Over twenty years ago, I worked for an organization doing microcredit for women in Central America. The research to support microcredit showed that giving loans to women, rather than men, to create microbusinesses and manage their household income, resulted in greater investments for their children’s education, the family’s healthcare, and overall well-being.
Today, there is similar evidence to demonstrate the positive impact of women in leadership and decision-making positions at the community and country level. In India, for example, communities with women-led councils had 62% more drinking-water projects than those with men-led councils. Yet, 61% of countries have never had a female leader and we have a long way to go for gender equality at all levels of society.
I am encouraged by the trends of women-centered development and recent investments announced at the Generation Equality Forum in Paris. Several Global Washington members are at the forefront of this approach for gender equality. I hope you will take the time to read more about this issue and our members in the articles below.
Also, this month Global Washington facilitated small group gatherings of over 60 female-identifying members to discuss gender equality and strengthen the network of females working in global development. This builds on our conversations from the Fall of 2020 about the Sustainable Development Goal #5 on Gender Equality that revealed the need to create more meaningful connections and allies across organizations and disciplines to promote gender equality. We’ll be producing a summary of recommendations coming out of these conversations in August.
I’m also thrilled to announce that registration for our 2021 Goalmakers Conference on December 8 and 9 will soon be open. The first day of this event will be virtual and the second day will be in-person in Seattle. The in-person event will be a homecoming after a long stretch of only online communication. As always, we will monitor public health guidance and make contingencies, but we are hopeful that we can gather again in-person to spark those connections vital to your work. I hope you can join us!
Perhaps the Ambition of Gender Equality Will Finally Become a Reality
By Joanne Lu
Photo credit: UN Women/Fabrice Gentile
At a time when the world is grappling with the urgent consequences of crises like climate change and the global COVID-19 pandemic, gender equality advocates say we need more women in leadership than ever.
That’s why, on July 2, the Generation Equality Forum Paris, hosted by UN Women, concluded with historic commitments – including nearly $40 billion of confirmed investments – from governments, philanthropies, corporations, civil society, and youth organizations to accelerate gender equality over the next five years. It’s an effort to put concrete action behind the intentions that were set in 1995 at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing and the goals that were specified by Sustainable Development Goal 5.
“The Generation Equality Forum marks a positive, historic shift in power and perspective,” said Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Executive Director of UN Women in a press release. “Together we have mobilized across different sectors of society, from south to north, to become a formidable force, ready to open a new chapter in gender equality.”
The Paris event was preceded in March by a two-week-long kickoff gathering in Mexico City, where UN Member States adopted a set of Agreed Conclusions that recognized the need to significantly increase women’s full participation and leadership at all levels of decision-making in government and the public sector. It recommended, for example, setting targets and timelines to achieve gender balance in government through quotas, appointments and training, changing laws and policies that hinder women’s equal participation in public service, measures to eliminate, prevent and respond to all forms of violence against women and girls, measures to support young women’s participation in public life, and reinforcing women’s presence and leadership in all places where climate change-related decisions are made.
The Generation Equality Forum in Mexico was closed on March 31, 2021
Such changes are especially relevant as COVID-19 has exacerbated pre-existing gender inequities, resulting in problems like increased violence against women and worse economic impacts for women. Indigenous women, women of color and youth have experienced compounded risks and barriers. And yet, women have mostly been excluded from governments’ pandemic task forces, composing only 24 percent of the 225 task force members in 137 countries, according to the UN Development Programme’s COVID-19 Global Gender Response Tracker.
Screenshot of Global Gender Response Tracker
That’s not the only disturbing statistic on women’s participation in leadership and decision-making. Only 22 countries have women Heads of State or Government; 119 have never had a woman leader. Four countries – Rwanda, Cuba, Bolivia and the United Arab Emirates – have 50 percent or more women in parliament in single or lower houses. And globally, women under age 30 make up less than 1 percent of parliamentarians. Yet, there is growing evidence that political decision-making processes improve when women hold leadership positions. In India, for example, communities with women-led councils had 62 percent more drinking-water projects than those with men-led councils. Other studies have found that countries in which women enjoy greater social and political status produce fewer carbon dioxide emissions and have lower climate footprints.
But the work of getting more women into leadership begins with the basics, like ensuring that they have access to quality education. Globally, 130 million girls remain out of school. That’s why Sahar Education for Afghan Girls is working hard to provide girls in war-torn Afghanistan with schools that provide quality teaching and are designed with their needs in mind. Sahar also has a Digital Literacy Program that opens doors for girls to higher education and job skills through technology. They are currently serving 1,500 girls a year through their computer labs.
Photo credit: Sahar
Similarly, Rwanda Girls Initiative (RGI) founded a STEM-focused upper-secondary boarding school for girls in Rwanda. In addition to STEM subjects and English, the Gashora Girls Academy of Science and Technology offers extracurriculars that empower students to develop political leadership skills, such as Community Service, Leadership, and Mentoring where they’re encouraged to change the politics of Rwanda in their generation, and the exceedingly popular Debate and Seminars club. The debate team in fact made history by being the first all-girls school to win Rwanda’s annual Youth Entrepreneurs Debate Competition. Since then they’ve also competed on regional and international levels.
For many girls around the world, acts of violence like early marriage are keeping them out of school and preventing them from thriving into positions of leadership. That’s what CARE’s Tipping Point Initiative is working to address. Based on the premise that “major change only occurs when those who have been excluded from power organize collectively…to challenge existing systems and their impact,” Tipping Point facilitates adolescent girl-led activism against early marriage in Bangladesh and Nepal. Through the initiative, they’ve strengthened their organizing skills, they’ve connected with government officials, religious leaders, teachers and others, and their voices have been elevated to the national level.
Care’s Tipping Point Initiative targeting child marriage in Bangladesh and Nepal
Girl Rising is also amplifying the voices of adolescent girls, especially in advocating for their right to education. But their most recent Future Rising initiative works at the intersection of gender equity and climate justice because, according to the ND-GAIN Index, every additional year of schooling a girl receives correlates with a 3.2-point improvement in her country’s resilience to climate disasters. One piece of the initiative is a fellowship that supports 10 young people (mostly girls) who work in their communities on these issues. These fellows are creating projects like short films, comic series, essays, and grant applications that will illuminate the urgency of the crisis and change cultural narratives around climate and gender.
There are also several organizations working within the legal framework to end violence against women and other barriers to gender equality. These include Every Woman Treaty, which is advancing the creation, adoption, and implementation of a global treaty to end violence against women and girls. And, Women’s Link Worldwide, which works in and beyond courts to promote social change that advances the human rights of women and girls, especially those facing multiple inequalities.
Screenshot of Every Woman Treaty website
The LGBTIQ community is especially familiar with multiple inequalities. Since 1990, OutRight Action International has been a leader in fighting for the human rights of LGBTIQ people globally. In addition to monitoring and documenting human rights violations, they help develop effective advocacy and capacity building for LGBTIQ rights and provide training to community members and allies. They also convene key stakeholders to exchange information on best practices related to ending violence based on sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression, or sex characteristics.
It’s clear that even with limited resources, civil society organizations like these have been doing the hard work of advancing gender equality for decades. But now, with action commitments and investments from all sectors, like those pledged at the Generation Equality Forum in Paris, perhaps the ambition of gender equality will finally become a reality.
The following Global Washington members are helping with gender equality and women empowerment.
APCO
APCO is the world’s largest independent and majority woman-owned advisory and advocacy communications firm. A passionate belief in breaking down barriers, challenging the status quo, and advancing equality has been in our DNA since our founding in 1984. APCO Impact is an advisory group that sits within APCO Worldwide and supports clients across business, government, and philanthropy. Our work helps clients be catalysts for progress and address the key issues of our time, including corporate purpose, ESG, climate and sustainability, racial and gender equity, and social justice.
Concern’s approach to ending extreme poverty is rooted in the understanding that the cycle of poverty is fueled by a combination of inequality, vulnerability, and risk. The greatest form of marginalization, and a force multiplier for other types of discrimination, is gender inequity. Women invest up to 90% of their income back into their families (compared to the average 30-40% invested by men), meaning that when there is financial equity at home, families are more likely to break that cycle, and whole economies change for the better. However, there are many factors that hinder this progress for women and girls, including barriers to education, healthcare, sustainable livelihoods, and a seat at the decision-making table, as well as gender-based violence.
All of Concern’s programs are implemented through a gender-transformative lens. Concern critically examines and challenges the harmful gender norms and dynamics in each community where we work in order to build the equity necessary to sustainably end poverty. They engage women as agents of their own future through skills training, psychosocial support, and healthcare solutions. Concern also actively engages men as accountable allies. Finally, they pay special attention to the intersecting inequalities that leave many women further behind, including caste, ethnicity, and health. Learn more at: https://www.concernusa.org/what-we-do/gender-equality/.
Every Women Treaty is a diverse coalition of more than 1,700 women’s rights advocates, including 840 organizations, in 128 countries working for a safer world for women and girls worldwide. Every Women Treaty envisions a world where every woman and girl everywhere lives a life free from violence. The Every Woman mission is to advance the creation, adoption, and implementation of a global treaty to end violence against women and girls.
Girl Rising’s mission is to ensure that girls around the world are educated and empowered. Girl Rising works with local partners by providing customized tools and curricula to build confidence and agency in girls and to change attitudes and social norms so that entire communities stand up for girls and against gender discrimination.
Their story-based tools and curricula engage, energize and motivate young people to see beyond their borders, value their education, understand their rights and believe in their capacity to change their lives, communities, and even the world.
The Global Leadership Forum strengthens globally oriented social-purpose leaders through a 7-month peer cohort program that addresses leadership, management, and organizational development topics. In this trusting peer community, creative problem solving and real-time application of topics results in personal and organizational growth. More than 75% of the over 100 alumni of GLF are women. 100% of GLF participants experienced statistically significant growth in felt leadership skills and competencies. They strengthened connections with others in the development sector, solved thorny workplace challenges, and made career transitions that seemed impossible before GLF. Mid-career cohorts build a pipeline of leaders into the sector, and senior level cohorts provide space for renewal and clarity for leaders to sustain their impact. Alumni of the program form an enduring community who support each other to improve lives in communities worldwide.
Kati Collective provides experienced, strategic, and pragmatic action focused on three of the most important drivers of change: gender, data, and partnerships. Using data as a tool to unlock solutions at every step of the development lifecycle, we align resources from across our network with global and local expertise to provide clients with targeted, cost-effective project resources.
We provide multi-national and multi-level clients and partners with the perspective and experience to navigate complex global health and development challenges, as well as the strategies and tools needed to improve data-driven health outcomes on a global scale – all with a gender equity lens firmly in place.
Kati Collective is a woman-owned and staffed organization built on the belief that achieving gender equity will change the world. Starting with our small core team, for each engagement we pull in diverse, international professionals with the talent and knowledge to provide the right skills at the right time to the right project.
We strongly believe that the community perspectives of women and girls must be included at all levels of stakeholder engagement and that by insisting on rigorous data science in the global ecosystem, we will advance gender equity.
Mona Foundation aims to alleviate global poverty so that no child goes to bed hungry, is lost to preventable diseases, or is deprived of the gift of education due to lack of resources. This can only be achieved when women and girls are able to equally participate in all aspects of socio-economic activity and fully contribute to the betterment of their communities.
Gender equality and education for all are strategic development priorities as well as birth rights. Nearly all of Mona’s 19 partner organizations in 12 countries work to educate and empower girls. The results have been dramatic. In India, the Barli Institute (Indore) educates illiterate rural young women and has graduated 8,500 “change agents” from 800 villages. All are driving sustained positive change in their communities as health workers, teachers, and independent entrepreneurs; 94% contribute to the income of their family. The Aarohini Girls Empowerment Program (Lucknow) teaches girls to resist and overcome gender injustice and educates boys to champion gender equality. As a result, child marriages dropped from 54% at risk in 2016 to 0% in 2019.
Gender equality is a reality of our humanity. Mona works to ensure this spiritual reality finds lasting form in every community.
Oxfam America’s work to advance gender justice is multifaceted and tailored to the people Oxfam serves. In some countries, Oxfam is the largest and most prominent organization to take a stand for women and gender-diverse people, and alongside them, often supporting the infrastructures of burgeoning movements. In other countries, like Sri Lanka, Oxfam helps rethink entrenched systems and remap biases to shift attitudes and overcome barriers. In all places, Oxfam strives for sustainable change. Oxfam does so first by acknowledging women, girls, and feminist actors as effective social change agents who must have a hand in ensuring their own rights and in the development they most want to see – development that will transform their families, communities and countries.
At Rwanda Girls Initiative, they know that education is the key to gender equality. They believe that investing in girls education, especially secondary education, is one of the most powerful levers one can pull to spark systemic change. When girls receive an education, they are more likely to lead healthy, productive lives, earning higher wages and participate in decision making in their community. Girls education fosters economic development, peace, and reduces inequalities between boys and girls. Still today, there are more than 132 million girls left out of school worldwide and only 25 percent of countries have achieved gender parity in upper secondary education.
As an all-girls boarding school in Rwanda, they have removed the most significant barriers to education for their students. Rwanda Girls Initiative is one of the most socio-economically diverse schools in Africa, with 100% of their students receiving some amount of financial aid. Their teachers and staff support an environment of academic excellence, problem solving, leadership and service; ensuring that graduates will become tomorrow’s leaders. To date Rwanda Girls Initiative has graduated 705 students; future scientists, entrepreneurs, advocates and thought leaders, who will bring insights and solutions to the biggest global challenges we face.
For 20 years, Sahar’s mission has been to provide safe spaces for girls to receive a quality education. Sahar partners with the Ministry of Education and Afghan-based organizations to build public schools and implement educational programs for girls, empowering and inspiring children and their families to build peaceful, thriving communities. Each academic year, 25,000 girls attend the thirteen public schools built by Sahar. The organization also provides a range of programs including: early marriage prevention, teacher training, digital literacy, and building gender allies to improve the achievement gap between girls and boys. In order to address this disparity, Sahar developed and implemented the Early Marriage Prevention program in 2015. Since its founding, 1,473 students have graduated from the program. In this program, girls are introduced to the importance of continuing their education, leadership skills and professional development.
As U.S. troops withdraw from Afghanistan, Sahar’s Board of Directors and staff have reaffirmed an enduring commitment to providing education in northern Afghanistan.
Starbucks commitment to ensuring a sustainable future of coffee for all starts with strengthening the communities that grow coffee and tea around the world. Women play key roles in these communities for their households, farms and businesses. We believe that investing in women and girls in coffee- and tea-growing regions makes a significant impact for both families and their broader communities. The Starbucks Foundation’s Origin Grants help these communities continue to break down barriers to education, promote clean water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) and create economic opportunities for women and girls. On International Women’s Day in 2018, The Starbucks Foundation announced a goal to empower 250,000 women and girls in origin communities by 2025. To date, The Starbucks Foundation is more than halfway towards achieving this goal, having reached more than 125,000 women through programs around women’s leadership, access to finance and healthy homes in coffee- and tea-growing communities across Africa, Asia and Latin America. This includes collaboration with other GlobalWA members, such as Mercy Corps empowering women in Indian tea communities as leaders around COVID-19 awareness. Learn more about the impact here.
Tostan’s three-year holistic Community Empowerment Program brings about positive social transformation for improved gender equality, which is manifested through improved voice, agency, and leadership for women and girls. Using participatory, culturally relevant educational techniques, the human rights-based curriculum provides new knowledge and skills in democracy, health and hygiene, literacy and numeracy, and project management and encourages communities to define their own vision for well being, review their current practices and adjust outdated social rules. Community Management Committees, with at least 50% female membership, advance community priorities and manage Community Development Funds that stimulate women’s economic empowerment.
Gender equality is reinforced through the program’s curriculum which incorporates dialogue, skills, and information that leads communities to reexamine women’s roles within their communities and beyond. The Community Management Committees provides women members the opportunity to practice leadership skills and act as role models for future generations. Increasingly, the program is grooming new women leaders who run for local and higher government positions. As women gain confidence and visibility in new roles, this strengthens new gender norms, making it possible for qualified women to more openly represent their interests and improve government institutions for all.
Girl Rising: Harnessing the Power of Storytelling to Ignite Change
By Joanne Lu
What happens when a group of filmmakers and journalists set out to answer the age-old question: How do we end global poverty? It turns out they harness the power of storytelling into a global movement to educate girls, called Girl Rising.
It started in 2009 when reaching out to experts across the development spectrum, says Christina Lowery, CEO of Girl Rising. They spoke with people who worked on HIV/AIDS, maternal and child health, agriculture, clean water, and other aspects of development to ask what are the best ways to reduce poverty.
“No matter who we spoke to, somewhere in their list of top five things that needed to happen to improve outcomes in their sector and address poverty was, ‘Well, really, you have to get girls in school and keep them there,’” says Lowery.
They dug into the data and found a “mountain of evidence,” as Lowery puts it, on what happens when you educate girls and when they go on to become leaders:
A girl with one extra year of education can earn 10 to 20 percent more as an adult.
If India enrolled 1 percent more girls in secondary school, their GDP would rise by $5.5 billion.
Girls with 8 years of education are four times less likely to be married as children.
And for every additional year of schooling a girl receives, her country’s resilience to climate disasters improves by 3.2 points as measured by the ND-GAIN Index.
Yet, very little money is invested into girls’ education and more than 130 million girls remain out of school.
“As filmmakers and journalists, we thought this was the story of a lifetime,” says Lowery.
The result was a feature-length film, released in 2013, that told the true stories of nine girls – in Haiti, Cambodia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Nepal, India, Peru, Sierra Leone, and Afghanistan – and the obstacles they overcame to get an education.
But alongside the making of the film, Girl Rising also created a strategy to use the film in educational settings to change minds, to use it in mass media to grow the choir of people engaged in educating girls and to use it to help change policies around the world. That work has snowballed into the organization that Girl Rising is today.
Today, Girl Rising works in 12 countries, reaching 5 million youth through various content and curricula, as well as tens of thousands of educators and parents to change how they teach and support girls. About 80 percent of the people Girl Rising reaches with their content fall under the low income bracket, including communities that are below the poverty line, earning less than $1.90 a day.
In all of the 12 countries where Girl Rising has a presence, they have deployed their core curriculum into direct learning environments to meaningfully impact the lives of adolescent girls, as well as engage educators and boys. Depending on resources and opportunity, they have also expanded their “circle of influence” in some countries into the community environment (families, caregivers, and community influencers), structural environment (institutional support and government policies), and cultural environment (mass media).
At the heart of their work, they’re still telling girls’ stories – creating educational resources, films, books, and television and radio programming. They also collaborate with more than 130 local partners, including educators, schools, community organizations, businesses, and non-profits to create locally-adapted programming and expand their reach. Finally they activate their audience – whether families, communities, corporations, governments, or the general public – to take action for girls’ education and gender equity.
Image credit: Girl Rising
In India, for example, Girl Rising is partnering with the Ministry of Women and Child Development to change the government’s policies toward girls. They’ve also created content specifically for the ministry to disseminate across the country, including in hard-to-reach communities. Additionally, Girl Rising has converted its film into “behavior-change tools,” says Nidhi Dubey, Girl Rising’s Country Representative in India. These include a facilitator’s guide to use at screenings of the film as well as materials that bundle the nine stories in the film into chapters that focus on specific behavior changes, like how fathers and brothers can support their girls or how girls can stand up for themselves.
According to Girl Rising, stories that change mindsets and stir behavior change help girls to gain a voice and agency. With voice and agency, they can articulate their dreams and aspirations and then do something about it. Those are some indicators of empowerment that Girl Rising looks at, besides tracking the number of girls enrolling and staying in school. But they also evaluate the empowerment of girls’ families and communities, their health and rates of early marriage and pregnancy, among other indicators.
Image credit: Girl Rising
Unfortunately, a lot of the progress in girls’ education and empowerment that has been made globally over the last couple decades has now been lost amid the pandemic.
“Because of deeply rooted gender norms, girls remain hurt first and worst by this pandemic,” says Virginia Terry, Girl Rising’s Head of Development. “Schools are often the only safe place an adolescent girl has to learn, be with peers, and get a meal and health and hygiene products, and then that was taken away. So, this past year has been all about adaptations to these disruptions.”
