Elvis
Rock n' Roll Doggie Band-aid
Getting the data on DATA
By Maya Akin and Devlin Smith
There's been a lot of talk about this next idea, but it couldn't possibly be too much. The past few years we've seen some very surreal things happen. We watched a rock star get an audience with the Pope, the G8, the Treasury Secretary of the United States, leaders of several African nations ?it was a new level of unhip for me,? Bono told Harvard students in his Commencement Day address, later adding, ?but it was very cool.?
You've no doubt read an interview or seen Bono on television using, as he puts it, the currency of celebrity to get attention to an issue that until recently, was that last thing you'd hear on the news -Third World debt. As well as dramatically lowering the standard of living for the entire continent of Africa, these debts also perpetuate a plethora of health emergencies including the AIDS pandemic. Unfair trade policies only escalate the crisis. That's where DATA comes in, but before you understand the solution, you have to understand the problem.
In the late 1940s as continental Europe was struggling to recover from World War II, the US Secretary of State George C. Marshall helped institute a project that would provide financial and material aid to these nations. Between 1948 and 1951, over $12 billion was dispersed through the Marshall Plan in the form of financial assistance, debt cancellation and trade incentives to 15 European countries, including Great Britain, West Germany and Switzerland. This foreign aid package is credited with contributing to the post-war economic recoveries of many European nations. More than 50 years later the idea behind the Marshall Plan is being floated again, but this time, the continent of Africa is the would-be beneficiary.
Currently, only one in three residents in Sub-Saharan Africa getting enough to eat every day, 20 African countries are poorer today than they were 20 years ago, and one African will become infected with the virus that causes AIDS every 25 seconds.
Formally launched at the World Economic Forum in New York last February by Microsoft honcho and philanthropist Bill Gates and Bono, DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade in Africa) aims to give Africa the boost Europe got through the Marshall Plan, not through charitable donations, but by educating the world about the problems facing Africa and convincing wealthy nations to respond immediately to the crisis.
As founder, spokesperson and chief benefactor of DATA, Bono uses the success of the Marshall Plan to convince skeptics of DATA's agenda. "You still find people my parents' age in Europe who talk about the Marshall Plan. That was where Europe felt the grace of America, in a way more than just stepping in with military might," Bono told Time magazine last year. "Can we do something that people will be proud of in generations?"
Over the past year Bono has been presenting DATA's agenda, which not only encompasses debt relief, the fight against AIDS, and fair trade for Africa, but also asks for democracy, accountability and transparency on the part of African governments to a varied group, ranging from politicians to students. In May of 2002, Bono and then US Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill toured sub-Saharan Africa on a fact-finding mission with two college students, several journalists (including CNN correspondent Daryn Kagan) and an MTV film crew in tow. This mission would later be documented in the intensely moving ?Fight for Your Rights: The Diary of Bono and Chris Tucker,? and broadcast on MTV. The broadcast would later be widely considered one of the best made-for-television documentaries ever made.
In December, actress Ashley Judd and actor-comedian Chris Tucker joined Bono, Agnes Nyamayarwo, a HIV-positive Kenyan mother of eight and member of TASO (The AIDS Support Organization), and The Gateway Ambassadors of the Children's Christian Storehouse, a troupe from a non-profit training and performance school in Ghana, on the Heart of America tour to talk to students, congregations and other Midwest residents about the DATA agenda and the AIDS emergency in Africa."You can't fix every problem, but what you can fix, you must," Bono told the Chicago Sun-Times during the December tour.
DEBT "If the same number died each day in wealthy countries it would be called a holocaust, but little notice is paid when they perish in places like Chad, Tanzania, or Mozambique." - Bono told The Guardian Unlimited in January of 2001.
