ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (APO) — The African Union and the United States government have worked together in significant ways to improve the lives of people in Africa. This collaboration, which can be found in diverse areas such as agriculture, HIV and AIDS, reducing hunger and poverty, As well as peace and security, ought to be strengthened and re- modeled to ensure that any future efforts will be aligned to the interests of Africa and other developing countries.
This was the gist of discussions which took place today at the African Union Commission, between the Commission’s Deputy Chairperson and the outgoing US Ambassador to Ethiopia, Mr. Donald Yamamoto, who came to formally bid farewell to the Commission after being Ambassador to Ethiopia since November 2006. Since January this year, he has also doubled as US Ambassador to the African Union.
Mr. Yamamoto disclosed that a new paradigm for development will be formulated and implemented by the new administration of President Obama. The new thinking, he said, questions whether aid is the best means to assist Africa and that, increasingly, there is the feeling that the focus should be on development, which is more sustainable.
In the context of a need to strike a balance between domestic and international policies for the US, the Deputy Chair suggested that the African Union can also assist the US government to adjust its national policies to suit global demands. He highlighted a need for a mechanism that allows both parties to listen and to talk to each other, so that development can progress smoothly, and that African perspectives are taken on board in the development of policy. He talked about the issue of climate change for example, where he said Africa, though a recipient of the effects of the climate change, can help in formulating adaptation strategies.
The two leaders also discussed current and future collaboration between the AU and the US government, such as linking the AU library to the Library of Congress, and an expected training programme to upgrade the Commission’s communication strategies and policies.
JERSEY CITY, New Jersey (CNN) — Alfa Demmellash grew up on less than a dollar a day, and against the backdrop of torture and murder. But these days she’s living the American dream and helping others do the same.
Alfa Demmellash helps low-income entrepreneurs in New Jersey start or grow their businesses.
“Entrepreneurs are at the very heart of what the American dream is all about,” says Demmellash, a native of Ethiopia. And from her small office in Jersey City, her nonprofit, Rising Tide Capital, is helping small businesses flourish.
Robin Munn, who runs a flower shop in Jersey City, says the skills she learned through Demmellash helped her transform the way she operates her business. “I was thinking about closing, but once I started taking the classes I found that the fire came back.”
Kim Bratten, a 39-year-old painter and mother of six, says she’s seen her yearly income increase by 50 percent since she started working with Demmellash and her team. “They put hope back into the community,” Bratten says.
Demmellash’s own struggle began in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, amid instability and unrest. Thousands of Ethiopians — including her aunt — disappeared or were tortured and/or killed under the ruling military regime.
When Demmellash was 2, her mother fled the country, leaving the toddler in the care of her grandmother and aunt. Demmellash lived on less than a dollar a day but never considered herself poor.
Nearly a decade later, Demmellash and her mother reunited in Boston, Massachusetts. But Demmellash found her mother wasn’t living the American dream she’d envisioned.
“I [thought] I would find my mom in a beautiful mansion with trees [and] gold everywhere,” recalls Demmellash, now 29. “I was shocked when I found her in her tiny apartment … working very, very hard.”
Her mother had worked as a waitress during the day and a seamstress at night to earn money to bring her daughter to the United States. Watching her mother sew beautiful gowns for low profits, Demmellash thought there had to be a way for her to increase what she was making as a seamstress.
“Even though she had the skills, she did not necessarily have the business skills,” she says, adding that her mother’s pricing “was completely off.”
Still, her mother worked tirelessly to keep her daughter adequately fed, clothed and in school. Demmellash was later admitted to Harvard University, which she was able to attend with the help of “wonderful financial aid.”
At Harvard, Demmellash and classmate Alex Forrester discussed what their generation could do to alleviate poverty on a local level. They set out to learn what resources people needed — or as Demmellash says, “to find people like my mom.”
In 2004, the pair started Rising Tide Capital (RTC) to help those who had ideas and abilities but needed the education and support to launch or grow their businesses.
“You hear a lot of talk about Main Street and Wall Street, but no one really talks about how exactly you go about helping the Mom-and-Pops,” says Demmellash.
The group runs the Community Business Academy, an intensive training session coupled with year-round coaching and mentorship to help individuals “really work on the hands-on management side of their business,” Demmellash says. The organization supports underserved populations, including women, the formerly incarcerated, minorities, unemployed and working poor, and immigrants and refugees.
Demmellash and Forrester — now married — have helped 250 entrepreneurs and small-business owners in New Jersey so far, 70 percent of whom are single mothers.
RTC raises money from corporations and works with local governments for funding in order to provide classes and support its participants at affordable costs. Participants pay a small materials and registration fee based on their income range: either $100 or $225 for the course that Demmellash says would cost thousands of dollars otherwise.
The organization has also built partnerships with micro-lenders, so when students are ready, the lenders provide financing.
“The ability to become self-reliant, to have economic hope, [that is] the fabric of this country and we have to fight for it,” Demmellash says.
