We are back this week from our extended summer break and have been up and running behind the scenes in October planning out our next year! Today, we have a special call to action for World Food Day…read on!
Sunday, October 16, 2022, I was in Philadelphia with the CARE foundation for World Food Day at the hip Taiwanese restaurant, Bao·logy, with the amazingly talented and inspirational Chef Judy. And I don’t use those adjectives lightly – Judy’s bao buns, dumplings, noodles, and more were delicious!
Local public servants, CARE volunteers, and people working on humanitarian initiatives that help feed those who need it most in Philadelphia attended the event. There, Chef Judy encouraged guests to join together to help eliminate hunger and powerfully stated that we’re “under-resourcing our most important resources, our people.” Now that Chef Judy and CARE have sounded the alarm and called us to action this World Food Day, I’m calling YOU to action, too. But first, let’s take a deeper look at what food insecurity looks like in my home country, the U.S., and globally. I’ll also provide some simple tips about how we can all help reach SDG #2 from our own corners of the world!
What is the current food insecurity situation in the U.S.?
To put it into perspective, that is about only 4 million people less than the ENTIRE population of Canada OR about the same as the entire populations of the countries of Peru or Saudi Arabia!!! This is not ok.
Even though the percentage of food insecure households has decreased slightly in recent years ( in 10.5 % in both, 2020 and 2019, and 11.1% in 2018), we are still leaving way too many people unfed in the United State.
White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health and the Farm Bill
At Sunday’s event I learned that there was a recent White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health on September 28th. The U.S. government coordinated with leading companies and organizations around the country to tackle the nation’s food insecurity state by state. President Biden is planning to put the U.S. back on track to eliminate national hunger and reduce diet-related diseases such as, diabetes, obesity and hypertension by 2030.
Some examples are Bowery (an indoor vertical farming company) forging new partnerships with hunger relief organizations increasing its produce donations by thousands of pounds, Chobani’s adopting of 3 schools to end food insecurity and also launching a program to encourage the adoption of 50 schools by additional businesses across the country, Google making the search for SNAP benefits more easily accessible, and the American Academy of Pediatricians focusing on training all of its doctors to better identify malnutrition and referring patients to helpful resources. Organizations are attacking the problem in all different creative ways. Here is a full list of what was pledged at the conference.
Additionally, in the U.S. the Farm Bill, originally passed in Congress in 1930 as part of the New Deal, is also up to be refunded for 2023. It’s original three main goals were:
“Keep food prices fair for farmers and consumers.
Ensure an adequate food supply.
Protect and sustain the country’s vital natural resources.”
Today, the Farm Bill impacts “a multitude of topics, such as health care, poverty, climate change and school foods.” Refunding this legislation is important to farmers and national nutrition programs.
What does Food Insecurity Look Like Globally?
With all the focus on the U.S., you may be wondering where your country or the entire planet stands when it comes to food security. According to a Standing Together for Nutrition study, in 2019, the UN World Food Programme estimated that 150 million people in 81 different countries needed food assistance. In February of 2022, it rose to 276 million people. The agency predicts that number to increase to 323 million this year alone!
Sadly, the planet is not on track to reach Sustainable Development Goal #2, to eliminate hunger and all forms of malnutrition by 2030. According to CARE, recent global events such as 1/3 of Pakistan being flooded and staggering inflation in Lebanon ameliorate the global hunger situation. Not to mention,the strains on the global grain supply from the war in Ukraine.
The Global Food Security Reauthorization Act
This past July, I was on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. lobbying U.S. Congress with a fellow CARE advocate, Christina Nhankundela of Mozambique. CARE works in over 100 countries servicing over 90 million people in over 1300 projects relating to crisis, food and water, health, education and work, climate, and equality. Christina and I were both part of an even bigger movement of over 200 CARE advocates (including World Mom, Cindy Levin, too!) on the hill asking our senators and representatives to support the reauthorization of the Global Food Security Act.