But Terry says that because of Girl Rising’s deep relationships with local partners, they’ve been able to adapt quickly, nimbly, and appropriately to what’s happening in local contexts. In Guatemala, for example, they quickly converted their program to a radio program and home delivery of education materials. In India, their partner Slam Out Loud turned to low-tech media like WhatsApp. Terry says these are adaptations that Girl Rising can carry forward into the post-pandemic world.
Image credit: Girl Rising
Looking ahead, Girl Rising is also excited about their newly launched Future Rising initiative, which addresses the intersection of girls’ education and climate change through storytelling, social action, and education. Part of the initiative is a fellowship that supports 10 young people between the ages of 17 and 25, who are working in their communities on these issues. Their proposed work include projects like short films, essays, or grant applications. One young woman in Nigeria, for example, will be creating a series of graphic novels that show the effect of drought on early marriage in her community. It will be an ongoing fellowship with a new cohort every six months that will focus on one specific topic under the umbrella of climate change, such as water shortage, sustainable agriculture, or civic leadership.
“We feel a great responsibility to help amplify and support especially young people and young girls telling the stories of their work in their own communities,” says Lowery. “They’re proof of concept that if we can ensure girls are educated and supported, they will, in fact, address some of the most serious problems in their communities and around the world.”
For Kirthi Jayakumar, Ending Domestic Violence Against Women is Deeply Personal
By Joel Meyers
Photo credit: Kirthi Jayakumar
Kirthi Jayakumar has been advocating to end domestic violence since she was 25, initially in Chennai, India (where she grew up) yet shortly after across the globe. She founded a non-profit, she has created a mobile app and Facebook chat bot to help victims of domestic violence, she is a passionate speaker, and a passionate proponent of ending gender violence wherever it exists. Most recently she is a graduate of Every Woman Treaty’s 1000 Voices Fellowship, a program to train women on international laws that address gender equality, women’s rights and ending violence against women. “Every experience in my life has pointed towards responding to this issue [of gender-based violence] one way or the other.”
Kirthi was quite young when she fell victim to domestic violence: “I was age five when somebody who was supposed to take care of me turned heel and winded up becoming my abuser, and that [turned into] 13 years of abuse.” Kirthi tolerated it in silence – she internalized the trauma as she thought she deserved the violence. “I am finding an answer for little Kirthi – the young woman who faced what she shouldn’t have faced – I’m looking for justice for her.”
Kirthi’s mother, a therapist working with survivors of gender-based violence, has been a tremendous positive influence in her life. “What my mum did is very unlike what a typical Indian mother does. She didn’t silence me, she didn’t cry, she didn’t decide to marry me away immediately – these are stories one hears of – instead she told me I can own my story, and reclaim control of my life, my body, my mind, or I could just go ahead and grieve, and whichever option I would pick, she would have my back.”
Kirthi found her voice when she was 25 “…when a horrific incident happened in New Delhi on 16 December 2012 when a young woman was brutally gang raped, and that incident in some ways helped me access a sense of solidarity. This was my first understanding that I thrive in an environment where there is solidarity, and in an environment where there’s nurture, which I would eventually find again in the 1000 Voices Fellowship.” Six months later, Kirthi, with tremendous help from her mother (and a strong influence from her grandmother who taught her the value of lifelong learning), founded a non-profit in Chennai called the Red Elephant Foundation. “The idea was to paint the elephant in the room red so people would speak about issues they simply weren’t.” She quickly follows: “It’s not that these conversations were not happening in India at the time – there were several great feminists, several great activists doing this job – the fact is the critical tipping point hadn’t yet come in for my generation.”
Domestic violence in India is certainly not a new phenomenon, though it has not been until this last century that it has been pushed into the light of political and cultural discourse. It wasn’t until the 1970’s with the women’s movement when the issue of gender began to gain traction and visibility as an issue separate from other concerns. But there is still a tremendous amount of work to be done. In a survey conducted by the Thomson Reuters Foundation in 2018, India was ranked as the world’s most dangerous country for women among the 193 United Nation member states. Today, according to UN Women, roughly 25% of women in in India are victims of some form of domestic violence, and of those the numbers may not even represent the full extent of the problem since as per National Family Health Survey (NFHS) 2015-16, roughly 77% of women who experienced domestic violence didn’t ever mention it to anyone and even less than 1% of the women actually sought help from the police(1).
Photo credit: Kirthi Jayakumar
“When I found my voice, I was able to use what I had learned at that time for speaking out, and I taught myself a lot of ways I could channel that into action at the community level. I pursued degrees in peace and conflict studies and gender studies at the same time in the hope of using peace education as a way to get young people to normalize nonviolence over violence.” Kirthi received her Bachelor’s degree in Law from the Ambedkar University in Chennai, India, an MA in Peace and Conflict Studies from Coventry University, and a second MA from UPEACE (also in peace studies).
Seven years after founding the Red Elephant Foundation she closed its doors because of the COVID pandemic, “…because money was hard to come by and my modality was to teach at schools; they went online and I couldn’t get the time to teach.” Her lifelong learning practice and desire for positive change was channeled into developing an app called Saahas, which means “courage” in Hindi. “I taught myself to code and created a mobile app and Facebook chat bot with resources that listed help for violence survivors across 196 countries, to find help wherever they are, whenever there’s an emergency. Legal help, medical help…all kinds of resources.” Via the app and her personal capacity as a liaison for survivors, her efforts have helped 40,000 violence survivors – “women, yet any individual facing domestic violence.”
And then she was introduced to Lisa Shannon, CEO of Every Woman Treaty. “Lisa renewed my belief that the future can be changed. She has made me feel welcome in ways very few have, and that is amazing.” Kirthi readily enrolled in the second cohort of the 1000 Voices Fellowship, an “intense 2-week training program that brings activists from the front lines from all over the world in a cohort of 20-25 people to train on international laws that address violence against women and women’s rights.” The Fellowship, she continues, “also includes a media training component that helps fellows shine the spotlight on violence against women through the local and international media. The program is a powerful catalyst to work with leaders from all over the world to share stories and best practices – something you don’t find very often. This program makes accessing this pool of talent possible from the comfort of your own home: it is a perfect mix of knowledge and intersectionality, and peer to peer learning.”
“The biggest thing I am looking at now is to find a path to ending violence against women – and to me at the moment it looks like getting the Every Woman Treaty in place and having the world’s women benefit from its existence.” To her, there is no other option. “Part of making [domestic violence] go away is pattern breaking. Change will not come without a catalyst – that catalyst is that treaty. It takes every hand on deck to make domestic and gender violence go away.” Through her involvement in Every Woman Treaty, she hopes to engage in conversations at both the country level in civil society as well as with people in power to support the treaty in passing. She will also continue to work with women in India, especially women with COVID.
Photo credit: Kirthi Jayakumar
Kirthi is a humble activist that keeps looking to the future and the positive change that can be achieved. “I personally refrain from identifying with one incident as an accomplishment as there is a chance I may put a ceiling on myself. And there is a chance I may compare everything thing else that is to come with that threshold and may not enjoy what’s to come.”
More on Every Woman Treaty 1000 Voices Fellowship
1000 Voices builds the capacity of coalition members through coordination and support, the creation of national coalitions, and diverse, culturally-appropriate expert peer-to-peer training in media, advocacy, fundraising, and public policy. Upon completion of this program these leaders will be further equipped to foster significant influence on policy makers, media, and diplomats, leading to increased security for all women and girls in their nation. 1000 Voices prioritizes emerging world leaders, including coalition members from marginalized communities, including indigenous people, people experiencing disability, and widows, as well as advocates in low- to middle-income countries, and countries with the highest rates of violence.
Please welcome our newest Global Washington members. Take a moment to familiarize yourself with their work and consider opportunities for support and collaboration!
Concern Worldwide US
Concern Worldwide USA is a global community of humanitarians, partners, community members, supporters, donors, and volunteers who share a common vision of a world where no one lives in poverty, fear, or oppression, and all can exercise their rights to a decent standard of living, can have access to the opportunities and choices essential to a long, healthy, and creative life, and can be treated with dignity and respect. Concern Worldwide US are innovators who have been at the forefront of engineering transformative approaches to the treatment of malnutrition, maternal & child health care, mobile cash transfers, disaster recovery and more. Concernusa.org
Results Educational Fund
RESULTS is a movement of passionate, committed everyday people who use their voices to influence political decisions that will bring an end to poverty. results.org
Special Olympics Washington
Special Olympics was started by Eunice Kennedy Shriver in 1968 as a way to provide people with intellectual disabilities a place to play, and feel included. Today, her vision has become a Global movement with over 4.7 million athletes competing in 169 countries. Through programming in sports, health, education and community building, Special Olympics is changing the lives of people with intellectual disabilities. Special Olympics is able to remove barriers and stigmas that people with intellectual disabilities face, and to share with the community the gifts and talents they possess. specialolympicswashington.org
October 2021: Global Leadership Forum Mid-Career Cohort, Applications are being accepted now. Email team@glfglobalorg to join a virtual info session on July 22nd 10-11am, or August 4th 12 – 1pm.
Gender equity is not an add-on. It is not a “nice” or “not necessary” element of a plan. Though there are many strong leaders and inspiring initiatives in the global health community who are outspoken and actively advancing gender equality, there are still organizations that are not considering gender equity as an integral element when undertaking new initiatives and programs and when reviewing existing work. This isn’t because they don’t care – it’s because they think gender equity doesn’t apply to their particular issue. Continue Reading
When people think about NGOs working in low and middle income countries, most people think of issues such as food security, healthcare, or emergency relief. However, several NGOs also provide essential support to build societal cohesion, safeguard human rights, and bolster the rule of law. The elements of a healthy and thriving civil society are fundamental to achieving each of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and are directly foundational to SDG 16 Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions.
Global Washington members such as the World Justice Project and the Chandler Foundation work to strengthen civil societies around the world and are featured in the articles below. This month, we also pay tribute to Rose Berg who was an icon in the global development community and tragically passed away in May. She will be deeply missed. We honor her and others who advocate for social justice around the world in our focus of SDG 16. Read more in the articles below and join us on June 24 for an event on this topic with Patners Asia, Tostan, and OutRight Action International.
I am also thrilled to welcome Joel Meyers as GlobalWA’s Director of Communications. Many of you already know Joel because he has been a GlobalWA member, attended almost every Global Washington annual conference, is a Global Leadership Forum (GLF) alumni, a Sahar Education board member, and promotes Tech4Good in many aspects of his life. If you are a GlobalWA member, you’ll be hearing from Joel often as he works to promote your organization. Welcome to the team Joel!
Creating Healthy Societies Requires Diligence, Grassroots Commitment, and Upholding Human Rights
By Joanne Lu
Partners Asia prioritizes increasing skills and confidence of women in the ethnic states of Myanmar. Photo credit Partners Asia.
The constant work of building peaceful, inclusive societies is one of the most challenging aims for civil society organizations. It’s often thankless work in increasingly challenging environments. Even before the pandemic, many experts described widespread “democratic backsliding” around the world – in Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe and North America. On some continents like Africa, there are now fewer democracies than 20 years ago, now replaced by autocratic regimes. Other powers, like Russia and China, are actively working to undermine democracy, while leaders in some well-established democracies, like former U.S. President Trump and India’s President Modi, have adopted authoritarian-like rhetoric. Since the pandemic, some governments have used the pandemic to drastically expand their powers.
Policymakers often prefer to adopt approaches that are more visible and appear to initiate change faster – such as supporting foreign leaders that align with democratic values and pouring billions of dollars into short-term interventions. Of course, national leadership plays an important role in good governance and peaceful societies, but local community groups, activists and individuals are often the ones moving the needle day-by-day toward Sustainable Development Goal 16: “Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all, and build effective, accountable, and inclusive institutions at all levels.”
Local groups not only understand the present and historical context in which they live, but they also know what their communities need most urgently, are trusted by community members, and are the first to respond to events. However, these civil society groups often lack funding, capacity, political support, and recognition.
That’s why Partners Asia focuses all of their work on supporting local leaders who serve the needs of “invisible populations” along the Thailand-Myanmar border, including refugees, migrants, ethnic minorities, and LGBTQI individuals. Through grants and leadership support, they are investing in grassroots civil society that promotes migrant and ethnic minority education, gender equality, community development, women’s financial inclusion, leadership, and cross-border cooperation. For example, they trained one local partner, Fortune, on research techniques for their mobile phone app. Fortune’s app helps refugees and migrant workers in rural Thailand navigate the path to citizenship so that they can have access to health care, education, justice, worker’s rights, and freedom of movement – basic human rights.
Partners Asia supports partners focused on education of Rohingya children in refugee camps in Bangladesh. Photo credit Partners Asia.
Similarly, Pangea Giving also supports community grassroots organizations in Myanmar and five other countries around the world through grants and long-term partnerships. Because Myanmar experienced a military coup in February, Pangea Giving no longer publishes details about their partners there in an effort to protect them. However, their work and partnerships continue, and they’ve also begun hosting webinars with other NGOs to discuss ways to support civil society, community groups, and democracy movements in the country.
Civil society also plays a critical role in providing sustained support to communities that are experiencing protracted violence and humanitarian crises. Yemen is the gravest example of this – a country that has been named the world’s worst humanitarian crisis and suffered the largest cholera outbreak in modern history since a political conflict broke out in 2014. When news cycles move past these crises and political will wanes, groups like the Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation (YRRF) are still there, advocating for support. Specifically, YRRF works to increase the awareness of U.S. policymakers and the public about Yemen’s humanitarian crisis, it supports relief and reconstruction efforts through fundraising, advocacy, and material support, and it facilitates campaigns to bring an inclusive and just peace to Yemen.
YRRF supports relief and reconstruction efforts in Yemen. Photo credit YRRF.
But, as mentioned before, the space for civil society is shrinking. Venezuela is just one example of a country in which civil society is increasingly being repressed. On March 30, the Venezuelan Ministry of Interior and Justice published a new mandate that requires all NGOs and nonprofit organizations to disclose sensitive information about their activities, including the identities of individuals and communities that they serve. According to a statement signed by 85 organizations, including Women’s Link Worldwide, this measure is “the latest in a string of actions intended to restrict and intimidate civil society organizations, especially those that receive support from international donors.”
Women’s Link Worldwide advances the human rights of women and girls through advocacy, litigation, and the development of new legal theories and strategies, particularly ones that highlight women’s rights violations that are undocumented or neglected. For example, in 2019, Women’s Link Worldwide won a groundbreaking case in which the Supreme Court of Colombia ruled that “Venezuelan migrant girls and women, due to their vulnerable status, cannot be denied healthcare.” By representing a teenage girl, who had migrated from Venezuela, became a victim of sexual assault, and was denied access to desperately-needed medical services, Women’s Link Worldwide paved the way for more migrant women and girls to get the sexual and reproductive health services they need. Additionally, they helped to build up key infrastructure for democracy, like a more robust and inclusive legal institution and access to health care.
Unfortunately, a country’s journey of democracy usually isn’t straightforward. Ethiopia’s democracy, for example, is at a crossroads as the pandemic-delayed elections are scheduled for June. Since last November, Ethiopia’s government – led by a Nobel Prize-winning prime minister who promised massive democratic reforms – has been embroiled in conflict with forces loyal to the former ruling party, composed of members of an ethnic minority group, the Tigrayans. There have been reports of major human rights abuses and civilian massacres by both sides, as well as attacks on independent media and arbitrary arrests by the government.
Among those watching is the World Justice Project (WJP), an independent, multidisciplinary organization working to advance the rule of law around the world. Through survey research and engagement activities, the World Justice Project updates an annual index that ranks 128 countries according to how the rule of law is experienced and perceived. Such indices can be an important tool for mapping progress or decline and advocating for change. “Effective rule of law reduces corruption, combats poverty and disease, and protects people from injustices large and small,” WJP says. “It is the foundation for communities of justice, opportunity, and peace—underpinning development, accountable government, and respect for fundamental rights.”
Reinvigorating the push for global democracy is a centerpiece of President Biden’s foreign policy. So much so, he promised to host a global “Summit for Democracy” during his first year in office to renew countries’ commitments to fight corruption, defend against authoritarianism, and advance human rights. Although COVID-19 might force Biden to postpone his widely anticipated Summit into 2022, there seems to be a renewed determination to push back, because as civil society groups know all too well, persistence is the only path toward peace, justice, and inclusive societies.
The following Global Washington members are helping build peaceful, inclusive societies.
Chandler Foundation The Chandler Foundation’s mission is to promote good government, fair marketplaces, and flourishing communities through investments and partnerships. The foundation invests in social purpose organizations that are working with government, civil society, and the private sector in the areas of: Transparency, Accountability and Anti-Corruption; Evidence-Informed Policy Making; Business Enabling Environment, Land Governance, and Digital Identification—all towards improving opportunity for all.
Covenant House International Covenant House International is the largest charity in the Americas serving and advocating for youth facing homelessness and trafficking. The organization builds a bridge to hope for these young people through a continuum of care that includes shelter, education, job training, medical care, substance-use treatment, parenting support, and legal aid in 31 cities and 6 countries: Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Canada, and the United States. Covenant House sites in Latin America have provided training for thousands of agents of each country’s national police forces as well as lawyers, judges, and civil society organizations on understanding, identifying, and preventing human trafficking and on defending human rights for youth. In Guatemala, the organization played a key role in creating a special prosecutor’s office on trafficking within the national government (Fiscalia contra la Trata de Personas) and in securing passage of a national migratory code with a human rights lens rather than a solely security lens. In Honduras, Covenant House’s Child Rights Observatory documents the violence and trafficking committed against youth in Honduras. Their reports are published and circulated widely to international governments and organizations, and their staff present regular testimony to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in Geneva.
Landesa Landesa champions and works to secure land rights for millions of rural women and men experiencing poverty, to promote social justice and provide opportunity. Gender-equal and socially inclusive land rights are a foundation for expanding economic opportunity, creating social and economic empowerment and growing prosperity for women, men, and communities. And more prosperous communities lead to more peaceful societies.
Landesa is working alongside the Government of Liberia and civil society to implement the landmark 2018 Land Rights Act, which strengthened land rights for historically marginalized groups, including women, youth, and rural communities. The Land Rights for Sustainable Development project partners with Liberian CSOs Development Education Network – Liberia (DEN-L) and Foundations for Community Initiatives (FCI) on programming to build awareness of the new law, improve community engagement and inclusive leadership in land governance, and strengthen alternative dispute resolution practices to peacefully address disputes over land. The project also includes robust training and capacity building resources for DEN-L and FCI to carry out their vital missions to improve lives and livelihoods for Liberians. In Liberia and elsewhere, access to justice, dispute resolution and rule of law are foundational to Landesa’s global land rights work. Learn more about Landesa’s work in Liberia.
Northwest Immigrant Rights Project Northwest Immigrant Rights Project has been defending and advancing the rights of immigrants in Washington State since 1984. As the largest legal-services organization serving low-income immigrants and refugees in the Pacific Northwest, NWIRP believes that all people deserve access to justice, protection from violence, and the opportunity to stay together with family, no matter where they were born or how much money they have. Each year, NWIRP serves over 10,000 community members through direct legal representation, community education, and systemic advocacy throughout their four offices in Seattle, Granger, Tacoma, and Wenatchee.
Oxfam America Oxfam America views protecting civic space as a critical component of all of their work across programmatic and advocacy areas. They define “civic space” as the oxygen for citizen’s voices—it is the set of formal and informal conditions that determine whether and how citizens are able to speak out and act based on their global universal rights. When present, civic space forms the background for civic activity and exercise of fundamental rights to free expression, assembly, and association. However, when the supply becomes constricted, the absence of civic space becomes an existential threat to free and open societies where citizens can exercise power over decisions that affect their lives. The ability of people to organize and speak out without fear is critical to shifting the balance of power that reinforces inequality and injustice. Oxfam works to influence attitudes towards the role and value of civil society and civic space in all our work, contribute to civil society partners’ resilience and effectiveness, build political support for positive legal frameworks or reforms in national and global multilateral spaces, advocate for protections of advocates under threat, and cultivate champions and more prominence for civic space in discourses from regional and global institutions and actors.
Pangea Giving Pangea Giving is a robust community of members and supporters who invest their financial and human resources and are passionate about helping others in developing countries. The contributions of individuals are pooled to collectively make a significant impact through our member engagement and grantmaking program. Pangea invests internationally in social change and dynamic leadership in grassroots organizations. They stand in solidarity with ethnic minorities and indigenous communities in the face of marginalization in their own countries.
