Travis Roberts, a member of the Faith team at ONE, recaps ONE’s recent conference call with agriculture expert and activist Roger Thurow.

When the harvest runs out, before the next one begins, smallholder farmers in rural Kenya face “the hunger season.” It is a season marked by difficult choices – do families use the little money they have for food or school fees? Can a father choose between his own meals and his son’s medications?

Guided by Heather Larson from Willow Creek Community Church, ONE spoke via phone with agriculture expert and activist Roger Thurow about these harsh realities and how people of faith can help their brothers and sisters abroad. We started by looking at food aid reform.

When a nation like Kenya faces a famine, as it did in 2011, America sends millions of dollars’ worth of food aid abroad. Packing up literal tons of grain, the American government saves lives but often disrupts local economies. But according to Thurow, by buying food locally, America can help support local farmers and save more lives more efficiently.

RELATED: Articles on hunger and poverty by Roger Thurow

Thurow also talked about how the energy poverty affects hunger. The hunger season isn’t only caused by external factors, like weather patterns and crop yields. The lack of infrastructure in many African countries also prevents farmers from bringing in crops that will last until the next harvest.

Currently, only 14 percent of rural Africans have regular energy access, limiting their ability to safely store food and medication, study outside of school and even walk safely at night. Today, 26 African countries have made firm commitments to improving energy access, a goal ONE personally supports.

Together with a diverse community of private and public partners, ONE has committed to see universal energy access for Sub-Saharan Africa by 2030. We are doing so in solidarity with the voices of three million ONE members around the world – including hundreds of thousands of people of faith.

When asked what people of faith can do to fight hunger in Africa and why they should, Roger answered: “We need to raise the clamor.”

“When I was in Kenya, I asked the farmers how they knew it would rain. They told me it would because ‘God knows who we are.’ It made me think. Do we?”

Inspired to help fight hunger and energy poverty with our African brothers and sisters? Sign up to join Faith at ONE by emailing Travis Roberts at troberts@one.org.

ONE’s global health policy expert Erin Hohlfelder shares some great news on the US’ work against HIV/AIDS. 

I have never been a big numbers person, and in advocacy work I usually tend to find stories and visuals more compelling than charts and formulas.  But as I walked out of a State Department event honoring the 10-year anniversary of the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) yesterday, I was surprised to leave with two numbers—“1 million” and “13”—stuck in my head.

The first number, 1 million, is the big milestone that got all the press.  In his first major speech on health since assuming his role as Secretary of State, John Kerry announced that US-funded PEPFAR programs have now saved 1 million babies, born to HIV-positive mothers, from being born with HIV.  He prefaced this announcement by saying it was something “we could literally only have dreamed about 10 years ago,” an assessment he could deliver with great credibility as someone who used his Senate career to help form and champion PEPFAR a decade ago.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaks at the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) 10th Anniversary Celebration. Photo credit: US Department of State

Though 1 million is just a numeric figure, it represents so much more.  It speaks volumes to how far the scientific community has come in its understanding of how to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV, improving treatment regimens and refining delivery techniques along the way.

RELATED: Read how ONE has been supporting PEPFAR throughout the years

It also exemplifies the term “return on investment,” leveraging low-cost, simple upfront prevention resources for mothers to generate huge, long-term cost-savings for their children, who won’t have to take lifelong antiretroviral treatments as a result. And it represents a million stories—most of which will remain unheard—of babies who grew up as healthy kids with bright futures ahead of them thanks to PEPFAR.

The second number, 13, was buried a bit further down in Secretary Kerry’s speech, but was equally noteworthy.  There are now 13 countries that have reached a national AIDS “tipping point,” at which the number of people added to treatment programs each year surpasses the number of people newly infected with HIV annually.

While definitions and ratios can sometimes seem like a bore, this one deserves our attention, because it gives us a clearer—though not complete —answer to the ultimate question: “Are we winning the fight against HIV/AIDS in Africa?”

In spite of this progress, significant challenges remain.  PEPFAR needs additional funding to continue making incredible progress. The Global Fund, which works with PEPFAR to deliver services, also needs $15 billion over next three-year period so it can work even harder to save lives.

Some countries remain far off from reaching an AIDS tipping point, and even for those who have reached it, the sheer scale of the AIDS crisis is still immense and troublesome.  The battle ahead is an uphill one.  But as we reflect on PEPFAR’s first decade, we should heed the encouragement of Secretary Kerry:

“Know that we can do the remarkable, that we can find solutions to what seems to be unsolvable … and we can leave politics and ideology at the wayside in order to choose life and possibilities for people everywhere.”

