16 June – The Global Call to Action Against Poverty is calling on the world to join social movements everywhere as we celebrate the ‘Day of the African Child’ and kick off an important 10-day initiative that will help deliver all of our demands to the world leaders at the United Nations Conference on the Financial and Economic Crisis and its Impact on Development on 24-26 June in New York City.

The ‘10 Days of Action’ will have a different focus each day to help raise awareness on several issues related to the impact of the economic crisis on women, children, education, climate change, the Millennium Development Goals, among others. The current economic crisis has devastated the situation in developing countries, yet the world’s leaders are teetering on the brink of abandoning the commitments they made at Gleneagles in 2005. There are now close to a billion people living on barely a meal a day, and millions living on $2 a day, yet goals are set to halve hunger by 2015. These are the faces of poverty that we don’t really see, the voices in crisis that we don’t hear.

"We will be in New York to lobby for those Southern voices who have no one to speak for them, and to bring up gender, hunger, Africa, and all the issues that must be talked about in the midst of this economic crisis when the poor are bearing the brunt of a situation for which they are not responsible," said Adelaide Sosseh, GCAP Global Co-Chair, speaking from Senegal.

The ‘10 Days of Action’ kicks off today 16 June – Day of the African Child – with an emphasis on vulnerable and marginalized populations who bear the brunt of the economic, food and climate change crises. The ‘10 Days’ initiative also includes a series of events culminating on the closing day of the UN Conference on 26 June.

"We are advocating for a just, equitable and sustainable global economy that puts people before profits. During the ‘10 Days of Action’ we are putting governments on notice and letting world’s leaders know that civil society activism and advocacy is in action for the UN Conference on June 24," said Rosa Lizarde, member of the GCAP Feminist Task Force.

The ’10 Days’ is a joint effort with many civil society networks including the Feminist Task Force, Social Watch, ITUC, ICAE, NGO Committee on FfD, International Network for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Women’s Working Group on FfD, Ibon Foundation and the major networks of the Global Social Economy Group and the Global Crisis group, among others.

For more information about '10 Days' and complete calendar of events, see

For more information about the UN Conference, see the GSEG site:  www.ffdngo.org or UN-NGLS site: www.un-ngls.org or the UN Conference site:  http://www.un.org/ga/econcrisissummit/

Please add this to your website links:  GCAP joins the launch of ’10 Days of Action’ - http://www.whiteband.org/Action/take-action/gcap-mobilisation-2009/unhlc-june-2009/10-days-of-action-a-countdown-to-commitments

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