As Kofi Annan identified back in 2008, there are 860 million illiterate adults in the world, and
two thirds of these are women. Out of more than 100 million children not currently in school,
the majority are girls.
MDG3 calls for the elimination of the gender disparity in education for women and girls at
all levels, by 2015. In this visually beautiful video, Kakenya tells her uplifting story and it
illustrates the great things that can be accomplished if we uphold our commitment to achieve
the third MDG.
Her story is a wonderful example of the far reaching effects of women’s empowerment in a
single community. It demonstrates that enabling a female child to go to school, and to get an
education equal to that of a male child, will positively change the lives of all members of her
community.
The story of Kakenya shows how this type of change, or cultural shift, in a community needs
to come from within the community itself, rather than from the outside. And, that change
begins with a conversation.
Providing an education for women and girls equips them with the confidence to speak out,
and to assert more control over their own lives. An education also creates a space in which
women and girls can speak freely, and in which they will be listened to with equal respect.
As Kakenya’s story show us, when given the opportunity to speak and act in an environment
equal to that of their male counterparts, women can, and do bring about incredible change.
Vital Voices is an organisation working across the world with people like Kakenya. They
empower women and girls to create spaces in which to lead and to assert their voices with
confidence, and to transform their communities.
Over the last few weeks we have been looking at the case for aid and the changes currently taking place in terms of how we provide aid, the way it is monitored and the level of participation that poorer nations have in their own futures’.
With the football world cup starting on Friday, all eyes are on South Africa as the first African nation to host the event. It leads many to ask whether Africa has perhaps reached a turning point in the story of their own development.
In light of this, the Financial Times recently launched a new series examining development aid on the continent and the relative progress that has been made by African countries over the last 30 years. Investigations like this one represent a distinct change in attitudes of the global north in relation to African nations and their economic and social capacity to help themselves.
As part of this series there is a comprehensive interactive graphic, Developing Aid in Africa, which allows you to look at different aspects of aid, country by country and year by year. For those of you that like to see the evidence behind some of these studies in a clear format, this graphic is helpful.
Studies like these contribute to establishing evidence about what effective aid looks like, as well as enabling us to learn from our past actions in terms of the aid we have provided.
Another development this week in the aid arena came in the form of Oxfam’s report, 21st Century Aid, which is an investigation into the effectiveness of aid. It addresses criticisms lodged against aid head on and in doing so acknowledges that many of them valid but also that they can be answered.
To mark the release of this report Oxfam hosted a debate with the new secretary of state for International Development, Minister Andrew Mitchell. Mitchell outlined the coalition’s commitment to increase development aid and highlighted their move to a more evidence based approach to aid. He called for a system which allowed all interested parties to see how and where aid money is spent stating, “International development aid is the best return you’ll find on investment anywhere in the government.”
The lasting message of the report is that while it is easy to recognise that not all aid works, this does not constitute an argument for aid to be reduced or phased out altogether. Instead, it calls for an improvement of the quality of aid we provide, the way that we deliver it, and the way in which it is monitored.
The Oxfam report provides a good summary of what we have learnt about how to make aid good but it still needs to do more to identify how we can make aid even better. We need to develop a much stronger evidence base for what really works and what doesn’t, so that we can use this to inform our future practices. While the report begins to do this, it does not go far enough in terms of the evidence it provides, or the suggestions it makes about how to really focus on this in the future. So, if you're as interested in making aid work as we are, we'd suggest you check out William Easterley’s blog, AidWatch - a rare site that is searching out what's really working, how, and what that means for the rest of us.
“Time is tick, tick, ticking away, [...] there is no time to delay, the Africa we dream of is only 8 goals away.”
These lines from the above music video just released by the 8 Goals for Africa campaign, an advocacy campaign for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by the United Nations in South Africa.The song points to the fact that time is indeed running out to achieve the MDGs, a set of eight internationally-agreed goals designed to reduce poverty, hunger, disease, and maternal and child deaths by 2015.
The video was released to coincide with the FIFA World Cup due to begin this week in South Africa. It will be screened throughout the World Cup in fan parks and all public viewing areas across South Africa.
The video is part of an awareness raising campaign which will use the world cup as a platform to engage people at a community, grassroots level and to encourage them to get involved in the campaign. In doing so, it highlights the important and significant role Africans have to play in achieving our common goals.
The song is sung by 8 of the biggest names in African World music including Yvonne Chaka Chaka, Angelique Kidjo and the Soweto Gospel Choir, to name but a few, and it exudes African cultural pride and hope for a better future.
As the music video is led by such strong and powerful African voices, it emphasises to everyday South Africans their capacity to take ownership of their own futures. It is an opportunity to be a part of a global movement to change not only their own lives, but also the lives of millions of others across the world.
South Africa has taken a pivotal step in the sporting arena as the first African nation to host the FIFA world cup and in the same way, ordinary South Africans should take steps to become instrumental in moving this campaign forward.
Africans are not bystanders to their own fate, they are absolutely fundamental in the shaping of their own futures as well as ours. As leader of the UN Development Group Helen Clark states, “There can be no spectators in the fight against poverty.”
Tell us what you think of the video – and of the Millennium Development Goals.
While watching the Channel 4 news on Tuesday night I happened to see a special report on development and aid. The segment was aired in light of the most recent DATA report by the ONE campaign, which looks at how well the G8 countries have done in terms of keeping their promises made at the G8 summit in Gleneagles.
