ONE

The fight against famine continues

Feb 7th, 2012 1:07 PM UTC
By Adrian Lovett

“Famine outcomes no longer exist in southern Somalia”.  These eight words, at the start of a dry assessment released on Friday by the Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit in Nairobi, can hardly be considered a cause for celebration. For the last four months, a part of the world had been struck by famine – not just food shortage, or even extreme hunger, but the appalling conditions that meet the strict technical definition of a famine.  As ONE insisted, no f-word could be more obscene. Drought may be inevitable, but famine is not – and famine in the 21st century is an obscenity.

So it’s difficult to jump for joy at the news that this famine has come to an end – not least because millions of people in the Horn of Africa are still in desperate need.  In Somalia especially, where new concerns about access for humanitarian organisations are emerging, the famine has left people more vulnerable than ever. Like a determined boxer who hauls himself to his feet after taking a beating, the next punch could be the most devastating of all.

And yet, the fact remains that while the world took too long to act on early warnings of crisis in 2011, it did act. Millions of people, from ordinary citizens to policymakers, stepped forward. The global African diaspora demanded action. 400,000 people signed ONE’s petition urging leaders to do more. Leading politicians responded in the European Commission, the African Union, the UK, Sweden and Kenya. Millions of people contributed to the UN’s most successful humanitarian appeal and record public appeals in Britain, Germany and countless other countries. Critically, aid workers from Africa and across the world delivered relief in the most challenging of conditions, and continue to do so right now.  All these actions saved lives.

And now this belated but strong effort has been rewarded with a little good fortune. Somalia has enjoyed a better-than-expected harvest. That has pushed food prices down in local markets and there is, for now at least, room to breathe.

Now the obvious question: can we stop this happening again? If political promises made years ago had been kept in the first place, we could have avoided much of the terrible human cost of the last few months. They must be kept now – by African governments who promised to invest ten per cent of their money on agriculture, and by richer nations who made commitments at the G8.  And of course it isn’t just about money. More progress was made at last year’s Cannes G20 summit to reduce the volatility in global food prices that has caused havoc in the poorest families’ budgets. That progress needs to be built on urgently.

Together, we managed to force action on this famine over the last few months. Let’s keep that pressure up. We need to build a movement that can keep food and agriculture at the top of the agenda. The US, who host this year’s G8 summit, have a big leadership role.  The Horn of Africa’s wealthy neighbours in the Gulf are global players too, well able to do their part. And governments in Europe must keep their promises, starting with the British-led conference on Somalia later this month. Overcoming extreme hunger is not just a fight we must face.  It’s one we can win.

How well do you know your MDGs?

Feb 2nd, 2012 3:25 PM UTC
By Peter Taylor

The Millennium Development Goals or MDGs are mentioned regularly by ONE (and many other campaigning organisations) – but how well known are they? Could you list all 8? And do you how many are likely to have been met by their target date of 2015?

The MDGs are a set of poverty-busting targets agreed by 189 nations in the year 2000. They cover hunger and extreme poverty, education, gender equality, child mortality, maternal health, AIDS / HIV, Malaria and other diseases, environmental sustainability and a commitment to global cooperation for development.

As a quick guide we’ve put together a new page that explains the MDGs and progress towards them, do have a look and share with your networks – we will continue to update this page as the clock ticks closer to 2015.

Please also urge your friends and family to join ONE. Now more than ever we need to make sure we hold leaders to account over the promises they made to the world’s poor.

Let’s Celebrate to Accelerate

Feb 2nd, 2012 2:11 PM UTC
By Jamie Drummond

Ten years ago today, at a small press conference in New York, Bono and Bill Gates launched an activist entity called DATA, with start-up funds from Mr Gates, George Soros and Ed Scott.

I was one of the founders, along with Bobby Shriver and Lucy Matthew, and appointed the executive director. Though we started small, our oh so clever acronymic name stood for audacious goals: to campaign on debt, AIDS, trade and aid in partnership with African activists – in return for African governments offering more democracy, accountability and transparency to their citizens. We aspired to be data-based activists with a transatlantic bipartisan strategy, blending pop and policy, so that those with extreme global power would be forced to deal with extreme local poverty – and take the historic opportunity before us to end it.

