How can your STANDFast donation make a difference and protect civilians?
Your STANDFast donation to the Genocide Intervention Network’s (GI-Net) Civilian Protection program is important because it goes towards unique initiatives that provide protection to vulnerable individuals in Darfur and eastern Burma. See how your donations make an impact:
$2.56 can provide a woman with a donkey for one week to collect firewood (1).
Give up coffee for one day, help a mother cook safely for a week!
Because collecting firewood outside the camps in Darfur is a dangerous activity that leaves women exposed to rape and gender-based violence from militias, GI-Net has worked with people living in camps and a partner organization to come up with a plan to reduce vulnerability during firewood collection. A vital part of this is improving the effectiveness and frequency of firewood patrols. In addition, providing donkey-carts will allow women to collect enough firewood at once to last until the next firewood patrol, so they will not have to go out unprotected.
$4.25 can provide 5 minutes of satellite phone coverage to communicate urgent warnings or upload images of an attack in eastern Burma.
Give up a long distance call to a friend, help a village escape an attack!
Families in villages targeted by the Burmese government live in fear of frequent and violent attacks that threaten their lives and assets. Often warnings arrive too late, if at all, to allow community members enough time to escape, much less pack or bury assets that are vital to their wellbeing. GI-NET is working with a local partner to develop an early warning system that utilizes satellite phones and radios to provide enough warning before attacks occur to allow innocent civilians to escape from danger.
$27 can cover the costs of protecting one household in eastern Burma via the civilian radio network (2).
Gather your friends and skip a night out to help protect a Burmese family!
An effective radio network connecting at-risk villages can mean the difference between escape and the fatal outcomes of the government’s ethnically targeted attacks. GI-NET hopes to provide 200 radios to community members in 2009 as a vital component of the early warning system, and with your help we can!
*These figures are obtained based on the following calculations: (1) Darfur: Though donkeys and donkey carts should be serviceable for many years, we use the term of this project (6 months) as the time horizon. Each donkey costs roughly $200, and each donkey cart costs $350. Each donkey and cart will benefit 3 women per week. Thus we estimate the price to provide these services to one woman for one week will be approximately $200/(26*3) = $2.56 to provide a donkey, and $350/(26*3)=$4.49 to provide a cart. (2) Burma: This project will provide radios to at-risk villages and incorporate them in an early warning network, at which point the chance of them being surprised by an attack is very low. The base cost is $680 per radio ($500 for radio, solar charger, antenna, etc. plus $180 in other project implementation costs). Each village needs one radio and has approximately 25 households, resulting in an average cost of approximately $27 for each household. In reality a single radio will also benefit the villages and hamlets surrounding it, increasing the number protected for a given number of radios.
