Tag Archives: Grassroots

Nutrition advocacy tour: a week with Walter Nyika

Posted on 23 May 2013 by RESULTS UK| Leave a comment

Todays blog comes from Mugove Walter Nyika, our southern advocate from Zimbabwe who joined us for our nutrition advocacy tour last week.

Saoirse Fitzpatrick was a student on attachment at the Rescope Programme in Malawi 2 years ago and now she is an Advocacy Campaign Assistant at RESULTS UK , an organisation that is working to end poverty. I arrived at RESULTS UK on Monday to participate in a campaign to lobby the UK government to contribute to a global fund that will help fight chronic undernutrition which is affecting 165 million children. The campaign  is building up to the Hunger Summit that the UK government will be hosting on June the 8th. That afternoon I had an interview with Michael Hodgkinson of Think Africa Press, a leading online publication on Africa.

Walter blog imageOn Tuesday we started with a meeting of the grassroots, who are members of the community dedicated to take part in the campaigns that RESULTS UK are working on. In the meeting  we shared on the experiences of the Rescope Programme in its work of promoting agro-ecology in school communities in eastern and southern Africa. After the meeting we proceeded to the Houses of Parliament at Westminster together with the members from the grassroots and had an organised tour of the complex which is packed with history.  In the House of Lords we saw the dent on the centre table which was caused by the ring worn by Winston Churchill as he banged on the table while addressing parliament and in one of the hall ways we saw the spot at which a former Prime Minister was assassinated. The highlight of the day was the green carding system where ordinary people walk into parliament and request to meet their MP to discuss any issue on their mind. Through this system we managed to meet 2 MPs one of whom was Caroline Lucas, the MP for Brighton who is also a representative of the Green Party.

In the evening I attended a dinner at Westminster which was hosted by Lord Cameron of Dillington, who is the chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Food and Farming for Development. In the course of the dinner I chatted with the Permanent Secretary at DFID, the President of Unilever Food Division, the Director of Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), an editor at the Lancet, the Health Correspondents at the BBC, the Guardian and the Financial Times, the CEO at the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), the Director of the Institute of Development Studies and the Executive Director of RESULTS UK. Lord Cameron appreciated a copy of the More and Better Food book.  I found this dinner to be the most strategic of the week’s  events.

On Wednesday we were back at Parliament and met 3 more MPs and Bishop Anthony of the Anglican Diocese of Hereford who sits in the House of Lords. On the same day we had a meeting with Dominic Foster, the Coordinator/Secretary for the APPG on Food and Farming for Development. On Thursday we went to Norwich and visited the John Innes Institute which is working on a Genetic Modification biofortication process to add zinc and iron nutrients into the endosperm (flesh) of the wheat and barley grains – It is wise to know your elements even if they may be enemies! In the evening we had a panel discussion at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine at which I made a presentation together with Samuel Hauenstein-Swan, a Senior Policy Director at Action Against Hunger and Steve Wiggens who is a Research Fellow at the Overseas Development Institute.

On Friday we had an integrated messaging brainstorming event with the RESULTS team and then went off to the BBC to be interviewed by Paul of the BBC Africa radio. If interested, check the BBC website for the programme on the 8th of June. In the afternoon I had a meeting with Hannah Torkington and Anna Cooper at the Tudor Trust.  By the time I went back to RESULTS for the debriefing meeting I was feeling as if I had been on this schedule for a whole month. What a week it has been!

Please feel free to contact me at rescope@seedingschools.org for more information about nutrition and the work I am doing with Rescope.

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Posted in Events, Hunger, News, Nutrition

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Rob Green reports on the Nutrition Advocacy Day at Parliament

Posted on 21 May 2013 by RESULTS UK| Leave a comment

Last Tuesday, 14 grassroots volunteers headed to Parliament with our southern advocate- Walter Nyika- to speak with their MPS about global undernutrition ahead of the ‘Nutrition for Growth’ event on June 8th. This guest blog post about the day comes from Rob Green, the new group leader of our new RESULTS group in Cardiff.

