Please welcome Kelsey Finnegan to the ONE Blog. She is the winner of our ONE Act a Week blog post contest on advocacy and the holidays. In this piece, she writes about her perception of Africa before and after her time in Ghana.
Sometimes I wonder what life would’ve been like if I’d never gone to Africa. I would have probably existed in a world that was simpler, where my thoughts didn’t reach beyond the boundaries of my university, where things were the way they were just because that was the way things were. We have all seen the sad ads with fly-bitten children’s faces flickering across the television screen. In those portrayals of Africa, it made the continent seem like a dark and curiously lost place, hopeless and wild.
I began my work in Africa at 19, as a volunteer teacher for two months in Ghana. I came across Happy Kids Orphanage, a beautiful but struggling place where the children slept on urine-covered cement floors and never experienced the luxury of a full meal. I saw it as a place that could be receptive to change, and in the years since, we’ve been able to build a dormitory, two classrooms and start a nutritional food program. In my favorite project, I partnered with a fair-trade company, Della, to start the Happy Kids Sewing Program.
When I received this third and final video blog from ONE member Katie Meyler, I immediately hit play to watch Katie tell Abigail’s story. Katie tells it best, but it struck me how Abigail’s story is really about how poverty robs a girl of more than an education -– it robs her of her childhood. Abigail is now in school and at the top of her class because of More Than Me.
Check out the amazing video by the What Took You So Long foundation:
ONE has big asks ahead of the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF-IV) in Busan, South Korea, starting on November 29th. Making donors accountable for where their development assistance goes through increased transparency will improve the effectiveness of aid across the board, or in this case –- across the chalkboard. In February 2011, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) released a new education strategy, called “Opportunity Through Learning.” The strategy contains some great examples of how donor agencies can translate aid effectiveness principles, which can often seem abstract and obtuse, into effective development strategies.
Katie Meyler’s childhood wasn’t easy. She was poor growing up in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. She didn’t have the money to fit in and escape her sometimes traumatic home life. Then, she went to Central America and experienced real poverty. She met “kids with big smiles with no shoes” and was inspired to do something about it. When she was nervous about starting her own organization, More Than Me, her friends encouraged her to “get over herself” — because it isn’t about her, it’s about them. Watch Katie’s amazing story in her exclusive video for ONE:
For last week’s ONE Act a Week, we asked you to write a personal note to USAID Administrator Raj Shah and call for a US pledge of $375 million for the Global Partnership for Education at Tuesday’s replenishment in Copenhagen.
In just three days, we received 130 awesome messages from our ONE members. We sent those messages to Administrator Shah on Monday afternoon in this tweet:
Yesterday, representatives from 52 countries met in Copenhagen, Denmark for the first-ever replenishment of the Global Partnership for Education. You may have read about it on the ONE Blog, taken action with our ONE Act a Week or tweeted @USAID to encourage the US to make a pledge. If you did -– thank you!
Tomorrow, the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) will be hosting their first-ever replenishment conference in Copenhagen. Carol Bellamy, chair of the GPE, talks to ONE about the importance of this event and its effect on quality education for the world’s poorest children.
Carol Bellamy inside a classroom in Rwanda
You’ve been an education advocate throughout your career. You’ve worked at UNICEF, World Learning, and now you’re leading the Global Partnership for Education. What was it that drew you to education?
Simply put, nothing has greater impact on reducing poverty than education — and especially girls’ education. Education saves lives as surely as vaccinations and clean water do. Children who receive an education earn more as adults and are able to provide a higher quality of life for their families and communities; the GDP of a developing country increases steadily when all children are educated. And children in fragile states are less likely to engage in violent conflict if they receive an education. The facts are very clear –- we cannot break the cycle of poverty without education.
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.
