We are proud to announce that the Good Shirts fundraising campaign for the Horn of Africa in partnership with Threadless and BBH recently received the Silver award in the “Direct” category at the Cannes Lions awards! The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is the world’s biggest celebration of creativity in communications.

I recently had the opportunity to organize a roundtable discussion on the emergency in the Sahel region of Africa. The event, co-hosted by the U.S. Fund for UNICEF and the Corporate Council on Africa, provided corporate participants an overview of the crisis and the impact of the drought and malnutrition on the region. Guillaume Sauval, Emergency Specialist at UNICEF’s Office of Emergency Programs, explained that the causes of hunger and malnutrition in the region are deeply rooted, with chronic underdevelopment and multiple droughts in recent years leaving the population vulnerable, even to small shocks.

This week America celebrates its independence. But many people in the world do not even enjoy the most basic freedoms, like having a place to live, food to eat, clean water to drink and access to healthcare. If you’ve been visiting our website, you know that the Sahel region in Africa is a place where even the most basic needs for survival are not being met. UNICEF has been tracking the situation in Mali and the rest of the Sahel region and is doing everything it can to save the children and families of Mali. Here is some of the work that UNICEF has been doing.

UNICEF is keenly aware of the importance of transparency and accountability to all who support its lifesaving work for children. In that spirit, UNICEF’s Executive Board recently approved a proposal to make publicly available on UNICEF’s website all internal audits published after September 30, 2012. Although UNICEF already has been providing internal audits to UN Member States upon request since 2009, these audits have not been available to the public. Now UNICEF will create a special “accountability and transparency” section at its site for the internal audit reports.

Recently I attended a presentation by Eileen Munro, a professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and an expert on child protective services. As child protection is a major focus area of UNICEF’s work it was very interesting to hear what Munro had to say about systems of child protection and how they could be improved. UNICEF helps protect children from trafficking, exploitation, violence, abuse and forced labor in countries around the world. And while Munro studied child protection in the U.K., what she found could be applied everywhere. Here are a few highlights from her talk.

This week, the bipartisan Senator Paul Simon Water for the World Act of 2011 (S. 641) unanimously passed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee! Our thanks to the Committee’s leaders, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) and Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN), as well as the bill’s sponsors, Senator Durbin (D-IL) and Senator Corker (R-TN).

Your voices helped make this progress possible! But the job is not done – the legislation still must pass the full Senate, and the House of Representatives still needs to pass a companion bill of the same name (H.R. 3658). You can help – keep contacting your Members of Congress to ask them to support the Water for the World Act.