A new World Bank loan for Mozambique

Mozambique has just signed on to a new batch of loans from the World Bank. The loan should help to develop information technology and health services in the country.

From News 24, we get more details on what the loans will go for.

The agreements which were signed by World Bank interim representative, Luiz Tavares and Cuereneia consisted of a $75.6m agreement to fund health and information technology from the World Bank and another one of $15.6m from the Canadian government, $4.3m from the Swedish government and $7.9m from the Russian government.

Cuereneia said projects run by the ministries of science and technology, health and transport and communications would benefit from the loans.

Tavares said the amount destined for the health sector would seek to reduce high mortality rates in children and women caused by malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/Aids and pregnancy complications.

It would also fund the construction of 25 health centres in three poor northern provinces.

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Anti-homeless laws make some cities "mean"

A national law advocacy group has put a mid-sized Michigan city into the list of the meanest cities for homeless people. The study ranks the top ten cities that are unfriendly to the homeless, Kalamazoo, Michigan joins Los Angeles, Orlando, Atlanta and others.

The law center that complied the reports says some loitering laws Kalamazoo have are anti-homeless. From this story in the Kalamazoo Gazette, reporter Kathy Jessup explains.

The report, issued by the National Coalition for the Homeless and the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, put Kalamazoo in the top 10 alongside larger cities such as San Francisco, Atlanta and Orlando, Fla. Los Angeles was No. 1 in the ranking.

The groups said the rankings are based on factors that include "the number of anti-homeless laws in the city, the enforcement of those laws, the general political climate toward homeless people in the city and the city's history of criminalization measures."

According to the report, Kalamazoo's designation is based largely on a 2007 controversy over a city ordinance prohibiting overnight sleeping in public parks and on rules passed in 2008 for downtown's Kalamazoo Transportation Center that addressed loitering, panhandling and illegal substances.

The report says information on Kalamazoo's ordinances and arrests was provided by Michigan People's Action, formerly known as the Kalamazoo Homeless Action Network.

KHAN has been a longtime advocate for local homeless people and an outspoken critic of Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety enforcement practices. The network participated in 2007 talks that shaped the city's park-use, panhandling and loitering ordinances.
The report says dozens of homeless people were arrested in Kalamazoo in 2007 and 2008 for alleged violations in parks and at the transportation center.

Michael Evans, who was the lead organizer of KHAN and one of the people arrested, said most of the charges were eventually dropped after the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty provided legal assistance.

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The MDG progress report for 2009

Yesterday the United Nations released their annual report on the progress the world has made in meeting the Millennium Development Goals. The report says that the global recession has slowed progress in meeting the goals, and in some cases, has even reversed any gains made since the year 2000.

This summary of the report from Mail and Guardian, Faranaaz Parker gives us some statistics found in the report. More from the U.N. after the jump.

The report showed that the proportion of employed people living on less than $1,25 a day (about R10) had returned to 64%. This is a drop of 6% since last year. The figure is now the same as it was ten years ago. In addition, the number of people suffering from hunger increased last year due to escalating food prices -- 29% of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa is undernourished.
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The MDG on which the least progress has been made over the years is maternal health. The UN says 536 000 women die during pregnancy, in childbirth or of labour-related complications, and 99% of these deaths occur in developing countries. With 900 deaths per 100 000 live births, Sub-Saharan Africa is lagging far behind the rest of the world in maternal health.

Here is a summary of the report from the U.N.'s press release. You can click here to download the entire report.

Gains in the eradication of hunger since the early 1990s—when the proportion of hungry people decreased from 20 per cent in 1990-92 to 16 per cent in 2004-06—were reversed in 2008, largely due to higher food prices. A decrease in international food prices in the second half of 2008 has since failed to translate into more affordable food for most people around the world.

