Archive for category: Global Poverty

Key articles and information on global poverty.

World Briefing: Bosnia 101

World Briefing: Bosnia 101

The Bosnian war took place on the other side of the world, but was so profound in horror and destruction that we in the West still speak of it today.

The Bosnian war started in what was formerly Yugoslavia, when ethnic divisions came to a boil. There were 3 main ethnic groups uneasily coexisting: the Catholic Croats, the Muslim Bosniaks and the Orthodox Serbs. The war started after the Bosniaks and Croats attempted to secede and declare independence. They were subsequently attacked by the Bosnian Serbs, who were against their independence. The conflict was mainly territorial, with the groups warring over allocation of land and ethnicity.

Bosnia’s war was characterized by its brutality, particularly by the Serbian forces. While the entire war was marked by extreme violence and cruelty, the two most infamous events were the Siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre, and through their horror, they have come to symbolize the conflict.

The Siege of Sarajevo was the longest siege on a city in the history of modern warfare, lasting from 1992 to 1996. Survivors describe a return to the Stone Age, without access to food, medicine, water, electricity or gas. Citizens lived in constant fear of random shellings by the Serbs, or attacks from others within the city who were desperate for food or ammo. The Serbs deliberately attempted to exterminate Bosnian men and boys, and rape and sexual violence were common weapons of war, against girls as young as 12.

The massacre at Srebrenica (also known as the Srebrenica genocide) saw the organized killing of over 8,000 men and boys at the town of Srebrenica. Accounts of the massacre are reminiscent of the holocaust, with mass transport and murder of citizens. Though the UN attempted to establish a protected perimeter, it was unable to prevent Serbian soldiers from murdering and brutalizing citizens at will. The Serbian government issued an official apology for it in 2010.

The war was a bloody, complex and hideously drawn-out affair in which the Bosniaks and Croats were slowly but surely being defeated until a NATO intervention in 1994. In 1995, after nearly a month of negotiations, the Dayton Agreement was signed, creating the Bosnia and Herzegovina of today.  Still relatively recent, the leaders of the respective armies and those who were in political power are still undergoing trial for war crimes. Slobodan Milošević, who was president at the time, died while awaiting a verdict at The Hague.

Many make reference to the Bosnian war as a result of a lack of international intervention in times of crisis. Then US Assistant Secretary of State referred to it as “the greatest failing of the West since the 1930s.”

– Farahnaz Mohammed

Sources: The History Place
Photo: Serbrenica Genocide

Social Media Used in Social Revolutions

Social Revolutions
More than two years ago, social media helped Egyptian activists organize massive street protests that lead to the end of President Hosni Mubarak’s reign. With billions of people logging onto Facebook, Twitter and Youtube everyday, it is no wonder that social media has become a celebrated and useful fixture in the voice of the people. However, as quickly as revolutions are sparked, third-party antagonists and governments are sure to falsify what is posted on these sites in an attempt to silence people of opposition. In Egypt, sites that seemed beneficial at the start of the revolution have transformed into venues used to spark violence, hate and oppression revealing the dark side of social media used in social revolutions.

During the Tahrir Square uprising in early 2011, networking websites, like Twitter and Facebook, allowed anti-regime activists to organize mass rallies while providing platforms to articulate political demands. Today, those sites allow a rampant slew of messages focused on provoking anger, hatred and in some cases unsubstantiated rumor. Since the revolution, provocative photos or videos appeared on social media venues which, after eliciting angry reactions, were later proved entirely false or highly exaggerated.

The anonymity of the cyber world is partly to blame for the abuse of social media worldwide and begs the question of validity regarding how effective social media is when used in a full blown revolution. A prominent Egyptian political analyst, Ammar Ali Hassan, notes that one of the main downsides of online social media is the ability of anonymous parties to create fake websites or social media accounts and to issue statements on behalf of political figures or groups that are in fact false. Another explanation of the unbridled use of social media comes from Adel Abdel-Saddiq, social media expert at the Cairo-based Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies. Abdel-Saddiq believes that a significant problem is the lack of legal oversight of social media platforms in Egypt, where “laws against libel and slander only apply to traditional media – i.e., television, radio and newspapers – but not to the Internet.”

