Nearly 4 million women fall victim to a severe burn from fire each year — the same number who are diagnosed with HIV/AIDS every year. (And like HIV/AIDS in the beginning, burn victims are often stigmatized and isolated.) More school-aged children die of fires each year than of tuberculosis or malaria. Almost all severe burns happen in developing countries where open fires for cooking, heating and lighting are commonplace. Without adequate medical care, burn victims are frequently disfigured, disabled and shunned; they often lose the ability to be productive citizens.

Burns can cause debilitating contractures which restrict crucial functions, like bending an arm or walking, and left untreated can leave one disabled forever. InterAction member Interplast provides free surgery, for the world’s most impoverished people, and restores their ability to use their hands to eat, to use their legs to walk to school/work, or to use their arms again to care for their babies. And by doing so, it improves productivity and alleviates some of the economic burden on developing countries, one patient, one family at a time.

Read more about Interplast and their work for burn victims at www.interplast.org.

Today’s program on Leveraging International Frameworks to Fight Poverty can be viewed in real-time by clicking this link between 12:00-1:30pm.

The event will be recorded and available for viewing soon after the event.

Beginning tomorrow, millions of people around the world will get on their feet at the same time to STAND UP and TAKE ACTION against global poverty and show their support for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Last year, the event set a Guinness World Record, with 43.7 million people from 127 countries standing up.

The goal this year is to top that number and reach 65 million people. Connecting with 1% of the world’s population would be impressive, but an even more sobering number is 1.4 billion. That is the number of people worldwide living on less than $1.25 a day.

There still time to register and be counted! http://www.standagainstpoverty.org

From campus rallies, to prayer vigils, to blogging about the issue, to living on $2 a day for just one day, thousands of Americas will STAND UP and TAKE ACTION.

InterAction will do its part by hosting THE END OF POVERTY? Documentary Screening and Happy Hour tomorrow in Washington, DC. What will you do to be counted?

According to The DATA Report 2008, the G8 are halfway to the 2010 deadline, but so far have only delivered $3 billion, or 14 percent, of the $22 billion commitment. If the G8 continue at their current pace, they will collectively fall far short of where they pledged to be by 2010.While the pace of delivery is deeply concerning, the good news is that the assistance that has been delivered is making a real, measurable difference on the ground in lives saved and futures brightened.

Because of recent increases in development assistance:

2.1 million Africans are on life-saving AIDS medication, up from only 50,000 in 2002.

26 million children were immunized and against a group of life-threatening diseases between 2001 and 2006.

29 million African children were able to enter school for the first time as a direct result of debt relief and increased assistance between 1999 and 2005.

By 2007, 59 million bed nets had been distributed by the Global Fund alone, helping to dramatically reduce malaria rates in countries such as Tanzania, Rwanda and Ethiopia.

Click here to read The DATA Report 2008 in its entirety.

To break the cycle of poverty, Christian Children’s Fund (CCF) implements programs to help children very early in their lives. Nine-year-old Celsia is one of many children now living a better life because of CCF.

Celsia and her family, which includes three siblings, live in Timor Leste where 46 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, life expectancy is low and there’s a low education level.

In Celsia’s village, children lack access to health care, safe water and pre-primary education. In 2001, Moris Foun (”New Born” in Tetun), one of the partner affiliates of CCF Timor Leste, started its service programs addressing the health, nutrition and pre-school needs of children younger than 6. At 2 years old, a severely malnourished Celsia was a beneficiary of a supplementary feeding program.

Visit www.christianchildrensfund.org for more information about CCF’s work in Timor Leste and other places around the globe.

Courtesy of

CEDPA’s Mary Ellen Duke, Senior Technical Advisor for Education and Youth, and Mpume Zama, Project Director in South Africa, visited schools in Swaziland where CEDPA’s Towards a Better Future pilot project is being implemented. Below Mary Ellen shares some experiences from her trip.

Summer 2008–Mpume and I have spent the last two days visiting two of the schools where our Towards a Better Future pilot project is being implemented. One afternoon was spent at the Enjabulweni Bridging School run by our local partner, Manzini Youth Care, a project of the Salesians of Don Bosco. The school is basically three simple buildings with a total of six classrooms. Kids who have never been to school or dropped out of primary school attend classes here and are eventually mainstreamed into the local schools. Enjabulweni is probably the only school in the country that is free.

Read more about CEDPA’s Towards a Better Future Pilot Project at http://www.cedpa.org/content/news/detail/1952.

October 2008-For the past month, 26 women from eight countries have come together in Mexico City to share, debate and learn about what it takes to be an effective manager and persuasive leader.

They came from urban neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro and remote, agricultural lands of Colombia. They survived wars in Angola and El Salvador. Some had MBAs and others never went to high school. But they were all dedicated to one thing: changing their communities for the better.

“There is a great challenge for women and families in my country,” said Clara Marina Rodríguez of El Salvador, who works with the Center for the Development of Women in San Salvador. Although that country’s civil war ended in the 1990s, “there were many widows and many orphans.” Clara Marina’s center provides these women and youth with job skills and social development.

CEDPA’s forty-seventh Global Women in Management training, held September 8 to October 3 in Mexico City, gave these women a chance to improve their skills for effective community development.

Learn more about CEDPA’s training programs and alumni at http://www.cedpa.org/content/news/detail/2016.

Little research has been done to understand how investments in girls impact economic growth and the health and well-being of communities. This lack of data reveals how pervasively girls have been overlooked. For millions of girls across the developing world, there are no systems to record their birth, their citizenship, or even their identity. However, the existing research suggests their impact can reach much farther than expected.

• When a girl in the developing world receives seven or more years of education,she marries four years later and has 2.2 fewer children. (United Nations Population Fund, State of World Population 1990.)
• An extra year of primary school boosts girls’ eventual wages by 10 to 20 percent. An extra year of secondary school: 15 to 25 percent ([Psacharopoulos and Patrinos, “Returns to Investment in Education: A Further Update,” Policy Research Working Paper 2881 [Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2002].)
• When women and girls earn income, they reinvest 90 percent of it into their families, as compared to only 30 to 40 percent for a man. (Phil Borges, with foreword by Madeleine Albright, Women Empowered: Inspiring Change in the Emerging World [New York: Rizzoli, 2007], 13.)

Learn more about The Girl Effect at www.girleffect.org.

Tuesday, October 14
9:30 – 11:30am
Commitment Towards Poverty Alleviation and Gender Equality Report (WFDA)

5:00 – 7:00 pm
Reception and Dedication of Julia Taft Conference Room at InterAction

Wednesday, October 15
12:30– 2:30pm
InterAction's Food Security Map:
Reaching the Bottom Billion

Thursday, October 16
12:00 – 2:00pm
The 2008 DATA Report (ONE)
Ground Floor Conference Room
1400 16th Street, NW

Friday, October 17
12:00– 1:15 pm
Leveraging International
Frameworks to Fight Poverty
Lunch will be served.
Webcast available for those
outside Washington, DC
Click to RSVP (by noon, Oct. 15)

5:00–7:00pm
THE END of POVERTY?
Screening of Documentary
to be released in March 2009.
Narrated by Martin Sheen.
Followed by Happy Hour.
Click to RSVP