New job openings at A Child's Right in Seattle: deadline Nov 24!

Please go here for details about these great jobs at a great organization below. Forward to your people in/around Seattle!

At A Child's Right:

1) The Development Director is responsible for overseeing philanthropic strategy, relationships, activities, contributions and results. This position collaborates extensively with the Executive Director in prioritizing and stewarding relationships, initiatives, strategy and management relative to individuals, foundations, businesses, and other allies. Coordinating with the Program Director, the Development Director articulates the value proposition of a child's right and engages donors in appropriate ways with program staff. Working with the E.D. and the Finance Operations Director, the Development Director helps ensure compliance with the standards and reporting requirements of external stakeholders, including auditors, donors, foundations, and other relevant entities. This position serves as a member of the leadership team.

2) The Finance & Operations Director is responsible for financial analysis, fiscal management and financial planning. This position oversees the human resources function, manages the day-to-day activities of the organization, and supervises the Administrative Assistant. Working with the E.D. and the Development Director, the Finance & Operations Director ensures compliance with the standards and reporting requirements of external stakeholders, including auditors, donors, foundations, and other relevant entities. This position serves as a member of the leadership team.

3) The Administrative Assistant will facilitate the smooth operation of a child's right, supporting the staff through a variety of administrative and clerical duties. This position functions as the receptionist and office clerk and also performs some Executive Assistant tasks for the Executive Director. This position also supports the Board of Directors, at the request of the Executive Director or Finance & Operations Director.

TED Conference - Dave Eggers - idea

This came out of the TED.com conference this week:

http://onceuponaschool.org

Dave Eggers - author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - was one of three winners of the TED prize, and wished for:

"I wish that you - you personally and every creative individual and organization you know - will find a way to directly engage with a public school in your area and that you'll then tell the story of how you got involved, so that within a year we have 1,000 examples of transformative change."

Little is more transformative than seeing that a school in the developing world gets safe drinking water, single gender sanitation and hygiene education. Kids have the opportunity to go to school, they - especially girls - have the change to stay in school, they suffer fewer cases of diarrheal and other waterborne diseases, they continue their educations past secondary school, they wait longer to start families, they have more economic opportunities, and so on.

Patty Hall is a schoolteacher from Minnesota who has recently launched H2O For Life: School to School.

"H2O for Life is the “sleeping giant” that lies within the potential of students and teachers in schools to raise funds to support people in need."

Check out their projects - Kenya, Mozambique, Mali, Nicaragua... transformative change indeed. Give Dave Eggers a call.

Untold Stories

Even in the under-reported water and sanitation sector, we are constantly bombarded by stories and reports about what doesn’t work, what hasn’t worked, how we are failing as a planet to meet the water and sanitation MDGs. So in a belated Happy Thanksgiving post, I offer a couple of stories and snaps that show the progress the sector is making in small but meaningful ways:

There is a child in school in Niger because she doesn’t have diarrhea thanks to an extraordinarily simple bucket half full of clean water and a little sliver of soap that she and her family use to wash their hands every day.

A woman’s hands in Guatemala are no longer calloused because her village recently acquired a borehole with a handpump. The story – more of a human dignity story than a water story - involves her coming up with gratitude to the project leader and insisting that he feel how soft her hands were. (Thanks to Gil Garcetti for the great photo.)

There is a village in Tibet that is 100% free of open defecation because of some bold little kids running around sticking ‘poo flags’ in each pile, with the names of their shamed depositors written on those flags.


There is a woman in Senegal who no longer has to wait until nightfall for cultural reasons to defecate, because her family invested $4 in a household pit latrine. I couldn’t find a picture of ‘less severe constipation’ or ‘fewer liver problems’ to post, but you get the point.

Onward.

Donde esta el baño?

What is the first thing you learn in any foreign language, other than perhaps the name of the most popular intoxicating beverage in the country (e.g. cerveza, vino, slivovitza)? It is:

"Where is the bathroom?"

If that isn't the best way to communicate the primacy of sanitation I don't know what is. Brilliant (thanks David!)

OK - now imagine that the answer, in whatever language, is "We don't have one, or any paper, or any water." NOW what would you like to be able to say in that foreign language? You will find those phrases here.

