, 2011, to lobby for a weak final rule—Shell, Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Occidental

15: Oil and mining companies who “support” the voluntary Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) program who are also members of American Petroleum Institute (API). API has threatened to sue the SEC to keep payment info secret.

5: Companies on the EITI board who are also API members

11: Luxury sports cars worth at least $5 million belonging to Teodoro seized by French police in Paris as part of an investigation into possible corruption

20: Days after auto seizure that President Obiang scored his son a UNESCO envoy post in Paris

$5,000: Teodoro’s reported monthly government salary as Equatorial Guinea’s minister of agriculture

2010: Year Equatorial Guinea was expelled from EITI for failing to meet its minimum transparency requirements

5: Companies producing oil and gas in Equatorial Guinea who will be covered by Dodd-Frank (Exxon, Marathon, Hess, Noble, and Mitsui produce the vast majority of oil and gas in Equatorial Guinea. The first four are members of the American Petroleum Institute. API sent a letter to the SEC on January 19 saying it would be unlawful to issue a final rule to implement the Dodd-Frank provision.)

No data: Percent of Equatorial Guinea’s population living below the poverty line. An estimated 60 percent lived on less than $1 a day according to a 2006 UN report.

700,000: Population in Equatorial Guinea still in the dark about the country’s finances and waiting for full implementation of Dodd-Frank Section 1504

Ian Gary is the Senior Policy Manager for Extractive Industries at Oxfam America and the author of Oxfam America report Ghana’s Big Test: Oil’s Challenge to Democratic Development. He has been quoted in major media outlets, has testified twice before the US Congress, and has given presentations at the World Bank, the UN, and other venues.

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:

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.

Rotavirus vaccines play an essential and life-saving role in comprehensive diarrhea control strategies and are already saving lives and improving health in the countries where they are in use. A coordinated approach that combines rotavirus vaccines with other prevention and treatment methods, including oral rehydration therapy, zinc, breastfeeding, improvements in water, sanitation and hygiene as well as proper nutrition, will achieve the greatest impact on diarrheal disease morbidity and mortality.

Last week, an innovative, multisectoral partnership between the Zambian Ministry of Health (MoH), the Centre for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia (CIDRZ), and Absolute Return for Kids (ARK) launched the Programme for Awareness and Elimination of Diarrhea (PAED) to strengthen Zambia’s capacity to provide comprehensive diarrheal disease prevention and treatment strategies, including the introduction of rotavirus vaccines in the capital, Lusaka, to reduce the huge number of child deaths from diarrhea.

PAED’s coordinated approach to addressing the substantial burden of diarrheal disease in Zambia includes:

PAED hopes that the introduction of rotavirus vaccines in Lusaka and the scale-up of health worker training and community-level education will provide the MoH with the implementation and public health experience necessary to expand its program and vaccinate all Zambian children. Zambia is a GAVI-eligible country, and the MoH aims to work with GAVI to support its nationwide introduction and sustained use of rotavirus vaccines.

In addition to the contributions of CIDRZ and ARK to PAED, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will support PAED’s monitoring and evaluation efforts, and GlaxoSmithKline has donated vaccines for PAED’s Lusaka rotavirus vaccination program in 2012.

RotaFlash is an e-news alert that provides breaking scientific news and updates on progress made by PATH and partners (GAVI, WHO, UNICEF, US CDC, manufacturers, universities, countries) toward increasing global access to vaccines against rotavirus, the leading cause of severe and fatal diarrhea in young children worldwide. RotaFlash is produced by PATH and funded by the GAVI Alliance and is one of the main advocacy and communication vehicles used to support accelerated introduction and access to rotavirus vaccines where children need them most urgently. If you’d like to learn more about rotavirus or receive PATH’s periodic RotaFlash newsletter, email rotavirusvaccine@path.org.

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.

Next, we discussed the different ways you can contract the disease. I explained to them that it can be transmitted through blood, from mother to child, and through sexual relations. The human reproductive system and sexual education isn’t taught until the 9th grade here in Burkina. So, I asked them if they knew what sex was. After the initial laughter died down, I taught them what sexual relations are. You may be thinking that these children are too young to be learning about sex, but quite a few of them are probably over 15 years old and are already having sex, not knowing the risks involved. Many of the girls, unfortunately, may not even feel they have a choice in the matter.

My job is to explain to them the importance of protecting themselves and presenting all the options on how to do just that, including abstinence. When I brought out the wooden penis the class erupted into laughter — but by the end of the hour-and-a-half session, every student in that classroom knew why, when and how to use a condom.