• In the period 1990 to 2005, the number of people living on less than $1.25 a day decreased from 1.8 billion to 1.4 billion (prior to the economic crisis and higher food prices). But major gains in the fight against extreme poverty are likely to stall, indicators show, although data are not yet available to reveal the full impact of the recent economic downturn. In 2009, an estimated 55 million to 90 million more people will be living in extreme poverty than anticipated before the crisis.

• More than one-quarter of children in developing regions are underweight for their age, and the meagre progress on child nutrition from 1990 to 2007 is insufficient to meet the 2015 target. This will likely be eroded further by high food prices and economic turmoil.

• Global unemployment in 2009 could reach 6.1 to 7.0 per cent for men and 6.5 to 7.4 per cent for women, many of whom remain trapped in insecure – often unpaid– jobs, holding back progress towards gender equality.

Furthermore, the report suggests that many global gains were due to a dramatic fall in poverty rates in East Asia. Elsewhere, progress has been slower. Sub-Saharan Africa counted 100 million more extremely poor people in 2005 than in 1990, and the poverty rate remained above 50 per cent.

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Malnutrition emergency in Kenya

Malnutrition levels for children in Northern Kenya have risen above emergency levels. The lack of food is due to extended droughts in the already arid climate that has little farm land.

From this IRIN story that we found at Reuters, we learn more about the dangerous situation in Kenya.

"Poor rains in April, May and June worsened food insecurity in the region, where 74 percent of the population [estimated at 550,000] already depends on food aid," Vincent Kahi, the health coordinator for the International Rescue Committee (IRC), said on 15 July at a press briefing in Nairobi.

He said at least 50 percent of child deaths in the region were due to malnutrition or had malnutrition as an underlying cause of death.

Turkana is a mostly arid region, with little agriculture. Most of the population depends on livestock, but the viability of pastoralism is being undermined by recurrent and increasingly unpredictable droughts and armed conflict with groups from neighbouring regions or countries.

Across the country, "food security prospects for the coming months are dismal", according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

"In [the north-central] Samburu district, the percentage of children under-five considered at risk of malnutrition increased to 29.4 from 21.8 last month. In Moyale [in the northeast], the nutrition status of children below five years declined, with the percentage of children rated at risk of malnutrition rising to 35 percent from 30.6 in April," OCHA warned in a weekly bulletin.

"The decline was attributed to higher food prices and reduced availability of food," it added.

"Given the very poor outcomes of the long rains, the situation is expected to seriously deteriorate, especially in districts receiving no or limited support, if nutrition interventions do not maintain higher levels of coverage in some districts e.g. Kajiado, Kinango, Marsabit, Wajir, Turkana, West Pokot, and do not scale-up in others i.e. Isiolo, Samburu, Baringo," the report warned.

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The Speedboats of Albania

Albania has a huge human trafficking problem, where woman are lied to or sold to men who take them to other parts of Europe to work as sex slaves. Experts fear that a recient change in laws could make the problem grow. It's a law involving speedboats.

From this New York Times article, Dan Bilefsky examines the problem. We would highly recommend hitting our link to the full article, that gives more about the history of history of human trafficking in Albania, as well as a harrowing tale from one of it's victims.

So many women, men and children had been trafficked abroad to work as prostitutes, forced laborers or beggars that the Albanian government three years ago barred all Albanian citizens from using speedboats, the favored transportation used by traffickers to get people out of the country.

This drastic measure, coupled with stricter border controls and revenge killings of traffickers by victims’ families, had a significant effect, reducing trafficking by more than half and all but ending Albania’s role as a major transit point for people trafficked to Western Europe from eastern and southern parts of the Continent, say experts who follow trafficking.

But the ban prompted loud protests from fishermen and people in the tourism industry, and in May it was reversed. Law enforcement and human rights officials are concerned that as a result, human trafficking may explode anew — at an especially difficult time.

The financial crisis, many experts said, could increase human trafficking around the world. A United States State Department report in June warned of the potential risk, saying that the crisis is causing “a shrinking demand for labor and a growing supply of workers willing to take ever greater risks for economic opportunities.”

