Christy Turlington Burns, ONE member and founder of Every Mother Counts, shares a resourceful way you can help the world’s poorest today.
When was the last time your cell phone saved your life?
In the world’s poorest countries, this happens every day. Cell phones help mothers get the medicine they need, babies receive life-saving vaccines and families stay healthy and strong.
As a ONE member and founder of Every Mother Counts, the advocacy and mobilization campaign I started to increase education and support for maternal mortality reduction globally, I’ve seen these programs in action and they work.
If you can answer these questions, you can help feed the world’s poorest right now. No, really.
Today marks the start of the first-ever World Freerice Week, a campaign to help end global hunger through Freerice, an online game managed by the World Food Programme. For each correct answer on trivia questions like the ones above, you get 10 grains of real-life rice that end up on the plates of hungry people.
This year’s theme, “6 Degrees of Separation,” aims to exponentially increase the amount of donated rice. Play the game in teams of six and compete against Freerice players all across the world. Players have already helped donate 94 million grains of rice since the game first started — so just imagine how much more we could help give if we got more people to play?
Register or join a group now, and play Freerice like a madman until Friday, February 11. Let us know how you do, and good luck!
Paul Bugala, Senior Sustainability Analyst for Extractive Industries at Calvert Investments, explains why Wall Street and the developing world need mandatory oil and mining payment transparency. This piece is part of a larger blog series on transparency in the extractives industry. Stay tuned for more updates on this topic.
Imagine you had to make one decision that could change your community and livelihood dramatically. Wouldn’t you want to be 100 percent sure your decision created the best opportunities possible for you and your family?
On the flip side, what if that decision involved an investment of millions of dollars? You would want all the information you could find about the possible outcomes and risks of your decision, wouldn’t you?
Today, across the globe, citizens of resource-rich yet poor countries and investors in oil, gas and mining companies have a problem just like this. These odd couples both need to make very important decisions about natural resource projects and the companies that undertake them, but they don’t have enough information to make sure their choices are right.
As we continue our campaign to protect critical Canadian international development funding, ONE member Sarah Stone, from Waterloo, Ontario, reports back from meeting her local member of parliament.
As a constituent and on behalf of ONE I had the opportunity recently to meet with Peter Braid, Conservative Member of Parliament for Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario.
ONE member Sarah Stone and Peter Braid, Conservative Member of Parliament
Mr. Braid had recently returned from a trip to South Sudan as part of his role as the vice chair of the Canada-Africa Parliamentary Association, the main purpose of which is to discuss trade, aid and strengthen ties with African parliamentarians. During this trip, and on previous trips to Africa, Mr. Braid has seen firsthand the benefits of Canadian foreign aid. We discussed my involvement in the Griot Project, and my recent trip to Washington this past December to participate in #ONErocksDC, a lobby day on Capitol Hill and the White House with ONE.
This blog post is reprinted from the Manila Times with permission from the author. For more information about the enormous burden of rotavirus disease in Asia and the introduction of rotavirus vaccines in the Philippines, check out PATH’s RotaFlash.
DIARRHEA is a leading killer and cause of illness in children in Southeast Asia, and many do not realize that a major cause of childhood diarrhea is a virus called rotavirus. The Philippines will soon become the first country in the region to provide rotavirus vaccines to its most vulnerable children. Rotavirus mainly causes illness in young children living in areas where there is a significant risk of dying from severe diarrhea and vomiting. The good news is that most of these deaths can be prevented with vaccines and managed with simple treatments, if available and accessible.
Dartmouth College’s award-winning a cappella group, the Aires, partnered with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to promote awareness of the continuing famine in the Horn of Africa. The group, which placed second in last year’s NBC show “The Sing-Off,” recorded “Calling My Children Home,” a folk-inspired tune by Emmylou Harris in honor of the victims of the famine. The song alludes to separation and longing, and they sang this special song at a performance at the UN headquarters earlier this month.
Listen to the song here:
These themes are all too real for the nearly 13 million people affected by the famine in the region. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports that upwards of 1000 people flee Somalia every day, choosing to walk to neighboring Kenya, Ethiopia, or Djibouti for refuge. Those countries, too, suffer from food shortages.
“We wanted to give something back,” the Aires’ manager Ethan Weinberg told the UN News Service. “We have a larger following now and we wanted to use our reach for a good cause.”
ONE member Heather James reports on a faith event in Washington state.
Saturday morning was incredible. Braving construction chaos and downtown parking, a group of 25 interested (and interesting) everyday citizens of Washington State converged in Tacoma to attend a ONE Faith workshop with Jonathan Young, our regional field director and Adam Phillips, manager of faith advocacy at ONE.
We learned about initiatives for global health and poverty relief, and how these things relate to our faith communities. Our goal for the morning? To come away with at least one practical thing a faith community could do to make a difference in the life of one of the 1.5 billion people living in extreme poverty.
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.
