“Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Global Poverty Project will begin its 1.4 Billion Reasons 2012 tour across the United States in February. We’re traversing the country in 18 weeks across 25 states with 66 presentations booked and counting. There are four of us on the trip and the office is bubbling with excitement as anticipation mounts for when we shotgun out of New York state and zip down to the US south for our first cluster of presentations.
We can hear Meg, our main speaker and former Peace Corp volunteer in Malawi, practicing the text of the presentation in the office next-door. As she rehearses, interjecting anecdotes about Malawi and her experience as a local teacher, we all can’t help but get distracted from our work as we listen. Living 14 hours outside the capital city of Lilongwe, she taught Secondary School in a country where over 40 per cent of the population lives on less that $2 a day.
Sometimes her stories are funny: Malawi fashion revolves around castoff T-shirts with inappropriate or erroneous messaging, including one announcing “Indianapolis Colts, 2010 Super Bowl Champions” (the New Orleans Saints were the real winners). But other times they are heartbreaking: she remembers girls being harassed as they attempted to go to school, corruption diverting critical school funds, and an impoverished security guard being fired for failing to protect a female student.
Dan, our logistics coordinator, sits in the corner desk of the office. He’s in charge of booking presentations and is the resident scheduling expert. Balancing 66 presentations, some in unfamiliar or isolated locations, he’s managed to create a cohesive route winding across highways and back country roads. A former Washington, DC resident, he’s developed USAID agricultural programs in East Africa and South Asia. He’s also an expert at finding engaging ways for us to present, including a spot at the SXSW Music Festival in Austin, Texas.
Tyler, our videographer, is busy ordering equipment and planning his camera shots. He’s organizing fascinating videos and interviews, focusing on organizations like Heifer International, whose innovative microfinance model includes donating animals to developing countries. Their headquarters are at a sprawling ranch in Arkansas, where we will be visiting for a few days. Tyler has documented everything from development in Africa to hiking in Montana, and he’ll be making videos following every leg of the tour.
As we traverse from one state to the next, we’ll be sharing the mission of the Global Poverty Project: to end extreme poverty within a generation, specifically focusing on preventable child deaths. It’s an ambitious goal for a pressing issue: about 21,000 children under the age of five –15 each minute – die every day. These deaths are preventable with access to vaccines, adequate sanitation, and maternal health care.
From February to May, we’ll present engaging personal stories and debunk myths about foreign aid which have co-opted U.S. dialogue on issues like preventable child deaths. In innumerable polls, Americans overwhelmingly believe that the U.S. government spends a larger portion of the total federal budget on foreign aid than defense spending, Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, or infrastructure. The truth? The U.S. spends less than 1% of the federal budget on foreign aid.
Additionally, many believe that increased foreign aid is a cause championed by Democrat Presidents and representatives. Yet the U.S. presidents that have historically appropriated the largest amounts of aid are Dwight D. Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush, who in 2003 gave the largest amount in foreign aid in three decades. All of the largest spenders were Republican.
We’ll be visiting states with vastly different political and social conceptions. We imagine that presentations in Butte, Montana will bring a different assortment of questions than those garnered from Washington, DC or New York City, NY. Or maybe they’ll be the same. Either way, we hope to build a movement where issues of poverty, and especially child mortality, can be discussed in any community.
Before living abroad in the developing world I had struggled to understand what it meant not to be able to afford enough food.
I knew of the the World Bank’s extreme poverty line, which is defined as living with an average daily consumption under $1.25. I’d assumed that $1.25 would go much further in a developing country than it would here, but I learnt quickly that it doesn’t.
The World Bank’s extreme poverty statistics are calculated using purchasing power parity. This means that economists consider a basket of goods such as rice and beans that are consumed by people everywhere and then compare the costs of such goods around the world. This method allows the World Bank to account for the differences in costs of goods and services in different parts of the world.
I was shocked to discover in my first trip to a developing country, $1.25 is enough to buy only about two bowls of rice with a few vegetables. The limited food options available to those in extreme poverty make them more vulnerable to increased food prices and instability.
On 24 September 2011 several world leaders met to discuss strategies that could be developed to address the recent famine in the Horn of Africa. Discussions led to the emergence of The Charter to End Extreme Hunger, which provides a succinct list of strategies that, if implemented, will bring real solutions.
This charter has been endorsed by Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga, UN OCHA head Valerie Amos, Norweigan Minister of the Environment and International Development Erik Solheim, UNISDR head Margareta Wahlstrom, and UK Secretary of State for International Development Andrew Mitchell.
One area of focus in the charter is to ensure that everyone can afford to buy food. To achieve this goal the Charter commits to “scaling up strategic and emergency food reserves at local, national and regional level, ensuring the governance of these reserves is accountable to the people they are intended to serve.”