In the case of Albania, a poor, southern Balkan country that joined NATO in April and seeks to join the European Union, the government’s ability to fight trafficking is viewed as a critical test.
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At the height of the trafficking, experts estimate, thousands of women, men and children were taken to nearby Greece and Italy and elsewhere for sexual exploitation or forced labor.

The United Nations estimates that 12.3 million people globally are employed in sexual servitude or forced labor. Many are lured by fake engagements, real marriages or false job offers. In some cases, victims have been sold by their families. Others go voluntarily.

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A young woman who does a missions trip every summer

An article in today's Naperville Sun introduces us to a young volunteer who goes to on a mission trip every year, and plans to do more. In the past, Allie Griffin has gone to help victims of Hurricane Katrina and worked at a Native American Reservation. After watching a documentary about the war in Uganda, she began to look for a trip to Africa.

From this story from reporter Angela Bender, we are introduced to Griffin and her mission trip for this summer.

The trip took Griffin to Kampala, Uganda, with about 20 other volunteers from the United States and Canada ranging in age from 18 to 70. For two weeks, the missionaries provided medical clinics and worked in orphanages. Afterward, Griffin didn't think twice about signing up to go on another trip this summer.

This year the trip took place in June. After two days of travel to get to Africa, the missionaries stayed in a guesthouse with "running water, a nice bed and good cooking," but were put right to work.

This year Griffin did triage at medical clinics -- taking blood pressure, temperatures and working with sick children, as well as adults. The clinics run all day, with many people coming to see a doctor even if they are not sick, just because they have the opportunity to do so.

"It's exhausting," Griffin said. "And the line just gets longer and longer. When you come home every day, you need to take a shower and go to sleep. It's a good feeling though."

Griffin has seen how people in some of the most poverty-stricken areas of the United States live, but still was not prepared for some of what she witnessed in Africa. With no bathrooms or electricity, but plenty of bugs and stench, Griffin couldn't believe some of the conditions in Kampala.

"The city is more of a slum and that is really sad," Griffin said. "It takes your breath away."

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More on the farming success of Malawi

Malawi is one of the good news countries in Africa in regards to food production. Thanks to fertilizer, seeds and irrigation Malawi is now a food exporter.

The government of Malawi conducts a subsidy program for farmers. The government helps with the costs of inputs to help increase farmers yields. The subsidy program takes up 15 percent of Malawi's national budget. Meanwhile, the percentage of those in poverty in the country has fallen to 40 percent from 52 percent.

From this Bloomberg story, writers Frank Jomo and Brian Latham give us more of the good news.

Once the victim of intermittent famines that left 40 percent of the population dependent on international aid just four years ago, Malawi has become a food exporter. Farmers credit a government program of subsidizing fertilizers for the turnaround.

“The world faces massive food shortages, but we have a lesson we can offer to the world,” President Bingu wa Mutharika, who was re-elected in May, told reporters this week. “Our subsidy program is a success and we want other countries to learn from us.”

Other African countries may now get the funds to follow Malawi: The Group of Eight nations on July 10 approved $20 billion in aid over three years to help poor farmers worldwide, mostly through cheaper access to fertilizers and seed.

Neighboring Tanzania began a fertilizer-subsidy program last December. Kenya had already announced plans for a subsidy system to turn it into a net food exporter by 2012, while Uganda increased agricultural spending by 47 percent in the budget announced on June 11.

“Before the subsidies came in during 2005, our crops were poor because we couldn’t afford fertilizer,” said Luckmore Banda, looking out over 5-foot-high corn stalks sprouting from every square inch of available land at his homestead outside Malawi’s commercial capital, Blantyre. “Now, things are on the up and up. Our production is rising and our income is rising.”

Banda, 62, says the subsidies helped lift his income to $5 a day from less than $1 four years ago. About 7.2 million small- scale farmers in a country of 14.3 million have received the subsidies over four years, Treasury Secretary Randson Mwadiwa said in an interview.

