Posted in Entries on November 28, 2012 by CIFA General
How do you educate millions of people whose lives may be at risk from HIV, when their cultures or religions taboo any open discussion of sex?
This is one of the biggest challenges in the fight for an HIV/AIDS-free world. Shame, stigma, and misinformation stemming from cultural and/or religious restrictions on talking about human sexuality are serious barriers to HIV risk-reduction education, especially in rural areas with limited access to medical and educational resources.
At the Center for Interfaith Action on Global Poverty (CIFA), we have always found that targeting faith leaders across religious institutions, in the spirit of honest education in the language of their faith, yields great results for community health and well-being – this is because in many areas, faith leaders are often the most trusted sources of guidance and information. This overall strategy of engaging faith communities to promote positive behavior change, is something we call “The Faith Effect” – and we believe it can be used to end the stigma, shame, and misinformation surrounding HIV, and open up honest conversations about HIV risk reduction strategies in areas with high infection rates.
Faith communities have long been vital allies in the fight against HIV/AIDS. For example, The International Network of Religious Leaders Living With or Personally Affected by HIV and AIDS (INERELA +) and the World Council of Churches have united religious leaders across faith traditions in the name of promoting open discussion and HIV advocacy. CIFA seeks to build on these organizations’ gains and continue to develop concrete tools and plans of action for faith leaders who wish to educate their communities.
CIFA’s most recent research and collaboration efforts in Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, and Mozambique have re-affirmed the validity of this approach, and have resulted in exciting new developments in our interfaith HIV risk reduction work. The results of this research were used to develop messages and educational tools to be used across faiths, with appropriate religious textual references. We have developed an interfaith education toolkit for faith and religious leaders, “PrEParing Your Community: A Toolkit for HIV Education & Risk Reduction.” The guide consists of lessons and information about the full range of HIV risk reduction methods available, including pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP (anti-retrovirals taken by HIV-negative people in the form of a pill or gel to reduce their risk of infection from an HIV-positive partner), where available/approved, as well as resources and tools for these leaders to help engage their communities in discussion of many healthy HIV risk reduction strategies.
On October 31, 2012, we submitted our completed toolkit, a template which can be easily adapted to local needs to our funders at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University.
The “PrEParing Your Community” toolkit is a faith leader guide that consists of multiple interactive components, and is designed to be used by three of the largest faith communities our target countries: Protestant Christianity, Catholicism, and Islam. Practical information is presented in the language of faith, and is easily adapted across several different cultures. The toolkit:
- Begins with an opportunity for faith leaders to inform themselves about HIV, and the myths surrounding transmission and prevention.
- Offers guidance on organizing discussions: once they feel they know enough to begin talking about HIV, faith leaders can then “Begin the Conversation” with their community, either one-on-one or in small or large groups.
- Provides “Conversation Starters” with faith-specific messages and verses about HIV risk-reduction, centered around kindness and acceptance towards all, and our duty to protect others.
- Includes lesson plans with activities for men’s, women’s, and youth groups associated with Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim houses of worship, as well as a pre-marital counseling guide for young couples.
CIFA is excited to announce this breakthrough in our initiative to provide real ways for religious leaders to end shame and stigma, and promote positive education and action through this branch of “The Faith Effect.” We are pleased to be able to help empower faith leaders around the world, in places where these messages are needed most, and look forward to seeing how this program can be scaled up.
Posted in Entries on November 19, 2012 by CIFA General
Since the first recognition of Universal Children’s Day in 1954, the international community has made great strides in working protect and nurture children around the world, ensuring them greater opportunity and a brighter future.
Child mortality rates have decreased by an average of 2% per year since 1990, sparing millions of children annually. Improvements in the access to vaccines, AIDS medicines, vitamin supplements, and medical care have accounted for millions more children living to adulthood.
Yet despite the billions of dollars invested in international aid, the supply of medication, and other aid services, the challenge of ensuring that all children have access to the care they need remains critical. This year, 6.9 million children died before reaching the age of five. Heartbreakingly, the overwhelming majority of them died of causes that could have been easily prevented through simple actions and engagement. Securing the delivery of medicine and services to those who need it most as well as promoting positive behavior change that directly addresses child mortality remains a top priority.
Here at the Center for Interfaith Action on Global Poverty (CIFA), we recognize that ensuring the survival and wellbeing of the world’s children is a goal many different faith traditions share. That is why CIFA launched Ten Promises to Our Children in partnership with Religions for Peace earlier this year.
Ten Promises to Our Children is a collection of action-oriented goals that help address issues of child survival pragmatically and effectively. These Promises outline a ground-breaking approach to radically change the way we reach these children in need – by engaging all our communities around ten simple behaviors that can make the biggest difference right away. By signing the Ten Promises to Our Children pledge, anyone can voice their support for practical, efficient ways to ensure child survival, and begin learning about what they can do to help.