Out of fear of corruption and market distortions, food reserves were eliminated or scaled back at the beginning of the millennium. But, it backfired in a big way.
Food prices rose 83% during the food crisis in 2007-08 and the lack of food reserves left millions of people in extreme poverty without enough food. Having emergency food reserves protects against shocks like droughts, fires, and natural disasters. ActionAid explains that maintaining food reserves can prevent famines and that such preventive measures are more cost effective then addressing the outcomes of widespread hunger.
Countries like Bangladesh, Indonesia, China, and India have used their food reserves to prevent famine. For example, Bangladesh increased its public food stock in 2008 to spur domestic production, and has occasionally released some of its public stocks at rates below market value to check back against inflated prices and increasing malnutrition.
The Charter to End Extreme Hunger also commits to “tackle the causes of high and volatile food prices by taking action to end biofuel mandates and limiting governments’ use of food export bans.” Taking food export bans as an example, they’re under fire because they cause instability in markets, and drive pries up. In 2010 Russia experienced a heat wave that had dramatic effects on Russian grain production. Russian exporters recognised that the heat wave would increase the price of grain internationally and imposed an export ban that reserved Russian grain for local consumption. Oxfam explains that export bans did not decrease food prices in Russia and that it led to price spikes and food instability.
The Charter to End Extreme Hunger is an ambitious and important call to action. Establishing food reserves and eliminating export bans, two components of the section of the Charter, will help developing countries to protect themselves against dangerous price fluctuations, and ensure that we never again are confronted by a famine of the sort we’re seeing in East Africa at the moment.
Nobel Peace Prize-winner and former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan speaks exclusively to Gary Nunn from the See Africa Differently team about transformations in Africa and how we can transform perceptions of the continent. We have republished the interview below, to read the original article click here.
Gary Nunn (GN): See Africa Differently is a campaign to showcase the under-reported progress from Africa. As Chair of the Africa Progress Panel, what do you predict will be the largest area of progress for Africa in the next decade?
Kofi Annan: In the past several years, there has been an enormous leap in information and communications technology (ICT) usage in Africa and I believe what we’ve seen so far is just the beginning.
Over the last decade, internet usage on the continent has increased by over two thousand percent. Africa has gone from having hardly any undersea fibre optic cables in 2000 to having nine that will connect almost all of Africa by 2012, reducing costs dramatically compared to satellite connectivity. At the same time, the continent has become the world’s second largest mobile market behind Asia – and the fastest growing. At present, more than one in three Africans owns a cellular phone.
These numbers are impressive and very promising. What I find even more impressive and promising, though, is how Africans around the continent are making use of these advancements - boosting the continent’s growth and facilitating a social transformation.
Small-scale agriculture and harvesting of natural resources provide livelihoods for over 70% of the African population. Having said this, most African farmers face numerous challenges on a daily basis, most of which have been aggravated by changes in the climate. Ever resourceful, Africans have embraced ICTs, as a means to access timely, appropriate and comprehensive agricultural information to support and improve their productivity.
We see similar progress in other sectors such as health care, where for example SMS codes are used to check for counterfeit drugs, and education, where just this week UNESCO unveiled an initiative to connect cellular phones to the classroom so as to provide additional support to teachers and students alike. In banking, M-PESA, originating from Kenya, is the first mobile money transfer service, anywhere in the world.
With greater access to the Internet, comes greater access to Facebook and Twitter. Never before has the world seen the extent to which these and other social networking sites can impact politics, as was seen this year in Africa. Africans throughout the continent have embraced social media as a way to voice their concerns, encourage and mobilise action, and bring about change. And in doing so, they have given a uniquely African meaning to the phrase ‘social media revolution’.
GN: One of the focuses of the Kofi Annan Foundation is sustainable development. What’s the greatest success story of sustainable development in Africa of the last decade?? ?
Kofi Annan: There are many wonderful success stories to be found across the continent. The change that I am most pleased to see is the green shoots of a uniquely African Green Revolution taking root in many countries.? ?
With the right investments throughout the agricultural value chain and an approach centered on empowering the small holder farmer – many of whom are women - I believe that Africa is now on the road to being able to feed itself. ??
The transformation of African agriculture into an engine of economic development has come about because of changes in government priorities and policies, development of the private sector, the creation of vibrant new partnerships, and an alignment of international aid with Africa’s priorities. ??
I have talked to smallholder farmers in Mali who tell me that high-yielding seeds and fertilizer are making a big difference to their livelihoods. Farmers are growing new varieties of sorghum, maize, and rice that are drought tolerant and disease resistant, and increasing their yields. ??
But more importantly I heard from them about their hopes for the future – that with more support they and their neighbors will do well year after year. ??