Help us ensure that The Global Fund, which works with PEPFAR to fight AIDS, gets the $15 billion it needs to save lives. Sign our petition here.

What an amazing two weeks – 350,406 ONE members called on world leaders to back Africa’s food revolution and unleash a transparency revolution, and they acted!

ONE’s G8 petition, signed by over 350,000 people is handed to European Commission President Barroso, French President Hollande and UK Prime Minister Cameron ahead of the summit. Photos: twitter.com/barrosoEU/Presidence de la Republique/ONE

ONE’s Laurie Moskowitz hands off US signatures to White House Chief of Staff for the Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs Yohannes Abraham.

Thanks to ONE members, we are a few steps further down the road towards ending extreme poverty. 20 million children will now be helped to avoid chronic malnutrition, and real steps forward have been taken on opening up secret data, alongside increased natural resource, aid and tax transparency.

To everyone who signed our petition, contacted your representative, or spread the word about agit8 and the power of protest – this success is yours.

As ever, there’s a lot more to do to achieve our vision of a world without extreme poverty by 2030 – leaders didn’t go as far as we’d like, for example, in cracking down on phantom firms that rob Africa of its resources. Get our detailed verdict on the G8 outcomes.

But for today, I just wanted to say thank you.

ONE members from around the world with their favourite protest song lyrics.

- In London, I presented your voices to Prime Minister David Cameron after Jessie J, Angelique Kidjo and many others performed live outside the Tate Modern as part of ONE’s agit8, calling on leaders to take action towards our goals,

- In Washington, D.C., ONE members headed to the White House to hand in our petition,

- In Paris, President Hollande personally received ONE’s petition, and European Commission President Barroso even took our record of protest songs all the way from Brussels to the summit!

- Just before leaders met, we took several transparency champions from Africa and Asia in to Downing Street to tell the Prime Minister face-to-face about the human impact of corruption and secrecy

I couldn’t be more proud of what we’ve helped achieve so far, together as ONE.

We love to hear what you think. Tell us how you have been involved in events leading up to the G8, and what you think of the outcomes in the comments below.

There are two ways to analyze a G8 communique.  One is what you do in the minutes after it is issued, desperately scanning sentences, paragraphs, whole pages in seconds, your eyes alert for keywords, trying to build an instant impression of whether they’ve pulled a fast one, whether things have come out better (don’t hold your breath) or worse (more like it) than you had expected. 

In these moments, the smallest things loom the largest, like the use of “for example” rather than “including” (the latter meaning that what follows it may actually happen, the former meaning that what follows was probably opposed by everyone around the table except the host).  Communiques need this kind of fast and brutal scrutiny.  Without it, the fleeting media spotlight might move on before genuinely significant downgrades (or even upgrades) in the text are spotted, and the chance to test leaders against their pre-summit intentions is left until nobody is listening.

The other way to analyze a communique is what you do later the same day, on a flight, or with a glass in hand, or sitting up in bed before you finally submit to sleep after days of summit madness.  This one involves actually reading it. 

The 2013 communique produced yesterday when the G8 wrapped up their meeting near Enniskillen, including the one-page “Lough Erne Declaration“, is unusual in being worth a proper read.  There is a thread running through it. It isn’t too long.  And it has some passages that may be genuinely significant in mandating bold action in the months and years ahead.

Take the declaration, a list of ten sentences that, taken together, demand a pretty high standard of behavior for G8 members from now on.  Point four: “Developing countries should have the information and capacity to collect the taxes owed them – and other countries have a duty to help them.” It’s easy to find holes.  The repeated use of “should” rather than the tougher “will”, for example, has not gone unnoticed. But picking such nits misses the big opportunity.  Campaigners should take this declaration at face value, advertise it widely and throw it back at G8 leaders every time they fall short – whether by failing to defend the land rights of marginalized people, excluding developing countries from access to information about the revenues they are losing to tax havens and wealthier countries, or caving in to the lobbying efforts of “big oil” to keep secret the payments they make to governments.

There are undoubtedly disappointments in this communique.  The biggest let-down is around the failure of the G8 as a whole to agree to compile information showing who actually benefits from the ownership of each company.  If the G8 had agreed to do this and publish the results, they really would have put some rev in the transparency revolution.  The fact that they didn’t manage to agree to compile these even for the use of law enforcement agencies is depressing (though five of the G8 are going to consult on doing at least this much).  It now falls to the UK and France, who showed leadership, to drive a positive European approach on “beneficial ownership” through the European Union.

