A Child’s Wish List
’Tis the season of children’s wish lists. As you rush around completing your shopping and trying to fulfill wish lists, please remember that the children of our world also have wish lists. Let’s help them smile and feel the joy of this season and of having basic life needs met for the coming months. Save the Children’s Wishlist 2009 gives some great and affordable ideas for helping children. More information is in the Friday File.
Tags: African children, Latin children, rural schools, Save the Children, school supplies, wish lists
A Child’s Wish List
’Tis the season of children’s wish lists, and one in particular has caught my attention this year. Save the Children Canada has a section on their website called “Wishlist 2009”. It’s a list of ten gifts that make a difference. Seven of the ten gifts cost between $20 and $100, with the other three stretching upwards in the budget to reach $1,000.
Starting on the lowest rung of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, for just $20 you can help feed two children lunch at school for a whole month in Burkina Faso (once known as Upper Volta) in western Africa. You can help buy lunch every day for a year for $200. If you’ve ever been hungry after missing a meal, you’ll know how distracting hunger can be. As well, children need food so they develop properly and stay healthy.
We’re so lucky to be able to turn on our taps and get clean water. Access to clean water is vitally important, and for $50 you can contribute towards providing a water filter for a school to help children avoid illness. You can also buy six ceramic water filters for rural schools for $300, and help keep Nicaraguan children healthy.
For $500, you can support the purchase of ten doses of Pentaxine, a vaccine that fights hepatitis, which can be fatal for children.
Consider sponsoring basic school supplies including notebooks, pens, pencils, and a geometry set for children in Latin America for $35. Or for $80, help Save the Children purchase a locally-made desk for two students, in Burkina Faso or Kenya.
You can also assist a teacher with transportation so they can get to school, visit parents, and even transport a sick child to a medical clinic, all for $100.
Accessing health services, education, and other state services in Nicaragua requires having a birth registration. For $25, you can help ensure that two Nicaraguan children have their births registered and can access the services that they need.
Remote communities in places such as Nicaragua often lack health facilities. For $120, you can assist in equipping a health services birthing team, including a midwife, and even emergency obstetric care if needed.
Feeling truly philanthropic? $1,000 provides 90 tables and benches for 180 students in Burkina Faso.
So as you rush around completing your shopping and trying to fulfill wish lists, please remember that the children of our world also have wish lists. Let’s help them smile and feel the joy of this season and of having basic life needs met for the coming months.
Tags: Africa, Burkina Faso, Humanitarian, Kenya, Nicaragua, philanthropic, remote communities, rural schools, Save the Children, school lunch, school supplies, wish list
MEDA Makes Positive Impact in Pakistan
I was excited to have a personal interview this week with Helen Loftin, Mennonite Economic Development Association’s (MEDA)’s regional project manager in Pakistan. She says the work they’re doing has linkages with the book Half the Sky, by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn, which is currently enjoying some much deserved media coverage.
Results of MEDA’s programs in Afghanistan and Pakistan prove that when women have a means of income and control over their personal income, the return on investment is phenomenal for their family, community and country.
Currently, Helen is involved with three of MEDA’s ongoing programs in the embellished materials (hand embroidered fabric) sector. These initiatives give particularly marginalized women, who are traditionally homebound, important economic opportunities, linking them to markets to create an income. With homebound women, the solution was to create a woman to woman sales network. Once the women have an income, they are able to invest it – they educate their children (including their daughters), buy better shoes, buy assets for the house such as a radio, or acquire more income-generating assets such as livestock. Some women have purchased a motorcycle for their family to use for transport to and from school, and for business opportunities, even though few women use it themselves.
Helen has observed a fantastic leap of confidence in the women involved in the projects. “The glory of this job is witnessing the effect that this has on the women in terms of their carriage, the way in which they engage with other members of their groups, and ultimately in their communities,” reports Helen. They become a role model for their children and other women.