Partners Asia For over 20 years, Partners Asia has taken a trust-based approach in their relationships in and along the Myanmar/Burma border. They invest in community-led solutions supporting invisible populations, support coalitions & communities of practice for investing in local leaders, and advocate for a shift in philanthropic practices towards equitable partnerships.
Partner Asia’s current work in Myanmar illustrates how they work: they strongly believe that the best way to support Myanmar’s fight for democracy and justice is to continue to connect, resource, and support local organizations and their leaders as they respond to the ever-changing situation to meet both immediate needs and longer-term strategic aspirations. It is vital that partners know that they are not alone, despite the threats around them, and that they have access to the kinds of flexible funding that enables them to serve their communities in protecting basic rights and assisting the most vulnerable to stay safe. As a result, they feel more secure in otherwise tenuous circumstances, and to remain strategic, resilient players in the bigger picture: building a better, freer future for the peoples they serve. And when it comes to those who invest in Partner Asia’s work, their donors see themselves as allies in shifting power and deconstructing systems that perpetuate injustice and marginalization.
PeaceTrees Vietnam PeaceTrees Vietnam is a humanitarian demining organization dedicated to peacebuilding and addressing the legacy of war in Vietnam. Since normalization between the US and Vietnam in 1995, PeaceTrees has removed more than 110,000 items of unexploded remnants of war and cleared over 3,000 acres of land. Working alongside communities in central Vietnam, PeaceTrees returns safely cleared land to productive use by investing in education, accident assistance, community building, and agriculture. Importantly, PeaceTrees also invests in citizen diplomacy travel, bringing delegations of travelers from the US to Vietnam to build friendships, plant trees, and celebrate together in the spirit of peace and reconciliation.
Tostan Tostan empowers communities to develop and achieve their vision for the future and inspires large-scale movements leading to dignity for all. Tostan’s human-rights based Community Empowerment Program (CEP), a three-year, holistic education model has already engaged more than 5 million people in eight African countries. Tostan’s Peace and Security Project, which is part of the CEP, first strengthens peace-building at the community level by reinforcing vital conflict prevention and management skills. Participants learn improved communication and problem-solving skills and also work to peacefully resolve community and familial conflicts by identifying the root of the problem and engaging in deep listening, and creating an action plan together. Involving religious and traditional leaders is also part of the process and is leading to unprecedented results.
Community partners also learn and apply strategies for fostering peace and human security across their social networks, which often cross national borders. Tostan connects grassroots communities and their larger social networks with regional and international institutions. This increased collaboration helps regions and nations work together to identify barriers to the peace and security of their area and create solutions for addressing those barriers.
Women’s Link Worldwide Women’s Link uses the power of the law to promote the human rights of women and girls, especially those facing multiple forms of inequality (poverty, race, sexual identity, migrant status and more), in contexts throughout East Africa, Latin America and Europe. We take on legal actions with the potential to address systemic rights violations and that can lead to the elimination of barriers that women and girls face in accessing their rights – particularly access to justice, sexual and reproductive rights and the right to live free from gender-based violence. We design tailored legal strategies that we execute in coordination with national civil society groups. These partnerships support and deepen the impact of our legal efforts and strengthen in-country capacity to implement resulting standards or decisions. The legal actions we undertake serve as platforms to complement and bolster the work civil society is doing to push public debate, build movement and achieve policy wins, as well as contribute to creating sustained changes in the legal, political and social environments required to uphold women’s human rights.
Vista Hermosa Foundation The Vista Hermosa Foundation seeks to resource organizations in the United States, Mexico, East Africa, and India to build healthy, flourishing communities. They work in places where history and experience have taught people either to act individually and look out for one’s own survival, or that they have nothing to offer. These lessons tear at the social fabric, leaving civil society weak and ineffectual. Their partners heal the roots of human connection – to self, others, God, and creation – to build a strong foundation for a civil society that works for every member of the community.
In Haiti, years of environmental and humanitarian exploitation, and the urban concentration of power means that farmers and rural communities struggle for resources and perceived as backwards and unvalued in society. Partenariat pour le Développement Local (PDL) brings men and women farmers together to heal their relationships through sustainable agriculture, elevating the important role and responsibility of farmers, and farmer-to-farmer education and support. As a result, PDL’s farmers have been able to attend regional development meetings and advocate for their vision for their communities. PDL’s founder Cantave Jean-Baptiste declared this might be the first time development officials ever heard farmers’ voices!
All Vista Hermosa Foundation partners work to empower local leaders and build up communities to see that they have inherent value and worth, and that they are capable of flourishing if they work together. At Vista Hermosa, they believe that only when each person sees their role and value in the Dream of God can we build peaceful and inclusive societies.
World Justice Project The World Justice Project is an independent, multidisciplinary organization working to advance the rule of law around the world. Effective rule of law reduces corruption, combats poverty and disease, and protects people from injustices large and small. The World Justice Project conducts survey research and engagement activities in 125 countries and maintains a global network of strategic partners
Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation The UN calls the situation in Yemen the largest Humanitarian man-made crisis in the world. Over 16 million people are food insecure and 2.5 million are under 5 years of age. Outbreaks are rampant including the largest cholera outbreak in recorded history, dengue, diphtheria and sever acute respiratory infections including COVID19 with the highest fatality rate. Asymmetric warfare complicates humanitarian assistance. Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation (YRRF) through an informal network with hundreds of Yemeni volunteers negotiating passage through competing armed checkpoints focused on concrete, lifesaving action. YRRF, working through this informal network of indigenous volunteers, and civil societies has successfully provided services to address the major issues including food, education, health, water, and income generation to many areas, especially those hard to reach in remote villages and internally displaced families. In 2020, YRRF has succeeded in delivering various relief activities throughout Yemen. Yemen has multiple combatants within its territory, with competing systems for aid distribution and healthcare delivery. YRRF has developed an efficient and cost-effective technique for managing those complex environments while delivering care to fragile, and often displaced, populations in a war zone.
World Justice Project: Promoting Accountable, Just, and Accessible Government
By Joanne Lu
Workshop participants at WJP’s 2019 World Justice Forum in The Hague. Photo credit World Justice Project.
The mission of the World Justice Project (WJP) is to advance the rule of law worldwide. It sounds like a tall order, especially in this global political climate, with increasing authoritarianism, human rights violations, and attacks on democracy. But what is “rule of law,” exactly? Why does it matter? And how does WJP promote it?
What exactly is “Rule of Law”?
Although politicians routinely exploit the term to justify repressive and oppressive measures, rule of law, properly defined, doesn’t actually permit those kinds of abuses. Instead, Ted Piccone, WJP’s Chief Engagement Officer, describes rule of law as a “durable system” with four key elements – 1) accountability to the law; 2) just law, meaning laws should be clear, publicized, equitable, and protect fundamental rights; 3) open government – How are laws written and enforced? Is it fair, efficient and accessible?; and 4) accessible and impartial justice delivered by competent authorities.
According to Piccone, these elements are “drawn from centuries of human experience, back to the [ancient] code of Hammurabi,” and are the result of many years of consultations with experts from around the world. Although it is internationally recognized as a necessary principle of good governance, unlike human rights, there are no treaties on rule of law at the international level, and inadequate understanding of this means we need a more comprehensive definition.
That’s why Bill Neukom, former president of the American Bar Association and general counsel at Microsoft, founded WJP in 2006. Recognizing that rule of law is the foundation of peace, justice, equity, and economic development in communities, he thought the best way to advance it was to bring together people from diverse sectors to develop pragmatic solutions to rule-of-law challenges.
Bill Neukom, 2017 GlobalWA Global Hero Award Recipient speech.
WJP’s Rule of Law Index
WJP is best known for is its annual Rule of Law Index, which ranks countries based on how rule of law is experienced by average citizens and expert practitioners. For example, do people have access to court? Do authorities adhere to due process? Is corruption effectively controlled? Getting this data in the hands of policymakers, donors, academics, business leaders, media, and civil society actors helps those people identify challenges and solutions. It also, to some extent, generates pressure on political leaders to improve.
The Rule of Law Index is just one tool that WJP uses to engage with people from various sectors to promote change. This last year, for example, the pandemic illuminated gaps in rule of law globally and, in many cases, exacerbated them. In terms of accountability, many governments issued a slew of strict emergency orders and provided little opportunity for legislatures to ratify those restrictions and for courts to adjudicate them. When it came to fundamental rights, marginalized groups around the world, including Asians in the U.S., faced discrimination, xenophobia, and racist attacks. Access to justice, legal services, and remedies were restricted. And, while some governments threw huge amounts of money at a pandemic response, few safeguards were put in place to ensure the money wasn’t corrupted or misspent
“The COVID-19 crisis really brought home how far away we are from strong rule of law societies,” says Piccone.
WJP spent the last 15 months closely tracking these impacts of the pandemic on rule of law around the world. Then, they designed a competition: the 2021 World Justice Challenge. They asked practitioners in the field to submit their solutions to these challenges, with a $20,000 cash prize for six of the best projects. Altogether, they received 425 submissions from 114 countries. Thirty finalists had the opportunity to promote their work on WJP’s website and at regional showcases and engage in cross-learning. Then, in May, a panel of judges chose five winners, with an additional winner by popular vote within the WJP network.
Thirty finalists from around the world were selected in the 2021 World Justice Challenge, drawing on 425 submissions from 114 countries. Projects were chosen for their impact in advancing the rule of law in four thematic areas affected by the COVID-19 pandemic: access to justice for all, accountable governance, fundamental rights and non-discrimination, and anti-corruption and open government. Image credit World Justice Project.
The winner in the Access to Justice for All category, for example, was a project by Justice Defenders, which provided prisoners and prison staff in Kenya and Uganda online training to become paralegals so they could defend themselves and others. They also linked prisons to courts so that judges could hold virtual hearings during COVID-19 when courts were closed.
Another winner, of the Ruth Bader Ginsberg Legacy prize, was a project called Inua Mama Fua by the Dhobi Women Network in Kenya, which took a multidisciplinary approach to defending the rights of informal women domestic workers in the suburbs of Nairobi. During the pandemic, the women have been unable to fend for themselves and have been arrested law enforcement officers for loitering and littering, as they sit around neighborhoods in hopes of getting a day’s worth of work. The project provided emergency social services, like counseling, food and cash transfers, and helped educate police officers on the hardships the women face.
In Honduras, the winner in the Anti-Corruption and Open Government category audited $80 million of national emergency purchases, including COVID-19 tests, ventilators, biosecurity gear, and mobile hospitals. Their investigation led to the arrest of a government official for misuse of public funds.
“These are projects that have real impact on the ground,” says Piccone. “That was one of the criteria for picking the winners, along with their potential for scaling and replication.”
Although this year’s competition is now closed, WJP plans to continue examining the effects of COVID-19 on rule of law around the world. It expects to analyze those dynamics in the next edition of the Rule of Law index in October, which will include 140 countries, up from 128 last year.
Looking Forward
WJP also plans to continue the discussion of the pandemic’s lessons for governing at the next bi-annual World Justice Forum on May 30 – June 2, 2022 in The Hague. They will take stock of how the pandemic has led to a regression on global progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially SDG 16, which is about peace, justice, and strong institutions. And they plan to dig deeper into the root causes of the systemic injustices that we saw during the pandemic, including unequal protection under the law for some people and lack of equal access to government services.
“The pandemic unveiled a range of rule of law problems,” says Piccone, “and we have to get to the root cause of them.”
Rose Berg-Fosnaugh is Leaving a Lasting Inspirational Legacy
By Joanne Lu
Rose Berg-Fosnaugh is the definition of a changemaker. Throughout an impressive career that spanned various roles, Rose fought for equity and social justice in Washington and around the world. She did so most recently as the Director of Advocacy and Communications at the Chandler Foundation. And she did so up until the moment her life was tragically cut short by a brain aneurysm on May 13.
A Seattle-area native, Rose’s career began in journalism as a local radio editor and reporter. In 1991 she watched law professor Anita Hill testify before Congress during the confirmation hearings for Justice Clarence Thomas, whom Hill accused of sexual harassment. In that moment, she decided she needed to do more to create change for women in the world and made the switch to politics to get women’s voices into leadership. In 1992, she helped “mom in tennis shoes,” Patty Murray, win her first term in the U.S. Senate. Nearly three decades on, Murray is still a U.S. Senator representing Washington. She will be running for her sixth term in 2022.
It was also in the early ‘90s that Rose met Bill Gates, Sr., and her personal mission entered the global stage. She helped set up the Gates Foundation’s communications and advocacy programs in its early days and continued to work with them as a consultant for more than 20 years. During that time, she also ran her own firm and held senior leadership positions in several large international public relations agencies, including APCO Worldwide, Edelman, and Weber Shandwick. At Weber Shandwick, she ran the firm’s West Coast Social Impact practice and became the inaugural recipient of the Ranny Cooper Award for Exceptional Leadership.
It was a rewarding chapter in Rose’s career as she worked on issues that included water, sanitation and hygiene, vaccine equity, and financial services. But by Rose’s own account, working toward change in those large organizations was a difficult and slow process. She was ready for something new.
In September 2019 she met Tim Hanstad, CEO of the Chandler Foundation. The foundation had stepped out from complete anonymity just a few years prior and rebranded in 2018. Tim was looking for someone to elevate the brand and lead the foundation’s advocacy and communications work. But his was a tall order: He needed someone who could set up strategy, was entrepreneurial, who could work on a small team, and hold a very senior position.
“As they sometimes call it in the human-resources field, I was looking for a purple squirrel,” says Tim. He found all these qualities and more in Rose.
The Chandler Foundation was also exactly what Rose was looking for – a smaller, more nimble organization that could work quickly to create systemic change. She was excited to work on the root causes of societal challenges. She loved connecting with partners in governments across the globe, making them more accountable to people, and rebuilding people’s faith and trust in government.
Rose officially joined the Chandler Foundation in November 2019. She helped move the foundation from having close to zero public presence to becoming an active participant and thought leader in global philanthropic circles. She developed the foundation’s Thought Leadership Plan and Communications Manual, organized events that reached tens of thousands of people, launched a growing social media and digital presence for the foundation, and led the development of Social Investor magazine into what it is today.
The idea for Social Investor was conceived by the foundation’s living donor, Richard Chandler, who wanted to inspire other philanthropists to give more thoughtfully and strategically. Rose helped with the second issue, published last year. But the upcoming third issue in many ways will be a tribute to her legacy, honoring her vision and input. At the direction of Rose, the magazine will have a strong focus on equity, including racial equity, gender equity, and vaccine equity. It will feature more storytelling to make very technical issues more relatable and accessible to people, and it will be disseminated more widely in print and digital form.
According to Tim, the Chandler Foundation would not have the influence it does today without Rose. “Her expertise and rich relational network was key to the very fast progress that we’ve made,” he says.
Rose is often described as a connector, who made strong impressions quickly, even over Zoom.
“I’ve only met Rose in-person twice,” says Leslie Tsai, Chandler’s Director of Social Impact, “because she started with us shortly before the pandemic started. But she quickly became the fourth person on my speed-dial after my husband, my mom, and Tim. She was full of warmth, humble, and connected with others naturally. She was always eager to make conversation and to get to know somebody beyond just that professional encounter.”
Rose often shared about her life on Bainbridge Island, her husband of 40 years, her children and granddaughter, her book club, and her personal passion – riding horses. In fact, on the day she had her aneurysm, she was preparing to ride her horse. “She was getting ready to do what she loved,” says Leslie.
“She just exudes warmth and light and calmness that draws you in,” says Tim. “She had this gift of human connection that often made people say, ‘Wow, she could be my best friend’ after meeting her for the first time.”
Without a doubt, Rose has left a legacy that not only spans continents but also continues to inspire the people around her. She created partnerships, encouraged philanthropists to be more thoughtful, and used her voice and position to be a champion for others.
As she often told her interns, whom she so loved to work with, “You’re going places, my friend.”
Please welcome our newest Global Washington members. Take a moment to familiarize yourself with their work and consider opportunities for support and collaboration!
NetHope
NetHope empowers committed organizations to change the world through the power of technology. This consortium of nearly 60 leading global nonprofits unites with technology companies and funding partners to design, fund, implement, adapt, and scale innovative approaches to solve development, humanitarian, and conservation challenges. Nethope.org
Sukarya USA
Sukarya helps educate and empower marginalized children, adolescent girls, and women by giving them access to non-formal education, primary healthcare, and economic opportunities while ensuring gender equality at the grassroots level through Sukarya’s programs in more than 600 villages and 100 slums in Delhi, Haryana, and Rajasthan in India. Sukaryaus.org
Throughout history, water has been a source of conflict, as nations wrestle for sovereignty over key waterways, communities fight for access to critical water sources, and populations are forced to leave their homes due to water scarcity. Access to clean water is a basic human right and just as it can be a source of conflict, it has the potential to be a powerful instrument of peacebuilding. Water security reduces conflict triggers in water-scarce areas and water projects present an opportunity for communities to build social cohesion and social capital around a shared resource.
There are several Global Washington members working in conflict areas and implementing water and sanitation projects to bring communities together. Please read more about this topic in our issue brief below and join us on April 29 for a virtual event about with speakers from Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation, World Vision, and EverVillage.
As we celebrate Earth Day this week, Global Washington is elevating the importance of Sustainable Development Goal 6 to ensure the availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all. And, as we have learned from our Global Washington members, supporting and strengthening local water systems in low- and middle-income countries has the potential to reduce conflict and build social capital. I encourage you to learn more and join us at our virtual event on April 29.
Sometimes it’s hard to imagine that something as ordinary as water can be so powerful. We know, for example, that access to clean water can transform the everyday lives of individuals, eliminating diseases, freeing up women to earn an income and allowing children to go to school. But more and more, water is also playing a crucial role in peace and conflicts, especially as water becomes more scarce with increasing populations, overuse, mismanagement, and climate change.
Throughout history, water has been a trigger or source of conflict, as nations wrestle for sovereignty over key waterways, groups fight for access to critical water sources, and populations are forced to leave their homes due to water scarcity. It’s also been weaponized to control populations and gain political leverage, and water infrastructure is often a casualty of conflict, being intentionally or unintentionally damaged or destroyed. In 2017, water was identified by the United Nations as a major factor in conflicts in at least 45 countries, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa. A chronology compiled by the Pacific Institute shows a striking increase in the number of water-related conflicts within the last few decades.
And climate change is exacerbating the situation. Amid erratic rainfall, severe droughts and other extreme weather events, competition for a diminishing water supply is ramping up and leading to more water-related conflicts. According to the World Resources Institute, 17 countries are facing “extremely high” levels of water stress, while about a quarter of the global population (more than two billion people) is experiencing “high” water stress. These conditions are fueling conflict and social unrest. It’s also forcing people to migrate in search of water for themselves, their crops, and their livestock. In turn, this large-scale displacement is causing further instability and conflict.
But increasingly, humanitarian and development organizations are seeing water emerge as more than just a basic human right – it’s also an instrument of peacebuilding. Not only can water security reduce conflict triggers in water-scarce areas, but water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) projects present an opportunity for communities to build social cohesion and social capital around a shared resource.
According to Jonathan Papoulidis, an executive advisor on fragile states for World Vision, managing complex risk – like water-related conflicts – and building resilience requires improving social capital along three components simultaneously: bonding, bridging, and linking.
Bonding brings people together within a community when they share assets and resources, provide psychosocial support to one another and respond to emergencies together. WASH projects in communities that previously didn’t have regular access to clean water often accomplish this. Organizations like Water1st International accomplish this by training communities – including refugee communities who have been displaced by conflict – to independently build, operate and maintain their own water projects in perpetuity. Community members elect their own water committee to govern their new water systems. The result is greater social cohesion and water projects that last.
Similarly, Friendly Water for the World empowers communities to take care of their own clean water needs, and does so partly through peacemaking efforts. And The Hunger Project has trained more than 20,000 local leaders since 2011 in building community skills and awareness around water and sanitation.
Bridging is the second component of increasing social capital. It involves connecting communities that are either disconnected or in conflict with each other. This is yet another function of water projects. For example, Water Mission found that in Mkinga, Tanzania, water scarcity exacerbated existing tensions and arguments between neighbors of different faiths. But when Water Mission installed a tap for clean water in the community, arguments over water stopped, and the tap became a source of unity in the community. It was not only a shared resource, but also a gathering place for residents to engage in friendly conversations everyday.
