Tag Archives: poverty

Motivated by Outrage?

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It is time to Stand Up and Take Action against Poverty!

When setting up Find Your Feet, Carol Martin declared: “I am motivated by outrage – that we, who live in plenty, do so little.” 

Ten years have passed since world leaders agreed on the Millennium Development Goals. Ten years with some successes, but also several setbacks. If we are to reach the goals – eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, achieve universal primary education & ensure environmental sustainability within five years – we, who live in plenty, need to speed things up!

On September 20-22, world leaders will meet in New York to review the progress on the MDGs. This is probably the last realistic chance of delivering a plan to make good on the promises made ten years ago.

Therefore – Stand Up and Take Action

Our world leaders’ willingness to pledge money and efforts are dependent on us, the public and tax payers showing that this is something we’d like to prioritize.

To make our voices heard before the MDG summit, there are a number of events you can take part in. One of them is stand up and make a noise in Westminster.

On 18 September, millions of people across the world will ‘Make a Noise for the Millennium Development Goals’.  This mobilization takes place just two days before world leaders meet at the UN MDG Review Summit

At 1 pm in the Old Palace Yard, outside the Palace of Westminster  we will record a message for the delegates at the UN: Keep your promises – deliver a funded, timetabled breakthrough plan to meet the MDGs!

Join with drums, bells, whistles, pots and pans and show your solidarity, whether you are motivated by outrage, compassion or a desire for fairness.

Stand Up and Make a Noise in Westminster is organised by UK campaign groups, as part of Stand Up and Take Action, a global mobilisation from 17-19 September, facilitated by the Global Call to Action against Poverty (of which Make Poverty History was the UK platform in 2005) and the UN Millennium Campaign. 

Find more information here: www.standagainstpoverty.org.uk

Join the event on Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=135844296460745&ref=ts


This post was written by Communications Intern Hilde Faugli

A better way of counting the poor?

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The MPI might help the international community target its aid efforts more effectively.

This blog piece was posted by Communications Intern Hilde Faugli.

The UNDP has just released a new indicator for measuring poverty – will it make any difference?

The Multidimensional Poverty Indicator, or MPI for short, was launched earlier this month, and promises to be better suited as a tool for allocating funding for development programs etc. The MPI assesses a range of deprivations at the household level, from sanitation and nutrition, child mortality and schooling, to cooking fuel and drinking water.

“The MPI provides a fuller measure of poverty than the traditional dollar-a-day formulas. It is a valuable addition to the family of instruments we use to examine broader aspects of well-being, including UNDP’s Human Development Index and other measures of inequality across the population and between genders,” Jeni Klugman, Director of the UNDP Human Development Report Office and the principal author of this year’s report, said.

The MPI can be broken down into different population subgroups and by dimension to see what type of deprivation is affecting different regions or groups.

So what?

Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), which has developed the indicator with UNDP support, has analyzed poverty levels in 104 countries using the new indicator. The result is a pretty staggering number of 1.7 billion people living in poverty. Using the more common extreme poverty measure, “1$/day“ (which has actually now been put up to 1.25$/day), the figure would be ‘only’ 1.3 billion.

Looking at India, one of the countries we are working in, the MPI poverty rate is 55%, compared with 42% counted as poor according to the 1.25$/day measure. The MPI also reveals that the rural areas are more affected than the urban, and that nutrition, child enrollment, child mortality and schooling are the prime contributors to deprivation in the country.

Whilst the findings are depressing, I don’t think that anybody working in international development would be surprised that taking on a more multidimensional view of poverty gives higher figures. People are deprived in a multitude of ways, and one single indicator will never be able to cover everything. This measure, as the HDI before it, sheds light on the fact that poverty is not just about income. Whether or not this will translate into a more targeted approach to tackling poverty remains to be seen.

The HDI has been criticized for being redundant, that it actually does not reveal much more than an income measure and that it ranks countries in a pretty similar order. Nevertheless there are interesting exceptions. Sri Lanka, for example, is ranked low in terms of its GDP, but moves up the ranks for HDI because of its good results in education and health.

Ms. Alkire stresses that the MPI “identifies the most vulnerable households and groups and enables us to understand exactly which deprivations afflict their lives.”

It will be interesting to see if the MPI will have an impact on the way countries, aid agencies and organizations allocate their money.

Explore the new index through an interactive world map on OPHI’s website.

