ONE Vote Organizer Charlie Harris reports from the Florida primary.
In my last post, I showed you some of the really cool things that can happen in a day in the life of a ONE Vote organizer. But sometimes, things don’t always go as planned. Such has been the case for my recent exploits down here in the Sunshine State in the build up to the primary. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to complain about being near the beach, but patience is definitely a virtue on the campaign trail.
Thursday, I made the two-hour trek down to Pensacola, Fla., from where I am staying with family in Panama City Beach. As soon as I arrived at what was to be an event with presidential candidate Sen. Rick Santorum, a torrential downpour made the event soggy and unpleasant for someone who forgot their umbrella. But luckily, I had a cool ONE hoodie nearby (shameless ONE Store plug, check them out). To my dismay, the crowd gathered was told that Senator Santorum couldn’t land due to the severe weather threat, and thus I trudged back to my car for what was not looking like a fun ride back. But when life gives you severe weather that makes road conditions hazardous, get FroYo until the storm passes!
Joseph Terranova, co-founder of Tukula, shares his company’s model for women’s empowerment.
In the East African country of Uganda, a staggering 276,000 young people cannot find jobs each year. Even though many of these youth are university or trade school educated, there is simply not enough infrastructure to accommodate them in the job market. And without jobs, many of these youth will relapse into the cyclical poverty endemic in much of their country.
Photo credit: Bobby Neptune/Tukula
Young women are particularly vulnerable to unemployment. Many find themselves caught in premature marriages, struggling to support their children with little hope of saving for the future of their families.
But in the heart of Jinja, Uganda’s second largest city, five young women work diligently to create beautiful handmade bags and other accessories for Tukula (meaning “we grow” in Luganda), a for-profit social enterprise based out of Lancaster, Pa. The women, who range in age from 16 to 33, have different life stories.
All of them have completed some amount of tailoring school, and two are continuing their education using the money they earn at Tukula. The women hail from different tribes and ascribe to different religions. But what brings them together is their desire to better the future of themselves and their families.
One of these women, Ayakaka Sally, talks about the impact that Tukula has had on her life. “I used to depend on people,” she says. “But Tukula has made me to be on my own. Now I can afford my food. I can pay my rent. It’s good for me.”
Tukula works with its artisans to create budgets and savings programs aimed at preparing each woman to attain her future goals. By creating and selling beautiful, high-quality products, the company hopes to impact more women in the future.
Tukula is working to eliminate abject poverty in Uganda before it begins, one woman at a time. To learn more visit tukula.org.
This piece is part of a larger blog series on transparency in the extractives industry. Stay tuned for more updates on this topic.
A year and a half ago, ONE and our Publish What You Pay Coalition (PWYP) partners asked ONE members to take action by calling your senators to urge them to pass a provision shining a spotlight on payments made between extractive companies and the countries they work in, many in Africa. The bipartisan Cardin-Lugar Amendment passed through Congress and became law!
This new law was designed to help to end the resource curse — the paradoxical condition of scores of countries blessed with abundant natural resources such as oil, timber, precious stones and metals, with most of their citizens living on less than $1.25 a day. This is because dictators, corrupt government leaders and bureaucrats steal and hide, in private foreign bank accounts, billions of dollars received from multi-national companies for drilling and mining these resources.
It’s been a little over a week now since ONE and Chegg dropped the big news that we’re taking a group of students with us to Africa this summer -– and well, it looks like we’ve caused quite the stir. A flurry of tweets, retweets, Facebook updates and hopefully the occasional offline interaction have set the Internet ablaze as students across the country prepare their applications in excited anticipation.
MTV featured the internship this week and we even had the pleasure of a tweet from Ashton Kutcher and none other than MC Hammer. Check out what everyone has been saying and join the conversation yourself. With applications due on February 10, you’ve got yourself a few more weeks to tell us why you’re the ONE!
Here’s what some people have been saying about the program on social media:
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.
Malaria’s Defeat, Africa’s Future – As a part of the African Leaders Malaria Alliance (ALMA), 41 African presidents have signed on to end deaths from malaria in their respective countries. Each nation will publish their progress in this fight in the ALMA Scorecard for Accountability and Action, to better ensure that foreign aid dollars are being used effectively. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the new Chairman of ALMA, argues that if you care about the health of mothers and children, education, and peace, than you must care about malaria as well. (The Huffington Post, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf)
Trade barriers imperil African food security – While Mozambique has the fertile soil to produce plentiful harvests, many people in the small town of Namiranga, on the Mozambique-Tanzania border, are struggling to pay for food. A bag of maize that sells for $60 in Mozambique costs only $46 across the border in Tanzania. It is “barriers to intraregional trade [that] are preventing food from reaching the poor,” as Tanzania’s minister of agriculture, food security and cooperatives banned the export of food stocks in an effort to avert hunger at home. (Trust, Fidelis Zvomuya)
Ben Skoda from Venture Expeditions, talks about his organization’s efforts to fight poverty through adventure.
When it comes to addressing HIV/AIDS and water crises in Africa, most of us do not lack heart. Unfortunately, many of us have a desire to act, but are deterred by the lack of a platform or the resources to contribute.
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.
