• Engineering a Healthy Tomorrow for the Poorest Billion, By Muhammad H Zaman, February 1, 2012, Huffington Post: “It is not everyday that you hear the words big Pharma, billionaires, philanthropists and eradication of diseases in the same sentence. Well, Monday, January 30th was one such spectacular day. Bill Gates, WHO Director General, leaders of major Pharmaceutical companies and senior government officials from around the globe unveiled in London, a joint declaration and a strategy to rid the world of ten neglected diseases that afflict the poorest of the poor in the world within a decade. The vision, goal and mission is bold, tremendously exciting, timely and hopefully a catalyst for a healthier world for all…”
• Joint Effort Announced Against Tropical Diseases, By Donald G McNeil Jr., January 30, 2012, New York Times: “Thirteen drug companies, the governments of the United States, Britain and the United Arab Emirates, the World Bank, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Lions Club and other smaller charitable organizations on Monday announced a joint effort to tackle 10 neglected tropical diseases in a coordinated fashion.The diseases, with multisyllabic names like lymphatic filariasis, visceral leishmaniasis and dracunculiasis, are almost never found in rich countries. Most are usually not fatal - but they still ruin the lives of subsistence farmers and rural craftsmen by causing blindness, grotesque swelling, chronic anemia, excruciating pain or other symptoms…”

How Haiti is fighting poverty by killing cash, By Margo Conner, January 27, 2012, Christian Science Monitor: “In Haiti, cash is escaping from wallets and savings accounts are breaking free from brick-and-mortar banks. Two years after 2010’s devastating earthquake, mobile money has taken off in the island nation. While the country has seen setbacks in many areas and continues to struggle, one bright spot is the transformation of the country’s traditional banking sector. Physical banks were wiped away by the quake and subsequent hurricane, and a mobile banking network that uses cell phones has grown up in their place…”

India celebrates one year without polio cases, huge milestone in fight against disease, Associated Press, January 12, 2012, Washington Post: “India will celebrate a full year since its last reported case of polio on Friday, a major victory in a global eradication effort that seemed stalled just a few years ago. If no previously undisclosed cases of the crippling disease are discovered, India will no longer be considered polio endemic, leaving only Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria on that list. ‘This is a game changer in a huge way,’ said Bruce Aylward, head of the World Health Organization’s global polio campaign. The achievement gives a major morale boost to health advocates and donors who had begun to lose hope of ever defeating the stubborn disease that the world had promised to eradicate by 2000. It also helps India, which bills itself as one of the world’s emerging powers, shed the embarrassing link to a disease associated with poverty and chaos, one that had been conquered long ago by most of the globe…”

• Poor countries lead in mother, child spending, Associated Press, September 20, 2011, La Crosse Tribune: “Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Nepal and some of the world’s other poorest countries delivered not only money but new services in the year since U.N. member states pledged more than $40 billion to save the lives of mothers and children, a new study of the spending said Tuesday. The spending report was released at a high-level event chaired by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who has made raising money for the health of mothers and their children a special project. Ban told a gathering at U.N. headquarters that when he was born in 1944 in South Korea, child mortality was so prevalent that families often waited months to register births to make certain babies would survive…”
• WHO report hails efforts to curb maternal deaths, By Sarah Boseley, September 19, 2011, The Guardian: “One year on from a major UN meeting to tackle the deaths of women and babies in childbirth, 44 of the world’s poorest countries have made major commitments to the cause, totalling nearly $11bn (£7bn), according to a progress report. The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, called the meeting a year ago because of sluggish progress towards two of the UN millennium development goals - reducing maternal and child mortality. More than $40bn was pledged for a range of strategies from donor governments, the private sector, NGOs and philanthropists. The one-year assessment from the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (PMNCH) of the World Health Organisation highlights progress in the worst-affected countries. Low-income countries made the highest number of commitments overall…”

To help the poor, experts invent solar-powered hearing aids, motorcycle ambulances, Associated Press, September 12, 2011, Washington Post: “A bit of creativity never hurts, especially when it comes to solving health problems in developing countries. Instead of the usual donated medicines and health equipment, some experts are inventing new products for the poor, like a solar-powered hearing aid or a motorcycle ambulance. Both inventions were showcased at an engineering conference in London. And in a new report published online Monday in the journal Lancet, the United Nations highlights innovations like using text messages in South Africa to remind women with HIV to get their babies tested and tucking medicines into Coca-Cola crates to reach remote villages. Hundreds of thousands of replacement joints, surgical tools and other medical devices have been sent to poor countries over the years. But according to the World Health Organization, about 75 percent of the donated goods sit unused, either because they’re broken or no one knows how to use them…”

Survey: U.S. trails in equal legal treatment of citizens, By Daniel Lippman, June 13, 2011, Kansas City Star: “The U.S. lags behind western Europe in access to civil justice and legal assistance, according to an international survey released Monday that also raised questions over whether U.S. police forces treat all citizens equally. The results of the survey by the World Justice Project, an advocacy group that promotes the rule of law, also signaled that some Middle Eastern countries continue to rank relatively low in certain areas, a key factor in the region’s popular protests.   ‘Without the rule of law, medicines do not reach health facilities due to corruption, women in rural areas remain unaware of their rights, people are killed in criminal violence and economic growth is stifled,’ William Neukom, the founder of the group, said in a statement announcing its second annual Rule of Law Index…”

Report: 15 percent of world population is disabled, By David Brown, June 9, 2011, Washington Post: “About 15 percent of the world’s population - some 785 million people - has a significant physical or mental disability, including about 5 percent of children, according to a new report prepared jointly by the World Health Organization and the World Bank. The disabilities run the entire gamut of impairment, from blindness and limb loss to chronic pain and mental retardation. The problems, especially among old people, are more prevalent in low-income countries than in rich ones. The report, released Thursday at the United Nations in New York, found that the problems are worsened by poverty and dozens of other variables, including stigma, architectural barriers, lack of legal protection, the cost of devices and assistance, and the lack of knowledge by others (especially health professionals) about how to interact with disabled people…”

The bad - and good - news on microcredit, By Gregory M. Lamb, June 9, 2011, Christian Science Monitor: “First Muhammad Yunus founded the nonprofit Grameen Bank, which lent tiny amounts of money to poor people to start businesses. It appeared to be a revolutionary success and he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in 2006. In 2009, for example, Grameen had 6.4 million active borrowers with an average loan size of $127. Then came the second guessing. For-profit companies got into the micro-loan business charging high interest rates in order to generate an attractive return for their investors. While nearly all of Grameen’s borrowers repaid their loans in full, other lenders didn’t do so well. Borrowers began to default. Pressured by their creditors, some in India even committed suicide when they couldn’t repay their loans…”