In a place where many people live on less than a dollar a day, the $40 million that Africa pays in debt each day (roughly $14.5 billion a year) is more than detrimental to society, it's downright suffocating. The debt crisis has its roots in loans made by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank in the 1960s. About 30 years after the loans were made, a string of debt relief programs were created in order to lift the burden of debt on developing economies,
however, these relief programs were designed by creditors, and were not always effective in relieving the plight of debtors. In fact, some of the programs were so ineffective that IMF officials publicly admitted their fallibility. "The HIPC Initiative is more helpful to multilateral organizations than to poor countries," said official Isac Diwan at a summit in London last February called, "Will HIPC Matter? The Debt Game and Donors' Behavior in Africa." A former executive director of the World Bank was quoted by Jubilee 2000 UK as having said, "In reality the initiative postponed until the mid-1990s the pressure on the IMF to join in effective and comprehensive debt relief."
19,000 children are dying daily because of the debt crisis. Governments are unable to provide for the basic needs of their people because many are spending more money paying back debt than they are on health care and education combined. In fact, for every $1 the West sends to Africa in aid, $9 comes back in debt service.
DATA differs from previous programs because it emphasizes investment in infrastructure, and a long term solution to the problem of debt, which is made apparent through their acronym ?which, in addition to standing for Debt, AIDS and Trade in Africa, requires Democracy, Accountability, and (economic) Transparency in return. Bono once said, "Only a leap forward, not pigeon steps, will make sense to people outside the IMF and World Bank conference center. There is a crisis taking place, and when there is a crisis everyone needs to put aside their habitual ways of doing things and do everything possible to tackle that crisis."
AIDS "I want to say that we cannot afford to let [Africans] die. This is not as a moral imperative, we financially cannot afford to fill in for the teachers we lose, we cannot afford to look after their children." Bono accepting the Entertainment Industry Foundation's Heart of Entertainment Award
As Bono toured the Midwest with DATA, 6,500 Africans were dying daily of AIDS. Africa has been harder hit by HIV/AIDS than any other region of the world, over 17 million Africans have died from AIDS, and another 28.1 million are infected with HIV. DATA believes this epidemic is preventable and is seeking resources for AIDS prevention, education and treatment. Part of this initiative includes making drug-therapy more accessible and affordable for AIDS patients in Africa. "I am made sorely aware of how we need the pharmaceutical companies, we need their scientists, their research departments, their determination, to reduce the costs of these life-saving drugs," Bono wrote in an online journal that chronicled the Heart of America tour.
According to DATA, currently 30,000 of the 28.1 million Africans infected are on medication. While some drug companies have agreed to reduce the cost of medication, the price is still beyond the reach of many African governments. Agnes Nyamayarwo, who toured with DATA in December, is on an anti-retroviral medication and is upset at the cost of keeping her alive. "She is affronted by the price on her life, $2 a day," Bono wrote in his journal. "It should be one. It should be none."
TRADE "A lot of the problems facing the developing world are structural? deeply embedded in a dysfunctional relationship with the developed world that's been so wrong for so long. This relationship has bred conflict and corruption. From the emasculation of the slave trade to unfair trade, from physical bondage to economic bondage...and the new colonialism of structural adjustment." ? Bono addressing the African Development Bank.
In addition to receiving record low prices for exports, many products exported from Africa are subject to high tariffs when imported into the developed world. For example, Ghana is forced to pay a 25 percent tariff on any processed cocoa it exports to Europe. Also, of the 38 African nations who are members of the World Trade Organization, 15 don't have representatives at WTO headquarters in Geneva. DATA is trying to level the playing field by asking wealthy nations to allow Africa to trade with them with no tariffs.
In the year since its launch, the DATA agenda has gained momentum on college campuses, in churches and within governments. By taking an active role in both addressing and erasing the problems of debt, AIDS and inequitable trade in Africa, DATA knows that citizens of the world, and the governments that represent them, can make a difference.
In a speech he made accepting his award as Humanitarian Laureate from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Bono said, "History has a way of making ideas that once seemed so acceptable ridiculous. An example would be the idea that one race is superior to another [or] the idea that the lucky few of us can live in some kind of glass case, separated from the sufferings of the many...We can choose to put our considerable resources and brainpower to get to grips with the AIDS emergency. If we don't, we're on track to being one of the ideas that history made ridiculous."