Another blow is the lack of new money to put behind positive words on agriculture, after David Cameron conceded early on that this would be a “leave your chequebook at home” summit.  Nobody can argue with the call for funding to address Syria’s humanitarian emergency.  But the $1.5 billion raised in an afternoon for Syria happens to be about the same as the shortfall in the Global Agriculture and Food Security Programme that last year’s G8 promised to fill – a promise so far entirely undelivered.  Ranking desperate human need is a dangerous business, but many will wonder why the chronic emergency of extreme poverty and hunger does not command the cash call as the acute crisis in Syria.  Both are a matter of life and death.

However, elsewhere in the communique (analyzed here by my colleagues Alan Hudson and Verity Outram) are tantalizing signs of how far the tax and transparency debate has moved in the last year and the extent to which developing countries could benefit.  The G8 makes clear that developing countries must be able to participate fully in the exchange of information needed for them to effectively collect the taxes they are due.  The push for transparency in the extractives sector, so important for resource-rich developing countries, is buoyant after Canada pledged to match EU and US legislation in a pre-summit announcement.  And the little-reported Open Data Charter has been agreed which could transform the way government information is presented and publicized, putting into citizens’ hands the means to hold their governments to account.

All of which means there is plenty of cause for encouragement from Lough Erne, and those who pushed this rock up the hill have something to show for their efforts.  The Enough Food for Everyone IF campaign should feel proud, holding together a 200-strong coalition to deliver a message that captured attention and leveraged action.  342,219 ONE members who signed petitions calling on the G8 to fight malnutrition and unleash a transparency revolution made their presence felt too, and helped ensure that the eyes of the whole world, not just Britain, were watching and willing a positive result.  Transparency champions from Africa and Asia joined ONE on Saturday to tell the Prime Minister about the human impact of a lack of transparency and their own brave accounts of fighting corruption.  And the performers, volunteers and supporters who came together last week for ONE’s agit8 campaign, reviving great protest songs to energize a call for G8 leaders to act, have made their mark and added to a powerful new sense of momentum in the global fight against extreme poverty.

Then there is David Cameron’s role.  His style and politics may be different from his predecessor and the 2005 Gleneagles Summit remains, for now, the high-water mark for anti-poverty campaigners as far as G8 summits are concerned.   He will have to take responsibility for where this summit fell short just as he should take credit for where it delivered. But he brought energy and a compelling and coherent idea to this G8 presidency and sold much of it to his counterparts. If activists hold leaders accountable for the commitments made today just as they did eight years ago, and those leaders show by their actions that they meant what they wrote, the Lough Erne communique may yet form a very significant chapter in the story of how extreme poverty was ended.  That’ll be worth a read.

Back in January the UK Prime Minister set out a ground-breaking agenda for this year’s G8 Summit ontrade, tax and transparency. While those of us who have been pushing for the G8 to take decisive action on phantom firms are left feeling a little disappointed by the lack of ambition, overall the verdict on thecommuniqué is reasonably positive.

ONE set out its ambitions for the G8 in our recent report “Summit in Sight”. In many areas the G8 has made significant progress but we’ve also seen missed opportunities to give the transparency revolution a real boost.

Extractives
On transparency in the oil, gas and mining sector, we had some great news with Canada’s announcement that it plans to join the EU and the US in requiring its companies to report on the payments they make to governments to exploit countries’ natural resources. The communiqué goes further in encouraging other countries to adopt equivalent mandatory reporting rules and attention will now turn to Australia, South Africa and Hong Kong to make the standard truly global. In line with the G8’s message to “get their own house in order”, the UK, US, France, Italy and Germany have all stated that they will look to become compliant with theExtractive Industries Transparency Initiative over the coming years.

We still need to go further and ensure that extractive data is usable, used and translates into results for the citizens of resource rich countries.

Open Data
We welcomed the announcement of a new Open Data Charter that G8 members have signed up to and non-G8 countries, perhaps via the G20, will be encouraged to join. The Charter will make more government data available, with health, environment and transport priority areas and a commitment by all G8 members to implement the the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) by 2015. We hope to see the Open Data Charter made relevant across the transparency agenda – from aid, to extractives, to budgets, to service delivery – smashing the silos between transparency initiatives to make them more than the sum of their parts.

