Landfills remain out of sight and out of mind for most people living in the United States, but many of the world’s poor depend on these collections of waste for their income and food. Though landfills allow people to survive in the short term, they often sicken and kill the people who attempt to live off of them.
What Is a Landfill?
A landfill is basically a mound of trash composed of many “cells” of compacted materials. In the United States and other developed countries, landfills are covered with several layers of soil at the end of each day and are capped with plastic, soil and grass once they hit capacity. These measures reduce the amount of toxins that leak out of landfills, protecting surrounding communities.
Environmental Hazards
Even the most regulated landfills have been proven to seep huge amounts of leachate, a toxic liquid that is released by trash into groundwater and soil. This chemical causes birth defects and contributes to higher incidences of bladder cancer, liver cancer, lung cancer, leukemia, and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. According to CNN, landfills also seep high amounts of methane, which is “20 times more powerful than CO2” at heating the atmosphere.
Disparities in Regulation
According to the United Nations Environmental Protection Programme, “tens of thousands of square kilometers of land” worldwide have been contaminated by inadequate landfills. Most of these landfills do not meet minimum standards and include massive amounts of untreated waste, yet they have become a source of subsistence for the world’s poor.
Living off of Landfills
Hundreds of thousands of the world’s poorest citizens live and work on landfills, deprived of education and access to basic social services. In Indonesia, for example, more than 2,000 families live on the Bantar Gebang landfill that lies outside of Jakarta, selling or consuming salvageable materials in order to survive. In Baguio, Philippines, a 2011 typhoon caused the wall of the Irisan Dumpsite to collapse, killing three people. Though there are high incidences of death and disease among those who live on or near landfills, most of them lack other opportunities and are forced to live amongst waste to survive.
Solutions
In order to begin addressing the danger faced by those living on landfills, the international community must strengthen environmental regulations and address immediate hazards such as untreated waste. It is costly to redevelop landfills, but doing so can greatly limit the amount of harmful chemicals to which surrounding populations are exposed.
Organizations such as USAID also provide those living on landfills with access to sustainable sources of income. In 2010, USAID helped 930,000 people “to improve their incomes through sustainable natural resource management,” veering them away from the hazardous environment of landfills. USAID is also working with countries such as India, Russia and Turkey to channel methane emissions into sustainable energy. While harmful when released into the atmosphere, methane can be used as an inexpensive energy source.
Thousands continue to subsist off of others’ waste, but USAID and other aid organizations are gradually helping the world’s poor to leave landfills in turn for safer economic opportunities.
– Katie Bandera
Source: CNN, Sixwise, GMA News Online, YouTube, EPA
Source: News 163
It Takes Two: Why Family Planning is Imperative for Gender Equality
At the London Family Planning Summit in July 2012, NGOs and donors came together to pledge money to halve the number of women without access to modern family planning by 2020. According to Global Citizen, however, “without proving there is demand for increased access to family planning services and information, there is a high risk these pledges won’t be honored”. If funded as promised, these pledges would provide around 120 million women with the information and services they need to plan their own lives. Further benefits could be seen in a dramatically reduced number of unintended pregnancies, as well as a reduced number of maternal and newborn deaths caused by complications with pregnancy and childbirth.
With these modern family planning services accessible to more women in the developing world, more women will have more time available to them. This means that less time will be spent with unwanted pregnancies and raising children, and more girls and women will be able to gain an education as well as enter the workforce and increase productivity as well as economic stability. Access to contraception and information about family planning is imperative for gender equality. It Takes Two encourages support for improved family planning from both men and women around the world in order to make gender inequalities a thing of the past. The first step the initiative has taken to gauge support from the public is to circulate a petition calling for government and organizations to make access to family planning a priority in developing nations.
In order to achieve equality, It Takes Two wants to fight not only for contraceptive provision, but also for the eradication of early and forced marriage, to keep girls in school, and to end gender-based violence. Matti Navellou, the campaign manager for It Takes Two, encourages the use of social media and the Internet to spread information and support for the project saying “It’s time to unlock the potential of technology for social good.”
