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Stanford students belong to the first generation that could witness the end of extreme global poverty — in what would be one of humankind's greatest achievements — the head of the World Bank said during a recent talk on campus.

But their generation, he said, is also likely to experience the first global pandemic since the 1918 influenza that killed more than 50 million people.

Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, said innovations in health, education and finance are behind the World Bank's twin goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity for the bottom 40 percent of the global population.

Speaking at the inaugural conference of the Stanford Global Development and Poverty Initiative on Oct. 29, Kim lauded faculty and students for their multidisciplinary approach in tackling poverty and improving public health. He is an infectious disease physician who oversaw World Health Organization initiatives on HIV/AIDS.

"Seeking transformative solutions to challenges of development and poverty that are necessarily cross-disciplinary is exactly what a great university should be doing," Kim said in his speech at Stanford.

The World Bank announced last month that the number of people living on less than $1.90 a day is expected to drop to 9.6 percent of the global population by the end of the year. That is down from 36 percent in 1990.

The bank has pledged to cut that rate to 3 percent by 2030.

"We expect the extreme poverty rate to drop below 10 percent for the first time in human history," he said. "This is the best news in the world today. And this is the first generation in human history that has been able to see that potential outcome." 

Promoting prosperity

One of the co-founders of Partners in Health, Kim was the keynote speaker at the daylong conference, "Shared Prosperity and Health," which drew together Stanford faculty and researchers, plus government and NGO officials from around the world.

Stanford's global development and poverty effort is a university-wide initiative of the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies, known as Stanford Seed, and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. The conference was held at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, which was a partner in the event.

Kim's talk was optimistic about the newly adopted U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, with an ambitious agenda to end poverty and hunger, ensure healthy lives, empower women and girls and attain quality education for all children by 2030.

 

While those goals seem lofty, Kim pointed to the accomplishment of bringing down extreme poverty to 10 percent, a figure many had once said was impossible.

Ninety-one percent of children in developing countries now attend primary school, up from 83 percent in 2000, he said. And the number of people on antiretroviral drugs for treatment of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa has increased eightfold in the last decade.

"But we're humbled by the challenges ahead," Kim said. "Rising global temperatures will have devastating impacts on poor countries and poor people – and, as we saw with Ebola, major pandemics are likely to disproportionately affect the poor."

Pandemic threats

Kim said that most virologists and infectious disease experts are certain a pandemic will sweep the world in the next 30 years. He said that would lead to more than 30 million deaths and anywhere from 5 to 10 percent of lost GDP.

He blasted the global community for taking eight months to respond to the Ebola crisis in West Africa, noting that Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia had among the fastest growing economies in Africa before the outbreak killed more than 11,000 people – most of whom were poor.

In an effort to speed up financial aid the next time such an outbreak occurs, the World Bank is developing the Pandemic Emergency Facility, which would disburse funding immediately to national governments and responding agencies.

Rajiv Shah, the administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development from 2010-2015, spoke earlier at the conference about his work leading the U.S. efforts to contain Ebola.

"Three small countries with total population of maybe 30 million people had such weak health systems with so little domestic investment – in one country $6 per capita health investment per year – that when Ebola became a crisis there was no first-line of defense," he said.

By October 2014, the U.S. was pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into containment efforts, including the establishment of a 2,500-personnel military deployment to hit Ebola on the ground. Shah said President Obama "stayed extraordinarily true to the science" of containment at the source.

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Stunted children 

Moving beyond containment of epidemics, Kim said the most important investment developing countries could make in their people starts when a woman becomes pregnant. Using a combination of health, nutrition and education will have lifelong benefits for each child, as well as for the country in which each prospers.

The World Bank estimates that 26 percent of all children under age 5 in developing countries are stunted, which means they are malnourished and under-stimulated, risking a loss of cognitive abilities that lasts a lifetime. The number climbs to 36 percent in sub-Saharan Africa, giving those children limited prospects in life."This is a disgrace, a global scandal and, in my view, akin to a medical emergency," Kim said. "Children who are stunted by age 5 will not have an equal opportunity in life. If your brain won't let you learn and adapt in a fast-changing world, you won't prosper and, neither will society. All of us lose."

From 2001 to 2013, the World Bank invested $3.3 billion in early childhood development programs in poor countries. Kim said innovative policymaking and financial tools allowed the bank to help Peru cut its rate of child stunting in half to 14 percent in just eight years.

"Progress is possible – and it can happen quickly. But we must do even more,"he said.

Kim said the world set a target in 2012 to reduce stunting in children by 40 percent. But that would still leave 100 million children malnourished and undereducated. The bank and world leaders should pledge to end stunting for all children by 2030, he said.

"With partners like the Global Development and Poverty Initiative and the entire Stanford community, I'm full of hope that we can indeed be the first generation in human history to end extreme poverty and create a more just and prosperous world for everyone on the planet."

Read more here about another innovation to improve health in the developing world.

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Ambassador David Lane was nominated by President Barack Obama to serve as the U.S. Representative to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture and confirmed by the U.S. Senate on May 24, 2012.

