Category: Humanitarian Aid

Mobile phones impacting health care in Africa

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A little over a decade ago there were around 100,000 phone lines in Nigeria, mostly landlines run by the state-owned telecoms behemoth, NITEL. Today NITEL is dead, and Nigeria has close to 100 million mobile phone lines, making it Africa’s largest telecoms market.

Across the rest of the continent the trends are similar: between 2000 and 2010, Kenyan mobile phone firm Safaricom saw its subscriber base increase in excess of 500-fold. In 2010 alone the number of mobile phone users in Rwanda grew by 50 per cent, figures from the country’s regulatory agency show.

Amongst the ways lives are changing as a result: A simple text-messaging solution was all 28-year-old Ghanaian doctoral student, Bright Simons needed for his innovative plan to tackle counterfeit medicine in African countries. The World Health Organization estimates that nearly 30% of drugs supplied in developing countries are fake. (In 2009, nearly 100 Nigerian babies died after they were given teething medicine that contained a solvent usually found in antifreeze.)

Simons’ pioneering idea was to put unique codes within scratch cards on medicine packaging that buyers can send via SMS to a designated number to find out if the drug is genuine or not. The system is now being used by several countries in Africa and rolled out to places such as Asia where there are similar problems with counterfeit drugs.

In South Africa there’s Impilo, a service that allows people to find healthcare providers anywhere in the country 24 hours a day, using their mobile phones.

Mobile phones are going to play an increasingly important role in mediating the provision of better healthcare to the citizens of African countries. Phone companies are realizing that mobiles are highly effective — and potentially lucrative — for the dissemination of health and lifestyle tips.

 

IKEA & UNICEF partner to provide better lives for Indian children

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The partnership between IKEA and UNICEF has worked towards providing a better live for over 74 million children in India.

The partnership was launched with a campaign in the state of Uttar Pradesh to promote children’s welfare, and was expanded to include the state of Andhra Pradesh in 2006, especially targeting the cotton industry to end child labor. In 2008, the partnership expanded to fifteen states with the aim to promote child rights, survival, growth and development. It is estimated that more than 28 million children are engaged in child labor and an estimated 4,700 children under the age of five die every day.

The philanthropic arm of IKEA, the IKEA Foundation, is the largest corporate cash donor to the 65-year-old United Nations humanitarian program, UNICEF. In the past ten years, these are some highlights of the partnership:
• 370,000 children screened for malnourishment, and 56,500 children treated.
• 2.14 million women were taught the benefits of breastfeeding their children.
• 32 million homes now have toilets, and 67 percent of schools have access to toilets, improved drinking water and hand washing facilities.
• Children in 13,120 schools benefit from newly trained teachers and better curriculum.
• 15,000 children in India’s cotton and carpet belts now go to normal schools after being taught basic reading, writing and math skills in bridge schools.
• 600 new Child Protection Committees set up to end child labor practices.
• More than 500,000 leaders, community members and officials trained to protect children

The work of the IKEA Foundation in India is even more remarkable when you consider that they do not yet retail their products in the country, though this might be changing soon.

Devastating effect of higher food prices on developing nations

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As last month’s World Population Day reminded us, we have over 7 billion mouths to feed. And we have to make a place at the table for the 9 million-plus projected by 2050. To do so, we’ll have to ramp up food production by 70 percent, according to United Nations estimates.

In 2011, world food prices went up by some 37 percent during the Russian wheat crisis, driving another 44 million people into poverty, according to the World Bank. This year, the effects of drought may signal more of the same for food prices in coming months.

And climate scientists predict extreme weather events with the potential to disrupt the food supply – including floods and droughts – will be far more common in the coming years.

Changing demographics are also putting new strains on our food supply, as millions of “up and coming” consumers in places like India and China buy more milk and meat to reflect newly middle class tastes, as chronicled in the Journal of Nutrition. In just this decade, there will be a 30 percent increase in global demand for milk, Tetra Pak’s own dairy index forecasts.

Furthermore, food crops and farmland are increasingly being diverted into biofuel production around the globe, making commodity crops scarcer and more expensive.

