Sports to work the UN millennium goals

In the classroom, teachers from Mexico use as part of the curriculum: games, physical activities and sports to work with their students, 6-14 years, based on the contents of the eight UN millennium goals. In a playful, almost 200 children from primary institutions-mostly orphans, child development centers and homes that welcome children on the streets - they learn content on disease prevention, citizenship, gender equality, environment and national culture. The initiative is carried out by NGOs Deport-es to Share (Sports to Share in free translation) which has the support of the Mexican Association for the United Nations. So far, more than 40 000 children, most rural areas, have benefited from the initiative four years ago expands to several Mexican cities. The NGO will tie in with the schools to which the themes and activities will become part of the school curriculum.

In practice, the program passes through five times. The first is the training of teachers through training where they learn to work the millennium goals in games and sports activities. In the second step, educators go into the classroom with a mission to empower children to replicate what they learn in their communities.

Another time, includes parents in the educational process. Class meetings become sessions they also get to participate in activities and learn more about the program. In the next stage are professional sportsmen - fighter’s taekwondo, judo or athletes - who visit schools. Inside the classroom, they tell about their daily lives and encourage students in the spirit of resilience and self-esteem. Outside school, the athletes take the children to practice different sports.

The last time the program is replacing the "treasure chest", a box with pictures, cards and crafts made by students sent to schools in other communities.

Source: http://www.portalodm.com.br/esportes-para-trabalhar-metas-do-milenio-da-onu--n--814.html

Accessed on: august 6, 2012

Researched by Daniela Silva

Rebuilding a Future

This week I started a project in my Human Geography class that focuses on redesigning an international city. I chose to look at Urban Development, and more specifically at slum prevention and then viable alternatives for future growth. The language of the universe is written in mathematics, from the interaction of particles at speeds near light to stars slowly (or at least relatively) orbiting one another. A statistical model can describe most of Human interaction and behavior that we call economics, and there is where I first turned. History tells us that there has rarely been an event where frugality didn’t play the key player and economics confirms that people look for the solution that is most viable with the highest profit for the party in power.


The question on the surface is what is the best solution, but ‘best solution’ is a subjective question. Everyone has an agenda, whether they are a high school student looking for a solution that improves foreign investment, gender equality, and human capital or a city planner looking to level the highest profit for the city or a slum dweller just hoping for a better life and better access to water. Obviously, leveling all the slums, building high rises, and shooing the untouchable further from the city center would be the most profitable for the city, but there isn’t a way that they could do that. Alternatively, they can’t invest their entire budget into the slums to bring them sanitation, bathrooms, water, and transportation systems. So what is the happy medium?


Well, first what are the main problems in the average slums today? And since this is a Gender publication what are the largest gender inequality issues? Slums are large expanses of land that are developed by migrants from the rural countryside to find jobs in the city. Generally, they aren’t looking for riches but a chance to survive. They build homes out of wood and cardboard. The average home size is about the size of half an American car parking space with an average house size of six to twelve members. In some house the members sleep on their sides and they almost fit. Sanitation is a huge issue, and women especially feel this, with few bathrooms that have constant lines and a surcharge per use and non-existent hygiene stations like sinks for hand washing. Most children just use the restrooms in the makeshift slum streets that run with water from the crowded and dirty water pumps that serve about 100 to a 1000 people each. Women are hard hit in these situations and are the first to feel the effects of poor sanitation through high birth-mortality rates, higher fertility rates, and little access to proper health care to boot.


In my project I followed the model that India is champing and combining it with western tax & property policies. The city I chose was Cairo, but I found that most developing cities are facing the same problems and that the solutions are more or less universal. First, land needs to be privatized to get anywhere. After that, there are a few roads that one could go down that could lead somewhere positive, the road I took was one where the city government and foreign investors came together to create change through free market competition. India champed this model, in a way; they would sell existing slum land to investors and give current inhabitants a lease in the building. In my model the land was sold anywhere from 16th to 1/3rd free market value, which would be rather high for land with that proximity to the city center and to charge an impact fee that would bring the sale price to about 2/3rds to 4/5ths the free market value. The impact fee would be used to purchase leases for 1.5 times the amount of space that current inhabitants previously occupied. Money would still be left over after those leases were paid and could be used to cover the cost of new infrastructure like water and roads. 


