[Africa] UNEP unleashes Africa's potential to end poverty

from African News Dimension

By Carlyn Hambuba

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has launched the second Africa Environment Outlook AEO 2, a report that assesses the state of the environment and draws plausible scenarios as to the likely impacts of different policies over the coming decades in the continent.

Africa’s potential to overcome poverty has been unveiled by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in its latest report. UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner is optimistic that Poverty in Africa can be made history if the region’s wealth of natural resources is effectively, fairly and sustainably harnessed.

Speaking when he officially launched the Africa Environment Out Look AEO2, the new head of the UNEP says despite the potential that Africa has there are still outstanding issues like rapid rates of deforestation, high levels of land degradation, wasteful water use in agriculture and climate change remain and need to be urgently addressed. Steiner noted that natural resources are at the heart of economic activities. The report entitled 'Our Environment, Our Wealth', stress that Africa is currently only using a fraction of its natural wealth potential.

"There is need for Africa to move from being a major exporter of primary resources to being one with a vibrant industrial and manufacturing base," says Steiner. He also called for ‘added value’ to the primary commodities exported by African states. Other challenges are emerging. These range from genetically modified organisms and the costs of alien invasive species up to a switch of chemical manufacturing from the developed to the developing world, says the Africa Environment Outlook-2.

However many African countries are now parties to a wide range of international environment treaties and new cooperative agreements are being born covering shared river and ecosystems like the Limpopo up to the management of the Congo basin’s globally important forests. Meanwhile initiatives like the African Union’s New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) promise to propel the region and its people onto a more prosperous path that balances economic, social and environmental concerns. Several African countries, like the Gambia and Zambia, are mainstreaming the environment in their Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers and other countries are starting to use tax and other market mechanisms to conserve ecosystems like forests.

Achim Steiner, UNEP’s Executive Director, said “The report challenges the myth that Africa is poor. Indeed, it points out that its vast natural wealth can, if sensitively, sustainably and creatively managed, be the basis for an African renaissance—a renaissance that meets and goes beyond the internationally agreed Millennium Development Goals. But this is not inevitable and, as the AE0-2 points out, African nations face stark choices”.

“If policies remain unchanged, political will found wanting and sufficient funding proves to be elusive, then Africa may take a far more unsustainable track that will see an erosion of its nature-based wealth and a slide into ever deeper poverty,” he added. “Such a track will have disturbing consequences not just for many of the 800 million people here but for the rest of the world. Nevertheless, I am convinced that we are fast reaching a watershed in Africa’s response and that the pieces of a sustainable jigsaw puzzle are being steadily put into place” said Mr Steiner.

“Governments are signaling an increased willingness to cooperate and to engage over a wide range of pressing regional and global issues. The economic importance of the environment is increasingly recognized by Africa’s leaders as an instrument for development, for livelihoods, for peace and for stability. I sincerely believe we have a real opportunity to take this impetus a long way,” he concluded.

The AEO-2, compiled on behalf of AMCEN with funding from UNEP and the governments of Belgium, Luxembourg and Norway, is the work of researchers and scientists from across the region. Untapped Potential From freshwaters to forests and from minerals to the marine environment, the region is only realizing a fraction of its nature-based economic potential says the AEO-2, which is sub-titled Our Environment, Our Wealth.

The report says, for example, that the potential for tourism based around nature and cultural sites is huge but relatively untapped. “Africa has numerous tourist attractions, yet it contributes only four per cent annually to the multi billion dollar global tourism industry,” it notes. Similar arguments are made in terms of food in a region with “sufficient land resources to produce enough to feed its people and yet one in three is presently undernourished”.

The report also overturns the popular view that Africa is short of water, rather it underlines how little of it is utilized for irrigation, drinking water and power generation. Africa’s renewable freshwater resource is, at close to 4,000 cubic km per year, about 10 per cent of the global freshwater resource and closely matches Africa’s share of the world population. Yet in 2005 only about five per cent of the development potential is being used for ‘industry, tourism and hydropower,” notes the report. It points out that Africa “is a mining giant” producing nearly 80 per cent of the world’s platinum, more than 40 per cent of the globe’s diamonds and more than a fifth of its gold and cobalt. Yet its industrial base is insignificant”.

The report argues that, in the case of minerals as well as areas like forest products, there is a pressing need to ‘add value to natural resources”. “There is a need for Africa to move from being a major exporter of primary resources to being one” with a vibrant industrial and manufacturing base. The AEO-2 assesses the state of the environment and draws plausible scenarios as to the likely impacts of different policies over the coming decades. The kinds of tough choices facing African leaders, business and civil society are most clear cut in the scenarios on Freshwater and Land.

If food production in Africa is driven purely by Market Forces, the level of land degradation is likely to rise to between 25,000 and 35,000 hectares a year under a worst case scenario. This rapid intensification of farming will hit forests in particular with forest cover declining ‘drastically’ during the 2005 to 2025 period. Under a more promising scenario, dubbed The Great Transition, agricultural land expands by 10 per cent between 2005 and 2025.

Under this scenario much of this comes not from greater exploitation of existing agricultural land but as a result of putting government-held lands into production. Revised tax systems also promote good land use with a switch towards agriculture tailored to local climatic, geographical, demographic and cultural factors. Land degradation declines to 0.1 million hectares a year by 2015 with restoration programmes leading, from about the same year, to an increase in forest cover.

Under a worse case scenario, competition for water will rise as industrial expansion grows with the losers likely to be the general public. Industrial growth in the region is likely to be as a result of developed world companies shifting factories, such as chemical plants, into developing parts of the world such as Africa and in particular North and South Africa.

The new industries will generate employment but will take up to 16 per cent of supplies putting increasing pressure on underground water supplies, says the report. Water prices for domestic consumers could soar in many African cities forcing people to buy cheaper but more polluted sources. Under this scenario over a third of Africans in future will not have adequate access to water.

Under the more optimistic scenario, industries are required to meet proper pollution control standards and, although industrial use of water climbs to just under a fifth of total water use, discharges do not pollute lakes or rivers. Increases in industrial demand are balanced by water efficiency gains in agriculture through, for example, the adoption of drip as opposed to spray systems. Currently agriculture in Africa accounts for up to 90 per cent of water use.

Under the Great Transitions scenario it declines to under 60 per cent as a result of governments introducing and encouraging tariffs and modern water saving irrigation systems. However, the availability of greater quantities of clean and safe drinking water allied to rising living standards and incomes generated by industrial growth will probably result in higher public use if not ‘over use’ in growing urban areas.

Thus the proportion of Africa’s citizens without access to adequate water supplies under this scenario will be 26 per cent by 2050 from a total population then of 1.5 billion. It indicates that to meet and maintain the internationally agreed development goals will require even greater efforts in areas of consumer awareness and water efficiency in homes and cities. Alien invasive species from toads to trees are among the emerging issues facing Africa says AE0-2.

Experts have pinpointed large numbers of life forms, deliberately or accidentally introduced into Africa, which are poisoning cattle, damaging water supplies, carrying infections and affecting tourism. The highest numbers of alien species are estimated to be found in South Africa followed by Mauritius, Swaziland, Algeria, Madagascar and Kenya.

Their impacts may equate to hundreds of millions of dollars in damage annually and may also be contributing to the undermining of economic progress and the delivery of the MDGs. Black wattle, a tree introduced into South Africa about 150 years ago to provide bark products, is undermining river banks and harming wildlife in the Cape Floral Kingdom, one of the world’s great biodiversity hot spots. Since 1995, the South African government has removed and destroyed some five billion black wattle trees. The annual bill for manual and chemical control of all alien species in the Cape Floral Kingdom is around $40 million.