Bringing together faith communities to engage with one another helps bridge gaps and create access to the world’s most difficult-to-reach communities. The Ten Promises initiative welcomes all faith communities, faith leaders, and individuals (whether or not they identify with a particular faith) to come together and help promote immediate and life-changing actions that will save hundreds of thousands of lives.
As we recognize Universal Children’s Day today, we should reflect and celebrate on how far we’ve come. However, we must also focus on how best to reach the 6.9 million children who still need support. Together, we can pledge to end global poverty directly, by delivering on the Ten Promises to Our Children.
Sign and share the Ten Promises pledge and see how you can engage your community in taking action to combat global poverty and child mortality.
Posted in Entries on October 15, 2012 by CIFA
In commemorating the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, it is important to reflect on the work we do and work to understand why it is so necessary. All of us who work in development undoubtedly share the same goals, and are focused on working towards a world without poverty, disease, or inequality, where every child will live to see their fifth birthday. But what does “eradication of poverty” really mean, and how is it achieved?
To most, the “eradication of poverty” is something that can only be achieved when certain obstacles are removed. For example, the elimination of malaria, HIV, or harmful practices that jeopardize the health of girls around the world are at the core of what many organizations focused on eradicating poverty consider to be their mission. Many organizations share this unifying goal, and today many of them will come together to raise visibility for efforts to solve these issues and work to galvanize greater support for the future. However, the eradication of poverty and the elimination of hurdles doesn’t occur by simply targeting a barrier for removal. The process by which these challenges are addressed requires engagement from wide sectors of the community, both local and international.
An integral and often overlooked part of combating global poverty comes from engaging faith communities, faith leaders, and individuals of faith, and empowering them to lead positive behavioral change within their own communities. The unique ability of religious communities to tackle controversial yet pressing global health issues is largely underestimated and often underutilized. Fortunately, the power of interfaith action in the fight against poverty is slowly gaining attention.
Here at the Center for Interfaith Action on Global Poverty (CIFA), we recognize the unique influence that faith leaders and their respective religious infrastructures can have in addressing challenges and promoting positive behavior change in their communities. Faith leaders are often the most trusted sources of guidance and information and hold great influence in even the most rural, hard-to-reach areas of the world. Unfortunately, they are often bypassed or ignored altogether by development efforts, seen only as obstacles to true progress rather than powerful allies in the mission to enact long-lasting change.
CIFA is taking on many of the same issues as other non-government organizations (NGOs), mounting campaigns to combat malaria, HIV, female genital cutting, child marriage, and an initiative to increase child survival in the developing world. We address these challenges at their roots by actively working to mobilize, educate, and empower faith leaders of all religious traditions to engage their communities around common development goals.
CIFA’s longest-running initiative, a program focused on decreasing malaria rates in Nigeria, has demonstrated how successful interfaith collaboration can create real change. In early 2009, CIFA and partner institution Religions for Peace helped found the Nigerian Interfaith Action Association (NIFAA), an independent, Nigerian-managed NGO, with a mission to mobilize the country’s religious leaders to take action in national campaigns against disease and poverty, beginning with malaria. Within a year, over 6,000 NIFAA-trained religious leaders worked to deliver faith-based malaria prevention messages that ultimately doubled the number of children under five sleeping under insecticide-treated mosquito nets in their districts.
The same potential for success is also being observed in CIFA’s pilot program for girl empowerment, “The Faith Effect: Equipping Faith Leaders to Empower Women and Girls.” There, with the support of the Nike Foundation, CIFA has designed and managed two phases of formative research and program work on faith leaders and their influence with regards to harmful traditional practices such as early marriage and female genital cutting (FGC). In September and October 2012, CIFA partners in Ethiopia conducted faith trainings for both Ethiopian Orthodox Christian and Muslim faith leaders, providing comprehensive education about FGC and early marriage, and equipping faith leaders with the tools they need to address these issues in their communities.
The results were stunning: 100% of faith leaders invited to these sessions completed the training, and the participants of both faiths drafted and signed declarations opposing the practices of FGC and early marriage, as well as committing to multi-phase plans for educating their communities on these issues.
Saving lives through interfaith action is the goal of all CIFA programming. Nowhere is this encapsulated better than in CIFA’s Ten Promises to Our Children campaign. Launched in partnership with Religions for Peace, Ten Promises to Our Children is a global, interfaith initiative to engage religious communities around the world in saving children’s lives through ten concrete and specific acts. The initiative mobilizes faith leaders, congregations, faith-based institutions, NGO’s, and individuals across diverse faith traditions all over the world around ten practical things they can do to save children’s lives.
By signing the Ten Promises to Our Children pledge, individuals, faith leaders, and organizations can commit to raising awareness, raising funds, or creatively pooling resources in order to ensure all children benefit from these basic yet vital actions, and create a demand for life-saving health services. These ten behaviors, which are endorsed by UNICEF and other international aid organizations, include simple methods to prevent some of the most common yet preventable killers of children in the developing world: malaria, pneumonia, diarrhea, and malnutrition. This, however, cannot be done without a unifying approach that utilizes the global power of faith communities. To date, nearly 300 religious leaders from all major faith traditions and over 90 faith and aid-based organizations have signed the Ten Promises to Our Children pledge, and more continue to sign every day.
