#famineAid - make or break for Africa
A call for Active Participants to the 50/50 project for #famineaid
by Tim Malbon Tim Malbon, co-founder of Made by Many:
We would like to introduce you here to an initiative that can respond to the HUGE need in Africa Right Now. As the UN has declared a famine in East Africa and it’s massive:
- A child is dying every six minutes
- 12 million people are seriously at risk
- It’s the worst famine anywhere in the world for 60 years
- The scale of this is utterly frightening: five times more people
are at risk than died in all the recent tsunamis and earthquakes put
together (Indonesia, Haiti, Pakistan, Japan) – but less than 20% of the
money needed
- No-one is talking about it – partly because there are few images
(it’s a part of the world that’s already seriously fucked up and v
dangerous), and partly because we’re preoccupied with our own economic
woes, the tea party, the riots etc etc. Boston.com published some pretty intense images from inside the famine zone, but there really isn’t a lot out there yet.
So… crisis in summary: much bigger need than ever/much
smaller response than normal, huge and urgent man-made catastrophe about
to unfold. If we do nothing we’re all going to be watching millions and
millions of people dying live on TV and the Internet.
It’s so sad to reflect that this catastrophe is totally avoidable – and that, counter-intuitively, this has the effect of making a person feel in some ways less empowered. We know it’s happening and we still can’t seem to do anything.
But this got us thinking about the direct power of citizens and
like-minded folk using networks to come together and fix things. We’ve
seen some amazing stuff in the past week – real people, citizens, have
come together to support each other and take the lead with some direct
intervention.
These examples prove that it can be done. We are trying to harness
the same goodness to raise money to save the people of East Africa.We realise it’s a bit insane to take this on. The received wisdom
says we can’t possibly succeed, that we can’t make a difference. The
scale of the problem is too huge.And we know there are rules and protocols and systems and blah, and
everyone is busy – yes, but we’re still going to try because if people
don’t start being extreme and taking risks we’re all going to stand by
and watch millions die…
Made by Many has been working on it for a week and a bit and it’s evolved as a plan, changing every day. Here’s what they’ve done:
- built a very lightweight, very thin, distributed fund-raising platform called 50:50
- This is a front page and 50 project pages for a loose coalition of
50 projects – probably weighted towards making, but also embracing
people/companies hacking a project together from existing platforms like
Twitter, Instagram and FB
- Want to try and get 50 projects raising money – the platform has
an API that hooks into payment third party systems and also tracks
money and supporters across the platform. Mint Digital have been making
the Ruby Gem that will handle the payments
- Now contacting NGOs, charities, brands, agencies, individuals
to try and persuade them to ‘make, hack or do a project’ to save lives.
- Want to raise somewhere between £1m and £50m
- Launch on Sat 27th August, with perhaps 10 projects, and 50 days
later on Sunday 16 October (World Food Day) we’ll have 50 projects and
will have started raising millions
- Thinking about making all the code available for NGOs and NFPs, so that the whole thing has an onward value
- GFN have been meeting with UNICEF, Oxfam, Virgin and lots of other
NGOs, charities and other NFP organisations to see how we can tie in to
what they’re doing
Needed teams of makers, hackers and players to get involved. Please be in touch.
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