In his TED talk, Global Citizen CEO Hugh Evans shares several stories about how the actions of global citizens have led to real world campaign impact. In this article, we give the details of what global citizens did, and the impact it made.
“Davinia’s actions, alongside 142,000 other global citizens, led the US to double their investment in the Global Partnership for Education.”
Global citizens led public campaigning to increase US contributions to the Global Partnership for Education from $20m in 2013 to $40m in 2014, to $45m in 2015, and then to $70m in 2016.
Global citizens started taking action on education as part of the 2013 Global Citizen Festival, responding to the crisis of the then estimated 57 million children missing out on a basic education. Between July and September 2013, they took over 75,000 actions calling for increased access to quality education, including 39,733 signing a petition calling on the US congress to provide greater support for the Global Partnership for Education, as in 2013 the US provided just $20m per year.
In response to this pressure from global citizens, Congressional leaders said in the fall of 2013 that they would take up the cause:
At the 2013 Festival, the CEO of Global Partnership for Education (GPE), Alice Albright, explained that it would take $26 billion to extend access to primary education to all children. She called on governments and world leaders to deliver on their promises and fill this funding gap, ahead of a global replenishment that was due to be hosted by the European Commission in mid-2014.
After the 2013 Festival, Global Citizen worked with partners RESULTS, Plan International and the Global Campaign for Education to turn these statements of Congressional support into increased funding from the US Government. Together we met with dozens of Congressional offices, getting 81 Congresspeople to co-sign a letter to their peers, known as a “Dear Colleague” letter, calling on the US Government to increase its support to GPE.
Publicly, another 40,000 global citizens signed a petition supporting the GPE, and the #BecauseofSchool campaign that we led saw 2,284 global citizens tweet at Raj Shah, the then USAID Administrator encouraging him to make a bold pledge at the 2014 GPE Replenishment Conference in Brussels.
To put even more pressure on, Global Citizen organized the Thank You Festival on the outskirts of Washington DC on the same day as the GPE replenishment in June 2014, where 15,000 global citizens gathered to thank the government for their investments in health and education, and call on them to do more.
In response, Raj Shah took to the stage of the Global Citizen Thank You Festival to announce the US Government’s commitment to immediately double their contribution to GPE from $20m to $40m for 2014. And he pledged to work with Congress to increase that commitment to $50m in 2015. After a further 40,000 global citizens took action, Congress eventually passed a budget of $45m for the GPE in 2015.
We have confirmation from GPE that funds from 2014 and 2015 have been received and utilized, affecting 330,600 children’s lives in 2014 and 580,000 in 2015.
Since this commitment, global citizens have been pivotal to securing further increases in US funding to GPE. At Global Citizen 2015 Earth Day, Congresspersons Nita Lowey, Judy Chu, Barbara Lee, Joe Crowley and Ted Lieu took to the stage to endorse the idea that US funding for GPE should increase substantially in 2016.
Ted Lieu announced, “I’m working [with] my colleagues in Congress to ensure the United States increases funding for the Global Partnership [for] Education to $125 million in 2016,” a pledge that was repeated in this CNN.com op-ed with Hugh Evans. In December 2015, Congress approved a budget of $70m for GPE in 2016. Global Citizen remains committed to seeing this increase even further in 2017.
“Global Citizens helped persuade the World Bank to both boost, and make more effective, the Bank’s investment into Water and Sanitation. Here’s the bank’s President Jim Kim, committing $15Bn, and PM Modi of India affirming his commitment to put a toilet in every household and school across India by 2019.”
In 2014, after being informed of the scale of the global sanitation crisis by Deputy UN Secretary-General Jan Eliasson, global citizens started campaigning to break the “poo taboo” and tackle the crisis that sees 2.5 billion people go without proper sanitation, and 1.1 billion people defecating in the open.
We had been talking to partners and experts in the area, and they had explained to us that political leaders didn’t want to talk about sanitation, and as a result, the right investments were not being made to address the crisis. Specifically, millions has been poured over the years into constructing toilets and latrines across developing communities. Yet many of these are not being used. The real challenge lies not only in giving people access to toilets, but rather in changing attitudes and behaviours so people actually use them and then in ensuring proper systems safely and adequately dispose of waste.
That means that when we turned to campaigning, we were both calling for more effective funding, as well as showing that it was okay to “talk about shit”, pushing decision-makers to publicly state how they were going to do more to address the crisis.
To break the taboo, we teamed up with Sesame Street and their WASH Ambassador Raya, and invited some of the world’s most influential companies and governments to take to the stage of the Global Citizen Festival to publicly outline their plans. Global citizens tweeted, emailed and petitioned world leaders - 35,000 actions in total - which helped result in both the World Bank and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India agreeing to attend and outline their plans.
