But… We’ve had a look at the poverty projections produced by different groups and found that the absolute numbers reported can be vastly different depending on the measurements used to produce the report. When reading reports such as the UN MDG report, it is really important to take a close look at the absolute numbers reported and also how they were produced, in order to thoroughly and objectively evaluate our progress towards achieving the MDGs.
The most noteworthy finding in the report has to do with MDG 1, which is to halve the number of people living in extreme poverty by 2015. According to the UN MDG report, we are well on track to achieving this goal as the overall poverty rate is expected to fall below 15%, which means by 2015 less than 900 million people will be living on less than $1.25 a day.
The UN report stresses the importance of inclusive and equitable economic growth for development and poverty reduction using the examples of East Asia, particularly India and China, who report the sharpest reductions in poverty due to momentous and rapid growth.
The report states that extreme poverty in both China and India fell by about 455 million between 1990 and 2005, and that 320 million more people are expected to be lifted out of poverty by 2015.
The Millenium Development Goals provide a framework for halving extreme poverty by 2015 - in just three years time.
However, poverty projections in the Brookings Report on global poverty are much more optimistic. The Brookings Institution researchers found that MDG 1 was met sometime in 2007, and project that by 2015 there will be less than 600 million people living in extreme poverty - less than half the number regularly cited in describing the number of poor people in the world today.
Yet the World Bank disputes the conclusions of the Brookings report, stating that it relies heavily on forecasts rather than actual household survey data.
The forecasts assume that there is no change in inequality during periods of rapid economic growth, which is an incorrect assumption. The World Bank states that the rising inequality that comes with economic growth dulls the impact of growth on poverty, and therefore results in a lower poverty projection than what is projected from forecasts. We looked at this dilemma in our recent post, here.
Brookings acknowledge that global poverty projections are difficult to measure and often out of date by the time they are published. They say that ultimately, anyone who wishes to measure global poverty faces a trade-off between timeliness and accuracy. They question whether the balance struck by the World Bank – whereby policymakers rely on poverty estimates that are up to 6 years old - is appropriate to today’s rapidly changing world.
It is important when reading documents such as the UN MDG report, to understand that the poverty projections reported are rough estimates, which vary according to how the research was conducted.
The absolute numbers depend on what assumptions researchers make about future economic growth rates and the link between growth and poverty, including the effect of growing income inequality. These relationships will also vary from country to country, so it is important to remember that numbers are not concrete. A range of estimates for poverty projections in 2015 is probably more useful than a single number.
Regardless, these findings are really exciting.
“Poverty reduction of this magnitude is unparalleled in history: never before have so many people been lifted out of poverty over such a brief period of time.”– Duncan Green, Oxfam
Save the Children’s ‘Born to Shine’ TV special came to a dramatic conclusion this weekend with comedian Jason Mansford stunning audiences with his opera performance – and Save the Children raising more than £1,788, 000.
The final was packed with talent from the final five candidates, voted through from the 15 celebrities that took part in the show. Providing a nice mix of campaign video and light hearted talent contest, the final included spectacular performances from actor Nick Moran, comedian Jason Mansford and Eastenders star Tracy-Anne Oberman. Throughout the series contestants with no previous experience learned to play the piano, to rap, beatbox, sing, dance and drum in just a few weeks - all because of the importance of Save the Children's campaign to give children across the world a better life.
‘No child born to die’ is a campaign to help prevent 8 million children across the world dying from preventable disease every single year. One third of these are from diarrhoea and pneumonia – diseases that are preventable. Deaths that are unacceptable.
Born to Shine is the hugely successful series for ITV that combines this message with light hearted talent contest, celebrity support and a clear point:
“Every child is born with the potential to shine, but right now, across the world, too many children don’t get the chance.”
- Natasha Kaplinski, presenter
The programme turns the popular talent show format on its head- with celebrities learning new skills from some exceptionally talented children. Not only is it refreshing to see the concept re-imagined, and it is a hook that works very well indeed, the show also manages to avoid being all about the glamour. The show has none of the anticipation and delay tactics that are common to similar shows the X factor and Britain’s got Talent… and is underlined with some hard hitting truths about child poverty around the world.
99% of child deaths occur in developing countries because of lack of healthcare – in places like Sierre Leone, Uganda, Tanzania and Myanmar. Africa accounts for one third of Global diseases affecting mothers and children, but only 3% of the world’s health workers and 1% of global health spending.
The statistics are shocking - but Save the Children partnered with ITV and Morrisons to show us just what some children can do when they are given a chance.