Food prices set to stay high, says UN food agency, June 7, 2011, BBC News: “Global food prices will remain high and volatile throughout this year and into next despite record food production. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) twice yearly Food Outlook analysis says rising demand will absorb most of the higher output. It says its index of food prices in May was at 232, only five points below February’s record high of 237. The FAO says higher food prices could mean poor countries will see food import costs rise by up to 30%. That would mean them spending 18% of their total import bills on food this year, compared with the world average of 7%. The organisation says the next few months will be critical in determining how major crops will fare this year…”

Height: Very poor women are shrinking, as are their chances at a better life, By Donald G. McNeil Jr., April 25, 2011, New York Times: “The average height of very poor women in some developing countries has shrunk in recent decades, according to a new study by Harvard researchers. Height is a reliable indicator of childhood nutrition, disease and poverty. Average heights have declined among women in 14 African countries, the study found, and stagnated in 21 more in Africa and South America. That suggests, the authors said, that poor women born in the last two decades, especially in Africa, are worse off than their mothers or grandmothers born after World War II…”

Soaring food prices send millions into poverty, hunger, By John Waggoner, March 17, 2011, USA Today: “Corn has soared 52% the past 12 months. Sugar’s up 60%. Soybeans have jumped 41%. And wheat costs 24% more than it did a year ago. For about 44 million people - roughly the population of the New York, Los Angeles and Chicago metropolitan areas combined - the rise in food prices means a descent into extreme poverty and hunger, according to the World Bank. The surge in food prices has many causes. Rising population. Speculators. Soaring oil prices. Trade policies. And, ironically, improved standards of living in emerging nations. By itself, the soaring cost of food didn’t cause the political unrest in the Middle East and elsewhere. Those tensions have been building for a long time. But higher food prices amplify those tensions…”

• Microfinance struggles to restore its reputation, By Erika Kinetz (AP), March 7, 2011, Boston Globe: “Long heralded as a way to lift the downtrodden out of poverty, microfinance is under a cloud. The stories of lives being changed by a $27 microloan and picture perfect scenes of smiling women with colorful handlooms, empowered by affordable credit, have been replaced by headlines about borrowers driven to suicide. At best, microfinance seems to be failing to achieve its most noble goal: poverty alleviation. At worst, some lenders are contributing to a cycle of indebtedness and abuse, just like the loan sharks they sought to replace. Critics say the industry has grown too quickly for its own good, with too much rapaciousness and too little regulation. That has fostered a breakdown in lending discipline, with multiple loans to overextended borrowers, and allowed some unscrupulous players to thrive…”
• India’s poor need help to help themselves, By Sarika Bansal, March 7, 2011, The Guardian: “Until recently, microfinance has been the golden child of international development. Microfinance companies would lend small amounts of money to poor women who would, in the ideal scenario, use them to start small businesses. Their interest rates were typically lower than loan sharks’ but still high enough to make a profit. Around the world, development experts believed microfinance was an ideal way to alleviate poverty, a smart way to ‘do good’ while also ‘doing well’. How times have changed. In the last few months, many people have become newly critical. In November, politicians in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh started making bold claims about how microfinance’s crushing interest rates and strongman tactics were, among other things, leading to suicide among over-indebted borrowers…”

Food prices reach record high, By Caroline Henshaw, March 3, 2011, Wall Street Journal: “World food prices rose 2.2% in February from the previous month to a record peak, the United Nations’ food body said Thursday, as it warned that volatility in oil markets could push prices even higher. The Food and Agriculture Organization price index rose by 2.2%-the eighth consecutive rise since June-to an average of 236 points last month, the highest record in real and nominal terms since the agency started monitoring prices in 1990. Global cereal supplies are also expected to tighten sharply this year due low stock levels, the FAO said. The body raised its estimate for world cereal production in 2010 by eight million metric tons from its December estimate to 2.2 billion tons but said it expects that to be outpaced by an 18 million-ton increase in world consumption. But while the world isn’t yet facing a food crisis, the secretary of the FAO’s Intergovernmental Group on Grains, Abdolreza Abbassian, said the recent rise in Brent oil prices to above $120 a barrel could create the same potent mix of factors that pushed grain prices to record highs three years ago…”

• One billion people forgotten in fight against poverty, By Annie Kelly, February 25, 2011, The Guardian: “This year Unicef’s annual flagship State of the World’s Children report, released on Friday, focuses exclusively on adolescents. A recognition, says Unicef, of the increasingly urgent need to invest in the world’s 1.2 billion 10-19 year olds, an invisible generation who are nevertheless pivotal in global efforts to reach the UN millenium development goals targets by 2015. The report argues that adolescents are often marginalised in development budgets and programming, and that if this is not corrected then investment in global poverty, health, education and employment goals will be compromised. Many of the world’s teenagers were babies or young children when the MDGs were established in 2000. Since then, many of them will have been the direct beneficiaries of the significant global gains in child survival, primary education, access to safe water and sanitation…”
• Indian teen girls most ill-fed: UN, By Chetan Chauhan, February 25, 2011, Hindustan Times: “Indian adolescents girls are worse than even those in world’s poorest region — Sub-Saharan Africa - in terms of nutrition and empowerment whereas a majority of boys are at high risk because of their sexual activity, a new United Nations report on adolescents on Friday said. The report, ‘Adolescence an Age of Opportunity’, released three days before the union budget had found that 63 per cent of the Indian boys in the age group of 15-19 were engaged in high-risk sex with non-marital, non-cohabitating partner as compared to just one percent girls in the same age group. Still it was lowest in the developing world with the highest being in South Africa with 95 % boys and 99 % girls reporting high risk sex. The report found sexual activity among Asian children below the age of 15, including India, to be lowest in the world…”

Rising global food prices squeeze the world’s poor, By Ben Arnoldy, February 10, 2011, Christian Science Monitor: “Amid the stalls of neatly stacked vegetables at this city’s Sarojini Market, Manju shops with her young granddaughter. Her bags have become lighter in recent months, as she’s cutting back on the basics. Food prices have risen sharply over the past year and Manju is even going with fewer onions, the ubiquitous ingredient that fills just about every Indian gravy dish. ‘The kids have stopped eating properly,’ she says. ‘They have lost the taste for food and are complaining.’ Families in many parts of the world - especially India, China, Mexico, Haiti, and Egypt, where food costs spiked in the past year - are making sacrifices and seeking alternatives. The United Nations Food and Agri­cultural Organization (FAO) food price index hit an all-time high in December. This sparked concern that high prices just prior to the global recession could reflect longer-term structural changes in supply and demand that will imperil the poor’s ability to eat…”