Meanwhile stockpiles of obsolete and hazardous chemicals, a switch of chemical production from developed to developing countries and gaps in the safe handling of toxic substances are becoming another new area of concern. The issue is underscored in a study of wetlands in Senegal where agricultural and industrial chemical pollution has more than halved fish catches in some places. The AEO-2 call for a raft of measures to be put in place to ensure Africa maximizes the benefits of any chemical industrialization.

These include improved risk assessments, monitoring, effective waste management, labeling of products to enable sound consumer choice and emergency response systems. The recommendations echo those proposed at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 and that were agreed by environment ministers under the Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management at UNEP’s Special Session of its Governing Council/Global Ministerial Environment Forum in Dubai earlier in the year. The third emerging issue focuses on how the region is responding to the promises and potential pitfalls of gene modified plants.

The report notes that nearly 20 African countries are now growing or field testing GMOs from Morocco and Egypt to Kenya, Zimbabwe and South Africa across to Benin, Cameroon and Mali in West Africa. The report accepts that such high tech crops could help in the war against famine and hunger and thus play a part in meeting internationally agreed development goals. But there are worries that such crops may be seen as ‘silver bullets’ deflecting attention from more fundamental issues of hunger like poor food distribution systems, the inability of the poor to get access to crop lands and environmental mismanagement.

There is also concern that too few African countries have the scientific, legal, risk assessment and administrative structures in place to deal with this new generation of crops. A multi million dollar capacity building project, being undertaken by UNEP and funded by the Global Environment Facility, aims to bridge theses gaps so that 100 developing countries, including over 30 African ones, have the necessary skills and laws needed to accept or reject GMOs.

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[Kids Count Report] Tough times for U.S. youths

from The Houston Chronicle

Health, living conditions of teens, kids leveling off; Texas slips to 39th in national report

By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER
Associated Press

Fewer teenagers are having babies or dropping out of high school since the start of the decade, but slightly more live in poverty with parents who don't work year round.

A report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation charity found that measures of health and income for children and teens are no longer improving as much as they did in the 1990s.

Instead, children are "treading water," said foundation President Doug Nelson.

"We're not talking about a catastrophe or the bottom falling out of anything," Nelson said. But, he added, "We've still got to do some poverty-rate reduction. We've got to make improvements from those 2000 numbers."

The findings were released Tuesday as part of the annual Kids Count report on the health and well-being of children and teens.

The report measures each state's progress on 10 statistics, including infant mortality, poverty rates, single-parent families and babies born with low weights.

Overall, Texas slipped from 37th to 39th in the national rankings.

Texas is higher than the national average in childhood poverty, child deaths, teen births and teen deaths.

Only Nevada has a smaller percentage of immunized children, and Texas has the highest rate of uninsured children in the nation.

The state's child poverty rate has worsened slightly, from 22 percent in 2000 to 23 percent in 2004, but a lower rate of Texas teens are giving birth, dying and dropping out of school.

"Even though we've seen some improvements, overall for Texas children, things are getting worse," said Frances Deviney, director of the Texas Kids Count. "And that's disconcerting."

States in the Northeast and upper Midwest scored the best. At the top: New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Minnesota and Iowa. Southern states did the worst: Mississippi, Louisiana, New Mexico, South Carolina and Tennessee.

Louisiana was ranked 49th, even before Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast last year.

"We're a really poor state," said Judy Watts, president and chief executive of Agenda for Children, an advocacy group in Louisiana. "Everything starts to unravel as poverty takes a grip on children and families."

Watts said conditions for children are even worse since the hurricane, even with help from the state and federal governments.

Nationally, there were improvements in eight of the 10 measurements in the 1990s, when the economy was booming, government-sponsored health care for children was expanded significantly and welfare reform helped move hundreds of thousands of families from welfare to work.

One issue that has continued to improve: teen pregnancies.

"Every state fell, every racial group fell," said Bill O'Hare, a senior fellow at the Casey foundation.

The Casey foundation uses the most recent statistics available from the Census Bureau and other government agencies for its report, now in its 17th year.

Chronicle reporter Melanie Markley contributed to this report.

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[California] Religious leaders, activists unveil covenant, rally against poverty

from Catholic Online

By Ben Gruver

WASHINGTON – Several hundred community and faith leaders along with religious activists from around the nation marched in Washington June 27 to fight against poverty.

The event celebrated the unveiling of the Covenant for a New America, a faith-based strategy for overcoming poverty.

The march and a related conference were hosted by Sojourners and Call to Renewal, a national network of churches, faith-based organizations and individuals working to overcome poverty in America.

Twenty-three national religious groups and religious leaders endorsed the covenant.

Among other things, the document aims to bring people from all religious and political backgrounds together so they can hold each other accountable for ending poverty. One goal is to develop a plan to cut child poverty in half over the next 10 years.

Among those endorsing the covenant was Sister Marge Clark, a Sister of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary who is a lobbyist with Network, a national Catholic social justice lobby whose mission is to bring about economic justice. Sister Clark said she was proud to sign the covenant.

Jean Sammon, an organizer with Network, said the organization follows the Catholic social teaching principle of addressing the structures that affect poor people.

Sister Carole Shinnick, a School Sister of Notre Dame who is executive director of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, said her organization also endorsed the covenant because it is consistent with LCWR's positions on poverty.

"Since 1727 when the first (Catholic sisters) arrived in this country, we consistently stood with the marginalized and the poor, especially women and children, and this document that we are endorsing is consistent with that position," Sister Shinnick, a speaker at the event, said.

The protesters marched to Upper Senate Park at the U.S. Capitol from the National City Christian Church, chanting as they went: "In God's name, make poverty history," "Raise minimum wage," and "Make work work."

The message of religious and government leaders who spoke at the park was clear: "Make poverty history."

Rev. Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners and author of God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It, said the poor are the new interest group in Washington.

"Poverty is God's special interest," Rev. Wallis said.

"This place (Congress) will be judged on how they treat (the poor)," he said.

Rev. Wallis urged the faith community to eliminate poverty.

"As long as they (political leaders) make bad decisions, we will have to tell them what the decisions ought to be," Rev. Wallis said.

Rev. Wallis urged the audience to "be a special interest group on Capitol Hill."

Rev. David Beckmann, a Lutheran minister and president of Bread for the World, a Christian anti-hunger lobby, said his organization is glad to be endorsing the covenant.

"We people of faith are here to wake up our political leaders and say here is what God is calling us to tell them," he told the crowd.

Kevin Hunter, vice president of domestic programs at World Vision, mentioned three of the covenant's core points his organization welcomes and feels are important to endorse:

- The covenant unites faith communities on common ground.

- It promotes biblical justice.

- It calls supporters to use persuasion for ending poverty.

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[UK] Cameron sets out world poverty pledges

from E Politix

David Cameron will today set out his party's views on tackling global poverty in a speech to Oxfam.

The Conservative leader is on a visit to Oxford where he will meet staff at the aid agency's headquarters and take part in a global weblink.

He will then deliver a speech on global poverty to Oxfam workers and members of the public at Oxford town hall.

At prime minister's questions in the Commons on Wednesday, Cameron pressed Tony Blair to do more to secure an agreement at world trade talks this week.

He said Oxfam had expressed severe doubts over the chance of making progress in the talks and added it would be a "disaster" if the WTO talks failed.

