News Release
For immediate release
3 September 2008

If you could change one thing forever, what would it be?

That’s the question posed to South Africans in the month of September through the dynamic CHANGE4EVER initiative presented by the Southern Africa Trust.

The public is urged to SMS their innovative answers to 36545 to help develop lasting solutions to poverty in southern Africa.

The campaign targets a newer generation of South Africans who believe that we need to address the causes of poverty, rather than just the symptoms – to give to a solution rather than the problem.  Far too often in the past, our countries’ problems have been temporarily addressed through charitable efforts. But no sooner than the symptoms are masked, the problems resurface.

Over one hundred million people in southern Africa live in poverty.

The Southern Africa Trust is an independent non-profit agency that supports more than 80 organisations in southern Africa that are committed to addressing the root causes of poverty by changing attitudes, policies, and practices so that efforts to overcome poverty work better for the millions of poor people in southern Africa. 

Executive Director of the Trust, Neville Gabriel, says that South Africans need to take responsibility for supporting efforts to overcome the underlying causes of poverty in our region.  “Instead of only giving food hand outs, for example, we need to support initiatives that address why there are food shortages and then build agreements to fix the root causes so that the problems don’t recur.”

With a group of well-informed “ambassadors for change” consisting of well-known public personalities lined up, the CHANGE4EVER campaign puts the power to tackle poverty back into the hands of the public, whilst building a national agenda for what the public hopes to change. Ambassadors such as Graça Machel, fashion designer David Tlale, and editor of the Mail and Guardian Ferial Haffajee have all committed themselves to the initiative and answered the CHANGE4EVER question. This is what they had to say . . .

Graça Machel: “If I could change one thing forever it would be the way in which women are viewed and treated. Equity and equality between men and women should not be an optional extra but should be seen as a benefit to all society. It is only when both men and women develop and display their full talents that we can truly attain political, economic and social development in our region, and in Africa as a whole.”

David Tlale: “If I could change one thing forever I would I impress a positive mindset in every 1's life of understanding that life is a miracle – whatever comes our way there's hope for tomorrow. So, there's no need to give up. Keep going, keep on surviving, and most of all keep on believing that God is the giver of life.”

Ferial Haffajee: “If I could change one thing forever I would ensure that poverty is no longer the hidden story of the media, that we are not surprised by the annual statistics that show half of all South Africans are desperately poor and that the only thing growing at a cracking pace is the Gini coefficient.  I would like the Millennium Development Goals (and where we are on that scale of human decency) to be as commonplace a set of indicators as the FTSE, the JSE-Alsi and the rand-dollar exchange rate.”

The names of many more celebrity ambassadors will be announced in the coming days as the initiative rolls out.

Through the R5 SMS charge, the Southern Africa Trust aims to raise enough money to boost innovative efforts to drive down poverty on behalf of supporters of CHANGE4EVER.

SMS the word CHANGE and your answer to 36545 and help make a lasting difference in the lives of people living in poverty.

ABOUT THE SOUTHERN AFRICA TRUST

The Southern Africa Trust was established in 2005 to support voices of the poor to have a better say in shaping policies to overcome poverty, so that efforts to drive down poverty in southern Africa have a stronger impact. The Trust seeks out innovative and effective initiatives that address poverty in new ways across the southern Africa region and ensures that funds are provided to support these initiatives.

The Trust now works with more than 80 organisations across 15 countries in southern Africa that are committed to addressing the root causes of poverty by making policies work better for the millions of poor people in southern Africa. This is done in two main ways:

• Supporting the organizations to do their work better by learning more about what kinds of interventions work well to have a lasting impact on poverty and what strategies don’t work.
• Giving them grants to finance their work, so that they can take practical action to drive down poverty forever.

All grant-making is managed according to the Trust’s publicly declared policies and strict principles, values, and rules of good corporate governance.

In the past two years, the Trust gave over 130 grants totalling more than $9 million to these organisations to enable them to strengthen their work. For example, to prevent hunger, improve the way in which water, land, minerals, and other natural resources are used to overcome poverty, promote better support for informal traders and small-scale farmers, protect migrant children, ensure that women have more power to shape policies that address poverty, ensure that community groups and governments work together to drive down poverty rather than against each other, and give a voice to the poor in the mass media. The Trust particularly supports poverty reduction initiatives that are evidence-based rather than just politically driven.


For more information on the Southern Africa Trust
please go to www.change4ever.org

For more information on the Change4ever campaign:
Grace Kadzere
Red Flag Design and Marketing on
(011) 447-8283
grace@redflag.co.za