NGOs in Haiti face new questions about effectiveness, By William Booth, February 1, 2011, Washington Post: “In the days after the earth shook and the government collapsed, the municipal nursing home here became one of the most desperate sights in Haiti, as old people lay swaddled in dirty sheets, huddled in cramped tents, begging visitors for water. But little by little, order was restored. A humanitarian aid group called HelpAge International arrived at the nursing home. They paid salaries for security guards, health-care workers and cooks. The last building left standing was patched, and the elderly residents no longer were bathed with buckets in the yard. But six months later, HelpAge abandoned the project after it failed to negotiate a new agreement with city hall. The group Project Concern International, which was operating a clinic on the grounds of the nursing home, also closed down after the mayor asked for rent. The travails at the municipal nursing home illustrate both the promise and the perils of the unprecedented humanitarian aid response in Haiti…”

After massive aid, Haitians feel stuck in poverty, By William Booth, January 11, 2011, Washington Post: “One of the largest and most costly humanitarian aid efforts in history saved many lives in the aftermath of last January’s earthquake but has done little to ease the suffering of ordinary Haitians since then. As U.S. officials, donor nations and international aid contractors applaud their efforts - all the latrines, tents and immunizations - the recipients of this unprecedented assistance are weary at the lack of visible progress and doubtful that the billions of dollars promised will make their lives better…”

Microlenders, honored with Nobel, are struggling, By Vikas Bajaj, January 5, 2011, New York Times: “Microcredit is losing its halo in many developing countries. Microcredit was once extolled by world leaders like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair as a powerful tool that could help eliminate poverty, through loans as small as $50 to cowherds, basket weavers and other poor people for starting or expanding businesses. But now microloans have met with political hostility in Bangladesh, India, Nicaragua and other developing countries. In December, the prime minister of Bangladesh, Sheik Hasina Wazed - who had championed microloans alongside Mr. Clinton at talks in Washington in 1997, while Mr. Clinton was president - turned her back on them. She said microlenders were ’sucking blood from the poor in the name of poverty alleviation,’ and she ordered an investigation into Grameen Bank, which had pioneered microcredit and which, along with its founder, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. In India, until recently home to the world’s fastest-growing microcredit businesses, lending has slowed sharply since the state with the most microloans adopted a strict law restricting lending. In Nicaragua, Pakistan and Bolivia, activists and politicians have urged borrowers not to repay their loans…”

Rural areas face challenges to eradicate extreme poverty, By James Melik, December 6, 2010, BBC News: “Some 350 million people living in rural areas being lifted out of extreme poverty in the past decade, according to The Rural Poverty Report, published by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a United Nations (UN) agency. However, in spite of this, more than a billion people around the world still continue to suffer. The UN describes extreme poverty as living on less than $1.25 (80p) a day. But factors such as human development, a lack of basic needs, vulnerability, livelihood, unsustainability and social exclusion are also considered in the report, which reflects on rural areas across the world and the implications for global food security. The last report came out in 2001 but, according to IFAD’s president Kananyo Nwanze, ideally it should come out more frequently. ‘You shouldn’t have to wait 10 years for a report of this nature,’ he says…”

Funding delays, housing complexities slow Haiti rebuilding effort, By William Booth and Mary Beth Sheridan, November 25, 2010, Washington Post: “Yolette Pierre says thank you, America. She points to the plastic over her head, to a gray sack on the dirt floor, to a bucket in the corner. Thank you for the tarp. Thank you for the rice. Thank you for the water, too. She is as sincere as she is poor. The $3.5 billion in international relief spent after the worst natural disaster in a generation succeeded in its main mission. ‘We kept Haitians alive,’ said Nigel Fisher, chief of the U.N. humanitarian mission. Now the really hard part begins. To weary Haitians such as Pierre, mired in a fetid camp, hoping to sweep away the tons of earthquake rubble and remake broken lives, the wait for $6 billion in rebuilding money promised in March by the United States and other donor nations is more than frustrating. It is almost cruel. Ten months after the earthquake left more than a million people homeless, only a small fraction of that recovery money has been put into projects that Haitians can see…”

Gates Foundation pledges $500 million to help the poor save money, By Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times: “The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pledged $500 million Tuesday to help create new banking systems that will reach into the world’s most impoverished corners and allow families earning $2 a day or less to begin saving money. After years of promoting microcredit borrowing to help impoverished farmers and bottom-of-the-rung entrepreneurs expand their business opportunities, foundation leaders said it was increasingly apparent that saving, not just credit, is crucial to helping poor families weather crises, pay for schooling and make small investments to expand their incomes. ‘Loans for the poor in some ways may be more intuitive for people to understand, and I think people naturally understand that poor people often don’t have access to capital or to credit or to cash. But I think people don’t often as easily grasp the concept that the poor actually need to save,’ Melinda French Gates, co-chair of the foundation, said at a forum here on the swiftly expanding global financial sector aimed at serving millions of poor…”

• UN rethinks how to measure, define ‘poor’, By Jina Moore, November 5, 2010, Christian Science Monitor: “The United Nations is starting to rethink that question. The UN Development Program yesterday unveiles this year’s Human Development Report and the Human Development Index (HDI), the annual statistical extravaganza that offers an alternative to GDP as a measure of well-being. This year, the HDI does something new for the poor: It multiplies them. The report introduces a new measure for poverty. Called the ‘multidimensional poverty index’ (MPI), it’s a different way of thinking about who is or isn’t poor. The old way was (comparatively) easy: Count the number of people who live on less than $1.25 a day. The report still does that, but it augments that income standard with a, well, multidimensional index…”
• Human development report shows great gains, and some slides, By Neil MacFarquhar, November 4, 2010, New York Times: “The world has made significant progress in income, education and health over the past 40 years, but the gains have been uneven and in some places war and the ravages of AIDS shortened life spans, according to a United Nations report on Thursday. Over all, average life expectancy around the globe jumped to 70 years in 2010, up from 59 in 1970. School enrollment through high school reached 70 percent of eligible pupils, up from 55 percent, and average per capita income doubled to more than $10,000 in the 135 countries for which numbers were available. The statistics cover about 92 percent of the world’s population…”

