Transcript
ALBINA DU BOISROUVRAY: Thank you. Well, thank you all very much for being here today. It’s a great privilege to share our learnings with you at Synergos. My son, François-Xavier, was a helicopter search-and-rescue pilot and he lived to serve others by rescuing the wounded, the sick, and bringing back the dead. And he was killed in 1986 when his own helicopter crashed in a mission in Mali and he was only 24 years old. So at the time of his death François had completed successfully more than 300 rescue missions in the mountains in Switzerland and in the deserts in Africa. His work was not only his passion. It was his purpose.
So when he passed away, I knew I could not let François’ passion and his work go lost. So with the help of friends and families, and supporters I created in 1989 an organization called FXB to fight the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which was raging at the time, as you remember, to eradicate extreme poverty and raise a generation of children in full accordance with the United Nations convention on the rights of the child so that those children who were plagued by war, and poverty, and disease would not fuel with what I call the, the discarded generation.
And so I called the organization FXB, which are the initials of François-Xavier Bagnoud. And since 1991 FXB and its innovative FXBVillage program, which is one of the multiple initiatives that we did in 26 years, has helped more than 80,000 overcome extreme poverty. So we traveled to Africa, to Asia, to South America. We’ve worked with widows, with grandparents in charge of whole households, with HIV individuals, and with orphans. So now we have decided to share with the world a guide to our work from the past 26 years in the spirit of shared knowledge as an open source to advance the field better. So it’s called the FXBVillage Toolkit and Planning Guide. It chronicles our history, our methodology, and successes, and we share stories from the urban slums of Colombia, from the rural villages of Rwanda, and from remote communities in China.
And most of all we provide a field tested, transparent road map that works and can be used to help eradicate extreme poverty. We launched the toolkit with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health on Monday with luminaries such as Nobel Prize laureate Professor Sen, Professor Sudhir Anand, and Dr. Julio Frenk, who’s the Dean of the school. And presenting the toolkit with those leaders was not just an honor but it was very fitting and appropriate because Harvard is the home to our FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, and it’s Harvard’s research and expertise that helped develop the FXBVillage Toolkit and Planning Guide as a learning tool for the world to use. So this toolkit is divided in three sections that help the reader learn the FXBVillage methodology, understand on a deeper level, and do it in the field.
There’s also the interactive planning guide for practical application that is complete with useful forms, and planning tools, and quizzes, and lots of different things. As I have always worked outside of the box, even when I was a film producer, when we developed the FXBVillage methodology in 1990 I went delving deep into the field and used my common sense, my creativity, and the teachings I had received, and I listened. I listened a lot. I found that organization’s contribution to the field of global development, yes, were valuable but they seemed to focus on either providing resources like food, or health care in silos. And very poor people were given micro credit loans. For the most part this is still true today. And I knew that to be successful FXB couldn’t focus on just on aspect of poverty to eliminate it over the long term.
I knew that micro credit, which is a fantastic tool for people just under the level of poverty who have a little something, was not a solution for our totally destitute friends in the AIDS swamped communities who had absolutely nothing.
So instead I drew knowledge and inspiration from the research of late Dr. Jonathan Mann, who was a Harvard University professor. Dr. Mann taught us that there is an inextricable link between health and human rights and both the social and cultural factors that heighten disease and prevent people from accessing their human rights. He taught us, and me in particular, the importance of those critical links between all the human rights. So rather than targeting in silos those issues such as providing treatment for malaria or latrines FXB set out to address all the factors that impact poverty together in 1991.
But we knew also that our work couldn’t end there. What would families do when we left? How would they become independent?
We had to teach those families how to generate their own source of income. We had to invest for them as we invested in the other interventions in the tools needed for long-term economic success that is a business. In our experience we realized the support needed to last only three years as families could learn very well how to care for themselves without us there, and how to earn enough income making savings and grow. And now at this juncture they can go into the micro credit world, which is at this point achievable for them. You see, we’re a step before. We are step for the ultra poor. The FXBVillage model we created simultaneously targets simultaneously the five drivers of poverty, which are food, health care, housing, nutrition, and an income.
So while also building families’ capacities to stand on their own two feet there is a lot of teaching, training, psychosocial counseling, which I consider as the cement holding everything together. There is of course much more also and I think we’ve managed to pack all the details indispensable in the toolkit and its planning guide. So I encourage you all to download and see for yourself at FXB.org/toolkit. FXB has been successful because our model is unique and the FXBVillage model has been recognized by both UN aides and UNICEF as a best practice. After nearly 30 years the FXBVillage model has been active in eight countries with an 86% success rate at helping families overcome extreme poverty for the long-term. But with 1.2 billion people living in extreme poverty today FXB still has much more work to do.
Extreme poverty is a complex cycle, as we all know, that is very hard to break. Yet when we tackle simultaneously the five drivers of poverty we can build families’ ability to overcome that poverty and put all of us on a better path to achieving the sustainable goals, the sustainable development goals by 2030. So with the global release of the FXBVillage model Toolkit and Planning Guide we’re asking researchers, entrepreneurs, philanthropists, policymakers, non-profit organizations and community leaders to apply this model that works for a more sustainable world. And we feel that sharing with others and replicating is the way to scale up, which is always the goal that governments look for.
So to bring this FXBVillage methodology to life our team has prepared a short video that tells the stories of several program participants whose lives have been changed. And so please meet in Burundi: Esperance, Jeannette, Jean-Marie, and Dohotae.
ALBINA DU BOISROUVRAY: You see, at FXB we deeply believe that investing in children, and women, and youth is investing in the peace and the security of our world. So I hope you will join me in our journey to eradicate poverty and raise children all the world wide. And I hope you find our shared knowledge on the FXBVillage model useful for your current efforts and your future efforts. Thank you all very much.