Formation | 1972 |
---|---|
Founder | Cecil Jackson-Cole |
Type | International NGO |
Legal status | Nonprofit organization |
Purpose | ActionAid works with communities to reduce poverty and promote human rights |
Headquarters | Johannesburg, South Africa |
Region served | Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia, the Middle East, Americas |
Membership | Child sponsors |
Secretary General | Arthur Larok |
Website | www.actionaid.org |
ActionAid is an international non-governmental organization whose stated primary aim is to work against poverty and injustice worldwide. [1]
ActionAid is a federation of 45 country offices that works with communities, often via local partner organisations, on a range of development issues. It was founded in 1972 by Cecil Jackson-Cole as a child sponsorship charity (originally called Action in Distress) when 88 UK supporters sponsored 88 children in India and Kenya, the primary focus being is providing children with an education, further the human rights for all, assisting people that are in poverty, assisting those who face discrimination, [2] and also assist people who face injustice. [1] ActionAid works with over 15 million people in 45 countries to assist those people. [1]
Today its head office is located in South Africa with hubs in Asia, the Americas and Europe. ActionAid was the first big INGO to move its headquarters from the global north to the global south. [3] [4] ActionAid's current strategy aims to "build international momentum for social, economic and environmental justice, driven by people living in poverty and exclusion". [5] This includes running campaigns and providing training and resources for social movements. [6]
ActionAid has been campaigning for tax justice since 2008, conducting research into the effects of various international tax treaties and supporting local people and organizations to hold their governments to account. [7] It argues that losing tax revenue to avoidance harms the world's poorest and most marginalized people, who depend on tax-funded public services. [8] [9] It is also often the case that the tax revenue lost in these treaties can exceed the amount of international aid money send to developing countries. [10]
In 2011, ActionAid revealed that 98% of the UK's FTSE 100 companies use tax havens. [11] In 2013 its research into corporate tax avoidance in Zambia showed that Associated British Foods were avoiding paying millions of dollars in corporate tax. [12]
ActionAid integrates women's rights into all of its programming and project work, but also undertakes campaigns that focus specifically on these issues.
Notable examples have included raising awareness about unpaid care work [13] [14] and sexual harassment [15] and violence [16] (including acid attacks [17] ) in Bangladesh, offering free cancer tests to women in Nigeria who could not afford them, [18] and tackling female genital mutilation in Sweden. [19]
ActionAid's advocacy work on climate change focuses on climate justice, guided by the experiences and needs of its country's programmes. Its most prominent engagement comes through the annual Conference of Parties, where it supports communities vulnerable to climate change to influence decision-making processes.
It calls for rich countries to live up to pledges of providing climate adaptation grants [20] [21] [22] and pushes for agreements to improve the lives of those most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. [23] ActionAid was also critical of climate insurance policies, such as those purchased by Malawi in 2015, since those insurance policies fail to deliver when they are desperately needed. [24]
ActionAid promotes women's leadership in humanitarian responses, arguing that women are best positioned to identify their needs and those of the communities around them in times of crisis. [25] Strengthening citizens' rights is also a focus, such as campaigning with Haitians for greater transparency and accountability in how aid money was spent after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. [26]
As it has established relationships with communities and other NGOs in countries that are prone to ecological events, ActionAid is often able to respond quickly to emergencies. Notable crises and responses have included the Boxing Day tsunami in 2010 in the Indian Ocean, [27] drought in East Africa [28] [29] and India, [30] and floods in Ghana, [31] Rwanda, [32] Sierra Leone, [33] Bangladesh and Nepal.
On 4 October 2018 ActionAid announced that Pakistan government has ordered 18 international aid groups to leave the country. [34]
Child sponsorship is one of ActionAid's primary sources of income. Donors sponsor an individual child [35] from a community in a developing country and receive regular updates about the child's progress and development.
Sponsorship funds support the child's whole community, "so children have a healthy and safe place to live and grow up." This support takes the form of providing clean water, healthcare, agricultural programmes, education centres in areas where schools are not available, and community income generation schemes. [36]
In 2018, ActionAid USA stopped using the child sponsorship method of fundraising, and switched to a monthly giving program.
