| OCTOBER 21, 2004 |
To: Members of the Global Board of Directors
From: Joan Holmes, President
The time since our Board meeting in April has been a very productive time for The Hunger Project – in our on-the ground programs, our work to influence international policy, and in our fundraising.
Our successes in fundraising in 2003 made it possible for 2004 to be our most significant year of expansion in a decade. We increased the budget of every program country by 20%, in addition to including funds in our budget for new initiatives.
We are committed to sustaining and building on this expansion in 2005, which means raising more money in 2004. For the first time, our entire global fundraising team is utilizing a consistent strategic framework for our fundraising, and is currently raising funds at a rate 15% ahead of last year.
Following out first-ever Latin America Strategic Forum in Mexico City in August, The Hunger Project is poised to play a far more significant role in Latin America in the future.
On August 9 – the International Day for Indigenous People and the final day of the UN Decade for Indigenous People – The Hunger Project brought together the key staff of our programs in Bolivia, Mexico and Peru along with 50 top leaders from Mexico’s government and civil society for a full-day meeting entitled Ending Hunger in Latin America: Empowering Indigenous Women. I was very impressed by the passionate support with which the participants responded to the analysis presented by The Hunger Project.
This was my first opportunity to travel to Latin America since we launched our new programs there in 1997. A delegation of investors, including Steve Sherwood accompanied me, and I was delighted that Steve was able to accompany me to high-level meetings as a member of the Board.
Leading up to the strategy meeting, I attended one of our animator trainings, and met with the head of Indesol – the research institute of the Mexican Social Development Ministry.
Immediately following the strategy meeting, I had the opportunity to meet with President Vicente Fox, and acknowledge the steps he has taken to shift development from patronage-based activities to empowerment-based initiatives – actions which have already reduced poverty to pre-crisis levels.
Earlier this month, our key leadership from Mexico came to New York and met with me and an expanded team for Latin America in the Global Office. Together, we redesigned our programs in Mexico to put them squarely at the cutting edge of gender issues, to call forth an expanded, decentralized cadre of leadership, and focus our activities on calling forth specific priority actions for the end of hunger.
In Africa, one very powerful example of our expansion and impact is the HIV/AIDS and Gender Inequality workshop. We have now trained more than 1,700 specialized village animators who have delivered the workshop to nearly 250,000 people!
Among the modes of impact that we’ve documented, we’ve seen:
1 Greatly increased demand for condoms in the rural areas.
2 Increased knowledge of proper condom use. In one survey, only 16% of men knew the proper use of condoms before the workshop, and 90% thereafter.
3 Successful introduction of female condoms.
4 Increased male responsibility for stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS.
5 Voluntary changes of traditional cultural practices that spread HIV/AIDS, such as requiring widows to have sex with other men in order to free the village of the husband’s ghost. Village elders have created “replacement” traditions to achieve the same goals safely.
6 Decreases in the spread of other sexually-transmitted infections.
7 Reduction of gender-related violence.
8 Increases in child-spacing and reduction of birth-rates.
9 Increases in voluntary testing for HIV, and increased grassroots demand for access to testing.
10 Adoption of our HIV/AIDS and Gender Inequality messages into the communications of other organizations and media.
Another important milestone in Africa is the expansion of our programs into Ethiopia, which has begun with real momentum.
By April 23, The Hunger Project-Ethiopia received its certificate of recognition from the Ministry of Justice and in May signed its implementation agreement with the government.
On July 6, while I was in Ethiopia to attend a head-of-state-level meeting of the UN Millennium Project Hunger Task Force, I officially inaugurated the office of The Hunger Project-Ethiopia.
The National Advisory Council has selected areas of intervention where the first epicenters will be built, and has begun baseline studies of the area. Jennifer Thomson, the head of our Africa Woman Food Farmer Initiative (AWFFI), recently led the first Vision, Commitment and Action workshops in these areas and has hired the staff for AWFFI in Ethiopia.
We will have the opportunity to hear first-hand from our acting Ethiopia Country Director at our November Meeting.
The centerpiece of our strategies in Africa is the mobilization and empowerment of rural communities as “epicenters” through which people are able to meet their basic needs. This strategy, which now is underway in communities – which include more than 2.6 million people –is attracting more and more attention of development experts. At this Board meeting I would like us to have an in-depth discussion with our African country directors on the impact of this strategy.
In India, we have made solid progress in expanding our programs in the 14 states that comprise 83% of India’s population.
As we began this expansion, we recognized that we would need to accompany it with action to deepen the understanding and ownership of our principles and strategies by all those participating with us.
Unlike in most other countries, the training and empowerment of local women leaders is directly implemented in the villages through partnerships with 60 local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). A major goal of this year has been to begin forging these 60 local NGOs into a national movement.
For the first time, at conferences in May and June, we brought together the key staff and leadership of these 60 local NGOs. In addition to deepening their understanding of our strategies, these organizations have begun to experience themselves as a nationwide movement for action and advocacy in support of the key role of women and panchayati raj in ending hunger.
One example of the power of working in alliance took place this summer in Bihar, when The Hunger Project was able to bring together 53 organizations to mobilize 2,000 elected women representatives to demand that their state fully implement the constitutional provisions for local democracy.