The Sari that protects against cholera

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This piece was posted by Communications Intern Hilde Faugli.

Woman in Varanasi, India

Woman in Varanasi, India. Photo: Peter Caton

The sari, it seems, may offer more than perhaps what we usually expect of a piece of cloth. The sari, that traditional brightly coloured garment worn predominantly in India, Bangladesh and Nepal, is currently being used by innovative women in Bangladesh to filter their daily water, thereby reducing cholera. 

A study published by the American Society for Microbiology shows the amazing results of women in Bangladesh who are using their saris to filter their daily water, in reducing cholera.  In 2003 researchers found that simply teaching Bangladeshi village women responsible for collecting water to filter the water through folded cotton sari cloth could reduce the incidence of cholera by nearly half. Five years later they found that the practice was sustained by many of the women in the village, and that it had also spread to some women that initially were not given training on how to filter water.

One of the things that particularly strikes me about this story is the simplicity of the technique.  It does not rely on costly technologies and it is socially acceptable, the filtration method did not require financial resources or extensive training on the part of the village women, and it was easily included in their daily activity.

Another thing that stands out is the fact that targeting women is a very effective way of bringing about change. Women in the developing world usually bear the brunt of the responsibility for their families’ daily needs, cooking, collecting water, collecting firewood, etc. A focus on women is therefore also often a focus on the broader household, and as, seen here, sometimes the wider community.

This resonates with Find Your Feet’s approach. Rather than bringing expensive, technologically complicated inputs into communities we support them to use locally available resources and to build on their own skills and knowledge to develop solutions to the problems they face. And, by involving women in leadership positions at every stage of our projects, the women we work with are gaining the skills and confidence to bring about changes that will benefit the whole community.

Click here to read more about Find Your Feet’s work with women.

Put People First G20 Counter Conference

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Put People First G20 Counter Conference
November 7, 10:00 – 17:30
Central Hall Westminster, SW1H 9NH

Put People First

In March, we marched in our tens of thousands to demand the G20 Put People First. Far from putting people first we’ve seen nothing but a tinkering around the margins followed by the return to business as usual.

On Nov 7, as the G20 returns to the UK, the agenda on the table nurses an already failed economic model back to life, whilst looking to stitch up an unjust international climate deal outside the UN process.

They bailed out the banks to the tune of billions, and now the only choice offered is between what cuts are made to pay for it.

Government intervention to create a Green New Deal is slipping off the agenda, and yet strong alliances are forming – for example environmentalists and trade unionists have been standing side by side at Vestas to save the UK’s largest wind turbine factory.

- In the run up to Copenhagen, how do we get a global agreement on climate that truly puts climate justice at its heart?
- How do we respond to the jobs crisis and growing poverty around the world
- How do we ensure the global green new deal the world needs?
- How we do we show that cuts are not the only option, and demonstrate what Putting People First really look like?

This counter-conference will bring together academics, activists, campaigners, unions, policy makers and YOU to share ideas on what the alternatives are to cuts, cuts and more cuts, and how we must organise across our issues, of jobs, justice and climate, to make the alternative the reality.
Register now

Rural Livelihoods in Africa

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As a member of the UK food group we were recently sent a report on a Conference on Ecological Agriculture: ‘Mitigating Climate Change, Providing Food Security and Self-Reliance For Rural Livlihoods in Africa.’

The Conference, which included over 80 participants from 15 African countries and representatives from the AU, FAO, UNCTAD, UNEP, WFP and IAASTD, reflects Find Your Feet’s agroecological approach to agriculture.

Highlighting the Tigray project, in which 20,000 farming families in Ethiopia benefited from almost double their normal crop yields as a result of using ecological agricultural practices, the Conference participants emphasised the fact that, for poor farmers, ecological agriculture offers a real and affordable means to break out of poverty and achieve food security. In addition to this it helps foster agrobiodiversity and other essential environmental services, has high climate change mitigation potential and increases agrosystem resilience to stress.

The Conference participants made a number of recommendations – two of which particularly stood out for me. They suggested that:

- In locations where Green Revolution projects are being launched or implemented, agriculture pilot projects should be given the same financial and other kinds of support in order to allow comparative assessment of the two management systems’ performance.

- The donor community should provide the resources required for ecological agriculture interventions to meaningfully support food security and rural livelihoods.

As debates around the most appropriate response to the current world food crisis rage, I think it’s really important that the conclusions and recommendations of this highly representative group of people are heard.