As well, as the book suggests, empowering the women lessens terrorism. The women are their children’s largest influence, and the kids are with their mothers for all of the first seven or so years of their life. “If the family itself has a business that is viable and growing and shows economic promise, that gives the family something worth holding onto and building upon,” explained Helen. The communities in which MEDA works line the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. A family with no other choice for survival might send a child or father off for $5 a day to carry anything anyone asks them to back and forth across the border. If you can build something for them to hang onto, that shows hope and gives them dignity, they will engage in that and defend it – rejecting outside influences of things they know are not right, reports Helen.
Coming from a family business herself, Helen has worked in the private sector in southern Ontario, and has an MBA. The MBA led to an internship with CARE in India that was her opportunity to test if international economic development work was a romantic ideal or a good match. Her internship, linking fledgling enterprises to interested multinationals, proved this was where she wanted to be. So, for the last 3 ½ years, she has worked with MEDA.
Part of MEDA’s success in Pakistan relies on the word spreading through the communities. MEDA links women new to the program to the marketplace in a culturally acceptable manner and most women just run with it. Although MEDA workers with western perspectives sometimes have trouble grappling with the depth of the need and the urgency to do something positive, the work is exciting and rewarding.
And while some women keep their business as a very small family venture, other women become real business people. Some are so enterprising they no longer need MEDA. They understand competition, and don’t want to share their numbers or the full story on how the business is doing. Although the humanitarian vocational workers are thrilled by the women’s success, it can be frustrating when annual program reports are due!
For more information about MEDA, or to donate, please visit their website.
Tags: CARE, empowering women, Half the Sky, Humanitarian, MEDA, Pakistan, women
Bringing Hope to Families in the Developing World
Recently, CARE Canada called. “Would you like to support our program and for $32 buy a pair of chickens for a family in the developing world?” they asked. “Your donation will be matched 3 for 1 by the Canadian Government.”
Promptly, my $32 was on its way to CARE. It inspired me to spread the word about this initiative, and at the same time crystallized what had been on my mind for months. So, welcome to this blog, where I’m excited to give a greater voice to those who are working to find or implement solutions to our planet’s problems.
Here’s the scoop on CARE Canada’s chickens program, which turns
out to be the first step of a much larger and more complex international humanitarian effort.
When people pay for chickens through phone queries or the CAREgift catalogue, the money supports programs such as the Kabul Humanitarian Assistance for Widows program in Afghanistan, Kieran Green of CARE Canada explained. Afghan widows have little means of income to support their family. The chickens provide the widows with eggs to feed their family, and then eggs and young chickens that they can sell to other people in their village. And that’s a huge step, which takes care of the basic needs of life for the women and their families.
Courtesy: CARE Canada
Then, implementing a humanitarian Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs program, CARE continues working with the women. Once feeding themselves and their family is eased in the widows’ minds, CARE provides vocational training in a commercially valuable skill such as cell phone repair, commercial baking or sewing, all of which are in demand in the Afghan jobs marketplace. Once trained, the women get CARE’s help in either starting a business or getting a job. So when you buy a pair of chickens, you “empower the women to start moving from vulnerability to independence”, Green reports.
Waves of economic and social benefits ripple from the widows into their villages. Eventually, villagers can support programs such as CARE’s Village Savings and Loans, a microfinance group.
The Kabul Widows program is currently working with approximately 1,800 Afghan widows. Since the CAREgift catalogue was launched in December 2008, supporters have purchased 420 pairs of chickens through the catalogue.
A slight correction over the original posting is needed here. CIDA matches the chicken funds three to one, and the vocational training funds one to one, so your donation is multiplied and does more good than if it was standalone. If you’d like to help, you can pay for chickens through the CAREgifts Livelihoods page on their website. If you’d like to support a vocational training program for 2,000 Afghan women, check out CARE Canada’s Afghanistan Challenge where CARE displays its interlinking attitude by partnering with Rotary International, MEDA, WUSC and the Canadian Government.
In future posts, I’ll look at some other solutions, as well as ways that we can all make a difference. I look forward to discovering where this blog goes, and welcome you to join me on the journey.
Tags: CARE Canada, CAREgift, charitable gifts, empowering women, Humanitarian, MEDA, Rotary International, WUSC
