Larry Fitzgerald and Anquan Boldin getting a taste of the local food and drink in Ethiopia. Photo credit: Audra Melton / Oxfam.

NFL wide receivers Anquan Boldin of the Baltimore Ravens and Larry Fitzgerald of the Arizona Cardinals are currently in Ethiopia with Oxfam staff to raise awareness about the food crisis in East Africa and see first-hand the effects of the drought. During the trip the players are meeting with local people, Oxfam partner organizations, and Ethiopian athletes. They are also visiting Oxfam development projects.

The players participated in a live call with fans and Oxfam supporters and from the field today. Fitzgerald said on the call: “I’m blessed to be able to come over here. And I feel like the work that we’re trying to do, the attention that we’re trying to raise, and the awareness is not going to fall on deaf ears.”

Listen to a full recording of their conversation.

Watch a Public Service Announcement from the players. And donate now to help save lives in East Africa.

There are two grocery stores in my neighborhood. One features soft lighting, spacious aisles, and well-labeled shelves of neatly stacked items. The other is a chaos of glaring fluorescence, where you’re likely to get sideswiped by another shopper’s overstuffed cart as you swerve between haphazard piles of random food products. But when I compared my receipts, I realized that at the second store, whose motto is “more for your dollar,” I bought about 20 percent more groceries for the exact same price.

When graphic designer Jessica Erickson and I set out to create an infographic, see left, about US food aid spending, we decided to model it on the humble grocery store receipts that we all keep tucked away in our wallets. As consumers, we keep track of what we’re buying in order to make sure we’re spending our money wisely. The food aid our tax dollars buy is no different. The facts show that we’re currently spending more on special interest regulations—shipping, overhead, and other government red tape—than we are on life-saving food itself. Rather than more for our dollars, we’re actually getting less.

Every day, we make choices about where we shop so we can get the best value for our money. Now we should ask our legislators to do the same. By cutting the red tape and purchasing food aid locally in developing countries, we can save millions more lives, make the world safer, and boost local businesses, too. All of which adds up to a value that’s pretty much priceless.

Maka Djibo is the president of a garden co-operative in Niger. Photo by Fatoumata Diabate/Oxfam

Hungry for spring, people here seemed to be celebrating in the disturbingly high temperatures that hit Boston last week. But all I could think about was how parched the ground is at a time of year when it should be spongy with the snowmelt that replenishes the ground water we’ll need later this summer.

How would we manage if there was a severe water shortage here?

I keep thinking about the daily struggle countless families in West Africa are now facing as their limited water supplies shrink: a food crisis is looming for millions of people, triggered in part by little rainfall.

Poor harvests in Banibangou village in Niger, near the border with Mali, means that some families have already exhausted their supply of millet. But women there are working to stave off the worst with produce harvested from their vegetable co-operative. Read the rest of this entry »

Ubah Hassan is a model and activist, and the President and Co-founder of Maji Umbrellas. Ubah has also served as a spokesperson for FEED projects and recently became a Sisters on the Planet Ambassador for Oxfam America.

As a model, I promote luxury goods—handbags, shoes, and couture clothing. But as an activist, social entrepreneur, and native of Somalia, I know what real luxury is: access to clean water.

Since the July 2011 declaration of famine in Somalia by the United Nations, I have been thinking a lot about water and food shortages in the Horn of Africa. I recently partnered with Oxfam America and created Maji Umbrellas to raise awareness about the crisis in East Africa and money for the 13 million people affected by the drought and famine. Maji will donate a portion of each umbrella purchase to Oxfam America’s relief work in East Africa, enough to provide a day’s supply of clean water to 20 people.

One in eight people has inadequate access to water supplies. And that lack of clean water claims more lives each year than all forms of violence on the planet combined.

The numbers are shocking. And the reality’s even worse.

I know firsthand what it’s like to go thirsty. I was born in Somalia and, at the age of seven, fled this war-torn country to Kenya with my brother and father. There were many days in Kenya when my family, neighbors, and I went with very little water. Sometimes the water pipe in my town would break or the water would get contaminated. When that happened, we’d travel for hours to the next village to get water. And once we got there, we had to wait for hours while others who arrived before us filled their canteens. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, The New York Times is discussing Oxfam, “The Hunger Games,” and The Harry Potter Alliance. What do these seemingly random groups have in common, you ask? Each shed light on the outcomes (real and imagined, in the case of the books and film) of food shortages in a resource-constrained world.

An excerpt: “This week, Suzanne Collins’s “The Hunger Games” hits the big screen. As the latest wildly popular young adult (Y.A.) novel becomes a film franchise, it’s not just box office dollars that will be captured, but potentially nascent citizens. At least that’s the goal of the social campaign called “Hunger Is Not a Game” which aims to connect fans to the global food justice movement.

“”The Hunger Games” devotees have long congregated on sites like Mockingjay.net, Down with the Capitol, and the “Hunger Games” Fireside Chat podcast. Now Oxfam, with its long history focused on famine relief, has joined forces with a small, fan-focused group” to encourage young people to join Oxfam’s GROW campaign to ensure everyone has enough to eat now and in the future.

Boy, that’s a lot of campaigns you say? Yes, but sometimes social change movements coming together can be a beautiful thing. Later this week, hundreds of young volunteers will set-up shop at movie theaters across the country to bring fans of the “The Hunger Games” movie on-board to GROW.

“Our members know that change isn’t easy and it requires helping others to understand what’s at the root of the problem,” said Andrew Slack, Executive Director of the Harry Potter Alliance, the sponsor organization behind “Hunger is not a Game.”

“The GROW campaign gives our members a chance to really make a difference in their communities by putting emphasis on an issue that can effect anyone from their neighbor down the street to a child tens of thousands of miles away.”