The issue has already been in the news this week after Tony Blair announced on Monday he was setting up a body to monitor progress on tackling poverty in Africa.

UN secretary general Kofi Annan will be joined by campaigner Bob Geldof and Microsoft founder Bill Gates on the Africa Progress Panel.

They will produce an annual report on the success of the pledges made at last year's Gleneagles G8 summit.

Delivering a speech at King's College, London on Monday, Blair said the summit achieved "more than all but those with the most rose-tinted spectacles thought was possible."

But he warned that the twin G8 issues of Africa and climate change could easily slip down the international agenda.

"We must not let that happen," the prime minister said. "I will do everything I can to ensure they don't."

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[South Africa] Sugar beet could be commercial antidote to desperate poverty

from The Herald

Business Correspondent

THE fledgling sugar beet industry in the Eastern Cape has moved up a gear with the first commercial plantings of the crop south of the Sahara.

Tests undertaken by international sugar consultants have shown that beet grown in the Great Fish River Valley near Cradock produces the highest yield per hectare in the world.

Plantings on a commercial scale have now started on 200ha of land scattered in pockets throughout the 250km length of the valley and at the Bilatye Irrigation Scheme. The plantings will prove whether or not sugar beet farming is commercially viable as a rotational crop.

The sugar beet project is backed by the Eastern Cape government, which owns 74% of Sugar Beet SA, the company set up to manage the project.

If the plantings are successful, the sugar beet industry could contribute significantly to the success of emerging farmers and the economic upliftment of an impoverished region of the Eastern Cape.

Sugar Beet SA has also been appointed as the Eastern Cape government agent for the production of bio-fuels from beet. Ethanol production is seen as being more viable than the production of sugar.

Volunteer farmers were selected according to geographic area, climate and the type of irrigation used. Roak Crew, MD of Sugar Beet SA, said: “We are paying the farmers to compensate them for what they would have made with another crop.”

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[Millennium Villages] Innovative Villages Seek to Ease Poverty in Africa

from The Voice Of America

By Cathy Majtenyi
Nairobi

Sauri, in western Kenya, is one of a dozen so-called Millennium Villages set up across the continent by American and African development experts and funded by governments and private donors. Local committees within the experimental villages are designed to boost food production, improve health, water and education access as part of an effort to help communities meet the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations.

Sauri resident Edward Oyier looks with pride at the stone structure surrounding a pipe out of which clean water flows.

He recalls how, more than a year ago, there were only five water points to serve 5,200 people in the area, and that people often drank dirty water and became sick.

About six months ago, the United Nations' Millennium Project supplied Sauri residents with cement, sand, and technical assistance. The community picked sites for building and hired workers, paying them with food.

Now, says Oyier, there are 15 water points in Sauri where people can get clean drinking water. He describes to VOA the difference that these water points have made.

"We are sure of that water, and we can draw it very conveniently because it is near to the people," said Oyier. "The distance that they come maybe [is] 10, five minutes, somebody has drawn the water and goes home. So time consumed is almost zero. But without this, people walk distances, many kilometers, going to fetch water. That is tiresome."

Down the road from the water point, Mama Tekla is spreading out peas on mats to dry in the sun. On her two-acre farm, the 72-year-old grows maize, peas, beans and other crops as well as raises chickens and cows.

She has been farming here since 1953. Her farm's performance was boosted over the past year by initiatives from the project.

The grandmother says that, ever since she made use of farming techniques from the Millennium Project, she and her family are now able to sell food and use funds to expand the farm.

Before the Millennium Project came in, says Mama Tekla, their harvests were not so good. She says that, from one acre of land, they could get two or three bags of maize. Now, she says, they are almost 20 bags per acre.

Sauri and the other Millennium Villages are the brainchild of American economist Jeffrey Sachs, who heads the United Nations' Millennium Project.

Sachs argues that countries aiming to meet the United Nations' eight millennium development goals need to start at the village level. In Sauri and other Millennium Villages, local committees set up and run projects in the areas of health, agriculture, water and sanitation, education, roads and communications, business, environment, and energy.

The eight Millennium Development Goals seek to reduce poverty, illiteracy, disease and food insecurity by 2015.

The projects are meant to be integrated local communities. For instance, Mama Tekla and other farmers donate 10 percent of their harvests to three primary schools in Sauri, which provide hot lunches to the students. The food, in turn, has boosted educational performance to the point where Bar Sauri Primary School's exam results rose from 108th to second in the district.

Patrick Mutuo is Sauri's project coordinator for the project. He describes to VOA some of Sauri's major achievements in the past year.

"The community themselves have become organized and now they are [more] focused than they were before. They are able now to sit down, analyze a problem, write a proposal. This community now has [more] sufficient food than they have ever had," he said. "School enrollment has increased. We are seeing a reduction in malaria because we have had the bed nets and we have now prompt treatment - the medicine is available. Malaria has reduced by almost a half. People have already started businesses."

The Millennium Villages is a joint activity of the United Nations' Millennium Project, the United Nations' Development Program, and the Earth Institute at Columbia University. The World Agroforestry Center is also involved.

Governments, business, and philanthropists worldwide provide funding for the initiative. Each village on average receives about $300,000 per year for five years.

In the case of Sauri, that works out to about $110 per person per year. About half of that is paid for by donors, while the rest is contributed by the Kenyan government, mainly in the form of salaries for extension workers, corporate giving, and from community members themselves.

Millennium Project communications officer Mattias Johansson says the program is part of a larger global effort to combat poverty.

"This is not a stand-alone project like a test tube or a hothouse in the middle of nowhere. This is very much connected to a national and a global discussion on development," stressed Johansson. "On a national level we have an on-going cooperation with the government in order to revise the national poverty and development strategies, to be more in alignment with the Millennium Development Goals. This is actually a part of that plan to eradicate poverty in the world. This is holistic approach to attack poverty from all angles at once."

Eleven other villages have been, or are in the process of being, set up in Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda.

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[Bob Geldof] ...to query poverty progress

from The BBC

Bob Geldof is expected to question whether promises made at last July's G8 summit to tackle African poverty have been kept.

Mr Geldof - organiser of the global Live 8 concerts last summer - will be joined by Eurythmics star Annie Lennox.

The joint press conference in London comes only days after Tony Blair warned that it would take "hard work for years to come" to tackle poverty.

Mr Blair praised the Gleneagles summit for raising awareness about poverty.

"These issues were not high up the political agenda in the UK, let alone internationally," the UK prime minister said.

"Now they are."

Mr Geldof is not expected to share Mr Blair's praise for the progress made after the summit as the aid increases promised have not materialised.

And the key concessions that the richest nations would have to make to improve trade terms for Africa have not come either.

Africa Progress Panel

The Irish pop star is expected to name individual countries which he feels have not done enough to keep the pledges made 12 months ago.

Mr Blair has enlisted Mr Geldof, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan to a new body to monitor the progress of pledges made at the G8 summit.

The Africa Progress Panel, which will be chaired by Mr Annan, will produce an annual report to be submitted to the G8, UN and the Africa Partnership Forum.

The aim is to "maintain the international political profile of Africa achieved in 2005".

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[Australia] Lending a Helping Hand

from The Australian

Remote indigenous communities are in penury, but their businesses are thriving thanks to an American expat, writes Michelle Wiese Bockmann

STARTING from a small shed with a few bags of flour and $5, US-born Glendle Schrader launched a $20million empire that manages businesses for Aborigines in remote communities.

