Category: Funding

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Aid Tree Aid

A BBC story alerted me yesterday to the existence of Tree Aid:

TREE AID was established as a charity in 1987 by a group of foresters in response to the famine in Africa, brought to public attention by Band Aid and Live Aid.

They wanted to provide a long term solution once the emergency relief efforts ended. They believed that trees could significantly reduce the vulnerability of communities in rural Africa’s drylands to drought and famine in the future.

Our current strategy expands on the original concept, focusing on forest management and income, food and medicines from trees.

I like their Cake Taste initiative, and their Tree of the Month feature. Seems very worthy. And it’s easy to donate online, should you feel so inclined.

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AGRA Watch is on the lookout

Concerned citizens and activists have begun a new CAGJ program called AGRA Watch whose objectives are to monitor and question the Gates Foundation’s participation in the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). Upon researching this initiative and its historical precedents, AGRA Watch finds the current approach politically, environmentally, socially, and ethically problematic (to read more, see “Four Categories of Problems” in blog posts). We support sustainable, socially responsible, and indigenous alternatives in Africa, and connect these movements to those occurring in our local communities.

But who’s watching the watchers? Well, I guess we are. The AGRA Watch blog has gone into my feed reader.

LATER: Ooops, sorry. Turns out that feed is for the whole CAGJ website, not just the AGRA Watch blog. But we’ll be keeping an eye on the blog anyway.

LATER STILL: As you were, I’m informed all blog posts are included in the central RSS feed.

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Nibbles: Databases, Hell squared, Genebanks, Goats, Olives, Safe movement, Pouteria, Roman wine

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Nibbles: Book, Moral and physical revulsion, DNA bank, Cacao genome, Cassava, Agroforestry, Dung products, Pork brain