Through the series, we were introduced to 13 year old elite tap dancer Sophie, 15 year old professional pianist Isata, 14yr old operatic singer George Clarke, and my personal favourite, harpist Ben. The children are amazing – and there are few words to describe how well the show juxtaposes the sheer talent of British children, who have myriad opportunities, and those children across the world who struggle to find food, attain good health and have to choose between work and school. And to make it absolutely clear, that children across the world are just as smart, determined and exceptionally talented as those in the show.
Here at Malaria No More UK we have just launched ‘Beat The Mozzy’, a campaign featuring ‘Ziii’ the malicious mozzy, to mark World Mosquito Day on 20 August.
Four 30 second cartoons have been produced by a team of creatives at the Cartoon Network UK and feature Ziii on her tireless quest to spread malaria far and wide. Happily, she is frequently foiled by barriers to her bloodsucking, including mosquito nets and mosquito spray.
We hope the cartoons will inspire people to get involved in the fight against malaria. You can share them with your friends via facebook or twitter and take on special ‘Mozzy Missions’ see below for more information!
Why Malaria?
Malaria tragically claims 781,000 lives every year with over 90% of all deaths in Africa. Those most risk from catching malaria are children under 5 and pregnant women. But malaria is preventable and treatable. In 2010 alone 485 children’s lives were saved every day from malaria thanks to the use of nets, sprays, tests and medicines.
Malaria No More UK champions efforts for people across the UK to get involved and help save lives. Last year we raised funds and awareness that helped to protect over two million people from malaria in Africa.
It’s the fact that we can make a difference and success is possible that got me involved in the fight against malaria. It is brilliant to work on an issue where you can really see what a difference it makes. I’ve been to Ghana a few times to see our work there and always come back even more inspired than before. You can read more on our website. We have lots of stories of those we help on the ground and those who help fundraise and campaign to support MNMUK. If you have a story to tell please about malaria add your own!
Parents Bonafactious and Valencia live with their family in rural Namibia. Their home is in an isolated part of the country meaning they are officially some of the ‘hardest to reach’ communities with little access to malaria prevention and treatment support. Their youngest daughter, Patricia is just one year old so especially vulnerable, as children under five account for 85% of all malaria deaths in Africa.
Bonafactious remembers suffering from malaria when he grew up, all too often this meant missing school for months at a time. Bonafactious recalls: “Many of us were suffering from malaria at home and missed out on our education. One time I was in hospital for two months and got very behind at school”.
Thanks to your support we funded a project to deliver mosquito nets to the Oroses family along with practical malaria prevention advice and information to help them live malaria free. Bonfactious is grateful for our support and relieved to have the nets and to know how to use them. He said: “I am very glad now we have the nets. I hope my children will be safe from malaria and able to stay in school”.
Namibia is seeing great progress in ending deaths from malaria with a 95% drop in malaria deaths in the last decade. Malaria No More UK is supporting Namibia’s ultimate goal of eliminating malaria by 2020 thanks to ongoing access to nets, malaria tests, medicines and education. You can read more about Malaria No More UK’s work here Namibia
What else are we doing?
To raise awareness in the UK we are working with MTVUK on a Music to Save Lives campaign. MTVUK very kindly made an advert for us that they are promoting this year. And if you are lucky enough to go the V festival you will see the ad played throughout the two days and can enter a text competition to win tickets to V festival 2012.
We would love you to get involved and help make malaria no more!
• Twitter:retweet our @malarianomoreuk tweets.
• Facebook:follow us on facebook and ‘Like’ us too. Tag us on your update so it comes up on our wall too.
• YouTube: we are featuring a short version of the Cartoon Network animation on - and you can also see our MTV advert there too. Please favourite these and promote to them to your friends.
• Fundraise: there are lots of exciting ways you can fundraise for malaria no more. Join the MNMUK ladies team for the addidas women’s challenge in September or sky dive for malaria no more. See our website for more details.
End the Cycle is a poverty campaign with a difference. At first glance, it might not seem like it – isn’t it just using people’s stories from Cambodia and the Solomon Islands to highlight issues of poverty in relation to disability? That might seem fairly standard, but it is the story behind the stories that makes this campaign so distinctive – because it has been developed using a human rights-based approach.
End the Cycle aims to achieve empowerment and increased awareness of the cycle of poverty and disability by practising inclusion. So people with disabilities and their organisations have had genuine participation in every stage of resource development, retaining control over the use of their own words and images – local ownership was very important to us.
The decision to develop this campaign came when we realised that most people don’t know about the links between poverty and disability. We asked ourselves who should tell them – and felt strongly that it should be people with disabilities themselves. As an organisation, CBM also wanted to explore and learn from new ways of collecting resources.
