NEWSBYANDY AMSLER

Where there’s corruption there’s probably a reporter to make it seem more pervasive than it actually is.

Such is the case with a recent Associated Press (AP) report that claims “astonishing” levels of fraud in the Global Fund to Fight AIDS’s grantmaking.

What’s astonishing, you may ask? To the AP, less than one percent counts.

Since 2000, the Global Fund has shelled out $13 billion to nearly 150 countries to aid in the fight against AIDS, TB and malaria. But the AP article leads with the shocking assertion that corruption has eaten up as much as two-thirds of some of the Fund’s grants.  But nowhere in the article is it mentioned that, so far as has been reported, the amount of money lost to corruption is just 0.3% of the total amount disbursed.

What better way to commemorate the anniversary of the January 12, 2010 earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands of Haitians and left millions more homeless than to deport Haitians living in the US back to their homeland, which is by all accounts still in the midst of a humanitarian crisis?

That’s just what Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plans to do this month after a year-long moratorium on the practice of sending folks who have criminal convictions in the US or have served prison sentences for crimes committed in the US back to Haiti.

Please sign the petition to stop the deportations!

The timing is poor at best; at worst it’s unconscionable, given the persistent cholera epidemic and the struggle to rebuild the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. It only takes a small amount of decency to see this. Unfortunately, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been less than forthcoming about its reasoning and ignored public calls for clarification.

When we think about global poverty we seldom focus on developed nations like Russia.

But FIFA’s latest decision to award the country with the rights to the 2018 World Cup could help shine a light on just how persistent and devastating poverty can be in the unlikeliest of places.

Russia’s 15.8 percent poverty rate is vastly better than the 86 percent experienced in Zambia or the 80 percent in Haiti, but the fight against poverty doesn’t begin and end with the world’s worst case scenarios. Despite the country’s immense oil and gas revenues, large segments of the population remain cut off and unable to get ahead, and health and food security are of major concern.

While many of the discussions about poverty that take place are rightly on the countries where its impact is most widespread, it’s impossible to ignore that poverty can hurt just as much in developed countries as it does elsewhere. In fact, a new UNICEF report shows that the world’s richest countries have a bad habit of leaving their poorest children behind.

Global events like the World Cup present a unique opportunity to change the way we look at poverty. In South Africa, FIFA failed to make the games accessible to the vast number of people there living in poverty, and once the games were over it became clear that little was done to use the World Cup to really address local poverty.

FIFA has an opportunity to right this wrong in Russia. The decadent stadiums that will be erected across the country can stand in stark contrast to the misfortunes of Russia’s poor, or they can be a symbol of what’s being done to make poverty history.

Make a statement that poverty will not be allowed, even in the richest of nations, and ask FIFA to commit to making tickets available to Russians living below the poverty line so that they too can experience this important world event.
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Buying a satellite isn't usually on the top of the list of potential actions for activists working around global poverty issues. But that's exactly what one campaign wants you to do.

If you’re reading this online, this means you have a computer and access to the Internet. But 5 billion people around the world do not, and the vast majority of them live in the developing world.

The Terrestar-1 satellite and some good ole' ingenuity from a team of movers and shakers over at buythissatellite.org might begin to change that. These folks hope to use the satellite to bring Internet access to at least one part of the world that needs it.

How? Terrestar-1, a bus-sized satellite that connects to a tiny handset called the Genus, is a bit of a rebel without a cause at the moment. Launched in 2009 to provide mobile communications to North America, the satellite is owned by the soon-to-be-bankrupt TerreStar Corporation, making it up for grabs.

That’s where the "Buy This Satellite" campaign comes in, courtesy of ahumanright.org. They want to buy the satellite and move it over to a country where Internet bandwidth is low. They list Papua New Guinea as a possible contender, namely because it has an orbital parking spot available. The move would provide Internet access to six million people who didn’t have it before. Throw Indonesia in and you can add 243 million to that. That’s nothing to scoff at.

If you thought Polio went out of style with Sock Hops and Flat Tops, you haven’t been to Africa lately.

The Democratic Republic of Congo and two neighboring countries are in a state of emergency after an outbreak of the disease, which has no cure and is suspected to have claimed the lives of 100 and left double that number paralyzed.

It’s sad when a disease like polio, which can be prevented with a few drops of an oral vaccine, is allowed to terrorize the developing world. That’s why the World Health Organization, Rotary International, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and UNICEF are launching a major immunization campaign to vaccinate more than 3 million people in the region.

