Last week, the White House unveiled a new strategy for Sub Saharan Africa (PDF) to promote opportunity and development, particularly sustainable access to clean water. Walter North shares highlights from his recent participation in Africa Water Week addressing the world’s most devastating water challenges in sub-Saharan Africa. Water is fundamental to development. As Secretary Clinton said during World Water Day earlier this year, [...]
Tag archives for Africa
Democracy and Development in Sub-Saharan Africa
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of the Republic of Liberia, and Carol Lancaster, Dean of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Affairs spoke today at USAID’s Frontiers in Development Forum. Below is an excerpt from their contribution to the Frontiers in Development essays. Twenty-five years ago, Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) was a region of despair. Outside of Botswana and Mauritius, democracy [...]
Zimbabwe’s Great Leap Toward Preventing HIV in Children
As featured on the Huffington Post This week, I witnessed a milestone in the fight to end HIV/AIDS in children — and it happened in Zimbabwe. Much of the news from Zimbabwe over the past decade has been around political and economic challenges, overshadowing a resounding public health success story. Zimbabwe is one of the [...]
Achieving Global Food Security
Gebisa Ejeta, 2009 World Food Prize laureate and director of the Purdue University Center for Global Food Security All of us share a stake in the search for practical and sustainable solutions to reduce poverty and the misery and inhumanity of world hunger. Global food security is a crippling, global problem. Nearly 1 billion of [...]
Video Workshops and Toolkit Offer Crash Course to Agriculture Projects in Sub-Saharan Africa
Inexpensive video production has become a viable way for agricultural organizations to communicate with beneficiaries, donors, and the public. And it’s not just posting on YouTube. Devices such as handheld projectors and tablet computers have come down in price, enabling practitioners to disseminate to farmers in rural areas with minimal technology. Social networks – just [...]
Remembering my 5th Birthday
On my 5th birthday, I was surrounded by the love of my family, and of course, enjoyed a delicious home-made birthday cake made by my mother. Everyone came to celebrate my day, showering me with gifts (I’m told a Barbie play set was involved), to show me how important I was in their lives. While it [...]
Responding to Acute Malnutrition in the Sahel
I recently returned from Niger and Mauritania, in Africa’s Sahel region, assessing nutrition-focused humanitarian assistance. This was not my first trip to the region, as I was also there with USAID in 2010 when a failed harvest and poor pasture conditions led to food insecurity conditions nationwide and a significant rise in acute malnutrition among [...]
Pounds of Prevention: Focus on Locusts
Imagine discovering that within a few hours your entire crop for the season had been consumed by unwelcome visitors. In this edition of “Pounds of Prevention,” USAID examines the desert locust, a pest that affects the lives of millions of people in more than 65 countries throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Southwest Asia, an [...]
Administrator Shah Meets with President of Ghana
Administrator Shah met with the President of Ghana, John Atta Mills to highlight USAID strong commitment to Ghana’s Partnership for Growth (PfG) and agricultural development through the Feed the Future (FtF) initiative. Feed the Future, is the U.S. government’s global hunger and food security initiative. USAID and the Ghanaian government are working together to generate [...]
USAID in the News
Weekly Briefing (3/5/2012 – 3/10/2012) March 4: Over the weekend, the Star Tribune (Minneapolis, Minn.) highlighted USAID Administrator Dr. Rajiv Shah’s trip to General Mills’ Minnesota headquarters. Shah was in town to present the company with a Global Citizenship award, recognizing several hundred employees who volunteered their time and expertise to educate farmers in Kenya, Tanzania and other African countries [...]
