News blog

We grow enough for every man, woman and child to eat what they need. There is no hunger due to a global shortage of food, and last week's widely reported statistics on waste provide yet more evidence of this.
 
Yet, there is a problem with hunger. And it’s a massive one.
 
Almost a billion people will go to bed hungry tonight according to widely accepted figures. 2.3 million children die of malnutrition every year, and one out of every six people lives with chronic hunger.
 
It feels incredibly uncomfortable to us at ActionAid, as I’m sure it does for readers of this blog, that we are wasting so much food globally while the widespread tragedy of hunger continues.
 
The truth is that there are a number of complex issues combining to create a senseless situation, in which people die of hunger in a world of surplus.
 
At ActionAid we have been working on a number of root causes of what is, essentially, manmade hunger.
One of the structural causes is the rising cost of food, driven in part by incentives for biofuel farming, rather than food crop farming.
 
Each year the UK burns enough food crops in our cars as biofuels to feed more than 10 million people. Find out more about our Food not Fuel campaign, which hopes to put this critical issue firmly on the agenda of decision-makers.

Saturday 12th January marks 3 years since Haiti was hit by the massive earthquake that killed thousands, devastated millions of lives, and has left hundreds of thousands of people still homeless. But now, the country is facing another crisis.  This time it’s hunger.Last year’s Hurricane Sandy virtually wiped out Haiti’s agriculture, and the country now faces catastrophic food shortages.  The government and UN have launched a second humanitarian appeal in order to support local agriculture and avert a crisis through temporary jobs and cash transfer programs. 

This is a good sign that some help may be coming to people at risk of hunger. 

But more is needed to build resilience and mitigate against these crisis in the future.  The government must put in place programs that guarantee farmers that their harvests will be sold (e.g. expansion of public school feeding programs), that support production through  access to credit and subsidized tools/organic fertilizers and that protect farmers against unfair competition from subsidized imports).

 
Jean-Claude O Fignolé, ActionAid Haiti's country director says: “Over two million people are already suffering from malnutrition, but what we are facing now is mass hunger if safety nets such as cash or food transfers are not put in place to protect people.”

Since the earthquake, ActionAid has helped 200,000 people with emergency shelter, food and water, cash for work programmes and disaster risk reduction, which saved countless lives during Hurricane Sandy. And it’s also pushing for policies that deliver safe, affordable housing, and address the underlying poverty issues that leave people vulnerable to disasters.

To read more about Haiti since the earthquake, read Jean-Claude O Fignolé (ActionAid Haiti's country director)'s blog on the ActionAid International website.

 

The appalling gang rape and murder of the 23 year old woman on a bus in Delhi caused outrage and brought into the spotlight once again what is horrifically not an isolated incident. Yet gang rape is just one manifestation of what is often an all pervasive culture of violence against women.
 
Tellingly, the figures between rape being reported and prosecuted in India versus rape being reported and prosecuted in the UK are not so drastically different. In India, with a population of over a billion, a quarter of those accused of rape are found guilty but according to Rape Crisis, in the UK only 15% of serious sexual offences against people 16 and over are reported to the police and of the rape offences that are reported, fewer than 6% result in an offender being convicted. 

Violence happens all over the world and not just outside the home. One in three women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime and the reality is that most women experience violence in their  own homes.  One of the biggest problems that women in so many countries face is the embedded culture of male dominance and power that routinely uses violence as a means to keep women under control. 
 
From harassment on buses – shown below in an ActionAid Nepal film - to these cases in Burundi and Sierra Leone - the question that begs to be answered is when will women be empowered to develop the self-confidence to shout out about what is happening? Not necessarily as individuals but as a movement for change.

In 2013 we must make headway, harness those voices of outrage and support our sisters, mothers and cousins,  and also the women we don’t know but nod to on the bus each morning, so we all understand that violence must stop.
 
Join One Billion Rising - an international coalition of campaigners and take part in a local march on Valentine’s Day, February 14th, to call for action to tackle violence against girls and women across the world. 

 

This week’s celebrity support for ActionAid’s child sponsorship week has been no exception. A host of famous faces have been helping us to celebrate child sponsorship all week. Samantha Womack visited our work in Burma (Myanmar) to help us launch child sponsorship in the country for the first time.

On Monday, Samantha launched child sponsorship week by talking about her experience in Burma on the sofa with Lorraine, Sky News and a host of radio stations and there was also this great piece in The Mirror.

Fay Ripley, Mark Watson, Gabby Logan, Sarah Alexander and Katherine Kelly attended our photo shoot to help us demonstrate how little 50p could buy in the UK - half a chocolate bar perhaps, maybe a few sips of a take-out coffee or a slice of toast - and how it is much better to spend 50p a day sponsoring a child with ActionAid.

Some of our celebrity child sponsors have also been doing media interviews about their experience of sponsoring a child with ActionAid and we have lots more interviews coming out so keep an eye on the liveblog to see all the latest coverage.

The child sponsorship week has also been receiving great celebrity support in the twittersphere, with #csweek tweets from Stephen Fry, Jamelia, Angela Griffin and Vicky McClure to name but a few.

With their help, and that of all our supporters, we have been able to shout loudly about child sponsorship week, ensuring millions of people hear about ActionAid’s child sponsorship programme and giving many more children and communities the opportunity to be sponsored.