This latest push to immunize is an emergency solution coming on the heels of the coalition’s Global Polio Eradication Initiative, which has resulted in 2.5 billion immunizations across 200 countries in its 22-year existence, as well as a door-to-door campaign in 15 African countries to reach more than 72 million children with the oral polio vaccine.

While the Western world has all but eradicated the disease, the recent outbreaks highlight the struggle international aid agencies have faced in making Africa polio-free, in part because of a lack of resources.

Ever since taking office in 2009, the Obama Administration has been engaged in an all-out offensive to redefine the way America does its business abroad. Specifically, Obama has elevated development and diplomacy as both essential pillars of our national security and economic answers to the world’s challenges and opportunities. That strategy became ever more apparent in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s latest essay in Foreign Affairs magazine.

What makes this approach so different from what we had before?

First, the sheer breadth of engagement this administration has taken with the rest of the world has been unprecedented, or at least was simply unheard of in the previous administration. From a speech in Cairo and a town hall event with students in Shanghai, to delving into the emerging mobile market in Africa and much more, America’s international rock stars have taken rather unconventional approaches to the act of diplomacy.

They’ve found ways, through technology, to communicate directly with the citizens of countries where high level diplomatic engagement has been difficult, and even in places where it’s been solid in the past.

It's not every day that the tech world is abuzz with social change, but there is a bit of a debate of late as to the value of crowdsourcing in helping to solve global challenges.

Crowdsourcing is when a group, rather than an individual, uses the Internet to collectively solve a problem or task at hand (check this video for an intro).

Change.org bloggers have discussed the many opportunities crowdsourcing presents before, for example here, here and here.

But what are some examples of cases in which this exercise in virtual collaboration has successfully made an impact on global development?

When the Apps 4 Africa competition launched back in July, there was little doubt that technology and innovation were a promising solution to the very real challenges facing the people of the African continent. With the announcement of the contest winners earlier this week, we know just what those solutions are shaping up to be.

There were some questions raised at the outset of the contest, which was sponsored by the U.S. State Department, *iHub, Appfrica Labs, and SODNET.  Skeptics wondered how realistic the apps would be, but the results have quieted those concerns. First place winner iCow is a voice-based app that helps farmers track the estrus stages (read, when they’re in heat) of their cows. Kleptocracy Fighters Inc. is an app that makes it easier for citizens to report and document government corruption in real-time. And Mamakiba is an app targeted to low-income women to help them save and prepay for maternal health care. These apps and the many other ideas that came out of the contest show far more utility than anything we see marketed here in the U.S. – and rightfully so.

You might have noticed your favorite NFL stars accessorizing with pink game apparel this week in a symbolic gesture to raise awareness for the fight against breast cancer. Off the field, their actions during Breast Cancer Awareness Month will be far from symbolic with players, coaches, and referees all joining forces to support the many breast cancer initiatives throughout the country. Is it time, though, that the fight against poverty make a prime-time appearance like this?

Of course, the NFL’s very visible push for breast cancer awareness is a clear positive at a time when an estimated 39,840 women in the U.S. will die from breast cancer this year alone.  But I think it’s also time that people other than Bono and Angelina Jolie who are in a position to make a difference take a stand in the fight against global poverty, which claims the lives of 22,000 children every day. It’s an overstatement to say Bono and Jolie are the only celebrities speaking out, but the NFL would be a new twist in the growing profile of the world’s poverty problems.

This week’s Tea Party primary upsets in New York and my home state of Delaware sure made for some great political theater.  All this talk of the morality of touching ourselves and racy (literally) emails aside, the advent of a group of political candidates who want to literally shut down the parts of government that exist beyond our borders (unless we’re talking about military action), or don’t fall on the “right” side of the morals debate,  is no laughing matter for anyone who believes America’s commitment to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is a good thing.

Take, for example, this unabridged quote from Delaware tea partier Christine O’Donnell’s campaign site (which has conspicuously been walled off since Tuesday’s primary):

“His [President Obama’s] Global Poverty Act, currently under consideration in Congress, is just one such policy. Despite its seemingly innocuous title, the Global Poverty Act would force America to adopt the U.N.’s “Millennium Development Goals” as official U.S. policy. This means outsourcing to the United Nations all important decisions concerning the use of U.S. foreign aid dollars.”

Setting aside the utterly ridiculous claim that buying into the MDGs means forking over all sovereignty in how foreign aid dollars are spent, O’Donnell’s insinuation that the goals agreed upon at the UN Millennium Summit in 2000 is simply disastrous.