Similar aspirations are rising across the continent and African governments are stepping up to the challenge. In Ghana, agriculture has grown at an average of 5% a year for over 10 years. Malawi transformed itself into a net exporter of maize for four years running. Rwanda increased its food production by 15% in 2007 and 16% in 2008. In Tanzania, a government program supporting farmers through vouchers to purchase seeds and fertilizers enabled 700,000 smallholder farmers to produce five million tons of maize. And Mali now dedicates 14% of its national budget to agriculture in a concerted effort to change the future for its farmers.??
Across sub-Saharan Africa, 19 countries have put in place plans to accelerate their annual agricultural growth of 6% a year. ??
I hope that these developments will help to banish the image of Africa as a continent of disease, hunger and despair.??
GN: Recent ComRes polling we commissioned of 2,000 UK adults found that 1 in 5 misidentify Africa as a country and 62% associate Africa with corruption - but only 3% say Africa is 'good for business.' How should we clear up these misconceptions and portray a more diverse and positive depiction of African countries???
Kofi Annan: Africa is a diverse continent of 54 countries with hundreds of languages and cultures, and endowed with plenty of natural resources. Despite this rich diversity, Africa and its people are often reduced to a single sound-bite or image of helplessness. This stems from ignorance or bias. ??
Fortunately, this perception is being challenged. Increasingly, Africans are telling their own story - their voices amplified by new technologies and media. Civil society is growing and demanding more democratic and accountable governance. African entrepreneurs are creating new jobs and business on the continent and abroad. Sub-regional economic integration is increasing growth and opportunity.??
Over the past decade six of the world’s ten fastest-growing countries were African. In eight of the past ten years, Africa has grown faster than East Asia, including Japan. Even allowing for the knock-on effect of the northern hemisphere’s slowdown, the IMF expects Africa to grow by 6% this year and nearly 6% in 2012, about the same as Asia.
The story of Africa today is that of a continent where there are incredible opportunities for growth and investment, where a young and dynamic population is making contributions in the area of business innovation, music, art, sport and social and environmental change. The road will be long and the challenges numerous but Africa has a story that no one can afford to ignore! ? ?
GN: What 3 words sum up a modern, progressive Africa to you? ??
Kofi Annan: Changing. Dynamic. Opportunity.
The Kofi Annan Foundation works to promote better global governance and strengthen the capacities of people and countries to achieve a fairer, more secure world. Find out more here.
The Africa Progress Panel (APP) consists of a group of distinguished individuals chaired by Kofi Annan who generously lend their time to track and encourage progress in Africa, and to underscore shared responsibility between African leaders and their international partners for sustaining it. Find out more about APP here.
I can’t count the number of photos of emaciated children from East Africa that I have seen this year. Headlines citing death tolls in the Horn of Africa have become just another part of most of the United Kingdom’s morning commute. The United Nations estimated in September that 13 million people are currently starving in East Africa and that 750,000 people in Somalia are at risk of dying of hunger. It is time that the international community do something to address this grave problem.
On 24 September 2011 several world leaders met at the United Nations in New York to discuss strategies that could be developed to end starvation. Discussions led to the emergence of The Charter to End Extreme Hunger which not only acknowledges occurrences of extreme hunger in East Africa but also provides a succinct list of strategies that, if implemented, will bring real solutions. This charter has already been endorsed by Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga, UN OCHA head Valerie Amos, Norweigan Minister of the Environment and International Development Erik Solheim, UNISDR head Margareta Wahlstrom, and UK Secretary of State for International Development Andrew Mitchell.
One of the most critical elements of the charter is its promotion of local food production. The charter reads, “Failure to act is costing lives every day as people struggle to deal with shocks such as the changing climate and rocketing food prices. This has to change.” In order to achieve this goal the Charter urges signatories to commit to fulfil the pledges made to the l’Aquilla Food Security Initiative (AFSI), to develop a new plan to decrease malnutrition and food insecurity after AFSI expires in 2012, to spend 10% of national budgets on agricultural development, and to implement global and regional policies already in existence to promote food security for all.
Encouraging local food production may be one of the more challenging tasks of the Charter. The BBC reported on 24 September 2009 that South Korea had signed an agreement with Tanzania where 500 sq km of land in Tanzania would be developed to produce processed goods for South Korea. South Korea has signed similar leasing agreements with countries like Madagascar. The BBC explains that leasing land from poorer countries has helped nations like China, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait to ensure food security for their populations but has limited the ability of lower income countries to grow food on their own land. Decreased food yields have led to greater food instability and higher food prices. As prices increase lower income families have been effectively priced out of eating.
In the wake of early moves toward land-leasing for food production the World Food Programme (WFP) indicated that their 2008 target of feeding 73 million people had become impractical and that the WFP would have to either reduce rations or the number of people it attempted to help. In 2011 the WFP was only able to meet around a fourth of the need for food in Somalia. Incomprehensive performance of the WFP should be a signal to us that something is wrong with our food system.