I should change the name of this blog to Blogging on Sanitation the way recent events have been going...

Clinton Global Initiative Part 1: Water, water, nowhere

Sorry for the gap in posts – have been on the road a lot lately, including a couple of very interesting visits to water development groups in Guatemala – check out Agua del Pueblo here or google them to find out more about their work for those of you interested in Guatemala. They are primarily funded by a bilateral relationship with the Spanish government now, but looking to diversify and expand their work with water, sanitation and hygiene promotion.

I’m blogging today from right in the middle of the 2007 Clinton Global Initiative, waiting patiently for a direct mention of water, sanitation, hygiene, diarrhea, cholera, or anything… Throw me a bone people! There has been a great deal of optimistic, inspiring discussion in the plenary and breakouts so far from 52+ current and former heads of state and probably 1000 other people, representing 600+ commitments, tens of millions of lives impacted or saved, in over 100 countries.

Five significant commitments have been made public so far, the most interesting of which is the “Global Campaign to Reduce Maternal and Child Deaths in Poor Countries” launched by Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg with others.

Finally, a discussion early this afternoon in the Global Health session about Prime Minister Stoltenberg’s commitment elicited an interesting remark from CARE’s President and CEO Helene Gayle. She suggested that in order to meet the goals laid out by the Prime Minister, it is necessary to take a broader approach to child and maternal health, and focus on the causes of that mortality and morbidity – and she mentioned safe water and sanitation specifically.

More to come.

PS Off to question Jane Goodall about the nexus of biodiversity conservation (viz. great apes) and homo sapiens need for safe drinking water. See earlier related post here.

PPS Best quote ever: Development is about much more than safe water, but never about less.

15,200 miles to go for safe drinking water

The New York Inquirer is duly impressed by several statistics associated with the Blue Planet Run: the 15,200 miles the BPR runners are putting in around the world to raise awareness of the global safe drinking water and sanitation challenge, over four continents and 95 days.

Even more meaningful statistics, however, compellingly link the issues of safe drinking water and human mobility:

• Poor women in Africa and Asia walk an average of six kilometers a day to collect water.


• Poor rural women in developing countries may spend eight hours a day collecting water, carrying up to 20 kilos of water on their heads each journey.

We have all seen and cooed at the glorious, romantic photographs of women in the developing world carrying those buckets of water on their heads with a baby strapped to their backs while dressed in colorful saris.



You think that’s romantic? You try it. A twenty liter bucket of water weighs 45 pounds, in some cases half the body weight of the woman carrying it. Add wild animals, snakes, and unduly interested men to the commute, and you’ve got a recipe for trouble.

The Blue Planet Run is performing admirably in raising ‘name recognition’ of the global health crisis of unsafe water and inadequate sanitation (which remains largely unreported in the U.S.) Name recognition will get an issue far, but not far enough (who hasn’t heard of Howard Dean?). It is up to everyone now to capitalize on the awareness that has been raised by the Blue Planet Run and move toward meaningful political and financial support:

• How can we keep each of the actors who designed sneakers for the campaign engaged in the issue (Hilary Swank, Courteney Cox, Rosie O’Donnell, Lance Bass, Alan Cumming)? Thanks to the Blue Planet Run they are now aware of this issue, and likely interested in doing more.
• How can we all encourage the New York Giants, also supporters of Blue Planet Run, to dedicate a day at the field to global safe water?
• How can the Blue Planet Run Foundation best prepare for its 2009 round-the-world footrace, which is expected to travel through the southern hemisphere? What can the world community do now to encourage the governments in the countries through which the 2009 runners will travel to greet those runners with increased budgetary commitments to water and sanitation infrastructure, particularly in rural communities? How many of those countries will commit at that point to universal coverage of water and sanitation (such as we enjoy in the US, Europe and Japan)?

None of My Business

Typically, I try always to be open-minded - to walk a mile in the other guy’s shoes, even if it is just to be a mile away and have his shoes when the deal goes sour. However, there are some things to which I cannot possibly relate, and even trying to gets me in trouble. One of those things is the female menstrual cycle.

So I find myself today getting caught up on some reading, in particular a NY Times article from December 23, 2005 entitled “Another School Barrier for African Girls: No Toilet.” I made it about three sentences into the article when this phrase caught my eye: “the realities of menstruation in a school with no latrine, no water, no hope of privacy other than the shadow of a bush, and no girlfriends with whom to commiserate.”