This little unit evolved into ONE, and in partnership with others helped catalyse the Make Poverty History campaign, the Live 8 concerts and (RED), enabling tens of millions of people to take effective action against extreme poverty. Curiously, hardly anybody knows what all this, and the huge Jubilee Drop the Debt movement where we cut our activist teeth, really achieved.

Some think it achieved nothing or even backfired. So by telling you now the aim is not to blow our own trumpet but to sound a loud alarm, because if people don’t get to know about the wild successes of these struggles, as well as lessons learned from some big failures, they won’t get what’s at stake if progress stalls and programmes get cut back.

The statistics of success seem staggering. Maybe that’s part of the reason that people don’t know what’s been achieved; the super-sized statistics drown out more human-size stories. For example, since we and partners ramped up our campaigning for access to life preserving anti-AIDS medication, access increased – from only 50,000 people in Africa receiving the life-saving anti-retrovirals in 2002 to over five million people receiving the drugs in 2010. Such huge inhuman numbers have millions of human faces. Grace and Agnes are two HIV positive Ugandan activists who, when we first met them a decade ago, weren’t able to get the drugs they needed to keep them healthy. Their friends were dying in droves; surely they would themselves depart soon. They had formed a solidarity group, the AIDS Support Organisation, to sing to each other and find strength in the face of this daily struggle, and spread a hopeful message of AIDS prevention to those not yet infected. I recall our fury that these brilliant people would die so prematurely, leaving a generation of AIDS orphans. Yet just two weeks ago – ten years to the day after we first met them – we hung out with Grace and Agnes again, as the equatorial sun set on a veranda overlooking Lake Victoria. They are so alive and beaming with pride as they told us how, with a little help from their friends like Presidents Bush and Clinton, they’ve helped get nearly 300,000 more HIV positive Ugandans on to life-preserving, orphan-preventing medications.

Scale this up to 5 million across Africa, and 6.6 million globally, and we see an achievement on an epic scale. It is one of humanity’s greatest recent endeavours. Yet it is a tale rarely told. The story is similar in the spread of bednets and medications to beat malaria, which have cut death rates in half in 11 African countries. It is similar for education, with 46.5 million more children in school across Africa, in part because of dropped debts. It is similar for vaccinations: 5.5 million deaths have been averted through investments in the GAVI alliance for simple childhood immunisations. And it is similar for AIDS, TB and malaria, with the Global Fund, also set up ten years ago, saving over 100,000 lives every month from these three killer diseases.

It is hugely humbling to see a campaign you work for catch fire, shift from the margins to the mainstream and know that for each of the millions of lives changed, there are a million others on the other side of the planet across seemingly vast divides, who reached out in partnership. Real people believing in each other and working together to change the world.

But there is no room for smug self-congratulation as the struggles against disease, inequality and illiteracy are far from over, and especially as we learn the lessons of three scandalous oversights: on food security, on trade, and on support for African civil society and their drive for improved transparency and accountability.

Firstly, we were all far too late to campaign for increased investments into food security until the price of food spiralled out of control, hitting the poorest hardest. Still nearly a billion people go hungry every day. Thankfully, the combined leadership of Kofi Annan, Bill Gates and President Obama has put the importance of food security back on the map. But there’s still much, much more to do.

Secondly, we never got going on trade. Despite repeated efforts, the Doha Trade Round is dead, and the often promised Development Round has delivered nothing. Yet steps can – and must – still be taken, for example to support intra-African trade and integration, and provide greater access to all developed markets for African goods, quota and duty free. The better news is on investment as word of Africa’s booming economies has transformed perceptions. Ten years ago the Economist called Africa the “hopeless continent”. In December, the Economist wrote of an “Africa Rising”.

Thirdly, calls from African civil society for greater transparency and accountability have often been paid politically correct lip service, but real support was scarce. Now we’re trying to make up for lost time, in particular by backing activists’ calls for oil, gas and other extractive companies to “publish what they pay” governments for the right to extract natural resources. This will allow citizens to scrutinise official accounts and reduce space for corruption. Indeed, all public finances must be made more transparent and all projects more rigorously monitored for impact, especially by the marginalised – the very people these projects are intended to help. In the last ten years new technologies – led by the mobile phone and social media – make it now much more possible to turbocharge such transparency drives.

