#Globalcitizens of the world unite – for this year we have an historic world leaders’ summit and a confluence of conferences. There have never been so many gatherings of the great and the good, but it’s all globaloney – without you. World leaders will be deciding all our fates for us, so we need to #demandbetter from them, and remind them they work for us.
Here are the key movement moments when activists must be loud and clear. If we get each of these right, we could ensure 2015 becomes a powerful turning point. If we don’t, we will regret bad or absent decisions for a generation to come.
15th January: action/2015
Launch of the action/2015 movement – a new network of global citizens backed by ONE, Civicus, Save the Children and a thousand other groups and leaders like Malala and Melinda Gates. Together we’re dedicated to holding world leaders accountable in the fight against poverty, inequality and climate change. Read this open letter to world leaders published today.
21st January: World Economic Forum in Davos
ONE Cofounder Bono in a panel at the 2014 World Economic Forum at Davos. Photo credit: World Economic Forum.
As world leaders gather in Switzerland for the World Economic Forum, listen carefully to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s speech about her G7 agenda, and pay heed to Bill Gates’ annual letter. This year Davos needs disrupting: as Pope Francis said, “Wealth must serve people – not the other way round”. ONE is also demanding that economic empowerment for women and girls is taken seriously this year – otherwise we will never end extreme poverty.
27th January: Gavi conference, Berlin
Mothers and babies at a health centre in Kenya. Photo: Morgana Wingard/ONE
Leaders must pledge at least $7.5bn for Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, to prove their seriousness in the fight against disease and poverty. And to ensure money to fight Ebola or climate change doesn’t come out of budgets for life-saving vaccines. There’s real jeopardy here – right now we might be $500m short, maybe more.
8th March: International Women’s Day
Princess Adeyeo, Monrovia, Liberia. Photo: Morgana Wingard
This year, women’s empowerment and gender justice groups will team up globally with anti-poverty activists as never before – watch this space.
April: IMF & World Bank meetings, Washington DC
Photo: Global Financial Integrity
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank meetings are key opportunities for the world’s finance ministers to propose plans to finance the fight against extreme poverty for the next 15 years. These plans must be finalised by July.
7th May: UK General Election
These are crucial elections when the UK’s aid and foreign policy will be hotly debated. The UK isn’t the only key election this year – Nigeria has a massive election in February, Canada and Tanzania in October. 40% of the citizens of African nations vote in 2015 - the largest number ever.
June: G7 Summit, Schloss Elmau, Germany
At this summit of the world’s seven biggest economies, and at a special meeting on women’s economic empowerment just after, Chancellor Merkel will make her case to the world’s leaders on the fight against extreme poverty, for sustainable development and for gender equality. It’s critically important that Germany secure agreement here to target 50% of aid to the very poorest countries (it’s less than a third now), and get agreement on transparency and accountability of all promises made.
June & July: African Union Summit
A few days after a woman hosts the G7, another woman – Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma – chairs the African Union summit on women’s economic empowerment. Taken together this can be a south-north breakthrough in women’s empowerment policy. It’s quite mad that in many regions of the world, women can’t inherit property, they can’t own land, they can’t open a bank account, and they can’t stay in school. This injustice must end.
July: Financing for Development
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Photo: Sam Affron, Flickr http://bit.ly/1DGqEDn
This meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, is the uber-gathering for global poverty geeks. The nerdathon must agree the definitions of aid and the numbers needed to finance development for a better, safer planet for the next 15 years. The T word will be bandied around with gay abandon (Trillion). But key details for ONE will be whether there is agreement that half of aid goes to the very poorest nations, and whether we can clearly track all the promises made through dramatically improved open high-quality data, through a much needed data revolution. And then crucially whether the money within developing countries stays there and is not stolen through corrupt natural resource deals and secretive shell companies.
18th July: Mandela Day
Let’s always remind ourselves of the great man’s words: “Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.”
September: United Nations
Photo: Huffington Post
Around the 26th September, all the leaders of the world will agree great inspiring goals – such as eradicating extreme poverty by 2030 and ensuring access to justice for women and decent education for all girls. This new global compact between everyone on the planet, must be shared with everyone on the planet, so they know about the promises just made and can then hold leaders accountable. Remember: politicians only keep their promises when they are made to do so.
November: G20, Turkey
Emerging nations like Turkey, Brazil, India, China, all members of the group of 20 largest economies, or G20, must step up and be great global citizens too. This means ensuring their companies aren’t corrupt when securing contracts with developing countries to extract natural resources, and improving transparency. We will not eradicate extreme poverty if the world’s resources are plundered through corrupt deals, then the stolen funds hidden through secretive offshore companies.
20th November – 11th December: Climate Summit, Paris
Farm in western Kenya. Photo: C. Schubert (CCAFS), Flickr http://bit.ly/1DGtdW4
At this summit, we must see a deal which helps the poorest fight climate change. The poorest smallholder farmers in drought-prone regions in Africa are already the worst hit. It would be a travesty if deals struck take funds away from those on the front line.
1st December: World AIDS Day
Funding for the fight against HIV/AIDS is a great marker of progress in the fight against poverty and diseases. Our colleagues at (RED) will be big again on this day, drawing more people in and driving them towards action and, by 2030, the virtual elimination of deaths from HIV/AIDS.
1st January 2016: Happy New Year!
New Year’s fireworks in San Francisco. Photo: Peter Thoeny, Flickr http://bit.ly/1DGvctu
Huh? The biggest date of 2015 is really in 2016. On one-one day 2016, we will be able to look back on the year that just was and decide: did world leaders agree great inspiring goals? Did they promise to fully finance them? Did they make the promises clear and transparent so people can follow whether they happened, backed up by decent open data?
Did we build a bigger, stronger movement of effective, informed global citizens, that brought millions more people in? Is this movement now armed with a smart global scorecard with which citizens the world over can hold leaders accountable? Well, whether this has all happened depends on the first 14 moments.