The Global Food Security Act runs out in 2023 and is not emergency food funding. It provides sustainable programs to mostly women globally. Not only is the act keeping people fed, which is just the right thing to do, but it is a fantastic example of the U.S. working together from both political aisles to make a humanitarian impact.
CARE Advocates Christina Nhankundela from Mozambique and Jennifer Burden of the USA lobbied US Congress in July 2022 in support of the reauthorization of the Global Food Security Act.
Think Globally, Act Locally to Meet SDG #2
So, you may be thinking now what you can do from home to help the world reach SDG #2. Here are some ideas!
1) You can join CARE as a local advocate or donate.
2) Contact your domestic government representatives to tell them why you think it’s important to eliminate hunger in your country or globally! And ask them what they are doing about it!
For example, if you’re in the U.S., you can call and write your Congress members to support the Farm Bill and the Global Food Insecurity Reauthorization Act and vote in November for Congress members who support the legislation. Not sure where your representatives or candidates stand on eliminating hunger and what food related policies they support? Pick up the phone, call them, Tweet them, Instagram message them, ask in a Facebook comment, show up at a campaign event — whatever it takes — just ask!
3) And wherever you are on the planet, you can coordinate a local food drive, donate to your local food bank, or find ways in which you can help local organizations carry out the work to help feed people in your community. For example, I will be helping my daughter’s Girl Scout troop organize a local food drive soon to help supply our local food bank.
I hope you will join the World Moms in our call to action, doing what you can when you can, to help feed the people who need it most! Please tell us in the comments or on social media what step you took! We want to hear from you!
This is an original post to World Moms Network from founder, Jennifer Burden, of New Jersey, USA.
Come check out our TikTok (Hey, did you know we’re on TikTok? We are just beginning over there, so give us a follow!), Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook posts about what the World Moms have been up to!
Jennifer Burden is the Founder and CEO of World Moms Network, an award winning website on global motherhood, culture, human rights and social good. World Moms Network writes from over 30 countries, has over 70 contributors and was listed by Forbes as one of the “Best 100 Websites for Women”, named a “must read” by The New York Times, and was recommended by The Times of India.
She was also invited to Uganda to view UNICEF’s family health programs with Shot@Life and was previously named a “Global Influencer Fellow” and “Social Media Fellow” by the UN Foundation. Jennifer was invited to the White House twice, including as a nominated "Changemaker" for the State of the World Women Summit. She also participated in the One Campaign’s first AYA Summit on the topic of women and girl empowerment and organized and spoke on an international panel at the World Bank in Washington, DC on the importance of a universal education for all girls. Her writing has been featured by Baby Center, Huffington Post, ONE.org, the UN Foundation’s Shot@Life, and The Gates Foundation’s “Impatient Optimists.” She is currently a candidate in Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs in the Executive Masters of Public Affairs program, where she hopes to further her study of global policies affecting women and girls.
Jennifer can be found on Twitter @JenniferBurden.
Kurandza (which means “to love” in Changana, the local language ) is a non-profit social enterprise that invests in the future of women in Mozambique. Founded by Elisabetta Colabianchi in 2014, Kurandza works to empower women and their community through education, entrepreneurship, and sustainable development programs in Guijá, Mozambique.
Elisabetta was first introduced to Guijá, a small village in southern Mozambique, when she lived and worked there as a Peace Corps volunteer at a local hospital. Her main role was to counsel HIV-positive women on the prevention of HIV transmission to their children. During her work she realized that many patients would abandon treatment because they could not pay for transportation to the hospital to pick-up their medicine each month. Elisabetta and her good friend, Percina Mocha who lived in the community, started an income generation project for the HIV-positive women, with the goal of teaching them a skill that would earn enough income to pay for the monthly transportation costs to the hospital. The impact was enormous and sparked the impetus for Elisabetta to do more.
In the Fall of 2014 after returning to the US, Elisabetta founded Kurandza to continue supporting the community through a variety of educational, business and sustainable development programs. Her good friend Percina works as the Country Director of Kurandza in Mozambique and is responsible for managing all of the programs on the ground.
