Notes from Archie Law, CEO of ActionAid Australia
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Imagine being a young child and turning up to school to find it riddled with bullet holes, doors ripped from the hinges and your school work littering the playground.
This is what children like Wahid (pictured) faced last year after a 28 day war between Israel and Hamas. One year after the conflict, the children are struggling to regain a sense of normality.
Wahid picks up what is left of her project work from the rubble
One of the big issues that we’re engaging more and more with at ActionAid Australia is Education. I hate quoting numbers all the time as I think it can sometimes dehumanise a problem that impacts on people and their families. However sometimes these numbers are so horrific they have to be put out there to give us an understanding of how widespread a crisis is.
Some 77 million children are denied an education today. Although active campaigning from organisations such as ActionAid has helped drop this number from 100 million in 2000, it is still an unacceptably high figure. This is even worse for girls – as more girls than boys don’t attend school.
It’s hard to believe some supermarkets still source their products from factories that underpay their workers and subject them to horrifying working conditions.
Mercy (not pictured), is one of 500,000 women processing cashew nuts for a living in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, India. These women often suffer from dermatitis, blistering and skin discolouration from shelling nuts.
“I get headaches; I get dizziness and vomiting from breathing in the smoke” says Mercy
Tags: actionaid, Exploitation, India, social justice, women's rights
Before Leya Chede, 47, joined ActionAid’s adult literacy Reflect program, she would have been too shy to even meet a stranger coming to her house. Now she is an elected local councillor, representing women’s issues in the local government in the Palisa district in Kampala, Uganda.
Leya Chede photographed at her turkey rearing house with some goats.
Tags: actionaid, Education, Uganda, women's rights
Chelimo speaking in 2009 ”My family haven’t been able to grow any food this year”
I’m currently in London where I’ve been attending the Annual Meeting of ActionAid’s International Emergencies and Conflict Team. In addition to reviewing how ActionAid responds to emergencies, particularly red alert emergencies such as Haiti, we have also been looking at some of the big challenges that face ActionAid such as climate change and how we work in conflict zones where we aim to do no harm and to maximise good. So to climate change which ties in nicely to last weeks policy dialogue in Canberra which was a joint effort with the ANU’s Asia Pacific College of Diplomacy and ActionAid and moderated by Ben Eltham from New Matilda. A big thanks to Ben and the gang at New Matilda for getting involved and doing such a great job!!
The dialogue centred on the impact of the Copenhagen Climate Change Talks on the world’s poor and we had a diverse crowd of students, NGOs, Academics and Government listening to a conversation between Lorraine Elliott from ANU, Maryjean Watt from the Department of Climate Change and ActionAid’s Country Director from Vietnam, Mr Phan van Ngoc who travelled from Vietnam especially for the event. This is the first of four such events that we’re going to be running through the year at ANU with forthcoming sessions focusing on the Global Food Crisis, the Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s) and the links between development, diplomacy and defence.
So what did I get out of this dialogue….From ActionAids’ perspective Copenhagen can be viewed as a partial failure as its better that there was no deal in Copenhagen rather than a weak deal. In our opinion the Copenhagen Accord is no deal and is simply an Accord developed by the rich for the rich. This Accord was “noted” at COP15 rather than “endorsed” or even “welcomed” (which are all wonderful diplomatic terms) and this means that the Copenhagen Accord has no status whatsoever outside of the select few countries that developed it and then agreed to it.
In contrast the emergence of the BASIC (Brazil,/South Africa/India/China ) group at Copenhagen will have profound implications for international relations and it was noted that the lack of a bad deal was in some way due to the power and influence of this group. The hopes of the world’s poor may be vested in the ability of the BASIC group to lead the international community towards a just outcome at talks throughout 2010 which will culminate in Mexico towards the end of the year.
This was a great way to kick off our first policy dialogue and we certainly are looking forward to round two in May which will focus on the Global Food Crisis.
For children living in poverty or violence in India, running away can seem the only way out – but they often find themselves even worse off. Many end up living on railway platforms around the country.
A young boy seeks shelter on a railway platform in Bhopal, India.
Tags: actionaid, Child Poverty, India
Tags: actionaid, earthquake, emergency, Haiti
Whilst banks around the world are back in the black and back to paying massive bonuses to their executives, millions of poor people around the world are reeling from the global financial crisis which has been caused by their greed.
ActionAid is supporting the call for a tiny tax on the bankers, a “Robin Hood Tax” that takes from the rich to give to the poor. A .05% tax on global financial transactions by banks and other financial institutions like hedge funds would raise billions to assist people affected by climate change and extreme poverty. In Australia we all pay a GST of 10% on practically everything we buy, so why shouldn’t the banks be paying a tax on their transactions?
Tags: actionaid, climate change, robin hood tax
The most amazing stories of strength, courage and perseverance amongst the most challenging and difficult of circumstances in developing countries usually come from women. This story from ActionAid in Ethiopia really struck a chord with me so I thought I’d share it.
In the village of Nadugne Agam there was no water locally and the women had to carry it from the river, bent double, in back-breaking, 25-litre heavy-duty containers strapped to their shoulders.
Tags: actionaid, water, women's rights