When Schrader moved to the isolated South Australian community of Pipalyatjara to manage its community store in 1975, he recalls seeing packs of dogs so hungry they gnawed through tin cans to get to food.

He says he used the last of his petrol to drive to the government settlement of Docker River in the Northern Territory and bought supplies for the store on credit.

Those first successful commercial contacts with the Anangu people of central Australia have deepened significantly. Schrader, 53, is now at the helm of an indigenous business empire with $10 million in assets that turns over an estimated $20 million a year.

Yet the empire he has built is owned by the nation's most desperate and dysfunctional Aboriginal communities.

Schrader's high-powered influence - especially among male leaders - amid the grog, petrol sniffing, endemic violence and abuse in some of these communities, has divided many.

"Sooner or later we're going to catch up with him and run him off the lands," says one high-profile female leader who asked not to be named.

A disgruntled former employee says "the community at Uluru refer to him as the farmer: the Aboriginal people are the cattle and he just goes up every now and then to check on his stock. The people he is profiting (from) are starving and living in Third World conditions while he lives the high life."

Schrader lives in a comfortable but not ostentatious property near the beach in Adelaide's southern suburbs.

He refuses to disclose his salary or the amount of government funding that flows through the empire he manages.

He agreed to meet The Australian at the offices of legal firm Johnston Withers to discuss his affairs in the presence of a freelance journalist engaged to provide media counsel.

Although he came to Australia in the early 1970s, Schrader's American accent remains strong.

Asked to respond to criticism that he is a leech "who gets rich off the back of blacks", he becomes clipped and closed.

"Well, I disagree," he says. "My wage is not picked by me but negotiated by other people. Our growth doesn't (affect) my salary. It's easy to make ill-informed comments from the sidelines."

Schrader dismisses concerns about his presence and influence in central Australia as indicative of fractured indigenous politics. "If there was somebody else to do it (this job), I would be happy for them to do it," he says.

Schrader runs Wana Ungkunykja, the money-making arm of the Nyangatjatjara Aboriginal Corporation.

He launched the corporation in 1993 with $250 and shareholders who comprised about 1000 Anungu adult members of three central Australian communities, Mutitjulu, Imanpa and Kaltukatjara (Docker River).

These communities remain plagued by substance abuse, poverty, illiteracy, violence, ill-health and financial mismanagement, yet they are the effective owners of the multimillion-dollar enterprise that Schrader manages. He is also chief executive or secretary of more than a dozen associated companies and trusts.

These businesses include roadhouses, a newsagency, tourist companies, a cattle station, community stores, a four-campus high school and screen-printing workshop for the Imanpa community. Schrader also runs a private job network for Anangu people.

He says he employs 200 through the businesses, whose number The Australian estimates at about 30. Only 70 of his employees are indigenous.

Schrader says profits over the years have resulted in payments to each of the communities averaging $100,000 annually.

With the profits, the communities have been able to take out loans and purchase assets such as roadhouses and cattle stations.

The money is distributed under contract and approved by trustees. "Aboriginal people are really worried about their kids; for many communities this is the only discretionary money they get and they apply that to their kids and their culture," he says.

Schrader refuses to discuss his private life and gives away little about his well-connected background and the Aboriginal powerbrokers to whom he is close.

He is married to Lois Pearson, a cousin of Cape York indigenous leader Noel Pearson, who has long championed the need for more private-sector partnerships to reduce welfare dependency.

Pearson's view is endorsed by the Labor Party's federal president Warren Mundine, who says Aboriginal-controlled companies can help to bring economic development to communities and rescue them from poverty.

"All the problems are poverty-related, and we have to deal with that or our conditions will not improve," Mundine says.

"One of the ways we can do that is having enterprises making money, that are profitable, with the benefits of that profit returning to the Aboriginal community."

He says Aboriginal people have to be made "more wise" and given skills to quickly become entrepreneurial. "Benefits must be returned to the Aboriginal community and the Aboriginal community needs to receive those benefits, otherwise we'll have this continual circle of poverty."

An ABC Four Corners program aired on May 29 showed a meeting at which Schrader took over running the Imanpa community store, which was on the brink of closure.

Despite concerns about conflict of interest and proxy voters, community council members, some of whom are illiterate, signed a legal document handing over store management to Schrader's Ninti Corporate Services.

"That's typical of him," says one leader. "That's how he operates." However, none of Schrader's critics are prepared to speak publicly, not even those who are prominent and powerful.

In 2005 Schrader presided over a similarly contentious takeover of the store, garage and community council at the troubled Ernabella community in South Australia's remote north.

Ninti has managed and distributed government grants for Ernabella. "Because the Government was not comfortable last year directly funding the community, so they chose to fund us," Schrader says. Ninti is also contracted to operate the community store at Docker River.

Schrader says the Ernabella and Imanpa stores were "a couple of hundred thousand dollars" in debt when he took over. A previous store manager at Ernabella had been busted by police for "running grog" and was now in jail for other offences.

"It was typical of the type of people who can take over and manipulate and then rip off Aboriginal communities," he says.

Schrader formed Ninti Corporate Services in 2004 to provide financial management to broke Aboriginal communities. Last February he briefed a federal and South Australian Aboriginal lands taskforce on the "useful options" his business provided "for communities that could not manage their assets".

Schrader says all businesses other than Ninti are profitable, while the job network just breaks even.

He expects Ninti, which charges a fee of between 2 per cent and 4 per cent of gross turnover in the stores it manages, to start turning a profit by next year.

Although Schrader paints a positive picture, there are some financial storm clouds hanging over him. Last month the Registrar of Aboriginal Corporations appointed an administrator to manage Schrader's parent corporation, Nyangatjatjar Aboriginal Corporation, because of financial concerns.

Schrader insists he had no role in managing the corporation until February 2006. He took over after auditors raised doubts the corporation could continue as a going concern.

The former administrator was Clive Scolley, who was replaced by the corporation's own subsidiary, Ninti.

Schrader fought the decision in the Federal Court, but lost.

"I think that Aboriginal people have been hard done by throughout Australian history ... This had been something that gives me personal satisfaction and fulfilment that I may be contributing in some small way to righting some substantial wrongs," he says.

It's not the first time Schrader's business deals have been under scrutiny. He clashed with South Australia's former health minister John Cornwell in the late 1980s over funding and spending for an Aboriginal-controlled public health clinic he established and ran.

Schrader blames Australia's tall poppy syndrome for the criticism he attracts.

"I'm proud of the job I've done and I know that the directors, who are my bosses, are quite proud of the work that my companies have done, and why shouldn't they be? The job I've done is long and hard."

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[WTO Talks Doha Round] ...is key to fair trade but reform is crucial

from The Times Online

European Briefing by Carl Mortishead

EVERY meeting at the World Trade Organisation is an eleventh-hour cliff-hanger, a make-or-break and a do-or-die. Since the Doha round of trade talks was convened in November 2001, there have been two failed ministerial summits — in Cancún, Mexico, in 2003, and in Hong Kong, in 2005.

Countless deadlines for agreement on a skeleton framework for reductions in tariffs and subsidies in agricultural trade have been breached, but the talks continue, officials fly to and fro and the recriminations mount.

Yet this week looks different. There is genuine fear that the European Union, America and the leading emerging market nations will fall at the first hurdle. The question is: does it matter? In the short term, it means nothing. American law is providing a much-needed deadline as President Bush’s mandate from Congress to negotiate a trade agreement expires in July 2007. Even with broad agreement on a trade deal in the next few weeks — a mammoth task — it will take at least a year to negotiate a full treaty and get it through Congress.

