Category Archives: Of Note

shipment arrives in malawi

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Our 40 foot container packed full of donated excess goods has just arrived in Malawi!

After a long journey at sea, 800 calculators, 4,000 bottles of anti-bacterial soap, 2,800 teacher bags, 30,000 cups and over 15,000 notepads (and much more) have finally arrived at our program sites outside of Lilongwe.

Members of the local community helped to unpack and store the goods, which will be distributed to 14 Goods for Good partner community-based organizations, public schools and orphan care centers in the coming months.

Thank you to all our supporters - you made this shipment possible!

Click HERE to see more pictures of the shipment’s arrival.

Goods for Good matches excess goods from the U.S. with the needs of vulnerable children in the developing world.

Welcome Blessings!

The Goods for Good program department is very excited to announce a new addition to the team! Blessings Lungu will be continuing the work of Aaron Lewani as the Goods for Good Malawi Program Manager. Blessings has previously worked as a Field Monitoring Assistant for Word Food Programme, District Planning Advisor for the United Nations Development Program and Program Monitor at Chinsomo Children’s Club in Malawi.

Takulandilani Blessings (Welcome in Chichewa) We’re glad to have you on board!

International Day of Rural Woman

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October 15th is International Day of Rural Women.

International Day of Rural Women was launched as an empowerment and educational campaign in 1995 during a UN Conference on Women.  It is now celebrated in more than 100 countries around the world. In honor of this day, I’ve created an album to recognize the women of the rural communities with which Goods for Good works.

Click HERE to check it out.

Some interesting points from a WomensWatch article about the critical role rural women play in their communities and the challenges they face:

  • 428 million women work in the agricultural sector around the world.
  • In sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, women produce over  80% of foodstuffs and in Southeast Asia, women account for up to 90% of the labor that goes into rice cultivation.
  • Women in agriculture are less likely than men to have access to land, equipment, training, credit, and other tools that could help them significantly improve their food securities and livelihood.
  • Because many of the tasks these women perform (clearing land, sowing seeds, hauling wood, etc.) are difficult to quantify and due to longstanding biases which undervalue their work, many  of their essential contributions go unnoticed.
  • This lack of recognition often leads to other problems such as a loss of livelihood when sexual violence leaves them afraid to return to the fields.
  • “Narrowing the gap between the general perception of rural women and their actual contributions and needs is essential to reducing hunger and improving lives in rural, developing areas, which are home to 70 percent of the world’s poor and hungry men, women and children,” says Eve Crowley, Principal Advisor in the Gender, Equity and Rural Employment Division.

New Jersey School Raises $1,800

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Waterfront Montessori School in New Jersey raised over $1,800 for Goods for Good through a student-run carnival. Each student created his or her own booth, which featured such awesome games as Splish-Splash, Wack-a-Mole, Beanie Bowling and ring toss. Sounds like a great time for a good cause!

The Goods for Good Team would like to extend a BIG thank you to the students, teachers and parents of Waterfront Montessori for their generous support. Their efforts will go a long way in supporting the children in our programs. Consider what $1,800 can provide to our partners in Malawi:

*Pens and notepads for the school year for 3,600 students  *Locally made school uniforms for 3,000 primary school children and tailoring training for older orphans *23 Teachers Supply Closets, each stocked with enough school supplies to teach 1,000 students for a school year

To link your school or other organization to an under-resourced school in Malawi, check out our School Connect program.

Goods for Good matches excess goods from the U.S. with the needs of vulnerable children in the developing world.

Malawian Chief Applauds Goods for Good!

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Goods for Good matches excess goods from the U.S. with the needs of vulnerable children in the developing world.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind

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The story of William Kamkwamba, aka The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, is one of true ingenuity and potential.

From a small village in central Malawi, William was forced to quit school at age 14 because his family could no longer afford his school fees. Fascinated by science, he decided to continue his education by reading at a nearby library. One day he happened to pick up an old textbook with a picture of a windmill on it. “I was very interested when I saw the windmill could make electricity and pump water,” said William. “I thought: That could be a defense against hunger. Maybe I should build one for myself.”

Though his fellow villagers were utterly perplexed when they saw William tinkering with spare bicycle parts, a tractor fan blade, and an old shock absorber for months on end (many thought he was smoking marijuana), their confusion turned to amazement when they witnessed the final product: William’s first functional windmill. The 16ft tall wooden structure was soon powering light bulbs and charging cell phones throughout the village (an amazing feat considering only 2% of Malawians have access to electricity).