Many of RTC’s students use the increased earnings from their new business to supplement their wages, allowing them to better provide for their families and transform the face of their communities, according to Demmellash.
“There are thousands of entrepreneurs, millions across this country, who do incredible things and make money to put food on the table, to pay their bills, and to save for the future and their children,” she says.
“If we were to literally bank on them, invest in them [and] support them … that’s the kind of stuff that changes lives and strengthens families.”
(UN News) — An independent United Nations human rights expert proposed a set of measures today to guide large-scale international land purchases, known as “land grabbing,” ahead of upcoming negotiations by the “Group of Eight” (G8) industrialized nations on responsible investment in agriculture.
The UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter, identified the practice of international investors buying or leasing large amounts of farmland in developing countries as one of the new trends to emerge out of last year’s global food crisis which needs to be addressed.
Although transactions can be opportunities for development, with the potential for creating infrastructure and employment, increasing public revenues and improving farmers’ access to technologies and credit, they also have negative effects on the right to food as well as other human rights, noted Mr. De Schutter.
The eviction of people who have informally cultivated the land for decades, the loss of access to land for indigenous peoples and pastoral populations, and increased competition for water resources are some of the potential detrimental impacts.
“These principles and measures are intended to assist both investors and host governments in the negotiation and implementation of large-scale land leases and acquisitions,” Mr. De Schutter told reporters in Brussels, Belgium.
He said that the proposed measures are meant to ensure that such investments work for the benefit of the population including the most vulnerable groups in the host country, with obtaining the right to food as the ultimate goal.
“From a human rights perspective, the negotiations leading to investment agreements should be conducted in full transparency and with the participation of the local communities whose access to land and other productive resources may be affected as a result of the arrival of an investor,” stressed the Special Rapporteur.
“Any shifts in land use should in principle be made with the free, prior and informed consent of the local communities concerned.”
Other measures included arrangements in investment contracts that obliged foreign investors to provide farmers with access to credit and improved technologies, and the establishment and promotion of farming systems that are labour intensive.
“A multilateral approach could avoid beggar-thy-neighbour policies, with countries competing against each other for the arrival of foreign direct investment and thus lowering the requirements imposed on foreign investors,” he argued.
Mr. De Schutter – who reports to the Geneva-based Human Rights Council in an independent, unpaid capacity – stressed that land not only represents the main means to access and procure food for millions, it is also critical to the identity of certain peoples and communities.
UN News Centre — The head of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) was in Ethiopia today, where she met with the country’s leader and discussed ways to support efforts to tackle poverty, address climate change and ensure that progress made thus far is not lost amid the global economic downturn.
“I think many countries would be happy to be seeing the progress Ethiopia is making,” UNDP Administrator Helen Clark said, highlighting achievements in areas such as maternal health and universal education.
While in the capital, Addis Ababa, Miss Clark met with Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who she said was “obviously very serious about the climate change negotiations and the possibilities that come from that.”
She said there are huge opportunities for developing countries if the Copenhagen talks aimed at a global agreement on tackling climate change “go right and deliver a deal for development.”
In addition to meeting with the Prime Minister, Miss Clark also met with members of the House of People’s Representatives, with whom she discussed the work being done to encourage women’s participation in local government and the importance of UNDP’s support to parliaments around the world.
The top UN development official also addressed a meeting of UN resident coordinators in Africa, stressing the importance of achieving the globally agreed anti-poverty targets with a 2015 deadline known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
“In the middle of a global economic crisis, making progress on these goals is of course challenging. In fact, we risk going backwards,” she noted.
“But if we drill down to the specific situation of any country and to evidence of progress and failure on specific MDGs, or we look at growth potential in new and emerging areas, we will find that dramatic progress is often possible.
“That progress will depend on what kinds of policies nations pursue, their budget priorities, their ability to enact governance improvements, and investments in filling crucial capacity gaps,” she stated.
Ethiopia is the last stop on Miss Clark’s inaugural tour to Africa as head of UNDP, which also took her to Liberia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
ATLANTA, GA (WABE) – The Atlanta-based Carter Center has been fighting neglected tropical diseases like river blindness and guinea worm all over the world. In our week-long series “From Georgia to Ethiopia”, WABE’s Odette Yousef focused on the Center’s fight against another disease, called “trachoma.” Trachoma is the leading cause of preventable blindness in the world… and the most affected country is Ethiopia.
In April, the Center’s launched a major new part of its health initiative: to treat and educate 5 million people in one region of the country, in just one week.
But trachoma is not exclusive to countries far away. It was once a health concern right here… in Georgia.
In 1921, the U.S. Public Health service dispatched a certain Dr. John McMullen down to Camilla, in southwest Georgia, to investigate reports of an outbreak of an eye disease. McMullen, who ten years earlier had found trachoma endemic in parts of Appalachia, was greatly concerned about what he found, and wrote about it in a report.