Prime Minister Modi took to the 204 Global Citizen Festival stage to reiterate his government’s commitment to put a toilet in household and school in the country by 2019. To an audience of 60,000 global citizens in the park, and an online audience of millions (including fans of John Oliver’s show Last Week Tonight), he responded to the call of global citizens to break the poo taboo, and encouraged the young people who had invited him to the stage to continue their advocacy efforts:
Also at the 2014 Global Citizen Festival, Junaid Ahmad, then Senior Director of the World Bank Group’s Water Global Practice, said
Since the Bank made that commitment, the Global Citizen team has been following up to ensure that the pledge is delivered on. At Global Citizen 2015 Earth Day, Junaid Ahmad reported to Global Citizen on some of the investments that had been made in the first six months of the commitment:
- ● $500 million for a sanitation program in partnership with the Government of India;
- ● $313 million to the Pakistani provinces of Punjab and Sindh, which is set to directly benefit more than 3 million people including millions of women and girls;
- ● $80 million is set to reach more than 760,000 people in Burkina Faso with water and sanitation;
- ● $72 million to end open defecation in Nepal;
- ● $50 million that is set to reach more that 500,000 people in Cholera hotspots in Haiti.
And, at the the 2015 Global Citizen Festival, we had World Bank President Jim Kim and Big Bird outline how the Bank have so far invested $4b of the funds, which to date has improved the lives of some 20 million people. And, as recently as February 2016 we’ve followed up on how they’re delivering support for India, which has grown to a $1.5 billion loan to the Swacch Bharat Mission Support Operation Project to support the Government of India in its efforts to increase access to improved sanitation in rural areas, and to help end the practice of open defecation by 2019.
“Global Citizens, encouraged by Late Night Host Stephen Colbert, launched a twitter invasion of Norway. Erna Solberg, the Prime Minister, got the message, doubling the country’s investment into Girls Education.”
After 2014’s successful replenishment to the Global Partnership for Education, global citizens turned the focus to ensuring that world leaders committed to ensure girls got the same educational opportunities as boys.
More than 200,000 actions were taken in 2015 to encourage the Norwegian government, a true leader on education, to go even further, and lead the world in getting more girls a quality education.
We started at an Education Summit in July in Norway, where Global Citizen ambassador Kweku Mandela spoke passionately on behalf of the more than 5,000 global citizens who participated in the 01 Second March for Girls & Women, directly inviting PM Solberg to attend the Festival and announce new funding for education.
From there, we took the campaign public, with 98,000 global citizens joining Stephen Colbert in launching a twitter invasion of Norway, 52,000 global citizens emailing the Prime Minister, and 29,000 calling and leaving her a voicemail. Our call was for Norway to increase its support to provide $500 million over 5 years to the Global Partnership for Education.
This call became even more important following the news that Norway, like many European countries, would be reallocating some of its development assistance to cover the resettlement costs of refugees fleeing war torn Syria. There was concern from some of our partners that funding for critical health and education programs could be cut.
While we did not succeed in securing our ask of $500 million over the next 5 years, PM Solberg responded with a video message of her own, committing to attend the Festival and reaffirm her commitment to double Norway’s contribution. As we wrote in our recap piece at the time:
This is the power of global citizens. And the world’s media is paying attention. From The New York Times to The Daily Beast, major publications highlighted the creative power of global citizens.
From the stage of the Festival in September 2015, Solberg said,
As of March 2016, the Global Partnership for Education have confirmed to us that Norway are on track to meet their commitment to double support for GPE, ringfencing this important funding from broader budget adjustments in the wake of the humanitarian crisis. We will continue to call on Norway, and indeed other countries, to continue to increase their efforts.
“Global Citizens, together with Rotarians, called on the Canadian, UK and Australian Governments to contribute to polio eradication. They responded and together made a $665m investment.”
The world is on the brink of eradicating the second ever human disease. Thanks to a global partnership, polio cases have plummeted from 300,000 cases a year in 1988, to less than 1000 in 2012, fewer than 100 in 2015, and just 9 so far in 2016 (as of the start of April).
Since 2011, global citizens’ efforts supporting The End of Polio and Rotary International’s End Polio Now campaigns saw more than 300,000 actions taken by global citizens, resulting in $665m in commitments from Canada, the UK and Australia.
In 2011, in the lead up to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Perth, Australia, we ran The End of Polio campaign. More than 20,000 people signed a petition calling on the Australian Government to invest $50m in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, and working in partnership with Rotary clubs across Australia, we met with dozens of government officials and MPs. We organized the 5,000 person End of PolioConcert on the eve of CHOGM in Perth, leading Prime Minister Julia Gillard to make a AU$50 million commitment, which was then added to by a further $68m in commitments from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Canada, Nigeria, the UK and Pakistan.