Trade will continue — unfairly, say the world’s development charities — but trade has always been about imbalance and, contrary to what you have been told, the main argument in the Doha talks is not between the very poor and very rich. It is between the rich and those who are getting rich.

The Doha round was promised as a “development round” focused on securing better access by farmers in poorer nations to the fat produce markets in America and Europe. Early in the talks, that was achieved in large measure for the poorest, the least-developed countries, who secured tariff-free access to EU and US markets for 97 per cent of exports. The marginal 3 per cent that remains contains some big items, but the US and the EU have made large concessions, notably in cotton and sugar.

What is at risk if Doha fails is a free-for-all in which trade negotiations revert to a bipolar world where the rich and powerful distribute favours and sweetheart deals amid a whiff of corruption. Doha has been different to previous trade rounds because a group of formerly poor nations have turned over the tables.

Called the G20, the group includes Brazil, India, China and South Africa, rapidly expanding and industrialising economies of enormous potential. It is their demands and their resistance that is setting the Doha agenda. The argument is about whether Tesco can open a superstore in Bombay in return for the EU opening its doors fully to Indian produce. The row is over the big gains and losses for billions of urban-dwellers, not the plight of a few poor farmers in Mali and Burkina Faso.

Without a formal trade round, the G20 and its billions of consumers and workers would struggle to punch at even half their weight. Without Doha, Washington and Brussels will carve up global trade into preference agreements. For Barbados, Brussels can offer a deal on bananas; for Mauritius, special terms for cane sugar. Meanwhile, Washington will grant Colombia, Ecuador and Honduras unlimited trade access on condition that a cold shoulder is shown to President Chávez of Venezuela.

The corrupt world of my gang, your gang beckons. It was apparent in the veiled threat contained in a letter last week to Mr Bush. Signed by 57 senators, it expressed “deep concern about the direction of talks on agriculture”. There are to be no more cuts in US farm subsidies without big concessions from America’s trading partners, say the senators.

Such a world would not last long — the disruptive element has already asserted itself. China and India would not be passive participants in a bipolar world and would quickly establish their own regional trading organisations to assert power on their own terms. There is also Russia, currently seeking admission to the WTO but frustrated by American resistance. It is already pushing its own agenda with energy as the principal lever, and its refusal to adopt the EU’s Energy Charter is its main bargaining chip.

After the Seattle street battles in 1999, Pascal Lamy, the current WTO Director-General, famously derided the organisation as medieval, its tortuous negotiations as archaic. He is right, and if Doha fails, the members should revisit the rules, notably the requirement of unanimity, that every member state must dot every “i” and cross every “t”.

The WTO needs reform because the alternative would be disastrous. Those who trade know that the real barriers to access are not tariffs and subsidies but corruption, graft and bureaucratic delay. Without the WTO’s levelling efforts, the world will quickly fragment, not into two trading blocs but many trading fiefdoms with rules imposed by despots and guarded by corrupt officials. We can then truly say goodbye to fair trade.

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[Effects on Health] Push for new tactics as war on malaria falters

from The International Herald Tribune

By Celia W Dugger, The New York Times

The mosquito nets arrived too late for 18-month-old Phillip Odong.

The roly-poly boy came down with his fourth bout of malaria the same day the nets were handed out on March 16 at the makeshift camp where he lived in northern Uganda. "It was because of poverty that we could not afford one," his mother, Jackeline Ato, recalled recently seated in rags beneath a mango tree.

The morning after his fever spiked, she took him to a clinic, but it did not have the medicines that might have saved him. He died four days later, crying, "Mommy, Mommy," before losing consciousness.

It is no secret that mosquitoes carry the parasite that causes malaria. More mystifying is why 800,000 young African children a year still die of malaria - more than from any other disease - when there are medicines that cure for 55 cents a dose, mosquito nets that shield a child for $1 a year, and indoor insecticide spraying that costs about $10 annually for a household.

An emerging consensus on solutions, combined with fresh scrutiny and a windfall of new financing, are prompting major donors to revamp years of failed efforts to stem malaria's mortal toll. The growing support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, enriched this week by a $31 billion gift from Warren E. Buffett, will provide still more impetus for change.

Paltry budgets, faulty strategies and government mismanagement have hamstrung past efforts. In Uganda, population 28 million, not one of the 1.8 million nets approved more than two years ago by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has yet arrived.

The World Bank, after pledging to halve malaria deaths in Africa six years ago, had let its staff working on the disease dwindle to zero.

And the main United States aid agency admitted to outraged senators last year that it spent more on high-priced consultants than life-saving commodities, like mosquito nets that cost $5.75 a piece.

Social conservatives and liberals have been building alliances across ideological lines on malaria, a killer of little children. Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, said he had found common ground with the economist Jeffrey Sachs, who has long maintained that practical solutions carried out by Africans can prevent millions of deaths from malaria. "You have the left and right coming together," the senator said.

At Congressional hearings last year, Senator Tom Coburn, a Republican and a doctor from Oklahoma, argued that Washington-based consultants and contractors have consumed too much of the malaria budget.

He called on Amir Attaran, a law professor at the University of Ottawa and fiery advocate on malaria, who testified that the American agency, the United States Agency for International Development, was too cozy with "the foreign aid industrial complex."

Only 1 percent of the agency's 2004 malaria budget went for medicines, 1 percent for insecticides and 6 percent for mosquito nets. The rest was spent on research, education, evaluation, administration and other costs.

The Bush administration is changing that approach.

First, the United States aid agency is shifting its focus from mainly backing the sale of subsidized mosquito nets in Africa to giving more of them away to poor people.

It is also committed to buying combination drugs like Coartem because the disease is proving increasingly resistant to older, cheaper medicines. A dose of Coartem, produced by the Swiss company Novartis, now costs 55 cents for a child up to age 3.

Finally, the United States is also getting behind the use of DDT and other insecticides and will pay for large-scale programs to spray small amounts of them inside homes.

"We pretty well do know what the silver set of bullets are," Senator Brownback said at his 2004 hearing.

The decisive push for change in malaria programs has come from the White House. Michael Gerson, one of the president's closest advisers, described malaria in an interview as "maybe the main source of unnecessary suffering in the world."

Under the Bush administration's new policy, this year more than 40 percent of America's growing aid for malaria control is to be spent on nets, insecticides, medicines and other commodities.

The Bush administration hopes to convince Congress to at least triple spending on malaria control to $300 million by 2008.

Global aid for malaria control has been rising, though the resources do not match the scale of the dying, critics say. Contributions from rich nations and international organizations have more than doubled since 2003 to $841 million last year, according to the World Health Organization.

With its new gift, the Gates Foundation says its malaria financing will rise, though it is too soon to say by how much. It has already given $177 million for malaria controls.

As the United States moves forward, other crucial donors are also taking steps to fix flawed programs.

The World Bank has approved $130 million for projects in Africa in the past year and says that by 2010 new lending will grow to up to $1 billion.

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a widely praised organization set up in 2002 to pool the resources of donors, generally relies on African governments to do their own procurement.

Still, the government has not yet bought the nets the fund approved more than two years ago. "Oh, my dear, there are a lot of complications in procurement here," said John Rwakimari, who runs the country's malaria program.

The fund is now considering a change that would enable it to provide countries like Uganda with the nets and other commodities directly, rather than the money to buy them after Uganda's management of past grants was marred by incompetence and corruption.

Millions of doses of Global Fund-financed Coartem, the antimalaria drug, arrived this year in Uganda - but that was because the country agreed, at the Global Fund's urging, to buy them through the World Health Organization.

