PANEL: The Infrastructure of Human Dignity
Star Spotter: Brad Pitt, Ashton Kutcher, Barbara Streisand, Ricky Martin, Eve Ensler
Moderator: John Podesta, president and CEO of Center for American Progress
Panelists:
Paul Farmer, founder of Partners in Health
Wangari Muta Maathai, founder of The Green Belt Movement, Kenya
Ingrid Munro, founder of Jamii Bora Trust and CEO of Jamii Bora Group
By Ruthie Ackerman for World Policy Journal
When we think of infrastructure we think of roads, sewage systems, and buildings. But a panel at the Clinton Global Initiative led by John Podesta, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress and former White House chief of staff under President Clinton, took a different look at infrastructure. Entitled “The Infrastructure of Human Dignity,” the panel focused on the systems that affect the world’s most vulnerable people: clean water, health care, and food systems. This is, as Podesta pointed out, the infrastructure needed “to support a decent standard of living for all people.”
Each panelist represented a different starting point on the issue: Wangari Maathai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for her work on the green movement in Kenya, believes environmental education should be a universal education in all schools, especially given the link between conflict and resource management. In wars around the world—and, especially, those in Africa such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the Democratic Republic of Congo—battles over natural resources have sparked and prolonged those conflicts.
The solution, Maathai said, is to develop a new consciousness over what she calls natural capital. “People come out of university with a lot of knowledge. They are full in the head. But it is important to be able to apply that knowledge. How do we tend the soil? This is important.”
Paul Farmer, who has dedicated his life to partnering with poor communities to combat disease and poverty, spoke about his work in Haiti battling infectious diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis. “Poverty is the chief lesion” that strips away dignity, he said. Once the other infrastructure, such as access to health care and clean water is in place in poor communities, Farmer believes building human indignity is the next step in eradicating poverty.
Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, sat down with me after the panel to talk about how her organization views human infrastructure. She spoke about technology such as mobile texting, which is being used to deliver weather and price information to farmers. It’s a seemingly simple idea, but text messages reshaping and empowering poor farmers’ lives by delivering much-needed information every 12 minutes, removing the costs of middlemen.
“Our effort is how to integrate all these challenges,” Rodin explained. “We don’t talk about all of these things as separate problems. And we don’t fund in silos or program areas. We define initiatives by the big problems we want to address,” such as health security, food security and climate security. Microfinance is used to support small businesses, which is tied into empowering women, which is tied into combating violence. “It is all connected,” she observed.
Slum Dwellers International, one of the programs funded through Rockefeller, is a good example of just how all-encompassing human infrastructure can be. This network of slum dwellers focuses on women, land tenure, and housing, among other challenges because Rodin says, “empowerment is one of the keys to human dignity.”