Poverty fight starts at home

from the Fiji Times

About 200 youths from all over Fiji converged on Lautoka for the Youth at Risk 2007 seminar.

Part of their program was to sign a petition for a "stand up against poverty" banner to eventually reach Africa.

This youth-driven project aims to achieve a Guinness world record by creating the globe's biggest banner for Make Poverty History

The joint banner will be a huge show of support for the world's poor and a call for world leaders to make poverty history, especially in African countries.

In every region of the world Oceania, Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, South America and the Middle East youth organisations are creating Banners Against Poverty.

These banners will be displayed over October 16-17 as part of Stand Up and Speak Out against poverty as well as for the Millennium Development Goals.

After October 17 national banners will be joined together to form a global Banner Against Poverty.

The banners creatively express people's demands for the world to take action to end extreme poverty and are an expression of the White Band, the global symbol for action against poverty.

In more than 30 countries massive banners are being created by students, trade unionists and citizens who want to artistically express their demands for an end to poverty.

Everyday 30,000 children die as a result of extreme poverty.

To tackle these problems:

- Richer countries should increase aid and ensure it is used effectively;

- trade must be fair;

- debts of poor countries must be reduced;

- governments in poor countries must be accountable, and

- climate change needs to be tackled.

In Pakistan more than 1.2-million people have signed a 10-kilometre banner that will be displayed in Bahawalpur.

In Ghana, students have joined individual banners to create a large banner that will be displayed at the Independence Square in Accra.

In Canada, local chapters of the Make Poverty History campaign have created a banner that will be displayed in front of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa.

Fiji Council of Social Services executive director Hassan Khan said instead of following the world trend of signing banners, youths in the country could be more active by doing something practical to eradicate poverty where they lived.

He said they could make better use of their time by being involved in farming initiatives to provide local fruits and vegetables for the hotel industry in Fiji as there was not enough local supply.

I mean what is the relevance of this banner to Fiji.

"Even the civil society organisations like ours did not know about this banner signing initiative but even if we did we would have suggested something else be done like farming," he said.

Mr Khan said some people were just making money or having free meals out of researching and discussing issues related to poverty but were really doing nothing to help the poor.

"It would have been a better idea to have local initiatives rather than adopting overseas ones that meant nothing to the local communities," he said.

"There are grassroots program that could better utilise funding in their projects that would improve the lifestyle of people in Fiji."

Mr Khan said there were people travelling business class by plane to overseas conferences, sleeping in five-star hotels talking about poverty in Fiji and they simply had no idea about the problems, struggles and stories of the poor as well as what they were talking about.

"Some even publish books and make money yet not a single cent goes to the poor from the profit, these people are just hypocrites," he said.

Ministry of Youth director Josefa Matau, at the official opening of the Youth At Risk seminar 2007, told young people at the seminar they represented one of Fiji's biggest windows of opportunity for national growth, development and prosperity.

"And this isn't something that's being realised here in Fiji alone but all across the world as leaders begin to digest the findings of the World Bank report titled Development for the Next Generation."

Mr Matau said Fiji's provisional census results indicated that the youth population has risen by 6 per cent since 1996.

"Youth now make up 26 per cent of Fiji's population and can become a potentially creative, stronger and therefore a more productive workforce," he said.

Mr Matau said the three-day seminar was about exploring and highlighting issues that could affect young people and proposing solutions and plans to counter them.

This year the focus was on health including overcoming the challenges and adversity of HIV/AIDS particularly as many of those affected and at risk of being affected were youths.

He said the announcement of the 2008 Budget last week cemented the restructure of the Ministry's Youth Development programs under the National Youth Service Scheme.

Mr Matau said the ministry would target the development of annual school leavers and job seekers to improve their competency skills as well as their employability through a customer and a market oriented approach.

He told youths the future was really in their hands.

"You just need to take ownership of your own development and that of your peers.

"Stop looking to others to do things for you, come out of your shells, interact and network to tap into the window of opportunities that your peers as a group represent."

Today 1.2 billion people live on less than $1 a day.

Eight hundred million people go hungry every day.

Targets for the Millennium development goals include that all children should complete a full course of primary schooling as 133 million young people cannot read or write.

There is the aim to eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education as two thirds of the world's illiterate people are females.

Another goal is to reduce mortality for children under five years as more than 11 million children under five die annually from preventable diseases.

Fiji too needs to wake up and work towards reducing poverty.

It must start from our leaders and trickle down to individual members of our families, where everyone realises the value of hard work.

Only then will we, as a nation, be able to improve our lifestyles for ourselves and that of our children's.

Everything begins at home.