• UN: ‘Significant progress’ in human development, By David Loyn, November 4, 2010, BBC News: “Launched 20 years ago with the simple line that ‘people are the real wealth of a nation’, the United Nations’ Human Development Report has become the most trusted annual indicator of progress in developing nations. The 20th anniversary report charts progress going back 20 years before that first publication - so it is an ambitious attempt to chart development achievements - or not - going back 40 years. The UN Development Programme’s report concludes that since 1970 there has been significant progress - often underestimated until now - and that the fastest progress has been in some of the poorest countries. It also concludes that aid works…”
• 8 Indian States have 421 million multidimensionally poor people, By Aarti Dhar, November 4, 2010, The Hindu: “Eight Indian States are home to 421 million multidimensionally poor people, more than the figure of 410 million in 26 poorest African countries. The Multidimensional Poverty Index - which identifies serious simultaneous deprivations in health, education and income at the household level in 104 countries - brought out in the latest United Nations Human Development Report has calculated that South Asia is home to half of the world’s multi-dimensionally poor population, or 844 million people…”
• Oman most-improved nation in last 40 years, UN index says, By Tavia Grant, November 4, 2010, The Globe and Mail: “Basic aspects of life such as health and education have improved for the vast majority of the planet’s population in the past two decades, with the greatest strides seen in the poorest countries, a United Nations report said Thursday. The UN’s human development index, launched in its 20th edition, shows that while development has not been uniform, huge steps in areas such as life expectancy, school enrollment, literacy and income means its index of 135 countries has climbed 18 per cent since 1990 and 41 per cent since 1970…”

Nokia taking a rural road to growth, By Kevin O’Brien, November 1, 2010, New York Times: “On Saturday at dawn, hundreds of farmers near Jhansi, an agricultural center in central India, received a succinct but potent text message on their cellphones: the current average wholesale price for 100 kilograms of tomatoes was 600 rupees. In a country where just 7 percent of the population have access to the Internet, such real-time market data is so valuable that the farmers are willing to pay $1.35 a month for the information. What is unusual about the service is the company selling it: Nokia, the Finnish cellphone leader, which unlike its rivals - Samsung, LG, Apple, Research In Motion and Sony Ericsson - is leveraging its size to focus on some of the world’s poorest consumers. Since 2009, 6.3 million people have signed up to pay Nokia for commodity data in India, China and Indonesia. On Tuesday, Nokia plans to announce it is expanding the program, called Life Tools, part of its Ovi mobile services business, to Nigeria…”

WHO: 1 billion suffer from hidden tropical disease, By Colleen Barry (AP), October 14, 2010, Washington Post: “The World Health Organization estimated Thursday that 1 billion of the world’s poorest people suffer from neglected tropical diseases such as dengue, rabies and leprosy that remain concentrated in remote rural areas and urban slums despite being mostly eradicated from large areas of the world. WHO said it can substantially reduce those numbers with the help of drug donations from the pharmeceutical industry, which announced fresh pledges. WHO identified 17 diseases and disease groups present in 149 countries one-third of the 2.7 billion people living on less than $2 a day. Thirty countries have six or more of the diseases. In all, more than one-third of the 2.7 billion people living on less than $2 a day are affected…”

Haiti still waiting for pledged US aid, By Jonathan M. Katz and Martha Mendoza (AP), September 29, 2010, National Public Radio: “Nearly nine months after the earthquake, more than a million Haitians still live on the streets between piles of rubble. One reason: Not a cent of the $1.15 billion the U.S. promised for rebuilding has arrived. The money was pledged by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in March for use this year in rebuilding. The U.S. has already spent more than $1.1 billion on post-quake relief, but without long-term funds, the reconstruction of the wrecked capital cannot begin. With just a week to go before fiscal 2010 ends, the money is still tied up in Washington. At fault: bureaucracy, disorganization and a lack of urgency, The Associated Press learned in interviews with officials in the State Department, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the White House and the U.N. Office of the Special Envoy. One senator has held up a key authorization bill because of a $5 million provision he says will be wasteful. Meanwhile, deaths in Port-au-Prince are mounting, as quake survivors scramble to live without shelter or food…”

Report: Poor countries face education crisis, By Jason Straziuso (AP), September 20, 2010, Washington Post: “Nearly 70 million children around the world are not getting an education despite much progress in the last 10 years, and Haiti and Somalia are the two worst countries in which to be a school-age child, a new report released Monday said. The global financial crisis has forced poor countries to cut their education budgets by $4.6 billion a year at a time when intensified efforts are needed to achieve the U.N. Millennium Development Goal of ensuring a primary school education for every child in the world by 2015, it said. The report listed 10 countries at the bottom of the education list, all but Haiti are in Africa. In addition to Somalia, the others are Eritrea, Comoros, Ethiopia, Chad, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Liberia. It based the rankings on access to basic education, teacher-student ratio and educational provisions for girls. Even Kenya, considered successful compared to its East African neighbors, had to delay free education to 9.7 million children over the last year due to budgetary constraints, the report said. The report was produced by Education International, Plan International, Oxfam, Save the Children and VSO…”

U.N. Millennium Development Goals appear out of reach in Africa, By Robyn Dixon, September 13, 2010, Los Angeles Times: “Sub-Saharan Africa will not reduce poverty and hunger and improve child and maternal healthcare to meet the goals set a decade ago by the United Nations unless African and Western leaders do much more, several recent reports suggest. The main reasons: Donors have failed to keep pledges and many African nations have not improved their governments or increased health spending as promised. Only a handful of developed countries have met a pledge to increase foreign aid to 0.7% of their gross domestic product, while in some countries aid is declining. And only Rwanda, Tanzania and Liberia have met their pledge to spend 15% of their budgets on health, while in some African nations - Mozambique, Zimbabwe, South Africa and others - the proportion has fallen since 2000, according to a recent report out of Britain. The average spending on healthcare in sub-Saharan Africa remains less than 10% of GDP. The Millennium Development Goals were adopted by about 190 U.N. member countries in 2000 to tackle poverty, hunger, disease and early deaths in poor countries, with a series of targets set for 2015. The struggling efforts to meet those goals will be discussed at a three-day U.N. summit in New York beginning Monday…”

Gains made, but many pregnant mothers still die, By Binaj Gurubacharya (AP), September 17, 2010, Washington Post: “Astamaya Tami, 55, is part of a ragtag army of women who have turned Nepal into an against-all-odds success story when it comes to saving lives of expectant mothers, hundreds of thousands of whom die unnecessarily every year across the globe. She and others pull on their flip-flops and head into the mountains by car or on foot to visit desperately poor villages, some connected only by a single, rocky footpath. They bring vaccines, vitamins and, equally important, advice. ‘At first people were suspicious. They’d scold us, or wouldn’t talk to us at all,’ said Tami, herself a mother of eight, adding that not long ago almost all women were giving birth at home or in filthy, frigid cowsheds. They were helped only by female relatives or untrained midwives cutting umbilical cords with unsterilized knives. ‘But that’s all changed,’ said Tami, smiling proudly and dressed in a red ceremonial sari. Like many developing countries today - especially in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa - this Himalayan nation of 28 million people, plagued by political instability following a decade-long communist insurgency, still faces massive challenges. But it is seen by many as an example of just how much can be achieved through sheer will when it comes to fighting maternal mortality: In the last five years, it has slashed rates in half. That is something 189 heads of state and development agencies well understood a decade ago when they set their Millennium Development Goals of tackling the world’s most serious humanitarian crises in the areas of poverty, disease and lack of education…”