Malawi expects to produce an estimated 3.7 million metric tons of corn this year, up 36 percent from 2008 and exceeding the 2.4 million tons needed for self-sufficiency, Finance Minister Ken Kandodo Banda said in a July 3 interview.

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Child poverty in Germany

Industrialized nations are seeing an increase in children who are poor, or are under their nation's poverty line. The numbers were high even before the global recession. But now that the industrialized nation's economies are shrinking even more children will become poor.

The BBC produced a great story about Germany today, a nation where already 36% of the children are poor. As we see in the story from reporter Steve Rosenberg, children can still get needs fulfilled,. but it is usually through charity and not through employment.



The accompanying article to the above video, looks at the growing numbers of child poverty in Europe and the U.S.

The German Society for the Protection of Children is even more worried.

It warns of a "massive" increase in child poverty, once the full effects of the recession kick in.

Germany is not alone. Governments around the world appear to be losing the battle against child poverty.

In the UK, ministers have admitted it will now be "very difficult" to meet their target of halving child poverty by 2010.

In the US, which already has one of the worst child poverty rates among industrialised nations, three million more children are expected to slip below the poverty line.

Charities have been criticising the German government for not doing enough to tackle the problem.

"If we have problems with our banks, or with our car producers, the politicians come together to find a solution very quickly. They give money and credits," says Michael Kruse of Deutsches Kinderhilfswerk.

"But when I tell them we have three million children who have no future and no money, nobody comes together to help the children. I think it's the wrong priority of our society."

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Building new leaders in social enterprise

Today we ran across this video from the Acumen Fund on a student workshop to help new leaders in social enterprise.

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Some fair-trade cosmetic products

Sure there is coffee, tea and cocoa, but there are fair trade beauty products as well. The cosmetics use natural plants or oils from the under-developed world, and give the farmers a decent wage for supplying them.

As we see in the below snippet, the benefits to the farmers go beyond just more money. For the extra cash is invested back into the farmers villages. Sometimes the cosmetic companies will build other benefits for the villages such as new farms, or schools.

From this Redbook magazine article, writer Krista Bennett DeMai tells us about the products in particular.

During travels in the 1980s, the late Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop, learned that many of the communities she visited were not getting paid fairly for their ingredients or goods -- often not enough to cover the cost of production or wages. Inspired by the early fair-trade movement happening with coffee and tea, Roddick started a Community Trade program -- working with undeveloped countries that were otherwise powerless in securing a fair price for their products. Twenty-one years later, The Body Shop spends more than $12 million buying ingredients as well as gifts and accessories, like wooden massage tools and tote bags, from suppliers in more than 20 countries. One of those suppliers is a cooperative of sesame farmers in Achuapa, a village in Nicaragua. When Roddick met the farmers in the 1990s, they were struggling to make a living by exporting sesame oil. Roddick worked out a fair price for the sesame oil (now used in more than 40 Body Shop products, including the Moringa Milk Body Lotion, $16) by calculating how much it costs to grow, as well as the community needs: the cost of living, the cost of education, etc. The cosmetics company then gave the farmers a forecast -- somewhat of a contract -- that projected how much sesame oil the company would purchase over the course of, say, a year, giving the farmers a newfound sense of stability and the ability to invest in their community. "We're not about charity," says Graham Clewer, global head of ethical trade at The Body Shop. "A hand up is always better than a handout."

Since this relationship began, the co-op has built eight primary schools that educate 400 children. And it's currently building a boarding house in Achuapa so 40 kids (mostly children of single moms or those who live in neighboring communities) can attend secondary school. There have been other improvements as well: 13 sanitary water wells built; an acupuncture and natural medicine clinic opened by a single mother of six; a bank, which offers low-interest loans and encourages community members to save money; a model farm, to test organic farming methods; and even family workshops to educate the community on complicated social issues like gender equality and domestic violence.