One major obstacle to this kind of plan is that slum businesses and services don’t want to, or can’t, pay the higher cost of business that urbanization brings. I proposed that the tax system be bracketed so that low-income businesses that operated in former slum land be given rent subsidization and that companies that hire low income workers on the books be given a tax credit. This would also encourage more companies to hire low-income workers and disperse more income. The next policy would be to create a perpetual sharing scheme in the city where infinite maturity bonds are sold and the profits be used to create infrastructure and finance the increased social sector, which I’ll touch on soon. All the citizens in the city, which would include the previous slum dwellers, will pay the interest that would be built on those bonds as they are cashed. This would mean that those who benefited from the projects would also be helping shoulder the cost. I wanted to create low-income housing for new residents to prevent future slums. However, they would only be able to retain residence if they practiced fiscally sound policy. That’s where the expanded social sector comes in; the city would need to train a fleet of social workers, which could be previous slum dwellers, which would help keep citizens on a fiscally responsible path.


This plan probably is too idealistic and too simple to spite the time I put into it, but I think that some of the ideas from the project could really be put into place to prevent, fight, and reverse slums in developing countries and help reduce gender in-equality and raise the standard of living across the board. 


By William Lynch

Development

Development as a concept has no universally accepted definition. It is often used by various people of different backgrounds to mean different things. In some quarters, it connotes the number of vehicles,
calories-intake, TV sets per head, industries, roads, including fly-overs, educational institutions, health institutions etc, that are made available. It has also been erroneously equated with economic development, growth, modernization or even westernization. 


While the above constitute indices of growth or what the radical school call "checklist of artifacts" they may not have contributed to development. Equally too, economic development, industrialization or westernization
is not the same thing as development. These are so, for the fact that an infrastructural transformation may not at the end contribute meaningfully to real transformation(development of the living being in that setting). Hence, it is possible to see a twelve year old child growing so tall, but has not developed intellectually to help 
the society through new discoveries.


From the above premise we want to identify ourselves with the school of thought in development studies which sees development as multi-dimensional rather than unilineal. Walter Rodney, a well acclaimed
scholar of this school sees development from three broad perspectives, the individual level(the crux of our work), the social group level, and the state level. Development at the individual level implies increased
skill and capacity, greater freedom, creativity, self discipline, responsibility and material well-being. Development at the social group level refers to the capacity of a social group to regulate its internal
and external relationships. At the state level it entails both quantitative and qualitative growth in the economic, political and social aspects of human and material resources from a lower to a higher stage. These are what constitute National Development. 

We may ask; "what are the universal aims and objectives of development, and that of Nigeria in particular?". The aims and objectives of development in Nigeria may be summarized from its various national development plans as: 
(1) a free and democratic society; 
(2) a just and egalitarian society; 
(3) a united, strong and self-reliant nation; 
(4) a great and dynamic economy; and 
(5) a land of full bright opportunities for all citizens. (Second National Development Plan, 1970-1974). 


A critical analysis of the aforementioned objectives no doubt centres on freedom for the individuals to attain survival goals, restriction notwithstanding. The state as an institution was created to cater for the individual by channelling state wealth into providing amenities which will aid the common goal.  According to Seers, the universal aim of development is the realization of the potentials of human personality(Seer, 1972). By
extension, development should always be people-oriented rather than economy-oriented. This must be so because a people-oriented program helps to uplift the living condition of the individual and this helps
him/her further to contribute his/her quota to further development. This makes him/her to prevent oppression from the system and its leaders. Thus, a government policy that increased housing units and a progressive
tax policy will uplift the individual and he/she will be ready to defend the nation anywhere, anytime. However, a policy that is singly geared towards fantastic industrialization may benefit the government and contractors, but may in turn affect the individual negatively. This makes the leaders to maintain their status quo. The bottomline of this is that social plagues like hunger, unemployment, criminality becomes imminent in the society.  


In other words, the development of human person is an important ingredient. National development is not complete without the moral elements. Societies must imbued of ethics and moral values. Through the inculcation of ethics and moral values, there will be development in the society. This brings into sharp focus the development of the human personality. It is, put in other words, the moral development of the citizens that constitute one aspect of national development. There are other aspects of national development, for a country is like a living organism with many parts or organs, each of which needs development. If any of its parts remain undeveloped, the whole organism suffers. Each part has its own distinctive contribution towards the growth and well-being of the whole organism.