World poverty seen falling sharply but patchily, By Teresa Cerojano (AP), September 15, 2010, Washington Post: “It’s lunchtime, but the cooking pots are empty outside Nurain Dimalao’s shack. Her 7-year-old son plays amid the flies in garbage-strewn sand. She worries where his next meal will come from. Baseco Compound, a shantytown of 50,000 people on the edge of Manila Bay, is the familiar face of poverty in villages and urban slums around the world. Yet there’s also good news, albeit qualified: Worldwide, the poor are getting less poor, though not everywhere. The share of the population of developing regions who live in extreme poverty is expected to fall to 15 percent by 2015, down from 46 percent in 1990, according to the U.N. The gains stem largely from robust economic growth in countries such as China and India, the world’s two most populous countries. Ten years ago, the U.N. set eight ‘Millennium Development Goals’ to tackle the world’s most pressing humanitarian problems by halving rates of affliction in such areas as disease, poverty and lack of basic education by 2015, compared with 1990…”

• Child poverty fight threatened by west’s cost cuts, says Unicef, By Larry Elliott, September 7, 2010, The Guardian: “The United Nations warned today that the patchy global struggle to lift children out of poverty was being threatened by budget cuts in the west, soaring food prices and climate change. In a report prepared for a New York summit this month to measure progress in meeting the 2015 millennium development goals, Unicef said the pressures on aid budgets would have knock-on effects in the world’s poorest countries. ‘Fiscal constraints in industrialised economies will likely have reverberations for developing nations, particularly those dependent on external assistance,’ the report noted. ‘Fiscal retrenchment may undermine social progress, particularly if the global recovery is uneven and halting.’ It added: ‘The austerity measures currently being introduced in some European Union countries call for sharp cuts in spending, and it is not fully clear how these reductions will affect child-related expenditures, either at home or abroad…”
• UNICEF refocuses on poorest of poor children, By Anita Snow (AP), September 6, 2010, Washington Post: “The U.N. children’s agency says it has failed to reach millions of the world’s neediest boys and girls in slums and remote countryside and is shifting to a strategy of getting critical health care services to the poorest of the poor. UNICEF’s new approach would likely concentrate more on such initiatives as training rural health workers and building schools in remote areas, and less on building big modern hospitals and universities in cities, said Charlie MacCormack of the non-governmental Save the Children, which UNICEF consulted. It would cost less but also demand more planning and effort, he said…”

For the poor, cellphones can offer lifeline, By Cecilia Kang, September 8, 2010, Washington Post: “For the world’s poorest, cellphone technology carries opportunity, aid groups say, as text messages and other mobile applications have created a new platform to reach the most remote farms and crowded urban slums of Africa, Asia and Latin America. The Grameen Foundation, a Washington-based group known for helping women with the smallest of business loans, has two dozen people in a technology lab here developing mobile Internet applications to help spread its microfinance model. It’s warning farmers in Uganda about banana crop rot through text messages and collecting data on spreadsheet applications on smartphones…”

• UN reveals global disparity in broadband access, By Jonathan Fildes, September 2, 2010, BBC News: “The Central African Republic is the most expensive place to get a fixed broadband connection, costing nearly 40 times the average monthly income there. Macao in China is the cheapest, costing 0.3% of the average monthly income. Niger becomes the most expensive place to access communication technologies, when landlines and mobiles are also taken into account. ‘Access to broadband in an affordable manner is our greatest challenge,’ Dr Hamadoun Toure, secretary general of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), told BBC News. The statistics were released ahead of the UN 2010 Millennium Development Goals Summit in New York on 19 September…”
• World leaders urged to act on poverty, By Danny Rose, September 1, 2010, Sydney Morning Herald: “The world’s aid and charity organisations have resolved to again urge governments to pump billions of dollars into the global fight against poverty. Any suggestion that they lacked the resources to do so was a ‘nonsense’, the final day of the United Nations DPI/NGO (Department of Public Information/Non-Governmental Organisation) Conference was told on Wednesday. A fraction of the world’s military spending would fund the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), said Professor Phil Batterham, convenor of the three-day conference in Melbourne. Around 1600 delegates represented more than 350 Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) at the conference…”
• Some have progress at their fingertips, but for others pain and poverty linger, August 28, 2010, The Age: “A street beggar’s dirty hand is drawn to his mouth in the universal sign for hunger. A busy foreigner bustles past and shrugs, indicating he does not have any local coins. ‘I take SMS,’ calls the beggar. This truly is the digital economy. While Melburnians struggle to work out how to use a myki card, Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, buzzes on a banking system based on short messages sent from mobile phones. Known as m-pesa - ‘pesa’ is Swahili for money - the mobile service works on a debit and credit principle. A vendor nominates a price, the buyer sends a text message to transfer funds between accounts. Should a person need hard currency, booths are dotted around the country so people can make withdrawals. The service is booming. Almost 12 million Kenyans used m-pesa in the past year, sending $A462 million in small transactions. Ready access to cheap mobile phones, even for the poor, gives the mobile money system many advantages over a traditional cash-based economy. Security is one thing - for Kenya’s many slum dwellers, finding a safe place to stash savings is tricky…”

Pakistan flood sets back infrastructure by years, By Carlotta Gall, August 26, 2010, New York Times: “Men waded waist deep all week wedging stones with their bare hands into an embankment to hold back Pakistan’s surging floodwaters. It was a rudimentary and ultimately vain effort to save their town. On Thursday, the waters breached the levee, a demoralizing show of how fragile Pakistan’s infrastructure remains, and how overwhelming the task is to save it. Even as Pakistani and international relief officials scrambled to save people and property, they despaired that the nation’s worst natural calamity had ruined just about every physical strand that knit this country together - roads, bridges, schools, health clinics, electricity and communications. The destruction could set Pakistan back many years, if not decades, further weaken its feeble civilian administration and add to the burdens on its military. It seems certain to distract from American requests for Pakistan to battle Taliban insurgents, who threatened foreign aid workers delivering flood relief on Thursday. It is already disrupting vital supply lines to American forces in Afghanistan…”