Not long after his first prototype was created, William built a new windmill, named the Green Machine, that turned a water pump to irrigate his family’s field and installed a solar-powered pump that brought the first portable water source to the entire region around his village.

“I want to hep my country and apply the knowledge I’ve learned” he says. “I feel there’s lots of work to be done.”

The Boy Who Harnessed Wind, a book about William’s story, co-authored by Bryan Mealer, has just been published in the US. We can’t wait to read it!

Read the full BBC article here.

Dialing for Answers

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This NYT article profiles Question Box, an innovative nonprofit telephone hotline that connects people from rural areas to the information they need. 

The concept behind Question Box is that barriers such as lack of computers and internet connection keep many living in the developing world from accessing important information available on Web search engines, thus putting them at a disadvantage for economic development. Rose Shuman, creater of Question Box, decided to bring information to these people in a way that is most convenient for them: cell phones. While internet connection in rural areas is both costly and slow, cell phones abound, especially in Africa. Cell phone use has more than tripled in the last 3 years with more than 300 million African having cell phones.

Each day, workers form rural areas dial into Question Box’s call center, located outside of Uganda’s capital, to ask questions on behalf of the locals. Operators at the call center will look up the information and relay it to the workers, who then pass it along to the villagers. 

Nathan Eagle, who has researched cellphones and development in Africa, said that while these services can be helpful, they must listen to the needs of their users. “We can’t sit in our offices in America and decide what is useful to people and what is meaningful in their lives,” he said. “The services only add value if they are open-ended.” 

Ms. Shuman said that this is precisely what Question Box aims to do. The service is first and foremost a tool for economic development. In Uganda, where over 80% of the population works in the agricultural sector, receiving accurate and timely information about crop prices and  planting techniques is hugely important.  “In this way we are helping farmers make decisions regarding where to sell, what to plant and how to best take care for their crops,” Ms. Shuman said. “It’s all about giving communities the ability to help themselves.”

“Most of Uganda’s rural agricultural communities are simply too remote to make it cost effective for Internet providers to offer service there,” said John Gosier, chief technolgoy officer at Question Box.  “Even in the next 10 years I don’t think you’re going to see areas like this being wired. That’s why Question Box will continue to be an important tool for getting people in these areas the information they need.”

Check out G4G Malawi Program manager Aaron Lewani’s article in Malawian newspaper, The Nation. 

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A Third Way to Think about AID

The debate over foreign aid often pits those who mistrust “charity” against those who mistrust reliance on the markets. Jaqueline Novogratz, founder and CEO of Acumen Fund, proposes a middle way she calls patient capital, with promising examples of entrepreneurial innovation driving social change. 

Watch her TED talk here.

Hopeful Signs in Malawi

The global effort to improve children’s chances for survival has reached a milestone: the number of children dying before their fifth birthday has fallen to an all-time low, according to data released by UNICEF on Thursday. Child mortality rates have declined more than a quarter in the past two decades because of more widely distributed vaccinations, anti-malarial mosquito nets, a rise in breast-feeding and philanthropies like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that have donated billions of dollars towards the effort.

Malawi, though one of the world’s poorest country, has experienced one of the most extreme drops in child mortality rates. For every 1,000 Malawian babies born, 125 more survived to their fifth birthday in 2008 than in 1990. Malawi’s success in reducing child mortality is not a given, but the result of their ability to find creative preventative measures and cost-effective treatments. South Africa by contrast, the richest and most developed country on the continent, has experienced a rise in child mortality, many would say because of their flawed political leadership and health-care policy.

One powerful weapon that Malawian has against child mortality is their 10,000 high-school educated village health workers who are trained to diagnose childhood killers, dispense medicines, and give injections, tasks that only doctors and nurses can perform in other countries.

Mr. Mwaraya, a village health worker who earns $90 a month, has a box in his home containing birth control injections and treatments for the most common childhood killers: otrimoxazole, a low-cost antibiotic, against pneumonia; oral rehydration salts for diarrhea; and Coartem, medicine for malaria. “My interest was to assist my fellow Malawians who were falling sick but never had treatment at the village level,” he said.

“Malawi is changing for the better,” said Doris Hebuye, a Malawian woman who listened while her daughter Fanny, a new mother, was counseled by a health-worker on breast-feeding, the danger signs of sickness, and choices for birth control. Mrs. Hebuye had lost two of her seven children for reasons she never fully understood. “In those days, people gave birth without advice. These days, women are assisted in many ways.”

Click here to read the full NYT article.

Goods for Good matches excess from the United States with the needs of vulnerable children in the developing world.