It’s an understatement to say that the world has changed utterly this last ten years, in some ways better, some worse. We’ve witnessed serious failures of political and corporate leadership bring on a devastating financial crisis. We’ve also seen that it is leadership from the people that is more often what inspires. From the Arab street to the millions of people delivering lifesaving support to each other on an epic scale we, as citizens and as organised global civil society, can change the course of history. In the face of such progress, and so many remaining challenges and opportunities, the abiding lesson must be that cynicism is unacceptable, apathy is the enemy, to care can be cool. There are grounds for optimism, for hope – for when we work together as one, across political divides, oceans, ethnicities, and beliefs we’ve seen we can achieve awesome results. With so much more to do forgive us if we celebrate – for it’s the best way to accelerate.

This post first appeared on the Huffington Post UK website

Time to take “neglected” out of neglected tropical diseases

Jan 30th, 2012 6:26 PM UTC
By Peter Taylor

This morning in London, 13 pharmaceutical companies, the US, UK, UAE governments, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank and other global health organisations announced a new plan to eliminate or control 10 neglected tropical diseases.

These 10 diseases disproportionally effect 1.4 billion of the world’s poorest people.

Dr Caroline Anstey of the World Bank said: “These are not neglected diseases – but rather diseases of neglected people.”

The aim is to eliminate Guinea worm, leprosy, lymphatic filariasis, blinding trachoma and sleeping sickness by 2020, and control schistosomiasis, river blindness, soil-transmitted helminthes, Chagas disease and visceral leishmaniasis. These diseases cause misery, suffering, disfigurement and death – and when they don’t kill the seriously affect the lives of many people.

At the event today $785 million dollars was pledged to support research efforts into the diseases, and to strengthen distribution to make sure the vital drugs get to the people who need them.

Bill Gates said that it was “thilling to go from an idea a year ago to this milestone event with ambitious goals”.

You can read more in depth information about the 10 diseases, and watch a recording of today’s event at unitingtocombatNTDs.org

Here’s a great Infographic that explains the problem and solution (click to enlarge):

10 Years of Lives Saved Through the Global Fund

Jan 26th, 2012 5:04 PM UTC
By Erin Hohlfelder

In celebration of the Global Fund’s 10th anniversary, ONE Global Health Policy Manager Erin Hohlfelder reflects on the organization’s accomplishments over the years.

When I was ten, I was busy doing important things like mastering long division, practicing softball and rocking the plastic glasses/bowl cut combo. While I’m proud of those accomplishments, I have to say I’m even more proud today to honor all the incredible things that the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has achieved in its first ten years of existence. To understand the Global Fund’s impact, it’s important to remember just how bad things were before it existed: Fewer than 50,000 Africans had access to AIDS treatment. Malaria was killing nearly 1 million people annually. Treating TB was considered too expensive for most of the developing world.

In late January of 2002, leaders came together in Switzerland to launch the Global Fund. Built to be what Kofi Annan called a “war chest” to respond to these global health emergencies, it had the backing of donors, public health officials, developing country leaders and NGOs. Intentionally, it was designed to be different than other aid models; it was rooted in having local stakeholders (rather than donors) say what they wanted to do to fight AIDS, TB or malaria, and how much money it would take to get the job done.

Though no aid model is perfect, the Global Fund has clearly been doing something right, because it has delivered incredible results over the last decade:

ONE CEO Michael Elliott at the World Economic Forum in Davos

Jan 26th, 2012 1:41 PM UTC
By Peter Taylor

This week ONE CEO Michael Elliott has been attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, and you can follow his progress on twitter or by searching for the #Davos hashtag.

This morning he took part in a Facebook Live chat, answering questions posted by ONE members on facebook:

You can read more about the message Michael will be taking to Davos on behalf of ONE on his blog post: Required reading in Davos.

Ask ONE CEO Michael Elliott a question at the World Economic Forum

Jan 24th, 2012 4:57 PM UTC
By Malaka Gharib

This year, the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, will be more open to the public than ever, thanks to social media. Facebook will again be interviewing key participants at Davos and airing them on Facebook Live, a live-streaming video channel, to help create much-needed buzz around the world’s most pressing issues.