2013-05-14 11.40.04It was my first time meeting the RESULTS team and my first time attending one of their Advocacy Days at Parliament.  The day began with a briefing from Walter Nyika, our honoured guest from Zimbabwe, who spoke to us about his work on permaculture and nutrition in Malawi.  After an inspiring talk, we headed to Parliament to meet with our MPS. My local MP of Cardiff South and Penarth is Stephen Doughty, a leader politician and former head of Oxfam Cyrmu.

After requesting to meet with Stephen at Parliaments central lobby, I was pleased to find out that he was available to meet with me. The meeting couldn’t have gone any better!  Stephen was extremely interested in the work RESULTS are doing and was keen to support their future campaigns. Within a minute he agreed to write the Rt. Hon Justine Greening, calling on her to commit at least 149 million per year, over multiple years, at the ‘Nutrition for Growth’ event to funding financially sound, national nutrition plans and by the end he wanted to give us a shout out in The Chamber. He also kindly agreed to speak at any future RESULTS events and was keen to help build the RESULTS group in Cardiff.

Other grassroots had similarly successful meetings. Reg Davis, leader of the Poole group, met with Robert Simms MP and Tom Maguire, leader of the central London group, met with Caroline Lucas MP, the former leader of the Green Party. Both MPs were extremely interested in the issue of global undernutrition and were keen to bring it to the attention of Justine Greening.

All in all, the advocacy day was an absolutely fantastic start to my time at RESULTS and I am now motivated to do more with the great team.

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Posted in Grassroots Network, Hunger, Nutrition

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Recording of May conference call now available

Posted on 9 May 2013 by RESULTS UK| Leave a comment

We are pleased to announce that a recording of the April conference call is now available for download.  On this month’s call we discussed the issue of childhood undernutrition and our upcoming campaigning on the issue. Over the next few weeks we are organising an advocacy tour and bringing a delegation of grassroots volunteers to London to campaign on the issue ahead of the G8 and the upcoming Nutrition for Growth being organised by the UK government.

Our guest on the call was Kat Pittore, RESULTS’s own nutrition advocacy officer. The call was a great opportunity to hear about the issue of undernutrition and the major campaigning opportunities we have over the coming month to make a big impact and turn the tables on hunger.

Click here for the call.

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Posted in Conference Call, Department for International Development, Global Health, Grassroots Network, News

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May Action Announced

Posted on 1 May 2013 by RESULTS UK| Leave a comment

Despite the focus on hunger and poverty in the MDGs, under nutrition remains a problem of almost unimaginable proportions. In 2010 it was estimated that 925 million people in developing countries were suffering from some form of under nutrition- that’s up from 824 million in 1990.

Banner ImageThere are many causes of this problem: an unfair global food system that favours large scale industrial food production over small scale farming; significant gaps in international financing for agricultural production; large numbers of people eating not enough or not nutritionally rich enough food; fluctuating food prices that force millions of people into food poverty…..the list goes on.

However, the winds of change are starting to blow.

This June, the leaders of the G8 are meeting in the UK to discuss, among other things, the crisis at the heart of our food system. What’s more, on June 8th ahead of the G8 meeting, David Cameron is hosting a ‘Hunger Summit’ in London, to make a resounding international call for financial resources and political will to tackle under-nutrition.

Over the past few months, hundreds of UK charities have been working together as part of the ‘IF Campaign’ to make sure world leaders clearly hear the call to end world hunger.

This month we will be joining the global movement to end the crisis in our food system. We are calling on the UK Government and David Cameron to stand up and make a strong pledge at the Summit and to implement changes that will create a fair and sustainable food system for all.

Materials included this month:

GROUP MEETINGS FOR TELEPHONE CONFERENCE: 7th May 2013, 8pm

This month there are groups meeting to join the conference call in: Central London, South London, Poole, the Stort Valley, Birmingham, Oxford, Macclesfield, Central Sheffield, South Sheffield, Leicester, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Norwich, Bath, Bristol, Leamington Spa, Reading and Linlithgow.  If you would like information on the location of your local group, please get in touch with us in the office at: felix.jakens@results.org.uk

If yo would like to join the conference call there are 3 numbers you can call –  0844 762 0762, 0203 398 1398 or 0800 22 90 900. You must then enter the participant code, which is 18723. If you would like advice about which number to call please contact us in the office.