A wealth of data, July 29, 2010, The Economist: “What is poverty and when is a person poor? Most would agree that poverty involves not having enough of certain things, or doing without others that richer people take for granted. But what is ‘enough’, which goods and services really matter, and who should decide these questions-researchers, governments or international agencies-are less tractable issues. Perhaps the poor themselves should have the final word. But this presents its own problems. Tabitha, a 44-year-old woman from a slum outside Nairobi, told researchers from Oxford University that going without meals was ‘normal for us’. Diminished expectations are only one of the effects of dire poverty. In the world of international development, most have rallied around the ‘dollar-a-day’ poverty line (or more precisely, the $1.25-a-day measure) and its less acute cousin, $2-a-day poverty. These World Bank measures judge a person to be poor if his income falls short of a given level, adjusted for differences in purchasing power. In principle poverty rates based on these measures count the fraction of people in a country who lack the resources to buy a notional, basic basket of goods…”

• Crisis deepens Middle East poverty, says report, By Deena Kamel Yousef, June 24, 2010, Gulf News: “Significant parts of the Middle East are experiencing an increase in extreme poverty as the global economic slowdown increased unemployment and hunger spikes in the region, according to the 2010 United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Report released Wednesday. About 6 per cent of people in the region lived on less than $1.25 a day in 2005 compared to 2 per cent in 1990. The global economic and financial crisis, which began in the advanced economies of North America and Europe in 2007, sparked abrupt declines in exports and commodity prices and reduced trade and investment, slowing growth in developing countries, the report said…”
• Millenium Development Goals hit by crisis but still achievable, UN says, By Uwe Hessler, June 23, 2010, Deutsche Welle: “The United Nations published its 2010 Millenium Development Goals Report simultaneously in New York, Paris and Berlin on Wednesday. The food crisis of 2008 as well as the 2009 economic crisis ‘didn’t stop progress’ in reaching the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs), the report said, but had made the prime goal of halving global poverty by 2015 ‘more difficult to achieve.’ The number of people in the world living on less than the $1.25 (1.05 euros) per day global poverty line had substantially decreased from 46 percent in 1990 to 27 percent in 2005 - the latest available figure on global hunger given in the report…”
• Fiscal crisis slows U.N. poverty fight, By Edith M. Lederer (AP), June 24, 2010, Fort Wayne Journal Gazette: “The global economic crisis has slowed the fight against poverty but the developing world is still on track to meet a key U.N. goal of halving the number of people living on less than $1 a day by 2015, according to a report released Wednesday. The U.N. report cited new World Bank estimates suggesting that the crisis left an additional 50 million people in extreme poverty in 2009 and will leave 64 million impoverished by the end of 2010, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa and eastern and southeastern Asia. Hunger may also have spiked in 2009 - with more than 1 billion people undernourished - as a consequence of the global food and financial crises. The effects of the crises are likely to persist with poverty rates slightly higher than they would have been had the world economy grown steadily at its pre-crisis pace, the U.N. said…”

A dirt-poor nation, with a health plan, By Donald G. McNeil, Jr., June 14, 2010, New York Times: “The maternity ward in the Mayange district health center is nothing fancy. It has no running water, and the delivery room is little more than a pair of padded benches with stirrups. But the blue paint on the walls is fairly fresh, and the labor room beds have mosquito nets. Inside, three generations of the Yankulije family are relaxing on one bed: Rachel, 53, her daughter Chantal Mujawimana, 22, and Chantal’s baby boy, too recently arrived in this world to have a name yet. The little prince is the first in his line to be delivered in a clinic rather than on the floor of a mud hut. But he is not the first with health insurance. Both his mother and grandmother have it, which is why he was born here. Rwanda has had national health insurance for 11 years now; 92 percent of the nation is covered, and the premiums are $2 a year…”

U.N. food price index increases 22 percent, Associated Press, June 7, 2010, The Oklahoman: “Families from Pakistan to Argentina to Congo are being battered by surging food prices that are dragging more people into poverty, fueling political tensions and forcing some to give up eating meat, fruit and even tomatoes. Scraping to afford the next meal is still a grim daily reality in the developing world even though the global food crisis that dominated headlines in 2008 quickly faded in the U.S. and other rich countries…”

• Global death rates drop for children 5 or younger, By Denise Grady, May 23, 2010, New York Times: “Death rates in children under 5 are dropping in many countries at a surprisingly fast pace, according to a new report based on data from 187 countries from 1970 to 2010. Worldwide, 7.7 million children are expected to die this year - still an enormous number, but a vast improvement over the 1990 figure of 11.9 million. On average, death rates have dropped by about 2 percent a year from 1990 to 2010, and in many regions, even some of the poorest in Africa, the declines have started to accelerate, according to the report, which is being published online Sunday by The Lancet, a medical journal. Some parts of Latin America, north Africa and the Middle East have had declines as steep as 6 percent a year…”
• Study: fewer kids dying than previously thought, By Maria Cheng (AP), May 23, 2010, Washington Post: “Child deaths worldwide seem to have fallen faster than officials thought, as a new study estimates far fewer children are dying every year than previously guessed by the United Nations. Using more data and an improved modeling technique, scientists predicted about 7.7 million children under 5 would die this year, down from nearly 12 million in 1990. The study was published online Monday in the British medical journal, Lancet. The new estimate is substantially lower than UNICEF’s last estimate of child deaths from 2008. Then, the agency said about 8.7 million children were dying every year of preventable causes such as diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria…”

• Maternal deaths decline sharply across the globe, By Denise Grady, April 13, 2010, New York Times: “For the first time in decades, researchers are reporting a significant drop worldwide in the number of women dying each year from pregnancy and childbirth, to about 342,900 in 2008 from 526,300 in 1980. The findings, published in the medical journal The Lancet, challenge the prevailing view of maternal mortality as an intractable problem that has defied every effort to solve it…”
• Fewer women dying in childbirth, study says, By David Brown, April 13, 2010, Washington Post: “The rate at which women die in childbirth or soon after delivery has fallen by about 40 percent since 1980, with dramatic reductions in the populous nations of India, China, Brazil and Egypt. Maternal mortality is a key gauge of a population’s health and wealth, as well as of women’s status. The rate differs greatly between countries and regions, with the best- and worst-performing nations differing by a factor of about 400, according to a study in the Lancet, a European medical journal…”