World Vision, too, has seen similar bridging happen through a Cash for Work Water (C4WW) program, implemented by the German agency for international development (GIZ), in Jordan. Because of a massive influx of refugees, primarily from Syria, tensions were rising between Jordanian host communities and refugee communities, especially amid high unemployment rates. The country’s already scarce water resources were under immense strain because of the influx of refugees. And the country’s water dams were losing capacity because of soil erosion. To address these issues, the C4WW program offered both Jordanians and Syrian refugees temporary work building erosion-prevention structures. Since 2017, the program has provided more than 9,000 people with temporary employment – half of them Jordanian and half of them refugees, working alongside each other.
The last component to building social capital is linking, in which communities that are bonded and bridged are also linked to formal institutions, such as governments, NGOs, multilateral organizations, and private companies. When it comes to water, Mercy Corps, for example, recognizes the importance of linking communities to formal institutions for sustainability. In the immediate aftermath of a crisis, Mercy Corps will deliver water to communities without access. But in order to ensure that communities have continued access, Mercy Corps partners with companies and organizations like Walmart, the Miami Foundation and BlackRock in Puerto Rico to rebuild the island’s energy and water supply. In the Bahamas, Mercy Corps made sure that Freeport YMCA and Salvation Army had clean water by installing reverse osmosis purifiers to desalinate ocean water that had infiltrated aquifers. Splash also understands the importance of linking, specifically through their partnerships with local governments. Splash believes that “in most cases, governments are the best entities to expand this work and carry it on for the long haul.” Splash’s influence on government practices acts as a “core building block towards sustainability and scale.”
Sustainable water projects that bond, bridge, and link communities are critical for building community resilience. They help prepare communities to not only confront increasing risks to water security, but also conflicts, water-related or otherwise. That’s why it’s important to continue progress toward Sustainable Development Goal 6 of clean water for all by 2030. Specifically, Target 6.A aims to expand water and sanitation support to developing countries, including through water harvesting, desalination, water efficiency, wastewater treatment, recycling and reuse technologies.
But Target 6.B really gets at how WASH projects can build resilience and peace. It aims to support and strengthen the participation of local communities in improving water and sanitation management, because it’s only through their participation that they become stronger as a community to withstand the threats of water scarcity.
Founded in 2010, Friendly Water for the World is a dynamic, rapidly growing, 501(c)(3) non-profit organization based in Olympia, WA. Its mission is to expand global access to low-cost clean water technologies and information about health and sanitation through knowledge-sharing, training, applied research, community-building, peacemaking, and efforts at sustainability. The organization empowers communities abroad to take care of their own clean water needs, even as it empowers people in the U.S. to make a real difference. Friendly Water for the World currently works in 15 countries, and has assisted more than 160 marginalized and oppressed rural communities – including widows with HIV, people with albinism, survivors of war-time rape, victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, indigenous tribes, and unemployed youth – ensure their own safe drinking water while becoming employed in the process.
The Hunger Project’s holistic approach in Africa, South Asia and Latin America empowers women and men living in rural villages to become the agents of their own development and sustainably overcome hunger and poverty. Through its WASH programs, The Hunger Project empowers rural communities to ensure they have access to clean water and improved sanitation, the capacity to develop new water sources, and the information to implement water conservation techniques. Since 2011, nearly 871,000 people have participated in The Hunger Project’s WASH skill or awareness building activities and the organization has trained over 20,000 local leaders in building community skills and awareness around water and sanitation.
Mercy Corps helps people around the world get clean water by providing water during emergencies, building wells to reduce long treks (often made by vulnerable girls and women), repairing damaged water infrastructure and helping construct reservoirs to ensure communities have access to clean water in the future. In Zimbabwe, Mercy Corps restored a community’s water infrastructure to provide clean and safe water for over 43,000 people. In turn, this also significantly reduced the distance girls had to travel to collect drinking water for their families from 2500m to 80m. During emergencies, access to clean water plays a vital role in preventing disease outbreaks and other water-borne illnesses. In response to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo where three quarters of the population lack access to clean water, Mercy Corps has provided over 600,000 displaced people with safe drinking water to help keep their families healthy and prevent disease. In 2018, Mercy Corps connected more than 3 million people to clean water and hygiene and sanitation facilities during emergencies across the globe.
In Kenya, with unclean water sources often miles from villages, woman and girls are forced to spend hours each day simply finding and transporting water. It is not safe for women and girls to fetch water in the very early hours of the morning. The daily average for a Kenya woman is 4-6 hours of walking for clean water. The typical container used for water collection in Africa, the jerry can, weighs over 40 pounds when it’s completely full. With much of one’s day already consumed by meeting basic needs, there isn’t time for much else. The hours lost to gathering water are often the difference between the time to do a trade and earn a living and not. Path From Poverty works to end this daily hardship and is putting a stop to girls lives being at risk by providing clean, safe water at the homes of women and their families. Empowering women, teaching them to work together, start a micro enterprise, and pool resources, Path From Poverty is changing lives and giving back the time lost fetching water so girls can go to school, women can earn much-needed income, and they can be safe from rape and abduction.
Splash is a nonprofit organization focused on clean water, clean hands and clean toilets for children living in urban poverty across Asia and Africa. Splash implements water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) programs in child-serving institutions, including schools, hospitals, shelters and orphanages, in order to reach the greatest number of children cost-effectively and to bring about generational change. The nonprofit’s holistic approach to WASH includes high-quality water filtration systems, durable drinking and hand washing stations, toilet renovations, and hygiene clubs to ensure that kids learn healthy habits like handwashing. To date, Splash has completed over 1,600 international projects and serves safe drinking water to over 400,000 children a day in eight countries (China, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, India, Nepal, Thailand, and Vietnam). Splash’s goal is to reach one million children per day by 2023.
Water1st prides itself on funding sustainable water projects that involve local communities, local women, as well as a consistent funding stream. Since its founding in 2005, Water1st has provided clean water to over 188,000 people. While its projects focus on providing easy access to clean water, the organization also ensures that projects integrate toilets and hygiene education. Water1st’s success centers on robust program evaluation of each of its funded projects to ensure that deliverables are effective and community needs are met.
WaterAid is the #1 ranked international nonprofit dedicated to transforming lives through access to clean water, toilets and hygiene education. WaterAid has been helping communities around the globe become more resilient to extreme weather, natural hazards and changing environmental conditions for more than 30 years. From rainwater harvesting and gravity-fed water systems, to spring water protection, environmentally-friendly sanitation solutions, improved rainwater monitoring and dedicated climate advocacy, WaterAid works with local communities throughout Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Pacific region to proactively identify the kinds of problems they face right now, and the ones they may face in the future. Since 1981, WaterAid has reached 24.9 million people with clean water and, since 2004, 24 million people with toilets and sanitation.
When COVID-19 began making its way around the world, Water Mission’s global staff quickly scaled up program efforts to provide handwashing stations, sanitation supplies, hygiene training, and COVID-19 awareness education. Water Mission provided critical hygiene supplies, such as safe water and soap, to more than 800,000 people around the world. Water Mission installed more than 8,550 handwashing stations in key locations, including healthcare facilities, schools, and existing safe water collection points in Haiti, Honduras, Indonesia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Peru, Malawi, Mexico, and the Bahamas. To date, this program has equipped nearly 1,000 healthcare facilities with handwashing stations and training materials, ensuring that frontline workers are better equipped and protected as they carry out their critical work.
World Vision is committed to accelerating universal and equitable access to water, sanitation, and hygiene services to contribute to Sustainable Development Goal 6. This will only be achieved through collaboration. Between 2016-2021 World Vision reached 20 million people with clean water. The organization has more than 1,200 designated WASH staff members in 41 prioritized countries that provide localized expertise. In its business plan for 2021-2025, World Vision aims to impact 15 million people with safe water, 14 million people with improved sanitation, and 18 million with improved hygiene through access to household hand-washing stations. The organization is also ramping up area-wide approaches to support WASH universal coverage plans for more than 150 subnational districts. World Vision is expanding WASH investments in healthcare facilities and schools. These plans will demonstrate sustainable impact and keep the organization on track to reach everyone World Vision works with everywhere with basic clean water access by 2030 —approximately 50 million people between 2016 to 2030. World Vision is deepening its focus on the most vulnerable, especially in fragile and extremely fragile contexts. It will continue to provide WASH during emergencies, and when combined with the provision of sustained water service, World Vision will continue to reach one new person with clean water every 10 seconds.
When Bob Pierce founded World Vision in 1950 to respond to emergencies in East Asia, the term “WASH,” for water, sanitation and hygiene, was still almost four decades away from being coined in the late 80s.
Nevertheless, a pivotal moment in the organization’s history came in 1979 when World Vision took its first foray into a WASH-like humanitarian response. Rescuing 93 Vietnamese refugees stranded at sea, when no one else would, a World Vision team provided the refugees with clean water, food, medical kits and other supplies until they were eventually able to transport the refugees to land. The rescue mission was dubbed Operation Seasweep, and it inspired other naval fleets to respond to the refugee crisis at large. It also established World Vision as an organization willing to make bold choices.
In the mid-80s, World Vision began to support standalone WASH projects, building rural water supply systems around the world. But by the 2000s, it became apparent that the nature of emergencies had changed. Instead of resolving after a couple of years, crises are increasingly drawn-out and seem to have no end. On top of that, climate change is exacerbating conditions in these so-called “fragile contexts,” places that are plagued by chronic instability, conflict and violence.
These are exactly the types of places and the conditions in which World Vision is called upon to act. But the blurring lines between immediate, temporary emergency response and long-term, sustainable development pose unique challenges when it comes to WASH projects.
Michael Wicker, World Vision’s senior emergency WASH technical advisor who is based in Amman, Jordan, says they always have to find an appropriate balance between quality, time and cost when it comes to WASH projects. Some temporary approaches such as emergency water trucking or quick fixing of broken water points may be the appropriate solution before assessing a long term water supply project especially with the fluid movement of displaced communities.
WASH is not just an emergency supply, like food. It’s a service provision. That’s why, Wicker says, World Vision always works “hand-in-hand” with local governments and water ministries to make sure, first, that their help is needed, and, if so, that their projects align with cities’ master plans and are an investment in local infrastructure. Because all water systems require maintenance, Wicker says it’s crucial that they never implement a project without buy-in from the local water authority or a rural water committee, which will be responsible for the system in the long-run.
Just in the six-and-a-half years that Wicker has been with World Vision, he’s seen the struggle over water resources cause conflicts in already strained communities. His first project with World Vision was in a Yazidi community in Khanke, Iraq, just upstream from the contested Mosul Dam on the Tigris River. Overnight, the town’s population had doubled with the arrival of those fleeing during the conflict with ISIL. Of course, that caused tensions in the town, especially when the water infrastructure began to falter under the immense pressure of the sudden population surge. Sewage, sand and unidentified gray matter began showing up in the water system and caused diarrhea, vomiting and disease. In response, World Vision partnered with local engineers to rehabilitate the town’s water treatment facility. Today, it continues to deliver clean drinking water to the town’s residents and their internally displaced guests.
“In all conflicts, resources are used as a tool for power,” says Wicker. “But with climate change and increased populations, we’re realizing that water is more valuable and limited than we had realized in the past.”
But Wicker has also seen water projects bring disparate communities together. The German-funded Cash for Work Water program, for example, which was started in 2018, has created 9,000 temporary jobs in Jordan – half of them are for Syrian refugees and the other half are for members of the Jordanian host community. Although the two communities are friendly, says Wicker, tensions increased with the refugees’ prolonged stay, which has put pressure on already-limited jobs and resources, like water. The program employs the refugees and Jordanians – for less than eight hours a day so as not to replace a full-time job, but rather to supplement – to address erosion problems in the water dams. Sure, doing it this way is slower, says Wicker, but instead of paying a huge company to do the job quickly, the program is paying the community.
“It’s Jordanians working alongside Syrians for the betterment of Jordan,” says Wicker.
Then, COVID struck and added an additional layer to the challenge of WASH in fragile contexts and refugee communities. Even before the pandemic, the World Health Organization and UNICEF estimated that one in four health facilities around the world lacked basic water services. World Vision had to, at the same time, come up with creative ways to educate and build social cohesion around good hygiene practices, while at the same time encouraging people to socially distance when they access shared water points. They’ve increased water supply and encouraged people to wash their hands at home as much as possible. They’ve drawn socially distanced chalk circles at community water taps and designated certain time slots just for elderly people or others who are more susceptible to the virus. They’ve created Whatsapp groups and Sesame Street hygiene programs so they can educate communities without putting them at risk.
“COVID really turned the world upside down,” says Wicker. But it has also propelled the agenda of good hygiene as well as highlighted just how important water is for everyone’s well-being long-term.
To that end, World Vision is working hard on many fronts to encourage water conservation and improve governance of water systems, especially in the face of climate change. They’re doing so through youth art contests that depict the importance of water conservation and in which the winner’s art is shared with the community at large on billboards and water towers. They’re also partnering with Grundfos, a global leader in pump solutions, to develop water ATMS that dispense water efficiently and affordably but not for free (to discourage misuse). They’re also helping farmers implement drip irrigation, which saves 30 to 50 percent more water on agriculture.
Moving forward, World Vision has an ambitious five-year commitment to invest $1 billion to extend WASH in 41 countries, with an emphasis on reaching the most vulnerable and fragile contexts. Wicker says they’re also being further compelled by their humanitarian imperative to respond rapidly in the face of emerging emergencies. This means ensuring that local partners and governments are adequately equipped with contingency measures and supplies to respond themselves to crises as they arise. It also means working to reach overlooked urban residents, not just rural communities. And it means spreading awareness that climate change is at the front door.
“Natural disasters are happening more frequently, water is going to become more precious and there’s going to be more conflict around water,” says Wicker. “We have to realize that these emergencies aren’t just going to slowly go away.”
Fred Auch Has Built a Bridge or Two. Now He’s Building Bridges to Sustainable Change
By Amber Cortes
Fred Auch likes to get things done.
“Throughout my career I’ve always been looking for efficiencies,” he says. “Let’s have an impact and let’s leverage as much as we can, so we can be as efficient as we can.”
After leading large, complex civil engineering and construction projects (he was the senior executive of the Pacific Northwest Region for PCL Construction), Auch is now helping support an international effort to bring WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) technology to a village in Senegal by raising funds through Rotary District 5030, a network of Rotary Clubs in the greater Seattle area.
Ever since he was a kid, Auch always knew he was interested in building things and solving problems. He got his first “job” in the field one summer between second and third grade.
“I spent the whole summer down the street watching and bugging the guys building the house down there,” Auch says. “They even made me a part of the crew!”
Knowing what he wanted to do was easy. It was “the how” that was the challenge.
“School and I didn’t really get along too well, because I couldn’t wait to go to work,” he explains. After college Auch worked for himself, but eventually decided that to get the opportunity to build more complex civil engineering projects, he would have to go work for a big company.
He started his career in the private sector, where he led teams that built the Mall of America in Minnesota and the Bravern Tower in Bellevue, among others. But Auch prefers the kind of work he’s done on public projects, like the extension of the Light Rail that goes to SeaTac airport—it’s much more challenging and creative.
For example, Auch says, in civil work, you may have to figure out how to build a bridge across a frozen river.
“And you have to come up with a pretty creative way to do that, considering environmental regulations and many other challenges.”
Auch’s shift into international development work happened when he retired. On the advice of a friend, he made a list of thirty things he wanted to do when he retired.
“One of the things on my list was getting involved with startups,” Auch explains.
Through a former colleague, Auch became aware of CREATE!, a non-profit based out of Eugene, Oregon that partners with communities in rural Senegal to help them take ownership of self-development projects focused on sustainable agriculture technology and practices.
Auch and a business partner learned about the work they were doing, and after a site visit to local villages CREATE! works with, they were impressed. The organization’s participatory approach includes enrolling Senegalese villages in a four-year graduation program to rehabilitate abandoned wells and bring renewable energy sources to the community.
Auch wanted to help promote the work CREATE! was doing, so, as a longtime member, he turned to his local Rotary Club to leverage some of the powerful tools in their fundraising kit.
Founded in 1906, Rotary International has a unique structure. The organization matches funds raised for projects from over 35,000 local member clubs across the world. Each club chooses local and international service projects and helps problem-solvers like Auch to fundraise, promote, and leverage projects like CREATE!’s project with their new partner village, Mbossedji.
Their plan to build a functioning WASH irrigation system in the village fit perfectly within Rotary International’s global areas of focus: promoting peace, fighting disease, helping mothers and children, supporting education, protecting the environment, growing local economies and providing clean water, sanitation, and hygiene.
In fact, Auch’s local chapter (and Global Washington member), Rotary District 5030 has a long history of international WASH projects, from building a well in a village Guatemala, to facilitating a large multi-year project bringing WASH training to over 32,000 students in Ethiopian schools.
CREATE!’s overarching goals in Mbossedji are to help teach the villagers how to grow and sustain the garden, raise poultry, and create voluntary savings and loan associations—all the things they need to do to create income and support themselves nutritionally.
“And all that starts with water,” Auch says. “I mean the first step in the whole program is water.”
CREATE! and Mbossedji are about a year and half into their program. So far they’ve rehabilitated an abandoned government well, installed a solar-powered pump and a drip irrigation system for a community garden in the village.
Over 75% of families in rural Senegal depend on agriculture for their income, but due to the effects of climate change, the rainy season is now a short 3-4 months. For the rest of the year, the men may leave the village to find other opportunities in Dakar and Europe.
“Because there’s nothing for the men to do,” explains Auch.
“There’s no commerce, no occupational opportunities for the men.”
Auch says the two hectares garden in Mbossedji has started to create opportunities for the men to be productive locally, and remain close to their family.
Many experts predict that the world’s next major conflict will be over water. Add to these dire predictions the exacerbating effects of climate change. Women, who often bear the burden of water insecurity, are the key to building peace. So empowering women to take leadership through WASH is a great place to start, Auch says, noting over the years the changes he’s seen in the women of the villages that graduate from CREATE!’s programs.
“Now they’re completely self-sustaining,” says Auch. “They’re in charge. They are assertive; they’ve got ownership.”
And thanks in part to health interventions from CREATE!, Mbossedji hasn’t experienced any COVID infections. The garden there actually became an ad-hoc market for the area when others were closed.
For his role, Auch brings his love of efficiency to the table to help the program make better use of funds from Rotary and other donors. “I’ve been able to have the greatest impact in helping CREATE! think more like a for-profit business, as opposed to operating without as many goals or as many metrics.”
For the time being, Auch is happily putting his construction hat aside to let the other people solve the logistical problems. “I like the fact that somebody else has already figured this out. Now all I need to focus on is leveraging that!”
Despite global efforts to provide water and sanitation solutions to healthcare facilities, almost 2 billion people worldwide depend on healthcare facilities without basic water services[1]. As a nonprofit Christian engineering organization that designs, builds, and implements water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) solutions, Water Mission is working to serve vulnerable communities through sustained WASH provision. Our work to provide WASH in healthcare facilities around the world includes advocating for patient care, equipping frontline workers, strengthening health systems, and providing engineering expertise.
Please welcome our newest Global Washington members. Take a moment to familiarize yourself with their work and consider opportunities for support and collaboration!
APCO Worldwide
APCO Worldwide is an advisory and advocacy communications consultancy helping leading public and private sector organizations navigate the challenges of today, act with agility, anticipate social risk, and build organizational reputations, relationships and solutions to succeed. apcoworldwide.com
Five Angels
Five Angels a 501 (c) (3) which assists with providing quality care and medical services to families in Shire, Ethiopia. Fiveangels.org
Despite global efforts to provide water and sanitation solutions to healthcare facilities, almost 2 billion people worldwide depend on healthcare facilities without basic water services[1]. As a nonprofit Christian engineering organization that designs, builds, and implements water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) solutions, Water Mission is working to serve vulnerable communities through sustained WASH provision. Our work to provide WASH in healthcare facilities around the world includes advocating for patient care, equipping frontline workers, strengthening health systems, and providing engineering expertise. Continue Reading
Just over two weeks ago, the first COVID-19 vaccines were received in Ghana, marking the start of a rollout in low- and middle-income countries. While this is incredibly hopeful, there is still worry that the vaccine will not have an equitable distribution globally. And, that the pandemic will continue for years to come if we do not mobilize for a quick worldwide vaccination campaign.
