ONE
This post was published with the permission of the author on the Chicago Council’s Global Food for Thought blog.
For many Moms, their biggest wish on Mother’s Day is to hear those special three little words from their children: I Love You.
For the mothers and women farmers of Africa, they also dearly wish to hear three little letters: A-N-D.
And. It’s a tiny word, perhaps the most common of all conjunctions. But in rural Africa, it is so often missing from the ambitions of mothers.
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PM: DR Congo Can Cut Poverty in Half by Exploiting Agriculture – Prime Minister Matata Ponyo Mapon of the Democratic Republic of Congo says that “the country could halve its poverty rate in the next five years by exploiting its vast agricultural potential.” Prime Minister Ponyo explained that “if the agricultural sector could increase its growth rate to 6%, then the rate of absolute poverty in the country could be cut by 50 percent by 2017.” One of the conditions for achieving this growth rate will be the donors allowing the government to should its own responsibilities. (VOA, Nick Long)
Expanding the Focus from Relief to Resilience – Over the past year, 13.3 million people in Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somalia suffered from a crisis as a result of a severe drought in the Horn of Africa. The international community spent over $1.5 billion in aid that provided million with access to food, water and basic health services. Droughts can’t be prevented, but they “can be predicted and mitigated thanks to investments made in early warning systems, satellite technology and on-the-ground analysis,” but in order to give “help with lasting impact we must expand our focus from relief to resilience.” (Huffington Post, Dr. Kristalina Georgieva and Dr. Rajiv Shah)
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ONE Mom Karen Walrond of Chookooloonks.com suggests three things you can do this Mother’s Day to help connect with moms around the world.
Lydia, with her son. We met last year, when I went to Kenya with ONE.
This Sunday is Mother’s Day, a day of fragrant bouquets, breakfasts-in-bed and sweet handmade gifts from our kids. It’s a lovely day to remember our moms, and to honor our partners for the job they do in parenting our little ones. Mother’s Day is awesome, no doubt.
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One of the biggest creative challenges we face is finding ways to adequately express the spirit and strength of our amazing membership — And more than this, to maximize the impact of member voices to push for the positive changes we are all seeking to achieve. Combine this scenario with a message-saturated G8 Summit and you’ll understand why we’ve had to find something extraordinary to do next week… Ahem, cue Tweet the Street…
We have been hard at work with some tech wizards to create the ONE Street Tweeter – a mobile, tweet-fed, hydraulic robot that uses non-toxic, water soluble, paint to print nearly real-time tweets-tweetetes if you will, (40 characters or less) on road surfaces.
This is what it looks like:
Yes – we want to take your messages on the road. Better still, if we print your message we’ll even send a pic of it back to you to share it with your friends.
So, what are you waiting for? You guys are more creative than any of those Mad Men types. Just tweet a message in your own words (no more than 40 characters including spaces) to encourage, rouse, and hustle the G8 to act now on hunger and poverty.
Tweet your message to @ONEStreetTweet or if you don’t do that sort of thing then you can type your message into the box below.
Let’s hit the road and get heard.
May 10th, 2012 4:15 PM UTC
By Ben Leo
This piece is part of a series of blogs by leading NGOs to call attention to a range of issues that should be raised at the G8 summit at Camp David in rural Maryland from May 18 to 19. This was originally published on Huffington Post Impact.
If you took the current population of the United States and quadrupled it, you would almost have the number of people living in extreme poverty in the world today. A whopping 20 percent of the world’s population — 1.4 billion people — lives on less than $1.25 a day. Over two-thirds of these extremely poor people do not have enough food to eat, and going to bed hungry is an everyday occurrence.
Dadaab.
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I am so excited to share with you today the work of one of your fellow ONE members, Ahtziri Gonzalez. Ahtziri is a 22-year-old photographer from Mexico City who — according to her blog — “travels… parties… writes… lives,” and above all, takes some beautiful photography. She emailed me 10 of her best photos from Africa, and they’re just stunning. What I like about her photos is that it’s vibrant, colorful and upbeat, but she also has an eye for quiet moments. Scroll through her photos to see what I mean:
Sunrise. Sani Pass, Lesotho-South Africa.
Cultural festival. Mbabane, Swaziland.
Mother and son – Mole National Park, Ghana.
Camel. Sahara Desert, Mali.
Looking for the answer. Al Azhar Mosque, Cairo, Egypt.
Woman. Grand Popo, Benin.
Fisherman. Aheme Lake, Benin.
Girl in the Volta Region, Ghana.
African Village – Tafi Atome, Ghana
Djenné Mosque, Mali.
Want more photos? Take a look at our Amazing Africa series archive.
What do you like about Ahtziri’s photos? Tell us in the comments below. And if you would like for us to share some of your photography from Africa, email me at mgharib@one.org.
US House panel to tackle 2013 foreign aid cuts – The Republican-led House Appropriations subcommittee on State and foreign operations’ will vote May 9 on “a proposal to reduce funding for U.S. bilateral aid and global health programs, and impose ‘significant cuts’ to the country’s contributions to multilateral development banks.” The draft budget provides $40.1 billion in regular discretionary funding for the Department of State, USAID and related programs, which is $2 billion less than current funding levels and $7 billion less than the budget requested by President Obama. (Devex, Ivy Mungcal)
FDA review favors first drug for HIV prevention – The Food and Drug Administration announced Tuesday that Gilead Sciences’ Truvada “appears to be safe and effective for HIV prevention.” The FDA concluded that the pill “could spare patients infection with a serious and life-threatening illness that requires lifelong treatment.” There have yet to be any other drugs proven to prevent HIV, and a vaccine is still believed to be decades away. (AP, Matthew Perrone)
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