The good news in development often gets buried, deep below wars and debt and disaster. But today, world leaders made bold new pledges to the GAVI Alliance in support of child vaccines, making the choice clear for reporters, press secretaries and live-tweeters alike: today was going to be a good news day.
David Cameron, Andrew Mitchell, Bill Gates and Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, together with members of the GAVI board
In fact, in spite of tough economic times, donors collectively pledged $4.3 billion between now and 2015 — surpassing GAVI’s $3.7 billion funding gap — setting GAVI and its partners on the path toward saving nearly 4 million children’s lives in the next five years.
Women’s empowerment has been getting a boost in a small village in the Amhara region of Ethiopia. The village of Awra Amba (“Top of the Hill”) was founded by 20 Muslim and Christian peasants in the 1980s and now has 400 residents and a growing fan club.
According to a piece in the Christian Science Monitor, the village is an experiment in egalitarianism in an otherwise traditional society, a community where education is emphasized, women are given three months maternity leave from work responsibilities, and men join the women in cooking and weaving, traditionally female activities. Awra Amba’s vision of women’s empowerment, the third UN Millennium Development Goal, has attracted increasing attention internationally:
“Government officials and members of parliament, sheikhs and priests, and local and foreign nongovernmental organization workers have made the trip via a rocky road only accessible with a four-wheel-drive vehicle to see the success for themselves.
“I was completely captivated by my visit to the community,” says Ambassador Tim Clarke, head of the European Union delegation to Ethiopia. “I regard it as the model for the world community on how gender issues should be treated. I have come across nothing else like it anywhere in Africa – and indeed the world. I am using it to inspire the work of my office here on gender mainstreaming and empowerment of women.”
Think the epidemic of poverty and disease in Africa is just too huge to tackle? Think again.
Take a look at great news from Kenya the other day. During the past five years, child deaths from malaria were cut by more than 40 percent!
But what’s also astonishing is the way this result–which means millions of children saved–was achieved: by simply handing out mosquito nets. Kenya and international organizations gave out 13.5 million insecticide-treated mosquito nets, meaning that 52% of children in Kenya now sleep under nets, up from 5% in 2003.
When you hear the staggering figures (up to 2.7 million Africans die of malaria each year, 75 percent of them children, tens of millions suffer chronically from the disease) the problem can be overwhelming, too massive to relate.
But as the ONE Campaign is telling America’s leaders and the news from Kenya proves, there are effective and affordable solutions that we can take on right now that will literally mean the difference between life and death for the poorest people in the world. Yes, the problems are huge and ending them may sound like a dream. But when countries focus on proven solutions, like delivering mosquito nets, big things happen, like saving millions of children and ending a disease.
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.