Ambassador Lane has more than twenty years of experience working in leadership positions across sectors.  Before coming to Rome, he served at the White House as Assistant to the President and Counselor to the Chief of Staff. 

Prior to joining the Obama Administration, he served as President and CEO of the ONE Campaign, a global advocacy organization focused on extreme poverty, development, and reform.  Before that, as Director of Foundation Advocacy and the East Coast Office of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he helped lead that organization’s advocacy and public policy efforts. 

During the Clinton Administration, he served as Executive Director of the National Economic Council at the White House and Chief of Staff to the U. S. Secretary of Commerce.  He served as Vice-Chair of Transparency International USA, and he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations

Ambassador Lane earned his B.A. from the University of Virginia and his M.P.A. from the Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.   


Sponsored by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE). Supported in part by Zachary Nelson ('84) and Elizabeth Horn.

Ambassador David Lane, United States Representative to UN Agencies in Rome United States Representative to UN Agencies in Rome Speaker
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As part of the Arab Reform and Democracy Program's speaker series, UC Santa Barbara Historian Sherene Seikaly discusses her research on Egypt's 1977 bread intifada. A return to the historical moment of the “Bread Intifada,” of 1977 interrupts the narrative resilience of the alternating sleep and wakefulness of the Egyptian, and more broadly the Arab people. By engaging 18-19 January 1977 as a moment of politics and popular sovereignty, Seikaly's project challenges who and what count as political, rational, and legitimate. The role food played in protestors’ and government strategies and demands reveals how basic needs function as a trigger of social upheaval as well as a vehicle of political containment. This project attends to the roles that poverty and hunger play in politics in order to detail critiques of the open door policy. It explores how government officials, journalists, and protestors defined and ultimately contained the “poor” and the “hungry.” More importantly, by studying how protestors narrated and represented themselves and the tools they used to make their claims, this project troubles the construction of the “people.”  In so doing, it explores continuity and rupture between 1977 and 2011.

 

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Dana Phelps
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Mark Lorey, vice president for Child Development and Program Effectiveness at World Vision International, spoke on his experience working for a faith-based international NGO on human rights issues at the Stanford Program on Human Rights’ Winter Speaker Series, U.S. Human Rights NGOs and International Human Rights, on February 18, 2015.

Lorey addressed the Stanford audience from the Christian perspective and outlined World Vision’s mission for the sustained well-being of children. The projects and other initiatives that World Vision has in place often have a strong religious component to them. For example, many of the projects aim to empower local religious leaders to mobilize marginalized populations through deep faith and commitment to their God. He focused on the stigma and judgment that is attached to HIV/AIDS, especially coming from those of strict religious orientation. In believing in the capability for change, he presented a video that highlighted the experience of a devout Armenian Orthodox priest that once spoke adamantly against those inflicted with HIV/AIDS, but that through a World Vision educative program became a strong advocate for the victims of the disease.

Nicolle Richards, a Stanford undergraduate whose commitment to faith-based organizations has shifted considerably throughout her Stanford career, moderated the event. Richards pressed Lorey on World Vision’s work and the work of faith-based organizations more broadly. She questioned the contrast between faith-based and secular NGOs’ mission and impact in the field; the ethics involved when working with children of secular backgrounds; incorporating religious differences into their community work; and the details of a particular World Vision controversy over their decision to not hire people of different sexual orientations. Lorey struggled to answer many of these sensitive and important questions, leaving the audience with an impression that World Vision battles internally with its constraints as a faith-based organization and that the work of faith-based organizations may not be as impactful as we hope. There was a particularly uncomfortable tension in the room when Helen Stacy, director of the Program on Human Rights, interjected in the discussion, asking Lorey to speak in more detail about World Vision’s recently revoked anti-gay policy that inhibited the hiring of peoples in same-sex marriages. Unwilling to speak about this in an open forum, Lorey asserted that while it is an important issue, it is not one that he wished to dwell on.

Questions from the silenced audience were sparse, but addressed the prevalent gender inequalities among faith-based leaders and concerns about being overly authoritarian in the Good Samaritan model towards human rights work abroad.

Dana Phelps, Program Associate, Program on Human Rights


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Carolyn Miles, CEO and president of Save the Children, spoke on her organization’s efforts to protect children’s rights in many countries of the world at the Stanford Program on Human Rights’ Winter Speaker Series U.S Human Rights NGOs and International Human Rights on February 11, 2015.

Throughout her talk, Miles addressed the Stanford audience about the importance of protecting the basic needs of children, proclaiming the Save the Children mission: Every child deserves a childhood.  She spoke about the urgent needs of child refugees in Syria, the organization’s biggest and most challenging hurdle at present. The audience grew still when Miles played a Save the Children commercial capturing a Syrian child’s experience in one year of her life during the wake of the crisis. Miles raised other important issues, such as the critical importance of developing longer-term strategies that support children in the aftershock of crises, which often can be more damaging than the initial crisis itself. For example, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when thousands of children were displaced, organizations such as the Red Cross had no plan in place for caring for children in shelters beyond a short period of time. Save the Children trained Red Cross workers in preparedness techniques and strategies for emergency aftermath.