– Kira Maixner

Source: INTER PRESS SOURCE
Photo: Policy Mic

10 Facts You Should Know About the Nobel Peace Prize

10 Facts You Should Know About the Nobel Peace Prize
It is a prize that is both coveted and renowned worldwide. As the date of announcement grows closer, here are ten facts to know about the Nobel Peace Prize.

  1. This year the Nobel Peace Prize will be announced at 11:00 AM on October 9, 2013 by Thorbjørn Jagland, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
  2. Every year, the Nobel Prize (including the Peace Prize) is awarded in Oslo, Norway and administered by the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden for achievements in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and for peace.
  3. There is a 50 Year Secrecy Rule in regard to the prize nominees and the grounds they were selected. The Committee does not announce the names of nominees to either the media or the candidates themselves.
  4. Since 1901, the Prize has been awarded 93 times to 124 laureates. It was not awarded on 19 occasions: in 1914-1918, 1923, 1924, 1928, 1932, 1939- 1943, 1948, 1955-1956, 1966-1967 and 1972.
  5. The 2011 Prize was awarded jointly to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkol Karman “for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work”.
  6. Of the 100 individuals awarded the the Prize, 15 are women. The first time a the prize was awarded to a woman was in 1905, to Bertha von Suttner.
  7. The work of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has been honored the most – three times – by a Nobel Peace Prize.
  8. The Vietnamese politician Le Duc Tho, awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize jointly with US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, is the only person who has declined the Prize. They were both awarded the Prize for negotiating the Vietnam peace accord. Le Doc Tho said that he was not in a position to accept the Nobel Prize, citing the situation in Vietnam as his reason.
  9. The oldest Prize Laureate to date is Joseph Rotblat, who was 87 years old when he was awarded in 1995.
  10. To date, the youngest Prize Laureate is Tawakkol Karman, 32 years old when awarded the 2011 Peace Prize.

– Kira Maixner
Source: Nobel Prize
Photo: Essence

How to Make Poverty History

How to Make Poverty History
Last month, Australian national Matt Napier, the Ambassador of Make Poverty History, had set out to walk 5 million steps to raise global poverty awareness. He is walking from Perth to Sydney, a journey that is approximately 4,400 km and will span along 3 to 4 months; Matt will be walking around 35km a day while bouncing an AFL football! Along the journey, Matt is stopping at schools, community groups, and churches to talk to them about how global poverty can end through foreign aid success.

He is hoping to get as many people as he can to sign the Movement to End Poverty petition, which is a petition to Australian leaders that the Australian people have voiced the need for their country to play a bigger role in the fight to eradicate poverty. Last year, Matt rode his bike from Perth to Canberra while supporting the Make Poverty History campaign. The journey lasted him 6 weeks and during it, he successfully talked with 250,000 people.

– Leen Abdallah

Source: World Vision Campaign

Elizabeth Pisani’s TED Talk: Sex, Drugs and HIV — Let’s Get Rational


Elizabeth Pisani is an assumption-busting independent researcher and analyst, who has worked in the field of HIV for 15 years in four countries. She believes that the world is failing to understand and manage the realities of HIV. She also shows how politics and “morality” have hogtied funding, and advocates for putting dollars where they can actually make a difference.

In Pisani’s TED Talk, she firstly points out an idea that people get HIV not just because they do stupid things. For most of them, when they are doing stupid things, they have perfectly rational reasons. We both know there are two major ways to spread HIV; sex and drugs. Pisani leads us to see problems behind the sex and drugs. Most of the people in Africa know sex and blood can transfer HIV. They also knowwhere to buy clean needles, but because of gender inequality and poverty, sometimes people choose to “rationalize” things even though they know there is a great chance that they may get HIV. At the end of her speech, she tells us a story about a transgender hooker on the street of Jakarta named lnes. She quotes Ines saying “why is prevalence still rising? It’s all politics. When you get to politics, nothing makes sense”. She believes that everyone has a duty to demand our politicians to make policy based on scientific evidence and on common sense.

