Up the main street of Bawjiase, a provincial town in Ghana, march some 60 women in canary-yellow shirts. Actually, they dance up the street in cadence with a raucous brass-and-drums band bringing up the rear of the procession. Still, it looks like a formal march because these exuberant women manage to dance forward in disciplined ranks, waving and shouting to the throng of townspeople going about their business in the roadside shops and stalls. The ranks of yellow shirts are led by an equally yellow banner, declaring August 7, 2008, the official launch date for the HealthKeepers program. Their destination is a large courtyard, where dignitaries wait to honor Freedom from Hunger’s latest social business initiative with speeches and a formal declaration that the HealthKeepers program is now officially launched. (more…)
In the second installment of Chris Dunford’s monthly insights into the longstanding crisis that diminishes the lives of nearly a billion chronically hungry poor people, he observes how milestones are as much about the future as they are the past. The global crisis of food cost and availability is not going away soon; for the chronically hungry poor, it is a crushing reality that has no immediate solution and that heretofore did not have the perverse “benefit” of being portrayed as a crisis. How can Freedom from Hunger’s recent victory in surpassing the million-client threshold illuminate what must come next?
The Million Woman Milestone Achieved: What’s Ahead?
Early in 2008, we at Freedom from Hunger determined that we are directly serving more than one million women and that this milestone was achieved by doubling our outreach in just one year. This is not a cumulative figure for the total number of people reached since our founding in 1946-it is a snapshot of the number of current clients at the end of 2007. (more…)
As leader of a global organization that strives to eliminate hunger, I want to put the food crisis in perspective and observe how a number of disparate but ultimately interrelated factors combined to create the crisis. Similarly, no single intervention will solve this global dilemma. At Freedom from Hunger, we put tools into the hands of chronically hungry poor people so that they can prevail against such upheavals.
A Growing World Population Demands More
I was an undergraduate at Cornell in 1968 when I first encountered Paul Ehrlich. He had just authored The Population Bomb and was touring campuses to promote his book and his prediction that the 1970s would see hundreds of millions of people die of starvation. Then the Green Revolution started to kick in, and growth of world food supplies soon outstripped population growth and drove down food prices for three decades. (more…)
I have been out in the field the last couple of weeks with our partners in The Philippines and India. As Chairman of the Board of Trustees, I believe it is important to understand well what we are actually doing with our women clients to solve the problem of chronic hunger in a sustainable way. I also wanted to understand our follow-up and measurement systems so that we can fulfill our commitment to ourselves and donors to have an effective tracking system in place for our results.This week I participated in two focus group sessions in the village of Gangodanga Para in West Bengal, India. Our initiative, Reach India, has been conducting sessions called “Learning Conversations” for groups of adolescent girls and their mothers. (more…)
Freedom from Hunger serves the rural poor. The poorest of the poor. This week I came to understand what that means.
I met a mother, Fula Devi, who had lost two children, one to a cold. She was in such deep despair, so full of sadness, that she could not recall for us one example of even a small joy in her life. The closest she came was to say, “When I go to my group, I am happy. We laugh and share the stories of our lives. I can depend on them to help me when I have an emergency. And then I walk home with my sadness.” Fula was describing her experience attending a savings-based self-help group established by one of Reach India’s partner organizations. This newly formed group has only begun to receive the much-needed education to accompany their savings—a combination that has met great success in other regions of India. But as a brand new group, such successes have yet to be seen.
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