The scope of malaria's toll was evident on a recent visit to the pediatric ward of the regional public hospital in Gulu, Uganda. Babies and toddlers burning with malarial fevers arrived regularly. Mothers lay next to them, their soothing maternal voices a low murmuring in the cavernous room.

As many as 100,000 people, mostly children, die of malaria each year in Uganda alone. "It's like a jumbo jet crashing every day," said Dr. Andrew Collins, deputy director of the Malaria Consortium, an international nonprofit group.

The United States is testing indoor insecticide spraying there. It is also treating more than 700,000 nets that Ugandans already own with insecticides and buying another 400,000 nets laced with insecticides that last up to five years.

Volunteers handed out the nets to families with children under age 5 in over 100 camps like the one where Phillip Odong lived his short life for people who have fled the Lord's Resistance Army, a ruthless rebel group that has terrorized the countryside. The volunteers, many of them peasants, were trained by United States-financed groups led by the JSI Research and Training Institute.

The nets were so sought after in some camps that families whose children were too old to qualify for them besieged health officials. "They packed the health center like firewood," said Suzanne Nyedo, a nurse at the Bobi camp.

Even as policies begin to change, many uncertainties remain.

For example, the United States aid agency has asked for bids on a five-year $150 million contract for indoor spraying of insecticides.

Michael Miller, a senior official at the agency, said contractors would hire Africans to do the spraying. He said the goal was to ensure that Africans also gained the know-how to run insecticide spraying programs.

Mr. Attaran, a harsh critic of the agency, has his doubts.

"Will there be a Halliburton of mosquito control?" he asked. "If there is, the effort will fail. To be cost-effective, it will need to use local labor and managers."

Others warn that the changes are not a panacea.

Andrew Natsios, who helped devise the new policy before resigning as administrator of the United States aid agency earlier this year, cautioned that malaria projects will need to provide much more than just nets and sprays.

"It's not only simplistic, it won't work over the longer term because the countries can't sustain it on their own" for lack of expertise and resources, he said. The aid agency has a crucial role, he argued, in providing technical advice and training.

And there are other questions. Will donors follow through on financing? Will families use the mosquito nets? Will there be enough health workers to deliver medicines?

"There's potential for incredible impact," said Dr. Regina Rabinovich of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, "or incredible failure."

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[California] Poverty soaring in area of Escondido

from Sign On San Diego

Mostly Latino immigrants live in crowded apartments
By Booyeon Lee
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

ESCONDIDO – A neighborhood just north of downtown is an island of mostly poor immigrants who live in crowded apartments, according to a city-commissioned report released yesterday.

The study, prepared by the National Latino Research Center at California State University San Marcos, found that the area languishes under the fastest-growing poverty rate in the state. About 80 percent of the residents never attended college, and more than half do not speak English.

The poorest section is near Grant Middle School, where the median household income is $17,000, less than half of the city's median household income.

“They are poor, disenfranchised Latino immigrants,” said Arcela Nuñez-Alvarez, interim director of the research center. “The general perception is that they don't care about their children's education and they are not invested in the community. But the people we talked to want to take ownership of their community to address some serious challenges they are facing.”

Seven years ago, Escondido began pouring money into one of its most troubled neighborhoods, which is bordered by Ash Street, Lincoln Avenue, Valley Parkway and Centre City Parkway, naming it Mission Park. The 200 residents interviewed for the study had never heard the name.

The city has spent about $9 million on affordable-housing projects, child-care subsidies, after-school programs and a 4.5-acre park scheduled to open in October, according to the city's housing and neighborhood services division.

“We've made a lot of physical improvements,” said Jerry Van Leeuwen, the city's director of housing and neighborhood services. “But we haven't been interested enough in the social fabric of that neighborhood.”

So the city spent an additional $10,000 on the study, which questioned residents on a range of issues, from concerns about housing and crime to availability of social services.

Students at the university research center who did the interviewing compared the neighborhood to some in Latin America where multiple families live in small apartments, Nuñez-Alvarez said.

“Many of these people leave the country of their origin for economic reasons,” she said. “Students questioned how much immigrant families are really moving up when they arrive here to share two-bedroom apartments with three other families.”

The population of Mission Park has increased by more than 6,000, to 16,500, over the past five years. About 80 percent are Latino. Van Leeuwen said the increase was alarming because the number of housing units has remained the same.

Nuñez-Alvarez said this means multiple families are squeezing into one-and two-bedroom apartments because for many of them the cost of rent is about 75 percent of their monthly income.

She characterized Mission Park as the “first stop” for Mexican immigrants, many of whom are families of mixed legal status, where children are U.S.-born and the parents are not.

The neighborhood has become a popular starting point for immigrants because of its large stock of apartments built in the 1960s. Building standards were lax back then, Van Leeuwen said, and developers were allowed to build more apartments than what would be permissible today.

The study also found that 67 percent of the respondents were “very concerned” about crime. In an average month, between June 2003 and June 2005, 65 burglaries, thefts, homicides, rapes or robberies were reported in Mission Park.

The actual number of crimes is probably higher, Nuñez-Alvarez said.

“Many of these crimes are gang-related, and residents told us they do not report some of them for fear of retribution,” she said.

Many respondents said they want to see Grant Middle School used as a recreational facility for families, with access to reading materials and other educational resources to help parents create a better learning environment for their children.

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[Africa] Careful natural resource use key to poverty alleviation - UNEP

from Reuters Alert Net

NAIROBI, 27 June (IRIN) - Africa's abundant natural resources hold the key to poverty eradication on the continent, but only if they are used carefully and managed creatively to improve people's living standards, according to a new report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

"The economic wellbeing of nations and peoples in Africa is inextricably linked to what will happen to the sustainable use of its natural resource base," said Achim Steiner, UNEP's executive director, during the launch of 'Africa Environment Outlook-2' at the agency's headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya, on Tuesday. "Natural resources are at the heart of economic activity," he added.

Entitled 'Our Environment, Our Wealth', the report said Africa is currently only using a fraction of its natural wealth potential, and called for 'added value' to the primary commodities exported by African states. "There is need for Africa to move from being a major exporter of primary resources to being one with a vibrant industrial and manufacturing base," it noted.

Africa produces nearly 80 percent of the world's platinum, more than 40 percent of the diamonds and more than a fifth of global gold and cobalt, yet the continent's industrial base remained insignificant, the report observed. "In a nation like Kenya, soils, coastal zones, wildlife are all assets that are at the heart of the productive economy," said Steiner. Africa had numerous tourist attractions yet it contributed only four percent to global tourism annually, the report pointed out.

The report, however, warned that an "unsustainable" use of Africa's natural resources could lead to an erosion of its wealth, forcing the continent to slide deeper into poverty. Steiner was nevertheless optimistic that African governments were showing increasing willingness to cooperate in efforts aimed at addressing global environmental issues. "The economic importance of the environment is increasingly recognised by Africa's leaders as an instrument for development, for livelihoods, for peace and for stability," he said.

Challenges to Africa's environment included land degradation as a result of the intensification of farming, pressures on fresh water sources that would come with industrial expansion, and the introduction of alien species, both animal and plant, some of which could be harmful to local life forms and the environment.

Stockpiles of obsolete and hazardous chemicals, of which Africa had 50,000 tonnes, also posed a major threat to the environment, according to the report, which said that the problem was mainly the result of moving chemical production from developed to developing countries, and lack of expertise in the safe handling of toxic substances.

