A-Z Challenge O is for....

ONE mum
Over the past few weeks numerous posts have been written in support of One Mum. Kate over at the fa Kateonthinice, has been actively promoting the One Mum campaign and Michelle from Mummyfromtheheart. Its not about donating money but more about your voice as a mum. Here is a little background.

I was in London today and it was a poster with the following on and a picture of a young African girl that prompted me to write this post:

Remember your first period?

Leaving school?

Getting married?

Having your first child?

Aneni does. She's twelve.

While Ones new campaign is entitled Thrive: Food, Farming, Future with more funding to improve living conditions, medical facilities and their agriculture and therefore food supplies, children in Africa would have a much brighter future. Girls like Aneni leave school to work the land, get married very young and have children while they themselves are still children in the hope that some of those children survive. With better medical facilities, available food, better farming, more children would survive and the need to have so many would be decreased and hopefully children could be children for longer.

At twelve I remember just finishing my first year at senior school, I had a whole new world lying open before, I was picked up from school by my mum who would have a snack in her bag for the walk home, I was playing with my dolls, or outside with my friends while my mum cooked our tea, something different every night to provide her family with a well balanced diet. Children like Aneni do not have this luxury, children like Aneni are lucky to eat one meal a day and while Aneni is under-nourished herself, she will now be trying to feed and nourish her own baby, possibly more than one.  By adding your voice to this campaign, you can help.

ONE is a grassroots campaign of more than 2.5 million people committed to the fight against extreme poverty and preventable disease particularly in Africa.

ONE’s new campaign – Thrive: Food. Farming. Future.



One have launched a new campaign called Thrive: Food. Farming. Future, to ensure that those children thrive and grow into healthy adults who are able to feed and sustain themselves with the promise of a bright future.

The key aims of the Thrive campaign are that by 2015 we could see 15 million fewer children chronically malnourished and 50 million people lifted out of extreme poverty.

So what am I signing up to do? And what can you do to help?

1. I’ve signed up and offered my voice to ONE.org and so can you. They already have more than 2.5 million people worldwide supporting them but it is important that this number continues to grow and we can help them to put pressure on African leaders, donor governments and the private sector to focus on thirty of the poorest countries that have smart agriculture and nutrition plans. Those plans are tested, costed and affordable. They need to be put into practice. For that they need two things: political leadership and financial backing. ONE’s campaign will insist on both. But we know leaders won’t act unless lots of people urge them to do so. ONE’s strength is its collective action – one plus one plus one quickly adds up to a giant roar which it will be impossible to ignore.

2. I’m spreading the word with this blogpost. Please put a post up on your blog or share about the ONE Thrive campaign as a facebook status. Check out this Google Doc for some simple information you can use in your post. If you do blog about this then please link back to Mummy from the Heart here. Thrive can use this blog post full of linked up posts to show to our Government and influential institutions that there is a strength of opinion in our blogsphere. Our voices count! Do you remember what we managed to do for Save the Children last September? Let’s do that again – we really can….

3. Tweet about the campaign using the hashtag #LetsThrive and urge people to sign up to ONE and offer their voice

4. Keep an eye on the Mummy from the Heart blog later this week to find out about a fun, quick and easy way that you can make a difference and really add your voice ready for the G8 Summit on 18 and 19th May 2012.
Will you be the ONE Mum to add your voice?

Visit http://www.one.org and add your ONE voice because it really will make a difference.

All they are really asking you to do is to spread the word about the amazing achievements that UK aid makes and can make to Africa.