Contribute to Change: No Lean Season

Update 10/21/2019 – Author’s Note: Evidence Action, the nonprofit that runs No Lean Season has discontinued this program. However, Evidence Action is still doing a lot of good so I still support their other efforts. Learn more about why they stopped No Lean Season here: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/7/18654620/evidence-action-no-lean-season-givewell

It’s a cliché wish made by beauty queens everywhere: end world hunger. It may seem far-fetched with some 795 million food insecure people in the world, but what if something as simple as a bus pass could do the trick? Evidence Action’s ‘No Lean Season’ is a beta program that gives low-income agricultural workers the opportunity to migrate to urban areas so they can earn wages during their off-season.

When you think of the off-season in agriculture, you probably don’t picture farmers and ranchers struggling to put a meal on the table for their family. In the United States, ag producers benefit from the ability to store and market crops year-round. This enables them to make it through the period between planting and harvest. Unfortunately, that’s not the case in many regions of the world. A 2016 Yale University study finds seasonal hunger affects 300 million of the world’s rural poor.

‘No Lean Season’ has a solution to the problem: help low-income ag workers get another job during these months of sparse-income. Since many households are too vulnerable to risk migration, ‘No Lean Season’ alleviates this constraint by giving them a relatively small transfer covering the costs of transportation and a few days of food. This allows people looking for work to reach urban locations where jobs are available.

Yale University says they’ve seen a 30-35% increase in food and non-food expenditures for households who accepted the incentive and sent a migrant to the city. In addition, 550-700 more calories are consumed per person per day under the program. This is the equivalent to an extra meal per person.

Evidence Action is currently working with other organizations to bring No Lean Season to scale in Bangladesh between 2017-2021. It’s expected to directly benefit more than 310,000 households (with 1.4 million family members) over that period. Currently, they are researching other potential sites where they can test this solution and hopefully bring it to a global scale.

‘No Lean Season’ is still in early stages of development, but its innovative, yet simple approach to combatting hunger is something I thoroughly support. There will always be problems and there will always be solutions, but efficient solutions breed progress. That’s why I chose to donate to No Lean Season. You can follow this LINK and click on the ‘Give’ tab to donate as well.

Sources:

http://www.givewell.org/charities/evidence-action/march-2016-grant

http://www.noleanseason.org/

http://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/december-2016/seasonal-hunger-deprivation-are-under-the-radar/

http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats

https://www.theigc.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/No-Lean-Season-1-pager-final-.pdf

http://faculty.som.yale.edu/MushfiqMobarak/featuredresearch/No%20Lean%20Season.pdf

Contribute to Change: Expand Education

Poverty is a global problem and so is access to education. The two issues create a circle of economic disparity. In the United States alone, 32 million children live in low-income families. When money is lacking, so is a young student’s access to early reading and pre-school education. Beginning students start out behind and are sometimes never able to catch up. It’s part of the reason low-income students are six times more likely to drop out of high school and fewer than one third of them will enroll in college. According to dosomething.org, if the 1.3 million dropouts from the Class of 2010 had graduated, the nation would have seen $337 billion more in earnings over the course of the students’ lifetimes. This number is staggering and lends itself to the notion that education is progress and even economic prosperity.

I chose to research two charities working to fill the education gap because role models of mine support them whole-heartedly.

First, Horizons National is a tuition-free academic program serving low-income, public school students. The program is hosted for six-weeks in the summer on campuses of colleges & universities. Horizons National says it retains 84% of students and families year to year and boasts that 91% of its students attend college or other post-secondary training. Allison Williams, star of HBO’s Girls and daughter of long-time broadcaster, Brian Williams, is an official ambassador for the organization. People.com says the program launched in her hometown school and has since grown to serve 51 communities in 17 states.

Second, Let Girls Learn, brings together several government agencies to give adolescent girls around the world the access needed to obtain a quality education. The initiative runs through the Peace Corps and was launched by President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama in March 2015. Let Girls Learn reports globally, more than 62 million girls are not in school. In some countries, fewer than 10% of teenage girls complete secondary school. Let Girls Learn leverages public-private partnerships to provide safe access to schools, to help rebuild education systems, and to create alternative learning programs. The organization also trains thousands of volunteers and tens of thousands of community leaders to advance education and work with leaders on solutions to overcome these barriers.

Today I’m donating $20 to both organizations. I hope you’ll join me in supporting the expanded access of education. DONATE to Horizons National and Let Girls Learn.

