You may have noticed that there have been few blogs posted in recent times. This is because we have been reprioritising our work as we wind things down here in the office. These are our final weeks in the office and as you can imagine, there is much to do.

What follows are my personal reflections on recent times.

The last three years have been incredibly challenging for Global Focus. The world changed around us and the Government changed too. The strategic policy framework articulated between the NGOs and the previous government became increasingly invisible until it was pretty much acknowledged that it no longer carried any weight.  (Although at the time this post was published that document was still on the NZ Aid programmes website).

Global Focus experienced increasing intrusion from the main funding body as rightly or wrongly the approach changed from the agreed core-funding model to a ‘contract for services’ model. Our funders felt growing ownership over our activities which therefore included the associated risks, both political and financial. It is my belief that eventually those perceived risks outweighed the perceived benefits and triggered the total withdrawal of all financial support.  This coupled with the realisation that we didn’t have a powerful constituency supporting us, meant we were considered expendable.

But perhaps somewhat obviously, I disagree with that assessment. In fact I believe a voice which helps people understand their lives in the context of contemporary global issues is more important now than ever. We have been accused of being too radical and not neutral enough but I now think that perhaps we didn’t go far enough.

In a world were the global media is dominated by a few key groups with specific self-centred interests, we have a duty to present a differing view points. In a world where famines are still occurring we have a duty to get people thinking about why that might be. In a world were peaceful protesters are being arrested while financial criminals aren’t held accountable because they happen to be in positions of privilege, we have a duty to keep talking about global injustice. We have a duty to remind people in Aotearoa New Zealand about the injustices that exist here, in our own backyards, lest we get lulled into a sense of false security that bad things only happen anywhere but here.

As we sift through our collections of publications we looked at one from 20 years ago. It was talking about the same issues that we discuss today; poverty, aid, food. Depressingly, not much seems to have changed. That publication barring minor edits is probably still just as relevant today as it was when it was published.

Does that mean we failed, that Global Focus didn’t change the minds of enough people to make a big enough difference? I don’t think so. I just think it means the size of the problem is bigger than we could manage on our own. Once lessons pass from living memory they are often forgotten and we are doomed to repeat them. (Three year election cycles don’t help) Resolving this requires more resources not less.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” – George Santayana

I hope the larger development sector (which includes all organisations involved in international, social and youth development work and education) will continue to recognise the value of global education and will resource the work of teaching knowledge, skills and the values in ways that go beyond communications and marketing strategies.

Maybe there won’t be an office of Global Focus staff who are producing regular documents for you to read, helping you to formulate your opinions or for you to use in your classrooms. But you can still continue the work of our organisation on our behalf. You can challenge harmful assumptions, you can take meaningful action. You can start with your own actions in your own communities.

Our publications are still available on our website and will be for the foreseeable future. Please put them to good use.

Good luck

Leaders must get serious about NCDs of risk the MDG targets

The past few weeks has seen a flurry of activity in the NCD community as we prepare for the special high level summit in New York next week. NCDs – non-communicable diseases – will be top of the agenda on 19-20 September as world leaders attempt to chart a way forward in addressing this number one global killer.

Each year, NCDs – primarily cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, cancers, and chronic respiratory diseases – are responsible for some 63 million deaths worldwide. And although traditionally thought of as a curse of the wealthy, the poorest people on the planet are those worst affected. Some 80 per cent of the deaths caused by NCDs occur in low and middle income settings, and evidence suggests that if current trends continue, they will account for almost half of all deaths in Africa by 2030.

“The consequences [of NCDs] for societies and economies are devastating everywhere, but most especially so in poor, vulnerable and disadvantaged populations,” says WHO DG Margaret Chan in the foreword to the 2010 Global Status Report on Non-Communicable Diseases. “NCDs deliver a two-punch blow to development. They cause billions of dollars in losses of national income, and they push millions of people below the poverty line, each and every year,” she adds. Continue reading →

I grew up with TV images of the Lebanese civil war, but I never really had a clue what was going on. Unless wars involved Western militaries, the media seemed to be happy to present conflict both simplistically – “it’s just selfish nasty people and there’s nothing to understand” – and also as terribly intricate, wheeling out the odd academic to tell us “it’s all so complicated and confusing, only the experts can possibly understand it.”

Later on I did some reading and discovered it wasn’t particularly confusing; it was just journalists and academics being either lazy, or happy to paint foreign countries as mysterious and incomprehensible places, that stopped them telling the story clearly.

I’m finding Somalia is getting the same treatment. In a recent, fairly lengthy, news story (‘Somalia famine aid stolen, UN investigating’) we were told the World Food Programme regarded the country as a “dangerous, lawless, and conflict-ridden environment” and the history was covered by a couple of references to the US military intervention nearly 20 years ago, referred to by the name of the Hollywood movie loosely based on an event that occurred at the time. There’s a few mentions of ‘the government’, without pointing out that it controls only a fraction of the country, and no mention of the fact that much of the country isn’t “conflict-ridden” and substantial parts of it are under stable administrations – just not the one that Western countries insist constitutes “the government”. Continue reading →