Bono meets German Development Minister

German Development Minister Gerd Mueller meets with Bono at the German Ministry of Development on September 23, 2015 in Berlin, Germany.





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Bono Adds His Voice To The Remix Of A Poverty Campaign Song

Leading African male artists D’Banj, Diamond and Banky W have joined forces with U2 lead singer and ONE co-founder Bono to remix ‘Strong Girl’ - the anthem that celebrates the power of girls and women everywhere.

The original track features Victoria Kimani, Omotola, Waje, Selmor Mtukudzi and other top female artists from across the continent.

The guys may be remixing it, but the message stays the same: Poverty is Sexist. Women and girls everywhere are held back, through lack of education, and economic opportunity.

1 million people have already signed the petition calling on our leaders to take action that leads to change for girls and women everywhere, but especially in the poorest communities.

As world leaders prepare to meet in New York to agree new Global Goals to end poverty in the next 15 years, the ONE campaign is more important than ever.

Apparently the male artists were invited to remix the track because this isn’t just a women’s issue. It’s everyone’s issue.

hotsecretz.blogspot.com.ar

Bono's Blog: Solar Fields, Sexist Poverty and a Modern Marshall Plan

Poverty is sexist: it hits women and girls the hardest, which is doubly ironic, because investing in them is the best way to end poverty

If you are allergic to fanfare you’d better bolt your doors and shutter your windows on September 25, because there is going to be a lot of it that day in the vicinity of the United Nations, when world leaders ratify the Global Goals for Sustainable Development. This is a genuinely big deal, of large consequence — let’s hope — especially for the poorest people on the planet, but you will be forgiven if some of you are rolling your eyes, or yawning, or worse.

At a time when Europe and the rest of the world are flailing in response to the massive refugee crisis in the Middle East, this hardly seems a time for grand commitments of any kind, unless it’s a commitment to stop stumbling over our own two feet.

It’s a fair and pressing question. If we can’t handle what’s happening in Syria — if we can’t even get the nomenclature right, insisting on calling these desperate refugees “migrants,” as if they had just packed their suitcases and moved north for a change of scene — how can we possibly handle the more chronic, endemic humanitarian crises of extreme poverty and hunger and sickness? Who, exactly, do we think we are, launching another fanciful campaign?

But pause for a second before you projectile vomit, and consider that the emergency in Syria shows exactly why we need to pursue — and achieve — these Global Goals. The evidence of that is all over the Sahel, the band across the north of Africa, where three extremes — extreme poverty, extreme climate, extreme ideology — pose a stark and constant threat. A failure to make progress there could trigger a series of crises that would dwarf what we’re seeing in Syria.
Boko Haram, in northern Nigeria, is well known now in the rest of the world, by virtue of its being horrific and violent, but it’s hardly the only group of extremists that’s active in the Sahel; Al Shabaab, The Lord’s Resistance Army, and Al Qaeda in the Maghreb are as well. CIA analysts — who are not, as a rule, dewy-eyed development types — have looked at northern Nigeria and said that the best way to stop the militants in the long run is to end extreme poverty in the area and create a better, more inclusive education system, one that Muslims feel they have some stake in. When the CIA and anti-poverty activists agree, things must be very right or very wrong!
Especially when the demographers join in. By 2050, we’re told, Africa will have 2.5 billion people, twice the population of China, and more than one third of the youth on earth will be African. Which is exciting news for all of us who find Africa, hands down, one of the world’s most energizing places. But hundreds of millions of unemployed or underemployed young men, if it comes to that, is not a recipe for stability — either there or here, wherever “here” is for you.

Of course the Global Goals are just that: goals, aspirations. Not blueprints or battle plans. As Amina Mohammed, the very impressive Nigerian Assistant Secretary General to the UN who’s shepherding the goals, would surely agree, they’re the what, not the how. So what’s the how?

It’s going to have to be a lot of things, of course. But one of them, a big one, might be an idea we’re hearing from African leaders in business, civil society, and government: a modern Marshall Plan, inspired if not actually based on what America did in Europe after World War II. According to Akin Adesina, the new President of the African Development Bank:

“The future of feeding a projected 9 billion people in the world by 2050 depends on Africa, which has 65% of all arable land left. Africa cannot eat potential. To seize this potential requires a scaled global partnership, a modern day Marshall plan, but led by Africa.”
Similarly, “A comprehensive, coordinated approach” is what Tony Elumelu, the Nigerian entrepreneur and philanthropist, has called for, a plan for trade, transparency, employment, infrastructure — all the elements of opportunity.