SEE ALSO: Back to Africa: Finally a Peace Corps volunteer!

Peace Corps volunteers around the world have English Clubs. They are one of the many ways we are able to get across more important messages about health issues, human rights and more. Toward the end of this month, President Obama will be releasing his annual budget proposal. As ONE members, we need to remind him the importance of the United States’ international aid and development programs. My 7th and 8th grade English Club wanted him to know that they appreciate what the United States does to help them so they took this picture with me. Fifteen million kids are alive today because of US efforts.

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.

Project HEART was launched in 2004 in partnership with the CDC and PEPFAR to scale up access to HIV prevention, care and treatment services in Côte d’Ivoire, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia. As of September 2011, Project HEART has enrolled more than 1 million people in HIV care programs (including 80,000 children), provided antiretroviral treatment for more than 560,000 patients, and tested and counseled more than 2.5 million pregnant women.

The success of Project HEART is especially remarkable given that the final stage of the project merely marks the beginning of a new one, in which local partners and organizations are responsible for HIV program management in their own countries. In just three years, EGPAF was able to build up the capacity of local governments and civil society organizations and transition the management of HIV prevention, care and treatment programs over to local partners. This was accomplished by following a three-pronged strategy:

As we turn our focus toward ending the AIDS epidemic, it becomes increasingly important to strengthen local health systems and capacitate them to handle the HIV/AIDS epidemic in a comprehensive and sustainable manner. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines six building blocks for health systems strengthening to help clarify the essential functions of a health system. Project HEART is a great example of putting these principles into practice and making a commitment to, and investing in, health systems strengthening. The result is something we can all celebrate: the successful transition of a large-scale HIV program to local partners and governments. Job well done!

Bono, Jeffrey Sachs, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and other guest advocates make an appearance in the video:

If you feel inspired, please share!

When I was ten, I was busy doing important things like mastering long division, practicing softball and rocking the plastic glasses/bowl cut combo. While I’m proud of those accomplishments, I have to say I’m even more proud today to honor all the incredible things that the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has achieved in its first ten years of existence. To understand the Global Fund’s impact, it’s important to remember just how bad things were before it existed: Fewer than 50,000 Africans had access to AIDS treatment. Malaria was killing nearly 1 million people annually. Treating TB was considered too expensive for most of the developing world.

In late January of 2002, leaders came together in Switzerland to launch the Global Fund. Built to be what Kofi Annan called a “war chest” to respond to these global health emergencies, it had the backing of donors, public health officials, developing country leaders and NGOs. Intentionally, it was designed to be different than other aid models; it was rooted in having local stakeholders (rather than donors) say what they wanted to do to fight AIDS, TB or malaria, and how much money it would take to get the job done.

Though no aid model is perfect, the Global Fund has clearly been doing something right, because it has delivered incredible results over the last decade:

In delivering these services — often in partnership with aid efforts including PEPFAR and with national health systems — the Global Fund has helped change the global health landscape. Though they each still claim far too many lives, all three diseases are all on the decline globally. Now, the mantra has shifted from a “stop the bleeding” approach to a more hopeful, long term approach characterized by phrases like “we can achieve the beginning of the end of AIDS” and “we know how to end malaria deaths by 2015.” And, just as my own personal style has thankfully evolved from those outdated plastic glasses to contact lenses, the Global Fund has gone through its own strategic reforms in the last 12 months to become an even more targeted, efficient mechanism in the years to come.

Funding — as always — remains a challenge. The Global Fund has said it is currently unable to fund new programs until 2014 due to a roughly $2 billion funding gap. Constricting global budgets, coupled with persistent whispers of corruption, are convenient excuses for donors to pull back on their contributions to these diseases. But the Global Fund has made the changes necessary to ensure that money invested in its programs will be monitored transparently, evaluated rigorously and directed toward specific outcomes. As a result, donors should feel confident that maintaining or increasing their contributions will go toward the achievement of bold new goals: saving 10 million lives and preventing 140 to 180 million new infections between 2012 and 2016.

Of all the aid projects I’ve been able to visit, the one individual who stands out most is a playful little girl named Madeline who I met at a Global Fund clinic in Ghana. She was born HIV-positive, but thanks to the Global Fund, her mother was able to access the antiretroviral treatment that will keep her alive and healthy. I get that 10 million lives saved through the Global Fund seems too overwhelming to conceptualize. So instead, I’d suggest we simply think of Madeline, and then think of all the other Madelines out there who, thanks to the Global Fund, will be able to grow up healthy and one day also master long division and practice softball like me. I just hope they all skip the bowl cuts!