GambiaHELP
begins landmark Milling Machine Project to fight rural poverty and facilitate
economic and social freedoms; the organization sends another 10,000 books
to West Africa. (January 2003)
Water
to Be First Focus for Post-Summit Action as Meeting on Sustainable Development
Concludes (May
2003) 
United
Nations Press Release
Water to Be First Focus for Post-Summit Action
as Meeting on Sustainable Development Concludes
New York – 12 May 2003
The follow-up to the
Johannesburg Summit will focus on water, sanitation and human settlements
for the first two years, decided the Commission on Sustainable Development
at the end of its annual meeting last Friday. By concentrating on a few
issues every two-year cycle, the Commission – the United Nations
body that monitors implementation of sustainable development commitments
– signaled its intention to make practical steps towards making
sustainable development a reality.
"Unless something dramatically new happens, we are not going to reach
our goals of providing 200,000 people with access to freshwater every
day and 300,000 people with access to sanitation each day. The United
Nations is very conscious of that," said Mr. Nitin Desai, head of
the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs and Secretary-General
of the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg, South
Africa, last September.
Some 1.2 billion people, or 18 per cent of the world's population, lack access to safe drinking water, and over 2.4 billion people (40 per cent of the world's people) lack access to adequate sanitation. More than 2.2 million people in developing countries, most of them children, die each year from diseases associated with lack of access to safe drinking water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene.
At the Johannesburg Summit, governments reaffirmed the Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water by 2015, and set a new target to halve the proportion of people without access to basic sanitation by the same year. At the present rate of investment, universal access to safe drinking water cannot reasonably be anticipated before 2050 in Africa, 2040 in Latin America and the Caribbean and 2025 in Asia.
"It is very good that water is our first focus," added Mr. Desai. "There were many big initiatives on water and sanitation launched in Johannesburg, so we can test whether the Commission can really put pressure on making them happen."
The decision to focus on water, sanitation and human settlements for the next two-year cycle came at the end of a two-week meeting in which some 40 Ministers and other government representatives, joined by heads of United Nations agencies and other international organizations and over 900 representatives of non-governmental organizations and other stakeholders, decided how to bolster implementation of programmes and goals agreed at the 1992 Earth Summit and last year's Johannesburg Summit.
A Long-Range Plan Towards Sustainability
The Commission's two-year "implementation cycles" include review and policy years. The review year will evaluate progress made in implementing development goals and identify obstacles and constraints, while the policy year will decide on measures to speed up implementation and mobilize action to overcome these obstacles and constraints.
The two-year cycles form part of a larger multi-year programme of work, with different thematic clusters of issues for each cycle, beginning with the period 2004/2005 and ending with 2014/2015. The Commission has decided that the second two-year cycle of work, for 2006/2007, should focus on energy for sustainable development, industrial development, air pollution, atmosphere and climate change.
Subsequent two-year cycles will focus on: agriculture, rural development, land, drought, desertification and Africa (2008/2009); transport, chemicals waster management, mining, and a ten-year framework of programmes on sustainable consumption and production patterns (2010/2011); forests, biodiversity, biotechnology, tourism and mountains (2012/2013); oceans and seas, marine resources, small island developing States, and disaster management and vulnerability (2014/2015).
In order to retain flexibility in case new priorities should arise in future, the Commission has reserved the right to amend the thematic clusters for the last three cycles. In every cycle, a number of cross-cutting issues will be addressed, such as poverty eradication, changing unsustainable patterns of production and consumption, health, education and sustainable development in a globalizing world, as well as means of implementation.
The years 2016 to 2017 will be devoted to an overall appraisal of the implementation of Agenda 21, the Programme for the Further Implementation of Agenda 21 and the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation.
The Commission also took a range of decisions on other practical issues relating to its future programme and methods of work. These included: enhancing the role of regional and sub-regional inputs to the CSD process; making reporting mechanisms more effective; promoting greater collaboration and cohesion between sustainable development activities undertaken by the UN system and other international institutions; and strengthening the involvement of major groups in the activities of the CSD.
Building on work undertaken through the WSSD process to encourage partnerships between governments, major groups and other stakeholders for implementing sustainable development initiatives on the ground, delegates also agreed on a set of criteria and guidelines for partnerships wanting to be recognized by the Commission, and decided that they should report regularly on their progress.
The Commission elected H.E. Børge Brende, Norway's Minister of Environment, as Chairman of its next annual session.
More information
and the final text of the Commission's resolution can be found on the
official website.
Media Contact:
Klomjit Chandrapanya
UN Department of Public Information
Tel: +1 212 963 9495
Fax: +1 212 963 1186
E-mail: mediainfo@un.org
January,
2003
GambiaHELP
begins landmark Milling Machine Project to fight rural poverty and facilitate
economic and social freedoms; the organization sends another 10,000 books
to West Africa.
Press Contact:
Michelle Lewis, (206) 523-6924
In The Gambia, a small country in West Africa, many families survive on only one meal a day. For the women, their biggest challenges are feeding their families, keeping them healthy, and struggling to earn a few dollars to send their children to school. After working in the rice fields for much of the day, each woman and her children will spend many hours pounding rice in a mortar so that there will be food to eat. At the end of such a long day, there is little energy left to begin the process of change.
GambiaHELP, (Gambia Health Education Liaison Project) a non-profit organization with offices in Seattle and Serre Kunda in The Gambia, is committed to helping these women. As part of their Womens Empowerment Program, GambiaHELP is purchasing a rice milling machine, and instituting training courses for these women in mechanical maintenance, management and finances, and micro-lending. The machine will facilitate food preparation, reduce the amount of intense physical labor required to pound rice in a mortar, and enable the women to pound rice for other villages at a small profit. By the end of this three-year project, which begins this February, the women will not only have the machine to facilitate their daily work to support their families, but will be able to run a small bank and lending institution with milled grains as collateral. The project is thus addressing needs in the areas of family health; education, including job skills; and social equality, as the women of the village work toward economic freedom.
The Milling Machine Project is one of the most promising and ambitious projects that GambiaHELP has sponsored to date. Past projects for the organization, run by former Peace Corps volunteer Shelby Tarutis, have included building and stocking libraries at schools in rural villages and creating computer labs at rural high schools. Last year, GambiaHELP partnered with the technology program at Seattle’s Garfield High School and Computers for the World to offer local students the opportunity to build both the labs and "a better understanding of the world" (from a feature in the Seattle Times, March 2002).
In addition to the Milling Machine Project, GambiaHELP has completed another successful Book Project, collecting and sending more than 10,000 donated books to schools in every region of The Gambia. In three years of Book Projects, GambiaHELP has sent 50,000 books to schools and community centers. The organization is also sending used clothing and medical equipment including wheelchairs and stretchers, that are being donated to The Gambian Red Cross.
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| Volunteers waiting to load container | Volunteers loading stretchers bound for The Gambian Red Cross | |
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| Volunteers loading wheelchairs bound for The Gambian Red Cross | Volunteers
loading the container |