A lipstick is always a quick pick-me-up, but Aveda's Uruku Lip Pigment, $14, helps lift the spirits of millions. Fifteen years ago, Aveda's founder encountered the Yawanawá tribe in Brazil. The tribe was dispersed after losing much of its land to rubber plantations, explains Chuck Bennett, vice president of earth and community care at Aveda. "Culturally, they were on the verge of extinction." To support the tribe, Aveda began purchasing urukum seed from the tribe. The antioxidant-rich seed is used for the tribe's body-painting rituals because of its vibrant red pigment, which Aveda now uses in its Uruku makeup line. Aveda has also initiated local social projects and school development and has provided equipment for urukum production. The goal: "We're working to move beyond the charitable relationship so they can become a fully sustainable community," says Bennett. The tribe has recently secured the rights to 125,000 acres of sacred land (for a total of 450,000), reestablishing their sense of community.

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OXFAM responds to President Obama

U.S. President Barack Obama recently called on African leaders to clean up corruption and mis-governance. As a response, OXFAM America is calling on the U. S. government to clean up the way to delivers aid. OXFAM wants more transparency and accountability to the U.S. aid that is handed out to the under-developed world.

We read more about the response from this OXFAM press release.

"Getting to better development assistance will require that donors such as the U.S. keep a close eye on the critical task of building government capacity and institutions directly," said O. Natty B. Davis, II, Reconstruction Minister of Liberia. "This will ensure the efficacy of aid and its ability to deliver results that can have a real impact on the lives of the people in these countries in as short a time as possible."

The panel reflected growing momentum in the foreign aid reform debate in the U.S. Before leaving for Ghana, President Obama was quoted in an AllAfrica.com interview saying, "Our aid policies have been splintered among a variety of agencies. . .Trying to create something steady [and] basing our policies on what works and not on some ideological previous position -- is going to be very important."

Last Friday, Secretary of State Clinton announced that the State Department and USAID will be undertaking America's first-ever Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR), in order to streamline the aid bureaucracy and insert development more coherently into debates over national security and foreign policy. In Congress, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman (D-CA) has introduced the Initiating Foreign Assistance Reform Act of 2009 (H.R. 2139), which has more than 75 bipartisan co-sponsors.

"It is a good sign that the administration and Congress are talking about development in a strategic way," said Paul O'Brien, Director of Aid Effectiveness at Oxfam America and one of today's panelists. "But if new strategies are going to deliver for the world's poor, they must be poverty focused. Effective development isn't about fixing short-term political or security problems -- it is about putting people in charge of their own lives. The best signal the U.S. can send to show it is serious about development is to nominate a USAID Administrator who will help rebuild the agency and bring back its capacity to be a true partner in development."

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South Florida food bank in danger of closing

A Miami area food bank is danger of shutting down, just when need is greatest. Stop Hunger Food Bank says that unless they receive enough donations by the end of the month, they will be forced to close.

From this article from WFOR, reporter Kimberley Chapin looks into the troubles of the food bank. The WFOR website is also collecting donations to help keep the food bank open.

"This is the first time in our 30 years that we have faced the problem of shutting down," said Executive Director, Julius Littman. That's a big change, considering that at one point, Stop Hunger handed out more than 550 thousand meals a month.

So how could this food bank that serves so many of South Florida's hungry now be facing closure?

Arnold Jean Baptiste of the Children's Services Council, who sits on Stop Hunger's board, explained, "The individuals that used to donate to Stop Hunger now are looking to Stop Hunger in order to survive. The donations they used to get have now gone down; they are working hard to get more food and keep the service going."

With more families lining up for food and a decrease in donation, many sacrifices have been made.

"Our volunteers are working full time and getting paid for half time," said Fox.

But it's a sacrifice that many at Stop Hunger are willing to make, because many of them once turned to Stop Hunger for help themselves; it's something volunteer Seven Rosario knows all too well. "It's always good to have a helping hand, they've helped me and now it's my turn to help someone else," Rosario said.

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Ethiopia's aid intake; rising or slowing?