We look forward to you joining us

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Milly Hooke from the central London RESULTS group reflects on her experience Living Below the Line

Posted on 29 April 2013 by RESULTS UK| Leave a comment

Today is the official launch of Live Below the Line 2013. As many of you begin to undertake the challange, here are some recent personal blog posts from Milly Hooke, a grassroot volunteer in London who took the challange last week.  Hopefully some of her posts and recipe ideas will encourage you as you embark on this difficult but thought-provoking challange.

Can I really Live Below the Line?

Having attended many grassroots campaigning meetings with Results UK, a charity working to eradicate poverty and suffering, it is now time to embark on their biggest activist challenge of the year. I will be ‘Living Below the Line’, spending just £1 a day for 5 days on my entire food and drink consumption! As a self-confessed ‘foodie’ this will be no easy task.

After discussing how to achieve a nutritious ‘shopping basket’, for under a fiver, with my friends I managed to compile a sufficient shopping list; rice, oats, jam, tea bags, beans, pasta, biscuits, some type of veg (hopefully at a discounted price) and possibly some form of reduced meat!… Bit of an ambitious list but with my list in mind I set off to Sainsburys to raid their ‘Basics’ range. In addition to my shopping list I managed to get some discounted breaded chicken bites and pork pies, definitely not my average choice but with a little bit of luck this meat will provide some source of protein and saving me from totally bloating up on a purely carb diet!

The reason behind my (slightly) crazy decision to embark on this challenge is to raise awareness of the millions of people that face this challenge every day.. But they don’t have to make the choice of how to last a just a week this way this is life for them. And they don’t just have decisions on whether its better to get ginger biscuits or custard creams, they have to choose between food or sending their children to school to gain an education. This is an inequality that should not exist, across the globe enough food is made to feed everyone, yet each night 1 in 8 people go to bed hungry. This is unjust and must be ended, together we can work towards a fairer world where everyone has enough to eat.

Continue reading →

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Groundbreaking Hunger and Nutrition Commitment Index will Improve Accountability

Posted on 11 April 2013 by RESULTS UK| Leave a comment

Today the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) released a new report called the Global Hunger and Nutrition Commitment Index which is the first index to look at government commitment to tackling hunger and nutrition, specifically looking at policies, legal frameworks and public spending on hunger and nutrition. The report examines both hunger, or not having enough food and undernutrition, or not having enough nutrients to be healthy, separately. It looks at interventions  such as provision of food rations, which alleviate hunger but do little to tackle underlying factors contributing to undernutrition, separately from nutrition interventions. It also examines nutrition interventions, which include policies to improve public health, sanitation, infant and young child care practices which reduce chronic undernutrition, which is caused by a complex interaction of disease and poor food availability.

The report looks at 45 countries, and found that sustained economic growth does not lead to an automatic interest in reducing hunger and nutrition. The report specifically examines 22 indicators of political commitment to reduce undernutrition and ranked the countries based in their commitment. The report found that countries with high levels of economic growth such as India and Nigeria have not chosen prioritized reducing hunger and under-nutrition where as low income countries, such as Malawi and Madagascar have high levels of political commitment to reducing hunger and under-nutrition.

This report is particularly interesting because of its goal to increase accountability and transparency, allowing for grassroots advocacy by citizens of each country, making it easy for individuals in the global south to see what their government has promised and how it compares to what other countries governments’ have promise.  The hope is that this report can be used by individuals and organizations to hold their governments to account and demand for better policies to tackle hunger and malnutrition.

If you want to learn more the final report can be found here

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Posted in Grassroots Network, Hunger, News, Nutrition

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Final National Conference speakers confirmed

Posted on 11 April 2013 by RESULTS UK| Leave a comment

We are pleased to annouce four more of the speakers who will be joining us at our National Conference over the weekend of the 20th-22nd of April at the NVCO Centre, London.

