Time to join together

This year, eight women from around the world have joined together to form the W8. These extraordinary women have dedicated their lives to fighting for health and education in their own countries. And, with your support, they’ll make great changes for the better. Because this year will see the W8 women lead the fight for our Health and Education For All campaign.

Time for change

There has been some improvement, but there is a long way to go before health and education is available, accessible and affordable for all. We must invest in basic services for the poorest people. If we don’t, more lives will be lost. Lives that could easily have been saved.

The cost of inaction:

• Every three seconds a child dies from a preventable disease.

• Every minute a woman dies in childbirth or pregnancy.

•  Around the world, 72 million children don’t go to school. Most of those are girls.

Time to act

Our campaign is in the hands of experts. Each member of the W8 already leads national coalitions in their own countries: lobbying for change and calling on governments to turn promises into deeds. They educate and inform about the basic right to health and education that we all deserve. And should all expect. They have achieved a lot – and they want to do more.

Starting on International Women's Day, March 6th, 2010, members of the W8 will be traveling to Canada and EU member states to bring the voice of their communities to the attention of world leaders and to explain the pressing need for more access to health and education in poor countries.

But they cannot do it alone. They need our support to get world leaders and decision-makers to deliver on their promises.

These women represent strength. They give a voice to those who find it hard to be heard. And, through working with Oxfam, they will build a global network of support for the Public Services For All  campaign. And change the world for the better.

The W8:

1. Sandhya Venkateswaran works for the Indian coalition ‘Don’t Break Your Promises’. It has over 3,000 members and aims to monitor the progress of Indian government towards meeting its commitments to reduce poverty.
   
   “Something as basic as giving birth to a child is incredibly risky for a large proportion of women, and although there has been a lot of talk about improving maternal health, many women just don’t know whether they will survive childbirth.”
   
   
2. Miranda Akhvlediani works for the Georgian coalition ‘Future Without Poverty’. The coalition hopes to be a mechanism to voice the problems of the poor in Georgia. Due to their campaigning work, the government now recognizes the need for adequate regulation of privatized healthcare systems.
   “In Georgia, the lack of access to healthcare is one of the most pressing problems.”
   
   
3. Rokeya Kabir is the convener of the My Rights campaign in Bangladesh: a national platform that puts pressure on the government to ensure primary education for all children.
   
   "In Bangladesh, education for all remains only a basic principle of the constitution, not a basic right of a citizen and a state responsibility. We need at least one school per village and one teacher per 40 students."
   
   
4. Kadiatou Baby Maiga is the president of the Malian coalition Education for All. Kady sees a strong civil society as a major resource for the government – offering knowledge and experience in order to support the government to achieve its goals on education.
    
   “In my year at high school only two of the 80 pupils were girls. This made me realize that education was not as normal to other girls as it was to me."
   
   
5. Doctor Jiraporn Limpananont is a member of the Free Trade Agreement Watch coalition in Thailand, protecting poor people against the negative impacts of bilateral and regional trade agreements. With a professional background in pharmacy, Dr. Jiraporn provides the group with knowledge about how intellectual property rules affect the prices and affordability of medicines, and limit poor people’s access to urgently needed medicines.
   
   
6. Professor Leonor Magtolis Briones is the convener of Social Watch Philippines/ Alternative Budget Initiative. She is playing a major role in the access to health and medicines campaign in the Philippines. Using her extensive knowledge of public finance, she is helping put together an alternative budget for the government – one with more money spent on essential services.
   
   “For women and girls, specific issues on health and education are worse.”
   
   
7. Elba Rivera-Urbina works for the Nicaraguan campaign for education and is living proof of the power of education. At the age of 16 a literacy campaign brought her out of illiteracy –and transformed her life. From the little girl who so badly wanted to go to school – against her father’s wishes – she has become a powerful woman who leads advocacy initiatives through school.
   
   “There is a huge need for quality education for teachers.”
   
   
8. Dorothy Ngoma is the Executive Director of the National Organization of Nurses and Midwives of Malawi. Dorothy has 32 years of experience working as a nurse, training nurses and advocating on behalf of nurses in Malawi.
   
   “We fight against all sort of diseases: TB, malaria, HIV/AIDS, cholera and dysentery – it’s a sick community. And why is this so complicated? The richest countries have already been through all the killer diseases and poverty.”