But what would a Marshall Plan even look like these days? Not exactly like Secretary of State (and General) George C. Marshall’s Plan, which was brilliantly suited to its own time, less so our own. The Second World War left not only cities but entire economies in rubble; the Marshall Plan helped them rebuild. A modern Marshall Plan would, by contrast, have to focus on countries that were not industrialised to begin with, but are working hard to build the foundations.

To succeed, it would have to employ a bunch of means all at once — ganging up on the problems of extreme poverty and unequal opportunity. Aid is one of those means — an essential one. Our ultimate goal is the end of aid — growing economies, shared prosperity, self-sufficiency. But the way we’re going to get there — if you can handle the cognitive dissonance — is actually to increase the aid, for now, to the countries that need it the most. The poorest countries get only a small share, 30 percent, of the aid that the world provides. Investing foreign funds can leverage domestic funds to improve basic health services and education for the poorest citizens, especially women and girls.

Poverty is sexist: it hits women and girls the hardest, which is doubly ironic, because investing in them is the best way to end poverty.

People have gotten smarter since the 1940s — smarter even since the early 2000s — in making sure that aid budgets get spent on what works and get results. A generation of techno-minded “factivists” are on the march, fighting corruption, campaigning for connectivity — and the access to information and opportunities it provides — and keenly aware that if they can mobilise their own domestic resources, soon they will no longer need the wealth of their partners to unlock prosperity in their own neighbourhood.

A 21st-century Marshall Plan would also have to get some private-sector skin in the game, not just foreign aid. The U.S. in the 1940s gave loans to struggling businesses, which is still a good idea, but this doesn’t just have to come from governments; there are successful companies across Africa and around the world that could be making investments in the ones that need capital. The private sector has got as much to gain as anyone from helping lagging industries to flourish, growing businesses to grow further, and developing economies to become developed ones. And the private sector, in many ways, has more leverage than multilateral aid agencies in making that happen. It’s got even more leverage when it works in concert with those aid agencies and with national and local governments.

I saw this last month just outside Kigali, in Rwanda, where a combination of government assistance, through President Obama’s Power Africa initiative, and private investment, through Gigawatt Global, has created a crazy futurist solar field that’s boosted Rwanda’s generation capacity by 6 percent and has basically blown my circuits with its possibilities; this array just has to be seen. Europe’s already on board with the idea of clean, green energy, promising to help 500 million people get access to it. The world ought to put its weight behind risk-takers like Gigawatt and help them scale in places like northern Nigeria. The sun shines there, too.

A modern George C. Marshall Plan could even draw investment from defense budgets, because military planners are starting (just starting) to think like a health insurance plan that pays for your preventative medicine instead of just waiting for you to get deathly ill. The military does love its machines, but it would rather not put its human beings into places where they are likely to get shot or worse. They know the original Marshall Plan was not just a postwar plan, it was an anti-war plan — designed to stop Soviet expansionism and keep the Cold War from getting hot in Europe.

Peace and stability are of course a precondition for building anything lasting — or anything at all. There’s a reason the Marshall Plan got started only after the war — not in the middle of it. Clearly we’ve got to end the fighting in Syria before development is even a remote possibility there. But that shouldn’t — can’t — stop us from preventing the dry regions of the world, full of tinder and lit with sparks, from exploding into flames.

The Marshall Plan should be a model but it needn’t be our only inspiration. There is plenty of that in Africa itself, from the solar fields in Rwanda to tech startups in Nigeria, Kenya, and Tanzania. There are success stories virtually everywhere on the continent — the brilliant work of a rising generation of African entrepreneurs and activists and artists and officials.

Partnership, not paternalism, is required here — and was the key to the success of the previous edition of the Global Goals, the Millennium Development Goals.
It should egg us on to consider the role the MDGs played in increasing the number of children in schools and dramatically reducing child deaths, maternal mortality, and the most degrading, debilitating sort of poverty.

I’ve been fighting with the world most of my life, and I’ve learned that change mostly comes slowly and incrementally. But sometimes, when a situation demands it, we think big, act audaciously, and we get it right — or at least partly right, which is no small thing. Now needs to be one of those times. We’ve got to get it right, right now, because the humanitarian disaster in the Middle East — and the blundering toward a humane response in Europe and elsewhere — are a kick to the collective gut, a brutal reminder of what it means to get it wrong. Syria will not be the last conflagration, but when we think and build as big as our goals, we have a chance to prevent the fire next time.

Bono

Lead singer of U2 and co-founder of ONE and (RED)

https://medium.com
http://www.one.org/

Bono's mission to end extreme poverty

CNN talks exclusively with Bono in Lagos, Nigeria to discuss his mission to end extreme poverty. New Day's Michaela Pereira reports.

