Pact

Pact's e-newsletter offers the latest on our efforts around the world to build thriving, resilient and engaged communities that are leading their own development.

In this Policy Commentary article for the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network, Pact President & CEO Dennis Vega explores critical questions about the consolidation of USAID and U.S. foreign assistance into the State Department. Vega writes that as U.S. foreign assistance is consolidated into the State Department, we must ensure that this new structure strengthens global development.

At 60 years old, Patricia Mulenga is a powerful example of resilience, hope, and community leadership. A resident of Zambia’s Serenje District, Patricia is living with HIV and has been on antiretroviral therapy (ART) for more than 28 years. She continues to thrive while inspiring others around her. Patricia currently collects her medication from Muililma Rural Health Centre, located in the heart of Serenje District.

A gold miner at the Beava Mine in Bibiani, Ghana. Credit: James McQuilken/Pact “Precious! Minerals! Cocoa! Ghana!” These were the call and response phrases echoing around a tiled room during a recent workshop in Bibiani, Ghana. The event, a collaboration among Pact, Solidaridad, and the Ghana Farmer’s Cocoa Association’s (GFCA), was designed to bring artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) and cocoa farming communities together.

An artisanal miner in the Tanga region of Tanzania shows rough gemstones dug from the earth. Credit: Michael Goima/Pact For Salma Juma Mode, making a living was never easy. For years, her main source of income has been gemstone mining in Tanzania’s Umba Valley, a gem-rich area in northeast Tanga Region. Like many gemstone miners, Salma has never been part of a big operation.

Christine de Guzman working from a makeshift stand-up desk in Pact's Ukraine office in late 2017. In the realm of global development, program operations isn’t always thought of as an area of technical expertise in the way that health, education, or governance are, for example. Christine de Guzman, who has managed programs at Pact for 12 years, rejects that notion.

Svitlana Pakulko has spent her career strengthening the often-invisible systems that allow civil society to function, adapt, and endure, even under extraordinary pressure. Trained as an accountant, Pakulko began her career at the Ukraine office of the International Center for Nonprofit Law, a U.S.-based NGO that, at the time, was supporting the development of new legislation for civil society across Ukraine and other former Soviet republics.

It was 2013, and Daisy Kisyombe was in the Mara region of Tanzania, meeting with women and older girls who were taking part in Pact’s WORTH program, a community banking model that brings community members together in small groups to save money, access credit, and start small businesses to lift themselves out of poverty. Kisyombe, who grew up in Tanzania and joined Pact in 2007, was there as a measurement and evaluation professional to assess WORTH’s impact.

Amayèle Dia remembers vividly the first time she met a former child miner. Dia was working for Pact in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A teenage girl, the former miner had taken part in a Pact-supported vocational training program designed to help children exit mining – one of the worst forms of child labor. The girl had studied IT and computing. Thanks to her new skills, she had landed a safe, stable job as a secretary in an English language institute.

For Lydia Naunt, her career has always been rooted in one question: How can clean energy reach the people who need it most? “Early in my career, I conducted site visits to rural communities in Myanmar, where families had no access to electricity,” says Lydia, a Myanmar native. “That experience changed me. While urban households could cook rice with the push of a button, rural families spent hours each day collecting firewood just to prepare a simple meal.