The Power of One - Samantha's story

Baulkham Hills resident Samantha Chivers realised from two recent eye-opening trips to Thailand that one individual has the power to make a real difference when it comes to fighting global poverty locally.

The social justice worker spent two years working on the frontline on the war on poverty in the small town of Sangkhlaburi, six hours north-west of Bangkok.

She remembers vividly the poverty-stricken conditions the town’s people endured and the aid efforts that occurred. “The people living there had some serious nutritional issues” Samantha remembers.
“Part of my job was to deliver the necessary drugs to them, but because of all the red tape and impractical policies, it made it unnecessarily difficult.

“In what should be taken as one small pill to combat Vitamin A deficiency, children had to take up to 8 different pills. It was then that I realised that change had to happen and it had to happen at the top,” Samantha added.

Upon returning home, Samantha joined us here at RESULTS International (Australia). For you who don't know we are a small but extremely effective anti-poverty grassroots organisation, who influence and inform Australia’s most powerful politicians and key policy decision-makers on the best practices of poverty alleviation.

“When you grow up in Australia and you think of global poverty you have a certain vision of poverty, of small children sitting in a hut with flies on their faces,” Samantha continued.

“While that vision is sometimes true, poverty is more often about having limited choices and opportunities. In Asia it’s more about inequalities within societies. There are a million ways to help, but if you want to make a real lasting change, it’s more effective to meet with your local Member of Parliament and talk about proven lifesaving practices and policies.”

Samantha, and a group of dedicated anti-poverty volunteers, visited the halls of power in Canberra in October last year and met with several representatives of RESULTS electorates to discuss the value of the GAVI Alliance, an effective public-private global health partnership committed to increasing access to immunisation in poor countries.

“The GAVI Alliance improves health systems, and helps cut through all that red tape and deliver the lifesaving vaccines to where they’re needed,” Samantha said.

Due in large part to the tireless advocacy work of RESULTS, Australia invested over $260 million to the GAVI Alliance between 2009 and 2013. With our pledge completed in January, RESULTS is upping its campaign for Australia to show regional leadership and invest in a proven mechanism for delivering vaccines.

“You can make a huge amount of difference with just a small contribution; meeting your MP to go into bat for lifesaving organisations that need our funding, for example,” Samantha added.

RESULTS is creating a new band of poverty-fighting volunteers in Sydney on March 5 at Level 27, Aurora Place 88 Phillip Street, from 5:30pm. The group, who meet once a month, learn about proven anti-poverty practices, write letters-to-the-editor and set up face-to-face meetings with their parliamentarians.

“A lot of people don’t realise that as a constituent you actually have a lot of power to create real change,” Samantha said.

To find out more about RESULTS and the new group please visit www.results.org.au or call 1300 713 037.

Adapted from RESULTS media release March 5 2014.

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.

AIDS 2014: An opportunity to highlight the deadly AIDS & TB link

In July 2014, Melbourne will play host to more than 14,000 researchers, medical experts, advocates and representatives of people living with HIV / AIDS at the AIDS 2014 Conference.  The theme for AIDS 2014 is “Stepping up the Pace” (of action to reduce infections and deaths).

With AIDS 2014 having such a large expected turnout, and a theme which indicates commitment to working towards eliminating HIV / AIDS, does RESULTS have scope during preparations for AIDS 2014 to play its customary role of focussing on issues which receive little attention or strong advocacy from other people?    

The answer is a very clear “yes,” for two reasons which the regional AIDS conference, the International Congress on AIDS in the Asia-Pacific (ICAAP) held in Bangkok in November, highlighted. 

·       The proposals by international working groups for post 2015 development goals (tentatively, the Sustainable Development Goals) place less emphasis on health goals than the Millennium Development Goals, and say very little about specific diseases such as AIDS and TB.  One of the panel sessions at ICAAP had the title “Disappearing Act?  AIDS and Development in the Post 2015 agenda.”

·       The deadly combination of TB and HIV still receives little recognition, even among people with a strong HIV focus.  The daily newsletter at ICAAP on 21 November contained an article “TB / HIV:  Why is ICAAP silent?”  See:  http://icaap11.org/index.php/media/newsletters.  This article noted that at least 170,000 people are co-infected with HIV and TB in South-East Asia and at least 50,000 people with HIV die from TB in South-East Asia each year.  However, few sessions at ICAAP and few of the activists and advocates in the region have made the TB and HIV combination a priority.

In our preparations for AIDS 2014 in Melbourne, RESULTS is aiming to break the silence on HIV and TB.  At ICAAP, Sarah Kirk (RESULTS Australia’s Global Health Consultant) and I promoted with potential partner organisations a TB/HIV Networking Zone at AIDS 2014, where the various people interested in both diseases (including researchers, activists and community representatives) can share information and ideas for action. 

