You heard it here first, folks. ONE is joining forces with Chegg, a leading social education platform for students, in a nationwide search to send eight all-star student advocates on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Africa. This unique internship program and trip will be an opportunity to become fully immersed in the issues faced by millions living on less than $1.25 a day in sub-Saharan Africa. You will get to experience the fight against extreme poverty and disease from the frontlines -– and come back fully energized to lead your peers as the next generation of advocates on campuses across the country.

Here’s how it works: let us know in 500 words or less why you should be one of eight lucky interns to experience the fight against extreme poverty in action with us and Chegg’s new social change arm, Chegg for Good, in Africa this summer. We want to know why you’re passionate about these issues and what you’re doing on campus right now to fight poverty -– whether in Africa or right here in your own community.

The top 50 applicants will be thrown into a public voting round, where you will have the chance to rally your friends, family and social networks to vote for you.

And from there, we’ll pick 20 finalists to come to Washington, D.C., in April, where you will spend a few days meeting with your members of Congress and proving to us you’ve got that special something to become one of eight headed on a jet plane to Africa this summer.

Think you got what it takes? Head over to Chegg for Good for more information and to submit your application.

APPLY HERE NOW

At the inaugural Mbele Africa Inter-College Convention at Dartmouth College, a group of 50 student leaders from across the United States gathered to network, discuss development projects and brainstorm ideas for Africa’s future.

It just so happened that on the weekend I chose to visit my alma mater, Dartmouth College, they were hosting the Mbele Africa Inter-College Convention, a student event focused on the role of youths in African development. As an intern at ONE, I jumped at the opportunity to see what these young African activists are doing on the ground.

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia kicked off the event with a personal video message. She welcomed participants, applauded our past efforts on development and urged us to continue taking action and leadership for Africa. The convention, organized by Dartmouth’s Students for Africa, featured additional guest speakers, round-table discussions, project presentations, social mixers and a concert. Topics of discussion ranged from gender issues to foreign aid.

Dozens of students from 19 colleges across the country attended. I met a young Williams College student from Kenya whose project “A Book for Change” has supplied 20,000 used books to schools in Nairobi’s slums, a Dartmouth student from Liberia whose “iMHere!” initiative mentors underprivileged boys in Monrovia, and an American student at Holy Cross who spent his summer training local teachers in South Africa how to integrate donated calculators into math classes.

Nearly every presenter emphasized the following three points about executing a project in Africa

1. Start small and stay focused. It is natural to want to expand your project, they cautioned, but as a student operation you have limited labor, funding, and support. Do not jeopardize your mission by spreading these too thin!

2. Take advice and share ownership. When working with others, collaboration and compromise are critical not only to your project’s success but also to its sustainability.

3. Stay humble. In the words of one student: when you return to Africa after studying abroad, “you’re ahead, but you’re also behind. It is naïve to think we can go home and say, ‘I’m back, I have an American education, and I’m here to save Africa.’”

For these exceptional youths, I realized, the greatest return on their investment here will not be an American diploma or even the wealth it promises in their countries; rather, it will be the knowledge and skills they gain, the networks they build, and their ability to empower generations of fellow Africans for Africa.

According to today’s report in The New York Times, a growing movement of parents, educators and philanthropists has banded together to strengthen the education system for poor and working-class students in South Africa. As a result, new private schools like Leap are “springing up” to serve this niche market.

The Leap schools — which, according to the Times, function a bit like charter schools — have adjusted the curriculum to fit the students’ needs. The school offers extra support for national matriculation exams, instill a fierce work ethic and provide a “life orientation” class to help students air out their personal problems.

These “charter” schools are just one part of South Africa’s up-and-coming education movement — but it’s good to see that concerned citizens are taking the matter into their own hands. Take a look at the story and read more about education on our issues page.

Me talking to the senator before his speech.

As a member of the campus ONE chapter, I took the opportunity to talk to the senator about our commitment to the fight against extreme poverty and disease.

I started out by thanking him for signing onto last year’s letter to President Obama, which asked for a strong foreign affairs budget.

He mentioned that he was on the Africa subcommittee and the Foreign Relations committee and understood the need for a robust foreign affairs budget.

I also took the opportunity to discuss the Global Food Security Act, and told him about the Lugar/Casey letter, which urges senators to bring the Act to the floor before the Senate year.

I requested that he sign on to that letter, because the bill would go a long way in combating poverty in African nations. Overall, the senator was very receptive, especially when we started talking about the Global Fund and its benefits.

Before leaving, I thanked him again and let him know that our Atlanta Congressional District Leaders would follow up with more information with his staff this week.

– Sharad Gopal, ONE member, Georgia

Action Africa is a service club at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia. We are trying to increase awareness of African issues and complete service projects at our school.

One of our ongoing projects is a pen pal relationship with a school in Bupoto, Uganda. Last year, as our big spring service project, we did literacy outreach with the Arlington Academy of Hope (AAH), a school in rural Uganda. We collected easy-reader books and recorded them on tapes, and then sent the books and tapes to the students of AAH in Bupoto.

We continue to learn about different issues, such as food security and AIDS awareness, and are working with ONE on many more events.