This following article may have a bit of accountant double speak, but we share it because it has important information on the use of aid dollars in Ethiopia's government budget.

The Ethiopian government now says that foreign aid makes up a smaller percentage of it's overall budget. Meaning more revenues for the government have been collected from within it's own boarders. However, the entire budget has increased, so the amount of aid dollars taken in is also growing.

From the Walta information Center, we find this further explanation that we hope will be less confusing.

Information and Public Relations Work Process Owner, Haji Ibssa, told WIC that share of foreign aid and loan has been declining over the past successive years.

The volume of foreign aid and loan Ethiopia is getting has increased over the past years, he said, however, the share of foreign aid and loan has declined to 28.4 percent during the current budget year from over 31 percent previously.

This fact is the result of the effort Ethiopia is making to alleviate its dependency on foreign financial sources, Haji said, underlining that only 10.4 billion birr of the 64.5 billion birr annual budget approved for the 2002 budget year is expected form foreign sources.

Looking more to domestic sources would contribute to efficiently fund and carryout poverty reduction efforts, he said.

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A hockey player heads to El Salvador with World Vision

One of our favorite non-Red Wings hockey players was sent by World Vision to the mountains of El Salvador. Mike Fisher of the Ottawa Senators had already sponsored a few children through World Vision. The charity asked him to participate in a trip to film a TV commercial that will be shown in the Ottawa area to gain more child sponsorships.

As well as working with the poor for a few days, Fisher was also able to see some success stories from sponsored children. Including a young woman who was able to sell eggs at a market with the help of some World Vision provided chickens. From this story that we found at Canada.com, writer Wayne Scanlan details the trip.

In South America, Fisher was more or less anonymous, causing a stir just as an outsider visiting some of the poorest villages, barely beyond the bustling capital city of San Salvador.

``Just five minutes outside the city, there is a major, drastic change,'' Fisher says. ``Extreme poverty.''

Fisher has sponsored children through World Vision in the past, helping to pay for basic needs and education, so, when the organization invited him to see El Salvador in the flesh, he was all over it.

``I've always wanted to go somewhere where the conditions are poor, a place like Africa,'' Fisher says. ``Maybe I'll go there next time.''

The rugged Christian from Peterborough, Ont., comes by this missionary zeal naturally. Fisher's uncle, David Fisher, was the chapel leader of the Toronto Blue Jays for 29 years. Mike's sister and father have done missionary work together in Ecuador.

n El Salvador, Fisher spent the first working day visiting villages of squalor, seeing first hand the living conditions of the poor. The conditions of the land alone was a challenge.

``We went up in trucks into the mountains,'' Fisher says. ``It was quite the ride even by truck, and the local people walk in. It takes four hours for this one family just to get into town.''

He won't forget visiting the tiny shack of one family, no food on the premises and eight children living in the one room, about 10 feet by 10 feet.

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Anti-trafficking video from The Killers

Rock band The Killers have a new music video that sheds some light on human trafficking. The video is produced in conjunction with UNICEF, MTV EXIT, and the US Agency for International Development. MTV EXIT is a campaign the network has to raise awareness of human trafficking for sex. More about the partnership can be found at UNICEF's press release.

The video is for the Killers song called "Goodnight, Travel Well." Radiohead previously filmed a similar video for their song "All I Need," great song, by the way.

Below is the youtube of The Killers video.

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A cease fire in Nigeria

A cease fire had been called in the Niger Delta area of Nigeria. This is where a rebel group has been disrupting oil production and demanding more action from the government to ease poverty there. The rebel group wants the government to give more oil revenues to the people. Nigeria's economy is almost completely dependent on oil.

Nigerian government will probably now be pressured by the big oil companies to negotiate with the rebels as fighting disrupted oil production in the area. However some Nigerian residents are afraid violent rebels will receive more benefits from the oil and take away their share.

From this analysis of the cease fire from the Guardian, reporter Michelle Faul profiles the rebel group and their issues.