I quickly stopped my halfhearted attempt to relate to this, and am now working on the more simple reality that this is a bad thing and needs fixing.

So… Although the article’s protagonist (Fatimah Bamun, pictured above) is in Ethiopia, this is a reality which unfortunately is not isolated to Ethiopia or even Africa. Fifty percent of the world’s schools do not have access to safe water and single-gender sanitation facilities, and those parts of the world with such luxuries are in the fortunate position of not having to relate to this reality.

In Guinea, enrollment rates for girls from 1997 to 2002 jumped 17 percent after improvements in school sanitation, according to a recent Unicef report. The dropout rate among girls fell by an even bigger percentage.

This post is not about water – it can’t be. This post is about water as a direct conduit to additional educational opportunities for girls, and as a less direct but perhaps more compelling conduit to corresponding increases in economic development and decreases of fecundity rates.

Water and sanitation are statistically validated as significant contributors to education, whether it’s the Education Millennium Development Goal or any other success metric. A recent WaterAid report quantifies the impact of safe water and sanitation on not just the quantity of education, but also on the:

• quality of education - children suffering from diarrhea or thirst (or holding back until nightfall to urinate) cannot concentrate on their lessons, and


• teachers - particularly female teachers who often suffer the same consequences as do their pupils. It is very difficult to recruit and retain qualified teachers where the schools don’t have water and sanitation.

I’d also suggest a quick glance at least at the summary of the Proceedings of the 2005 Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Education for Schools Roundtable Meeting which begins with this quote from former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan:

Water is intimately linked with education and gender equality. Girls who have to spend time gathering water for the family tend not to be in school. And where schools have sanitation, attendance is higher, especially for girls. Water is connected to health, since millions of children get sick and die every year from water-borne diseases and for lack of basic sanitation and hygiene.

I’m not asking readers to relate to this gruesome reality, or even to solve the world’s water problem. More pragmatically I am asking you to consider what it would take to catalyze a situation whereby each of the world’s schools achieves safe, affordable and sustainable access to safe drinking water and single sex sanitation facilities? How many schools are there, how many suffer from these shortages, and what would it take for every government in the developing world to meet its responsibility and fill that gap? Last and least, what could the international donor community do to jumpstart this sort of commitment to life and livelihood?

For example, there are 54,000 schools in South Africa. If 50% of those do not yet have water and sanitation that defines our universe as 27,000 schools. At a conservative (on the high side) $20,000 a pop for water, sanitation and hygiene promotion, that’s $540m. Couldn’t the international donor community come up with $54m to goose the GoSA to make that commitment? Then wouldn’t the governments of Zambia, Mozambique, Botswana and Namibia be embarrassed…

Water, Education, and American Express: priorities...

Just this morning I received an email from an old (I should say long-time) friend of mine suggesting I vote for the DonorsChoose project for education at the Amex Members Project contest here:

Members Project

She positioned DonorsChoose as the "David" and the UNICEF Children's Safe Drinking Water Project as the "Goliath," as does a recent interesting NY Times article here. My response to her (and to the dozens of other friends she had included in her To: line (most always a bad idea) was that Yes, UNICEF is large, but the word"Goliath" unjustly positions the Amex contest as a David vs. Goliath battle which fails to account for the real beneficiaries of both projects: children who either die from unsafe water or do not receive an adequate education.

Unsafe water is the #1 killer of children throughout the developing world. Period. Bad water kills five times as many kids as HIV/AIDS, twice as many as malaria. Period. More germane to this conversation: Without safe water, girl children in particular will not have the opportunity to enroll in school (they spend their childhoods either sick and hauling 45 pound buckets of dirty water on their heads). If their schools do not have single-gender sanitation facilities, they will drop out of school once they start menstruating and lack privacy. Safe water is in many cases the single biggest determinant of whether or not a girl receives an education.

For more information on the water/education nexus:

Water and Sanitation: The Education Drain (WaterAid)

The Education Millennium Development Goal: What Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Can Do

Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Education for Schools - Oxford Roundtable Statement

UNESCO – Focusing Resources on Effective School Health