• Rebuilding Haiti, By Kenneth Kidd, March 28, 2010, Toronto Star: “The rows of mounded, soggy earth stand nearly a metre tall, all of them fashioned by hand and hoe. By one row, his knee braced against the side, a farm worker is plunging long green shoots into the soil, sweet potatoes in the making. He’ll toil like this for six days a week, six hours per, and take home the equivalent of roughly $14 (U.S.). Next week, or maybe the week after, he’ll tend to his own little plots of land, his other role in the complicated agricultural system that reigns in the Artibonite region, about halfway between Port-au-Prince and Cap Haïtien to the north. The Artibonite is laced with winding rivers and irrigation canals, like strands of leftover spagetti on a dinner plate. Sweet potatoes, bananas, mangoes, rice and corn all flourish, the rich soil yielding three full crops annually. But apart from a few mangoes, scarcely any of this horticultural largesse makes its way south along Rue nationale #1 to Port-au-Prince - a three-hour journey over a dusty, heavily potholed road whose hazards sometimes reduce speeds to 10 km/h. After such a trip, most Artibonite produce simply can’t compete with crops grown closer to the capital in poorer soil, much less against imported, subsidized food from the United States…”
• Quake accentuated chasm that has defined Haiti, By Simon Romero, March 27, 2010, New York Times: “The lights of the casino above this wrecked city beckoned as gamblers in freshly pressed clothes streamed to the roulette table and slot machines. In a restaurant nearby, diners quaffed Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin Champagne and ate New Zealand lamb chops at prices rivaling those in Manhattan. A few yards away, hundreds of families displaced by the earthquake languished under tents and tarps, bathing themselves from buckets and relieving themselves in the street as barefoot children frolicked on pavement strewn with garbage. This is the Pétionville district of Port-au-Prince, a hillside bastion of Haiti’s well-heeled where a mangled sense of normalcy has taken hold after the earthquake in January. Business is bustling at the lavish boutiques, restaurants and nightclubs that have reopened in the breezy hills above the capital, while thousands of homeless and hungry people camp in the streets around them, sometimes literally on their doorstep…”

Deal provides vaccines to poor countries at lower prices, By Andrew Pollack, March 23, 2010, New York Times: “Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline will supply hundreds of millions of doses of their pneumonia vaccines to the world’s poorest countries at heavily discounted prices under a novel agreement announced Tuesday. The deal was announced by the GAVI Alliance, a nonprofit organization, which estimated the program could save 900,000 lives by 2015. The vaccines, Pfizer’s Prevnar 13 and GlaxoSmithKline’s Synflorix, prevent pneumococcal disease, which includes pneumonia and meningitis. Pneumococcal disease kills 1.6 million people a year throughout the world, including 800,000 children before their fifth birthday, according to GAVI…”

Weeks after quake, Haiti’s elderly hobble through chaos, By William Booth, March 12, 2010, Washington Post: “It was always hard to be old in Haiti, but after the earthquake, to be old and poor feels like a curse, say those who are both. ‘We struggle to maintain a little dignity, but look at us,’ said Lauranise Gedeon, who sat, embarrassed, in soiled sheets in the ruins of a municipal nursing home here in the capital. Residents were bathed outdoors with a bucket, trying to cover their nakedness. They spent the long, hot afternoons in hospital beds lined up side by side, six to a tent, fanning themselves with pieces of cardboard. They begged for water to drink. ‘No water today. We are waiting. We are waiting for medicines, for the doctors, for God to help us,’ said nurse Yolette François. ‘I am serious. These old people have a lot of troubles.’ Her patients, about 80 men and women, were scooping rice and beans from dented metal bowls. Asked what they need most, one resident said, ‘Something for the flies.’ Another complained that her spoon had been stolen and held up her fingers, sticky with food. ‘Look!…’”

Shower of aid brings flood of progress, By Jeffrey Gettleman, March 8, 2010, New York Times: “In the past five years, life in this bushy little patch of western Kenya has improved dramatically. Agricultural yields have doubled; child mortality has dropped by 30 percent; school attendance has shot up and so have test scores, putting one local school second in the area, when it used to be ranked 17th; and cellphone ownership (a telltale sign of prosperity in rural Africa) has increased fourfold. There is a palpable can-do spirit that infuses the muddy lanes and family compounds walled off by the fruity-smelling lantana bushes. People who have grown bananas for generations are learning to breed catfish, and women who used to be terrified of bees are now lulling them to sleep with smoke and harvesting the honey. ‘I used to think, African killer bees, no way,’ said Judith Onyango, one of the new honey makers. But now, she added, with visible pride, ‘I’m an apiarist.’ Sauri was the first of what are now more than 80 Millennium Villages across Africa, a showcase project that was the dream child of Jeffrey D. Sachs, the Harvard-trained, Columbia University economist who runs with an A-list crowd: Bono, both Bills (Clinton and Gates), George Soros, Kofi Annan, Ban Ki-moon and others…”

• Haiti to relocate 400,000 homeless outside capital, January 22, 2010, BBC News: “Haiti is planning to house 400,000 earthquake survivors in new tented villages outside the capital, Port-au-Prince, officials have announced. Interior Minister Paul Antoine Bien-Aime said 100,000 people would initially be sent to 10 settlements near the suburb of Croix Des Bouquets. He gave no timeframe, but said the moves would start as soon as possible. An estimated 1.5 million people were left homeless by the 7.0-magnitude quake, which killed as many as 200,000…”
• Haiti plans tent cities for homeless as rebuilding begins, By Scott Wilson, Mary Beth Sheridan and Manuel Roig-Franzia, January 22, 2010, Washington Post: “The Haitian government is planning to erect 11 tent cities to house as many as 400,000 people displaced by the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake, hoping to establish safer and more sanitary conditions as the country’s rebuilding begins. Most of the camps will be in and around the capital, officials said, replacing more than 500 squalid, makeshift settlements that have materialized out of desperation and despair. The plan, which is being coordinated with international relief officials, also calls for a camp to house 100,000 Haitians in the town of Croix de Bouquets, about eight miles northeast of the capital…”
• Economy in shock struggles to restart, By Simon Romero, January 21, 2010, New York Times: “The price of candles in the teeming La Saline market here has climbed 60 percent since last week’s earthquake. A box of matches is up 50 percent. A package of Perdue Chicken Franks has gone up 30 percent. As Haitians begin to turn their attention to rebuilding a crippled economy, the rapid surge in prices of crucial products is just one of the many challenges they face. The port here was also knocked out of operation, hobbling exports. The banking system, largely shut down because of fear of robberies, is struggling to restart. The earthquake destroyed the finance ministry and part of the central bank, and killed senior financial officials including Jean Frantz Richard, director of the tax collection agency…”