As ActionAid has grown in influence, building alliances with like-minded organisations has become a key focus area. Announcing this approach at the World Social Forum in 2015, [37] ActionAid has played a role in convening civil society and community groups to tackle issues of youth political participation in the Middle East [38] and global inequality. [39]
ActionAid made India's first Bollywood film focusing on AIDS,[ citation needed ] Ek Alag Mausam , a love story involving HIV positive people, based on a script by playwright Mahesh Dattani. [40]
ActionAid also supported Shyam Benegal's film, Samar , which is based on the book Unheard Voices: Stories of Forgotten Lives by Harsh Mander. [41] The film raises issues about Dalits. [40]
Javeria Malik [42] [43] is the first Pakistani woman [44] to lead the Global Safety and Security Unit at ActionAid International and was featured [42] on the official website of International Women's Day 2022. INSSA Insights has featured Javeria as the first female Chairperson of the International NGO Safety & Security Association. Her interview published by the city security magazine was nominated for the best article of the year award. [45] She was interviewed by Global Interagency Security Forum [46] to speak on the topic of inclusivity and anti racism in the nonprofit and aid sector.
Marco De Ponte is currently a member of the Global Leadership Team and also at the helm of ActionAid Italia since 2001. He has led ActionAid's expansion into new countries and is a well known civil society leader in Italy and internationally. He has previously engaged extensively, in particular as a human rights activist with Amnesty International and in the field of humanitarian assistance. He is on the coordination committee of the Italian Inequality Forum Forum Diseguaglianze e Diversità and has published extensively on issue of social justice and public policy. [47] [48] [49] [50] [51]
Poverty is a state or condition in which an individual lacks the financial resources and essentials for a basic standard of living. Poverty can have diverse environmental, legal, social, economic, and political causes and effects. When evaluating poverty in statistics or economics there are two main measures: absolute poverty which compares income against the amount needed to meet basic personal needs, such as food, clothing, and shelter; secondly, relative poverty measures when a person cannot meet a minimum level of living standards, compared to others in the same time and place. The definition of relative poverty varies from one country to another, or from one society to another.
Human security is a paradigm for understanding global vulnerabilities whose proponents challenge the traditional notion of national security through military security by arguing that the proper referent for security should be at the human rather than the national level. Human security reveals a people-centred and multi-disciplinary understanding of security which involves a number of research fields, including development studies, international relations, strategic studies, and human rights. The United Nations Development Programme's 1994 Human Development Report is considered a milestone publication in the field of human security, with its argument that ensuring "freedom from want" and "freedom from fear" for all persons is the best path to tackle the problem of global insecurity.
Islamic Relief Worldwide describes itself as "a faith-inspired humanitarian and development agency which is working to support and empower the world's most vulnerable people".
Development aid is a type of aid given by governments and other agencies to support the economic, environmental, social, and political development of developing countries. It is distinguished from humanitarian aid by aiming at a sustained improvement in the conditions in a developing country, rather than short-term relief. The overarching term is foreign aid. The amount of foreign aid is measured though official development assistance (ODA). This is a category used by the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to measure foreign aid.
World Food Day is an international day celebrated every year worldwide on October 16 to commemorate the date of the founding of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in 1945. The day is celebrated widely by many other organizations concerned with hunger and food security, including the World Food Programme, the World Health Organization and the International Fund for Agricultural Development. WFP received the Nobel Prize in Peace for 2020 for their efforts to combat hunger, contribute to peace in conflict areas, and for playing a leading role in stopping the use of hunger in the form of a weapon for war and conflict.
Poverty reduction, poverty relief, or poverty alleviation is a set of measures, both economic and humanitarian, that are intended to permanently lift people out of poverty. Measures, like those promoted by Henry George in his economics classic Progress and Poverty, are those that raise, or are intended to raise, ways of enabling the poor to create wealth for themselves as a conduit of ending poverty forever. In modern times, various economists within the Georgism movement propose measures like the land value tax to enhance access to the natural world for all. Poverty occurs in both developing countries and developed countries. While poverty is much more widespread in developing countries, both types of countries undertake poverty reduction measures.
The Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP) is a network of over 11,000 civil society organizations (CSOs) dedicated to social justice, established in 2005 during the World Social Forum in Porto Allegre. It represents approximately 58 national groups. It serves as a platform for individuals and organizations to unite against systemic factors perpetuating poverty and inequalities.
