Welcome to EuroNGOs

On 4th August, Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, and Warren Buffett, American investor, announced the creation of the ‘Giving Pledge’ which asks the globe’s wealthiest people to “commit to giving most of their wealth to philanthropy’. So far 40 American billionaires have signed up, including Star Wars direction George Lucas and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. However, the initiative has come under criticism in Germany. Peter Krämer, a Hamburg-based shipping magnate and multimillionaire, who donated millions of US dollars to UNICEF, has spoken out against the initiative.  In an interview with the German newspaper “Der Spiegel” on 8 August, he states that “you can write donations off in your taxes to a large degree in the USA. So the rich make a choice: Would I rather donate or pay taxes? The donors are taking the place of the state. That's unacceptable… It is all just a bad transfer of power from the state to billionaires. So it's not the state that determines what is good for the people, but rather the rich want to decide. That's a development that I find really bad.” For more information about the Giving Pledge, click here.

On 30th August, the Development Committee (DEVE) in the European Parliament adopted a pilot project by MEP Michael Cashman for 2.5 million Euros to fight maternal mortality in Rwanda. Focusing on training local health personnel and developing family planning services, this project, if successful, will become a new budget line under the Development Cooperation Initiative (DCI), the European Parliament-controlled development funding mechanism. The project will now be tabled as one of DEVE’s official budgetary amendments for approval by the Budget Committee and then the whole of the parliament.

More information can be found here. Thanks to DSW for their work and information on this issue.
 

More cases are being uncovered in Southern Africa of women accusing their doctors of violating their reproductive rights. One case in South Africa involves a HIV- positive woman who was sterilised, without her knowledge and consent, directly after giving birth.
An AIDS and women’s rights activist, Promise Mtembu is hoping to draw further attention to these violations, travelling round the country collecting stories from these women. Along with Mushahida Adhikari, an attorney at the Women's Legal Centre in Cape Town, who underlines that “performing a medical procedure without informed consent is a serious human rights violation”, Mtembu hopes to collect enough evidence to take the cases to South Africa’s high court.
More information is available here.
 

To download a registration form, click here.

The conference will take place on 8-9th November at the Grosvenor Hotel, London, U.K. We are looking forward to welcoming a number of high-level speakers, including among others Dr. Indu Capoor, Director of the Centre for Health Education, Training and Nutrition Awareness (Chetna), India, Dr. Mabel Bianco, President FEIM, Argentina and Dr Steve Sinding, currently a Senior Fellow at the Guttmacher Institute. Further international and European experts on gender, SRHR and development cooperation issues as well as representatives from governments, the AU, the EU and multinational (donor) institutions are expected to confirm their attendance soon.

More information on registration and the conference itself can be found here.