-Caiqing Jin(Kelly)
Source: TED Talk

Capitol Hill: A Glimpse of Prince Harry

Capitol Hill: A Glimpse of Prince Harry
In his first visit to the United States since the infamous Las Vegas scandal, Prince Harry and other members of the Royal Family visited Washington D.C. The Prince’s first stop was Capitol Hill to view an anti-landmine photography exhibition in honor of the HALO Trust’s 25th Anniversary. HALO is an organization that works to remove explosives left behind in war-torn countries. The exhibit took place at the Russell Senate Rotunda and long-time HALO patrons, such as the Prince, and HALO board members were not the only exhibit attendees.

Filling the balconies and lingering in hallways, the women of Capitol Hill were out with a mission in order to welcome the Prince. The Rotunda was filled with women, presumed Capitol Hill staffers, intent on getting iPhone documentation and a glimpse of Prince Harry’s visit. Later that evening, he was scheduled to give a speech regarding HALO’s work at the home of British Ambassador Peter Westmacott.

The Prince’s trip did not stop at the Capitol. Prince Harry was scheduled to tour Arlington National Cemetery, then the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Later, he was scheduled to visit Colorado to be followed by visiting parts of New Jersey that were hit by Hurricane Sandy. His last stop on the stateside tour was a polo fundraising event in Greenwich Village in Manhattan.

– Kira Maixner

Source: Huffington Post

Business Process Outsourcing & Global Poverty

Business Process Outsourcing & Global Poverty

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) has long been regarded by Americans solely as a process that takes away internal jobs and substitutes them for jobs overseas. However, the process could be doing a lot more to combat global poverty as well as boost the US economy than can be seen on the surface.

While working for Global Catalyst Partners, a man named Michael Chertok was able to see the results of BPO firsthand. He was given the task of creating jobs for the poor in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and throughout the years, has given the opportunity of experience and greater education to more than 500 youth from the area. Many have been able to obtain university degrees and go on to professional jobs, earning “over five times more than the average high school graduate in Cambodia”.

BPO has also had an effect in other places, like the Philippines, which posted a 6.6% GDP growth in 2012. The Philippines look to remain one of the fastest-growing countries, facilitated in the most part by investments and economic aid from other countries. This economic development not only benefits the countries themselves but also those that invested in them.

Providing aid in order to lift regions out of poverty feeds back into the cycle by providing new consumer markets for investors to take advantage of. So, the more aid invested in other developing countries and impoverished areas, the greater the return in terms of new markets and a dramatic decrease in global poverty.

– Sarah Rybak

Sources: Huffington Post
Photo: Donny Brook

USAID Launches Infrastructure Fund for Africa

USAID Launches Infrastructure Fund for Africa

The Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Rajiv Shah, the President of the African Development Bank (AfDB), Donald Kaberuka, and the Swedish Minister for International Development Cooperation, Gunilla Carlsson, recently announced a new fund called the Agriculture Fast Track. The Agriculture Fast Track is a $25 million fund that will spur greater private investment in agricultural infrastructure projects in sub-Saharan Africa. The Agriculture Fast Track fund is the first of its kind.

The announcement was made at the Grow Africa Forum in South Africa. Grow Africa is a partnership of the African Union, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, and the World Economic Forum. It works with eight African countries to engage governments, civil society, and the private sector to advance sustainable agricultural growth.

The Agriculture Fast Track will spur agriculture infrastructure development in countries that are members of the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, strengthening the links from farmers to markets to tables. It will also finance upstream work of project design, including feasibility studies, market analyses, site surveys, business plans, financial modeling, and other activities necessary to ensure project quality and bank-ability by supporting each project with up to $1.5 million. These project preparation grants will ultimately facilitate access to more funding for agriculture infrastructure because banks and other investors require this documentation to issue commercial loans.