With regard to genetically modified organisms (GMOs), the report acknowledged that the crops could help combat hunger in the continent, but added that there were worries that such plants were likely to be seen as "silver bullets", thus deflecting attention from more fundamental issues of hunger: such as skewed food distribution systems, lack of access by the poor to arable land and environmental mismanagement.

There was also concern that some African countries lacked the scientific, legal, risk assessment and administrative capacity to deal with the new generation of crops. UNEP had undertaken a multi-million dollar project with funding from the Global Environment Facility to help 100 developing countries, including 30 African states, to build the necessary skills and introduce laws that would enable them to decide in favour or against GMOs, according to the report.

The full report is available at: www.unep.org

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[Kids count Report - US] Few bright spots for Mississippi kids

from The Hattiesburg American

A new report paints a dismal picture of children's well-being in Mississippi.

The 2006 KidsCount Databook, an annual report released today by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, ranks Mississippi at the bottom or close to the bottom in comparison to the rest of the country in 10 different indicators of child well-being.

Those indicators are: low-birthweight babies, infant mortality rate, child death rate, teen death rate, teen birth rate, high school dropout rate, percent of teens not working or attending school, percent of children living in homes where parent has no regular employment, children in poverty and children in single-parent families.

Though the state did experience some improvement in five of the 10 categories, in only two categories -decreases in the high school dropout rate and in the child death rate -did Mississippi outstrip the national average, still placing well behind most states in the country.

And in the percentage of children living in poverty, the number of low-birthweight babies born and the infant mortality rate, Mississippi ranked dead last.

Thirty-one percent of Mississippi's 749,569 children lived in poverty in 2004, compared to the national average of 18 percent, according to the report.

"The child poverty rate tells the story for lots of other indicators," report author Laura Beavers said.

The state's low rankings are deeply rooted, she said.

"In Mississippi, there is a historic disinvestment in lots of the things that we know help kids succeed," Beavers said. "In many states where you have the lowest outcome levels for kids, there wasn't the same amount of investment in the educational system, the economic development system and in the health care system, going back to the beginning of the state government system. And it continues to have a negative impact on children."

Mississippi's seeming progress on some fronts may be misleading, Beavers said.

While the state's teen pregnancy rate dropped from 70 births per 1,000 in 2000 to 63 per 1,000 in 2003, Mississippi teens still have a much higher pregnancy rate than the national average, which dropped from 48 per 1,000 in 2000 to 42 per 1,000 in 2003.

The factors that affect child well-being play into each other, said Larry Rodick president of Planned Parenthood Alabama, which covers southeastern Mississippi.

"Infant mortality rate is used as a general health indicator," Rodick said. "But teen pregnancy is one of the problems. We know, for example, that teens who deliver babies prior to 18 or 19 years of age - those infants tend not to make it, and that drives up the infant mortality rate."

Poverty also plays a role in infant mortality and child death rates, said Kaye Ray of the Southeast Mississippi Rural Health Initiative Inc.

"I think you can look at the poverty levels that are outrageously high for Mississippians - so many people make minimum wage, and don't have many opportunities to improve their lifestyles," Ray said. "Sometimes you have parents trying to raise their children and it's difficult to think of medical care as being a high priority when they're trying to pay the rent."

The decrease in the high school dropout rate is good news, said Hattiesburg Schools Superintendent Annie Wimbish - but it isn't moving quickly enough.

"I would like to believe other districts are doing what we're doing with attendance officers - being vigilant and doing follow-ups," Wimbish said. "It's not going fast enough for my liking, but having everybody educated has become a focus."

In the Hattiesburg district, 88 percent of students live in poverty.

Wimbish said the schools work to train teachers on how to help students in poverty and also offer free-lunch programs during the summer.

Mississippi kids have seen some positive improvements during the 17 years the Annie E. Casey Foundation has produced the databook, Beavers said. And in many ways, Mississippi is mirroring national trends - conditions that improved nationally during the 1990s have dropped off around the country. But compared to other states, she said, Mississippi still has a long way to go.

"The state still hasn't closed the gap," Beavers said.

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[Kids Count Report] More children in U.S. living in poverty

from Monsters and Critics

U.S. children are poorer and less healthy now than in the 1990s, a child advocacy group says.

The 17th-annual KIDS COUNT Data Book from the Annie E. Casey Foundation shows that three out of 10 child 'well-being indicators' have worsened since 2000.

There were more than 13 million children living in poverty in 2004 -- an increase of 1 million over four years. There was also an increase in the percentage of low birth-weight babies between 2000 and 2003 and an increase in the number of children living in families where no parent has full-time, year-round employment.

William O`Hare, senior fellow at the Casey Foundation and author of the 2006 report, said the good news is that the child death rate and the teen death rate have fallen; the teen birth rate has continued to go down, and the high school dropout rate has improved.

New Hampshire, Vermont and Connecticut ranked highest in well-being, while New Mexico, Louisiana and Mississippi ranked the lowest.

The report said strengthening early childhood development can help to assure that all children begin life on a level playing field.

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[Zambia] Population of the Poor is Growing Everyday - Sakala

from All Africa

Ireen Mukabo
Lusaka

CHIEF justice Ernest Sakala has said the population of the poor is growing every day.

During the induction dinner for Rotary Club incoming president Anthony Sambo, justice Sakala said the number of poor people was on the rise and that they were the majority in the country.

"One thing I can assure you or perhaps warn you is that the population of the needy is growing every day and these in fact constitute the majority of our population in the nation," he said. Justice Sakala said Lusaka city had grown into a Metropolis forcing people to migrate from rural areas in search of better life.

"This influx has led the city of Lusaka to fail to cater for the additional unplanned for population," he said. Justice Sakala observed that the proliferation of unplanned residential areas had led to shanty compounds, which had not been developed due to insufficient resources.

"Because of limited resources, the city council cannot upgrade these shanty compounds nor effectively manage them," Justice Sakala said. "This means that the utilities such as clean water, electricity, street lights, sanitation, roads and health centres are inadequate if not lacking."

Justice Sakala said the absence of such utilities in communities had resulted in many people living in abject poverty. He urged the Rotary Club to supplement government's effort in alleviating poverty in the country in accordance with this year's theme 'Lead the Way'.

"This, I believe is where you, as the Rotarians, you should come in to fill the void and help the needy and the poor," he said. " As Rotarians you are better placed to sensitise and seek donor support. I urge you to mobilize funds for projects and programmes targeted for the disfranchised communities in our localities." Justice Sakala further said the advent of HIV/AIDS had also worsened poverty levels in the country.

"The entire society is affected with the disease and as you are aware orphans are everywhere. You must take up the challenge to give due attention and commitment to the issue of HIV/AIDS," Justice Sakala said.

And Sambo said the club would this year concentrate on the provision of clean water, health services, alleviation of hunger as well as literacy management in the country. "This is our mandate from the RI president and we shall strive to achieve some of these goals and expectations during this Rotary year and beyond," Sambo said.

He said more projects on malaria control had been initiated in order to find a lasting solution to the killer disease. Sambo said the club would also continue placing emphasis on projects such as support to University Teaching Hospital - vulnerable patients and burns unit, Kasama and Kasisi Orphanage and Kasempa Lepers and HIV/AIDS orphans project.

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[WTO Talks Doha Round] Anti-globalisers want WTO trade round "buried"

from Reuters UK

More than 100 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) opposed to trade liberalisation on Tuesday demanded the WTO's troubled Doha round be "buried" as ministers prepare to fly to Geneva in a bid to revitalise it.