Watch this quick video to learn more

Drought has reduced available pasture for livestock herds in eastern Senegal. Photo by Aliou Bassoum/Oxfam America.

Second of two posts by guest blogger Aliou Bassoum, Oxfam America’s regional communications officer in Dakar, Senegal.

It takes a little more than an hour on a red dirt road through forests and millet fields to find the village of Balkissima, population 162. We can still see a few stalks in the fields, left over from the harvest last fall here in the region of Kolda. According to an assessment by the World Food Program and Food and Agriculture Organization in November, about 138,800 people in Kolda are at high risk of food insecurity.

Some of them are here. They are mostly farmers and herders in Balkissima, a small village with a few mud-walled houses. Around one of them, the home of the chief, stand a few cows. This area is well known for raising livestock.

The food crisis here in southern Senegal is not just hitting people. The livestock are also suffering, and becoming quite skinny, almost puny in size. The village chief, Amadou Korka Balde, says it is due to lack of pasture in the area, and the poor quality of what grass is there during the dry winter months.

Read the rest of this entry »

Berthe Souré says she grew only 400 kg of rice in her last crop, about one tenth her normal yield. Photo by Aliou Bassoum/Oxfam America.

First of two posts by Oxfam’s regional communication officer in Senegal, Aliou Bassoum.

This year there is another food crisis knocking at the door of the Sahel, and it is threatening about 850,000 people in Senegal. Many of them live in Kolda, southern Senegal, and in Kedougou in the east, about 12 hours from Dakar by car.

I’ve just visited these areas over the last few weeks with the humanitarian team planning our response, and in each of the villages we heard a similar story: The last harvest was not good, and people are hungry. Many agricultural communities experience a hungry period while their crops are in the ground and they finish eating the food harvested from the previous year. But this year the lean season is happening four or five months earlier than normal.

Read the rest of this entry »

Trains in Tokyo paused. Sirens sounded. And children across the country quietly lit their paper lanterns.

These are just some of the ways Japan marked the anniversary of the 9.0 earthquake that set off a massive tsunami and nuclear disaster a year ago this Sunday.

Sunday marked the one-year anniversary of the Japan earthquake and tsunami. Photo: Reuters/YOMIURI, courtesy Trust.org - AlertNet.

When reading about the anniversary this weekend, I stumbled upon a poignant photo gallery from The Guardian. One picture—a 7-year-old girl walking through the rubble where her house used to stand—really stuck with me.

I wondered what my own daughter would think in that moment. What would she ask me? What would I say?

Read the rest of this entry »

Dyenaba Traoré and her daughter, Bintou, carry water to their garden. Photo by Charles Bambara

A colleague the other day sent a computer file of photos from Mali, one of the countries in West Africa where a new food crisis is now threatening 13 million people with hunger.  Drought is among the problems many are struggling with there.

The photos are from the Kayes region near the borders of Senegal and Mauritania where Oxfam’s  partner, Association des Organisations Profesionnelles Paysannes, is working with women’s cooperatives to help families boost their incomes. Gardens are playing a key role in that effort. The pictures showed small plots of plants green and vibrant—amazingly so—in the parched landscape.

I clicked further into the collection and came to a photo of two women, Dyenaba Traoré and her daughter, Bintou, trudging up a steep, sandy slope, each with a bucket of water on her head and one lugging a second bucket by her side. And that’s when it struck me just how precious these patches of green are: It’s the backbreaking labor of women that has made them possible. With local wells running dry and no fuel for a pump to pull water from the River Senegal , Traoré and Bintou are porting water from the river’s edge to keep their vegetables growing.

Studying that picture, I found myself slipping back nearly 40 years to the summer a friend and I had to walk for our water. We were volunteering for a couple of months as fire lookouts and living on a ridge near Mt. Rainier in Washington. Our only source of water was a small, half-frozen lake about a mile’s hike down a steep trail. We dragged the water back up in awkward five-gallon containers. Full, each was about 42 pounds. We dreaded the chore, and back in our lookout, we used that water as sparingly as possible. Neither of us wanted to have to fetch it a moment sooner than was absolutely necessary. Read the rest of this entry »

Note: this blog post originally appeared on Care2 Causes.

Yvette Cissé. Photo: Oxfam America

I met Yvette Cissé a year ago today. The farmer from Yanfollila, Mali, traveled to the US for the first time for Oxfam America’s 2011 International Women’s Day celebration. In the midst of an East Coast speaking tour, Cissé told me about the biggest challenge facing her community: hunger.

“When I was young, we’d eat three meals a day, but that’s not the case anymore,” said the soft-spoken mother of six. She said unpredictable rainfall, combined with chemicals used to grow cotton—Mali’s biggest commercial crop—has weakened the soil and made it hard for farmers to produce enough to earn a living.

As treasurer of an organization called the Malian Organic Movement, Cissé is working toward a solution. Her group trains 8,000 local farmers to use organic growing methods. Going organic improves both the soil and farmers’ incomes, since organic cotton and other products fetch higher prices on the international market.

About a third of the farmers in Cissé’s organization are women. Many are defying gender roles by growing cash crops like cotton, which is traditionally considered men’s work. With support from Oxfam, women members also learn reading, writing, accounting, and entrepreneurial skills. (Mali has a 31 percent literacy rate for women, compared with 47 percent for men.)

“Education has worked wonders,” said Cissé, who said the knowledge gives women confidence to become leaders in their communities. And because women farmers often use their earnings to pay school fees or put food on the table, their children also benefit.

A year later, Oxfam America is celebrating International Women’s Day, March 8, by honoring women who make a difference. Our supporters are giving awards, sending e-cards, and hosting events in recognition of the inspiring women in their lives.

Read the rest of this entry »