With elevern speakers now confirmed, including four speakers from the global south, this year’s conference is shaping up to be one of our most exciting conferences to date!  To find out more about the recent additions, have a read of their bios below.

Erinch Sahan

Erinch is a Private Sector Policy Adviser at Oxfam. He works on Oxfam’s partnerships with business as well as its campaigns against companies. Currently, Erinch is working on partnerships with business to understand the poverty impact of agricultural sourcing from Africa. He is also leading Oxfam’s work in developing an index that ranks food companies. Erinch will be presenting in the ‘Beyond Aid’ session that will look at some of the wider structural factors that have contributed to and hindered development.

Dr Meera Tiwari

Dr Meera Tiwari is a reader in International Development at the University of East London, specialising in multidimensional poverty, deprivation in both Northern and Southern contexts and the MDGs and post 2015 discourse. Dr Tiwari will be speaking in the ‘Impact Beyond Targets’ session on the impact that the language of the MDGs has had on the discourse of international development.

David Satterthwaite

David Satterthwaite is a Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and Editor of the international journal Environment and Urbanization. David will be joining John Hilary from War on Want and Matt Collins from Aid Thoughts to share his on what should replace the Millennium Development Goals post 2015 in  the session ‘The World We Want: What should replace the MDGs’.

Alvaro Bozo Garcia

Alvaro Bozo Garcia is the Head of South American Campaigns at Global Witness, a not-for-profit organisation that investigates and campaigns to prevent natural resource related conflict and corruption, and associated environmental and human rights abuses. Alvaro will be speaking in the ‘Beyond Aid’ session on the impact of corruption on achieving the MDGS and how this issue might be addressed in the new framework that emerges.

For more information about the conference take a look at the National Conference website or click here to download a booking form.

And we’d like to thank CardsMadeEasy for the free business cards

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New updates from the Dying For Gold tour

Posted on 15 March 2013 by RESULTS UK| Leave a comment

We are now on day 9 of the Dying For Gold tour! Have a read of some of the latest blog posts from the TGTD team from Sheffield, Norwich and Cambridge.

Day 4: Sheffield

We rose on Sunday morning feeling slightly heavy from our delicious curry at the legendary Akbars, loaded the car and set our across mightily Yorkshire for Sheffield, the city of steel. The mining and industrial manufacturing history of the region is remembered in the names of bridges, rivers and towns across the region.

We arrived in Sheffield with no screening on Sunday night fully prepared to spend the day relaxing and catching up on ourselves.

On Monday we rose early and had a leisurely, delicious full Yorkshire breakfast and continued working on different bits and pieces. Saoirse went and spoke about the film at an event organised by the Sheffield Institute for International Development where she met with professor David Sanders of the University of the Western Cape where he works on public health and specifically on the issue of health equality in Africa. You can read the full piece here.

We left the meeting and headed for a brief meeting with Dr Simon Rushton, development expert with a passion for global health. Over some of Sheffield’s finest cask ales we discussed the film, the work of the department and the issue of TB in mining. Dr Rushton is doing some important work in terms of establishing an interdisciplinary public health group of academics within the university. He was enthusiastic about the need for increased advocacy from researchers and spoke of the challenges to building stronger relationships between academia and policy.

​This was followed directly by the evening’s screening, and the team headed over to the Arts Tower. The screening was attended by around 50 people, including members of both of the RESULTS Sheffield groups, Sheffield Medsin and the Sheffield Institute for International Development.

Continue reading →

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Dying For Gold tour blog now live!

Posted on 11 March 2013 by RESULTS UK| Leave a comment

After months of planning and preparation, the Dying for Gold UK tour officially begun last Thursday. To keep everyone updated on the campaign, screenings, meetings with academics and media and the tour more broadly, we have been keeping a daily blog on the Dying For Gold website.

Below are a few extracts from the blog, that can be seen in full on the Dying For Gold website. We will be updating the blog daily from the city that we are in, so keep an eye out for future posts!