–Sydney Shrider, Thomas Jefferson High School, Alexandria, VA

Throughout middle and high school, my best friend Laura Whitman and I have been involved in PASC, the Pennsylvania Association of Student Councils. Each year, PA District 8 hosts a conference for student council members and their advisors to share ideas and communicate between schools. Laura Whitman and I have submitted a workshop on the topic of our choice for several years to share with other school’s student councils.

This year we chose to focus our workshop around ONE. On March 6th, we presented our workshop, “Be ONE in a Million,” to 60 students in District 8. Our workshop focused on ONE’s main priorities and growing ONE membership. The students also viewed numerous ONE videos which were all received very well. Each student received two wristbands and two stickers with the promise that they would wear one set and give the other set to a friend. Some students even won ONE t-shirts and ONE lapel pins through a raffle.

This workshop proved to be a learning experience for the presenters and the students, and was also a great experience to connect with other teenagers through tough issues like global poverty. Hopefully, Laura and I will be submitting our workshop to the PASC State Conference in November!

-Becky Guldin, Northern Lebanon High School, Fredericksburg, PA

ONE Volunteer Adam Stackhouse attended the Clinton Global Initiative University meeting this weekend at the University of Texas at Austin. CGI U brings together students, university presidents, nongovernmental organizations, and national youth organizations to make commitments to action against global poverty and injustice.

He wore his ONE shirt and even struck up a conversation with Paul Begala who told Adam that he was a big fan of ONE! He put on his white band and posed for a picture to show his ONE (and Longhorn) pride!

-Lauren Conn, VA ONE Field Organizer

Greetings from snowy Oslo, Norway, where government ministers, campaigners and education experts are currently gathered for the High Level Group meeting on Education for All. The conference is the eighth annual since the historic World Education Forum in 2000, which set forth the Dakar Framework for Action, a roadmap to achieve quality education for all by 2015.
 
Participants here in Oslo are acutely aware that halfway towards the target date set for achieving the goals set out in Dakar and the MDG targets on education, the world remains seriously off track: according to new statistics published a couple weeks ago in UNESCO’s annual Global Monitoring Report (GMR), there are still 75 million primary-school aged children out-of-school around the world, 35 million of whom are living in sub-Saharan Africa. 55% of these children are girls, and over one-third live in fragile states. If current trends continue, 29 million children will still be out of primary school in 2015.
 
Another common thread in many of the discussions here is that amidst the current global economic crisis, the case for expanding access to quality education is stronger than ever. Evidence shows that investments in education yield some of the highest returns in development. With its strong linkages to health, economic growth and gender equality, progress in education is central to progress on all the Millennium Development Goals. Take child mortality, the third MDG- the new GMR found that when mothers receive a primary education, the likelihood that their children will survive past age five increases by 25 percent. With a secondary education, this likelihood increases to 50 percent.
 
Also on high on the agenda here in Oslo is how to strike the balance between access and quality.  Many countries, especially in Africa, have made great strides in the past few years in expanding access to education- debt relief, for example, helped many countries  abolish school fees, opening school doors for millions of children in the world’s poorest countries. In both Ethiopia and Tanzania, for example, 3 million more children were enrolled in primary school between 1999 and 2006. However once these children are in school, the challenge is to make sure they are learning something.  A central component of this is ensuring that schools are equipped with trained teachers who have manageable class sizes. One startling finding of this year’s report is that 18 million more teachers will be needed by 2015 to achieve universal primary education (which calls for one teacher for every 40 students). This is a tall order for most developing governments, especially because donors are not doing their part to provide the long-term, predictable funding education ministers need in order to recruit and retain quality teachers. Currently only 17% of aid to basic education is available for teachers’ salaries, despite the fact that they account for 70-90% of education budgets.

Many are hopeful that strong language on what’s needed in teacher financing will be included in the Oslo Declaration, which will be finalized here later today. Check back here later for an update.

-Nora Coghlan, ONE Policy Analyst

I’m Maisie Pigeon, ONE’s Student Coordinator, and I’ll be managing this year’s OCC—a good-natured competition between universities to see which school will be the national champion at tackling extreme poverty.

Our quarterback is three-time Super Bowl winner and two-time Super Bowl MVP Tom Brady of the New England Patriots. An active ONE supporter since 2005, Tom visited health clinics, schools and other life-saving projects in Ghana and Uganda in 2007 with ONE. Hear what he has to say about OCC at:

Last year, more than 1,400 colleges and universities competed through seven months of rigorous activism, awareness-raising and action-taking. OCC students signed up over 33,000 ONE members, took 182,000 actions, and convinced campuses, cities and even states to declare their support for ONE. And they engaged candidates including Barack Obama and John McCain on the campaign trail, getting them to pay attention to and talk about global poverty and disease.

In January, the 100 top schools sent representatives to the Power 100 Summit, an exciting three-day conference in Washington, D.C. They heard from leaders of the global anti-poverty movement and influential members of the Democratic and Republican parties, and joined forces through workshops and forums to become smarter, stronger advocates.

This year’s ONE Campus Challenge is going to be even better, but we need you to help your school get started. Sign up here.

Game on!

-Maisie Pigeon and the OCC Team