Tax
The headlines of the day however, focused on what the G8 would commit to around tax and transparency of beneficial ownership. Over the last few days we have heard voices from Kofi Annan to George Osborne, calling for a deal on automatic information exchange for tax authorities to include developing countries.

The G8 announced today that the OECD will take forward work on this agenda and report to the G20. This is great news. It should mean that tax authorities in Africa will be able to trace the money leaving their countries. The UK further announced that it would reign in its own tax havens, once more highlighting the UK’s commitment to this agenda.

Beneficial Ownership
However, on beneficial ownership – despite the leadership demonstrated by the UK and France – the G8 has taken only baby steps towards cracking down on the secret companies that play such a major role in robbing Africa of its resources. These steps must be just the beginning. David Cameron and François Hollande should now take the fight to Europe, leading efforts to get other EU Member States to agree to make information about who really owns and controls companies public. This is what is needed. Nothing less is acceptable.

Global Witness reacted by saying,  “Anonymous shell companies are the getaway car for crime and corruption”.

More announcements
Plenty more was announced today – G8 country partnerships to support countries to implement the new EITI standard; capacity building via Tax Inspectors Without Borders; the tasking of the OECD with the development of a common template for country by country reporting by developing countries –  all of which are further steps in the right direction.

While the G8 has not turbo-charged the transparency revolution in the way that many of us hoped, it has – under David Cameron’s ambitious leadership – pushed things forward substantially. Commitments have been made and will be monitored. And people all over the world, will continue the fight.

Get ONE’s reaction to the G8 in issue by issue detail.

No woman should die in childbirth.  In fact, most maternal deaths are preventable. Yet nearly one woman dies in childbirth every two minutes, and 99 percent of these deaths occur in the developing world.

This month marks the first anniversary of Saving Mothers, Giving Life, a partnership intended to aggressively reduce the number of women in the developing world who die during pregnancy and childbirth.

An expectant mother’s death has a profound, cascading impact.  Her death jeopardizes the lives of her surviving children and their likelihood of receiving health care and education.  By ensuring safe births, we help to produce healthy and economically secure families and communities.

Saving Mothers, launched by then-Secretary of State Hilary Clinton last June, supports and builds upon national maternal health programs in Uganda and Zambia, with the goal of reducing maternal deaths by up to 50 percent in targeted districts.

After evaluations by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as Columbia University, we know that we’ve achieved a tremendous amount very quickly.  Childbirths in medical facilities have increased, emergency obstetric and newborn care services have improved and community linkages to medical facilities have been strengthened.

In Saving Mothers, Giving Life districts, the number of women attending four or more antenatal care (ANC) visits has increased significantly. ANC visits are critical to the health of the baby. 

Saving Mothers trained community health workers, including 4,000 Village Health Team members in Uganda and 800 Safe Motherhood Action Group members in Zambia, promoted facility deliveries and birth preparedness as well as distributed supplies for childbirth and caring for a newborn. Furthermore, we helped add more than 300 new doctors, nurses and midwives to the health workforce in Uganda and Zambia, improving emergency obstetric and HIV care.

We also upgraded infrastructure. Maternity waiting shelters have been constructed and renovated, providing a safe space for women to stay before their due dates and enhancing access to maternal health services.

On my recent trips to Uganda and Zambia, I had a first-hand look at some of the challenges —and opportunities —we face.  Some of the facilities we visited handle as many as 10 childbirths per day but often face a shortage of delivery beds. The situation is challenging even when labor and births pass without complications, but is especially difficult when multiple women are in labor simultaneously.

Health workers also cope with frequent blackouts and unreliable water supplies. Ambulances, critical for serving large catchment areas, often don’t exist or frequently run short of fuel.

Addressing these problems starts with leadership and policy change at the national level.  Zambia’s First Lady, Dr. Christine Kaseba-Sata, is helping lead a national effort to reduce maternal mortality.

Safe Motherhood Action Groups work in Zambian communities to encourage women to deliver in health facilities. The risk of death from pregnancy-related complications is far greater when women deliver at home. Saving Mothers, Giving Life partners provide extensive training and support for these groups in four districts in Zambia.

A trained obstetrician-gynecologist, Dr. Kaseba-Sata is promoting policies that encourage women to deliver their children in medical facilities, train new midwives and ensure that facilities are well-equipped.  Saving Mothers is guided by national programs and priorities, and reinforces them with additional resources and expertise.