In addition, with our international partners in ACTION, we are developing proposals for several papers and workshop topics for AIDS 2014 which will address issues such as: 

·       Obtaining additional resources for combating TB and HIV;

·       How to reach the 3 million people who are not diagnosed or treated for TB;

·       Reaching the most vulnerable populations for AIDS and TB.    

AIDS 2014 will provide a number of opportunities for RESULTS volunteers to raise the profile both of RESULTS and of our work on HIV and TB: 

·       The RESULTS Australia National Conference is taking place on the weekend preceding AIDS 2014 (19 and 20 July 2014).

·       The ACTION partnership is planning to have a booth at the Conference, at which we will be able to engage with Conference participants on HIV-related issues and also about RESULTS Australia’s work and role.

The AIDS 2014 Conference runs from 20 to 25 July 2014, and if you can spend some extra time in Melbourne following the RESULTS National Conference, you would definitely be welcome to be one of the volunteers helping to break the silence on TB and HIV and promoting RESULTS at the same time.

As a preview of the type of activity we can undertake, a short video of RESULTS’ CEO Maree Nutt, speaking at the AIDS 2012 Conference in Washington DC is also available on our web site:   http://www.results.org.au/our-actions/other-events/aids-2014/.       

Mark Rice

Global Health Advocacy Manager

Why I Support The Global Fund

By Gina Olivieri, RESULTS' Grassroots Engagement Manager

Over the past few weeks, RESULTS grassroots volunteers all over Australia have been writing to their MPs and asking that Australia give $US 375 million to The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria for 2014-2016. Next week we will go to Canberra to meet with several MPs and Senators, sharing our vision of a world free of these deadly diseases, and our reasons for believing this should be a priority for Australia. In this blog post, I share my reasons for supporting The Global Fund.

1. The 15 year old students I met in Umlazi who planted a vegetable garden at their school, so they could provide free, nutritious food to all the orphans at school.
2. The boy of 15 I met on the south coast of KwaZulu-Natal who could not do his homework until 10pm, by candle light, because he had to take care of his younger brother, clean the house, and cook dinner first.
3. The homeless girl of about 14 I saw sitting in the front seat of a tow truck, being leered at by the driver.
4. The girl of about 13 with a piece of tape marked ‘134’ on her hand to indicate her place in the queue at a clinic in Umlazi.

A generation of orphans who have lost their parents to AIDS are vulnerable to exploitation, hunger and disadvantage. Child headed households abound, impacting on educational opportunities and putting girls especially at risk of HIV infection if they take an older boyfriend or ‘sugar daddy’ for financial security. Queues at HIV/AIDS clinics snake around the building and struggle to keep up with demand – despite the fact that many HIV+ people stay away for fear of stigmatisation.

What a lot of people don’t realise about The Global Fund is that it does much more than just pay for medicines. Grants from The Global Fund are used to strengthen, integrate and resource a variety of public health activities by government and non-government organisations to better educate the public about HIV risk, run support groups for HIV+ people, train community leaders, medical and support staff, and provide support for orphans and other vulnerable children, to name but a few.

These kids are my reason – what’s yours?

World Toilet Day 2013: #Igiveashit

By Samantha Chivers, RESULTS Australia's Campaign Manager (Maternal, Child and Neonatal Health)
 
Today, November 19th, the world comes together to think about toilets. World Toilet Day is an event that brings together advocates, the United Nations and organisations working in the field to give attention to the fact that billions of people around the world go every day without basic toilets. Important in itself, this lack of water and sanitation is also essential to consider when talking about undernutrition.

The burden of undernutrition around the world is high, and a major deterrent to development and health. As an indicator of long-term poverty and inequality, stunting – or having a low height for your age – serves a grim picture: around one quarter of children under five in the world are stunted. In the least developed countries, this rate rises to thirty-seven percent.

Undernutrition carries such a large burden that its impacts can be seen today, as well as tomorrow. Globally, around seven million children under five die every year from mostly preventable diseases such as pneumonia and diarrhoea. Astonishingly, undernutrition is the underlying contributing factor in nearly half of these deaths.

Undernutrition is a major barrier to families and nations escaping poverty. Stunting is a huge public health problem not only because it leaves children more susceptible to infectious diseases, but also because stunted growth in the first months of a child’s life means stunted development of the brain and thus, of cognitive capacity. Permanently. It limits the ability of children to learn and earn, and develop into adults who can lead healthy and productive lives. By keeping adults out of work and limiting their opportunities, undernutrition has a huge impact on the social and economic development of families, and of countries.