Price spikes hurt people in developing nations more, simply because they spend a much higher fraction of their incomes on food.  Whereas U.S. households spend about 6 percent of their total expenditures on food, this compares with 35 percent in India and 45 percent in Kenya. As a result, a major uptick in food prices in developing parts of the world is beyond devastating — it’s destabilizing.

A holistic approach in grantmaking

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Community foundations in South Africa often use a holistic approach in their grantmaking, addressing multiple, inter-connected issues simultaneously, such as education, employment and health care.

Community foundation leaders in South Africa intentionally focus on creating positive local change from the bottom up, initiated by citizens, instead of the top down, initiated by elected officials, say those in the field.

“If we believe in the community foundation movement, and I do, we need to get down to the ground level and talk with the people living there and hear how they are affected by our community’s problems,” said Beulah Fredericks, executive director of the Community Development Foundation Western Cape based in Cape Town, South Africa. “We need to hear their voices and what their aspirations are. We should be asking: ‘What do you want to change? Where do you want your life to go?'”

Elsewhere in Africa, community foundations that are in varying stages of development are being created in response to local needs. These newer foundations are able to bring a holistic approach to their grantmaking, which means addressing multiple, inter-connected issues simultaneously, such as education, employment and health care.

“Before, people in a community would be told: ‘We’ve got money for water; where do you want your pump?'” one participant says. “Instead of assuming they all need pumps, community foundations are instead asking: ‘What do you see as your most urgent need? What assets do you have? How can we help you meet this need?'”

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Turning Oppression into Opportunity

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Nicholas Kristof likes to take his kids with him when he travels, but they don’t spend a lot of time at ­resorts. In 2008, he took his eldest son, Gregory, then 16, to South Sudan, and they sneaked without visas into two parts of northern Sudan—Blue Nile and Southern Kordofan, where the war is now raging. At 13, his daughter, ­Caroline, complained to him that her friends always went to the Caribbean for vacation. “So we went to the Caribbean—Haiti,” he says with a wry smile. “The cholera clinics.”

The New York Times columnist, and co-author of Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, Nicholas Kristof has raised our consciousness about the struggle for gender equality and forced us to look at injustice around the world. Kristof uses his twice-weekly New York Times column as a bully pulpit to advocate against one uncomfortable global injustice or another, from government abuses in the Sudan to the torture of circumcision that mothers ­inflict on their daughters across Africa and parts of Asia.

He has spent the last ten years focusing on the oppression of women. Half the Sky, published in 2009, tells heart-wrenching, grisly stories of female exploitation, sex trafficking, slavery, and death. Not the typical stuff of Oprah’s Book Club, but after Winfrey devoted an entire show to it, sales of the book skyrocketed and it spent more than 60 weeks on the best-seller list. The book inspired the kind of grassroots activism that MoveOn.org would envy: It’s been discussed among prison populations, turned book groups from Connecticut to Oregon into fund-raisers for women’s organizations, and inspired a documentary series by the same name that will air on PBS in October.

Today, Kristof continues to make us think about the world’s unsung victims and heroes. “We in the news business don’t cover reproductive health, sex trafficking, and maternal mortality very well,” says Kristof, who has made it his job to change that record.

“People always ask me, ‘Do you get depressed when reporting on poverty and global conflicts?’ …I go back because it is hard to deal with.”

Revolutionary toilets to provide safe sanitation

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A toilet that uses little or no water is expected to improve sanitation in the developing world. Last year the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, named after the Microsoft co-founder and his wife, gave grants to eight universities around the world to help create a hygienic toilet that is safe and affordable and can transform waste into energy.

About 2.6 billion people – or 40 per cent of world’s population mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia – lack access to safe sanitation and are forced to defecate in the open.

Open defecation leads to sanitation problems that cause 1.5 million children under five to die each year.

The winner of the Reinvent the Toilet fair was a team from the California Institute of Technology. Professor Michael Hoffman’s design toilet is solar powered, generating hydrogen gas and electricity [EPA]

The designs needed to operate at a cost of no more than five cents a day and would ideally capture energy or other resources.

Other designs submitted included a lavatory that used microwave energy to turn human waste into electricity. Another turned excrement into charcoal, while a third used urine for flushing.

The Toilet Revolution is coming

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This week, engineers, philanthropists, media and more from around the world will gather at the the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle for the “Reinvent the Toilet Fair,” a $3 million project funded in grants by the Foundation that will showcase revolutionary new toilets that don’t need water, electricity or even a connection to a sewage system.