The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta has been attacking oil installations, kidnapping petroleum company employees and fighting government troops since January 2006 in what it calls a protest against the unrelenting poverty of people in the Niger Delta. Nigeria's military has fighting a losing battle against opponents using guerrilla tactics in an intricate network of lagoons, creeks, estuaries and mangrove swamps stretching across a million square miles — home to several minority groups and some of Africa's largest oil deposits.

The poverty there has been deepened by more than 50 years of oil production: soil once used for crops is sticky from crude oil leaks, rivers that used to provide fish are slick with oil and the air is acrid with fumes from decades of gas flaring.

The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta called the cease-fire Wednesday saying the government had met one of its demands by releasing ailing rebel leader Henry Okah. It said it wants to negotiate with the government, is busy identifying envoys and hopes the 60-day cease-fire will create "an enabling environment" for negotiations.

President Umar Yar'Adua's special adviser on the southern Delta region, where all Nigeria's oil is produced, responded that the president was "sincere and committed, and is truly poised to turn the Niger Delta into a bastion of peace and development."

But the rebel group has called cease-fires before, the government has made similar promises and all has come to naught. In January, the group called off a four-month cease-fire alleging that the government had broken it, though the government denied that.

The most pressing issue, one the government can address most speedily, is the 13 percent share of national oil revenue allocated to the delta under Nigeria's federal system. Various groups in the region have been demanding an increase that would bring that share up to anywhere from 25 percent to 100 percent of revenue.

But Yar'Adua's government, like its predecessor, is showing little enthusiasm and faces political resistance from other parts of the country that automatically must accept less revenue if more goes to the delta. The economy of Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation of 140 million, is almost totally dependent on oil.

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A dissident aid group in Myanmar

A year after a large cyclone destroyed the Irrawaddy Delta of Myanmar people there are still rebuilding. Some of the physical damage has been restored, and Farmers have gone back to growing crops after some loans and donations.

Most of the rebuilding was done by aid groups that were reluctantly allowed in by the government. The military government of Myanmar tries to control everything in the country. The cyclone was too much for the government to control, so they allowed others to do the work of rebuilding.

In this New York Times article we learn of an aid group that uses helping people to be subversive to the government. Mingalar Myanmar was a begun by a family with a history of opposing the government. In this piece we see how building houses and feeding people peacefully opposes a military.

“The government always believes everything will be solved by giving orders,” said Daw Yuza Maw Htoon, who founded Mingalar Myanmar with her husband, U Phone Win. “It failed. They recognize the failure. It’s much beyond their capacity.”

When Cyclone Nargis struck the Irrawaddy Delta in May 2008, killing upwards of 130,000 people, a number of local organizations rallied to offer assistance. After initial resistance, the government agreed to let groups like Mingalar distribute aid independently in the delta. To date, Mingalar alone has reached 700 villages, spent $3 million in the delta and grown to 80 employees from 5. In Nauk Pyan Toe, the village was rebuilt using financing from the Swedish and British governments, a Malaysian charity and a Buddhist organization.

With a $300,000 donation from the Singapore Embassy and Singaporean businesses, Mingalar also built 1,500 boats for the victims of the cyclone.
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The government has announced elections for next year, the first in two decades. Although it appears likely they will be rigged in favor of the military, some foreign observers believe they may also lead to a devolution of some responsibilities and power to civic groups like Mingalar Myanmar.

Mingalar’s work is not political, the organization tells the authorities. And yet in the top-down, yes-sir context of four-and-a-half decades of military rule in Myanmar, it is difficult to see the group’s work as anything but a challenge to the status quo.

Mingalar’s seminars in remote villages encourage collective decision- making and community-based activism, ideas that have been eclipsed by a government that instills fear in those who step out of line.

“The idea is that you have to give priority to people’s opinion,” said Ms. Yuza Maw Htoon.

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Holocaust survivors in the U.S.

An eighth grader in New York City did a school project on Holocaust survivors. What he found was many of the survivors are still suffering in some way. 30% of Holocaust survivors living in the U.S. are living in poor conditions.