• UN report: Crisis will keep children out of school, By Angela Charlton (AP), January 19, 2010, BusinessWeek: “The world financial crisis not only hurt balance sheets but could sabotage poor countries’ efforts to get more children into school, according to a report released Tuesday by the U.N. education agency. UNESCO urged more funding and attention for those shut out of education systems such as ethnic minorities and rural girls, who make up a disproportionate part of the legions of school-age children who have never seen the inside of a classroom…”
• India still home to largest illiterate population: UNESCO, January 20, 2010, The Hindu: “India still has the largest number of illiterate adults in the world, but has made ‘rapid advances’ in cutting down the numbers of school drop outs, a new UN report on education has said. The Education For All-Global Monitoring Report, released here on Wednesday finds that out of the total 759 million illiterate adults in the world, India still has the highest number. ‘Over half of the illiterate adults live in just four countries: Bangladesh, China, India and Pakistan,’ the report said, adding the progress has been ‘painfully slow’ and threatens to obstruct the Millennium Development Goals…”

Gates Foundation seeks to spur savings by the poor, By Steve Lohr, January 13, 2010, New York Times: “For decades, the microfinance industry has really been about microcredit - making tiny loans to shoestring entrepreneurs in poor countries. Taking deposits and creating savings accounts for the poor has gotten short shrift. The reasons were straightforward: funding for loans often came from international donors, and collecting small deposits seemed to be an inefficient headache for the microfinance bankers. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is hoping to change that with $38 million in grants announced on Wednesday for 18 microfinance institutions. The goal is to spur the building of efficient models and systems for small savings accounts. The foundation hopes to reach 11 million people across a dozen nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America over the next five years…”

• Poverty opened eyes of Haiti visitors, By Annysa Johnson, January 14, 2010, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “When Scott Hamel tries to describe the poverty that plagued Haiti even before Tuesday’s devastating earthquake, he always goes back to a young mother he met there a few years ago. She was living with her six children, two under the age of 1, in a hut the size of a walk-in closet. Her husband had gone to the Dominican Republic for work, and she had not heard from him in more than a year. She had no other family and was on the verge of being evicted. ‘Basically, she had the clothes on her back, no income and no way to feed her children,’ said Hamel of Madison, who has traveled to Haiti repeatedly as part of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Engineers Without Borders. ‘It was staggering to see this woman in her 30s who had nothing,’ he said. ‘It took me awhile to get my head around that.’ Nearly every story coming out of Haiti since the quake mentions its status as the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. It is one thing to read about it, but many Wisconsinites have seen it firsthand, working alongside Haitians in health clinics, food kitchens, construction projects and more…”
• Impoverished, storm-prone Haiti is a magnet for disasters, By Seth Borenstein (AP), January 14, 2010, Worcerter Telegram and Gazette: “When it comes to natural disasters, Haiti seems to have a bull’s-eye on it. That’s because of a killer combination of geography, poverty, social problems, slipshod building standards and bad luck, experts say. The list of catastrophes is mind-numbing: This week’s devastating earthquake. Four tropical storms or hurricanes that killed about 800 people in 2008. Killer storms in 2005 and 2004. Floods in 2007, 2006, 2003 (twice) and 2002. And that’s just the 21st-century rundown. ‘If you want to put the worst-case scenario together in the Western Hemisphere (for disasters), it’s Haiti,’ said Richard Olson, a professor at Florida International University who directs the Disaster Risk Reduction in the Americas project. ‘There’s a whole bunch of things working against Haiti. One is the hurricane track. The second is tectonics. Then you have the environmental degradation and the poverty,’ he said…”
• Haiti, Editorial, January 14, 2010, New York Times: “Once again, the world weeps with Haiti. The earthquake that struck on Tuesday did damage on a scale that scarcely could have been imagined had we all not seen the photos and videos and read the survivors’ agonizing accounts - of the sudden crumbling of mountainside slums, schools, hospitals, even the Parliament building and presidential palace. Whenever disaster strikes, we are reminded that Haiti is the poorest country in the hemisphere. And each time there is a disaster, this country and others help - for a while. This time must be different…”
• Helping Haiti help itself, Editorial, January 14, 2010, Los Angeles Times: “Haitians have long been prey to hurricanes and coups, their nation ravaged by erosion and corruption, mudslides and marauders, poverty and violence. Now the few economic and political gains made over five years of relative stability have been buried along with thousands of corpses in the rubble of a magnitude 7.0 earthquake. The presidential palace, parliament, government ministries and hospitals — indeed most of the capital of Port-au-Prince — are in ruins. An already dysfunctional state now lacks even the edifices of government. Gone too are some of the buttresses: the archbishop and his cathedral; the head of the United Nations mission and some of his top aides, who died when their headquarters collapsed…”

• Climate change help for the poor ‘has not materialised’, November 25, 2009, BBC News: “Rich countries pledged $410m (£247m) a year in a 2001 declaration - but it is now unclear whether the money was paid. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has accused industrialised countries of failing to keep their promise. The EU says the money was paid out in bilateral deals, but admits it cannot provide data to prove it. The money was pledged in the 2001 Bonn Declaration, signed by 20 industrialised nations - the 15 countries that then made up the European Union, plus Canada, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway and Switzerland. They said they would pay $410m per year until 2008. The date the payments were meant to start is unclear, but the total should be between $1.6bn and $2.87bn. The declaration said: ‘We are prepared to contribute $410m, which is 450 million euro, per year by 2005 with this level to be reviewed in 2008.’ But only $260m has ever been paid into two UN funds earmarked for the purpose, the BBC World Service investigation has found…”
• UK and France propose climate fund for poor, November 28, 2009, BBC News: “UK PM Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy have proposed a multi-billion-dollar fund to help developing nations deal with climate change. Mr Brown said the $10bn (£6bn) fund should also be used to help developing nations cut greenhouse gas emissions. Both spoke at the Commonwealth summit in Trinidad, the last major world forum before the global summit on climate change in Copenhagen on 7 December. Many Commonwealth members are island states threatened by rising sea levels. Mr Sarkozy, with UN chief Ban Ki-moon and Danish Prime Minister Prime Lars Loekke Rasmussen, is there to give weight to any climate change statement. The topic was the only issue on the Commonwealth summit’s agenda for the first day…”

Poor nations vow low-carbon path, By Richard Black, November 11, 2009, BBC News: “Poor countries considered vulnerable to climate change have pledged to embark on moves to a low-carbon future, and challenge richer states to match them. The declaration from the first meeting of a new 11-nation forum calls on rich countries to give 1.5% of their GDP for climate action in the developing world. It also calls for much tougher limits on greenhouse gas emissions. The forum was established by Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed to highlight the climate ‘threat’ to poor nations. The declaration contends that man-made climate change poses an ‘existential threat to our nations, our cultures and to our way of life, and thereby undermines the internationally protected human rights of our people…’”