A key element of our strategy is to mobilize the power of the media, and the center piece of this strategy is the annual Sarojini Naidu Prize for Best Reporting on Women in Panchayati Raj. The annual number of submissions for the Prize has increased from 160 in 2001 to 705 this year. The Prize was presented on Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday – October 2 – at New Delhi’s prestigious Habitat Center by the Minister for Panchayati Raj, Mani Shankar Aiyer, and famed film director Aparna Sen. Our fellow directors Mohini Giri and George Mathew participated in the ceremony, and can join Rita Sarin in briefing us about it.
In Bangladesh, at a time of continuing political turmoil and statements in Time Magazine that Bangladesh is now “the most dysfunctional country in Asia,” our actions at both the grassroots and policy levels continue to point the way to what’s possible.
We have now trained more than 45,000 volunteer animators, 1/3 of whom are women. These animators are working in partnership with the elected leaders of 330 clusters of villages known as “union parishads” to demonstrate how strong local democracy is able to mobilize people to end their own hunger.
In addition to expanding our mobilization into many more villages, we had the opportunity to demonstrate dramatically during the recent devastating floods the point that George Mathew has frequently made – that well-organized villages with strong local democracy are far better able to respond to crisis. At times when official emergency aid was either not forthcoming or not appropriate, our animators jumped into action to ensure people had access to safe water, food, dry shelter and other emergency supplies. As one of our animators said, “Floods can wash away people’s homes and livelihoods, but not their dignity.”
In addition to our work at the grassroots level, we continue to catalyze three coalitions at leadership levels to advocate in support of gender equality and people’s empowerment:
At our April Board Meeting, I had just been appointed to the UN Millennium Project Hunger Task Force, co-chaired by Dr. M. S. Swaminathan and Dr. Pedro Sanchez, a soil scientist originally from Cuba, now at Columbia University.
The overall mandate of the Millennium Project is to provide the UN Secretary General with the best possible strategies to meet the Millennium Development Goals by early 2005.
Since the Board Meeting, I’ve met with Pedro Sanchez and his key associates several times, gave a presentation at a World Bank Workshop in Washington, attended the head-of-state level meetings in Addis, and participated in the final drafting committee meetings in Bellagio. In addition, with our staff team, we reviewed four drafts of the task force report and provided more than more than 100 pages of detailed analysis and suggested language to ensure that gender and social mobilization – the two issues we feel are the highest priority issues for the end of hunger – are included powerfully in the recommendations.
As I discovered last year when I testified before Congress, there is a profound lack of understanding of these issues among the experts of the development community.
There are 32 experts on the task force. Twenty-one specialize in agriculture, three in economic development and poverty reduction, four in nutrition, three in government reform and political action. And me – the only member whose recognized expertise is the gender dimension of hunger and social mobilization.
I will have more to say on this subject when we meet in person, as I believe it is indicative of a major challenge which the development community will need to face if it is to achieve any of the Millennium Development Goals.
Our meeting in November will coincide with this year’s Fall Event: The Girl Child – the Future Depends on Her. Once again, we are committed to making this our greatest event yet – and this topic deserves it.
As a global human family, we are doing a terrible job taking care of girls. Girls are three times as likely to be malnourished, and twice as likely to be out of school as boys. They are far more likely to be involved in child labor.
On this one special night, Saturday November 6, at the New York Hilton, we are going to celebrate the girl child.
Prior to the dinner, you will have the opportunity to walk through a photo exhibition and immerse yourselves in a sea of little girls from all parts of the world.
In addition to my speaking the condition of girls, we will hear directly from young women from the developing world about their girlhood. Professional actors will perform the poems, songs and sayings that inculcate the mistreatment of girls. The evening will culminate with the same great gospel choir that performed in 2001.
At the beginning of this year, we created targets to raise $7 million+ in the US and $2 million+ in the partner countries, for a total of $9 million+, a very ambitious target that represents 24% growth in sustainable funding over 2003.
As of the end of September, we had raised a total of $7 million globally towards that target, 16% higher than at the same time last year.
Our focus through the first half of the year was on renewals, and our renewal rate to date for investors at $1,000+ is 69% – the same rate at this time last year, a significant achievement given that the number of investors is significantly higher.
Our focus right now is on high-level investment, and a key campaign within this is our special “Girl Child Appeal.”
The Girl Child Appeal is designed to raise at least an additional $1 million for 2004 in recognition of the impact our programs are making in the lives of girls. It is only for those willing to invest an additional $25,000, $50,000 or more beyond their current pledge. We launched this campaign in late July and to date 11 people have stepped forward, committing $350,000 for this year.
In addition to these funds, our team in India – after many months of meetings and preparations – has secured a 4-year unrestricted grant from the Swiss Development Corporation that will ultimately total $2 million. This is the first major example of large-scale, bilateral, multi-year funding of our programs – something that we always intended would occur and now has. We hope to build on this example as we search for ways to bring our approaches to national scale.
The growing success of our programs stands in stark contrast to an overall slowdown in global progress towards ending hunger. We have noted for years that the rapid progress during the 1970s and 1980s was due in large measure to the world having made progress with the “easier problems” – problems such as increasing food supply, increasing the supply of clean water and vaccinating children – that lend themselves to technical solutions.
The remaining problems are human problems, and we have been successful at pioneering fairly large-scale human solutions. The challenge before us is to find ways to work with governments to (a) understand these approaches and the analysis upon which they are based and (b) scale-up these solutions to true national scale. We have only begun work in this arena, and it will clearly define our challenge for at least the remainder of this decade.