Below is our issue brief, which provides a good overview of this topic and discusses how Global Washington members are working to ensure equitable access to COVID-19 prevention and treatment options in low- and middle-income countries. Also, stay tuned for in-depth member stories on this issue later in the month, as well a virtual event on March 24 with speakers from VillageReach, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Medical Teams International, and the International Rescue Committee.
In addition to vaccine equity, we have also posted two Action Alerts on situations that are unfolding in Ethiopia and Myanmar, to which many of our members are responding. Both stem from underlying political crises that are driving widespread suffering and human rights violations.
Lastly, I am excited to share a report we published on our 2020 Goalmakers initiative, including key insights and cross-cutting themes that emerged from the series of events that we held last year on the Sustainable Development Goals. These are themes we will continue to build on this year and in the years ahead.
Global Community Takes a Shot at COVID-19 Vaccine Equity
By Joanne Lu
A nurse vaccinates a baby at a clinic in Accra, Ghana. Photo by Kate Holt, MCSP. Flickr. (CC BY-NC 2.0).
On February 24, Ghana became the first country outside India to receive COVID-19 vaccine doses as part of a global initiative, called COVAX, to provide equitable access to the vaccines, particularly in low-income countries.
“This is a historic step towards our goal to ensure equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines globally, in what will be the largest vaccine procurement and supply operation in history,” the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a press release.
Since then, more than 16 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been shipped to 27 countries through the COVAX initiative, according to a March 18 update from the WHO. In Africa, 25 million vaccines have been sent to 38 countries through COVAX, bilateral deals and donations, and 30 of those countries have started vaccination campaigns.
While these developments are certainly cause for celebration, they come as some of the world’s richest countries have purchased a surplus of more than 1.2 billion excess doses, according to The ONE Campaign. Canada, for example, has secured enough vaccines to immunize its population five times over. For comparison, nearly 7 million doses have now been administered in Africa, while the U.S. surpassed that number in just four days.
Meanwhile, the majority of low- and middle-income countries have had to “watch and wait,” WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote in the Guardian. In mid-February, the UN reported that 2.5 billion people in 130 countries still had not received a single vaccine dose.
Even Ghana – which opted to administer its 600,000 AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccines to 600,000 people as their first dose, instead of to 300,000 people as their two recommended doses – still has to trust that its government or COVAX will come through in time with enough vaccines to give people their second doses. With Ghana’s government planning to vaccinate 20 million people by the end of October (meaning 40 million doses), the shipment on February 24, though “historic,” was still a just small step that should have happened much, much sooner.
The rush by wealthy countries to secure first access to vaccines has been dubbed “vaccine nationalism,” which the WHO and others have condemned.
“Even as they speak the language of equitable access, some countries and companies continue to prioritize bilateral deals, going around COVAX, driving up prices and attempting to jump to the front of the queue,” Dr. Tedros said in January. “This is wrong.”
Additionally, experts warn that vaccine nationalism will slow recovery – both from the virus and its economic effects.
“[Vaccine nationalism] is a problem morally. It’s a problem in terms of public health, because we need to vaccinate more widely in order to tackle issues like the barriers. And it’s bad news in terms of the economic impact as well,” Mark Suzman, CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said in February.
The Gates Foundation helped set up the COVAX Facility and has also funded vaccine, therapeutics and diagnostics research and development. Suzman says that some of the modeling supported by the Gates Foundation shows that there’s going to be “much longer, lingering economic damage” if vaccinations are concentrated in wealthy countries and not distributed evenly.
According to the World Economic Forum, high-income countries and regions, including the U.S., the U.K., and the European Union, could lose around $119 billion per year, until a global recovery is secured.
“A me-first approach might serve short-term political interests, but it is self-defeating and will lead to a protracted recovery, with trade and travel continuing to suffer,” wrote Dr. Tedros in the Guardian. “The threat is clear: As long as the virus is spreading anywhere, it has more opportunities to mutate and potentially undermine the efficacy of vaccines everywhere. We could end up back at square one.”
According to the WHO, there’s a lot that countries and companies can do to promote equitable vaccine access, including dose sharing, technology transfer, voluntary licensing, and waiving intellectual property rights. Oxfam has called for a “People’s Vaccine,” one that is “mass-produced, fairly distributed, and made available to every individual, rich and poor alike.” A People’s Vaccine, the organization says, would “unlock the production of billions more doses in the shortest amount of time and ensure access for everyone, everywhere across the globe.”
Meanwhile, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center has stepped up to serve as the coordinating center for vaccine clinical trials of the COVID-19 Prevention Network (CoVPN) to continue developing vaccines, even though there are a few options on the market already.
“We need multiple successful vaccines to protect the entire global population from COVID-19,” said Dr. Larry Corey, former president and director of Fred Hutch, who will co-lead the CoVPN’s vaccine testing pipeline.
While vaccine development and manufacturing continues to ramp up, organizations like Americares are also working hard to support “vaccine readiness.” Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, says that a country’s vaccine readiness can be assessed on four fronts: awareness of evidence-based information; acceptance of the new vaccine; accessibility to the vaccine, especially in the hardest to reach places; and availability of infrastructure to store and deliver vaccines. In particular, Americares is tackling misinformation head-on, with weekly Q&A videos about COVID-19 vaccines and other resources.
Mercy Corps’ CEO Tjada D’Oyen McKenna says that important lessons about building public trust can be drawn from past Ebola outbreaks. In Liberia, for example, Mercy Corps helped train more than 15,000 community messengers to help combat misinformation in their own communities, reaching more than 2.4 million people. (That’s over 56 percent of the population.)
Mercy Corps is especially concerned about the vaccine reaching people in conflict zones, where the pandemic tends to take a back seat to other basic needs that feel more pressing, suspicion and misinformation thrive, and violence has destroyed infrastructure for vaccine delivery and threatens the safety of health workers. In late February, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution demanding “vaccine ceasefires” in conflict zones.
Similarly, organizations like Medical Teams International are advocating for migrants and refugees to be included in vaccination campaigns in countries like Colombia. Closer to home, Medical Teams International is getting together equipment, like freezers, to distribute vaccines in Washington state.
Of course, effectively executing the largest global vaccine rollout in history requires working closely with local leaders. CARE’s comprehensive two-year vaccine initiative will support national, regional, and local governments with logistics, public education and strategies to ensure fast and fair vaccine distribution.
VillageReach also participates daily in Ministry of Health-led response efforts, including vaccine planning. Recently, Mozambique received its first shipment of vaccines. VillageReach will support the Mozambique Ministry of Health with the supply chain planning and logistics, as well as training vaccinators. With its organizational mission of reaching the last mile, VillageReach knows all too well the importance of working with community health workers, like vaccinators, to reach even the most remote places.
PATH – which supports the Serum Institute of India, manufacturers of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines that are being shipped through the COVAX Facility – also recognizes the critical role of vaccinators. That’s why even before the COVID-19 pandemic, PATH’s Living Labs Initiative was working with frontline health workers to understand the day-to-day challenges that prevented them from achieving their immunization targets and professional goals. Now, insights from these health workers are helping to optimize labeling for COVID-19 vaccines, informing local adaptations to WHO’s training guidance for health workers, and supporting the ministries of health in Kenya and Zambia as they develop vaccine plans.
“We know from experience that when we listen to health workers, they identify challenges—and solutions—that no one else sees,” says Dr. Joseph Kayaya, lead product manager with PATH’s Living Labs Initiative.
In Africa, the experience and expertise of health workers is on full display right now as vaccination campaigns there have covered a lot of ground quickly – despite receiving late shipments of limited doses.
“This is due to the continent’s vast experience in mass vaccination campaigns and the determination of its leaders and people to effectively curb COVID-19.” said WHO Regional Director for Africa Dr. Matshidiso Moeti in a press release. “Compared with countries in other regions that accessed vaccines much earlier, the initial rollout phase in some African countries has reached a far higher number of people.”
Although the vaccine rollout so far has been slow and uneven, the fact that it’s happening is an encouraging sign that recovery is on the horizon. Tracking the pandemic from its beginning was the data-visualization company Tableau. Now, it’s turned its attention to tracking global progress toward recovery, helping to inform individual behavior, business decisions, and government policy. The company’s new Global Tracker pulls information daily from multiple sources to allow people to see and interact with data on things like localized disease spread, testing and vaccination, and social policy indicators, both in the U.S and globally.
Through private and public sector cooperation, a massive global vaccination campaign that reaches every person is possible. But it will require setting aside the business-as-usual notion of vaccine nationalism in order to put all of us first. As Dr. Tedros said: “While the virus has taken advantage of our interconnectedness, we can also turn the tables by using it to spread life-saving vaccines further and faster than ever before.”
The following GlobalWA members are working toward global equity on COVID-19 treatment and prevention.
Americares
As COVID-19 infected millions around the world and forced families into isolation, Americares launched into action, responding in more than 30 countries with critically needed protective gear and training for frontline health workers. Since launching its response last February, the health-focused relief and development organization has dedicated every resource to ensure health workers stay safe and can continue their lifesaving work. Americares response also included telehealth consultations to ensure patients continued to receive care during community lockdowns and medical facility closures, launched public education campaigns to combat misinformation and made water system improvements to help slow the spread of the virus. The “Americares COVID-19 2020 Special Report” details its global response to the crisis.
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
In their 2020 Goalkeepers report, Bill and Melinda Gates reflected on how COVID-19 has impeded progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals, and what the world needs to do to come together to end the pandemic. For one thing, the foundation believes a shared global response is critical: “Together, we can ensure a safe and effective vaccine is distributed equitably and affordably for every last person on earth—not just those with ability to pay. The virus does not adhere to borders, and neither can the vaccine. A global response must also aim to build more resilient health systems that protect the world’s most vulnerable and prevent future disease outbreaks.” To date, the foundation has committed about $1.75 billion to support the global response to COVID-19, including funding the development and procurement of new tests, treatments, and vaccines, and supporting interventions to alleviate the social and economic effects of the pandemic globally. The focus for 2021 is to ensure equitable, timely, and scaled delivery of proven interventions.
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
Fred Hutch is part of the global scientific community racing to stop the COVID-19 pandemic. Scientists from across the organization have been tackling all aspects of the disease and the virus that causes it – including researching how it spreads, how it affects people’s bodies, and developing potential therapies and vaccines. In July 2020, Fred Hutch became the coordinating center for vaccine clinical trials of the COVID-19 Prevention Network, leading operations across at least five large-scale efficacy trials with over 100 clinical trial sites in the U.S. and abroad. Three months later Fred Hutch opened the COVID-19 Clinical Research Center, one of the first stand-alone facilities in the nation designed to test novel interventions to treat and prevent COVID-19, from Phase 1 through 3 clinical trials for COVID-19-positive participants and, in the future, participants with other infectious diseases.
Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch (HRW) builds on decades of research and advocacy to shed light on the immediate and long-term impacts of Covid-19 on human rights. The pandemic has exposed the frailties in our social system. While billionaires grew richer by $1.9 trillion in 2020, hundreds of millions of job losses were concentrated in low-wage industries. These losses disproportionately affected women and people of color, pushing many into poverty. HRW reported on the devastating impacts of Covid-19 on historically marginalized communities and the most vulnerable members of our population in the U.S. HRW also called on the U.S. Congress to safeguard frontline meatpacking workers and spoke out on the inaccessibility of online vaccine registration systems for the elderly. The organization has also continued to sound the alarm on rising domestic violence rates, and advocated for protecting tenants’ rights to adequate housing and financial relief. In 2021, HRW remains steadfast in its commitment to build a rights-respecting future and defend human rights for all.
International Rescue Committee
Over the past year, the IRC scaled up its response to the coronavirus pandemic in over 40 countries, providing essential health care services to refugees, sharing vital information about hygiene, handwashing, and self-isolation, training health workers on how to keep themselves safe, and providing protective equipment to aid workers. Through partnerships with organizations like COVAX, the IRC is helping countries prepare for the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. The IRC is also working with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance to advocate for equitable access to vaccines—including for populations affected by crisis. As vaccines become available, the IRC will help administer them through the network of health facilities it supports around the world. The IRC also helps refugee and immigrant communities impacted by COVID-19 in the United States, including in Washington state, through health services, remote learning support for K-12 students, distribution of food and masks, emergency financial assistance, and more.
Lynden
Lynden International is a global freight logistics provider, headquartered in Washington state, with developed services to multiply the capacity of organizations doing global health and humanitarian work. Before the coronavirus pandemic, Lynden participated in epidemic response measures for Ebola and Zika outbreaks and continued to work to build health system resilience with government, foundation, and NGO stakeholder clients worldwide. To combat the spread of COVID-19 Lynden has worked with these same organizations to deploy personal protective equipment (PPE), sanitizing supplies, and test kits globally to lower- and middle-income countries, as well as native communities and remote locations in the United States since March 2020. While COVID-19 vaccines were in development, Lynden worked with logistics partners to enhance cold chain capabilities in Africa, and it began vaccine distribution to underserved communities in Alaska and offshore locations in the U.S. Lynden is also expediting deployment of cold chain containers in which vaccines are transported and collaborating with organizations supporting the UN COVAX facility and African Union efforts to distribute vaccines equitably.
Medical Teams International
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, Medical Teams International President & CEO Martha Newsome has placed a high priority on global equity in treatment and prevention. For example, when the first cases were identified in the world’s largest refugee camp in Kutupalong, Bangladesh, in May 2020, Medical Teams responded by opening the camp’s first isolation and treatment center in partnership with Food for the Hungry and UNHCR. Medical Teams’ strategy of educating and equipping community health workers has empowered them to share best practices in prevention throughout impacted communities in Uganda, Guatemala, Colombia, Lebanon, and Bangladesh. In the Pacific Northwest over the past year, Medical Teams’ staff and skilled volunteers have tested nearly 30,000 people. Globally, Medical Teams has conducted more than 1.91 million screenings. These numbers represent vulnerable populations without access to traditional healthcare, such as refugees, migrant farm workers, and individuals and families lacking housing.
Mercy Corps
As higher-income countries continue to secure agreements for COVID-19 vaccines above and beyond what’s needed for their populations, millions of people are standing at the back of the line. Mercy Corps is advocating for equitable vaccine access for lower-income and conflict-affected countries unlikely to have widespread access to vaccines before 2023, as well as often overlooked and hard-to-reach populations, like refugees and internally displaced people, who are at risk of being left out of vaccination efforts. In Colombia, Mercy Corps is partnering with El Espectador, a national Colombian newspaper, on a nationwide campaign to build empathy, understanding and support for Venezuelans in Colombia, and to advocate for vaccine equity for migrants. Mercy Corps is also working to combat misinformation and build vaccine acceptance through information campaigns launched during COVID.
OutRight Action International
In the wake of COVID-19, OutRight Action International launched a research project to document the immediate and severe impact of the pandemic on LGBTIQ people globally. Its findings were based on interviews with advocates in 38 countries, and featured on BBC Newshour among other news outlets. OutRight also launched a Global LGBTIQ Emergency Fundto support grassroots LGBTIQ organizations on the frontlines of providing emergency assistance to LGBTIQ people experiencing loss of income and food, lack of access to HIV medication and healthcare, increased domestic violence, and even scapegoating by religious and government leaders. Moreover, LGBTIQ people often are not reached or left behind by government or traditional relief efforts, and many grassroots LGBTIQ organizations are on the brink of survival – threatening to set the movement for equality and human rights back by years. To date, OutRight’s Emergency Fund has raised more than $1.65 million from 300+ companies, foundations and individuals and has issued 125 grants in 65 countries, reaching more than 50,000 people. OutRight will be issuing a second call for applications and additional grants this spring and throughout 2021, as funding is available.
Oxfam America
Oxfam America is advocating for a People’s Vaccine, a COVID-19 vaccine that is patent-free, mass-produced, fairly distributed, and made available free of charge to every individual across the globe. Within this work, Oxfam America is leading a coalition of partners to pressure the Biden Administration to ensure the technology and know-how to make COVID-19 vaccines is shared with the world. This coalition wrote a public letter calling on President Biden to champion a People’s Vaccine, which was signed by more than 200 leaders from the fields of public health, medicine, global development, and racial justice, as well as faith leaders, economists, Nobel laureates, former members of Congress, and artists. Oxfam America is leading other efforts, taking both public and insider approaches, to pressure the Biden Administration to push for a People’s Vaccine, which have included meetings with Administration officials and a grassroots petition to President Biden. Watch Oxfam America’s video about the People’s Vaccine here.
PATH
PATH has been closely involved with the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator, a global public-private-philanthropic collaboration to accelerate the development, production, and equitable rollout of COVID-19 tests, treatments, and vaccines. COVAX is the vaccines pillar of the ACT Accelerator and PATH has been mobilizing its staff, networks, and partnerships to anticipate and address specific country needs. Through PATH’s expertise in vaccine financing, procurement, and partnerships, it is assisting the COVAX Facility with program design and operationalization. PATH is also leveraging its manufacturing expertise to evaluate production capacity and offering strategies for scale-up. In addition, PATH has been providing technical assistance to support COVID-19 vaccine trial-site readiness in Africa and Asia.
Save the Children
Save the Children responded to COVID-19 across 87 countries, including the United States, reaching 29.5 million coronavirus-affected people. Its teams launched and sustained an emergency response to contain the spread, protect communities, and support children and families. As vaccines are developed and rolled out, Save the Children is pressing leaders around the world and working with its partners to ensure the most vulnerable people will have access and are prioritized, as well as health workers, community leaders and teachers, who are critical to keeping children safe and learning. Find out more in a recently published report: A Chance to Get it Right: Achieving equity in COVID-19 vaccine access. Save the Children has been adapting and expanding how it delivers world-class programs and advocates for children, as well as launching new and innovative initiatives to prevent, mitigate and respond to the pandemic’s devastating impacts. More information on Save the Children’s overall response and impact can be found in its COVID-19: One Year On Global Impact Report.
Splash
Splash is a non-profit organization that delivers child-focused water, sanitation, hygiene (WASH), and menstrual health solutions in some of the world’s largest, low-resource cities. Its vision is for children in urban poverty to thrive and reach their full potential. Through Project WISE (WASH in Schools for Everyone), Splash plans to reach 100% of government schools in two major growth cities: Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Kolkata, India by 2023, serving one million kids. As schools re-open globally, Splash is especially focused on increasing handwashing with soap, the first line of defense against COVID-19. It does this through behavior change programs for teachers and students, as well as through patented handwashing stations designed just for kids. Through Splash Social Enterprises, the organization has launched a new project to design handwashing stations for a broader array of institutions (such as health care facilities and rural schools), helping provide access to handwashing for people of all ages in low- and middle-income markets.
Tableau Foundation
Software company Tableau’s free, publicly-accessible COVID-19 Data Resource Hub includes real-time data on case reports from Johns Hopkins University, the WHO and the CDC, as well as a curated gallery of visualizations from national news and health organizations. The foundation has also ramped up its Community Grants Program, expanding the number of grantees and streamlining the application guidelines. Tableau has created two other giving campaigns for employees: one to support frontline health workers, and another, the COVID-19 Response Fund, to meet the needs of community organizations and non-profits serving at-risk communities that are disproportionately impacted by the disease and its repercussions.
VillageReach
In the early months of the pandemic, VillageReach joined like-minded collaborators to form the COVID-19 Action Fund for Africa, a group of 30 organizations focused on getting personal protective equipment (PPE) to community health workers in Africa. Many African countries were shut out of the PPE market, making frontline health workers and their patients extremely vulnerable. More than 57 million pieces of PPE have been secured for 18 countries since August 2020. Fast forward to today and 80 days have passed since the first health worker in Washington state was vaccinated. COVID-19 vaccines arrived recently in Africa, but the number of available doses does not match the need. And as U.S. leaders announce vaccine availability for every adult by May, VillageReach continues to advocate for health workers in Africa – they need vaccines NOW.
World Vision
World Vision is responding to the devastating impact of COVID-19 in more than 70 countries. The organization is using its global reach and grassroots connections to encourage vaccine acceptance and uptake. This means ensuring that communities are accurately informed of the nature and purpose of each COVID-19 vaccine, that leaders and champions are equipped to support their constituencies, that public health decision makers understand vaccine acceptance barriers and the science of reducing vaccine hesitancy. World Vision is using mobile phones to enable health workers, in even the most remote areas, to access vital voice message trainings on COVID-19. Its networks to combat the spread and impact of COVID-19 include 300K faith leaders, 181K community health workers, government and private sector partners, as well as World Vision’s own humanitarian and development experts. Globally, World Vision participates in COVAX1 in an advisory role, providing guidance on community engagement and participating in a working group on demand-side preparedness.
How Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center Became a Global Leader in Testing COVID-19 Vaccines
By Joanne Lu
The global path of COVID-19. Image courtesy of Fred Hutch.
When COVID-19 first made landfall in the U.S. last year, it made its grand entrance in Snohomish County, Washington, and eventually turned Seattle into the country’s “coronavirus capital” for some months. So, in a way, it’s only fitting that the institution at the center of the vaccine development campaign to end the pandemic is based in Seattle, as well.
On the face of it, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center may sound like an unlikely candidate to coordinate COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials. But “Fred Hutch” or “the Hutch” as it’s known, was actually an obvious choice, after having worked for more than 20 years on a vaccine to end another pandemic: HIV/AIDS.
Fred Hutch was founded in 1975 as a center dedicated to studying cancer – and that work continues. But it soon became renowned for its work on other diseases, too, especially HIV (which also causes a type of cancer called Kaposi sarcoma).
Fred Hutch in Seattle. Photo courtesy of Fred Hutch.
It was through HIV research that the center’s former president and director, Dr. Larry Corey, became friends and colleagues with Dr. Anthony Fauci in the 1980s. In fact, it was Fauci who encouraged Corey in 1998 to co-found what became the HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN), the world’s largest publicly funded international collaboration conducting clinical trials of HIV vaccines. The HVTN is headquartered at Fred Hutch and supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is headed by Fauci.
So, when COVID-19 hit, it was no surprise that Fauci tapped Corey, along with the global network and expertise of Fred Hutch and the HVTN, to coordinate vaccine trials through a newly-formed clinical trials network: the COVID-19 Prevention Network (CoVPN). The plan was to “harmonize” trials of various vaccines so they could be compared to each other by asking a common set of questions, setting a common set of goals, and measuring success with a common set of tests, carried out by independent laboratories. And it needed to be done as quickly as possible.
CoVPN manages more than 100 clinical trial sites in the U.S. and around the world, including in Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi. So far it has tested, and is still evaluating, vaccines from Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Novavax, and Sanofi.
“Our large network, which is very connected across different disciplines, was a really obvious choice to move forward these COVID-19 vaccines,” says Dr. Michele Andrasik, a senior staff scientist in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division of Fred Hutch and director of Social & Behavioral Sciences and Community Engagement at HVTN and CoVPN.
Dr. Michele Andrasik, a senior staff scientist in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division of Fred Hutch and director of Social & Behavioral Sciences and Community Engagement at HVTN and CoVPN. Photo courtesy of Fred Hutch
The HVTN’s three core areas — operations/leadership, statistical, and laboratory — are all housed at Fred Hutch. Additionally, with clinical trial sites spread across the country and around the world, the Hutch had all the mechanisms and processes in place to ensure that COVID-19 vaccines could get through trials safely, effectively, and relatively quickly.
“We’ve been incredibly successful at shepherding through HIV vaccine trials, so for us, it was a seamless shift,” says Andrasik of taking on the responsibilities of the CoVPN.
“It’s always been our opinion that vaccines are what is going to get us out of this,” says Andrasik, but testing and developing vaccines that work is only the first step. Vaccinating people – enough people – is the goal.
Doing so requires building people’s confidence in vaccines. So, Fred Hutch did what it has always done. Its external relations team reached out to community partners in Washington and around the world – in Asia, in the Pacific Islands, in Indigenous communities, in the Latin American diaspora, in the Black diaspora – to learn how the disease was impacting their communities. They asked leaders what their communities needed to know about the vaccines and what was needed to not only enroll people in vaccine trials, but to increase the number of people getting vaccinated.
According to Dr. Stephaun Wallace, a Fred Hutch staff scientist and HVTN and CoVPN’s director of external relations, skepticism about the trial process or of the vaccines usually falls into four main categories: questions about the benefits, safety and side effects; concerns about the speed with which the vaccines have been developed and whether they work on people “like me;” distrust in the political and economic motivations of the governments and companies involved; and belief in misinformation or conspiracy theories.
Dr. Stephaun Wallace, a Fred Hutch staff scientist and HVTN and CoVPN’s director of external relations. Photo courtesy of Fred Hutch.
Fred Hutch is working especially hard to ensure representation of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities in vaccine trials, because diversity is important for finding a vaccine that works in all kinds of people, and it is necessary for building vaccine confidence. People are more likely to take a vaccine that they know worked on someone who looks like them, says Andrasik.
Again, community engagement is key to increasing BIPOC representation in trials. Fred Hutch’s clinical trial sites have always been in the communities where they work, says Andrasik, and the people who work at those sites are members of the community themselves. Wallace says the team works hard to acknowledge community concerns, provide accurate information, and ensure the ethical conduct of research.
Vaccine confidence isn’t as great of an issue outside of North America and Western Europe, says Andrasik. Instead, the challenge in many low- and middle-income countries is just getting the vaccines there. Besides an inequitable global supply of vaccines, inconsistent pricing is also part of the problem, as well as inadequate public health infrastructure that limits the types of vaccines that are viable in areas without sufficient cold storage capacity, according to Raquel Sanchez, the managing director of Global Oncology at Fred Hutch.
Raquel Sanchez, the managing director of Global Oncology at Fred Hutch. Photo by Robert Hood / Fred Hutch News Service.
Andrasik says Fred Hutch’s approach is to let global partners take the lead. “They’ll let you know what they need in terms of support,” she says, but ensuring that the trials go through as quickly as possible – without bypassing any safety procedures – is one way they’re helping low- and middle-income countries get vaccines sooner.
As vaccines are now being rolled out, community engagement is still key. According to Andrasik, some of the most successful places in the country that are distributing vaccines are doing so in collaboration with faith-based organizations, community organizations, and long-standing institutions that have earned the trust of the communities they’re in. Locally, Fred Hutch is working with the Washington Department of Health and Seattle and King County Public Health to further that effort.
But it’s always a learning process. For example, early on, Seattle – and other cities – thought that mass vaccination sites in BIPOC communities were the answer to administering vaccines equitably. Instead, it quickly became clear that the people who were accessing the sites were not the people who lived in those communities. Instead, it was mostly people who had the ability to chase down appointments, as they worked from home on their computers, who then drove into BIPOC communities to get their vaccinations.
In response, Andrasik says there has been a “massive effort” by the city, local, and state government to deploy pop-up and mobile sites that go directly into BIPOC communities. In some situations, unique URLs have been created for community-based organizations to give to their clients in order to ensure that vaccination appointments are actually being filled by BIPOC individuals.
Although there’s still a lot of work to do to ensure equity as we move closer to ending this pandemic, Andrasik is optimistic: “This is by far the greatest and most concerted effort toward equity that I’ve ever seen in my life, and it’s really amazing to be a part of it.”
New Head of PATH, Nikolaj Gilbert, Brings Flexibility and Partnership Prowess to Global Health
By Andie Long
Photo courtesy of PATH.
Nikolaj Gilbert joined PATH, a global public health organization headquartered in Seattle, in January of 2020 – just as the first cases of COVID-19 began appearing globally and shortly before the first U.S. cases were reported in Washington state. With little more than a year on the job, having immigrated to the United States from Denmark with his family and onboarded to PATH almost entirely virtually, the new CEO already has a strong vision for the future, one that challenges it to be an even better global partner.
PATH works locally, with national and sub-national health organizations around the world, as well as globally with partners like the World Health Organization, developing vaccines, devices, and tools that can reach people who would otherwise not have access. This expertise has been essential in light of the global pandemic, as many of the hardest hit communities navigate COVID-19 on top of other major health threats. Doing this well requires a strong set of institutional values that drive all of PATH’s work – and Gilbert is the right leader for the job.
In early June when a renewed push for racial justice in the U.S. reached a fever pitch, Gilbert said that PATH accelerated its efforts to ensure the organization held its staff and leaders accountable to its values and for the first time, publicly acknowledged racism as a public health issue. In a statement, PATH said that “…while racism has a uniquely devastating role in the history of the United States, it is a global crisis, marginalizing people and communities everywhere.”
Gilbert has been a staunch advocate for vaccine equity and a multilateral approach to pandemic response. In an article for Devex in October, he called out nationalist policies that have undermined global strategy and fractured the cooperation needed to end the COVID-19 pandemic, warning, “No country will reap the full benefits of a COVID-19 vaccine by only considering the needs of its own population.” More recently, he has used his voice to draw attention to the financing and market challenges of delivering medical oxygen to health care facilities in low- and middle-income countries.
Throughout the pandemic, PATH has worked closely with Gavi/COVAX, the vaccine arm of a global public-private-philanthropic collaboration that was formed to stop the disease in its tracks. And throughout Africa and much of Southeast Asia, PATH has been coordinating with countries to refine their plans for an equitable rollout that prioritizes those who are most vulnerable.
REDEFINING WORK / LIFE BALANCE
Gilbert’s values transcend PATH’s offices. With remote work widespread during the pandemic, many of us have become accustomed to seeing our colleagues occasionally interrupted by their children, pets or even their partners during video calls. This real life incursion has served to remind us of our shared humanity.
Gilbert’s daughters range in age from six to 13. The girls are not yet fluent in English, so the move has been particularly challenging for them, he says, especially as Seattle schools shifted to all-remote learning.
What we all need to remember, he says, is “It’s okay to have your kids jumping on your lap in a meeting.” They’re as much a part of your life as your work is.
Just then, Gilbert’s six-year-old can be heard in the background yelling “Daddy!” He hesitates a split second before saying, “I need to tell her I’m in a call, and I’ll be back.”
After the short interlude, Gilbert is back on camera, his wry smile acknowledging the perfect illustration of what we were just discussing.
In terms of balancing work and home life, Gilbert insists there are ways organizations like his can support employees who have children, without people having to compromise their careers. For him, it’s about demonstrating flexibility in how you evaluate people on their contributions to the organization.
“It’s not always about being physically somewhere for a number of hours,” he says. “It’s what you bring.”
COLLECTIVE LEADERSHIP
Gilbert brings to PATH a strong belief in what he calls collective leadership. “I’m not very hierarchical,” he says. “I seek advice from people who have the knowledge, regardless of where they sit in the organization.”
Reflecting this vision, PATH has recently undergone a reshuffling in its organizational structure, having named four new executives representing PATH’s country teams and “reduced the layers” between top executive levels and the rest of the organization. This new model intentionally addresses the dynamics between PATH’s U.S.-based headquarters and its country-based programs, making sure the country teams have “the power and influence to do what is best and make those decisions.”
The new five-year organizational strategy PATH will be launching this summer focuses on strengthening health systems globally, as well as moving toward a more country-driven model.
Gilbert says he is glad he didn’t have a strategy already in place coming into PATH “because what’s happened in the last year has changed everything.”
The process of setting a new strategy at PATH took nine months, and encompassed organizational-wide surveys together with partners, donor, and staff interviews. “It has been a challenge,” he admits, “but it has also been extremely rewarding and brought us together as an organization.”
PARTNERSHIPS DONE RIGHT
While most organizations find partnerships difficult to build and even more challenging to maintain, PATH’s whole mission depends on navigating public-private partnerships to improve global health. Whether it’s finding the right partners to advance a health innovation, or launch a product, or build the capacity of local manufacturers, Gilbert says, “This organization is pretty darned good at partnerships.”
Having previously served as director of partnerships at the United Nations Office of Project Services, Gilbert brings a wealth of insight on what it takes to manage complex partnerships successfully. One key he says is to forge “fewer partnerships, but more quality partnerships.”
All parties need to be honest and transparent, he says, about what they expect, as well as how the partnership will advance the “greater good” and the needs of both organizations. “There’s no doubt in my mind that partnerships are the way forward,” Gilbert says.
And what better place to be building partnerships than in Washington state?
“It’s amazing to be in an environment where there’s so much focus on critical issues and global health,” Gilbert says. “There are so many like-minded partners and stakeholders here, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and many corporate and philanthropic donors, that want to help.”
“The mentality for partnerships here … I feel that when people talk about entering partnerships, it’s really something that they see the benefit of. Maybe here there is this history and legacy of how these partnerships have transformed and led to many innovations in different areas.”
While Gilbert knew Washington state was home to many important global health organizations, he says he didn’t realize until he moved here the “amazing energy” of those local stakeholders and how well they connect and work together to scale up solutions. “That’s quite remarkable and the innovation capacity and passion in this part of the world has surprised me and stunned me to be honest.”
Vaccines Touch Down Across Africa: Now the Work Begins
By Emily Bancroft, President, VillageReach
I never thought I’d be so excited by pictures of boxes being unloaded from airplanes. When I saw the photos come streaming across social media this week, I breathed a deep sigh of relief. The pallets being wheeled onto the tarmac meant that COVID-19 vaccines had arrived in Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Côte d’Ivoire, Malawi and many other African countries. As government officials and partners began to unpack the containers, we all knew the hard work was just beginning.
Malawi officials receive COVAX delivery at Kamuza International Airport. | Photo Credit: Hope Ngwira
Over the last year, as the scientific community quickly mobilized to develop, test and produce multiple effective vaccines, the focus for VillageReach has been protecting health workers and communities against the virus. As an organization dedicated to the delivery of vaccines, medicines, supplies and information, COVID-19 vaccine delivery has been constantly on our minds. We participated in the Country Readiness and Delivery working group of the vaccine pillar of the Access to COVID Tools Accelerator (ACT-A) to help link global-level plans with country efforts. Read more.
Aid Organizations Respond to Instability and Violence in Myanmar
Feb 9, 2021 – Teachers protesting a military coup in Myanmar. Credit: Ninjastrikers. Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
The fragile democracy of Myanmar, which held for a decade, was upended at the beginning of February 2021 when the military staged a coup to prevent newly elected members of parliament from being confirmed. The military’s favored party lost the November elections in a landslide to the National League for Democracy, the governing party of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.
In response to the coup, millions of Myanmar’s citizens and residents took to the streets to protest, many banging on pots and pans to “drive the ‘military regime’ out of the country.” The demonstrations soon evolved into a nationwide strike of civil service workers, with nurses and doctors the first to refuse to work. They were followed quickly by teachers, as well as bank tellers and other private sector employees. All this after a grueling year of lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, today the country has nearly ground to a halt. Read more.
Millions at Risk from Evolving Crisis in Northern Ethiopia’s Tigray Region
(UPDATED March 4, 2021)
Credit: Joost Bastmeijer for Medical Teams International.
According to the latest report from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), at least 4.5 million people in the Tigray region of Ethiopia are in dire need of assistance, with those in rural areas the hardest to reach. Food is scarce and the lack of water, sanitation, and hygiene services has increased the risk of deadly disease outbreaks. What’s more, people in the region have few functional health facilities to turn to. Read more.
Please welcome our newest Global Washington members. Take a moment to familiarize yourself with their work and consider opportunities for support and collaboration!
Nia Tero
Indigenous peoples sustain many of the healthiest ecosystems on Earth: areas rich in biodiversity and systems essential to our global climate, fresh water, and food security. Nia Tero exists to ensure that Indigenous peoples have the economic power and cultural independence to steward, support, and protect their livelihoods and territories they call home. These places are vital to us all. Niatero.org
Opportunity International
Opportunity International provides financial solutions and training to empower people living in poverty to transform their lives, their children’s futures and their communities. Opportunity.org
Water Mission
Water Mission is a Christian engineering nonprofit that builds safe water, sanitation, and hygiene solutions in developing countries and disaster areas. Watermission.org
I never thought I’d be so excited by pictures of boxes being unloaded from airplanes. When I saw the photos come streaming across social media this week, I breathed a deep sigh of relief. The pallets being wheeled onto the tarmac meant that COVID-19 vaccines had arrived in Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Côte d’Ivoire, Malawi and many other African countries. As government officials and partners began to unpack the containers, we all knew the hard work was just beginning.
Malawi officials receive COVAX delivery at Kamuza International Airport. | Photo Credit: Hope Ngwira
Over the last year, as the scientific community quickly mobilized to develop, test and produce multiple effective vaccines, the focus for VillageReach has been protecting health workers and communities against the virus. As an organization dedicated to the delivery of vaccines, medicines, supplies and information, COVID-19 vaccine delivery has been constantly on our minds. We participated in the Country Readiness and Delivery working group of the vaccine pillar of the Access to COVID Tools Accelerator (ACT-A) to help link global-level plans with country efforts.
We were inspired last February when the former President of Ireland Mary Robinson visited Seattle to talk about her foundation and the importance of centering human rights when it comes to a robust and ethical climate change response.
We learned that climate change has a greater impact on people living in low- and middle-income countries with few monetary resources, poor health conditions, insecure land rights, and fragile infrastructure.
The climate impacts we are already seeing include severe droughts, growing food insecurity, wider disease transmission, and rising seas that threaten the very existence of many coastal cities and island nations.
As is often the case, those who are most affected by a crisis have a great deal of insight and knowledge to create effective solutions. While Indigenous communities are often at greater risk from environmental degradation and climate effects, their long history of living from and caring for the land provides a unique perspective and an integrated set of solutions that can make sustainability a reality and help turn the tide on the climate crisis.
In this month’s newsletter you will meet James Mulbah, a project manager for Earthworm Foundation, who having grown up in war-torn Liberia, decided to dedicate his career to conflict resolution and environmental rights. You will also learn about how Landesa approaches climate change and sustainable land management through first helping individuals and communities secure their land rights, particularly women and Indigenous groups.
Climate justice was also the theme of our Women of the World January celebration, where we featured incredible women from Nigeria, Palau, Suriname, Nepal and the U.S. A summary of this event provides an overview of the topic in this newsletter.
To continue the conversation, please join me on February 25 for a virtual event about climate justice, co-hosted by the Posner Center for International Development. Global Washington is committed to promoting the work of our members as it relates to Sustainable Development Goal 13 — Climate Action. I am hopeful that the global community will make significant progress toward climate justice in 2021 and beyond.
Centering Indigenous Knowledge and Experience Infuses Discussion of Climate Justice at Annual Seattle Philanthropy Event
By Joanne Lu
“Everything is connected, and there’s no longer any such thing as solving for only one challenge.”
That was the emerging theme of Global Washington’s annual Women of the World event, as expressed by Martha Kongsgaard, a prominent Seattle philanthropist and co-founder of the Kongsgaard-Goldman Foundation.
The topic of the January 28 event was climate justice, inspired by the former President of Ireland Mary Robinson, who defined the effort as “[linking] human rights and development to achieve a human-centered approach, safeguarding the rights of the most vulnerable people and sharing the burdens and benefits of climate change and its impacts equitably and fairly.” In other words, said Kongsgaard, “it’s managing the ecosystem with people and equity at the center.”
For example, the Seattle Foundation’s Climate Justice Impact Strategy is a comprehensive initiative to ensure that communities of color and low-income communities are leading and shaping efforts to reduce the disproportionate effects of climate change they experience, explained Norma Fuentes, managing director of the foundation’s philanthropic services. But the event didn’t just address climate justice in our region. Speakers from four other countries – Nepal, Nigeria, Palau and Suriname – shared what climate justice looks like in their communities, as well.
Video image of speaker Jupta Iteowaki, an Indigenous woman from the Wayana tribe in Suriname and president of Mulokot Foundation, during Global Washington’s virtual 2021 “Women of the World” event.
Unlike the events of years’ past, the discussion was held online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which Yifat Susskind, executive director of the international women’s rights organization MADRE, described as one of the compounded threats that have “rocked us all” over the past year. However, far from affecting everyone equally, the pandemic, economic breakdown, and climate crisis have deepened existing inequalities.
The irony is that many of the people who are hurt most by these crises are actually essential to solving them. Yet, they have not only been left out of the conversation, but also often harmed by so-called solutions that aren’t human-centered.
For example, the threat of climate change is perhaps felt more immediately and existentially by Indigenous communities than any other, as rising sea levels threaten to swallow their homes, wildfires consume their forests, droughts diminish their water sources, and seasonal changes endanger their food security and livelihoods. According to Jupta Iteowaki, an Indigenous woman from the Wayana tribe in Suriname and president of Mulokot Foundation, the crisis is creating profound negative mental health impacts on Indigenous communities.
At the same time, even though Indigenous people only make up about five percent of the global population, they protect 80 percent of biodiversity, says Susskind.
