Archive for 'UNICEF'
Mahabat is a natural teacher. Her warm character is balanced by a gentle authority that ensures her young pupils are quick to follow her direction in class. I met her last week in Dostuk, Kyrgyzstan, while visiting the kindergarten where she works and which DFID helps to fund through the Equity project. The dilapidated building [...]
The eve of the London 2012 Olympics is finally here. For the next two weeks we will all be cheering on Team GB, hoping our athletes will realise the Olympic dreams they have trained so hard for. But I hope they will not be the only winners of these Olympic Games. I hope the 180 [...]
This month sees the 19th Biennial International AIDS Conference being hosted in Washington DC - it's great to see a return to the USA of this major event, following the lifting of visa restrictions for HIV positive people. Thankfully the stigma against HIV/AIDS infected people is declining and it is great to see steps being taken to [...]
India has been polio free since January 2011. Before the launch of polio immunisation campaigns in 1995, an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 polio cases were being reported annually, so that's quite an achievement. The near-eradication of polio in India was made possible by the strong ownership of the Government of India, and by the efforts of [...]
Since December last year, UNICEF has been warning of a looming food crisis in the Sahel region of West Africa, where more than one million very young children will suffer from life-threatening malnutrition this year. I've just returned from a visit to Chad, one of the eight countries affected by this crisis that has resulted from [...]
ITV1's Soccer Aid match will be shown live from 6pm on Sunday May 27th. For more information on UNICEF and tickets to Soccer Aid go to www.itv.com/socceraid. All donations to Soccer Aid will be matched pound for pound by the British Government. When UNICEF asked me to get involved with Soccer Aid and suggested I make [...]
Sitting down for dinner in the Bulawayo Club (est. 1895) in southern Zimbabwe, one feels that one has been transported back to a gentlemen's club in fin de siècle Mayfair. One is immersed amongst Greek colonnades, oil portraits of colonial expeditions and the cult of Cecil Rhodes; of how this 'wild west' was won for [...]
In a repeat of last year's 'Textbooks For All', I found myself once more at a huge logistics warehouse on the edge of Harare, in a marquee filled with dignitaries to launch the second phase of the Education Transition Fund programme (ETF). The UNICEF procurement people had driven such a hard bargain with book publishers that [...]
My first year in Zimbabwe has flown by and spring is once more in the air as the jacaranda trees lining Harare's streets burst into bloom once more, in a riot of regal purple. The beauty of the garden suburbs is deceptive. Despite the steady economic recovery of the past 24 months, the levels of poverty [...]
Requests from visiting colleagues to see our work on the ground is a regular occurrence. These trips are not just useful for the visitors, but they also allow me to investigate the programmes I support and see the impact of broader development initiatives. Recently I accompanied visitors on a trip to Chitungwiza, a sprawling suburb on the edge [...]