Bono: the voice of innocence and experience

In a fast car in Italy, the U2 singer takes a ride through the band’s Dublin roots.

Late at night, in a fast car on the motorway between Turin and Milan, en route to meet the Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi, Bono goes quiet before saying: “The greatest line ever said about me and also the most accurate line ever said about me was most definitely by my father. He said, ‘You, Bono, are a baritone who thinks he’s a tenor.’ And that is the story of my life right there.”

He has sung about his father in the past; he is now singing about his mother. When he performs Iris live earlier tonight, he sinks to his knees, weeps and then makes the sign of the cross.

“It’s hard, of course it’s hard singing that song,” he says. “But I’ve always had this big thing which is: What is the point of being in U2 if we can’t take on subject matter that others would find uncool?” He raises his voice. “I mean, what is the point?”

We pull into a lay-by so he can play tracks from the next album, Songs of Experience. His voice comes through his phone singing about “the dying of the light”. He harmonises with himself as the album continues and gives every song an introduction: “On this one we were going after a broken cassette recorder type of sound”; “This has got a really crunchy beat”; “You have to hear Edge’s guitar work on this”; “Just wait until you hear the drum break on this one.” He’s lost in his music, staring out the window as he sings along.

The Italian prime minister is waiting but it seems that cat can chill. Bono keeps scrolling and playing. “We’re going to get this album out next year; unusually for us, a lot of the songs are done already,” he says. (I’ve heard that before.)

By now, I’ve one eye on the car’s clock and am calculating my chances of making it back into Turin tonight. I open the door and place one foot on the ground. “Listen to this. It’s really atmospheric, it was written for a film,” he says. Two feet on the ground now – I could just make a run for it. “Wait! You have to hear this one, it’s really sad . . .”

After the final encore in Turin that night, I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, Bono improvises a bit of Patti Smith’s People Have The Power, walks off stage and directly into an already revving car in which I’m waiting for him. The music is still playing as the police escort guides us out of the venue.

“I thought last night’s gig was great [the tour’s opening night] and it was really ‘there’ because the script was there and the feelings were there . . . It’s when you’re confident enough to be able to relax, it becomes even more powerful. It’s like throwing a punch. There were some hip rhythms in there – it’s the pelvis”.

The concept for the Innocence + Experience tour began on the opening night of the 360° tour in Barcelona in 2009. For a band who had been forged in the white heat of punk/New Wave music in the late 1970s, there was a realisation upon seeing the enormodome scale of 360° that the next tour would have to go indoors and pull the audience in tight.

“360 was a communal experience at its best,” he says. “But to be a proper communal experience you have to have the song lines, you have to have the folk songs. If the audience are the centrepiece - and that was the idea behind 360 - then you have to have tunes to sing. The thing is: we had made quite an atmospheric album [No Line on the Horizon], quite a complex piece of work so it was slightly at odds with that.”

Clash city rockers

It was The Clash, The Ramones and songs such as Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t Have) by The Buzzcocks and Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division that turned U2 from a Peter Frampton and Eagles cover band into the group behind Boy, their 1980 debut album. This current tour is an exposition of early U2: in Turin, the band play more songs from Boy than from their best-selling and fan favourite album The Joshua Tree.

For Bono, the distance travelled between then and now throws up some uncomfortable truths. The teenager who took the bus into Trinity to see The Clash perform in the Exam Hall and then bunked into the State Cinema in Phibsboro to worship at the stage of The Ramones: what would he make of the Bono he has become? A billionaire Southsider with global political leaders on speed dial.

His answer is in the new lyrics he has written for these European shows: “I go back to talk to that teenage Bono [who he refers to as the boy] from where I am now.”

ADAM'S SHIRT & VIP TICKETS

Fancy owning a personalised T-Shirt, as worn by Adam at one of the #U2ieTour shows?  How about VIP tickets ... and a tour of the stage?

A series of charity auctions are taking place to support the work of Walk In My Shoes, a campaign promoting mental health awareness and well being for young people in Ireland.

The winners get VIP tickets to one of the current European performances, a backstage tour and a T-shirt worn in one of the shows - personally signed for you by Adam. 

The tickets for you and a guest include access to a premium viewing area on the floor up close to the stage.

There are four auctions live right now. 

Get bidding for tickets to the show in
Berlin
Barcelona
Belgium 
Koln

Inspired by a 16year old at St. Patrick's University Hospital, who wished his friends could 'walk in his shoes' to understand what he was going through, Walk in My Shoes raises funds to provide mental health support, information and services to vulnerable young adults in Ireland.