While undernutrition can come about from many causes, one that may not be so obvious is the link between undernutrition and hygiene. Clean water, access to toilets, and hygiene practices such as exclusive breastfeeding and handwashing are incredibly important for preventing disease, and thus, for preventing undernutrition. It turns out that half of undernutrition is associated with intestinal parasitic infections and repeated diarrhoeal episodes. Diseases transmitted from water contaminated by sewage, including worms, intestinal parasites, and bacterial infections like environmental enteropathy and typhoid, actually play a very large role in undernutrition. Some diseases, like diarrhoea, literally flush nutrients from the body, as well as depleting stores while mounting an immune response. Others, such as environmental enteropathy, cause an infection that damages the wall of the small intestine and limits the ability to absorb nutrients, slowly causing stunting. Contracting these infections from poor hygiene, defecating in the open, or not having access to clean water, is a strong contributing factor to being undernourished despite what you eat.

This year, RESULTS Australia is marking World Toilet Day. Our nutrition and child health campaigns focus on implementing interventions that are based on what works. The United Nations estimates that there are 2.5 billion people who still do not use an improved sanitation facility and a little over 1 billion practising open defecation. As a single gram of poo can contain 10 million viruses, one million bacteria and 1,000 parasite cysts, open defecation can cause serious infection and raise the prevalence of undernutrition. Working to integrate nutrition interventions with increased access to toilets and clean water and using basic hygiene practices such as handwashing, can have a major reduction in child undernutrition. It’s as simple, and as complicated, as that. So if you “give a shit” about child undernutrition, please appreciate the clean water that comes straight out of the tap the next time you wash your hands, and join us to learn how you can make a difference on this important issue.

@RESULTS_AU
@World Toilet Day
#WTD
#Igiveashit

Nutrition, Food Security and RESULTS

Samantha Chivers, Global Health Campaign Manager RESULTS Australia, on World Food Day

Hunger remains a persistent problem in the world. Around seven million children around the world die before their fifth birthday every year, mainly from preventable and treatable diseases such as diarrhoea, pneumonia and malaria. Shockingly, around half of these deaths are directly linked to undernutrition. While around one in four children are too short for their age worldwide, this rises to one in two in some countries in our region, such as East Timor, India and Cambodia.

On October 16th the United Nations hosted World Food Day, whose theme was Sustainable Food Systems for Food Security and Nutrition. Food security – or all people at all times having access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food – is an increasingly important issue for Australia, and for the Asia – Pacific region. Engaging with food systems to make them more equitable and diverse is especially important at this point in time. Worldwide, more than one billion people are undernourished, and the world will need to produce 50 percent more food by 2050 to feed a projected population of 9 billion people. 

In honour of World Food Day, I represented RESULTS Australia at the FAO World Food Day event hosted by the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance. Speaking at the event was Ronnie Kahn, founder of OzHarvest, nutritionist Rosemary Stanton OAM, and gardener Costa Georgiadis, in addition to a multitude of community organisations profiling their work in their own communities. Being relatively new to RESULTS it was inspiring to see members of the community come together to work on food security and nutrition in their local area, and especially to involve those who may be left out of traditional systems, such as new migrants and adolescents out of school. It also reminded me that connection with your community, be it local, regional, or global, be it based on geography, shared values or ideals, is the only way to make a sustainable difference. A small community of like-minded individuals can have a huge impact, through actions and through advocacy.

RESULTS Australia is working to build a network of the organisations working in the nutrition and food security fields. We are encouraging the Department of Foreign Affairs to pick up where the late AusAID left off, and continue to develop their first strategy dealing with child undernutrition in a holistic manner. To quote Senator Brett Mason, the new Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs "Australia is helping to fight hunger, improve nutrition and increase food production by working with communities to make farmland more productive, create better markets, and improve the health of mothers and babies". Nutrition is an issue that is a forgotten priority in our aid program. One in eight people around the world suffer from chronic hunger, and this will only increase unless we act.

Samantha Chivers, Global Health Campaign Manager, RESULTS Australia

With thanks to the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance and the Macarthur Future Food Forum for hosting RESULTS Australia.

Sources and Further Reading
http://progressreport.apromiserenewed.org/

http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/resources/online-library/life-free-hunger-tackling-child-malnutrition

http://www.irinnews.org/report/92039/timor-leste-chronic-malnutrition-among-world-s-highest

www.fao.org/getinvolved/WorldfoodDay/en/

http://blogs.worldbank.org/voices/world-food-day-challenge-feeding-more-people-fewer-resources

http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2013/01/17747135/implementing-agriculture-development-world-bank-group-agriculture-action-plan-2013-2015

http://sydneyfoodfairness.org.au/blog/2013/09/25/fao-world-food-day-2013-october-16/

http://ministers.dfat.gov.au/mason/releases/2013/bm_mr_131016.html

http://www.ozharvest.org/ourimpact.asp?pageID=609

http://www.fao.org/docrep/018/i3458e/i3458e.pdf

http://sydneyfoodfairness.org.au/

http://www.sectorconnect.org.au/macarthurfuturefoodform