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They are contracting HIV/AIDS in ever-greater
numbers (7000 infected each day in 2003), often
because poverty and lack of education drives them
to sell their bodies in order to survive. Youth
umemployment stands at 40% (or 70 million), yet
youth are heading households more frequently and
caring for siblings not much younger than themselves.
Girls are often forced to marry young, becoming
the sole breadwinners for their families when
their husbands die of age or disease. Their children
repeat the cycle of poverty, poor health, and
early death, because they lack the education and
other means for a better life.
Education has been identified as the most crucial
factor in empowering youth, women, HIV/AIDS orphans,
and those in poverty. A recent UNAIDS report states
that "staying in school offers orphans the
best chance of escaping extreme poverty and its
associated risks, thus everything possible needs
to be done to keep them in school". And the
UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which
all 191 nation-members of the UN have pledged
to meet by 2015, has primary universal education
as its second major goal, denoting both the importance
of education in its own right as well as its vital
role in achieving other goals, like the eradication
of extreme poverty and hunger, a reduction of
child mortality, the empowerment of girls and
women, ensuring a sustainable environment, and
combatting disease.
In keeping with our primary goal of "music
making a difference", One World Beat will
focus awareness and fundraising on education through
its 2005 campaign, "Give A Child A Chance".
We have chosen to donate to two organizations
who are doing just that: Outside
the Dream is a US-based nonprofit working
in Uganda and India to provide school fees and
supplies to orphans, street children, working
youth, and other vulnerable children in Africa
and Africa, and Liberation
Through Education is a nonprofit based in
Haiti and the US which builds schools in rural
mountainous areas where there are none otherwise,
helps students with fees, supplies, and meals,
and is planning to develop a microcredit program
for families which will help them pay for their
child's education, which all aspire to do.
By helping to "Give A Child A Chance"
in two of the world's poorest nations (per capita
income is less than $400 yearly), you can make
a difference not only for these children, their
families, and their countries, but for us all.
We hope you will join us--musicians, fans, volunteers,
teachers, youth and students, nonprofits, media--as
we "teach the world to sing" of education
as a beautiful thing, and unite to beat poverty,
despair, and other global challenges as one.
Make
your donation here...
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Give A Child A Chance
