Development For Good
From WikiForGood
Contents |
Child Soldiers
Two NPR talk shows featured about a novel called Beasts of No Nation, by Uzodinma Iweala, focusing on child soldiers in West Africa. For background on this topic, see this UN web site. If you have ideas about how to raise awareness about this issue, or to help in some way, please add it here by using the edit button above.
Human Rights
Global Freedom Index: Freedom House released the findings from the latest edition of the annual survey of global political rights and civil liberties. According to the survey’s findings, the year 2007 was marked by a notable setback for global freedom. The decline was most pronounced in South Asia, but also reached significant levels in the former Soviet Union, the Middle East and North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa.
WITNESS is an international human rights organization that provides training and support to local groups to use video in their human rights advocacy campaigns.
Media & Development
Population Media Center (PMC) strives to improve the health and well being of people around the world through the use of entertainment-education strategies, like serialized dramas on radio and television, in which characters evolve into role models for the audience for positive behavior change.
Food Force, a free video game that educates kids about hunger, has been downloaded by more than 1 million people from more than 40 different countries. What a great idea!
A Force More Powerful "A Force More Powerful is the first and only [video] game to teach the waging of conflict using nonviolent methods. Destined for use by activists and leaders of nonviolent resistance and opposition movements, the game will also educate the media and general public on the potential of nonviolent action and serve as a simulation tool for academic studies of nonviolent resistance."
WITNESS is an international human rights organization that provides training and support to local groups to use video in their human rights advocacy campaigns.
Preventable Disease
Trachoma: "Few people have heard of trachoma, a preventable disease that threatens to blind nearly 10 percent of the world’s population. It remains hidden in rural communities where people live in overcrowded conditions with limited access to water and health care. Because the disease is not fatal, it is often overlooked as a priority for public-health intervention. In some communities, the disease is so common that blindness from trachoma is simply accepted as a fact of life. Yet trachoma is treatable, and the suffering that it causes is avoidable." The link above explains how.
Malaria: Nothingbutnets.org is a grassroots campaign to save lives by preventing malaria, a leading killer of children in Africa. While the UN Foundation has been working with the UN to fight malaria for years, it was a column that Rick Reilly wrote about malaria in Sports Illustrated, challenging each of his readers to donate at least $10 for the purchase of an anti-malaria bed nets -- and the incredible response from thousands of Americans across the country -- that led to the creation the Nothing But Nets.
Technology For Development
Segway creator Dean Kamen invents machines that produce electricity and clean water for households in the developing world -- article here (February 16, 2006). The technology and initial plans for distribution add up to a potentially powerful force for alleviating suffering world wide. An estimated 1.1 billion people lack access to clean drinking water, and an estimated 1.6 billion lack electricity.
MIT's Media Lab is spearheading an effort to produce a $100 laptop for use by children worldwide.
It’s cute. It’s orange. It’s got bunny ears -- An update on the One Laptop Per Child project by Ethan Zuckerman, published on worldchanging.org in June of 2006.