To find out more about DATA and how you can make a difference visit www.datadata.org .
By Maya Akin and Devlin Smith
There's been a lot of talk about this next idea, but it couldn't possibly be too much. The past few years we've seen some very surreal things happen. We watched a rock star get an audience with the Pope, the G8, the Treasury Secretary of the United States, leaders of several African nations ?it was a new level of unhip for me,? Bono told Harvard students in his Commencement Day address, later adding, ?but it was very cool.?
You've no doubt read an interview or seen Bono on television using, as he puts it, the currency of celebrity to get attention to an issue that until recently, was that last thing you'd hear on the news -Third World debt. As well as dramatically lowering the standard of living for the entire continent of Africa, these debts also perpetuate a plethora of health emergencies including the AIDS pandemic. Unfair trade policies only escalate the crisis. That's where DATA comes in, but before you understand the solution, you have to understand the problem.
In the late 1940s as continental Europe was struggling to recover from World War II, the US Secretary of State George C. Marshall helped institute a project that would provide financial and material aid to these nations. Between 1948 and 1951, over $12 billion was dispersed through the Marshall Plan in the form of financial assistance, debt cancellation and trade incentives to 15 European countries, including Great Britain, West Germany and Switzerland. This foreign aid package is credited with contributing to the post-war economic recoveries of many European nations. More than 50 years later the idea behind the Marshall Plan is being floated again, but this time, the continent of Africa is the would-be beneficiary.
Currently, only one in three residents in Sub-Saharan Africa getting enough to eat every day, 20 African countries are poorer today than they were 20 years ago, and one African will become infected with the virus that causes AIDS every 25 seconds.
Formally launched at the World Economic Forum in New York last February by Microsoft honcho and philanthropist Bill Gates and Bono, DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade in Africa) aims to give Africa the boost Europe got through the Marshall Plan, not through charitable donations, but by educating the world about the problems facing Africa and convincing wealthy nations to respond immediately to the crisis.
As founder, spokesperson and chief benefactor of DATA, Bono uses the success of the Marshall Plan to convince skeptics of DATA's agenda. "You still find people my parents' age in Europe who talk about the Marshall Plan. That was where Europe felt the grace of America, in a way more than just stepping in with military might," Bono told Time magazine last year. "Can we do something that people will be proud of in generations?"
Over the past year Bono has been presenting DATA's agenda, which not only encompasses debt relief, the fight against AIDS, and fair trade for Africa, but also asks for democracy, accountability and transparency on the part of African governments to a varied group, ranging from politicians to students. In May of 2002, Bono and then US Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill toured sub-Saharan Africa on a fact-finding mission with two college students, several journalists (including CNN correspondent Daryn Kagan) and an MTV film crew in tow. This mission would later be documented in the intensely moving ?Fight for Your Rights: The Diary of Bono and Chris Tucker,? and broadcast on MTV. The broadcast would later be widely considered one of the best made-for-television documentaries ever made.
In December, actress Ashley Judd and actor-comedian Chris Tucker joined Bono, Agnes Nyamayarwo, a HIV-positive Kenyan mother of eight and member of TASO (The AIDS Support Organization), and The Gateway Ambassadors of the Children's Christian Storehouse, a troupe from a non-profit training and performance school in Ghana, on the Heart of America tour to talk to students, congregations and other Midwest residents about the DATA agenda and the AIDS emergency in Africa."You can't fix every problem, but what you can fix, you must," Bono told the Chicago Sun-Times during the December tour.
DEBT "If the same number died each day in wealthy countries it would be called a holocaust, but little notice is paid when they perish in places like Chad, Tanzania, or Mozambique." - Bono told The Guardian Unlimited in January of 2001.
