Never Be Silent

The Hunger Project is a global, non-profit, strategic organization committed to the sustainable end of world hunger.

In Africa, Asia and Latin America, The Hunger Project seeks to end hunger and poverty by empowering people to lead lives of self-reliance, meet their own basic needs and build better futures for their children.

The Hunger Project carries out its mission through three essential activities: mobilizing village clusters at the grassroots level to build self-reliance, empowering women as key change agents, and forging effective partnerships with local government.

Learn how you can get involved.

From oneworld.net, excerpt:

In mid-December, a bi-partisan group of lawmakers introduced the Jubilee Act in the U.S. House of Representatives. If passed, this bill will broaden debt relief for poor countries, reform the policies of international financial institutions, and press lenders to use responsible practices with respect to the world’s poorest nations.

From CNN, excerpt:

“WFP is deeply concerned about rising hunger and suffering among the most vulnerable due to these unprecedented and inhumane attacks on purely humanitarian operations,” the agency said in a statement.

One of the recent threats to the food agency occurred in late November when Islamist militants in Somalia warned the agency to buy food from Somali farmers or stop sending aid to the impoverished African country.

That threat came from al-Shabaab, a group that has waged a bloody insurgency against the U.N.-backed government of transitional President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed.

Four of the agency’s staff members were killed in Somalia between August 2008 and January 2009.

Despite difficulties in southern Somalia, the agency says it is still dispensing food in the capital city Mogadishu and several other areas.

The agency says it is still able to reach more than 60 percent of those in need or about 1.8 million people.

From Reuters, excerpt:

GENEVA, Jan 4 (Reuters) - One in 10 of the some 130 million births around the world each year is premature, the vast majority in poorer countries where chances of survival are low, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Monday.

An article in the U.N. agency’s January bulletin also reported a “dramatic rise” in pre-term births in a range of richer countries over the past 20 years, especially in North America and parts of Europe.

Based on studies from the mid-1990s to 2007, it said 85 percent of births before the normal 37-week human gestation period were in Asia, with some 70 million, and in Africa, with more than 40 million annually.

But the highest rates of pre-term deliveries against the overall total of births were in Africa, with an average of nearly 12 percent, and North America, with 10.6 percent, according to the article by WHO specialists and researchers.

In Europe, the figure was only 6.2 percent and in Latin America and the Caribbean just 9.1 percent.

Many premature babies in Asia and Africa have no access to effective care, said Dr Lale Say, a lead author of the article. One born at 32 weeks, weighing less than 2,000 grams, has little chance of survival, the WHO specialist wrote.

By contrast, an infant born at 32 weeks in a developed country is as likely to survive as one born at full term.

From the UN Development Fund for Women:

• There is a direct link between increased female labour participation and growth: It is estimated that if women’s paid employment rates were raised to the same level as men’s, America’s GDP would be 9 percent higher; the euro-zone’s would be 13 percent higher, and Japan’s would be boosted by 16 percent. [1]
• Women’s nominal wages are 17 percent lower than men’s.
• Women perform 66 percent of the world’s work, produce 50 percent of the food, but earn 10 percent of the income and own 1 percent of the property [2].
• In some regions, women provide 70 percent of agricultural labour, produce more than 90 percent of the food, and yet are nowhere represented in budget deliberations [3].
• In Mexico, women in paid employment devote an additional 33 hours to domestic chores per week, while men’s weekly contribution six hours [4].
• If the average distance to the moon is 394,400 km, South African women together walk the equivalent of a trip to the moon and back 16 times a day to supply their households with water [5].
• In Arab states, only 28 percent of women participate in the workforce [6].
• OECD Official Development Assistance (ODA) for gender equality has tripled in 2006 compared with 2002, going up from US$2.5 billion to US$7.2 billion. This has meant an increase in the proportion of total ODA from 6 to 8 percent.

• One in three women will have experienced rape or abuse in her lifetime.
• In the U.S., 600 women are raped or sexually assaulted every day.
• For women aged 16 to 44, violence is a major cause of death and disability, higher than cancer or automobile accidents.
• 70 percent of casualties in recent conflicts are civilians, mostly women and children.
• Studies show that in tough economic times, girls more likely to be first in their families to go without food and be pulled out of school
• Violence by intimate male partners worsens the longer men are jobless.
• According to 2009 figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 37 percent of the 49 million Americans facing hunger are households with children headed by single mothers.
• In 2008, governments spent a staggering $1.464 trillion worldwide in military budgets, a 45 percent increase from 1998. The US accounted for nearly half. Meanwhile the entire budget of the United Nations amounted to $27 billion, a mere fraction of the global military budget.
• In 2008, the U.S. government spent $706 billion on defense, including supplemental war spending in Iraq and Afghanistan. In contrast, the US allocated $7.278 billion on global health programs.

Nick Kristof’s Sunday column, excerpt:

It was a lack of this substance that led to a tragedy that I encountered the other day at a hospital here in the Honduran capital. Three babies lay in cots next to one another with birth defects of the brain and spinal cord.

In the first cot was Rosa Álvarez, 18 days old and recovering from surgery to repair a hole in her spine. She also suffers from a brain deformity.

In the next cot was Ángel Flores, soft tissue protruding from his back.

Closest to the door was José Tercera. His mother unwrapped a bandage on his head, and I saw a golf-ball-size chunk of his brain spilling out a hole in his forehead.

The doctors believe the reason for these deformities, called neural tube defects, was that their mothers did not have enough micronutrients, particularly folic acid, while pregnant. These micronutrients are the miracle substance I’m talking about, and there’s scarcely a form of foreign aid more cost-effective than getting them into the food supply.