The site also gives the opportunity to design and share personalized condoms, and the top ten designers will receive a few condoms of their own designs for free. The act of designing a condom wrapper itself also enters the creator into a drawing for a chance to win tickets to a concert from over 70 artists. Design and share for your chance to win, but more importantly for the chance for millions of women to receive the care they need to do greater things in life, and for a step closer to gender equality.
– Sarah Rybak
Sources: Take Part, Global Citizen
Photo: Take Part
Drugs and Poverty in Tajikistan
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2012 World Drug report, heroin is “the illicit drug most highly associated with a single source” with “90% of the world’s heroin coming from opium grown in just a few provinces in Afghanistan.”
Since 2006, Afghanistan has produced more than 12,000 tons of opium, which the UNODC amounts to two years’ worth of the global demand. It is very clear that drug lords in Afghanistan are making a lot of money through the production and export of heroin. There is also evidence suggesting that terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan are reaping benefits of the trade as well.
Unfortunately, this illicit drug trade has affected the people of nations outside of Afghanistan’s borders. According to the UNODC, Tajikistan has suffered immensely because of its position on the Northern trade route that transports heroin to Russia. Heroin dependency has devastated the Tajik population and has resulted in the spread of lethal diseases such as HIV and hepatitis-C. In addition, the position of Tajikistan along a primary drug trade route has promoted the rise of organized crime groups and warlords in the fledgling nation.
In Tajikistan, the direct influence of Afghan heroin can be witnessed in its purest form. In a nation economically ruined by the demise of the Soviet Union, a single substance has threatened not only the social fabric of the society but also the entire governmental structure of the newly independent nation. Tajikistan illustrates the way in which the illicit trade of heroin has devastated Central Asia. The people of Tajikistan have all been affected by the adverse consequences of heroin addiction and the diseases that so often accompany intravenous drug abuse. In addition to addiction and disease, the very framework of the state in Tajikistan is threatened by warlords who have grown fat on the profits of the drug. As criminals get richer, however, Tajikistan’s people, especially its poor, are left even more vulnerable to violence and political instability.
– Josh Forgét
Source: UNODC World Drug Report 2012,Johan Engvall
Photo: RFERL
Reasons to Make Clean Energy a Top Priority
While there are many areas of development — including access to safe water and an adequate amount of food — access to clean energy should also be a priority in any nation’s development. Clean energy drives productivity and increases the standard of living in a country without perpetuating the negative consequences of nonrenewable energy sources.
– Jordan Kline
Source: National Geographic, Sustainablog
Rayburn Building 101
The Rayburn Building is the newest and largest of the three buildings for the House of Representatives. Completed in 1965, the building is four stories tall, has two basements, and three levels of underground garage. It contains 169 suites for members of the House, nine committee rooms, 16 subcommittee rooms, 51 staff rooms, a cafeteria, post office, and gym. Additional amenities include a first-aid station, Library of Congress book station, recording studio, and press conference faculties. The building is connected to the Capitol in Washington, D.C. through a walking tunnel and subway system with electric cars. It isn’t hard to see why the Rayburn building is the most popular among members of Congress.
Rayburn Building Critics
Although its extravagant amenities make Rayburn a Capitol Hill get-a-way, the building has been ridiculed among architects and designers, many of whom object to its eccentric detailing and classicism. Before Rayburn, the House resided in the Cannon House Office Building and in the Longworth House Office Building. In 1955, with no architectural schematics, site plan, or an architectural study, House Speaker Sam Rayburn called for a third House office building. J. George Stewart, the architect of the Capitol building, simplified his original design into what he believed to be a classically harmonious compliment to the Capitol building, and obtained approval from the House Office Building Commission. Stewart selected the space west of the Longworth building, strategically facing the entrance toward Independence Avenue. Full occupancy began upon completion.