These contributions were formally recognized by the Independent Monitoring Board of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, who noted the role that Global Poverty Project (the legal entity that runs Global Citizen) played in a 2012 report:
In 2011, the Global Poverty Project raised $118m for polio eradication. It heightened popular awareness of the polio programme, particularly in Australia. The Australian Government increased its financial commitment substantially. The Global Poverty Project used approaches that this programme has not previously used, and from which this programme intends to learn.
In 2012, polio eradication became one of the first campaign areas of the first Global Citizen Festival in New York City, with more than 50,000 actions taken. Off the back of this the Global Polio Eradication Initiative launched a $5.5 billion replenishment campaign, the key moment of which was the April 2013 Vaccine Summit in Abu Dhabi. Working with partners, including Rotary International, global citizens continued to lead campaigning under The End of Polio banner for this replenishment. We took a 4-pronged approach, involving media, events, public action and direct advocacy.
More than 65,000 global citizens took action, signing petitions, writing emails and letters, making phone calls, sharing on social media and meeting with more than 100 elected officials around the world. We ran speaking tours that reached more than 10,000 people, mobilized hundreds of grassroots ambassadors in the UK and Australia, ran events in Congress and the Parliaments of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and UK, and got more than 180 stories in the media about polio eradication. You can read the full story in our 2013 End of Polio recap report.
In response to this advocacy, governments made new commitments:
- ● United Kingdom: committed £300m over 6 years at the Global Vaccine Summit in April 2013.
- ● Isle of Man: In April 2013, Isle of Man became the first 2013 nontraditional donor contributing towards the end of polio strategy by committing £90 000 over the next three years - as a direct result of our grassroots campaigning efforts.
- ● Australia: The momentum of the commitments made at the Global Vaccine Summit – along with our public and political advocacy - led the Australian government to commit an additional A$80 million for polio eradication in May 2013 during Bill Gates’ visit to Australia. Although this pledge would later by reduced as a result of cuts to the Australian aid program, A$30 million is still set to be disbursed to global polio eradication efforts throughout 2016.
- ● Canada: At the Global Vaccine Summit, the Canadian Government pledged $250 million towards polio eradication. Our campaigning included a speaking tour with polio advocate Ramesh Ferris that directly mobilised 4,000 global citizens to write personal letters to the Government.
- ● United States: Congress approved a final budget for 2014 that includes $205 million for polio eradication, an increase of $54.2 million, or 36%.
Since 2013, global citizens have been working to ensure that these governments deliver on their promises, with activities including:
- ● Securing a commitment from the Prime Minister of Malta to seek a renewal of global support to polio eradication during the 2015 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting following a sustained campaign we kicked off in July last year, which included over 245,000 tweets, letters and emails from global citizens as well as an open letter in the Times of Malta.
- ● Coordinating a high-level side event at 2015’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting on polio eradication, the most significant gathering of political leaders on the disease since 2013’s Global Vaccine Summit. Leaders from Malta, Canada, Australia, Nigeria, Pakistan and the UK joined UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and Commonwealth Secretary-General Designate Patricia Scotland to voice their commitment to wiping out polio for good.
- ● Presenting a petition to UK Secretary of State Justine Greening from global citizens on World Polio Day in 2015, which solicited an official response from DFID to global citizens who took action;
- ● Keeping polio in the media spotlight, including by activating our celebrity ambassadors like this open on CNN by Freida Pinto in 2014, partnering with Rotary to increase US appropriations to GPEI, including on op-eds like this one in the The Hill, or writing articles ourselves such as this piece for Huff Po UK.
- ● Mobilising tens of thousands of global citizens to send targeted emails, letters and tweets to key government decision-makers, and leveraging the Global Citizen Festival itself to secure new commitments, including 500,000 Euros from Luxembourg.
- ● Holding Australia accountable in the media - as illustrated with our team being cited in this Sydney Morning Herald piece and ABC National Australia - and through a social media campaign that was referenced by the then International Development Minister Steven Ciobo in his remarks when he said he would maintain existing levels of funding to GPEI;
- ● Co-hosting and organising two events on the same day in both the Australian and British Parliaments to mark World Polio Day, which came 2 and a half years after we had Australian MPs, including Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, attend a lunchtime event on polio; and,
These efforts have largely been successful, with only Australia cutting its support as a result of billions of dollars of cuts across the wider aid program.
In 2016, we are supporting the Global Polio Eradication to raise the final $1.5b needed to eradicate polio forever by the end of the decade.