Health and Education For All

Elba Rivera Urbina, W8 member from Nicaragua, lives in the Southeast of the country. As well as her work with the Nicaraguan Campaign for Education coalition she works with the ecological farming community of the "Región Autónoma Atlántico Sur," educating and training mestizo and indigenous families, who use organic agriculture, which mainly means diversified agro-forestry in the humid tropics.

Following her visits to Germany and Italy Dorothy Ngoma, our Oxfam champion from Malawi, visits Scotland to talk about public healthcare issues.

I’m huddled in a corner of the swank Sheraton Hotel in Doha, Qatar.  Around me, workers are carrying massive rows of theater chairs, and rolls of wallpaper.

Why am I here at the most famous hotel in Doha, in this tiny and extremely wealthy Gulf country? (Obviously not where I hang out on an average day)  And what on earth are they doing to this place?

I am in good company here in New York – more than 80 national leaders have flown in to participate in a special UN meeting on poverty reduction taking place tomorrow. Why are they here?Millennium Development Goals. And because with just 7 years to go, things are seriously off track.  So leaders are here to demonstrate they are serious about ending poverty, and to put some much needed steam back into meeting these commitments.

Why are we here? 

Donors and aid recipient’s countries are not the only group interested in development aid. Again and again, civil society organizations from all over the world have been demanding a right to a say in the aid industry.
“Governments from developing countries are shamefully more accountable to donors than to citizens that have queued in poll stations to cast their votes to elect their leaders” – described some of the groups I met with during the civil society for better aid event in Accra.

"We are one people; we are one nation; we have one destiny," sang a group of musicians at the opening of the Civil Society Forum on Aid Effectiveness taking in place in Accra, Ghana from August 31 through September 1st.

I’ve just come back from Quebec, Canada and America, where I’ve been organising Oxfam’s presence at Coldplay’s concerts. We’ve been campaigning on the For All campaign, asking the crowd to sign up to the For All Pledge.

As an Oxfam policy advisor on access to medicines, I believe governments have to take decisive action to reduce the price of new medicines to treat HIV and AIDS that are needed when HIV positive individuals develop resistance to first line treatments. These 2nd and 3rd line treatments, which are patented by big pharmaceutical companies, often cost five to ten times more than 1st line treatments for AIDS.

DENIED! screamed the headline on the media advisory I and Oscar Alarcón were handing around the press room this morning to drum up interest in the Oxfam news conference scheduled for noon.

Mexico City abounds with life, but this week it´s even more abuzz. More than 25,000 people from around the world have come together to demand universal action now on HIV/AIDS and the energy is electric.

Activists and service providers, funders and researchers, big Pharma and sex workers, presidents and hairstylists have converged for the 17th International AIDS Conference, the first time the conference is being held in Latin America.