Granting the world a future

 

 

The new global grants will fund water and sanitation projects such as the one in Vihule Kond. "the people don't have water for six to eight months out of the year," says Manoj Mehta, of the Rotary Club of Bombay Metropolitan, which has cosponsored scores of water projects funded by Matching Grants.

T he world’s greatest minds have always envisioned the impossible: flight, the artificial heart, a vaccine for polio. Jeffrey Sachs, who spoke at the 2006 RI Convention, sees an end to poverty. Not one to mince words, he once told the UN General Assembly, “Millions of people die every year for the stupid reason they are too poor to stay alive.” Marian Wright Edelman, president of the U.S. organization Children’s Defense Fund, asks why 24 industrialized nations have a lower infant mortality rate than the United States. Each insists we can do better.

Doing better is the reason behind the high-impact projects funded by The Rotary Foundation’s new global grants. The grants are part of the Foun­dation’s Future Vision Plan .

District grants will give Rotarians increased flexibility in choosing projects.

Here, we introduce several areas of focus for global grants through insights from visionary thinkers, including Sachs and Edelman.

The road to reading
From reading a street sign to learning the ABCs, words open up the world

Taken from a 1997 speech Kofi Annan gave for International Literacy Day, 8 September 

Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope. It is a tool for daily life in modern society. It is a bulwark against poverty, and a building block of development, an essential comple­ment to investments in roads, dams, clinics, and factories. Literacy is a platform for democratization and a vehicle for the promotion of cultural and national identity. Especially for girls and women, it is an agent of family health and nutrition. For everyone, everywhere, literacy is, along with education in general, a basic human right. Literacy is, finally, the road to human progress and the means through which every man, woman, and child can realize his or her full potential.

Planting peace

It’s hard to do, but forgiveness is a first step

By Anand Panyarachun

We must never forget that the roots of conflict, and the way to its resolution, lie in human causes. Look more closely at almost any conflict in the world today, and you will see that it is not irrationality or wrong-headedness that lies at the root. Instead, you will find grievances, and it does not matter if they are real or imagined.  Perceptions of social injustice, denial of legitimate rights, mistreatment, and other grievances can breed frustrations that may one day erupt in violence. This is not to excuse the use of violence, but to just suggest that it may be constructive, as the old saying goes, to walk a mile in the other’s shoes.

Technology has made it easier than ever for us to physically destroy our enemy – as we saw in the Iraqi war – but in doing so, there is a price to pay in terms of our humanity. The very act of trying to kill a cancer can also kill the patient. It would be small comfort to vanquish the enemy, only to find the values we live by have been thoroughly eroded in the process.

Real family values

Making a healthy start to life

By Marian Wright Edelman

The greatest preventable causes of death in today’s world are pregnancy and childbirth. It is incomprehensible that more than seven million mothers and newborns are lost each year. That’s 20,000 human beings like you and me and our children every day; 833 each hour; 14 each minute; 1 every four seconds. Only cancer, for which there is no vaccine or cure, slightly exceeds this staggering death toll. It is more than three times the number of deaths from AIDS in 2007. Skilled birth attendants, emergency obstetric care, and the most basic health infrastructure and care privileged mothers take for granted could save countless lives.

In the United States, 9.4 million children and 750,000 pregnant women are uninsured. We are the only industrialized nation that does not provide coverage for prenatal care for all mothers. What is our excuse? I hope we can join together to ensure every child a healthy start in 2009 in our rich nation and close U.S. maternal mortality disparities.

Children need their mothers. Families, communities, and national development need the survival, education, and leadership of women. To deny basic health care to millions of mothers and children is morally and practically indefensible.

We must stand up together and say stop to the massive, chronic, and too invisible genocide of mothers and babies, which we have the capacity – but not the will – to stop. The Global Women’s Action Network for Children, for which Children’s Defense Fund is a coconvener, hopes to join with Rotary in every way to erase this indelible human stain.

Wells and wellness

With clean water, we can control disease

By Laura H. Kahn

Clean water and sanitation have arguably done more to improve the human condition than any other single invention. The ancients recognized the importance of hygiene: Civiliza­tions, such as Rome, pos­sessed aqueducts and sewage systems. Sadly, these “public goods” disappeared during the Middle Ages, when human and animal waste was dumped into open cesspools in cities. People drank sewage-contaminated water. City life was deplorable, and cholera and plague were epidemic.

When governments are unable to provide minimal public health services, such as clean drinking water and adequate sewage removal, then acute diarrheal illnesses will inevitably surface.

Cholera is a measure of government failure. For example, in 2007 in Iraq, more than 30,000 people developed acute diarrhea, of which over 4,000 tested positive for cholera, including 24 people who died.

According to the United Nations Population Fund, more than half of the world’s population (3.3 billion people) in 2008 will live in urban areas. By 2030, almost 5 billion people will live in urban areas with much of the growth taking place in African and Asian cities. Critical to the health and well-being of these  new megacities will be clean water and effective sewage removal. Governments must ensure that expanded, upgraded, and innovative sewage removal and treatment systems are in place to meet the population and environmental needs of the 21st century.

Building community trust

Give people the tools they need, and they will help themselves

By Jeffrey Sachs

If  poor farmers are given access to improved seed varieties and fertilizer, typically they can double or triple or quadruple their food output, even in a single growing season. They can carry a community from extreme hunger – even famine – to a bumper crop, a surplus, adequate food, school feeding programs, and income earned by selling food on the market.

The total cost of these basic investments is around US$50 per villager per year. This sum is then combined with contributions from governments, other nongovernmental agencies and the community itself. This small sum is something that the rich can afford. This $50 per person per year from outside help is the road out of disaster.

Read about disease prevention and treatment in " Well healed ," by infectious disease specialist Paul Farmer.