McMULLEN: A subsequent examination some months later showed many more trachoma cases, some of whom had lost both eyes from trachoma; others had been blinded in one eye, and a considerable number of others had had their vision greatly reduced as a result of this disease.
A temporary clinic was opened in the neighboring town of Pelham to focus on what McMullen termed an “epidemic”. In the four-and-half months that it operated, the hospital recorded 200 cured cases of trachoma, and McMullen declared the venture a success.
McMULLEN: Mothers have been restored to their places in their families, fathers resumed their work as bread winners, and children returned to school as a result of this public health endeavor by the United States Public Health Service, the State of Georgia, and the local authorities.
At the time, U.S. Public Health officials were not only worried about the endemic trachoma that was found in Georgia and Appalachia, but from other sources, too.
KRAUT: But there was also a major concern about trachoma being brought from abroad by immigrants entering the US.
Alan Kraut, professor of medical history at American University in Washington, says that U.S. officials began examining immigrants for trachoma when they offloaded at Ellis Island and other depots. They’d flip up immigrants’ eyelids, to see whether they were red, grainy, and irritated on the inside — the tell-tale signs of trachoma. Those who had it were sent back.
KRAUT: Imagine yourself standing on line, waiting to be assessed by a physician, hoping that nothing goes wrong so you can enter the US uneventfully, and someone comes along and everts your eyelid, and not just everts your eyelid, but uses for want of a better instrument, a buttonhook.
Chlamydia trachomatis is caused by a bacteria that irritates the inside of the eyelid. If untreated, repeated infections over the years can cause blindness. The only thing that can save someone from blindness in later stages, is surgery.
But what once was a major health concern is now more likely to draw blank stares…
HARPER: Tell me what kind of hospital it used to be? Trachoma. Which is an eye disease, right?
Tom Harper and his family live in the building in Pelham, Georgia, that served as the temporary hospital in the early 1920s. The one-story complex is now a neutral beige, and has a car port in the back, but it still looks institutional, with a very plain exterior.
HARPER: If you actually look at the inside of the house, you can tell that each of the rooms was definitely designed for hospital rooms. The doors are much larger than typical doors, and inside the rooms you can tell that the closet doors are much smaller because obviously the patients would only be there for a short period of time.
There’s a skylight in the kitchen, which once served as the light source for the operating room. And perhaps most revealing about the structure’s former use
HARPER: Almost every one of the rooms has its own individual sink, sink and mirror where they can stand and wash their hands, or the patients can wash their hands. Yeah, you can tell there are a lot of features inside the house that still remain that were for a hospital.
Hand-washing, and face-washing, are key components in controlling the spread of trachoma… and health officials at the time promoted that type of basic hygiene.
Paul Emerson, director of the Carter Center’s trachoma control program, says the disease can be found anywhere, but it thrives where people are poor.
EMERSON: Where slum conditions exist, or where there’s poor access to water, where there’s poor access to sanitation, where people are living in high densities close to one another, without washing their clothes, without access to hygiene and sanitation facilities, that’s where you find trachoma.
As western countries developed, the conditions that favored trachoma disappeared: housing became less crowded, easy access to water became the standard, and trachoma went away. Now the battleground has shifted to places like China, India, Sudan and Ethiopia — a landlocked country roughly twice the size of Texas, in the Horn of Africa.
Experts say that Ethiopia is the most endemic country in the world for trachoma. Out of a population of roughly 80 million, more than 1 million have been blinded by it already. Eighty-five percent of Ethiopians live in places where they’re at risk of getting it. Former President Jimmy Carter says the magnitude of the problem is what convinced the Carter Center to work there:
CARTER: We are demonstrating to others who are working on the same disease the techniques that can be used.
And one of those techniques that the Center has recently ramped up is the wide-spread use of antibiotics. In late April, nearly every one of the 5 million people in the eastern part of the state of Amhara got the medicine, in just one week. The same was done in the western half in November, and it will become an annual feature of the project.
Paul Emerson says that helps to relieve people’s irritated eyes, but it’s no long-term solution
EMERSON: The antibiotic is a great kick, and really accelerates the process. But antibiotic alone is never going to be the answer.
Still, the attention and resources poured into the massive treatment campaigns will bring attention back to trachoma, which often lies in the shadow of bigger-name, fatal diseases that also afflict the country, namely, malaria and HIV. The trick is, how to spread the messages of hygiene and sanitation, the habits that will ultimately defeat trachoma, where the prospects for development are decidedly dimmer than they were in the U.S. in early 1900s.
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (APO) — The African Union and the United States government have worked together in significant ways to improve the lives of people in Africa. This collaboration, which can be found in diverse areas such as agriculture, HIV and AIDS, reducing hunger and poverty, As well as peace and security, ought to be strengthened and re- modeled to ensure that any future efforts will be aligned to the interests of Africa and other developing countries.