In a place where many people live on less than a dollar a day, the $40 million that Africa pays in debt each day (roughly $14.5 billion a year) is more than detrimental to society, it's downright suffocating. The debt crisis has its roots in loans made by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank in the 1960s. About 30 years after the loans were made, a string of debt relief programs were created in order to lift the burden of debt on developing economies,
however, these relief programs were designed by creditors, and were not always effective in relieving the plight of debtors. In fact, some of the programs were so ineffective that IMF officials publicly admitted their fallibility. "The HIPC Initiative is more helpful to multilateral organizations than to poor countries," said official Isac Diwan at a summit in London last February called, "Will HIPC Matter? The Debt Game and Donors' Behavior in Africa." A former executive director of the World Bank was quoted by Jubilee 2000 UK as having said, "In reality the initiative postponed until the mid-1990s the pressure on the IMF to join in effective and comprehensive debt relief."
19,000 children are dying daily because of the debt crisis. Governments are unable to provide for the basic needs of their people because many are spending more money paying back debt than they are on health care and education combined. In fact, for every $1 the West sends to Africa in aid, $9 comes back in debt service.
DATA differs from previous programs because it emphasizes investment in infrastructure, and a long term solution to the problem of debt, which is made apparent through their acronym ?which, in addition to standing for Debt, AIDS and Trade in Africa, requires Democracy, Accountability, and (economic) Transparency in return. Bono once said, "Only a leap forward, not pigeon steps, will make sense to people outside the IMF and World Bank conference center. There is a crisis taking place, and when there is a crisis everyone needs to put aside their habitual ways of doing things and do everything possible to tackle that crisis."
AIDS "I want to say that we cannot afford to let [Africans] die. This is not as a moral imperative, we financially cannot afford to fill in for the teachers we lose, we cannot afford to look after their children." Bono accepting the Entertainment Industry Foundation's Heart of Entertainment Award
As Bono toured the Midwest with DATA, 6,500 Africans were dying daily of AIDS. Africa has been harder hit by HIV/AIDS than any other region of the world, over 17 million Africans have died from AIDS, and another 28.1 million are infected with HIV. DATA believes this epidemic is preventable and is seeking resources for AIDS prevention, education and treatment. Part of this initiative includes making drug-therapy more accessible and affordable for AIDS patients in Africa. "I am made sorely aware of how we need the pharmaceutical companies, we need their scientists, their research departments, their determination, to reduce the costs of these life-saving drugs," Bono wrote in an online journal that chronicled the Heart of America tour.
According to DATA, currently 30,000 of the 28.1 million Africans infected are on medication. While some drug companies have agreed to reduce the cost of medication, the price is still beyond the reach of many African governments. Agnes Nyamayarwo, who toured with DATA in December, is on an anti-retroviral medication and is upset at the cost of keeping her alive. "She is affronted by the price on her life, $2 a day," Bono wrote in his journal. "It should be one. It should be none."
TRADE "A lot of the problems facing the developing world are structural? deeply embedded in a dysfunctional relationship with the developed world that's been so wrong for so long. This relationship has bred conflict and corruption. From the emasculation of the slave trade to unfair trade, from physical bondage to economic bondage...and the new colonialism of structural adjustment." ? Bono addressing the African Development Bank.
In addition to receiving record low prices for exports, many products exported from Africa are subject to high tariffs when imported into the developed world. For example, Ghana is forced to pay a 25 percent tariff on any processed cocoa it exports to Europe. Also, of the 38 African nations who are members of the World Trade Organization, 15 don't have representatives at WTO headquarters in Geneva. DATA is trying to level the playing field by asking wealthy nations to allow Africa to trade with them with no tariffs.
In the year since its launch, the DATA agenda has gained momentum on college campuses, in churches and within governments. By taking an active role in both addressing and erasing the problems of debt, AIDS and inequitable trade in Africa, DATA knows that citizens of the world, and the governments that represent them, can make a difference.
In a speech he made accepting his award as Humanitarian Laureate from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Bono said, "History has a way of making ideas that once seemed so acceptable ridiculous. An example would be the idea that one race is superior to another [or] the idea that the lucky few of us can live in some kind of glass case, separated from the sufferings of the many...We can choose to put our considerable resources and brainpower to get to grips with the AIDS emergency. If we don't, we're on track to being one of the ideas that history made ridiculous."
To find out more about DATA and how you can make a difference visit www.datadata.org .
