TB/HIV Advocate Carol Nawina Nyirenda Honored By Dalai Lama

This weekend, ACTION partner and RESULTS' friend Carol Nawina Nyrienda was honored by His Holiness the Dalai Lama as an "Unsung Hero of Compassion" - an award recognizing leaders around the globe who work to alleviate the suffering of others without expectation of reward.

Carol spoke at AIDS 2012 and will return to AIDS 2014 in Melbourne. Many of RESULTS Australia's advocates will recognise her from her attendance at our National Conference 2010.

Carol is the Executive Director of CITAM+ in Zambia, a  patient-led organization providing Zambians with life-saving information and care. The profile below is reposted from Unsung Heroes of Compassion.

Carol Nawina Nyirenda is tireless—one day advocating at the World Health Organization, another speaking at an international AIDS conference, yet another building a rural health clinic in her native Zambia. What gives this passionate, articulate activist her energy is that, unlike many of her friends and family, she has survived HIV.

“There must be a reason why I’m still alive,” she says. “I went to rock bottom, but I survived. I want to inspire people by showing them that you can be HIV-positive and still lead a normal, productive life.”

Born in rural Zambia in 1963, Carol was leading a middle-class life with her husband and two children when people around her began dying of a disease not seen before. Soon her world began to collapse. Her husband got sick. They lost their home and then separated. Carol and her daughter moved in with relatives, apart from her husband and son. Months later, she got a phone call telling her that her husband had died; HIV was never mentioned.

In 2001, Carol became ill. She was diagnosed with Kaposi’s sarcoma, a cancer common in people with HIV. When she began coughing, her brother, a doctor, suspected she had tuberculosis (TB). He urged her to be tested for TB and also for HIV. “I was highly offended,” she remembers. “I had been a faithful wife and thought I was safe.”

In 2002, Carol received the diagnosis that changed her life. “I felt very angry,” she says. “My husband was gone. I had HIV, cancer, and TB. Why had God done this to us?” The AIDS epidemic hit Zambia hard in the 1980s, but even 20 years later when Carol was diagnosed, HIV was seen as a death sentence: it wasn’t a question of if you would die, only a question of when.

Carol sought treatment in a neighboring town to keep her condition secret, but news of her illness soon leaked out. People stopped coming to her restaurant. She ran out of money for expensive antiretroviral drugs. The hospital providing her chemotherapy told her brother to save his money for her funeral rather than spending it on more treatment. Feeling hopeless, she went home to her mother to die.

Then, in 2003, through George W. Bush’s President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the U.S. sent antiretroviral medications to Zambia and Carol was able to access free treatment. “I wanted to survive for my children,” she says. “I dreamt that one day I could start an organization to help others like me.”

Her mother encouraged Carol to join an HIV support group, but Carol hesitated. Then, she says, “I heard about the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, and helped write a proposal to fund our patient group.”

Carol has since become an internationally known TB and HIV activist, launching numerous projects to help people recover from what she calls “the Thriller Syndrome.” She explains: “In the Michael Jackson video, people come out of the grave walking around like zombies. That’s what it feels like—when people are diagnosed with HIV, they are alive but not really living. I want to help them wake up and bring them back to full lives.”

In 2008, she founded the Community Initiative for Tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and Malaria, a patient-led organization providing Zambians with life-saving information and care. She chairs the Coalition of Zambian Women with HIV. She is president of the Africa Coalition on TB. Her latest endeavor, the Nambwa Project, is creating access to health care, education, and self-sustaining income for a rural community in Zambia heavily affected by HIV. “I bridge the gap,” Carol says. “People are willing, sometimes they just need a little help.”

Carol is indefatigable in her activism, and optimistic about the future. “I refuse to be beaten,” she says. “Life gave me a lemon, but I wanted a banana. So I made lemonade, sold it, and bought the banana I wanted.”

Originally posted on the ACTION partnership blog

New Report Highlights the Role of the Global Partnership for Education

Teaching and learning: Achieving quality for all

2013/14 Education for All Global Monitoring Report stresses the need for education funding.

by our colleague in the US, Tony Baker, RESULTS Educational Fund

The 2013/14 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, the world’s most comprehensive annual report documenting progress towards the Education for All goals, was launched yesterday in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Developed and published by UNESCO, this year’s Education for All Global Monitoring Report (EFA GMR) bears the theme “Teaching and learning: Achieving quality for all.” The report draws attention to the learning in many parts of the world:

• 250 million children (38% of the world’s children of primary school age) are not learning the basics in reading and mathematics, let alone higher skills.
• Even with four years in school, one out of four young people in low and lower middle income countries cannot read a sentence.
• In a third of the countries analyzed, less than 75% of primary school teachers are trained.
• By 2015, only 56% of countries are likely to achieve universal primary education.
• The poorest girls in sub-Sahara Africa won’t complete lower secondary school until the 22nd century.

To support teachers and end the learning crisis, the report lays out four strategies: (1) attract good quality teachers, (2) improve teacher education, (3) ensure the best teachers teach the most disadvantaged students, and (4) retain good teachers with incentives including better salaries and attractive career paths.

The Global Partnership for Education targets low and middle-income countries

The 2013/14 EFA GMR also highlights the increasingly important role that the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) is playing in basic education, particularly in some of the most critical education environments in the world:

“The GPE is an important source of external financing for education for some low and lower middle income countries, although currently it only accounts for a small proportion of education aid. Between 2004 and 2011, donors paid in US$2 billion to the GPE. By comparison, donors spent US$32 billion in aid to basic education to low and lower middle income countries over the same period. However, the GPE’s influence appears to be increasing over time.”

In the 31 countries that had GPE program implementation grants in 2011, GPE support represented 24% of their basic education aid. Designed to act more as catalyst to crowd in additional resources, GPE program implementation grants constituted no more than one fifth of aid to basic education in one third of the countries which had received GPE funds in 2011. In other countries, however, the Global Partnership provided the primary means of support to basic education, making up more than 50% of basic education aid to Guyana, the Gambia, and the Central African Republic in 2011.

Source: 2013/4 EFA GMR

The Global Partnership for Education alone cannot fill the gap

With disbursements to basic education climbing to an all-time high of $385 million, GPE was the fourth largest donor to low and lower middle income countries in 2011. However, the EFA GMR points out that this increase in spending “is unlikely to have filled the gap left by the World Bank’s reduction in aid to low income countries.” While World Bank support to basic education increased by 13% between 2010 and 2011, the amount going to low income countries fell by 23%.

The report also warns of the alarming rate at which education aid is declining in general. Between 2010 and 2011:

•     Total aid to all levels of education declined by 7% between 2010 and 2011.
•     Aid to basic education fell for the first time since 2002, by 6%.
•     Aid to secondary education declined by 11% from an already low level.

The June 2014 GPE Pledging Conference

As the Global Monitoring Report clearly precautions, the overall decline in education aid “puts at risk the chance of meeting Education for All goals and any hope of more ambitious goals to include universal lower secondary education after 2015.”

While the Global Partnership for Education alone cannot fill the education finance gap, its replenishment conference to be held in June 2014 offers the international community the opportunity to commit funds to drive the partnership’s increasingly important work over the 2015-2018 period. The conference will also help   to raise bilateral and multilateral aid to the levels needed to end the learning crisis, ensure a quality education for all in a post-2015 world, and unlock the national and global prosperity promised by a quality education.