This month, Kurandza has launched their second #IStandForGirls campaign with the goal of sending 200 girls to school in Mozambique.
What is the campaign?
In the month of September the goal is to bring-on 200 purpose-driven individuals who support girls education, empowerment and gender equality to become monthly donors and will afford an education to girls in Mozambique.
For $20 per month (or $240 a year), someone can join the movement and give a future to a girl in Mozambique. The $20 pays for school fees, uniform, backpack, school supplies, school books, photocopies for exams, and transportation to get to school.
This is my second year signing on to support a girl’s education. It is something I have always wanted to do especially as a mother of a ten-year old girl who has all the opportunity imaginable simply based on where she was born.
Why girls education?
I had the opportunity to interview both Elisabetta and Percina (who was the first girl to graduate from high school in her community) to learn more about the campaign and the impact an education makes on a girl. Here is what they had to say.
Third Eye Mom is a stay-at-home mom living in Minneapolis, Minnesota with her two children Max (6) and Sophia (4). Her children keep her continually busy and she is constantly amazed by the imagination, energy and joy of life that they possess! A world wanderer at heart, she has also been fortunate to have visited over 30 countries by either traveling, working, studying or volunteering and she continues to keep on the traveling path.
A graduate of French and International Relations from the University of Wisconsin Madison, where she met her husband Paul, she has always been a Midwest gal living in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Chicago. This adventurous mom loves to be outside doing anything athletic (hiking, running, biking, skiing, snowshoeing or simply enjoying nature), to travel and volunteer abroad, to write, and to spend time with her beloved family and friends.
Her latest venture involves her dream to raise enough money on her own to build and open a brand-new school in rural Nepal, and to teach her children to live compassionately, open-minded lives that understand different cultures and the importance of giving back to those in need. Third Eye Mom believes strongly in the value of making a difference in the world, no matter how small it may be. If there is a will, there is a way, and that anything is possible (as long as you set your heart and mind to it!).
Visit her on her blog, Thirdeyemom, where she writes about her travels and experiences in other lands!
Singing and dancing is the order of the day as this procession of Save the Children preschool graduates, teachers and community members in Mozambique’s Gaza Province makes its way across the school ground to the nearby primary school, where the little graduates will be studying next year. Photo credit: Pei Ketron for Save the Children. October 2013.
In a newly published World Bank Study preschool programs are described as a promising policy option for improving the school readiness and later success of poor and disadvantaged children in rural Africa.
Tonight at 9pm EST World Moms Blog will join Save The Children and Multicultural Kid Blogs at #Moms4MDGs to discuss the importance of early education, and as a specific example, the success of the Save The Children preschool program in Mozambique. Ajla Grozdanic of Save The Children recently returned from a site visit to Mozambique and the early education programs there. She shared her insight in an interview with World Moms Blog as a lead up to tonights Twitter party:
World Moms Blog: In a Chicken & Egg sense, are early education programs only able to be initiated in areas where some basic infrastructure is already in place, i.e. access to clean water, healthcare & nutrition, or are they catalysts for communities to begin to pull out of extreme poverty?
AG:We are able to initiate education programs in communities at any level. In other words, having a basic infrastructure in place is not a pre-requisite for education programs, which can range from in-home daycare to in-school programs.
In fact, early childhood education can bring catalytic change for communities. Early childhood development centers and programs provide an opportunity to reach young children with basic services like healthcare and nutrition, which can be more difficult to deliver if we depended on parents to seek out these services on their own. Early childhood development centers also facilitate community mobilization, bringing parents and other community members together for projects, such as digging wells or cleaning stagnant water that hosts malaria.
Young children naturally learn from and imitate what’s in their environment–good or bad. For this reason, educating young children is key and it fosters the kinds of attitudes and behavior that can improve community well-being over the long term, such as developing good hygiene and healthy eating habits and sharing this knowledge with siblings and neighborhood children.