We started gathering resources for this campaign about a year ago. We spent two weeks gathering footage, interviews and photographs in Cambodia, and another two weeks doing the same thing in the Solomon Islands. Our resource collection team included people with disabilities from the local community through grassroots organisations – the Cambodia Disabled People’s Organisation and People with Disability Solomon Islands. Interestingly, these local partners were not existing partners of CBM, which was a deliberate strategy to increase the objectivity of stories – we didn’t want people to feel they had to tell a certain story to “the donor”.
After several weeks of editing video, compiling the interviews and creating factsheets around various issues related to poverty and disability, we sent the materials back to Cambodia and the Solomon Islands to be shared with the people who had first shared their stories with us. Using a translator, participants were able to see the videos, the photos we had taken and the stories. They checked that they were being represented just as they had wanted to be – as active, contributing members of their families and communities, with the same rights, hopes and challenges as everyone else. This process in itself contributes to the empowerment of people with disabilities - who are so often ignored. Of course, it also slowed down the process of completing our resources – but we think it was worth it. The Disabled People’s Organisations also appreciated it and have plans to use the campaign materials in their own advocacy and training of other organisations.
We believe this campaign brings a balanced and thoughtful approach to storytelling and is aligned with the slogan of the disability-rights movement: “Nothing about Us without Us”. People with disabilities are speaking for themselves rather than being spoken about by others, recognised appropriately as the ones who know best about their lived experience of disability.
How we represent people we work with - especially in this age of limited privacy and the scope of the internet - is something CBM is exploring through this campaign. We share this methodology both to hold ourselves accountable, and to share with other organizations who might be wrestling with how to communicate about complex and multi-dimensional people as well as building understanding amongst our followers. We believe this approach is not only helpful for accountability, but allows our campaign to be more authentic and compelling.
We would like to continue and extend our work with this human rights-based approach. It was definitely positive to work with Disabled People’s Organisations in the story collection – it felt like a respectful partnership, where people could say what they thought. This also meant that sometimes we didn’t get exactly the quotes we were hoping for and couldn’t reinterpret people’s stories. This was challenging at times but a reality of working with the methodology of the campaign. When we are next gathering stories, we would also build more time into the feedback process – so we weren’t rushing people in Cambodia and the Solomon Islands to give us their feedback.
What do you think about the campaign? Is this different to the way you’ve seen disability portrayed before? Do you think it is feasible for more stories of people in the majority world to be collected in this way? We’d love to see your comments below.
We invite you to read more about our approach, sign the “End the Cycle” pledge, and follow @EndTheCycleAUS on Twitter and Facebook.
It’s a number – the amount Galatasaray are rumoured to be paying for Eboue in his exit from Arsenal, the reported size of Rebekah Brooks’ severance package, the population of Oaklahoma – but also the size of the massive gap the world is suffering from in the number of health workers.
We have seen numerous campaigns calling on increased funding to vaccines, maternal health, access to healthcare, and yet the health workers themselves are often forgotten. They are the critical element in any health service. Without them, no vaccine can be administered, no life-saving drugs prescribed, no family planning advice provided and no woman can be given expert care during childbirth.
Without health workers conditions like pneumonia and diarrhoea – which can be treated easily by someone with the right skills, supplies and equipment – become deadly.
On 20 September, the UN General Assembly meets to set out their commitments to increase the number of health workers in their own countries and ensure resources and support for new and existing health workers, and with time running out before the MDG deadline of 2015, it is vital governments take this opportunity to make a firm commitment to boost the number of health workers.
This is why today sees the launch of an innovative new social media campaign warning the world leaders that they have 3.5 million seconds to close the 3.5 million global health workers gap.
The campaign includes an innovative web and mobile phone application allowing anyone from around the world to become a Superhero, join the call for more health workers, better supported, and share the app with their friends via Twitter and Facebook.
Germany has already agreed $3.1m to help fund new health workers and Norway is per capita the most generous donor for health. Developing countries like Vietnam and Sri Lanka have achieved impressive child survival rates, by investing in health workers. As these examples show, progress is possible with political will.
This is why together with over 250 other organisations we are supporting this campaign and have built it into The End of Polio campaign we are currently running, calling on governments to fully fund the critical work of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, which will provide vaccines for hundreds of millions of the world's poorest children and support health workers to protect future generations from this debilitating disease.
So what can you do to support this call?
You can:
• Go to http://healthworkerscount.org/superhero online or on your smartphone, upload your image and become a Superhero and post it to your profile
• Tweet:“Join me, become #superhero #healthworkers http://bit.ly/rm8q0A and help save lives!”
• Direct Tweet or message your friends on your smartphone using BBM or WhatsApp: “Join me, become a Super Hero Health Worker http://healthworkerscount.org/superhero and help save lives! Please pass it on.”
• Tweet @ your favourite celeb to encourage them to also become a Superhero Health Worker