One of the people that she plans on interviewing is ONE’s CEO Michael Elliott. During the interview, he will be answering the following questions:

• How are changing models around communication technology and social networking impacting how you or your organization works?
• As the world becomes more connected over the next few years, what do you see as the biggest changes that will occur for your organization and/or society at large?
• The World Economic Forum provides a time to examine the world’s biggest challenges and opportunities. What are the major themes for you this year?

Aside from those questions, Facebook is asking ONE members submit a few questions for Michael to answer during the interview, too. Ask him anything you want on our issues in the comments below by Wednesday, January 25 at 18:00 CET / 17:00 GMT/UTC and 12:00 ET, and we’ll send our favourites over to Facebook.

Tune to watch the the interview live on Facebook on Thursday, January 26 at 10:30  CET / 09:30 GMT/UTC. And if that’s too early for you, no worries — we’ll be posting a recorded version later in the day.

Haiti Aid Map: Visualizing Two Years of Coordinated Response

Jan 12th, 2012 3:46 PM UTC
By ONE Partners

The mapping team at InterAction reflect on the earthquake in Haiti on its two year anniversary.

We have all seen the statistics: over 1.5 million people displaced and 230,000 lives claimed. The January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti was the second deadliest on record in the last decade.

The lack of infrastructure and strong government leadership, and overall short-comings in health care, education, housing and access to water and sanitation in Haiti only magnified the devastating impacts of the earthquake. The immense damage sustained and number of lives lost and uprooted put the international spotlight on Haiti in a historically new way. With the worlds’ eyes suddenly focused on the poorest country in the western hemisphere, non-profit organizations (NGOs) responding to the crisis felt an increased pressure to improve their transparency, accountability and coordination.

Expectations have been high; NGOs in particular have been faced with endless questions on donations raised, accomplishments and progress.  InterAction members alone raised over $1.3 billion in private funding since the earthquake, and are currently implementing over 320 projects all across Haiti.

To facilitate transparency and coordination, InterAction developed Haiti Aid Map, a snapshot of who is doing what, where. Using Haiti Aid Map and its features, you can quickly determine the activities going on in a given commune or within a specific sector, which organizations are working there, and who are the beneficiaries.  Mapping projects in Haiti also allows the public to better understand how their contributions are being used and how they are being allocated.

But Haiti Aid Map is more than just dots scattered across a map. Photos and videos on project pages show how communities are rebuilding and how lives are moving forward. From newly opened schools to expanded health care services to increased access to clean water, visitors to the map can see the vast amount of progress that has been made. In addition to these successes, two-thirds of those displaced have moved out of temporary camps, rubble continues to be cleared and the unexpected cholera epidemic has been contained.

Although much work remains to be done, the progress in Haiti over the past two years could not have been achieved without a coordinated and transparent response.

To learn more about the on-going work of NGOs in Haiti, please visit Haiti Aid Map.

InterAction is an alliance of U.S.-based international NGOs focused on the world’s poor and most vulnerable people.  Haiti Aid Map is part of NGO Aid Map, InterAction’s online mapping initiative. To learn more or to participate in Haiti Aid Map, email mappinginfo@interaction.org.

What’s ahead in 2012

Jan 3rd, 2012 12:44 PM UTC
By Adrian Lovett

2012 is a huge year in the fight against extreme poverty. There’s no other way to put it. And I wanted you to be the first to know our plans for the year.

You’re a core part of all that we do as ONE, and we’ll be in touch over the months ahead to ask for your support in:

• Fighting corruption and empowering African civil society, by supporting a European law forcing oil, gas, and mining companies to publish what they pay to governments in developing countries;
• Asking the UK government to keep their promise of spending just 0.7% of national income on international aid by 2013, and enshrine this in law;
• Making sure that our governments deliver on short and long-term solutions to help break the cycle of famine, and
• Stepping up our campaign to see the beginning of the end of AIDS by 2015.

Last year you helped persuade world leaders to fund vaccinations against two of the biggest killers of children under 5 – saving 4 million more children’s lives in 5 years.

Not only that, but G20 leaders heard your voices in calling for short and long-term agricultural solutions to help break the cycle of famine in the Horn of Africa. And that’s only some of what we achieved, together as ONE. Thank you.

Now in this even bigger year, you can do something today to help make our movement even stronger. Please watch our video, share it with friends online and invite them to join us too:

Thanks very much.