Sources:

https://www.horizonsnational.org/

http://www2.guidestar.org/profile/06-1468129

http://people.com/celebrity/allison-williams-raising-money-for-horizons-national-10-days-of-giving/

https://letgirlslearn.gov/

https://www.peacecorps.gov/about/global-initiatives/let-girls-learn/

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/08/10/5-facts-about-americas-students/

https://www.dosomething.org/us/facts/11-facts-about-education-america

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372

Contribute to Change: Malaria

Nearly half of the world’s population is at risk of contracting malaria. The disease, transmitted to humans through female mosquito bites, claims hundreds of thousands of lives each year. In fact, in 2015, there were 429,000 deaths worldwide. While the work of the World Health Organization and charities like Against Malaria Foundation have helped reduce malaria mortality rates by roughly two-thirds in the last 15 years, the funding for eradicating this disease has flat-lined. In 2015, global malaria financing totaled $2.9 billion. WHO says to achieve global targets, contributions must increase to $6.4B annually by 2020.  This is where donations from the public can make a difference, because malaria really isn’t that expensive to prevent.

There are currently two main vector controls used in malaria prevention; insecticide-treated mosquito nets or indoor residual spraying. The Against Malaria Foundation is a non-profit that uses public donations to buy the nets. They work with distribution partners to distribute nets and ensure use. They also conduct net use surveys and track monthly malaria data. Givewell.org estimates the cost to purchase and distribute an AMF-funded net is between $4 and $6. Since an estimated 43% of the population in sub-Saharan Africa was not protected by treated nets or by insecticides sprayed indoors in 2015, you can see how donating just $5, can help the WHO reach its goal to control and eliminate the disease in the next 15 years.

Once you learn about the prevention methods, it may seem unusual the disease hasn’t already been eradicated. Unfortunately, malaria occurs most often in poor, tropical and subtropical areas of the world. With many unable to afford treatment, the disease then runs rampant among the most vulnerable groups within these populations. The Centers for Disease Control says the most vulnerable groups are pregnant women whose immunity is decreased by pregnancy and young children who have not yet developed partial immunity to malaria. According to WHO, malaria takes the life of a child every 2 minutes. Fortunately, there is a new effort to eliminate malaria, a vaccine, which will be rolled out in three countries in sub-Saharan Africa in 2018. If all goes well, WHO will decide whether to deploy the vaccine on a wide scale. A further step by WHO to reduce malaria mortality rates by at least 90% by 2030.

If you would like to donate to the Against Malaria Foundation to provide nets and help the World Health Organization reach the above goal click this link: https://www.againstmalaria.com/donate.aspx

Sources:

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2016/funding-malaria-vaccine/en/

http://www.latimes.com/world/global-development/la-fg-global-malaria-snap-2016-story.html

https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/malaria_worldwide/impact.html

http://www.givewell.org/charities/against-malaria-foundation

The Bystander Effect

I’ve been watching the Olympics. Many may call the bi-annual event a celebration of international cooperation, but, while I think these competitions can be beneficial to the global society, I also think it highlights the degree of ignorance to which several people adhere to day by day. In a world with an ever increasing population (7.125 billion in 2013), the Earth is becoming its own monumental example of the Bystander Effect. This social psychological phenomenon refers to a case in which individuals do not offer help to a victim when others are present. This probability is inversely related to the number of bystanders. This means, the more people, the less likely someone will step up to help. When you take a moment to think about it, as a whole, our diffusion of responsibility as a global population has reached a grotesque level. Right now, there are an estimated 795 million suffering from chronic undernourishment, according to the World Food Programme. That’s 1 in 9 people. In other words, each day 8 out of 9 of us turn the other cheek to ignore this glaring problem. I’m guilty of it and so are you. Each morning I grab my smart phone off my night stand in my 72-degree air conditioned room, turn on my bed lamp to flood my room with light and read morning headlines from news accounts I follow on Twitter. As I did this yesterday, I saw the following Tweet from the New York Times : “The image of Omran, 5, captured the attention of a public numb to Syrian suffering. He is one of thousands.” The image shows the 5-year-old covered in dust and blood due to the ongoing war in Syria. This headline hit my feed along with stories about Olympic athletes and their gold medal counts, Olympic athletes and their ridiculous drunken shenanigans, and an increasingly repugnant rhetoric that is the media’s coverage of the 2016 election. I’m not saying these other headlines aren’t important, but I think we need to draw more attention to the unrest plaguing our world today. In the next 30 years,the global population is expected to grow to 9.7 billion people, according to The Guardian. We have to stop turning our heads away from other people’s problems. You may feel like there’s nothing you can do about the war in Syria and that’s okay. All I desire is an awareness by the people who live in the richest countries in the world to know about these problems and think about them. Once people put some effort into thinking about these problems, maybe, just maybe, they will go donate to their own community’s food pantry or help out a less fortunate neighbor or even do something as simple as share this post to people who weren’t aware this many people go hungry each day. Global development is necessary. It’s necessary to sustain our future generations, to keep the peace and to evolve our society for the better. I will leave you with this quote from a recent White House press release, “Global development is not ‘charity.’ In an increasingly interconnected world, it’s a crucial investment in the security and prosperity of us all.”