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Smart and Cool students are asked to discuss the topic of world poverty, especially how poverty in Haiti affects children.  After reading this VOANews.com article, what are your thoughts about the situation in Haiti?  What can be done to erase world poverty?

Poverty in Haiti Places Children at Risk for Labor Exploitation

by Brian Wagner

Port-au-Prince

29 April, 2008
U.N. officials are working with Haiti’s government to prevent scores of children from falling prey to forced labor. VOA’s Brian Wagner reports that chronic poverty places many children at risk of exploitation.

Many Haitians take pride that their nation was the first in the Americas to abolish slavery during a revolt in 1791. Yet even today, scores of children labor as unpaid domestic servants in homes across the impoverished Caribbean nation.

The U.N. Childrens Fund estimates that more than 170,000 children, mostly girls, do not attend school and engage in forced labor in a practice known as restavek. Many come to the capital from rural areas, where parents say they have no resources to provide food and schooling for some of their children.

These children clean, perform chores, and live in the homes of extended family members or non-family.

Sintyl Wilson runs a school in the Martissant neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, where he says he is working to keep the numbers of restavek children down. He says, if not for free meals and low tuition at his school, some of his 125 students would likely be working as domestic servants.

Wilson says the neighborhood is full of restavek children. He says the students most at risk of being pressed into work are those with siblings who already are restaveks.

U.N. estimates show about half of Haitian children attend primary school, and about 20 percent continue on to secondary school.

This school in Martissant offers afternoon classes for restavek children who must work during the day.

Now, Wilson says he is trying to draw more restavek children into the school, by offering vocational training for students to become auto mechanics, electricians or develop other trades. Wilson shows off brand-new wrenches and other hand tools he has bought for students to begin apprenticing in a nearby auto repair shop.

One of those students is 15-year-old Audrel Delil, whom Wilson found living on the streets.

Audrel says he came to the Haitian capital about a year ago from the southwestern port town of Jeremie.

He says he came to live with his aunt, but she beat him when he was disobedient and did not send him to school.

Audrel fled his aunt’s house and now lives on the top floor of the cramped school, along with several other children who have no other safe place to stay.

The school’s assistant director, Jean Baptiste Marie Marline, says children pressed into domestic service often face a difficult future.

Marline says children in abusive and demeaning situations often have low self-esteem and, even if they flee restavek homes they can be drawn into forced labor by others.

Haiti’s government has laws on the books forbidding forced labor and child abuse. But experts say many children can fall through the cracks in a nation where scores of babies never receive a birth certificate.

Massimo Toschi, a child welfare expert with the U.N. Mission in Haiti, says a child without a birth certificate has very few legal protections. “So basically they do not exist, and it is very easy to have them forced into trafficking, exploitation, child labor, and no one would know about it,” he said.

Earlier this year, the U.N. mission began targeting restavek with a media campaign featuring Haitian-born musician Wyclef Jean.

Toschi says the goal is to raise awareness about the plight of thousands of children and challenge cultural acceptance of restavek.

Also, U.N. officials from UNICEF and the U.N. mission in Haiti have been working with the government to improve its ability to monitor orphanages across the country. Experts say traffickers take advantage of the weaknesses of Haiti’s birth registry system and adoption agencies to gain custody over orphans.

Toschi says the U.N. mission has seen improvements in orphanage monitoring efforts in the past year. But he says the problem of restavek goes beyond enforcing existing laws. “Children restavek exist because their families are poor, that they cannot manage to cope with feeding their children. So the real problem is the poverty,” he said.

Higher food and transport costs in recent months are raising more concern about the future of the majority of Haitians, who live on less than $2 a day.

Please write a constructive comment below and let us know what you think about this article and topic.  What can be done to erase world poverty?

Here are examples of cool and smart American people who are using their skills to help people in Africa.  What are your thoughts about this article from VOANews.com?  What else can we do to make this a better world?  Add your constructive comments below.

US Students Help Upgrade Water Resources in Northern Ghana

By Howard Lesser

Washington

27 March 2008

MIT Sloan School Grad Student Matt Thomson - Download (MP3)
MIT Sloan School Grad Student Matt Thomson - Listen (MP3)

A team of graduate students from one of America’s top business schools has just returned from Northern Ghana after helping a small company provide safe drinking water to rural and nearby urban communities around the city of Tamale.  The students, MBA and engineering candidates at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, the entrepreneurial arm of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology near Boston, conducted marketing surveys and developed sustainability solutions for the Ghanaian company Pure Home Water (PHW), striving to improve the qualities of filtration, taste, cost, and cleanliness.  Second-year MBA candidate Matt Thomson explains how the team developed new strategies for marketing and improving the quality of H2O to Ghanaian consumers.

