New partnership born to help battle poverty in Africa

WASHINGTON -- Former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan announced Wednesday a partnership to combat hunger and poverty in Africa between two of the largest grant-making organizations in the continent.Annan, who heads the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, said his Nairobi-based organization would collaborate with the Millennium Challenge Corporation on a joint effort to improve life in Africa."We join forces at a time when the world has witnessed a global food crisis that is destabilizing societies, driving millions more into poverty, but nowhere is this problem more serious than in Africa," Annan, who has been AGRA's chairman since last June, said at a press conference.His organization is dedicated to helping curb African poverty and hunger by increasing productivity of small-scale farming. The Millennium organization is a U.S. government corporation designed to promote sustained economic growth and reduce poverty in some of the world's poorest countries."The growing cooperation between AGRA and MCC advances the goals of African countries themselves to make their agricultural sectors strong, competitive and successful in lifting the poor out of poverty," said MCC's chief executive officer John Danilovich, a former U.S. ambassador to Costa Rica and Brazil. Since its establishment in 2004, MCC has signed anti-poverty grants with 16 countries totaling about $5.5 billion. Nine of MCC's grants worth more than $3.8 billion are with African nations.AGRA was founded in 2006 by the Bill & Melinda Gates and Rockefeller foundations. Since then, it has invested about $330 million into agricultural programs.The new collaboration will initially focus efforts on Ghana, Madagascar and Mali, where the emphasis will be on infrastructure-building efforts designed to help small-scale farmers, most of whom are women. The hope is that any profits from surplus crops can be reinvested in education, health care and housing."We are going to create jobs and (the farmers will) remain in the countryside, in the rural areas and make a living without rushing to the cities to end up in slums," Annan said.Programs are expected to ease access to credit and support cold storage efforts, along with road and irrigation channel building. Another focus will be on coordinating local seed industries to improve distribution and seed variety.According to AGRA, in the last 15 years the number of Africans living on less than $1 per day has increased by 50 percent. More than 200 million people there are chronically hungry, including 33 million children under the age of five, AGRA reports.(E-mail Daniel Collins at sintern(at)shns.com. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)