“Most of what remains of nature is in the hands of Indigenous peoples,” says Margarita Mora, managing director of partnerships for Nia Tero, an organization working to secure Indigenous guardianship of vital ecosystems. “These are the areas with the highest cultural value to humanity. These are the areas with the highest diversity of plants, and animals, the largest carbon stocks worldwide and areas that are key for freshwater cycles.”
As Kongsgaard noted, the environment has traditionally been siloed from other social justice issues like human rights and development. The result, according to Mora, is that conservation efforts forced Indigenous people out of their territories, fenced in protected areas, changed their way of life and manipulated many communities. Conservationists, she says, have failed for the last century to recognize Indigenous people’s rights, knowledge systems, and contributions to humanity.
Video image of speaker Martha Kongsgaard, a prominent Seattle philanthropist and co-founder of the Kongsgaard-Goldman Foundation, during Global Washington’s virtual 2021 “Women of the World” event.
“It was not good for people. It was not good for nature,” says Mora.
Additionally, there is the gender layer. In many societies, including Indigenous ones, women are the caregivers and protectors of not only their families but also their lands, according to Kamala Thapa, a longtime advocate for Indigenous women’s rights in Nepal. This means that for Indigenous women and girls, the climate crisis exacerbates loss of livelihoods, gender-based violence, and school drop-out rates; deepens poverty; increases early childhood marriages; impacts reproductive rights and health; and forcibly displaces communities. In sum, Thapa says, “it affects nearly every aspect of life.”
There is no singular solution to the problem, but at the heart of all solutions should be the rights and welfare of those who are most at risk, says Thapa. This includes protecting Indigenous sovereignty and their right to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent, whereby they can give or withhold consent to a project that may affect them or their territories. For some communities, it’s even letting them know that they have rights – says Habiba Ali, founder, managing director and CEO of Sosai Renewable Energies in Nigeria – and that their problems are due to an issue (climate change) bigger than them.
Video image of speaker Habiba Ali, founder, managing director and CEO of Sosai Renewable Energies in Nigeria, during Global Washington’s virtual 2021 “Women of the World” event.
Several of the speakers also highlighted the importance of learning from Indigenous women and communities, whose long history with the land has resulted in deep knowledge of how to preserve it. This includes ensuring the effective participation of Indigenous communities in the planning and decision-making process for climate actions, says Itoewaki. It also means conscientiously developing equitable partnerships with those who are most affected by climate change, genuinely listening to their needs, and making sure the impacts of climate policies – including funds – actually reach them, says Madelsar Ngiraingas, a Palauan conservationist who is currently the Micronesia community partnerships manager for OneReef. Additionally, she says, it’s important to make sure that our desire for measurable data doesn’t put an undue burden on communities like hers that are battling the climate crisis every day.
Image shared by speaker Margarita Mora, managing director of partnerships for Nia Tero, during Global Washington’s virtual 2021 “Women of the World” event.
“A lot of grants require indicators, measures and all these very technical aspects,” says Ngiraingas. “We need to recognize that in many spaces – Indigenous spaces – these types of expectations are insurmountable. Hold people accountable in ways that make sense.”
Beyond rights advocacy and knowledge sharing, there are also many technical solutions to the climate crisis, like the ones Sosai Renewable Energies is scaling up in Nigeria. Some are low-tech, like reforesting areas and introducing new livelihood opportunities like fisheries. Others are high-tech, like solar solutions to power homes, distributing cookstoves that use 70 percent less wood and thereby reduce smoke and indoor air pollution, and deploying solar food dryers to create less food waste and ensure food security. According to Ali, Sosai has impacted more than 750,000 people so far and is responsible for removing more than 200,000 tons of carbon dioxide every year from the atmosphere. And they’re doing so primarily by reaching out to women.
For those who don’t feel like they’re on the front lines of the climate crisis, there’s still plenty to contribute. “Try to use renewable energy, try to eat less meat, don’t waste food,” says Iteowaki. “And please speak up for us. If we’re not able to share our stories, please share them for us.”
At the end of the day, says Mora, we all should be asking ourselves a question that Indigenous people have been asking for thousands of years: “What kind of ancestor will I be? And what kind of ancestor will we collectively be?”
The answer, she says, will determine whether we continue to exploit our planet and fellow humans or build a sustainable, equitable, and just future for all.
Image credit: Nia Tero.
Read more about how Global Washington members are taking action on climate change.
Agros
In Central America, Agros has seen that climate change, agriculture, and poverty are deeply intertwined. Current farming methods do not meet the world’s growing demand for food, do not generate enough income for those growing the food, and contribute a third of all greenhouse emissions worldwide. Those living in poverty are disproportionately affected. To address these issues, Agros launched a Climate Smart Agriculture Initiative in 2020. The goal was to increase farmers’ ability to adapt to changing climate conditions, mitigate contributions to climate change, and increase farmer productivity. Agros invested in modern production systems that significantly increase the number of harvests and increase the yield of each harvest—meaning more income and more food is generated on less land with fewer emissions. Highlights of the program include: reducing the use of chemical fertilizers by 40%; reducing the use of pesticides by up to 75%; reducing costs by up to 32% while increasing yields by 18%; and building a hydroponics module that decreases water use by 50%. This initiative was facilitated in part by a special partnership with the travel author Rick Steves. In 2021 Agros will renew the partnership, expanding its climate smart work from agriculture to the entirety of village operations.
Amazon
In 2019 Amazon co-founded the Climate Pledge with Global Optimism, and became its first signatory. The Climate Pledge is a cross-sector community of companies, organizations, individuals, and partners, working together to crack the climate crisis and solve the challenges of decarbonizing the economy. Bringing together those that are prepared to run the furthest and fastest, The Climate Pledge calls on signatories to reach net zero-carbon emissions by 2040—10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement.
Earthworm
Earthworm Foundation is a non-profit organization driven by the desire to positively impact the relationship between people and nature. With most of our staff operating directly on the ground where the issues are, we work with our member companies and partners to make value chains an engine to drive positive economic, environmental and social impact. We are tackling one of the main drivers of climate change by working collaboratively with companies, communities and other stakeholders to eliminate deforestation from global supply chains of commodities like palm oil, cocoa, and pulp and paper. At the same time, we are helping farming communities become more resilient in the face of climate change through our Rurality program, which promotes smallholder farming practices and crop diversification with the goals of ensuring that farmer households have more secure livelihoods and access to a variety of food crops for their own consumption. Ultimately, much of our work around the world is aimed at preserving the climate that allows life on Earth to thrive.
EverVillage
EverVillage is a place that believes in a green recovery – a place of environmental and social resilience, where women and youth are designing the future, and water is the key to it all. EverVillage combines art and science to develop innovative, green infrastructure solutions that last – through community-based planning, placemaking, capacity-building, and an inside-out approach. The organization focuses on long-term water resilience and resource management with rural, Indigenous, and refugee communities – and those most impacted by the intersections of climate change, social injustice, poverty, and now the COVID-19 pandemic. In joining the global community as it re-examines the status of the SDGs in this critical time of recovery, EverVillage’s current climate justice work is focused on the UN initiative, Leave No One Behind. By bridging the digital divide and making voices heard and counted, EverVillage supports data-informed decision making for a sustainable water future for all and believes: “We are One Global Village.”
FSC Investments & Partnerships
FSC Investments & Partnerships (FSC I&P) is the Seattle-based unit of Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) International, a global leader in responsible forest management. FSC promotes the environmentally responsible, socially beneficial, and economically viable management of the world’s forests, and is widely recognized as the gold standard in responsible forest management. Since 2019, FSC International and the FSC Indigenous Foundation have developed and launched a programmatic effort that centers Indigenous Peoples in the continued management of their territories for the protection of the world’s forests, biodiversity, and carbon stocks. The FSC Indigenous Foundation is an Indigenous-led entity within the global FSC network. Dr. Francisco Souza, Managing Director for the FSC Indigenous Foundation, said: “As a member of the Apurinã Indigenous community of the Brazilian Amazon, I have seen firsthand the destruction of the forests around my community and violence against our rights and traditional practices of managing and protecting nature. At the same time, I have seen the benefits, for the forests, for mother nature, and for the brothers and sisters in the region, which arise when we are supported to manage our own lands based on our visions, traditions, and rights. Around the world, Indigenous communities are the best stewards and guardians of the forests where we live. We are global providers of environmental health and wellbeing to the planet.”
Heifer International
Heifer International is on a mission to end global hunger and poverty in a sustainable way. For over 75 years, the organization has invested alongside more than 36 million farmers and business owners around the world, supporting them to build businesses that deliver living incomes and protect the environment. Heifer International works with smallholder farmers using a tried and tested community development model, providing farming inputs and technical assistance that enable them to grow their businesses using locally available resources. Expert teams and partners provide training in climate smart agriculture techniques so farmers can increase their resilience to climate change, improve production, restore soil health and reduce deforestation. Many of the communities Heifer works with are among the most vulnerable to climate change. Heifer International works with them to manage grazing and protect areas of important biodiversity, enabling farmers to make a living income and restore resources for future generations. Heifer International and Heifer Impact Capital also invest alongside farmers in clean, green energy solutions, like solar power and solar drying systems for continued business growth. Heifer International believes local farmers hold the key to feeding the world while cooling the planet and it works with them to make their businesses sustainable in every sense of the word.
Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch conducts on-the-ground research to document the impact of climate change and climate-harming activities and to advocate for positive change locally, nationally, and internationally. Human Rights Watch disseminates its findings through a global media network and 11 million social media followers. It uses its findings and media exposure to urge governments and corporations to implement rights-respecting environmental policies and practices, with a focus on the disadvantaged populations that are suffering harms most acutely. In coalition with other environmental and human rights groups, Human Rights Watch successfully advocated for the inclusion of human rights language in the landmark2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. In the coming year, Human Rights Watch’s work on climate change will focus on two of today’s most urgent issues: protecting environmental defenders struggling to preserve forests, land, and water, plus safeguarding communities vulnerable to climate events. Human Rights Watch will expose violence and intimidation against Indigenous peoples, community activists, and others and promote protections to keep them—and our planet—safe. The organization will also document climate change consequences, from droughts fueling child malnutrition in Colombia, to rising temperatures depleting Indigenous food sources in Canada, and extreme heat debilitating pregnant outdoor workers in the United States. Human Rights Watch moves governments to respond with policies that help vulnerable populations not only cope but thrive.
The Hunger Project
The Hunger Project is working to end hunger and poverty by pioneering sustainable, grassroots, women-centered strategies and advocating for their widespread adoption in countries throughout the world. The Hunger Project’s work starts with a mindset shift that allows women and girls to gain agency — or voice in the decisions that affect their lives — as well as skills, time, income, and leadership. When women and girls gain agency, there are a whole host of outcomes, including women claiming their reproductive rights and girls enrolling in secondary school. Project Drawdown revealed that educating girls and family planning together form the most promising solution to drawing down carbon from the atmosphere and reversing global warming. Beyond that, women and girls with agency drive local climate justice in many forms — planting trees, building water catchment systems, developing agroforestry from native plants, keeping their schoolmates enrolled in school, advocating that indigenous values be reflected in local development plans. Women and girls with agency, income, time, skills and leadership are not just a side benefit to the work of climate justice — they are central actors in its achievement.
Future of Fish
Future of Fish works to ensure sustainable livelihoods for fishing communities and long-term health of wild fish populations, which billions of people depend upon as a critical source of protein. Climate change is already wreaking havoc for coastal communities in developing countries, with rising seas damaging dockside infrastructure and warming waters driving away traditional fish stocks. The result is loss of income, food, and in many cases, cultural heritage. Future of Fish collaborates with small-scale fishers to design better systems, practices, and technologies that help fishers continue supporting their communities in a time of unstable climate impacts. Climate justice is only possible when front-line communities have the resources they need to survive and thrive. Future of Fish works closely with fishers, seafood supply chains, and the local community and governments to co-design interventions that build environmentally sustainable, climate resilient, and economically viable fisheries. With support from global and regional partners, Future of Fish helps address food security and achieve long-term social and environmental impact for coastal fishing communities around the world.
Landesa
Landesa champions and works to secure land rights for millions of rural women and men experiencing poverty, to promote social justice and provide opportunity. When rural and indigenous communities are equipped with secure land rights that are gender-equal and socially inclusive, they are better able to make investments – in sustainable land management and farming techniques like terracing, improved irrigation, and agroforestry – that conserve soil and water and build resilience to climate change. Beyond a role in climate adaptation, there is evidence that secure land rights can help advance efforts on climate mitigation, particularly through preservation of forests and land restoration practices. At the country level, Landesa’s climate change work includes improving community forestry management in Myanmar’s mangrove forests; better management and protection of wetlands in Liberia, including recommendations to improve use and access rights for women; and researching the link between youth land rights and uptake of climate-smart agriculture techniques in Tanzania. Landesa’s advocacy efforts include recommendations to integrate land tenure, particularly for women, in global frameworks on climate change, including the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Mercy Corps
The climate crisis is creating unprecedented challenges for millions of people already burdened by poverty and oppression. Mercy Corps’ climate resilience work tackles the human impacts of climate change—particularly disappearing livelihoods, rising food insecurity, increasing disaster, and escalating violence—by empowering communities to adapt, innovate and thrive. Mercy Corps tackles the root causes of instability, empowering people to survive crisis and transform their communities. In the Commune Arcahaie region of Haiti, where farmers’ incomes are dropping and hunger is on the rise as time-honored agricultural practices become less effective in the face of climate disruptions like erosion and flooding, Mercy Corps’ Credit for Conservation program gives farmers the incentive and funding they need to shift toward more sustainable agricultural practices. Participating farmers who implemented improved land management practices not only conserved and restored their natural resources but they had up to a 113% increase in crop yield and a 12% increase in income. In Kenya, where climate change is bringing worsening drought, flooding, deforestation, and soil erosion, Mercy Corps is making sure climate funds reach the communities that need them most by working with community groups to unlock funds from the national level. Mercy Corps has already helped two regions access funds, helping 138,000 people become more prepared for future climate disruptions.
Microsoft
Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. This includes working with enterprise customers as well as non-profits and NGOs around the world to scale the impact of their work. Microsoft is empowering first responder organizations to meet critical global needs, humanitarian organizations to drive greater impact, and displaced people to rebuild their lives with a mix of technology, cash grants, employee donations and staff time. This mission-driven work is evident in its environmental work, which began in 2012 as a carbon neutral company. In responding to the urgency of climate change, Microsoft has made three public commitments at the beginning of 2020: 1) to become carbon negative by 2030; 2) to responsibility for removing its historical carbon emissions by 2050; and 3) to invest $1 billion over the next four years into new technologies and expanded access to capital for those working around the world to solve climate change. In September of 2020, Microsoft made another commitment: to become “water positive” by 2030 – reducing its water use intensity (water consumed per megawatt of energy expended for operations) and replenishing water in regions where the company operates that are water-stressed. By 2030 Microsoft intends to replenish more water than it consumes on a global basis.
National Wildlife Federation
As the U.S. confronts the cascading impacts of a changing climate, advancing environmental justice must be central to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, boosting resilience, and revitalizing communities. Low-income and communities of color are disproportionately impacted by the effects of a changing climate—and the National Wildlife Federation has a responsibility to empower frontline communities to enact transformative change by providing resources and tools. To achieve this vision, for both people and wildlife, NWF is working to ensure that equity and the principles of environmental justice are institutionalized into its climate work. One way is through Revitalizing Vulnerable Communities Institute, which is empowering communities to implement holistic solutions to environmental and economic issues. The Federation is also undertaking a Climate and Communities Project that works to help communities heavily dependent on fossil fuels feel more prepared for, and engaged with, national climate policies. Here in the Pacific Northwest, the National Wildlife Federation is engaged in climate change issues unfolding in the Columbia River basin and the Snake River. Hotter water temperatures are pushing cold water fish—including salmon—toward extinction, greatly impacting the inland and coastal Native American communities, and as well as rural fishing communities that depend on them.
Nia Tero
Nia Tero works in areas where Indigenous peoples sustain large-scale ecosystems within their collective territories. The organization supports existing and potential systems of governance that can secure successful guardianship of these territories. Nia Tero’s relationships with Indigenous peoples and local communities revolve around shared commitments for guardianship. These commitments are put in practice through agreements that lay out mutual obligations to secure the well-being of peoples and places and to provide durable, long-term financial and technical support. Each agreement follows an explicit process of planning, guided by humility and a principle that all participants are equals. Nia Tero believes Indigenous peoples uphold many of the planet’s healthiest ecosystems, rich in biodiversity, and systems essential to the security of global food production, fresh water, and ultimately, the Earth’s climate. And the peoples who call these places home are the best guardians of their cultures’ vital birthplaces, and that supporting the rights and livelihoods of Indigenous peoples, and following their leadership, is critical to the health of our planet as a whole.
Oxfam America
Oxfam America believes that the injustice of climate change is also the injustice of inequality – those who have done the least to contribute to global emissions are the hardest hit. Climate justice requires that we rapidly shift towards low-emissions economies that leave no one behind, and promote resilient development by building capacities and leadership of communities & women on the frontlines. The climate crisis is already impacting the world – wildfires in Australia, locusts in Africa, and communities in the global south are often the hardest hit with extreme weather events like droughts and floods taking a heavy toll. Oxfam’s vision and value add in the fight for climate justice centers these communities, rather than focusing only on wildlife preservation or more narrowly on environmental impacts. Through its work, Oxfam is committed to reducing climate change by tackling the structural drivers of the crisis often rooted in unequal economic models, which requires holding governments and big business accountable. Oxfam works with a range of partners to help communities adapt and become more resilient, and it is committed to elevating the voices and leadership of communities – especially women who are on the frontlines. Oxfam also believes that policy and advocacy have key roles to play to advance climate justice. Oxfam works to defend the Paris agreement and engage the U.S. government to push for a robust global framework to tackle the climate crisis. Oxfam engages food and beverage companies to tackle the hidden emissions in their supply chains; advocates with international finance institutions to channel more investment towards pro-poor clean energy; works toward greater transparency in the oil and gas sector; and encourages governments to invest in the rights and livelihoods of small famers, especially women farmers.
Remote Energy
Remote Energy (RE) believes that access to reliable sources of sustainable energy is a fundamental requirement for the advancement of education, healthcare, economic opportunity and quality of life. It is also a critical step in mitigating the effects of climate change. The climate crises has fostered significant growth in the solar energy industry worldwide, and has fueled the fast growing need for a trained solar workforce. RE has responded by developing and implementing regionally appropriate, customized technical capacity building programs and developing hands-on, practical learning opportunities for solar technicians and instructors in marginalized communities worldwide. RE’s scalable programs, methodology and mentorship opportunities provide the knowledge, technical skills and support network for inspiring people and communities to move towards energy independence and sustainable development. RE is also committed to gender equality and supports the belief that women’s talents and leadership are vital to maintain a diverse, sustainable PV industry and critical in the fight against climate change. RE’s Women’s Program is designed to develop women decision-makers, end-users, technicians, and educators and offers customized, women’s-only courses and mentoring opportunities with professional female instructors.
Save the Children
The climate crisis is a child’s rights crisis; which is magnifying inequality, poverty, and displacement. Hotter temperatures, air pollution and violent storms are leading to immediate, life-threatening dangers. For Save the Children, climate change adaptation means advancing measures in programming, policy and advocacy, which reduce vulnerabilities and increase resilience of children and their communities. As a global leader in protecting children and families in emergencies and natural disasters, Save the Children’s key strengths is in reaching the most vulnerable communities that are hardest hit by climate change. Deeply engaged with communities in over 100 countries, Save the Children manages a global portfolio of more than 100 resilience projects. It is uniquely positioned to help amplify children’s voices by advocating for climate justice and addressing the impacts of climate change on children and their families. In September 2020, Sultan Latif joined Save the Children as director of the Humanitarian Climate Crisis Unit, a linchpin of the organization’s commitment to safeguard a better future for children. A partner in the Children in a Changing Climate (CCC) coalition, Save the Children is also currently the only non-environmental NGO in the world accredited by the Green Climate Fund (GCF), the world’s largest global fund dedicated to helping fight climate change.
