An Unbelievable Turn of Events for Global Poverty

On January 8, I posted here about Congress' intentions to pass a continuing resolution. The plan would have kept U.S. funding at 2006 levels for all of 2007 and meant that extreme poverty programs would have lost an expected one billion dollar increase.

A few weeks ago, the ONE Campaign launched a major effort to save as much of this money as possible. With many important priorities competing for an extremely tight budget, we recognized how much work we had to do. Today, I'm happy to share an unbelievable turn of events:

On Tuesday night, a bill was filed in Congress asking for $1.45 billion increase for extreme poverty funding - a full $450 million more than the $1 billion ONE members had been fighting to save over the last two months! Yesterday afternoon that bill passed the House 286-140. If the same bill passes the Senate by February 14, then instead of receiving no increases for the entire year, AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis programs will receive their greatest one-year increase in U.S. history.

We have been told that this money, which easily could have vanished virtually unnoticed, was saved due to pressure from the global poverty community. In January alone, ONE members sent over 200,000 letters to their members of Congress urging them to fully fund extreme poverty programs this year. I want to thank the Huffington Post readers for joining with us to help to make this happen.

Outreach on the 2007 continuing resolution, without exaggeration, may have just saved hundreds of thousands of lives in the world's poorest countries.

Virginia Simmons, ONE.org
www.theONEblog.org