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Dear Friend:
Thank you for starting a movement to save lives. Thank you for asking your friends and family to join ONE.org. Thank you for calling on the President, Congress and the heart of America to do more for the world's poor.
Thank you for being one of the first 2 million of us crazy enough to say America won't stand for global AIDS and stupid poverty. And thank you to the people who joined campaigns in other countries to make their governments come to the table and do more for the world's poor.
Thank you for the concrete results that came from calling on America to invest more in fighting poverty and disease in Africa and around the world. In July, the whole world heard you: the leaders of the 8 richest nations - the G8 - pledged an additional $50 billion annually to poor countries by 2010, half of it for Africa.
Already our money is getting results. Thank you America for putting over half a million people on life-saving AIDS medicines and leading an effort that has provided 8 million anti-malaria bednets and treated 1 million people with TB. And thank you for pushing our governments to use this money to provide AIDS drugs to everyone who needs them and basic schooling for every child.
Thank you for being part of a campaign that will cancel the crushing debts of up to 36 countries, and more to come.
Thank you to the people who called on government to act and thank you to the people in government, who started to listen and who will have to make sure we keep these historic promises and build upon them.
We must keep the positive pressure on our leaders if we want them to follow through. Americans must give these leaders permission to invest just a fraction more of the budget in what we know works, from $5 mosquito nets to drug treatments that cost pennies apiece.
If ONE thing is certain for 2006, this campaign will keep growing, your voice will grow louder, your compassion and thirst for justice will keep saving more lives. By 2008, ONE needs to have 5 million supporters, each of us doing what we can, learning more, telling friends, calling Congress.
Take one minute and ask three friends to join ONE and make the impossible possible with you in 2006.
Beating AIDS and extreme, stupid poverty, this is our moon shot. This is our generation's civil rights struggle, our anti-apartheid movement. This is what the history books will remember our generation for — or blame us for, if we fail. We can't afford to fail nor will we.
We've come a long way, and we've got a long way to go. Now let's really get started.
Thank you,
Bono
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As I''m sure you''re aware, many development initiatives often don''t help much at all. In the worst cases they involve imposed inappropriate intrusions into the lives of ''local beneficiaries'' by elite moneyed powers. But even the most sensitive and carefully planned home-grown efforts can be counterproductive too, because of how they might address development challenges by integrating people into systems that themselves might be unsuitable (like improving school access in a country where formal education is in shambles like Egypt, or promoting small loans in a society where misinformed consumerism is rampant, also like Egypt). The issues I mentioned (education and income) are more complex of course, but they are examples of issues that we tend to see as no-brainers when it comes to development assistance. Many who work in development leave feeling disillusioned and frustrated, with a feeling that their efforts aren''t really helping. Personally, I believe there are two reasons for this. First, imagine a person who sleeps too little, eats junk food, has bad posture and smokes too much and complains of headaches. Sure asprin helps, but it doesn''t address the root causes of his headaches. From what I''ve seen (working for a few years in different areas of development), most of development is aspirin. The other reason is that development is predicated on there being those who are needy and those who provide. In many developing countries this has nurtured a sense of impotence and helplessness and dependance on money and imported knowledge. To not denife a community that, for example, lacks a proper sewage system and has widespread malnutrition as being in need would be just as silly as claiming that a particular project or organisation will save the world. That said, I think it''s a big deal that development is predicated on need. There is an alternative approach known as asset-based community development, which stress on communities capacity for helping themselves and not just the need for help. Of course these issues are all more complex and there remains a lot of debate surrounding them. I just thought I''d touch on a couple of ideas thought were relevant.
I''m writing this because you seem like someone who cares about development issues and would be interested to get a fair take on things. So I''m attaching a link to an article by journalist called George Monbiot in which he questions the value of Live 8 and the End Poverty movement in a way that I peronally found to be useful. It invites us, at least, to question a lot of development concepts that we take for granted. I''m looking forward to hearing your input, questions, criticisms and ideas on this.
Here''s the url:
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/06/21/bards-of-the-powerful-/
beece,
Gayyash (Comment this)
للجاديين بس ولازم يكون عنده كام (Comment this)