Seattle Aquarium
The Seattle Aquarium has a responsibility to foster inclusive conversations and is committed to advancing equity and environmental justice throughout its work. Environmental burdens and benefits are not equitably distributed, and for too long the people most impacted have been marginalized and unable to lend their expertise to ensure their needs are met. Meanwhile, climate change is having far-reaching and numerous effects on the ocean and coastal communities. Through diverse partnerships and coalitions, the Aquarium works to co-generate innovative solutions to help ocean ecosystems and coastal communities become more resilient to the effects of climate change. The Aquarium seeks to partner with organizations leading climate and environmental justice efforts to create a pathway for all communities to benefit from environmental policy. The Aquarium advocates for policies that incorporate environmental justice—related to climate resilience, plastic pollution, clean air and water—with a particular focus on ocean-climate solutions that provide jobs and lift up overburdened communities to better advance a just future. The ocean has mitigated some effects of climate change, but it is becoming increasingly clear that we must act now—we need to protect the ocean and its ability to help provide solutions for a brighter, more equitable future.
Seattle Foundation
Seattle Foundation ignites powerful, rewarding philanthropy to make Greater Seattle a stronger, more vibrant community for all. As a community foundation, it works to advance equity, shared prosperity, and belonging throughout the region while strengthening the impact of the philanthropists it serves. Founded in 1946 and with more than $1.1 billion in assets, the Foundation pursues its mission with a combination of deep community insight, civic leadership, philanthropic advising and judicious financial stewardship. The Climate Justice Impact Strategy is Seattle Foundation’s comprehensive approach to ensuring that communities of color and low-income communities are leading and shaping efforts to reduce the effects of climate change, which they experience disproportionately. To reduce the risks of climate change, Seattle Foundation addresses its root causes, identifies and adapts to its impacts, and strengthens community resiliency to those impacts. Justice and equity are at the core of this approach, which uses community-based research while building diverse coalitions and increasing the capacity of nonprofits to advance local solutions to this global challenge.
Snow Leopard Trust
The Snow Leopard Trust (SLT) seeks climate justice through its mission to protect snow leopards in partnership with local communities that share the cat’s habitat. For four decades, SLT has worked to empower herding families across Asia to take action for their local ecosystems and secure a prosperous future for both humans and wildlife. With programs and staff in five countries in Asia and support from around the world, SLT coordinates programs that promote sustainable development, green livelihoods, and climate-smart planning, including environmental education camps, livestock insurance and vaccination programs, ranger trainings, and a handicraft program called Snow Leopard Enterprises. Using approaches from both natural and social sciences, SLT researchers endeavor to understand the complex dynamics between people, predators, and the environment. SLT has been a key partner in the Global Snow Leopard & Ecosystem Protection Program (GSLEP) and rallied the governments of 12 countries to support programs that link conservation with sustainable development. As humankind expands its reach to the most remote areas of snow leopard habitat, SLT strives for climate justice through community involvement and multilateral partnerships.
Tableau Foundation
Tableau Foundation works with organizations that are using data to effectively advocate for climate action—by illustrating the scope of the climate crisis, making evident which communities and populations are most at risk, and guiding policy and action. Headwaters Economics is one of Tableau’s partners for climate action. The organization focuses on building the data-driven case for protecting public lands and taking action to protect vulnerable populations from climate change. Another partner, Grist, is a non-profit publication dedicated to covering the climate crisis and solutions to it.
Tearfund USA
In 1992, Tearfund became the first large international development NGO to focus on the climate crisis after seeing how it affected the organization’s partners across the globe. The rate and impact of environmental degradation are hitting people living in poverty the hardest – the very people who have done the least to cause it. To combat this issue, Tearfund supports communities with programs related to waste management, renewable energy, climate-smart agriculture, and climate resilience. Through Tearfund’s training and equipping programs, vulnerable communities are able to produce enough food for everybody using environmentally responsible farming methods. This way they become part of a sustainable future. Tearfund also calls on governments and companies to change harmful practices that contribute to climate problems. Currently, Tearfund is working in more than 24 countries to address the challenges caused by the climate crisis, furthering its efforts in advocacy, campaigning, and supporting environmental sustainability programs.
Vital Voices Global Partnership
Vital Voices Global Partnership invests in women leaders who are solving the world’s greatest challenges – from gender-based violence to the climate crisis, economic inequities, and more. The organization considers itself a “venture catalyst,” identifying those with a daring vision for change and partnering with them to make that vision a reality. Vital Voices scales and accelerates impact through long-term investments to expand skills, connections, capacity and visibility. Recognizing that women and girls are the most adversely and disproportionately impacted by climate change, health crises, and environmental destruction, Vital Voices works with women leaders on the frontlines of change who are creating visionary solutions, and equips them with networking opportunities, leadership development and amplification they need to scale their work on a global level. Over the last 24 years, Vital Voices has built a network of 18,000 change makers across 182 countries, each of whom are daring to reimagine a more equitable world for all.
World Vision
World Vision is a Christian humanitarian organization dedicated to working with children, families, and their communities worldwide to reach their full potential by tackling the root causes of poverty and injustice. World Vision works directly with communities to identify context-specific solutions with a focus on food security, clean energy, natural resource management and climate change adaptation and mitigation. Projects include interventions like reforestation, agro-forestry, climate-smart agriculture, clean energy and access to carbon-offset markets. World Vision is also a world leader in promoting Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) in rural communities, a process that naturally regenerates trees on farmland and forest areas to improve agricultural productivity and reduce the incidence of droughts, floods and landslides. A number of communities in Ethiopia have also benefited from a Clean Stoves Project, which reduces the health risks associated with smoky open fire stoves, and reduces the need to cut down trees. Finally, World Vision has worked with communities in South East Asia and the Pacific region to better prepare them for tropical storms and other natural disasters, which are becoming increasingly frequent and violent as a result of climate change.
Landesa: Finding ‘Elegant Solutions’ to Complex Problems
By Amber Cortes
Wetland areas in Liberia are a source of food for rural and periurban communities. Photo credit: Tyler Roush/Landesa.
Like the air you breathe, you may not spend a lot of time thinking about the land you live on.
But for many communities and individuals in low- and middle-income countries, land is life—”their entire world is access to land and natural resources, both from an income front and for food security,” says Rachel McMonagle, the climate change and land tenure specialist at Landesa, an organization working to secure land rights for people experiencing poverty, discrimination and economic inequality around the world.
When it comes to conversations about climate change, human rights and sustainable development, McMonagle says, people don’t seem to recognize the vital role of land in climate resilience, and how it can be a powerful tool for good.
“I think there’s a disconnect, especially for a lot of people in the U.S., that we just take property rights and rights to natural resources for granted,” she continues.
For the Global North, land rights are pretty much a settled issue. But even though at least half the world’s land and natural resources (some say as much as 65%) are managed by local communities and Indigenous people, they only have formal legal ownership of 10 percent of that land.
This imbalance, McMonagle says, opens up the door for corporate interests or outside land grabs from logging and mining companies, or other ‘outside actors’ coming in who may be disrupting centuries of sustainable land management due to this lack of legal land rights.
As a global nonprofit with over five decades of experience, Landesa’s impact spans different geographies, land uses and communities, working with farmers, forest communities, and pastoralists to secure land tenure—because land ownership leads to greater financial and food security, and can open up opportunities in health care, education and political power within communities.
Land ownership also encourages more investments in the land itself—investments with long-term environmental benefits such as agricultural practices like terracing the land, tree planting, or investing in sustainable infrastructure development.
“And so Landesa is really focused on those win-win solutions that benefit both communities and the environment at the same time,” McMonagle says.
One example is in Myanmar, where Landesa has been working with the forest department to allow communities to secure forest certificates and create sustainable land management plans, so that entire communities can own the land collectively, and reforest areas through mangrove restoration.
U Pho Toke and his 14-year-old son lost their jobs in Thailand, and returned to their mangrove village in Tanintharyi, Myanmar, which has been certified as a 150 acre community forest. With this new certification, they receive free mangrove saplings from the forestry department for replanting, and a sense of security so that they will invest in their land. Photo courtesy of Landesa.
Mangroves provide a host of climate mitigation and adaptation benefits. They sequester four times as much carbon as tropical rainforests, protect inland farmland from storm surges, help with saltwater intrusion and also provide fish habitat to strengthen local livelihoods.
“It’s just a lot of benefits through one activity,” McMonagle explains. “I don’t want to call it a simple solution—but maybe it’s an elegant solution.”
Reports have also shown that when women and Indigenous groups are able to secure land rights, it can lead to climate mitigation and resilience efforts such as restoring forests and natural reservoirs, resource-sharing and carbon sequestration.
It also puts communities in a position where they can become drivers of local sustainable development and safeguards of the land by launching campaigns and lawsuits against corporate land grabs.
And the cascading effects of women in particular owning land, McMonagle says, can shift gender roles, financial equity, and social norms in a community towards the direction of greater gender equality.
Another example—in India, Landesa has been working on securing women’s land rights for more than a decade, in part by focusing on inheritance laws and helping implement homesteading initiatives in areas where there’s a gap between national and regional statutes.
Women like Indira and her family were able to turn their initial allocation of land into a thriving business, finding stable income while stewarding the land itself. Her family is among the more than 40 million people enjoying stronger land rights through Landesa’s work in India.
Indira and her family pose with their land title. Photo credit: Tyler Roush/Landesa.
It makes sense that when people own the land they manage, they become better stewards of their environment, says McMonagle, “since their livelihoods and well-being are so closely tied to these natural resources.”
If you’ve ever signed a lease or purchased property you may have an inkling of how complicated land ownership can be. So just imagine navigating land rights in other countries and cultures, with their own sets of laws and customs. It often makes for a “messy web of factors” to reckon with, according to McMonagle.
Like the differences between national statutory laws and local customary laws (for example, in Zambia, statutory law provides for the sharing of property between husband and wife, but customary law denies women any rights to family property). Or sometimes sweeping national reforms get passed, but without the capacity for local implementation.
“Land reform is super challenging, and requires tremendous political will,” McMonagle says.
Add to that the social norms and gender roles just within a specific community—and, as McMonagle puts it (and many in the global development world realize), “If you know one community, you know…one community!”
Which is why research is such a core part of what Landesa does, interfacing with government officials, local civil society organizations, lawyers, and communities, taking into account unique legal frameworks, national and regional policies, as well as customs and cultural norms.
“A lot of our research is trying to translate realities on the ground back to policy proposals,” McMonagle explains. “So, it’s kind of a two-way street on translating how things are working up and down the chain.”
COVID-19 has, of course, complicated matters even more—reversing the previous migrations of populations fleeing climate disasters in rural areas for the city, to people leaving crowded urban areas to go back to family farms and villages. Already it has set off the second-largest mass migration in India’s history.
But, McMonagle says, land rights can actually play a powerful role in both adapting to climate change and preventing future pandemics—in ways you might not even think of.
For example, land tenure could play a role in establishing different natural areas or migration corridors to enforce the separation between animal populations that might be carrying pathogens and keep interactions with people at a minimum.
Just like in many sectors of global development, COVID-19 has wrought havoc on everyone’s lives and modes of being. But it also brings opportunities to change the iniquities and failings of the systems that are supposed to support us.
“By strengthening land rights for rural communities,” McMonagle says, “we can achieve sustainable development priorities and reduce the risk of facing this degree of suffering ever again.”
James Mulbah, Project Manager, Earthworm Foundation
By Amber Cortes
Photo credit: Earthworm Foundation.
Being a child in a war-torn environment makes you grow up fast. James Mulbah was only six years old when the first Liberian Civil War began—a conflict that would kill around 250,000 people and create economic devastation in the country for years.
“As a child I witnessed human rights abuses, destruction of properties, and lack of business services,” he explains. “I also saved myself— my survival depended on it.”
The hardship that Mulbah and his family endured included walking—179 kilometers (110 miles)—from Monrovia to Gbarnga Bong county.
The experience started a lifelong path and commitment to justice that led Mulbah to become a project manager in West Africa for the Earthworm Foundation (formerly known as The Forest Trust), an organization that works with both businesses and communities to solve social and environmental challenges.
With “God and all the good spirits” on his side, Mulbah made it to a small village called Giziwolo in a neighboring county. There, where villagers grew their own food and used the local river for drinking and fishing, Mulbah learned about the respect for the environment inherent in the village’s culture.
“The environment was seen as a sacred place, organized around certain fundamental laws and principles. I saw the sacredness in all things that the environment provided. Life was so enjoyable and peaceful in the village. Food was in abundance, and there were no shortages of water.”
A few years later, Mulbah’s mother, who could not yet join him in the village due to the war, passed away from lack of medical care. Mulbah considered the tragic circumstances of her death a consequence of the civil war, and begin to draw connections about the human costs of conflict.
Mulbah knew that in order to work for peace, he needed to get a formal education. So, he left the village for Monrovia. There, he shared a small apartment with other family members as he worked and saved towards school. Eventually, he made it, “even though I did not have a school uniform, or books!” he exclaims.
But despite the obstacles Mulbah succeeded, eventually earning a scholarship and establishing a junior youth empowerment program while at the University of Liberia.
The program allowed Mulbah to travel throughout rural areas, and he started observing similar issues in communities that had been impacted by mining and logging: “ranging from water pollution, to health and safety issues, to land disputes,” he says.
And Mulbah was in for another rude awakening when he went back to visit Giziwolo, the idyllic village of his childhood.
“The village was empty. And the house that I once lived in when I was there was broken down. And there’s a logging company – they had constructed roads over the beautiful river we had there,” Mulbah says. “And people from the village, they relocated to the city.”
He was shocked at what he saw.
“All those memories were lost, and I couldn’t do anything to get them back.”
The experience only strengthened Mulbah’s determination to learn about conflict resolution—especially when it came to environmental rights.
As his professional career began, he joined other recent university graduates from across Central and West Africa for in-depth training in conflict resolution and stakeholder engagement at Earthworm Foundation’s Centre of Social Excellence (CSE) in Cameroon. With these skills, Mulbah started working in the field to solve land disputes between communities and between communities and companies.
He then got his master’s degree in sustainable peace from The University of Peace, a United Nations mandated university, just as the UN member states were broadening their approach to peace and security to include the concept of ‘sustainable peace’—addressing the root causes of conflict, and achieving lasting, long-term peace in hand with sustainable development, equitable economic opportunity, and human rights protection for all.
Mulbah brings what he learned about conflict resolution and climate mitigation, along with a super-specific set of data science tools (like ArcGIS, geographic mapping software) to his work at the Earthworm Foundation.
After the civil war, the Liberian government attempted an economic revitalization plan, which granted a number of concessions to foreign investors, particularly in the palm oil sector. And after nearly three years, the major palm oil producers allegedly engaged in land grabbing, human rights abuses, and persistent deforestation.
So, palm oil producers in Liberia asked the Earthworm Foundation for help addressing some of the critical issues that were raised against them.
Mulbah and his team proposed that the companies put a sustainability team in place and created an action plan for the company to set up a governing structure for local communities to have a say.
They conducted assessments and participatory mapping with members of the community to resolve historical boundary disputes and other grievances. Using the 2018 Land Rights Act in Liberia as a legal basis, they finally were able to formalize land use agreements between palm oil companies and neighboring communities.
Over the years, Mulbah’s been grateful to be able to do things like convince supply chain actors that responsible sourcing is essential to the future of their business and the environment—”to preserve those areas which we consider as high conservation value areas—sacred places.”
But his favorite part of the job is being able to sit down and talk with farmers, share-croppers, and other community members.
“Just being with them reminds me of when I was in Giziwolo, sitting around and talking on the farm.”
Mulbah is optimistic about meeting the UN’s SDG goals for 2030. For instance, all around him there’s evidence that the world is waking up to the urgency of climate change, he says.
“NGOs and civil society organizations are aggressively pushing governments for even more action to address climate change and biodiversity loss.”
“You see corporations being held responsible for what’s happening to our planet,” he says. “Companies are looking for how to solve their sustainability issues. There’s a large pool of talent inside these companies willing to contribute to fighting the current environmental and social crisis.”
“You see traditional investors seeking to understand and mitigate the socio-environmental impact of their investments, in turn pushing companies to act more responsibly,” he continues. “And we have new technologies of all kinds of scalability potential.”
James Mulbah facilitating a land rights meeting in Liberia. Photo provided by James Mulbah/Earthworm Foundation.
Mulbah’s optimism comes from a place of deep respect for the land, and the village that is so close to his heart.
“Land is not owned. I learned that when I was in Giziwolo. I didn’t own land; but I survived from the land,” he says.
“We’re all just caretakers of the land. The better we care for it, the better it will care for us.”
Agros: Tackling Poverty and Climate Change through Agriculture
By Alberto Solano, Guillermo Jiménez, and Sierra Golden
Hipólito ‘Polo’ Chavarria of San José, Nicaragua, shows off coffee beans he grew using more environmentally friendly farming practices. Photo courtesy of Agros International
Travel writer and documentarian Rick Steves calls climate change, conflict, and corruption “the three Cs of extreme poverty.” Agros has long tackled conflict and corruption as causes of poverty by giving marginalized families in rural Latin America the opportunity to own land and transform themselves from day laborers into successful agribusiness owners. In 2020 we added a climate smart agriculture program to our work as a top new initiative. Read more
Please welcome our newest Global Washington members. Take a moment to familiarize yourself with their work and consider opportunities for support and collaboration!
Chandler Foundation imagines a world in which nations are well-governed, principled businesses drive economic growth, and all people have the opportunity to flourish. Through patient, long-term, system-changing investments in trusted partners, we can help build thriving economies that work for everyone.
Diversity Travel is the leading travel management company for the charity, non-profit and NGO communities, providing expert advice and first-class services.
EverVillage is a place that believes in a green recovery – a place where communities drive nature-based solutions, youth design sustainable systems, and water is managed holistically. EverVillage’s intersectional work is focused within rural, Indigenous, and refugee communities that face issues like climate change, environmental injustice, and poverty.
GoodCitizen provides executive search and leadership advisory services to mission-driven organizations. Its purpose is impact. The pressing challenges in our communities and around the world – and the best ideas for addressing them – converge on questions of leadership.
Tostan pursues its vision of “Dignity for All” in West African communities through sustainable development and social transformation based on human rights. Since 1991, Tostan has shared its Community Empowerment Program (CEP) with more than 3,000 communities in ten African countries. The CEP is recognized for changing harmful practices, empowering women and girls, and improving well-being in resource-poor communities.
VOCFINU is a non-profit focused on strengthening and transforming the lives of the most vulnerable adolescent girls, who have been caught in poverty and human trafficking.
Women’s Link Worldwide is an international non-profit organization that uses the power of the law to promote social change that advances the human rights of women and girls, especially those facing multiple inequalities.
February 23 & March 4: Virtual information sessions held for Global Leadership Forum 2021 Senior-level Leader Cohort, launching April 22-23. Cohorts of globally-oriented social purpose leaders meet monthly for 6-7 months and explore leadership and organizational development topics with real-time application and peer support. For more info contact: team@glfglobal.org.
By Alberto Solano, Guillermo Jiménez, and Sierra Golden
Hipólito ‘Polo’ Chavarria of San José, Nicaragua, shows off coffee beans he grew using more environmentally friendly farming practices. Photo courtesy of Agros International
Travel writer and documentarian Rick Steves calls climate change, conflict, and corruption “the three Cs of extreme poverty.” Agros has long tackled conflict and corruption as causes of poverty by giving marginalized families in rural Latin America the opportunity to own land and transform themselves from day laborers into successful agribusiness owners. In 2020 we added a climate smart agriculture program to our work as a top new initiative. Continue Reading
In response to Johnson & Johnson (JNJ)’s submission of their COVID-19 vaccine for emergency approval from the US Food & Drug Administration, Niko Lusiani, Senior Advisor with Oxfam America, made the following statement:
“Scientists have yet again delivered hope in the war against the coronavirus. As a single-dose and lower-cost vaccine, the JNJ vaccine could deliver the necessary boost the world needs to save lives and rebuild our economy.
“Now it’s time for executives and policy makers to deliver a people’s vaccine that is mass produced around the world to ensure access to the greatest number of people in the shortest amount of time. JNJ can only produce the vaccine for less than 13 percent of the global population by the end of the year. Continue Reading
Over twenty years ago, I worked for an organization doing microcredit for women in Central America. The research to support microcredit showed that giving loans to women, rather than men, to create microbusinesses and manage their household income, resulted in greater investments for their children’s education, the family’s healthcare, and overall well-being.
Rose Berg-Fosnaugh is the definition of a changemaker. Throughout an impressive career that spanned various roles, Rose fought for equity and social justice in Washington and around the world. She did so most recently as the Director of Advocacy and Communications at the 
Fred Auch likes to get things done.