The Charter to End Extreme Hunger affirms that strong local production is key to fighting malnutrition and food instability. Regional and global strategies, such as AFSI, are present but are not being enforced. The East African famine this year should show us the effect that malnutrition a continent away can have on us. We can’t erase the image of the hundreds of thousands of people suffering from starvation in Somalia but we can take preventive action in the short term to ensure that a crisis of this degree never happens again.
To ask someone with a CV like Charles Kenny’s about the current circumstances facing the average African family, “wholly undramatic” is not the answer one would typically expect. Yet Kenny—a former senior economist at the World Bank—opens his new book Getting Better in precisely this optimistic fashion.
He describes a hypothetical morning for a modern rural African family, where mosquito nets shield against malaria, mothers know the benefits of breastfeeding, children are inoculated against deadly disease, and girls can go to school.
Contrasting the traditional “crisis” view of African life as portrayed in news reports, infomercials and even by many in the development profession, Kenny depicts a world where in an average day, people are waking up to a life in which “Nobody gets sick, nobody gets shot, and nobody dies. Kids go off to school, and parents to work. They return to food on the table and a peaceful night.”
This undramatic characterization of modern African life is exactly what fascinates Kenny. “Its beauty is in its banality,” he says, “a sign of the considerable progress that African countries have made in extending a basic quality of life to ever more people.”
This is the thesis of Getting Better: Why Global Development is Succeeding—and How We Can Improve the World Even More—that although poverty and injustice are still rampant across the developing world, quality of life for millions of people is getting better every day, in ways that were unimaginable only 50 years ago. That even though many people are still poor, they are no longer doomed to live in crisis and uncertainty.
In making his case, Kenny undertakes two separate yet equally important analyses: first, of the factors that affect economic growth, and second, of the factors that affect development, with the ultimate purpose of demonstrating that the two are not synonymous.
For Kenny, the answer to the question of economic growth “is not ‘investment’ or ‘trade’ or ‘education’ or ‘technology’ or any one ‘X’ at all. Instead, the answer is ‘It depends.’” Meaning that all countries are different, and growth depends largely on contextual factors—a country’s history, geography, and institutions, to name a few. “The universal policy prescriptions of dirigistes and interventionists suffer as much,” Kenny says, “as those of neoliberals and free marketeers at the hands of the historical record.”
While acknowledging the role that economic growth plays, Kenny argues that the main reason life is getting better is the spread of the “technologies of development,” namely ideas (like “girls should go to school”) and innovations (like vaccines for measles and polio). And even better, he argues, these technologies that are driving the good life are getting cheaper and spreading further all the time. Following Kenny’s argument, we should not completely despair the lack of growth in household income or GDP in much of the developing world, because “improvements in health, education, and security are what we want from development, while income is just a tool to help achieve them.”
Getting Better certainly paints a more optimistic picture of global development than most, but it isn’t without its caveats. Kenny highlights “the bad news” in the beginning of the book; global income inequality is growing, and even the experts have no idea what will truly cause economic growth. He also highlights how certain indicators of progress can be misleading.
For example, the dramatic increase in primary school enrollments in sub-Saharan Africa often belies the fact that enrollments do not necessarily equal a quality education. But overall, Kenny says, “the world appears to be a far better place to live in today than it was in the middle of the last century or in any century before that. And life has gotten better in particular for those who suffered the worst living conditions in 1950. This is evidence of considerable success in development.”
As a whole, Getting Better provides us a lens through which we can analyze any development text that claims to have all the answers. I had the pleasure of reading this book directly after finishing Dambisa Moyo’s anti-aid diatribe, Dead Aid. It proved a very helpful exercise to contrast Moyo’s self-assured conclusion—that Africa’s failure to spur economic growth is directly because of too much aid—with Kenny’s own argument: that there can be no self-assured conclusions as to what spurs economic growth, and that economic growth itself is in no way synonymous with development.
Thus, channeling Socrates, Kenny’s analysis proves intelligent precisely because he acknowledges how little we truly know, instead insisting we focus on using what we do know to keep getting better. Through a detailed and moving view of our recent history, Kenny enables the reader to look at our world, troubled though it may be at times, and see a hope for the future.
Over the last decade, internet usage on the continent has increased by over two thousand percent. Africa has gone from having hardly any undersea fibre optic cables in 2000 to having nine that will connect almost all of Africa by 2012, reducing costs dramatically compared to satellite connectivity. At the same time, the continent has become the world’s second largest mobile market behind Asia – and the fastest growing. At present, more than one in three Africans owns a cellular phone.
and 62% associate Africa with corruption - but only 3% say Africa is 'good for business.' How should we clear up these misconceptions and portray a more diverse and positive depiction of African countries???
He describes a hypothetical morning for a modern rural African family, where mosquito nets shield against malaria, mothers know the benefits of breastfeeding, children are inoculated against deadly disease, and girls can go to school.