As we focus on the importance of combating global poverty today, we must remember that every part of the international community must be engaged and empowered to enact change locally – this is the key to achieving full “eradication of poverty.” CIFA is proud of its successful efforts to develop powerful and simple initiatives that engage and assist religious leaders and faith communities in the effort to fight global poverty and disease and improve the lives of men, women, and children around the world.
Posted in Entries on October 10, 2012 by CIFA
Today marks the first annual International Day of the Girl Child, a day that should hold major significance for all of those working for girls' rights across the world. Fortunately for all of us, the international community has increased public awareness and advocacy efforts for girl empowerment in the past 2-3 years, with particular focus on economic and educational empowerment. Included in these efforts is a focus on ending harmful practices that disproportionately affect the well-being of girls worldwide, specifically, the practices of child/early marriage and female genital cutting (FGC). On behalf of the Center for Interfaith Action on Global Poverty, I would like to share some highlights of CIFA's exciting and unique work in this field.
In many areas of the world, religious leaders are among the most trusted and influential leaders in the community. They can have significant impact, not only on the day-to-day lives of their congregants and community members, but on the beliefs and practices supported by a given community. In order to achieve real and lasting change for girls affected by these harmful practices, religious leaders, or the gatekeepers of tradition and culture in even the most hard-to-reach areas, must be engaged. This is the philosophy behind "The Faith Effect," and this is how CIFA is working towards empowering girls, through the elimination of child/early marriage and FGC.
With generous support from the Nike Foundation, CIFA has pioneered a groundbreaking new approach to combat early marriage and FGC. CIFA’s pilot program, "The Faith Effect: Equipping Faith Leaders to Empower Women and Girls" seeks to provide religious leaders across faith traditions with the knowledge and tools to engage their communities in open discussion of the realities of child/early marriage and FGC, and mobilize them towards ending these harmful practices for good.
Two years of quantitative and qualitative research have led to the development of faith-based behavior change communication tools, in the form of faith leader training sessions, training manuals to educate the faith leaders themselves, and educational toolkits (including religious text-based conversation starters, youth and women's group lessons, and FAQ's) for community engagement. All of these tools are culturally sensitive, written in the language of faith, and approved by high-level theological authorities.
None of this, of course, could have been done without the tireless efforts of our on-the-ground partners: Dr. Samson Hailegiorgis (MD, PhD, MPH) in Ethiopia, and Dr. Adeyinka Abimbola in Nigeria (MBBS, MBA), who have dedicated their time, resources, and connections to helping us conduct robust research and facilitate everything from focus group discussions to faith leader trainings. These two, and all of our partners in multiple countries, are helping us help faith leaders make the world a better place for girls.
Ending harmful practices like FGC and child/early marriage is an international effort that is fundamental to guaranteeing the human rights of women and girls throughout the world. We are inspired by the international community’s focus on these issues and are proud to help mark this first annual International Day of the Girl Child with our partners, volunteers, and supporters.
Posted in Entries on March 10, 2012 by CIFA
Ms. Fatima Gebril knows from personal experience the challenges children in her community face. As a child Fatuma became an orphan, and as she grew older, she began to understand more and more the personal burden carried by parentless children.
In 2003, she started the Community-Based Child Support Program, directed at both Christians and Muslims, in Bahirdar, Ethopia, which began with 87 children. Fatuma’s program focuses on educational and psychological support, as well as developing life- skills. An important part of her advocacy efforts is encouraging schools to provide financial support for orphaned children who cannot afford school fees. These include children who have lost one parent, those who have lost both parents, and those who are in living in great poverty. For children who have lost only one parent, Fatuma works to support that family financially and emotionally. For children who have lost both parents, they look for relatives, and support the family once the child is taken in.
What I find most inspirational about Fatuma‘s story was not only her passion for helping children in her community but how she is willing to try anything to improve the lives of these children. This includes leveraging religious leaders to support her cause, and she has an excellent working relationship with the imams as well as with other government and community leaders.
Fatuma also believes Imams can play a great role in eliminating harmful traditional practices such as child marriage. Imams are highly heard in the mosque. So if they speak out boldly on these harmful traditional practices, it will be easy to bring about the desired change.
Fatuma has become talented at leveraging religious institutions to support her initiatives. Thanks to her efforts, at the ritual Muslim engagement ceremony, it is now established practice for the couple to be asked, in private, if they love each other. The man will also be asked if he understands the woman’s rights. Fatuma has also established an impressive record of legal interventions in unlawful marriages with underage girls or polygamous arrangements. Her role in the community as the protector of the vulnerable has allowed her to expand her advocacy and she looks forward to establishing her programs in new neighborhoods to spread her message of equality.
This blog was featured on the Tony Blair Faith Foundation's My Female Faith Hero blog series. Check out the original post here.
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