WMB: Could you explain a bit why Mozambique was a good fit for this program? What is the success rate for other similar early education programs Save the Children runs in other countries?
AG: Mozambique had very low coverage for preschool or early childhood development programs, so the need and demand was high. It’s also important to note that the local communities demonstrated an openness and eagerness to engage in these issues. Communities saw the potential and agreed to invest in their young children. Once they saw the results, which were very good, the word spread and the demand grew.
The World Bank Study, which is the first such evaluation of early childhood development programs in Africa, showed that children in rural Mozambique, who attended Save the Children’s preschool programs, were 24 percent more likely to enroll in primary school and were significantly better equipped to learn than children not covered by the program. While we haven’t had the funding to conduct similar studies in other countries where we offer such programs, our own results monitoring shows a similar success rate across the board.
Save the Children preschool graduate, Vania, 5, from the Gaza Province in Mozambique, joined by a future classmate, gets a taste of what it will be like to sit at a real desk when she enters primary school next year. Preschoolers in her village are used to sitting on mats on the floor and were excited to sit in ‘big-kid’ chairs and desks at the nearby primary school. Photo credit: Pei Ketron for Save the Children. October 2013.
WMB: Do you see the benefits in terms of kids who have had these early intervention programs staying in school longer, and particularly for girls, marrying later or are these programs too new to tell yet?
AG: Children enrolled in preschool have a greater chance of going to school, going to school at the right age, and staying in school longer. They have higher graduation rates and are less likely to drop out of school or end up imprisoned. What’s more, staying in school is a mechanism to protect girls from early marriage. While it’s still too early to prove long-term benefits of preschool, such as that it results in girls marrying later in life, we hope to conduct such longitudinal studies in the future.
WMB: Are the children given meals through the program as an incentive for parents to send them or are the community members generally open and willing participants?
AG:It is usually not sustainable to provide meals to all children who are enrolled in preschool. Taking this into account, in most communities preschool lasts for half the school day so children can come home for meals. In some communities, parents might pool their resources in order to provide meals at preschools. In addition, preschools provide an opportunity to educate parents on how to improve nutrition for their child.
The willingness of parents to enroll their children in preschool varies from parent to parent and from community to community. Oftentimes, we’ll have a group of early adopters who are eager to enroll their children and whose success, in turn, inspires a wave of other parents–who prefer a stand-back, wait-and-see approach–to sign up their little ones.
WMB: Had you been to Mozambique before?
AG:No, this was my first time.
WMB: What is the best way people reading could support the Save the Children preschool programs in the developing world?
AG: Your readers could become a sponsor to support early childhood programs in developing countries. They could also advocate to the U.S. government to include preschool and early childhood development in its international aid programs. To learn more, visit www.savethechildren.org.
WMB: How have the mothers responded to these programs? (ie. gives them the opportunity to go to work or tend to smaller children)
AG: We encourage the participation of both mothers and fathers in their children’s education. Sending their children to preschool allows parents to tend to their daily chores, work in the field or otherwise provide for their family while knowing that their children are in good hands and are learning, to boot. In traditional societies, where childcare falls on women, preschools certainly offer an opportunity for women to engage in more productive labor and earn an additional income for their family. And we know from experience that when women earn more income for their families, they tend to invested in their children.
Vania, 5, practices the alphabet and counting every day with her father, Armando, who is a teacher at his daughter’s preschool, which is supported by Save the Children. Photo credit: Pei Ketron for Save the Children. October 2013.
This is an original interview and post for World Moms Blog.