From this WCBS video, Jennifer McLogan tells us about Joe Klein's discovery.

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India and China's progress on meeting the MDGs

In a meeting of the Asian Economic and Social Council, China and India have both submitted reports detailing their economies. China says they can meet some of the Millennium Development Goals ahead of schedule, while India reports a focus on health issues for those in poverty.

From the IPS, reporter Thalif Deen breaks down the reports.

Since 1978, China has accelerated development and reduced its population living in "absolute poverty" from 250 million to 15 million, according to a new report submitted by the Chinese government to the annual ministerial meeting of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) through Jul. 31.

"We firmly believe that China will achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) fully and on schedule, thereby making an important contribution to the achievement of the Goals at the global level," the report said.

China also boasts it is "the earliest among developing countries to meet the MDGs of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger".

The MDGs include a 50 percent reduction in extreme poverty and hunger; universal primary education; promotion of gender equality; reduction of child mortality by two-thirds; cutbacks in maternal mortality by three-quarters; combating the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensuring environmental sustainability; and developing a North-South global partnership for development.

China is one of the few developing nations to publicly declare its commitment to meet all eight MDGs by 2015, while most countries have declared their inability to meet the deadline, a situation made worse by the global financial crisis.

Meanwhile, in a report titled "India: Urban Poverty Report 2009", the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation points out that over 80 million poor people live in cities and towns of India.

India has shared the growth pattern of some of the fastest growing regions in Asia, according to the study. The country has witnessed around 8.0 percent growth in gross domestic product (GDP) in the last couple of years.

But India's urban population is increasing at a faster rate than its total population of 1.16 billion.

Overall, India's population growth has been steadily decreasing and continues to do so, says Professor Gita Sen of the Centre for Public Policy at the Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Management. She said that National Family Health Surveys point to important reductions in the number of children that women want to have.

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Paul Collier and the U.S. President's remarks on Africa

In his latest commentary, Paul Collier analyzes U.S. President Obama's remarks on African leadership. Collier says that besides more aid, perhaps what Africa needs is more accountants. We found Collier's commentary in the Guardian.

The most explosive was that Africa's core problem is its own misgovernance: Africa's persistent poverty has been largely self-inflicted. Obama is the first western leader to have the political space to deliver this tough but necessary message. He does not need a photo-op with smiling Africans to signal to voters back home that he is a compassionate sort of guy. Nor does he risk being denounced. His protection is in part that it is not possible to imagine Obama in a pith helmet; but beyond that, nobody can seriously question Obama's sincere concern to help his father's continent. His statement cannot be interpreted as being the preliminaries to neglect.

Second, the solution to misgovernance will come from within Africa: the key struggle is internal. By choosing to visit Ghana – which recently hosted an honest election, with the governing party narrowly losing – Obama flagged up that leadership depends critically on the integrity of the political process.

Obama has made a clarion call for change, but more importantly, he is the change. Africans see Obama as a fellow African, but unlike most of Africa's own leaders he personifies the leadership values that he preaches. Poor leadership is not intrinsic to African leadership; it is intrinsic only to the people who have jostled their way into presidencies.

Why has the selection of African leadership been so disastrous? The problem lies not with Africans but with the structure of the polities in which they live. Around the world the chance of a stolen election soars if the society is poor, small, and resource-rich. Even then it is not inevitable: Botswana started with just these features yet it is a functioning democracy. But such countries need strong checks and balances such as a free press and what political scientists call "veto points" – independent bases of power that can block presidential decisions. The democratisation that swept across Africa after the fall of the Soviet Union in most cases amounted to little more than elections.

Which takes us to Obama's final message: America will help, where it can, to tilt the balance towards brave people struggling for change. American money will be conditional upon decent governance. Where public money can be looted, the political class – no matter what its original composition – will end up peopled by crooks. In Africa aid is such a major component of public money that the scope for capture matters enormously.

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