The New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition was launched last year by President Obama at the G-8 summit and includes six member countries: Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mozambique, and Tanzania. The New Alliance matches market-oriented regulatory reforms in these six countries with $3.7 billion in commitments from the private sector in agriculture.

The fund will be managed by the African Development Bank with the USAID pledging $15 million and the Government of Sweden, pledging $10 million, respectively.

Shah said, “Since the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition was founded last year, we’ve seen member countries make serious reforms that have led to real progress. The launch of the Agriculture Fast Track allows African farmers to take advantage of these reforms through fast-tracked infrastructure projects that will better deliver their products to markets.”

Carlsson noted, “By targeting the project preparation stage of projects, the Agriculture Fast Track will advance infrastructure projects when funding is most acutely needed to pivot from planning to construction. This targeted approach allows us to catalyze significantly more private sector investments and ensure the highest standards in terms of social and environmental sustainability.”

–  Essee Oruma

Source: USAID
Photo:NEPAD

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How Bono Got Interested in Global Poverty

How Bono Got Interested in Global Poverty

Nowadays, Bono’s face is synonymous with activism. The lead singer of U2 is known as much for his humanitarian work as for his music, if not more. Known for his charisma and tirelessness, Bono has been championing causes such as poverty reduction and AIDS relief for decades. He is the celebrity face of activism and has had incredible impact in garnering momentum for the movement of international aid.

Bono got his start in activism after he performed at Bob Geldorf’s groundbreaking fundraiser, Live Aid, in the late eighties. The performance spurred a month-long trip to Ethiopia with his wife, Ali Hewson, where they worked on a famine relief project. The two said they were stunned by the conditions, and Bono walked away determined to change what he’d seen. He repeatedly tells the story of the end of his visit, when a man asked the singer to take his son with him. As Bono explains, “He knew in Ireland that his son would live and in Ethiopia, his son would die…At that moment, I became the worst thing of all; I became a rock star with a cause.”

After that, his humanitarian work began in earnest and has only increased in intensity and scale. The early 90s saw tours around Central America and campaigns with major organizations to rally support for development work. As U2’s fame grew, so did Bono’s influence. He is a key player in a number of powerful advocacy organizations including DATA (Debt, Aid, Trade, Africa), the ONE campaign and the Make Poverty History movement, as well as launching an ethical fashion campaign and promoting the RED campaign. He’s famous for using his celebrity star power to draw attention to emergency causes throughout the world and has become a regular at political events. He’s been credited with the implementation of the US’s massive and incredible AIDS program in Africa and been awarded an honorary knighthood for his efforts.

– Farahnaz Mohammed

Sources: TED – Bono’s Call to Action for Africa
Photo: Andpop

What Are Social Safety Nets?

What Are Social Safety Nets?
Now that extreme global poverty has an expiration date, we can begin to think more closely about the methods that are helping us achieve this momentous goal. While some of them may seem obvious, such as providing better education and increased numbers of job opportunities, others are not so obvious. One of these methods is the idea of social safety nets.

Social safety nets are programs that help the poorest and most vulnerable people stay out of extreme poverty. These are the people who teeter on the edge of poverty and could fall back into their old lifestyle quickly if not helped. The programs help cushion them from unexpected crises, such as if a family member gets sick or their crops are destroyed in a natural disaster.

These social safety nets come in many forms and from many places. They can be in the form of cash, food, healthcare, or schooling, and they can come from the state, donors, or the private sector. The programs can also be altered to fit the particular needs of the country, and are not limited to countries with certain income levels. Also, increased technology is helping spread the rate at which people receive help from the programs, as well as allowing the aid to go to the people who need it most, therefore increasing its efficiency.

Social safety nets are one of the most important factors that can help not only eradicate extreme poverty but also make sure it’s gone for good.

– Katie Brockman

Source: The Guardian
Photo: NCRW