Mira: en Barranquilla se baila así

Shakira is on a mission to bring attention and dollars to issues of early childhood development in Latin America. Check out the NY Times Magazine piece...it's another reason to love the Columbian singer. Shakira's group, ALAS (Spanish for "wings") has

a policy focus — early-childhood nutrition, education and medical care — that is on a scale beyond the reach of private charity. It requires the steady effort of the state. It cannot be addressed by rich countries’ check-writing. So the trick is to take pop celebrity, marry it to big business and permanently alter the way Latin American governments help care for the young and the poor. What the golden-haired young woman staring at her laptop was trying to do was a tall order, given the fragility of celebrity influence, the dubious track record of Latin American governments in providing social services and the lengthening shadow of a global recession that was straitening everyone’s budget. But she is not someone whom it would be reasonable to underestimate.
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“It has been scientifically proven,” Shakira said — as Bono told me in an e-mail message, “When she gets going on the subject of child poverty she can be pretty scary” — “that a kid that receives proper stimulation and nutrition during these early years will develop all their potential in life: intellectual skills, learning abilities, social and emotional abilities. . . . So many other countries in Asia or in Europe are already putting early-childhood development at the top of their agendas, and we want our heads of state to do the same.” To that end, she told me she would insist on obtaining promises of action and the establishment of an early-childhood working group at this year’s Ibero-American Summit. “We want that every president walks out with a firm commitment. We want to make sure that they will go back to their countries with those children between zero and 6 years old in their minds, and understanding very well what early-childhood development initiatives mean.”