The 2010 DATA Report comes as the final report in a five year series of reports which functioned primarily to hold countries accountable for their previously made commitments, and to communicate their progress in meeting their targets.
The news segment identified the key findings of the report – that the G8 will deliver 61% of their promised increases in development assistance to sub-Saharan Africa. When looked at closely, the report identifies that Britain is the only country on track to meet its target of spending 0.7% of its gross national income on foreign aid, which is an admirable achievement.
Other countries such as the US, Canada and Japan are also on track to surpass their modest targets, while France and Germany are on course to deliver at least a quarter of their ambitious targets by 2010. But, while these countries’ contribution to aid has increased, Italy has actually regressed, decreasing its spending on foreign aid. ONE have taken aim at this, launching an online game, ‘Hurl Burl’ – in which they ask you to help them get Italian PM kicked out of the G8.
But, the Channel 4 report also asked two more critical questions – whether Britain still has a moral obligation to give aid when we are facing our own economic problems, and whether aid always benefits the recipient.
These are valid and relevant questions – and certainly ones that I’ve grappled with.
The DATA Report gets it right on the moral question – great nations should keep their promises, and in the long term, it is in the interest of everyone that we keep these promises to enable the world’s poorest people to lift themselves out of poverty.
But, on the question of aid, it’s a little more complex. As part of their discussion, Channel 4 aired part of a recent Oxfam animation (which we blogged about here) that addresses the benefits of aid to people living in the global south and why we should continue to give it. As I said at the time, this is great in principle, but we do have to work harder to make sure that more aid makes a real difference.
Still the problem remains that regardless of how much aid is given, there is no credible monitoring system or data to measure the effectiveness of aid, nor is there enough political accountability in recipient countries. These things prevent us from fully understanding the effectiveness of aid given, and highlight how necessary it is to hold governments accountable in both recipient and donor countries. There has been a lot of attention on our blog about this it’s something that was brought into light by Esther Duflo’s TED talk which I blogged about here.
The findings of the ONE Report demonstrate the sheer force of collective accountability and so called peer pressure associated with making collective commitments such as those made at the previous G8 summit. ONE’s report may be the final one in the series but it does not signify the end, but rather signifies a new chapter in the story of development aid. The report draws on the lessons learnt over the past five years to outline what future commitments made by rich nations should look like in light of the progress that has already been made. With the up and coming G8 and G20 meetings, as well as the Millennium Development Goals summit in New York in September, the ONE campaign brings to our attention the great opportunity we have to frame a better, more cohesive response to aid and engagement through our future commitments.
One of the biggest obstacles we face in the fight against poverty is that all too often, we don’t know what works and what doesn’t because we don’t collect good data.
Watch the above TED talk, from award-winning economist Esther Duflo to see that it is possible to know which development efforts work and those which don’t, using the same process of experimentation and testing we use in science.
And, for a summary of the talk, read on…
Duflo explains how, by using a system of randomized controlled trials, we can take the “guess-work” out of aid. To make this real, she asks three simple questions and offers three simple solutions; how to immunize children, how to stop malaria, and how to get children into school?
The answers: lentils, bed nets and deworming.
Immunization is the most effective way of saving children’s lives yet millions of children still die every year due to preventable illnesses. So, what measures could we take to encourage mothers to immunize their kids, to make immunization a priority?
Duflo ran a randomized controlled trial in Udaipur, India so that she could answer these questions. After setting up three immunization camps, Duflo found that by giving mothers an incentive to go to the camps to immunize their children, and by making it easier for them to get there, the rate of full immunization increased from 6% to 38%. The incentive – a kilo of lentils for every child immunized.
Duflo also applied a similar system of randomized controlled trials to the use of bed nets to prevent malaria. Considering bed nets are the most effective way of dealing with malaria, should they be given away for free or should we ask people to pay for them, and what affect would this have on whether or not people buy them in the future?
The trial she conducted was in Kenya where different discount vouchers were given to people to buy bed nets in their local pharmacy. The trial showed that making people pay (any amount) for the nets, significantly lowered the amount of people who used them. But, regardless of how people got them, if they had bed nets, they used them. The trial also found that if people were given the nets for free, they were more likely to buy the nets in the future. This goes against claims that giving people stuff for free simply makes them dependent on handouts – it doesn’t, as Duflo says, people just get used to using bed nets.
The final question Duflo looks at is the best way to get children into school, a question aid agencies have always grappled with. After conducting another randomized controlled trial the evidence showed that if you educate people about the benefits of going to school, the number of years a child goes to school increases to an astounding 40 years for every $100 of aid spent. This is compared to a 1 -3 year increase using traditional methods such as providing food, scholarships or school uniforms. Duflo also found that in areas where there were intestinal worms, deworming the children got you an extra 30 years of education.
Results like these are exciting because they show us how a cheap and easy solution such as deworming or bed-nets are effective aid measures which significantly contribute to enabling people to reduce poverty in their own communities.
Duflo shows us how we can approach development projects in a logical, systematic way and she breaks down what is normally seen as a problem too “huge” to deal with, into bite-size manageable chunks. Her talk is incredibly inspiring and it gives us some amazing examples of how aid can, and does, work when done in the right way. Her work should serve as a reminder to us all that our goal of ending extreme poverty in a generation, is an achievable one.
To find out more about Education and extreme poverty, click here.
