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As I brace myself for my final year at American University, graduate level classes, and a highly uncertain job market at the end of the tunnel, I’m (at least a little) comforted by my experiences at AIDemocracy this summer. This organization’s ability to connect the dots between global issues (socio-political stability, food security, local organic agriculture initiatives, US aid policy, and child mortality rates, for example), rather than viewing them in isolation, has always appealed to me. I find myself almost looking forward to writing my senior thesis and diving deeper into these systemic issues that impact global development, global health, and global peace and security.
Over the last few months, many of my micro-level experiences and personal relationships have come to fit into a bigger puzzle of US foreign assistance and trade policies. Researching and blogging about progressive alternatives in the development field has shown me that effective solutions are out there, that their supporters do exist in the public policy arena, and that I’ve actually seen many of these approaches in practice with my own two eyes. My experiences abroad have taken on new meaning and weight, and I’ve realized that young people like myself are, while not scholarly experts, some of the best equipped proponents of such policies.
We are an online generation, the first group of young people fully familiar with Google, Facebook, Youtube, Wikipedia, Twitter, Skype, and WordPress. Yes, this has made some of us lazy, overweight, and phenomenally uninteresting. I would counter that it has made far more of us open-minded and better attuned to global problems. All of that Facebook chatting with acquaintances around the world is worth much more than we generally admit—it’s time we started using it to shift the national policy dialogue about global development, global health, and global peace and security.
It’s been a comfort to share experiences with my fellow activists this summer, to learn we’ve traveled and worked in some of the same communities in the developing world, and to build relationships within the movements for global justice that we’ve chosen to be a part of. It’s been a pleasure getting to know so many of you this summer, and I hope you’ll stay in touch – you’ll always be able to find me through the AIDemocracy network. Meanwhile, I hope to share my continuing research on global development initiatives this fall!
Want to learn how to get more involved in a cause you care about?
Come to the New Media and Youth Action Conference and learn why your involvement is key to making a difference!
This free, one-day community forum on progressive social issues like health, environment, global and local development, and cultural diplomacy will be taking place September 1, 2009, in New York City. Register at the conference website and connect with other activists, community organizers, and organizations working on youth outreach.
Not in the area? No problem! Join the interactive online community at the event site and start discussions with youth activists across the US and the world. Videos from the conference will be broadcast on the site as well.
Join and share your ideas!
Original post by Carol Hansen, Intern, USLEAP
Honduran unions are helping lead popular resistance to the June 28, 2009 coup when democratically- elected Honduran President Zelaya was dragged out of bed, abducted, and forced to fly to Costa Rica. The union movement immediately called a national strike, joined by, among others, Chiquita banana worker union members who gave up a day’s pay and more to participate. Teachers unions, the largest in the country, continue on strike, shutting down the education system while thousands of workers have joined peaceful protests that have been met with teargas. Also, members of the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) have refused to load or unload Honduran cargo ships in resistance to the coup.
While mediation by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias has so far yielded little progress, the situation in Honduras continues to worsen with reports of hundreds of human rights violations and four political assassinations, including one trade unionist. The International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers’ Federation (ITGLWF) stated in a July 14 press release: “since the coup there has been growing concern at the threat to trade union and popular leaders, and it appears there is a list of leaders who are threatened with detention and whose personal safety is at risk.”
Decades of research leave little doubt about the vital role of women in global development. While women often bear poverty’s heaviest burdens, focused investment in that portion of the population has proved a near-surefire way to build healthier, better educated, more prosperous communities. Last month, the Global Resources and Opportunities for Women to Thrive Act (GROWTH Act, S.1425) was introduced in the Senate. This legislation is an exciting opportunity to ensure that US foreign assistance and development efforts adequately (and smartly) invest in the power of women in the developing world.
Though women comprise a disproportionate percentage of the world’s extremely poor, studies have demonstrated that women who are given extra income are more likely than men to invest it in their children, improving the family’s health, lowering child mortality and malnutrition rates, and boosting education rates. Women’s successes in the microfinance industry over the last 30-40 years have been breathtaking as well. The GROWTH Act proposes much wider administrative and financial support for such initiatives, including microenterprise, improved land and property rights for women, more access to formal employment, skills trainings, and focused investments from trade (the latter four components have been widely absent from general microfinance initiatives).
Somali refugees attending a cooking class that will enable them to secure better jobs and earn higher wages
I’ve had the luck to witness the results of such initiatives in Kenya, and am now very much a believer in the power of women in development. I spent several months in early 2008 interning at the Centre for Domestic Training and Development, an organization led by an inspiring Kenyan woman to help other impoverished women thrive. Edith Murogo, the Centre’s founder, is a wife and mother who recognized a problem in her community and began working to solve it, raising money slowly to establish and expand her organization. Today she is one of the most well-known and respected social entrepreneurs in Kenya.
Original post by Laura Freschi
“Salvation is Not Ours to Bestow: A Review of Michaela Wrong’s New Book” as posted on William Easterly’s Aid Watch today!
Michaela Wrong’s gripping latest book, It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower, is the antidote for anyone who knows the weariness of wading through the jargon of implementation plans and institutional treatises on governance and anticorruption. It’s the anti-boredom serum, the potion that brings you the real consequences of what happens when those plans are ignored.
On one level, the book is the story of one John Githongo, the eponymous whistleblower. A former journalist and pro-transparency activist, Githongo was handpicked in the euphoria following the 2002 Kenyan election to serve as the new president’s special anti-corruption advisor. “The era of ‘anything goes’ is gone forever,” declared Kibaki in his acceptance speech, “Corruption will now cease to be a way of life in Kenya.”
But when life very quickly began imitating that old Who song (“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss,”) Githongo fled the country, fearing for his life, with the tapes and documents that would blatantly incriminate government officials—up to the highest rungs—in a $500 million corruption scandal.
On a different level, Wrong’s book is also the story of an international movement. Githongo was up against the looters and thugs who threatened to silence him. But he also found himself on the wrong side of the fence from much of the donor community, which wanted Kenya’s new president to be part of a generation of democratic leaders paving the way for a new and prosperous Africa.
As Githongo gasped for air, Tony Blair was boosting DfID’s aid commitments to Africa and launching the Year of Africa:
“Playing to the industrialized world’s guilt complex, the Make Poverty History Campaign, Africa Commission and Gleneagles summit all shared one characteristic: the emphasis was on Western, rather than African action. Top-down, statist, these initiatives were all about donor obligations, pledges, and behaviour. What they definitely weren’t about…was highlighting the shortcomings of African governments set to benefit from future Western largesse.”
It’s Our Turn to Eat is an unblinking look at the roots and the consequences of sleaze (the violence during Kenya’s recent elections, a referendum on the corrupt leaders’ failure to spread the wealth, was the worst Kenya had seen since independence). It is also a condemnation of “the Western tendency to turn a blind eye to blatant graft and routine human rights abuse in the eagerness to save ‘the poorest of the poor’.”Despite Nairobi booksellers’ reluctance to stock the book, Kenyans are buying the book off street corners, reading it aloud on the radio, and debating it in church groups. Still, some of the best advice Wrong has to offer is for her Western readers.
“Worried Westerners, who so often seem to fall prey to a benign form of megalomania when it comes to Africa, would do well to accept that salvation is simply not theirs to bestow. They should be more modest, more knowing, and less naïve.”
