Influencing and collaborating - Kate's blog from America

Blog updates from Kate Norgrove, WaterAid Head of Campaigns June 2010

It's a busy couple of weeks for Kate Norgrove, WaterAid Head of Campaigns (pictured right), as she travels to Washington DC and New York to attend some important and influential meetings.

In New York, she is taking part in the Civil Society Hearings on the MDGs. The consultation, which takes place on 14-15 June, gives civil society a chance to comment on the progress of the MDGs. The outcomes of this consultation will input into preparations for the Millennium Development Goal Summit taking place in September which aims to build on learning from the past 10 years and accelerate progress on achieving the goals.

Ahead of this, she also attends a key conference on gender and health as well as a meeting with Amnesty international and Realising Rights on how to bring human rights activists and development activists together.

Read her thoughts from these diverse and important events below, updated throughout her visit:

16 June 2010

We've had a few big days in our mission to get toilets and taps on to the agenda at the UN.

My colleague Idrissa (pictured left) and I, as well as Lajana from the Freshwater Action Network, have been attending two days of 'hearings' at the UN. This is an historic opportunity where member states of the UN (basically representatives of national governments, all 192 of them) have been listening to civil society from around the world talk about development.

Our governments are all right in the middle of negotiating the text that will be agreed at the important summit on the Millennium Development Goals this September, so the timing of these hearings couldn't be better.

Today saw Lajana give a searing speech to a room full of government representatives about the importance of sanitation and water to development. You could have heard a pin drop when she asked the room how many people they thought had, that morning, defecated in the open air (1.1 billion).

• Watch the speech on the UN website here (RealPlayer required).
  
  

I wondered how many times 'poo' has been discussed in this formal general assembly room – the one in all the pictures – the one that has seen heads of state discuss development issues for decades. Not enough, I imagine.

Lajana also asked states to "bring a revolution in water and sanitation by ending the neglect and making it a national development priority". She movingly described a concept of "water spirituality" and asked everyone to "recognise its centrality to life, dignity, peace and development".

Idrissa and I prepared those attending for Lajana's speech by picking off around 20 key governments to talk to, just as they were sitting down for the morning's session.

From Canada to Sierra Leone, Ghana to France, we toured the globe by heading from table to table, giving governments our suggested changes and additions to the draft outcome document which they are already negotiating on for September's summit.

Tomorrow we get a chance to talk to them all properly; we have back to back meetings lined up with embassy staff to discuss their thoughts on September.

The UN is the sort of place where it's easy to do this sort of networking. In the last few days I've seen old friends from Amnesty, World Vision, Social Watch, Save the Children and others (and got advice and agreed joint campaign actions with many of them), and bumped into a colleague from UNICEF in my favourite department store!

I even passed UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon walking down the street just yesterday – I thought about accosting him to talk about toilets but eventually decided that perhaps the colleagues with him might object!

14 June 2010

Some initial pictures from the civil society hearings, thoughts to follow tomorrow!

From left to right: Kate Norgrove, where all the action takes place and Lajana Manandhar representing the Freshwater Action Network Credit: WaterAid

11 June 2010

Kate's thoughts following a meeting with human rights organisations Amnesty and Realising Rights about bringing human rights activists and development activists together.

So, I’m writing from my room high up in a tower near the UN building in New York after a day looking at how human rights help development.

Traditionally, human rights activists and development activists, at least in the UK, do not always sit well together. Amnesty does their stuff and all the development types do theirs – and they don’t always talk to each other. Amnesty has recently launched a Dignity campaign, bringing their human rights expertise to development. Today I was at a brilliant day-long meeting organised by Amnesty and Realising Rights, the organization set up by Mary Robinson, ex-President of Ireland, to talk about bringing the two communities closer together.

Amnesty's concern is that the Millennium Development Goals, the goals agreed by governments in the year 2000, are largely silent on human rights. So what? I hear you say. The first goal commits governments to halving poverty by 2015, which we are due to meet – surely that's enough of an achievement in itself? Do human rights need to be brought in to it at all?

One of Amnesty's major objections to the goals is that they hardly touch on inequity and discrimination. The thing is that although we will meet some of the MDG targets in 2015 (although not the sanitation target), we will be leaving huge numbers of people behind. We are likely to reach that first goal of halving poverty only because of development in China and India; most of Sub-Saharan Africa will still be way back in the distance somewhere.

Although we know that discrimination against women drives poverty, the development goals hardly touch on women's rights. Measured by inequality, there's no way that we would be on track to meet the halving poverty target, nor, without tackling discrimination, will we meet many of the other targets.

Which brings me to next week, where Lajana from the Freshwater Action Network, Idrissa - my colleague at WaterAid - and I will be working the corridors at the UN to talk about those targets. We need to make sure that people's right to water and sanitation is firmly on the agenda for the UN MDG summit in September.

Find out more about Amnesty’s Dignity campaign

Read Amnesty's From Promises to Delivery; putting human rights at the heart of the development goals

Find out more about human rights organisation Realising Rights

10 June 2010

The following post was written about Women Deliver 2010, a global conference on gender and health that took place in Washington DC on 7-9 June 2010.

Imagine giving birth and nurturing a child during its first few months of life in Sierra Leone. This week's issue of Time magazine follows Mamma Sessay, an 18 year old woman giving birth and dying, just a few hours later, in a country with some of the worst maternal and child mortality rates in the world.

It was this photo-essay, along with a powerful film by the model Christy Turlington (No Woman No Cry) that had me unexpectedly weeping in a huge conference hall in Washington DC this week. I’m here to attend 'Women Deliver', a meeting where thousands of experts are coming together to try and tackle one of the world's forgotten crises; the millions of women and children dying preventable deaths each year in the developing world.

Dirty water, and particularly poor sanitation, have something to do with the problem. Although it is barely mentioned at the conference, poor sanitation is a major cause of diarrhoea – surely the most ordinary of symptoms - which causes 4,000 children to die each day. Recently experts have shown that the role of poor sanitation in malnutrition may have been massively under-estimated. This is why I’m in DC.

The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon speaks at the very opening session of the conference, to launch a grand action plan for maternal and child health. All very stirring stuff; but when he lists out the main challenges for the achievement of child health, the cheapest and simplest intervention – decent hygiene and sanitation – doesn't get a mention.

But what he does tell us that I'm happy about is that 2010 will be a turning point for women's health'. This September will see the world meet again, ten years in to the millennium, to review progress on development. The sanitation target is, in Africa, the second most off-track of the Millennium Development Goals that were agreed at the turn of the century. Women bear the brunt of poor sanitation and we want to see real progress on this target in September.

Which is where I'm off to now. In the next few days I'll be heading over to New York to go to the UN itself and report back to you all from there.

Read The Perils of Pregnancy; One Woman’s Tale of Dying to Give Birth with photos by Lyndsey Addario on Time magazine's website

Find out more about No Woman No Cry, a film by Christy Turlington-Burns, which will be launched in London soon

Please sign our petition calling on the UK's new government to prioritise water and sanitation if you haven't already.