“What we did was really a marketing survey that broke down water filtration and water home treatment into five aspects: water taste and clarity, product type, filtration speed, price, and health, the most important one.  What we were doing was taking those five and saying, to the average Ghanaian person, ‘Which is the most important quality in water filtration?’” he noted.

In earlier surveys American consumers had shown partiality to taste and clarity in their preferences. But for both rural and urban respondents of Northern Ghana, who regularly experience water shortages during annual seasonal droughts, health was the prevailing factor.  With strong participation and cooperation from the local population, the MIT team, which included four researchers and a water engineer, conducted intensive 45-minute surveys with their subjects.  Residents sampled alternative methods of filtration, from traditional Ghanaian-manufactured pipes and filters to conventional, modern steel technology used widely in the west and registered their preferences.  Thomson says that cost was of minimal concern to the northern community, which surprisingly indicated it would gladly pay higher prices for guarantees of obtaining better grades of water.

“The most interesting thing we found, by far, was that price wasn’t as important as we thought it was going to be.  Any economist will tell you that anybody in the world would go for the lowest priced product, and what we found is that’s really not true.  They equated higher price with a better product quality.  And that’s based on the fact that the data in our surveys showed consistently that people actually preferred a higher price,” he said.

Thomson called the Ghanaian survey group “the most patient people I’ve ever been privy to, interrupting their subsistence work, inviting us into their homes, and looking at this, honestly, as something that was going to be very good for their community.”  However, he points out a major drawback of the community’s water delivery system is its inadequate resources to keep delivery flows on all the time, a weakness that leads to widespread hoarding and contamination of reserves that are stored in home containers for prolonged periods of time.

“When they do deliver water, the water quality is actually quite good.  The water, while it is quite good, is only delivered on a sporadic schedule.  They can’t save up enough water in these dams to actually treat on a normalized level.  So it’s possible that not enough either political capital or monetary capital is actually going into the north to develop these systems,” he said.

The MIT MBA notes that if utility companies and commercial firms can attain the capacity to ensure a steady flow, which he claims they are close to doing, it would make for a more efficient use of the system.

“If the water company could believe that they have more water to actually treat and flow, they would actually solve a lot of those issues because they would then just keep the pipes on most of the time.  But I’m reminded of the fact that the rural people don’t get that much water as it is right now in the piped water.  So the water company would have issues with that as well because you would actually have increased demands from those communities,” he points out.

Do you feel inspired to help the world community?  What do you plan to do? Share your thoughts with us by adding a “comment” below.

More and more teenagers are becoming aware of the destruction of genocide that our history and present times share.  It is an unfortunate reality that genocide continues despite horrific historical occurences.

What can be done about genocide?   Read the following article from VOANews.com and please add your constructive comments below.

‘Never Again’ Organization Educates Youth about Genocide

by Jackson Muneza Mvunganyi

Washington D.C.

30 April, 2008

Human rights activists are expressing concern about the awareness of genocide — they say it gets far too little attention around the world. It’s been fourteen years since the Rwandan genocide, and the activists say not enough has been done to keep them from happening in other parts of the world, such as Darfur.

An organization called Never Again International is helping young people focus on the issue. It was inspired by youth from around the globle to act as a platform for them to discuss the prevention of genocide, including conflict resolution and peace building. Melanie Tomsons, the executive director of Never Again in Canada, says the name is supposed to invoke the “never again” message “that is often a reaction after the fact.”

Tomsons says members come from countries like Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, England, United States and Canada. Their activities include traveling to high schools to speak to students about genocide and encouraging youth participation in peace building activities. Never Again has organized visits to Rwanda for students from Britain, the United States, Japan, Israel, Canada, Sweden and the Netherlands.

It also organized an international youth conference in Kigali, Rwanda, with participants from Burundi, Canada, the DRC, Britain, and the United States. Melanie Tomsons says it’s the task of Never Again chapters to encourage creative peace building activities such as theater workshops, educational field trips and organized debates.

These activities engage young people in discussions “exploring the history of the genocide and the role of youth in reconciliation and development.” One of their recent projects involved organizing a workshop with young American and Rwandan human rights activists in Kigali. The meeting, which was organized in partnership with Global Youth Connect, included a discussion with Canadian senator and former UN General Romeo Dallaire, who was force commander of the UN mission to Rwanda during the genocide.

Tomsons became involved with the issue when she was an undergraduate student at McGill University in Canada. She took a course on peace building and soon she was teaching other young people about the issue. “I really had to do something about genocide prevention,” she says. Tomsons says she’s disappointed that some people deny that the genocide in Rwanda ever occurred. She compares them to the Sudanese government officials who refuse to acknowledge the genocide in Dafur. She says the solution is “to educate the youth more on these issues, so that when faced with such detractors, they know the truth.” In Rwanda, the organization is creating a peace-building center in the Kigali, and another is being planned in Canada

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