The Communication Initiative Network

Background on FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas], Pakistan's Polio refusal cases:

INTRODUCTION:

As we know, 80 percent of the population of Pakistan is living in rural areas, and the overall literacy rate is not more than 45 percent. Keeping in view the above facts, most of the population have sufficient knowledge about the Malaria, Tuberculosis, Hepatitis B (HBV)& C virus, but, unfortunately, a very large number of Pakistani population know less about Polio!

I met Luis Fernando Gómez nine years ago. We first met in a small meeting room at IDEA (the Antioquía Development Institute), to talk about the Uno Más Uno Foundation, which he had founded a few months earlier. He was searching for institutions that could help support his efforts to prevent blindness and other types of visual impairment in children. He himself had been condemned to blindness due to a delayed diagnosis of retinitis pigmentosa.

With compassion, commitment, and courage, members of the Rotary Club of Peshawar, Pakistan, recently helped immunize children in one of the most remote and dangerous parts of the world.

Members of the club took part in the country's 15-17 September [2008] Subnational Immunization Days, reaching children in a federally administered tribal area in North-West Frontier Province near the troubled Pakistani-Afghan border.

Balochistan is 45% of the geographical area of Pakistan and only 5% of the population. More than 75% of the population of Balochistan lives in rural areas, and it has one of the weakest healthcare infrastructures in the country. The tertiary care hospitals in the provincial capital Quetta are considered crucial settings for the polio eradication initiative. Mobile teams are deployed in the hospitals during polio campaigns, and each of these hospitals has an immunization center where children can get polio drops and routine immunization shots.

Few issues are present in the collective consciousness with an assessment as favourable as education. As time passes, this privileged perception only grows and multiplies because within it is supposedly contained the economic solution for the poor or the continued success for those of greater fortune.

In keeping with that belief, the state and institutions of all kinds are on the same path, consigning to education much of the responsibility for our future and, in particular, equitable and sustainable development that we have not yet reached.

Before we work for development, we should ask ourselves where the development should lead to, where does our own development lead to, where does the traditional development of the other country lead to, and which values have made their development different from ours?

Where will be the children of Edison Flores, the young man who died ten years ago lying on a steep street of Comuna 8, one of the leaders of the bloc of the AUC Metro [El Bloque Metro - a paramilitary organisation reported to be of the extreme right that organised itself in the late 1990s in Medellín]?

In Buea, Cameroon, 26 year-old Lydia lives in one room house with her husband. She has been living with HIV for at least seven years now. As she stares at her sleeping, beautiful baby girl who was born HIV negative, she speaks of her firm belief that the only way to control HIV is by taking antiretroviral (ARV) treatment. Her unconditional acceptance of ARVs comes after two encounters with people who failed to deliver on their promise of a cure for HIV. One of is the owner of a modern herbalist clinic in the outskirts of Buea.

From Linda Raftree’s blog site "Wait… What? bridging community development and technology" on March 29 2012:

“At the global level, a very small percentage of development funding goes to urban spaces, yet hard-hitting issues impact many of the urban poor: lack of tenure, lack of legality of land, informal settlements, lack of birth registration and civil registration in general, waste disposal, clean water, politicizing of local authorities and more. Can new technologies be a solution for some of these issues?