The outside of the Rayburn building is designed to complement its interior: two ten-foot marble statues stand on either side of the main entrance along with eight marble rhytons (drinking horns of the mythical creature chimera) on the east and west walls. A six-foot bronze statue of Speaker Sam Rayburn adorns the courtyard.
– Kali Faulwetter
Sources: Capitol.gov, Aoc.gov
Photo: Natlfire
5 Interesting Facts About Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela was a Nobel Prize winner, icon of modern South Africa, and one of the most respected world leaders of the 20th century. Below are interesting facts about Nelson Mandela.
5 Interesting Facts About Nelson Mandela
1) Nelson Mandela was born as Rolihlahla Dalibhunga Mandela. He was given the name Nelson by a school teacher, and is sometimes called Madiba.
2) Mandela graduated from the University of South Africa with a law degree in 1942 and is known as “the worlds most famous political prisoner” and “South Africa’s Great Black Hope.”
3) Mandela has been married three times. He was married to his first wife Evelyn from 1944-1958, his second wife, Winnie from 1958-1966, and his third wife, Graca, from 1998 to present day. The marriages have resulted in six children.
4) Mandela has established the Nelson Mandela Foundation. The Foundation was established in 1999 and focuses on three areas of work including the Life and Time of Nelson Mandela, Dialogue for Social Justice, and Nelson Mandela International Day.
5) Nelson Mandela has an international day named in his honor. The day is celebrated every year on June 25th and is dedicated to his life’s work and that of his charitable organizations, helping to ensure his legacy continues. The day serves as a call to action for individuals to take responsibility for changing the world into a better place.
– Caitlin Zusy
Sources CNN, Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory
Photo Guardian
Cocoa Life Program
In a press release published on PR Newswire, the world’s biggest chocolate company, Mondelez International, Inc. recently announced an agreement that it made with the Ivorian government’s Conseil du Cafe Cacao (CCC) to aid farmers with more sustainable production of cocoa.
Mondelez International is known for producing delightful, globally well-known, and billion-dollar chocolate brands such as Toblerone and Cadbury. The CCC agreement also covered building “thriving communities” in Cote d’Ivoire. Thus, the non-profit organization, CARE International, which tackles poverty and injustice in 87 countries, will lead the program Cocoa Life in Ivorian cocoa communities through 2016.
Sustainability is the key goal of this program and in order to achieve that, partnership is essential. Thus, Mondelez is teaming up with CARE International and the Ivorian government to create and maintain a sustainable production and supply of cocoa, and to empower cocoa farming families to “create the kind of communities they and their children want to live in, while promoting gender equality.”
As a result of this goal, Cocoa Life and CARE International initiated a program in Cote d’Ivoire working in 11 villages helping approximately 4,000 farmers with production of cocoa, and improving 40,000 lives. Both organizations set up meetings where farming families discuss what they need and achieve desired development results through “Community Action Plans.” In addition to meetings, and in honor of preserving gender equality, meetings were held for women specifically to enable them to voice their opinions and concerns. The press release also mentions how Cocoa Life plans to involve women in farmer training and community life all together.
The Country Director of CARE International in Cote d’Ivoire, Balla Sidibe, mentioned how business plays a key role in fighting poverty and injustice, and in order to better facilitate that, Mondelez must incorporate farmers and communities as the central part of the supply chain. And finally, the press release includes last November’s achievements in Cote d’Ivoire where Mondelez International made a 100 million dollar commitment to aid 75,000 farmers increase productivity. The Cocoa Life program is a $400 million ten year commitment to “improve the livelihoods and living conditions of more than 200,000 cocoa farmers and about one million people in cocoa farming communities around the world.”
– Leen Abdallah
Source: PR Newswire
What is Handicap International?
Handicap International is an “independent and impartial organization working in situations of poverty and exclusion, conflict and disaster.” Founded in 1982 to help 6,000 Cambodian amputees living in refugee camps along the Thai border, it evolved from being mainly focused towards improving the living conditions of the disabled to implementing prevention programs through “weapons and landmine clearance, risk education activities, stockpile management, and advocacy to ban landmines and cluster bombs.” This comprehensive approach comprises a series of preventive and effective actions to ensure that disabled people all over the world enjoy basic human rights and respect.
