2011 Global Microcredit Summit: Day 2

Our National Manager, Maree Nutt, is in Spain this week for the 2011 Global Microcredit Summit.

Day 2:

YESTERDAY, November 15, I met Kirsten Hambly, First Secretary to the Australian Ambassador to Spain (Ms Zorikas McCarthy). We all agreed that on the whole microfinance initiatives are very useful and an important tool for poverty reduction.

There are many hundreds of institutions here at the summit doing great work, like the Grameen Bank, the BRAC in Bangladesh, Fonkoze in Haiti, Kashf in Pakistan, Jamii Bora in Kenya and many, many more.

We talked about the challenge in how to differentiate 'good' microfinance from the 'bad' microfinance that recently attracted media attention.

An expert panel is now working through The Summit Campaign and developing a 'Seal of Excellence', whereby microfinance institutions would be certified and easily recognised for their strong financial performance, protection of clients, and their strong focus on poverty reduction.

The Ambassador's representatives agreed to report on the importance of the summit, and agreed to include RESULTS' request to double aid for microfinance in her report to Foreign Affairs Minister Kevin Rudd.

2011 Global Microcredit Summit

OUR National Manager, Maree Nutt is in Spain at the 2011 Global Microcredit Summit and has recently written about the opening ceremony:

QUEEN Sofia of Spain has just opened the Global Microcredit Summit in the beautiful city of Valladolid, two hours from Madrid. 

She recounted, seeing with her own eyes, the positive impact of microfinance when she visited Grameen Bank over 16 years ago.

Queen Sofia has participated in every global summit since, and Spain can be proud of being the second-highest aid donor in microfinance programs, totalling almost $1 billion! We could do with such a champion in Australia.

Any suggestions?

Disappointingly, AusAID is not represented here, and the Australian Ambassador to Spain, who was due to representing Australia is sick with flu. Instead, I will meet with the Ambassador's First Secretary shortly...

Make sure you follow our blog for continual updates of Maree's visit to Spain.

Her Majesty Queen Sofía of Spain, is Honorary Co-Chair of the Microcredit Summit Campaign.

 

Pneumonia kills babies: To protect them - vaccinate!

Dr. Kate O’Brien is pediatrician, epidemiologist, Deputy Director of the International Vaccine Access Center (IVAC), Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, USA, and a winner of the 2011 US Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. Read why she thinks World Pneumonia Day is so important:

I AM  a pediatrician, an infectious disease pediatrician at that.  We’re supposed to know what to do when a baby has pneumonia - apparently that’s not always true.  I’ve treated hundreds of such cases - but this time was different.   

When it’s your own infant none of that experience matters.
 
Jack looked at me with what seemed like panic in his eyes.  Coughing, crying, breathing fast, sleeping in fits and spurts.  Babies aren’t supposed to breath that fast.  He lay beside me in bed. It was the day before Christmas and I just kept telling myself that we’d be better soon---apparently that’s not true either.    We both had influenza, I’m sure of that.  If you’ve had it you’ll know what I mean---I felt like hell, exhausted, muscle aches, every time I coughed it felt like sandpaper scraping over my trachea.  But since I’m an infectious disease doc, of course we were vaccinated!---well, apparently that wasn’t true this year.  I had every intention of getting that done weeks earlier, but life got in the way.

The middle of the night always makes things worse, or at least things seem worse.  So, we became ‘that family’, calling our neighbors in the middle of the night to care for our two-year old while we drove to the hospital with Jack.  So many times I was that doctor we were about to meet in the emergency room, scratching my head wondering, “Why did they wait the whole day at home and decide to finally come in at 2 in the morning?”  Well, now I knew.  Sometimes it doesn’t get better.  He had pneumonia on the chest x-ray and needed antibiotics.

                                                    Baby Jack at 4 months.

Every day, of every year, millions of children get pneumonia and struggle to breath; more than a million of them don’t get the treatment they need and die.  Every day of every year something unimaginable to the mothers we are, happens to mothers we don’t know, over 90 per cent of them living in poor countries in Africa and Asia ---their child dies in front of their eyes from pneumonia.  It’s senseless. It’s inhuman. 

Vaccines against the biggest pneumonia causing bacteria, Hib and pneumococcus, along with other simple strategies can prevent these deaths.  

So, this year on World Pneumonia Day, look at your kids and remember to get them vaccinated, remember to get yourself vaccinated and remember that not every mother is so lucky….yet.

The  GAVI Alliance is helping give those mothers the same opportunity for their kids, faster than ever before for any vaccine.  At a time when the world seems to be more complicated than ever, this seems like a pretty sensible thing to do.