Innovation at the local level is also vital. Dr. Richard Mugahi, the district health officer in Kabarole, Uganda, embodies how a motivated, entrepreneurial leader can make a big difference.  Dr. Mugahi has challenged and motivated local health workers, creating ambulance committees to coordinate the network of vehicles that transport pregnant women to care.

We are making progress. But we have a long way to go. Millennium Development Goal 5, which calls for a 75 percent reduction in the maternal mortality ratio by 2015, lags furthest behind all eight goals.

Working together, with strong leadership at all levels of the health care system, we can ensure that more sons and daughters will be delivered safely and more mothers survive childbirth.

Want to do your part to support maternal health in the developing world? Check out Saving Mothers, Giving Life’s website and their global partners: American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Every Mother Counts, the Government of Norway, Merck for Mothers and Project C.U.R.E.

For the past five years, a group of San Francisco engineers from Engineers Without Borders USA (EWB-USA) have partnered with a Tanzanian community thousands of miles away to harness the sun’s energy to provide electricity to the town and meet the villagers’ basic human needs. Kelsey Gross, EWB-USA communications coordinator, shares their story. 

Community members in the rural village of Ngelenge, Tanzania, have a reason to rejoice when the hot, African sun beats down on them. Solar energy now provides solutions to a serious problem – lack of access to clean water and adequate health care.

Five years ago, women and children in the Ngelenge community spent the better part of each day walking many kilometers to collect water. Community members also had to walk five kilometers (3.1 miles) to the nearest health facility, which lacked consistent electricity, whenever they wanted basic health care.

This phenomenon of unstable energy access is all too common for many African communities. In sub-Saharan Africa, 30 percent of health facilities lack electricity. As a result, they cannot adequately store essential medicines, operate essential, life-saving medical equipment or perform procedures after the sun sets.

However, the Ngelenge Development Association (NGEDEA), a Tanzanian organization dedicated to the development of the Ruhuhu River Basin, wanted to make a change and reached out to the Engineers Without Borders USA (EWB-USA) San Francisco Professional Chapter to do so.

After exploring many potential ways to improve access to clean water and adequate health care, EWB-USA and NGEDEA partnered with the community to build a health clinic and a water distribution system powered by solar energy.

EWB-USA members and community members celebrated the installation of the solar panels that now power the water pump and local health clinic. The solar panels have been functioning for two years and the system receives routine maintenance by well-trained community members. Photo credit: David Youmans

Tanzania receives more than 3,000 hours of sunlight each year. For community members in Ngelenge, more than 3,000 hours of sunlight each year means more than 3,000 opportunities to supply life-giving energy for their health clinic and water source.

“Ngelenge is 75 kilometers from the nearest electrical grid ,and the bumpy dirt roads make the transport of goods, including fuel for energy, expensive and difficult,” David Youmans, an EWB-USA member who was one of the engineers on the ground in Ngelenge, said. “What they do have, though, is abundant energy in the form of sunlight.”

The EWB-USA San Francisco Professional Chapter worked with local solar vendors to install the project, a localized approach that increased the capacity of the community’s solar technicians. This also helped build the local solar economy and ensured long-term sustainability for the project.

Today, every community member in Ngelenge has access to health care facilities within one kilometer from their home, whether or not the sun is shining. Additionally, the solar-powered water pump delivers water to 18 access points in the community so that every family has access clean water less than 100 yards from their home.

EWB-USA members also conducted solar energy training in Ngelenge so individual community members can maintain the solar energy technology. In addition to keeping the water pump and health clinic running, the solar energy training increased the capacity of community members to install solutions to energy poverty in their own homes.

“It was amazing to return to the village year after year and see that community members had purchased panels, batteries and controllers to put together their own systems,” Youmans said. “Many homes in the community now have a few lights to brighten up their night.”

On the community level, energy access is now a reality for Ngelenge. However, many communities in sub-Saharan Africa are still living in the dark. The solutions are there, and more than two dozen African states have already committed to support the goal of providing universal energy access by 2030. By partnering with developing communities to supply sustainable supplies of energy, we can energize the fight against energy poverty.

Interested in learning more how you can help address energy poverty in Africa? Join the conversation about how to bring energy access to the world’s poorest countries here. Keep an eye out for a new energy poverty action soon!

This post was written by Caitlin Hodes, a member of ONE’s Field team. She was one of the lucky ONE staffers to visit the White House last week.

