Microfinance is the most exciting and dynamic development innovation in the past quarter century, because it provides a highly useful resource in very high demand by the poor - money! Having money offers far more options than having a bag of seeds or even a bag of fertilizer. To support the exercise of free will, money is the king of resources. But what about the information necessary to use money for good rather than ill - not just to use money to make money, but to use it to seize the new options that having more money opens up for the poor? (more…)
Today is our third annual Freedom from Hunger Day - an occasion marking the many triumphs we’ve had over the problem of chronic hunger, and a time to honor the millions of hard-working women and families dedicated to sustaining themselves.
This year, though, Freedom from Hunger Day serves another very significant purpose, and that is to call critical attention to the severity of the current Global Food Crisis and the reality of its destructiveness.
With food shortages and food prices escalating everywhere, the extent of chronic hunger is expected (more…)
Any movement to eliminate hunger and radically reduce poverty has to be built on a basic understanding:The poor - even the very poor - even the chronically hungry poor - are not passive victims of their circumstances. They’re ready, willing, and able to actively use any help offered to them to help themselves.
Here are two corollaries:
- The poor have the power of individual human spirit, which gives them resourcefulness and resilience. And…
- They have each other - their social capital - the relationships, the solidarity, the collective courage that enable them to survive in conditions that would kill most of us who haven’t grown up with them.
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Up the main street of Bawjiase, a provincial town in Ghana, march some 60 women in canary-yellow shirts. Actually, they dance up the street in cadence with a raucous brass-and-drums band bringing up the rear of the procession. Still, it looks like a formal march because these exuberant women manage to dance forward in disciplined ranks, waving and shouting to the throng of townspeople going about their business in the roadside shops and stalls. The ranks of yellow shirts are led by an equally yellow banner, declaring August 7, 2008, the official launch date for the HealthKeepers program. Their destination is a large courtyard, where dignitaries wait to honor Freedom from Hunger’s latest social business initiative with speeches and a formal declaration that the HealthKeepers program is now officially launched. (more…)
In the second installment of Chris Dunford’s monthly insights into the longstanding crisis that diminishes the lives of nearly a billion chronically hungry poor people, he observes how milestones are as much about the future as they are the past. The global crisis of food cost and availability is not going away soon; for the chronically hungry poor, it is a crushing reality that has no immediate solution and that heretofore did not have the perverse “benefit” of being portrayed as a crisis. How can Freedom from Hunger’s recent victory in surpassing the million-client threshold illuminate what must come next?
The Million Woman Milestone Achieved: What’s Ahead?
Early in 2008, we at Freedom from Hunger determined that we are directly serving more than one million women and that this milestone was achieved by doubling our outreach in just one year. This is not a cumulative figure for the total number of people reached since our founding in 1946-it is a snapshot of the number of current clients at the end of 2007. (more…)
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