One billion people across the globe -15 percent of the world’s population- live with a disability. Today, the issue of access for the disabled is sorely under-treated in developing countries, and there are still many places with no facilities for the disabled at all. The story of Hodan, suffering from multiple disabilities including hearing, physical and intellectual impairments, is a heartbreaking illustration of this problem.
Hodan had to stay home all day long and had no friends because her school made no adjustments for disabled children. It was not until she turned 17 that she was finally able to go to school as a first grader because Handicap International set up a series of training programs to compensate for the lack of accessibility. Unfortunately, her story is just one among many. In Ethiopia alone, of the 4.8 million children living with disabilities, only 3 percent go to school according to Handicap International.
In 2011, Handicap International helped 768,050 disabled people through Health and Prevention; 424,600 through the management and distribution of aid; 332,320 through demining campaigns and 118,550 people through rehabilitation. In the past, Handicap International has intervened in crisis situations such as the Balkan wars (1993), the Rwanda Genocide (1994), the Sierra Leone civil war (1996) and the 2001 earthquake in India, to name a few examples. In total, Handicap International has operated in more than 60 countries, providing equipment and training to better the conditions of the forgotten and the ostracized.
Today, Handicap International centers its actions around the Syrian refugee crisis and condemns international inaction in the face of the atrocities committed. Thanks to its prevention and training programs, Handicap International will have helped almost 37,000 Syrians by June 2013 while teaching 9,000 others how to spot and avoid weapons and explosive war remnants.
It also launched an International Campaign to Ban Landmines which has saved thousands of lives and for which it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize after the 1997 Mine Ban treaty was passed. It is now actively fighting to make this treaty a reality across the globe.
– Lauren Yeh
Sources: Handicap International, ICBL
Photo: Monsoon Adventure
The World Wildlife Fund and Global Poverty
The World Wildlife Fund is one of the most recognizable organizations in the world, working in over 80 countries with more than 5 million members and 2,500 staff. It has a long and illustrious history, involving members as powerful as Prince Phillip from the earliest days of its foundation. The World Wildlife Fund, or WWF as it is more commonly known, was created in 1961 in response to a dire shortage in funding towards conservation issues. At any given moment, the WWF is said to be running 1,300 projects, cooperating with other powerful agencies like the UN, USAID and the World Bank.
The organization’s current practice is focusing on the preservation of species that are important to humankind (e.g. elephants, tuna, whales, dolphins) as well as working to reducing countries’ ecological footprints. (This is a measure of an impact on the environment through commercial activities, like carbon emissions from factories, fishing, forestry and water treatment.)
They also maintain a significant level of outreach to the public by educating on endangered species, environmental degradation, pollution and the state of the planet by aggressively promoting and publishing articles and factsheets. They also offer individuals many opportunities to get involved, not only through donation but also through campaigns, pledges, tips for greener living and adopt-an-animal programs. They are a highly active and interactive organization, attempting to harness public power as well as directing their own considerable influence.
Organizations such as the WWF are integral in the alleviation of poverty. Though it is not a link that is immediately recognizable, sustaining a healthy environment is necessary to provide the world’s population food, shelter and water.
For many in the developed world, conservation is somewhat distanced from our everyday lives; living, as we do, in an urbanized environment, we get our food from supermarkets, we live in concrete houses, we work in the third sector and the weather is largely inconsequential to us. Yet for many, subsistence farming is their only source of food, droughts and floods are a matter of life and death and disturbances in the delicate balance of nature have an immediate and devastating impact on their daily lives.
– Farahnaz Mohammed
Sources: WWF, The Guardian
Photo: WWF
Dangerous Life for those Living on Landfills
Landfills remain out of sight and out of mind for most people living in the United States, but many of the world’s poor depend on these collections of waste for their income and food. Though landfills allow people to survive in the short term, they often sicken and kill the people who attempt to live off of them.
