For the women of the Maasai communities, life may be simple, but it’s far from easy. According to Teresia, one of the senior Maasai “mamas,” the greatest challenge facing her boma “was the darkness in our houses” because without electricity, “you can’t see anything at night.” Across sub-Saharan Africa, two out of three people live off the electrical grid – that’s 70 percent of the entire population, or 600 million people.
With mounting challenges overseas– from the world’s worst humanitarian crisis since World War II, to devastating famines, to tension with North Korea – this year has shown us that American global leadership is more important now than ever before. And as the year draws to a close, we’ve rounded up our top ten blogs of 2017 – the inspiring stories of U.S. foreign assistance, it’s impact around the world and here at home.
A fourth-grader at the Malamawa Primary School in northwest Nigeria, Hadiza Hamza hopes to become a teacher one day. Eager to learn how to read and write, Hamza asked her father to enroll her in the six month jump-start program: the Northern Education Initiative Plus (NEI+). The literacy program, established in 2015, made possible by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and Creative Associates International has opened up a world of possibility for Hamza and others like her.
2017 brought a steady stream of challenges and changes to U.S. foreign policy and development assistance – from a new Administration taking the reins, to a budget proposal that sent shockwaves through Washington, to a steady drumbeat of support for American global leadership. We’ve gathered 12 of the top stories from the past year – one from each month – that you won’t want to miss.
In Gieta, a town in Northwest Tanzania, Bi Mariam Masasi Willison and her husband recently celebrated their healthy daughter Elizabeth’s first birthday — a time of joy, but also relief for the new parents. A few years ago, Mariam gave birth to a child who fell ill shortly after birth and passed away. Luckily, this time around, things went differently — with some help from Pact and USAID.
At the heart of USAID Administrator Mark Green’s vision for the agency is “to end the need for its existence,” and a desire to transition countries that may no longer need development assistance to a new relationship with the United States. But against the backdrop of the proposed 32% cut to the International Affairs Budget, there have been some concerns that “transitions” could serve as a cover for cutting aid budgets and closing missions.
For Violet and her classmates in Tanzania, lunchtime means sitting under the shade of nearby trees, happily devouring a hearty bowl of rice and beans. In the rural Mara region where Violet lives with her family, school meals like these were once a rare occurrence. Recurrent droughts in the region made farming difficult and food scarce — and until Project Concern International (PCI) stepped in, hunger was commonplace in the classroom.
While all eyes are on President Trump’s whirlwind 12-day, 5-country tour of Asia, there’s been another narrative is playing out across the Indian Ocean: China’s growing influence in Africa.
Speaking in Vietnam just a few hours ago, President Trump launched a debate on the future of development finance by committing the Administration to help American businesses invest and compete in the developing world.
While more people than ever before are climbing out of poverty, major pieces to the puzzle of eradicating it are still missing. But by investing in the proper tools and resources, this report shows how quickly poverty, its symptoms and its dire consequences could finally be wiped out.