InterAction

InterAct(ion)ing with Kojo Nnamdi

On Wednesday, at the height of the Republican National Convention, I joined former USAID Administrator Brian Atwood and former Chairman of the House State, Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee Jim Kolbe on the Kojo Nnamdi radio show to discuss “Global Poverty and the Next President.”

The conversation focused on the role of grassroots organizations like ONE and Bread for the World in promoting a bold agenda for development, as well as the possibility of totally restructuring the systems that the U.S. government uses to implement and administer development assistance overseas.

You can listen to the 30-minute segment on WAMU’s website here.

-Sam Worthington, President & CEO, InterAction

Worthington on the Food Summit- Final Day

A post from former ONE regional field organizer Annisa Wanat, who’s now in Afghanistan

When I was in high school, every April the principal would get on the PA and give his annual speech about “rams butting heads” – which was his way of telling the boys to keep their tempers under control. Fights always seemed to peak in the springtime. Fifteen years after I first heard the speech, I found myself living in the Balkans. The speech would always be in the back of my head when I spoke with my colleagues about how we hoped for a late winter thaw to minimize the potential for springtime fighting. Today, I find myself in Afghanistan.

Right after I arrived – just around the time that Josh Peck started sending emails about the global food crisis and ONE members could help – the demonstrations began in Afghanistan about the skyrocketing food prices. At the time, I was admittedly too busy trying to get used to a new job, making new friends, and adjusting to the altitude to do more research about how extreme poverty affects the Afghan people. But over the last couple months, I have talked to more people and a picture has begun to form.

25 years of war. Landlocked country with extreme summers and extreme winters. Low water tables. Dilapidated, bombed out, under-funded, or non-existent schools. Ditto for health clinics. 70% illiteracy rate – as a population – female literacy rates are the lowest in the world. TB. 40% of the population has access to clean water. Malaria. 53% of the population lives below the poverty line. Highest maternal mortality rate in the world. Unexploded land mines. 40% official unemployment. Life expectancy of 43. The opium trade and the resulting crime. Internally displaced persons.

Afghanistan is a country full of vulnerable groups – widows, orphans, victims of war, IDPs, youth, woman. But there is one vulnerable group that doesn’t get mentioned enough – military-aged males. Boys who are just becoming men and about to make pivotal decisions about their futures. Do they choose the “straight and narrow” path – full of the struggles outlined above – unemployment, food insecurity, lack of access to health care and education for their families? Or do they choose the “easy” way out and join with one of the criminal and anti-government elements so prevalent through the country?

ONE members know the OV08 tag-line – “Saving lives, securing our future” – but increased funding for international development is not just a talking point. Although I see examples of the positive impacts of international development daily in Kabul, I have been thinking about the “securing our future” portion a lot of the last couple days as international news sources carried stories of the prison break in Kandahar. Many of them began with a phrase like “the summer violence in Afghanistan starts with a bang.” Again, I was reminded of my high school principal and his springtime speech. And then I thought of all the military-aged males here who are trying to decide what to do with their futures.

Poverty breeds instability.

As ONE members step up their engagements with presidential candidates this summer and fall – keep these boys in mind when you band the candidates. The “saving lives” part is easy to remember – providing basic medicines, increasing access to education, supplying clean water. But remember that its not just securing Americans’ futures. Giving choices to teenage boys is securing everyone’s future – so the boys then don’t have to resort to “butting heads” every spring to provide for their families.

-Annisa Wanat

Worthington on the Food Summit- Day 2

If you’re a DC area ONE member or are going to be in the area on June 20th, you won’t want to miss the regional premiere of “A Powerful Noise,” co-hosted by ONE and CARE. This moving documentary by Tom Cappello follows four women – Nada Markovic, Bui My Hanh, and Jacqueline “Madame Urbain” Dembele – as each of them go about the daily business of empowering, educating, and seeking justice, weaving through locations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Mali, Vietnam and to tell a tale of hope much larger than the sum of its parts.

You can get all the information and purchase tickets here: http://silverdocs.com/festival/films/2008/powerful-noise/

Worthington Weighs in on Rome Summit

InterAction President and CEO Sam Worthington wrote this post from the first day of the FAO emergency summit in Rome on the food crisis.

The concern is the current global food crisis, affecting millions of people in both developed and developing countries all over the world. The scene is the FAO Food Security Summit in Rome.

After more than fifteen speeches on the food crisis by various heads of state, the themes begin to blur. Some talk about the need for a new North-South partnership based on solidarity between the world’s rich and poor. The idea that poor African countries, rich in water and arable land, would unite with rich dry countries in a partnership to address this food price crisis is interesting. If it had been proposed by a Gulf state, rather than the President of Benin, maybe it would become something more than another paper speech sitting outside the plenary room.

Some speeches were sadly very disconnected from reality. To hear President Mugabe talk about how his policies have contributed to food security reflected a significant cognitive disconnect. Western NGOs, he said, are causing all the political discontent in Zimbabwe.

Overall the speeches were quite good and reflected the world’s widespread recognition of the urgency of the food crisis and the timeliness of the high-level conference. They acknowledged that limited progress has been made since the 1996 World Food Summit, and that the world can’t continue business as usual. There is widespread recognition that issues with food distribution, price, access, and production could slow or even reverse our progress towards achieving the first Millennium Development Goal.

Behind all the words, there is a sense of overall commitment to address this crisis and to doing it in a way that is sustainable. Unfortunately, such a solution still eludes us. The fall of the government in Haiti, caused by food riots, left a void that concerns many conference attendees.

-Sam Worthington

Sam Worthington is the President and CEO of InterAction, the largest coalition of U.S.-based international NGOs focused on the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. More information about InterAction’’s response to the food crisis is available at: http://interaction.org/foodcrisis

Sam Worthington Is Heading to Darfur

(InterAction President & CEO Sam Worthington is visiting humanitarian workers in Sudan.)

The trip to Khartoum was a typical flight to Europe followed by another seven hours in the air, landing just south of the Sahara. A few key strokes of the customs agent’s computer and my American passport, with its appropriate visa, had a newÂ%C

InterAction interaction

Todd Shelton, Suzanne Kindervatter, Cherri Waters and Laia Grino, from the umbrella organization InterAction, just came by the ONE DC office to host a brown bag about their new Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) Report.

The report looks at the U.S.’s current contribution toward meeting the MDGs. The entire assessment is worth reading, but one item that really stands out to me is on page 62.

That page lists the 20 countries that received the most U.S. aid in 2006 and then goes on to list the 20 poorest countries in the world in 2006. Critically, only four of these countries overlap: Ethiopia, Liberia, Rwanda and Uganda.

(The full lists are below. All stats are from the U.S. State Department.)

20 Top Recipients of U.S. Aid in 2006 (US$ millions)

20 Poorest Countries – each listed with the amount of U.S. aid received in 2006 in US$ millions.

You can download the whole report, including a color-coded world map of the above, here.

UPDATE: See the map below.

Key
Red=Top Recipient of U.S. aid
Yellow= Poorest country (by GNI capita)
Blue= Poorest countries that are also top recipients of U.S. aid