What Is a Landfill?
A landfill is basically a mound of trash composed of many “cells” of compacted materials. In the United States and other developed countries, landfills are covered with several layers of soil at the end of each day and are capped with plastic, soil and grass once they hit capacity. These measures reduce the amount of toxins that leak out of landfills, protecting surrounding communities.
Environmental Hazards
Even the most regulated landfills have been proven to seep huge amounts of leachate, a toxic liquid that is released by trash into groundwater and soil. This chemical causes birth defects and contributes to higher incidences of bladder cancer, liver cancer, lung cancer, leukemia, and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. According to CNN, landfills also seep high amounts of methane, which is “20 times more powerful than CO2” at heating the atmosphere.
Disparities in Regulation
According to the United Nations Environmental Protection Programme, “tens of thousands of square kilometers of land” worldwide have been contaminated by inadequate landfills. Most of these landfills do not meet minimum standards and include massive amounts of untreated waste, yet they have become a source of subsistence for the world’s poor.
Living off of Landfills
Hundreds of thousands of the world’s poorest citizens live and work on landfills, deprived of education and access to basic social services. In Indonesia, for example, more than 2,000 families live on the Bantar Gebang landfill that lies outside of Jakarta, selling or consuming salvageable materials in order to survive. In Baguio, Philippines, a 2011 typhoon caused the wall of the Irisan Dumpsite to collapse, killing three people. Though there are high incidences of death and disease among those who live on or near landfills, most of them lack other opportunities and are forced to live amongst waste to survive.
Solutions
In order to begin addressing the danger faced by those living on landfills, the international community must strengthen environmental regulations and address immediate hazards such as untreated waste. It is costly to redevelop landfills, but doing so can greatly limit the amount of harmful chemicals to which surrounding populations are exposed.
Organizations such as USAID also provide those living on landfills with access to sustainable sources of income. In 2010, USAID helped 930,000 people “to improve their incomes through sustainable natural resource management,” veering them away from the hazardous environment of landfills. USAID is also working with countries such as India, Russia and Turkey to channel methane emissions into sustainable energy. While harmful when released into the atmosphere, methane can be used as an inexpensive energy source.
Thousands continue to subsist off of others’ waste, but USAID and other aid organizations are gradually helping the world’s poor to leave landfills in turn for safer economic opportunities.
– Katie Bandera
Source: CNN, Sixwise, GMA News Online, YouTube, EPA
Source: News 163
The Family Independence Initiative
Mauricio Lim Miller had spent years working in social services in Oakland and San Francisco utterly frustrated at the lack of results and the absence of sustainable change or progress. He knew something needed to change and he knew it had to happen at the bottom level within families. He witnessed how individual communities provided support to their members and helped each achieve personal goals. Miller used a similar concept to create the Family Independence Initiative.
Miller offered families a regular stipend if they would agree to a monthly meeting and to setting and tracking goals for their households. His employees were not authorized to counsel or advise, simply to monitor the families’ goal progress. The program proved to be a great success because, when given the autonomy to set and meet their own goals, people made remarkable changes.
The families’ incomes increased by an average of 27%, and 40% of the families purchased homes within three years. The Family Independence Initiative has expanded to other cities and includes many different communities. Goals differ from place to place but Miller’s policy prevails – provide them with the means in the form of small stipends and they will figure out the right strategy to improve their lives. Some groups want to establish better daycare for children, other communities want their members to be able to own houses, and others hope to set up businesses.
Giving people the responsibility for directing their own change allows them ownership over their success and investment in their future. Jesus Gerena, Director of the Family Independence Initiative explains, “The more families take initiative, the more they watch out for each other, the more they share successes, the less they need us.”
This is not just about helping each individual family but rather about transformative change and altering the way anti-poverty policy is crafted. Programs like the Family Independence Initiative show the potential to break the cycle of poverty in a sustainable way.
– Zoë Meroney
Source: The Boston Globe National Journal
Photo: Facebook