On Friday, a group of ONE staff  members and a herd of summer interns delivered your voices to the White House. Together we met with Yohannes Abraham, chief of staff for the Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs, to represent the 59,664 US ONE members who signed our G8 petition asking world leaders to prioritize fighting malnutrition and increasing government transparency at the summit this week. This follows our G8 petition delivery of 342,219 EU signatures to UK Prime Minister David Cameron, and more than 8,900 French signatures to French President François Hollande last week.

Taking smart action on food and nutrition will allow Africa to lift itself out of poverty and make important strides in preventing 3.1 million children from dying each year from malnutrition. The G8 leaders can also have the opportunity to spark a transparency revolution,  enabling Africans to use their resources effectively and preventing the illegal and corrupt appropriation of $20 to 40 billion every year.

ONE’s Senior Director for US Campaigns Laurie Moskowitz delivers the G8 petition signatures to White House Chief of Staff for the Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs Yohannes Abraham.

World leaders have arrived in Lough Erne, Northern Ireland for the 39^th G8 Summit and will discuss the most pressing global issues in these next two days. Thanks to the support from ONE members like you who are pushing G8 leaders to act this week, we will be one big step closer to getting world leaders on board to virtually end extreme poverty by 2030.

We at ONE have been preparing for this moment for months now, and we’re glad to send your voices in. We’ve been taking action and building momentum to get the ball rolling, so that the G8 leaders can get the job done as efficiently as possible.

The summit may have started, but that doesn’t mean that this moment is over. Add your voice in the fight against extreme poverty by visiting one.org/protestsongs.

Last week, the House Foreign Affairs Committee held an important hearing on H.R. 1983, the Food Aid Reform Act, which was introduced last month. If passed, the reforms outlined in the bill would not only improve the speed and efficiency of delivering US food aid in humanitarian crises but also save tax dollars on food and transportation costs. (Read more why we’re trying to get it passed in this blog post, “Fight for the 4 million“).

The hearing made it clear that food aid reform is desperately needed and there is political will to get it done, even in the face of opposition from members of Congress and organizations that prefer to maintain the status quo. However, it also proved that we’re not finished yet.

We need to fight global malnutrition, particularly during food crises. Between 2010 and 2011, 44 million people were pushed into poverty due to food price increases. By 2050, seven out of 10 people will live in a country that doesn’t produce enough food for its population. We can no longer ignore that food security is a problem and that it’s worsening.

If we want to see these common-sense, bipartisan reforms become a reality, the Food Aid Reform Act needs more support. Thus far, much of the push for passing the bill is thanks to outreach from thousands of passionate activists from dozens of NGOs—including over 14,000 ONE members who have called, emailed and tweeted—all clamoring for these reforms.

Within the next week few weeks, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., will propose the reforms as an amendment to the Farm Bill, the all-encompassing legislation related to US agricultural policy.  Let your voice be heard in support of food aid reform and ask your Representatives to co-sponsor the bill and support the food aid reform amendment as well as the Food Aid Reform Act.

Want to learn more about food aid reform and how you can get involved? Read up on the fight for global nutrition here.

Photo: Andrew Aitchison / IF

As the G8 Summit kicks off in Northern Ireland, the Enough Food For Everyone IF coalition, which ONE is part of, have been making sure hunger is in the headlines.

Earlier today, a flotilla of longships sailed into Lough Erne where the summit is being held, carrying the Big G8 Heads, and a message to end tax dodging written across the sails.

Photo: Andrew Aitchison / IF

Just a few hours before, the coalition presented UK Prime Minister David Cameron with 1.4 million signatures calling for an end to hunger and tax dodging.

This incredible number of signatures is the culmination of a campaign launched in January by the coalition that now numbers 208 organisations, including some of the UK’s biggest charities. The hand-in delegation included two children from Northern Ireland who took part in a G8 youth project at their schools in Fermanagh, and IF ambassadors Baaba Maal and Pamela Chisanga from Zambia.

L-R: Chairman of IF campaign Ben Jackson; Senegalese musician Baaba Maal; ActionAid Zambia’s Pamela Chisanga; Prime Minister David Cameron; two students from Fermanagh and campaigner Laura Kerr. Photo: IF

As David Cameron hosts the G8 leaders today, this will act as a strong reminder that millions of people are looking for them to act decisively on global hunger.

Follow all the latest developments on Twitter at @ONECampaignUK and @EnoughFoodIF.

Photo: Andrew Aitchison / IF