Eliminate Poverty Now

Bill Gates Likes What EPN is All About

2012-02-29T16:27:00.000-05:00

Have you heard the news? Last week, the Gates Foundation announced $200 million in Agricultural Development Grants!

In the speech he gave at the IFAD conference, Bill Gates confirmed the approach we take at Eliminate Poverty Now, saying:

“If you care about the poorest, you care about agriculture...Investments in agriculture are the best weapons against hunger and poverty, and they have made life better for billions of people. The international agriculture community needs to be more innovative, coordinated, and focused to help poor farmers grow more. If we can do that, we can dramatically reduce suffering and build self-sufficiency.”

There's a great blog post at ICRISAT, an article on the Philanthropy News Digest, and you can read the speech posted in its entirety on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation website.

Here's another quote from Gates, which reflects our own mission at EPN:

“The goal is to move from examples of success to sustainable productivity increases to hundreds of millions of people moving out of poverty...If we hope to meet that goal, it must be a goal we share. We must be coordinated in our pursuit of it. We must embrace more innovative ways of working toward it. And we must be willing to be measured on our results.”

This thinking is what drives Eliminate Poverty Now's projects, like Farmers of the Future, The Women's Cooperative Garden in Mali, the warehouse cooperative in Uganda, and the elevage program in Niger.

At work in the Women's Cooperative Garden in Mali

Some Farmers of the Future!

The sentiments expressed by Bill Gates are what EPN is all about, and the goals mentioned are very much our goals.

Help us on our way! Follow or subscribe to the blog, and encourage your friends and family to do the same, and to visit our website, or find us on Facebook and Twitter. We can't do it alone. As Gates said, if we hope to meet our goal, "it must be a goal we share."

A Preview of John and Judy's Trip to Africa

2012-02-27T17:45:00.000-05:00

In less than a week, John and Judy will be in Africa, seeing the progress of Eliminate Poverty Now's projects in person! They have a packed schedule, and we thought it would be nice to give you an idea of what they'll be doing while they are there.

In their first week, they will be in Nairobi, where they visit the new site for the Little Rock Early Childhood Development Center!

As I mentioned in my first post a few weeks ago, the new buildings will serve 1,000 nursery school children, four times the number of children being served at the current location. We are so excited that this wonderful program is growing.

John and Judy will meet with Lilly Oyare, founder and director of the Little Rock ECD to discuss the RockPads project, and possible partnerships between U.S. and Kenya Rotary clubs. They will also meet with groups of girls from the Kibera slum who will be receiving sanitary pads through the RockPads project at GlobalGiving.

Early the following week, they will be in Benin to visit the Songhai Center, and to officially launch the Songhai Women's Capital Fund! We are really excited about this project. EPN will be providing start-up capital to the most promising women who graduate from the school to create dozens of successful agricultural entrepreneurs.

Then it's off to Niger, where there will be days of in-depth meetings regarding Farmers of the Future, the Galbal Sewing and Literacy Center, and the Women's Elevage program (referred to in the previous blog entry as "embouche"), among other topics. Judy and John will also be co-hosting the official opening of the Farmers of the Future program! There is hope that the National Minister of Education and representatives from the U.S. Embassy and USAID, as well as other officials, will be in attendance. It promises to be a super exciting event celebrating a truly wonderful program.

And this doesn't cover everything they'll be doing! They will be busy-busy, with lots of wonderful, exciting things, and as promised, they'll be blogging regularly to keep everyone up to speed with news and updated photos. If you're not already subscribing, now's a great time to start, so you don't miss anything! And don't forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter. We'll always let you know when another post is up.

Great News from the Senegal Sewing Center

2012-02-23T10:40:00.000-05:00

Hello again!

Almost as soon as we published our blog post updating you on two programs we did in partnership with the Millennium Villages Project, we received fantastic news from Serigne Kandji about our sewing center in the Millennium Village in Senegal!

Have you been reading the headlines coming out of Senegal lately? You can get a good idea of what's going on from these NPR and New York Times reports. The reports are focused on regime change and rioting, which makes the good news we received from Senegal mean that much more to us. It proves what we always say: Africa can seem totally hopeless if you read the American press, even when there are wonderful things happening all over the place! Unfortunately, good news doesn't sell.

But we're not selling news here, and we LOVE to share good news! The Leona sewing center, Jigeen ca Waarwa (Women at Work), is located in the Potou, Senegal Millennium Village cluster and was fully operational in 2011, with four girls enrolled. A photo slideshow from the center can be seen on the Women's Sewing Center project page of our website. Due to the resounding success--ever growing activity and demand for training in other villages in the cluster-- two decisions have been made by the management committee.

The first is to move the Leona center to a more spacious and centralized location! This space has already been found--a stall along the Leona-Potou main road--and a contract signed with the owner. The machines will be moved before the end of this month.

The second decision made is to open another sewing center! This center will be located in Potou, with the money generated by Jigeen ca Waarwa. Again, a stall has been found, and the contract already signed. Very soon, there will be two or three machines purchased. A tailor will be hired for this center, and girls will be recruited for training!

Tailor and Student

With all of this success, the training of the first class of girls in the Leona center will be accelerated so that they are able to graduate before the next rainy season.

This kind of news makes me think of an January article I came across recently, in which Millennium Promise founder Jeffrey Sachs makes the point, "We're not arguing for a culture of dependency. We're arguing to end it." This is exactly reflected in the success of Jigeen ca Waarwa, and we cannot wait to see this project continue to grow and generate good news from Senegal!

Work-in-progress

A finished product