2011: A Year of Progress

Dec 23rd, 2011 5:49 PM UTC
By Rachel Anderson

As the end of 2011 fast approaches everything is winding down here at ONE. At this time of reflection, we wanted to take the opportunity to look back at 2011 and what we, but much more importantly YOU, have achieved in the fight against extreme poverty.

All the way back in January French President Nicolas Sarkozy pledged to lead the way in making oil, gas and mining companies operating in Africa more transparent in their financial reporting, and UK Chancellor George Osborne soon followed. Determined to make transparency a reality – you took action. 10,000 of you signed our petition and we delivered an open letter to Prime Minister David Cameron on behalf of over 200 Ugandan civil society activists.

Fast forward to October and the campaign was given a HUGE boost by European Commission proposals for a new law guaranteeing all company payments to governments will be published. This is a big step forward – and YOU helped make it happen! Keep your eyes peeled for further developments in 2012 when we’ll be pushing to turn the proposals into legislation…

2011 has been the year for championing aid effectiveness and transparency. ONE launched a campaign to Make Aid Transparent, with our friends at Publish What You Fund In November, we presented your petition to governments meeting in South Korea demanding that they publish the details of the aid money they spend. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s keynote address at the forum in Busan, announced that the United States would be signing the International Aid Transparency Initiative – a fantastic result that YOU helped us achieve.

One of our biggest successes came in June when ONE members took action on the crucial issue of childhood vaccines.

More than 300,000 of you signed our petition. ONE members also sent hundreds of letters to members of parliament in the UK, and in the USA we swamped the Whitehouse with tweets. In South America ONE volunteers recruited thousands of new members who added to the weight of our international voice. In Australia ONE members called and emailed the foreign minister’s office, and in Germany the outstanding youth messengers were hard at work gathering support.

Because of your skill at advocacy, your hard work and a ton of determination, it worked. World leaders promised to commit $4.3 billion to vaccinate some of the world’s most vulnerable children against deadly diseases – saving an estimated 4 million lives in the next 5 years.

ONE members in the UK have been getting involved in another exciting project for us this year – our first UK student activist programme! Students & ONE for Africa Rising (SOAR) launched with two very successful training weekends in London and Leeds, and has already seen students promoting ONE’s World Aid’s Day campaign at their universities and recruiting other students to get in involved too. Keep SOARing, guys.

This has been an exciting year for progress in the fight against HIV/AIDS as momentum grows for ‘The Beginning of the End of AIDS’. Back in February over 250,000 of you signed our petition calling for ‘No Child Born with HIV by 2015’ which were delivered to world leaders  You were heard. In November Hillary Clinton incredibly announced that welcoming in the first AIDS-free generation is now a policy priority of the US government for the first time in history!

Progress can and IS happening. On 1 December ONE and our sister organization (RED) hosted an inspirational World AIDS Day event in Washington to highlight the progress that has been made in the last 10 years in the fight against global AIDS. ONE members have been joining the fight in droves, getting creative and making panels for ONE and (RED)’s (2015)QUILT, a ground breaking digital tool that brings people from all over the world together to fight for an historic achievement – the beginning of the end of AIDS.

It is impossible to look back on 2011 without considering the situation in the Horn of Africa, where in just 3 months 30,000 children died. October saw the launch of our The F Word: Famine is the real obscenity video and our Hungry No More campaign. In total 409,000 people signed our petition urging G20 leaders to act. In the UK ONE members tweeted, emailed or met with MPs and ONE members in France joined our Paris team to project our campaign videos and a list of petition signers’ names onto the face of the historic Hôtel de Ville. There is still much to be done but you ARE being listened to. The G20 agreed that there is an urgent need to strengthen emergency and long-term responses to food insecurity and that responsible investment in long-term agricultural solutions in the poorest countries is essential.

This is just some of the things we at ONE and our fantastic members have been up to. We have also had Youth Messengers championing the cause in Germany, volunteers all over Europe recruiting at Maroon 5 shows, and have been presenting Living Proof to celebrate the incredible progress being achieved by some of the world’s poorest people.

There is still much to be done in the fight against extreme poverty, and it is often an uphill battle. But with inspirational people doing inspirational things like this, we at ONE believe with your help we can do it.

Bring on 2012!