Elizabeth Atalay is a Digital Media Producer, Managing Editor at World Moms Network, and a Social Media Manager. She was a 2015 United Nations Foundation Social Good Fellow, and traveled to Ethiopia as an International Reporting Project New Media Fellow to report on newborn health in 2014. On her personal blog, Documama.org, she uses digital media as a new medium for her background as a documentarian. After having worked on Feature Films and Television series for FOX, NBC, MGM, Columbia Pictures, Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, and Castle Rock Pictures, she studied documentary filmmaking and anthropology earning a Masters degree in Media Studies from The New School in New York. Since becoming a Digital Media Producer she has worked on social media campaigns for non-profits such as Save The Children, WaterAid, ONE.org, UNICEF, United Nations Foundation, Edesia, World Pulse, American Heart Association, and The Gates Foundation. Her writing has also been featured on ONE.org, Johnson & Johnson’s BabyCenter.com, EnoughProject.org, GaviAlliance.org, and Worldmomsnetwork.com. Elizabeth has traveled to 70 countries around the world, most recently to Haiti with Artisan Business Network to visit artisans in partnership with Macy’s Heart of Haiti line, which provides sustainable income to Haitian artisans. Elizabeth lives in New England with her husband and four children.
Where I live it is a given that most parents will send their kids to pre-school, some as young as two years old. It is common belief that early education builds a strong foundation for future learning, and we take for granted that our kids will go on to higher education. In other areas of the world where food security, clean water, sanitation and extreme poverty are primary concerns, education can be a luxury. In some cases in these areas it is not uncommon for an older child to begin formal primary education for the first time creating classrooms of mixed ages.
Back in 2008, a $1 million donation from the 2007 Idol Gives Back television special, helped to build escolinhas or preschool centers targeting orphans and vulnerable children for Save the Children‘s program in Mozambique. Since then the program has reached about 5,000 three to six year olds and their families, and it continues to run with the help of trained volunteers from rural communities.
Children in developing countries, like Mozambique, who attend early childhood development programs are more likely to enroll in school and enter school at the right age. This is important because children who are over-age for their grade level are more likely to drop out, so early childhood development programs actually increase the chances that children will stay in school longer.
Due to the success of the preschool centers Save The Children was able to continue to find funding, and recently the progress seen in the area caught the eye of the Government of Mozambique, resulting in the implementation of similar early childhood education programs throughout the country.
In a country where most inhabitants live in rural interior areas that are prone to “hungry seasons” of flooding or drought, kids enrolled in early childhood development centers benefit from access to health care and interventional care such as deworming, malaria prevention, nutritional support or social welfare.
Investment in early childhood development can provide the greatest return, and the results from these Early Learning Centers are proof. It is important to reach kids before it is too late, before they have dropped out of school, or grown up without reaching their full potential. Development aid and countries have the opportunity to make a lasting difference in health outcomes, economic productivity, and educational opportunities by investing more human and financial resources into early childhood development programs.
To find out more about early education and Save The Children’s program in Mozambique join us tomorrow night, Wednesday November 6th from 9-10pm EST for a #Moms4MDGs twitter party with Save the Children, Multicultural Kids Blogs and World Moms Blog! Hope you can make it!
This is an original post written by Elizabeth Atalay of Documama for World Moms Blog.
Elizabeth Atalay is a Digital Media Producer, Managing Editor at World Moms Network, and a Social Media Manager. She was a 2015 United Nations Foundation Social Good Fellow, and traveled to Ethiopia as an International Reporting Project New Media Fellow to report on newborn health in 2014. On her personal blog, Documama.org, she uses digital media as a new medium for her background as a documentarian. After having worked on Feature Films and Television series for FOX, NBC, MGM, Columbia Pictures, Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, and Castle Rock Pictures, she studied documentary filmmaking and anthropology earning a Masters degree in Media Studies from The New School in New York. Since becoming a Digital Media Producer she has worked on social media campaigns for non-profits such as Save The Children, WaterAid, ONE.org, UNICEF, United Nations Foundation, Edesia, World Pulse, American Heart Association, and The Gates Foundation. Her writing has also been featured on ONE.org, Johnson & Johnson’s BabyCenter.com, EnoughProject.org, GaviAlliance.org, and Worldmomsnetwork.com. Elizabeth has traveled to 70 countries around the world, most recently to Haiti with Artisan Business Network to visit artisans in partnership with Macy’s Heart of Haiti line, which provides sustainable income to Haitian artisans. Elizabeth lives in New England with her husband and four children.