'We need support growing up, but especially if you're vulnerable and you need someone to talk to,' explains Adam, an ambassador of the organisation. 'It's ok to ask for help and Walk In My Shoes is working hard to remove the stigma around mental health difficulties.'

Read more about Walk In My Shoes. More auctions for more European dates coming up. Keep checking back.

www.U2.com

Stockholm Septermber 16-22 ,2015

'Your eyes were like landing lights

They used to be the clearest blue

Now you don’t see so well

The future’s gonna land on you..’

Volcano erupting in Stockholm for the opening night in Sweden.

'It is a thrill to be here,’ said Bono, catching his breath before introducing Iris. 'I don't know why but this band always feels like we're on our holidays when we're in Stockholm.

Seriously …The Edge wants to go fishing in the archipelago visiting the arctic circle to measure things ...he does love measuring things ...don't you The Edge?

Adam wants to go shopping on Library Street - bibleeoteksgothan - is that how you say it? - for girl’s underwear. I mean not for himself - but for his wife... and sometimes mine!

Larry wants to trace his family history. Yes Larry Mullen is convinced that his blond hair is a Viking throw back. I'm not convinced he's Swedish but I am convinced he's a Viking alright…’

Second night...

October and the trees are stripped bare

Of all they wear.

What do I care?’

A song that never grows old, with a powerful and poignant new place in the European set. The opening of the show, we never mention that - Patti Smith introducing U2, the people with the power introducing the miraculous Joey Ramone.Another night, another introduction to the band from Bono. You never know what he’s thinking.

'Wow.. that's a good start, are we moving’ up? Guess yesterday evening was just a warm up! Look at ya.. Look at ya! You haven’t changed a bit.. neither have we. Larry, you haven’t changed. Larry Mullen hasn’t changed.. that's ‘cos he stays up late, he avoids daylight, and he has very sharp teeth. Larry Mullen.

Edge is looking more Edge-like than ever, very pleasant this evening in his zen-warriorness. And do not think that because you’re all loved-up and newly-wedded that we haven’t noticed the female energy on your side of the stage Adam Clayton...

In so many way these men have not changed since I knew them as boys…'

Another track we never mention is one that rarely fails to bring the house down, on this tour, the band lined up along the centre of the venue - Sunday Bloody Sunday.

'I can't believe the news today

I can't close my eyes and make it go away.’

According to the eagle-eyed observers at U2gigs.com, tonight was the 800th performance of Sunday Bloody Sunday.

'And the battle's just begun

There's many lost, but tell me who has won?’

Tonight Stockholm belongs to you.’ Has to be Angel of Harlem and a guitarist (Philip from Poland) and drummer (Michael from Poland) are recruited from the audience to help the band out. The whole thing goes out on Meerkat to the world thanks to Simona from Italy. So many nationalities, notes Bono, ‘It’s like a Beneton ad.’  Simona, incidentally, is getting good at dancing with the band. Tonight was her third call up. First Rome in 2005, then Zagreb in 2009 and now Stockholm.

* Mother and Child Reunion segueing into City of Blinding Lights brings a special shout-out to Melinda Gates, who’s changing the world for the poorest people and ‘who changed my world’. The night ends like this.

'I have climbed the highest mountains

I have run through the fields

Only to be with you

Only to be with you...'

SUNDAY SHOW IN STOCKHOLM RESCHEDULED UNTIL TUESDAY

Due to a security breach, Stockholm's The Globen evacuated the audience from the building this evening.

Third night:

We're very, very pleased to be in Stockholm and actually playing a show,' said Bono, introducing Iris at tonight's third show in Sweden. 'You might have heard, we had a security breach last night. I must say our audience handled it brilliantly, real cool...'

The police were all over the place. I mean all over the place. 

Now that's not normal to want the police all over you but last night... 

We have a message to the police, thank you for being cautious... and for taking care of our audience and the band.

It was hard to cancel the show last night but it was the right thing to do… and guess what, we get to stay here for an extra night.'

As Edge played the opening bars of Paul Simon's Mother and Child Reunion, Bono talked of the special role Sweden has played in the fight against extreme poverty and its history in welcoming refugees.

'That is the right word – refugee – migrant is just plain wrong. These people are running from broken homes, broken cities, running for their lives, running from a war zone…'

'It's a difficult problem but as Nelson Mandela said 'It always seems impossible until it is done.'

No-one could imagine, ten years ago, that we'd be within reach of the first HIV-free generation, but now we are. 'In the next few years, if we tell our leaders that's what we want, we can have this...'

'The mother and child reunion

Is only a motion away…'

'Everybody having a good time except you.

You were talking about the end of the world…'

Great final night in Sweden, with Until The End of the World among the highlights.

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