Global Rights is an international human rights capacity-building non-governmental organization (NGO). Founded in Washington, D.C., in 1978 with the name International Human Rights Law Group, the organization changed its name to Global Rights: Partners for Justice in 2003 on the occasion of its 25th anniversary. In December 2014 it shut its Washington headquarters and devolved the center of its operations to its country office in Nigeria and Burundi from where the organization continues to work with local activists in Africa to promote and protect the rights of marginalized populations. It provided technical assistance and training to enable local partners to document and expose human rights abuses, conduct community outreach and mobilization, advocate for legal and policy reform, and provide legal and paralegal services.
Acted is a French international solidarity non-governmental organization (NGO), founded in 1993. It is headquartered in Paris.
Climate justice is a type of environmental justice that focuses on the unequal impacts of climate change on marginalized or otherwise vulnerable populations. Climate justice seeks to achieve an equitable distribution of both the burdens of climate change and the efforts to mitigate climate change. The economic burden of climate change mitigation is estimated by some at around 1% to 2% of GDP. Climate justice examines concepts such as equality, human rights, collective rights, justice and the historical responsibilities for climate change.
The Global Hunger Index (GHI) is a tool that attempts to measure and track hunger globally as well as by region and by country, prepared by European NGOs of Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhilfe. The GHI is calculated annually, and its results appear in a report issued in October each year.
The aim of water security is to make the most of water's benefits for humans and ecosystems. The second aim is to limit the risks of destructive impacts of water to an acceptable level. These risks include for example too much water (flood), too little water or poor quality (polluted) water. People who live with a high level of water security always have access to "an acceptable quantity and quality of water for health, livelihoods and production". For example, access to water, sanitation and hygiene services is one part of water security. Some organizations use the term water security more narrowly for water supply aspects only.
ACT Alliance is a global alliance of more than 145 churches and related organisations from over 120 countries created to provide humanitarian aid for poor and marginalized people. 76% of its member organisations are rooted on the global south, 22% in the global north and 2% have a global presence.
Salil Shetty is an Indian human rights activist who was the Secretary General of the human rights organization Amnesty International (2010–2018) till 31 July 2018. Previously, he was the director of the United Nations Millennium Campaign. Before joining the UN, he served as the Chief Executive of ActionAid. Most recently, Shetty had a short stint as the Vice President of Global Programs at the Open Society Foundations.
Human trafficking in Nepal is a growing criminal industry affecting multiple other countries beyond Nepal, primarily across Asia and the Middle East. Nepal is mainly a source country for men, women and children subjected to the forced labor and sex trafficking. U.S. State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons placed the country in "Tier 2" in 2017.
Climate change affects men and women differently. Climate change and gender is a research topic which aims to understand how men and women access and use resources that are impacted by climate change and how they experience the resulting impacts. It examines how gender roles and cultural norms influence the ability of men and women to respond to climate change, and how women's and men's roles can be better integrated into climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies. It also considers how climate change intersects with other socioeconomic challenges, such as poverty, access to resources, migration, and cultural identity.
Protection of children’s rights is guaranteed by the Constitution of the Republic of Azerbaijan and a number of other laws. Children’s rights embrace legal, social and other issues concerning children.
Kenya is a lower middle income economy, with Kenya's GDP hitting $150 billion as of 2024. This is due to increasing technology innovation services. Although Kenya's economy is the largest and most developed in eastern and Central Africa, 63% (2023/2024) of its population lives below the international poverty line. This severe poverty is caused by economic inequality, government corruption and health problems. In turn, poverty also worsens these factors. The Kenyan government's efforts to address poverty have received help from international institutions as well. The incident rate of poverty has steadily decreased, as shown by a recent MPI index.
Global Goals Week is a shared commitment between a coalition of over 160 partners across all industries, which mobilizes annually in September to bring together communities, demand urgency, and supercharge solutions for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It was founded in 2016 by the United Nations Foundation, Project Everyone, and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). It is timed to coincide with the UN General Assembly "High-Level Week" in New York. The week includes events, summits, conferences, forums, workshops, pledges, and other activations in New York, around the world, and online. It usually runs alongside Climate Week NYC, the annual conference of Goalkeepers, Bloomberg Global Business Forum and many other high-level events.
In this article, NGOs in West Africa will be divided into three categories: African national NGOs, African international NGOs, and non-African international NGOs. NGOs stand for non-governmental organizations. These organizations are mostly non-profit and mostly work independently from the government, they have specific aims that range from human rights, finance, health, education and more. There are many non-governmental organizations in West Africa, and much activity between these countries, organizations and the rest of the world.