Stephanie Ross, ActionAid editor

As the emergency in east Africa unfolded, the resilience of people in Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia has been tested to the limit. In the harsh climate of Bulla Juu, Kenya, the only thing people have to cling to is the desperate hope that rains will come in October. You can read about what happens when the rains fail.

It is unusual for us to make a direct ask of you in this section, but a sponsorship crisis means we have to ask for your help. We urgently need to recruit more child sponsors, as the financial crisis means only 50% of those we need have signed up this year. Can you ask a friend or colleague to sponsor a child? It would make a massive difference if you could.

And lastly, what will it mean for the women of Afghanistan if the Taliban return to power? As UK and US troops withdraw, we surveyed 1,000 Afghan women about their hopes and fears for the future. You can read their stories now.

Stephanie Ross, ActionAid editor

Are women’s rights ‘done’? A recent ActionAid survey suggested many young people in the UK think so. But our work around the world shows that, 100 years after the birth of International Women’s Day, we are far from equal.

Women's rights are central to everything ActionAid does. With shocking inequalities still so prevalent, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. But there are so many shining lights among the women we work with, so many examples of their amazing power, desire and ability to change the world, that there is much to celebrate too.

If these stories make you angry, excited or outraged, we want to hear about it. And so do the women we work with. That’s why we’re launching our Get lippy campaign. We want you to send a personal message of support to women who are fighting for their rights. We’ll create an online gallery and deliver your messages into their hands as they prepare for this year’s International Women’s Day. Just visit www.actionaid.org.uk/iwd for more.

Richard Turner, Director of Fundraising

In the last few days, you may have noticed a whole new set of ActionAid posters on the tube - rather unusual posters, focussing not on the work we do, but on our supporters, and how the way they help others through ActionAid makes them feel.

We've always known how passionate our supporters are, how much they love being part of ActionAid, and how powerful it makes them feel when they know that what they are doing is helping to end poverty, so this January we decided to share that with the whole of Britain.

When we ask supporters what they get back from supporting us, they say... all sorts of things. They inspire us! So we put those things on posters, made a little video, built a fun survey so that new visitors could discover what might inspire them, and made the Happy Bubble on Blue Monday to help spread the word.

We're hoping, of course, that this will inspire more people to join ActionAid, to campaign alongside us against injustice and donate and help people free themselves from poverty (imagine how that feels!). But we also want to inspire conversations, to get people speaking in the street, online, and with their friends, about what they might be able to do to end poverty.

It's a campaign that comes from the knowledge that poverty is man-made... and therefore that poverty is something that people can fix. If we can get Britain inspired, if we can spread those feelings, then there's nothing we can't do together.

And of course the impact of all this action leads to something special. The feelings we help create amongst the people we work alongside with all over the world are priceless.

Let us know what you think... how does giving to charity make you feel?

Stephanie Ross, ActionAid editor

This issue’s cover story was a tricky one to tackle – accusations of witchcraft come with all sorts of disturbing parallels from our own history. But this is a modern day travesty, and it is having devastating effects on women in Ghana. However you view the belief systems behind it, the impact of this practice illustrates one thing – an outrageous abuse of human rights veiled by a very effective smokescreen.

After the positive news on our Vedanta campaign last issue, I wasn’t expecting to be able to bring more quite so soon, but we had a real breakthrough after the Indian government decided it is no longer in favour of the controversial mine on Niyamgiri hills. We hope a much harder battle is now ahead of the company.

And finally, we’re already filled with a warm Christmassy glow here in the ActionAid office. Not because we’ve started early on the sherry, but because of the feel good factor from our alternative guide to Christmas.

Sam Bueno de Mesquita, ActionAid web editor

One of our fundraisers was digging through some old papers the other day, and came up with these remarkable artefacts from ActionAid's past. The 01 dialling code dates it  back to the 80s, but the fonts take us further than that. Any long-term supporters out there who can shed some light on when these posters were made?

(Click the images to download a full-size copy).

Sam Bueno de Mesquita, ActionAid web editor

International Women's Day is a mixed blessing for an ActionAid web editor. On the one hand, since women's  rights are at the core of everything we do, it's a time when we gets lots of traffic to the site and appreciative comments.

The downside are the stories that come in from our teams in the developing world, which are often so distressing that I  struggle to read, let alone edit, them. The cruelty faced by women in war zones, and the grisly 'corrective' rape meted out to lesbian women in South Africa, actually make me feel physically sick, in a way that writing about post-earthquake Haiti or drought-stricken East Africa never have.

Why should this be? Perhaps it's the simple humanity of these events. These crimes feel personal in a way that the forces of economics or a natural disaster never can - and this is why we have our 6 Degrees Project, that brings out the personal connections between women all over the world.

It is also why we are confident that these are problems that can be fixed. The courage of the women who come forward to tell us their stories is the first step in the road to ending what remains the most widely accepted form of inequality in the world.