Global News

The global effort to roll back measles worldwide is succeeding, but declines in funding threaten to halt further progress. In early December 2008 the Measles Initiative, an international partnership of the American Red Cross, the United Nations Foundation, UNICEF, and the World Health Organization (WHO), announced that the number of deaths from measles had fallen by nearly three-quarters between 2000 and 2007—-from 750,000 to 197,000—thanks in large part to vaccination campaigns being carried out by Global Impact charities and other non-governmental organizations worldwide.

Right now, instead of playing games and going to school with their friends, an estimated 20 million children and adolescents are living in makeshift camps far away from their homes, communities and loved ones. They are refugees and IDPs (internally displaced persons) forced by war, natural and manmade disasters, persecution and economic collapse to abandon their childhoods. In the past decade alone, an estimated 60 million children have had to live this way.

Throughout Zimbabwe, Global Impact charities are struggling to resume distribution of vitally needed aid following the temporary halt ordered last summer. In addition to widespread malnutrition, this southern African country is reeling from crop failure, economic collapse and a rapidly spreading outbreak of cholera and accelerating civic violence.

Skyrocketing food prices are threatening to topple at least 100 million people worldwide into chronic hunger, a crisis that Josette Sheeran, the Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has termed the “silent tsunami.” According to Global Impact charity Plan USA, that tsunami consumes more than 10 million lives a year—more than the number who die from tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS combined.

Lebanese youth are the future leaders of Lebanon. Their skills and their abilities are crucial to the long-term growth of the Lebanese economy. The Partnership for Lebanon is working to plant the seeds of such growth by teaming with businesses and educational organizations to provide Lebanese youth with the skills they need to compete in a 21st century marketplace.

Every day millions of women and girls worldwide experience physical, sexual and psychological violence. According to the United Nations, one in three women around the world are likely to be victims of gender-based violence (GBV) in their lifetime, including sexual abuse, rape, genital mutilation, trafficking and forced prostitution. In areas of armed conflict, such violence is increasingly being employed as a strategic weapon of terror.

As China struggles to deal with the aftermath—and aftershocks—of the May 12, 7.9-magnitude earthquake that claimed the lives of 70,000 and displaced nearly 5 million people to date, a new threat has emerged which places the lives and homes of those already suffering at greater risk.

As the death toll from Cyclone Nargis climbs above 22,000 dead with over 40,000 missing, Myanmar’s secretive military government may be forced to allow wide-scale foreign aid into the country for the first time in decades. The devastating cyclone made landfall on May 2, savaging the marshy Irrawaddy delta with 105-135 mph winds and rains that caused flooding and landslides and trailing a 12-foot tidal wave that washed whole villages into the Bay of Bengal. Already battling chronic poverty and a crumbling public infrastructure, this disaster may prove to be one crisis too many for the notoriously isolated country to bear without outside help.

It starts with a seemingly harmless mosquito bite. Within a few days, it suddenly appears as a feeling of coldness, followed by a frightening paralysis in the joints. Fever and sweating follow, and then, suddenly, the malaria symptoms disappear—only to return two or three days later, and every two or three days thereafter. If left untreated, it can cause severe anemia and brain damage in children, and possibly even induce a coma. And for up to 3 million people a year—that’s 3,000 people a day or one person every 30 seconds—it kills.