Helen Stacy, director of the Program on Human Rights and moderator of the event, questioned Miles on the organization’s strategy for accessing marginalized communities; prioritizing children that are forgotten or ignored; and the concern of overeducating and preparing children in countries with a depleted workforce. Miles believes that focusing on the hard-to-reach populations will close the gap between the majority and the minority, and that studies show that this is achievable when governments are made to feel accountable to their marginalized peoples when witnessed on an international level. In relation to unrealistically preparing children for the workforce, Miles stated that in the Middle East this may potentially be a problem, but that Save the Children endeavors to prepare students through matching their skillsets to jobs that are already available. When Stacy challenged Miles on the Western mindset that frames the Save the Children mission that “every child deserves a childhood," Miles agreed that it is a Western attitude but stood by her stance that she believes that all children under the age of eighteen are entitled to certain basic rights, regardless of non-Western cultural norms indicating otherwise. Questions from the audience included fundraising issues, learning from undesirable program evaluation results, dealing with diversity when designing projects and innovation in children’s rights.

Dana Phelps, Program Associate, Program on Human Rights

 

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Abstract:

Over the last four years of upheaval in the Arab world, the notion of “the people,” Egyptian and otherwise, has proven profoundly resilient.  It is these “people”—as individuals and a collective—that are problematically celebrated as subjects finally fulfilling their long-awaited destiny; dismissed as passive objects duped by external forces and incapable of politics; or incited against as dangerous masses capable of destroying the nation. A return to the historical moment of the “Bread Intifada,” of 1977 interrupts the narrative resilience of the alternating sleep and wakefulness of the Egyptian, and more broadly the Arab people. By engaging 18-19 January 1977 as a moment of politics and popular sovereignty, this project challenges who and what count as political, rational, and legitimate. The role food played in protestors’ and government strategies and demands reveals how basic needs function as a trigger of social upheaval as well as a vehicle of political containment. This project attends to the roles that poverty and hunger play in politics in order to detail critiques of the open door policy. It explores how government officials, journalists, and protestors defined and ultimately contained the “poor” and the “hungry.” More importantly, by studying how protestors narrated and represented themselves and the tools they used to make their claims, this project troubles the construction of the “people.”  In so doing, it explores continuity and rupture between 1977 and 2011. 

Speaker Bio:

sherenesphoto Sherene Seikaly

   
Sherene Seikaly is Assistant Professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the co-editor of the Arab Studies Journal, and co-founder and editor of Jadaliyya e-zine. Seikaly's Men of Capital in Times of Scarcity: Economy in Palestine (Stanford University Press, forthcoming) explores how Palestinian capitalists and British colonial officials used economy to shape territory, nationalism, the home, and the body.

This event is co-sponsored by the Arab Studies Institute and the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.

 


 

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Okimoto Conference Room
3rd Floor East Wing
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, California 94305

Sherene Seikaly Assistant Professor of History UCSB
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Abstract
The most important post-Nuremberg health-related human right and bioethics principle is informed consent. A series of post-9/11 developments, including quarantine and forced vaccination proposals, "altered standards of care" for disaster responders, eliminating consent for "emergency research," the post-ACA rise of "standard of care research," whole genome screening guidelines for adults and children, and proposals for newborns, gene bank proposals for "broad" or no consent, and the force-feeding of hunger strikers at Guantanamo and in US prisons, all suggest that informed consent should be seen as optional, and judged by a physician-determined standard of care. It's time to kill these zombies, and save the life of informed consent, and thus of the individual person who retains dignity and human rights.

George Annas is the cofounder of Global Lawyers and Physicians, a transnational professional association of lawyers and physicians working together to promote human rights and health.  He has degrees from Harvard College (A.B. economics, '67), Harvard Law School (J.D. '70) and Harvard School of Public Health (M.P.H. '72).

Professor Annas is the author or editor of 18 books on health law and bioethics, including Worst Case Bioethics:  Death, Disaster, and Public Health(2010),Public Health Law (2007),American Bioethics: Crossing Human Rights and Health Law Boundaries(2005),The Rights of Patients(3d ed. 2004),Some Choice: Law, Medicine, and theMarket (1999), Standard of Care: The Law of American Bioethics (l993), and Judging Medicine (1987), and a play entitled Shelley's Brain, that has been presented to bioethics audiences across the U.S. and in Australia. Professor Annas wrote a regular feature on "law and bioethics" for the Hastings Center Report from 1976 to 199l, and a regular feature on "Public Health and the Law" in the American Journal of Public Health from 1982 to 1992 and since 1991 has written a regular feature for the NewEngland Journal of Medicine (“Health Law, Ethics & Human Rights”).

He  is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the Institute of Medicine, a member of the National Academies’ Human Rights Committee, and co-chair of the American Bar Association's Committee on Health Rights and Bioethics (Individual Rights and Responsibilities Section). He has also held a variety of government regulatory posts, including Vice Chair of the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine, Chair of the Massachusetts Health Facilities Appeals Board, and Chair of the Massachusetts Organ Transplant Task Force.

 

Building 200 (History Corner)
Room 205
Stanford University

George J. Annas, JD, MPH Professor Speaker Boston University Schools of Public Health, Medicine, and Law
Seminars
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