​Day 1: Edinburgh

On Wednesday, we left the bright lights of London ​and headed north by car to the beautiful city of Edinburgh,  ahead of  the first screening of ‘They Go To Die’ on Thursday. ​After a nights rest at a local, quintessentially “Scottish” B&B, we got up early to pick up Jonathan Smith-the film’s director- from the airport, before hitting the road to start campaigning! Although the weather was grey and glum, that didn’t dampen our spirits or interest in the campaign from Edinburgh’s students who were keen to learn more about the tb epidemic in southern Africas mines and what they could do to help.

Day 2: Newcastle

We bid our farewells to majestic Edinburgh on Friday morning and took the scenic route to Newcastle. Pete from Medsin kindly put us up and accompanied us to the student’s union where we set up our ‘FREE GOLD’ stall.  Our  golden action cards caught the magpie eyes of many of the students who were shocked to discover the extent of the TB epidemic in Southern Africa.

Later we headed to Newcastle’s Side Cinema where we were almost to capacity, thanks to the hard work from Medsin and RESULTS’ group members Ellie, Ian and Frances amongst others. The audience were impressed with the film and asked interesting questions about establishing ‘fair trade’ and ‘lung safe gold’. People were keen to sign action cards and put their names to the concrete set of policies we are demanding from Anglo Gold Ashanti.

Day 3: Leeds

On Saturday morning we rose early and left our host’s house in Newcastle to make the two hour journey down the M1 to Leeds.

We shot through the Yorkshire countryside with a spring in our step after the success of the screening in Newcastle. We arrived at the home of our new hosts. Alice and Sarah, at a house filled with Medsin committee members in the characterful Hyde Park area of the city.

The day was as grey and drab as one can imagine so our golden message sparkled with a renewed brightness. The screening was attended by over 100 people who asked some excellent questions on the issue of TB and mining. The messages are now flowing freely from all members of the Dying for Gold team!

Another great day on the road! Tomorrow Jonathan will be doing an interview with the Lancet to discuss our tour and the messages we have about the campaign.

To read the blog in full click here

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National Conference early bird tickets now on sale

Posted on 16 January 2013 by RESULTS UK| Leave a comment

We are pleased to announce that early bird tickets for this year’s National Conference are now available at a discounted price of just £15!

This year’s event will take place over the weekend of the 20th-22nd of April 2013 at the NVCO Centre, Kings Cross, London. Click here to register!

The conference is an excellent opportunity to learn about issues relating to international development and to join a full day’s training workshop on how to undertake strategic advocacy. We are also again holding our lobby day on the Monday, when we have meetings arranged with key professionals from across the international development spectrum.

This year’s conference, titled ‘What next for development? The world after the Millennium Development Goals’ will reflect on the progress of the Millennium Development Goals and look ahead to the new international framework that will replace the MDGs in 2015.

To secure your place at this year’s National Conference for just £15,  please either send a cheque made payable to ‘RESULTS Education’ to RESULTS UK, RESULTS UK Head Office, 31-33 Bondway, London, SW8 1SJ

Or do a bank transfer to Alliance and Leicester, account number 42817802, sort code 72-00-05. Please identify your  payment with the reference code ‘NC13’ plus your surname, e.g. ‘NC13 Smith’

Your £15 will include entrance to the 3 days of the conference, plus lunch and refreshements on each day.

Saturday night will also feature the now infamous RESULTS social event! A great chance to unwind with fellow advocates.

More information about speakers and the conference will be available ahead of the event.

You will also need to complete an early bird registration form and return it to the office via post to RESULTS UK Head Office, RESULTS UK Head Office
31-33 Bondway, London, SW8 1SJ or via e-mail to tom.maguire@results.org.uk.

Download a registration form now by clicking here

Registration form

If you have any questions, please contact Tom in the office at tom.maguire@results.org.uk or call 0207 499 8238

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Posted in Child Survival, Disability, Education for All, Events, Global Health, Grassroots Network, Microfinance, National Conference, News, TB, Vaccines

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