The goal of the project is to help improve the lives of the 2.6 billion people in the third world who do not have access to a toilet.

Lack of access to proper sewage can expose people to deadly diseases, and as Bill Gates notes on his blog, “we need new ideas to help reduce disease and find new ways to turn crap into valuable stuff, like fuel, fertilizer, and fresh water.”

Leaving Hollywood for Cambodia’s garbage dumps

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Scott Neeson’s final epiphany came one day in June 2004. The high-powered Hollywood executive stood, ankle deep in trash, at the sprawling landfill of Stung Meanchey, a poor shantytown in Cambodia’s capital.

In a haze of toxic fumes and burning waste, swarms of Phnom Penh’s most destitute were rooting through refuse, jostling for scraps of recyclables in newly dumped loads of rubbish. They earned 4,000 riel ($1) a day—if they were lucky. Many of the garbage sorters were young children. Covered in filthy rags, they were scruffy, sickly, and sad.

Clasped to Mr. Neeson’s ear was his cellphone. Calling the movie mogul from a US airport, a Hollywood superstar’s agent was complaining bitterly about inadequate in-flight entertainment on a private jet that Sony Pictures Entertainment, where Neeson was head of overseas theatrical releases, had provided for his client.

Neeson overheard the actor griping in the background. ” ‘My life wasn’t meant to be this difficult.’ Those were his exact words,” Neeson says. “I was standing there in that humid, stinking garbage dump with children sick with typhoid, and this guy was refusing to get on a Gulfstream IV because he couldn’t find a specific item onboard,” he recalls. “If I ever wanted validation I was doing the right thing, this was it.”

Doing the right thing meant turning his back on a successful career in the movie business, with his $1 million salary. Instead, he would dedicate himself full time to a new mission: to save hundreds of the poorest children in one of the world’s poorest countries.

Much to everyone’s surprise, within months the Australian native, who as president of 20th Century Fox International had overseen the global success of block-busters like “Titanic,” “Braveheart,” and “Die Another Day,” quit Hollywood. He sold his mansion in Los Angeles and held a garage sale for “all the useless stuff I owned.” He sold off his Porsche and yacht, too.

His sole focus would now be his charity which he had set up the previous year after coming face to face, while on vacation in Cambodia, with children living at the garbage dump.  [Read full CS Monitor article]

 Further reading     Further reading

 

Find work with purpose

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“Many people today have not been given vocabularies to talk about what virtue is, what character consists of, and in which way excellence lies, so they just talk about community service, figuring that if you are doing the sort of work that Bono celebrates than you must be a good person.” –  David Brooks, The New York Times 

A CSR Blog excerpt:

The new wave of social entrepreneurs believes work needs to be meaningful. What kinds of people are drawn to careers devoted to social change? Where should they work, given the changing roles of governments, philanthropic organizations, and corporations? How can young people who want to make a difference find jobs that matter?

Should you work for a profit, a non-profit or the government? Or for a profitable non-profit? Or for an unprofitable, grant-taking for-profit? Or a for-profit foundation that makes grants to the government?

If you’re a student who is hoping to find meaningful work in the new social economy, here’s some advice I hope will help your search:

1. Don’t be pigeonholed by your academic credentials. Social organizations that are becoming more businesslike need people who know about finance, marketing, operations, and strategic planning. Corporations that put a high priority on social outcomes need people who know about social service and sociology. Governments need people who aren’t tainted with the bureaucracy and can get things done. In the new social economy you’re valuable in ways that you may never have thought about.

2. Talk about your own vision of social change. The most successful organizations in the new economy are those that are working backwards from a future vision of social change. They are inventing as they go and are looking for likeminded people who have the courage to trust in their vision. Share what you believe and discuss issues that you’re passionate about.

3. Understand and stand by your social purpose. There is no shortage of talented, highly educated people, who have had really interesting volunteer and intern experiences. There are far fewer people who have a sense of purpose about why they’ve chosen a particular academic discipline and why a particular work or volunteer experience was so meaningful.

4. Don’t settle. In his 2005 Commencement Speech at Stanford, Steve Jobs said, “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking.”