The group, including Action Aid International, Friends of the Earth and Focus on the Global South, said current negotiations "preclude any possibility of benefiting the majority of the world's population".

"The Doha round should be buried, starting by withdrawing support and objecting to the legitimacy of the June mini-ministerial," they said, referring to the meeting beginning on Thursday.

WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy has said the four-year-old round risks collapse without a breakthrough soon, starting with this week's meeting to be attended by more than 50 ministers, a third of the WTO membership.

Ministers are seeking an accord on slashing farm subsidies and import duties, along with deep cuts in industrial goods' tariffs, which is seen as vital to clearing the way to a full free trade treaty which advocates say will boost the global economy and help lift millions out of poverty.

But the NGOs said that analyses by the World Bank, the United Nations and several international think tanks showed that most of the gains would flow to the developed world.

People in Africa and in many other developing countries were projected to lose, they said in a letter sent to Lamy and the chairmen of the farm and industrial goods' negotiating committees.

"This is an unacceptable outcome from multilateral talks," they wrote.

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[Uganda] Malaria kills 320 Ugandans daily

From New Vision

By Milton Olupot and Charles Ariko

UGANDA loses an average of 320 people daily to malaria, a symposium on the disease heard in Kampala yesterday.

Dr. Myers Lugemwa told a two-day symposium that malaria remains one of the most serious global health problems and a leading cause for childhood morbidity and mortality.

The symposium, under the theme ‘molecular biology and immunology in malaria vaccine development,’ is organised by Makerere university and the university of California, San francisco.

The Uganda Malaria Surveillance Programme and the African Malaria Network Trust are part of the organisers of the symposium that will be followed by a three-day workshop.

About 70 participants from about 20 African countries, the US and Europe are taking part in the symposium, focussing on malaria treatment, control and research.
Lugemwa said research had shown that malaria had killed half of the global population since the stone age.

A paper by Prof. Fred Wabwire and Dr. Adoke Yeka from the malaria surveillance project said resistance to the accessible and cheap drugs poses a threat to malaria control.

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[US] Retired Women Face Poverty

from The Monterey County Herald

Median annual income half of older men's
By BOB MOOS
The Dallas Morning News

DALLAS - Adeline Brown had other plans for retirement.

She never dreamed she'd lose her house and car, be forced to take odd jobs to supplement her Social Security and stretch her dollars by going to a barbershop instead of a beauty salon.

But once Brown left her accounting clerk's job, her income plummeted to less than $1,000 a month. She quickly exhausted her retirement savings when she paid the bills from a back injury.

"This isn't how my life was supposed to go," she said.

Brown, who is 63 and lives in Oak Cliff, Texas, is one of millions of older women who live alone and scramble to make ends meet. Their median yearly income is $12,080, half of what older men receive.

Long overlooked, these women have begun to gain the attention of policy analysts and lawmakers who expect the number of poor older women to swell as 40 million baby boomer women retire.

"Unless there are dramatic policy shifts, boomer women, particularly minority women, will find retirement a never-ending struggle," said Paul Hodge, chairman of Harvard's Global Generations Policy Institute.

Financially strapped older women are a day-to-day concern for Suzanne Cobb, who runs the money management program at The Senior Source in Dallas, a nonprofit social service agency.

Most of the older adults who sign up for financial counseling through the Senior Source are women, and most of them depend entirely on their Social Security checks, Cobb said.

"Some people come to us with a fistful of credit cards and as much as $50,000 in debt," she said. "In those cases, we try to sit down with their creditors and negotiate reduced payments."

Women are more likely than men to spend old age in poverty, in part because many have spent their lives at an economic disadvantage, said Laurie Young, director of the Older Women's League in Washington.

"Women still earn an average of only 76 percent of what men earn," she said. "That means women have an average of $250,000 less over their working lives to invest in their retirement."

Women also drop out of the work force for an average of 12 years to care for children or parents. When they do, they forfeit $550,000 in wages over their lifetime, Young said.

As family caregivers, women often take more flexible jobs that come with low wages and few, if any, benefits. Frequent job changes also make it harder to qualify for pensions.

Women live longer, which makes them especially vulnerable during retirement. They outlive their husbands by an average of six years and, once alone, often have less money to pay the same bills.

Widows typically lose a third to a half of their household's Social Security income when their spouse dies.

Women who reach 65 can expect to live another 20 years.

"Most older people live on 'fixed' incomes that, except for Social Security, aren't adjusted for inflation," Young said. "Over 20 years, women's purchasing power can shrink quite a bit."

Cindy Hounsell, executive director of the Women's Institute for a Secure Retirement, warns that most boomer women will run into many of the financial problems their mothers have.

"The 20 percent with good-paying jobs won't have any worries, but everyone else will," she said.

Besides building a bigger nest egg, some women have come up with their own ways of improving their finances in retirement.

Cobb at The Senior Source, who's 58, plans to work full time until 68. By delaying her Social Security checks for two years beyond her full retirement age, she estimates she'll receive 16 percent more each month.

"I'm no Rockefeller, but I'm not afraid of the future," she said.

Still, retirement experts agree that women won't be able to improve their fate in old age entirely on their own. They'll need changes in Social Security, employer-sponsored retirement plans and labor laws.

The most important reforms will come in Social Security; 29 percent of unmarried older women depend on it as their only source of income, said Young of the Older Women's League.

"Women shouldn't be penalized for their caregiving when it comes time to figure their Social Security benefits," she said. "They should be given credit for the unpaid care they've provided."

Social Security also needs to rethink its benefits for divorced women, said Kimberley Strassel, co-author of the just-published "Leaving Women Behind: Modern Families, Outdated Laws."

"The number of divorced older women will double as boomers retire," she said.

A marriage must last 10 years before a divorced spouse can claim benefits based on a former spouse. Since most divorces now occur within seven years, that rule is out of date, Strassel said.

Pension laws also should be updated to account for the growth in 401(k) retirement plans, said Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

The Senate's Special Committee on Aging recently held hearings on how to narrow the gender gap in retirement income and improve women's financial security in old age.

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[UK] Fewer save for pension despite the warnings of poverty

from The Scotsman

ALASTAIR JAMIESON CONSUMER AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT

A DRAMATIC drop in the number of workers saving enough for their retirement has been uncovered, despite widespread publicity over the pension gap.

Less than half of workers are making adequate provision for the future - a drop of 10 per cent on last year, according to research by Scottish Widows.

There has also been a fall in the proportion of income being saved by people who are not members of a final salary pension scheme.

The study of more than 5,000 Britons found that employees who are not members of one of these schemes are setting aside an average of just 5.8 per cent of their pay, down from 7.9 per cent last year and less than half the amount Scottish Widows recommends they should be saving.

The problem is worst among women, with one third failing to set any money aside compared with a quarter of men.

The study also found the average value of investments had risen from £16,000 to £24,300 in the past year, suggesting that Britons are putting more faith in property or savings accounts than in pensions.

Ian Naismith, head of pensions market development at Scottish Widows, said: "The deterioration is very disappointing when you consider how high profile pensions have been in the last 12 months."

Stuart Glendinning, of the consumer website Moneysupermarket.com, said: "Few companies are actively promoting the government's stakeholder pensions because there is no incentive."

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[Kids Count Report] More Illinois children living in poverty

from WQAD

The rate of children living in poverty and in homes where neither parent has a full-time job has climbed in Illinois, but the state improved in other measures.
That's according to an annual study of how U-S children are faring called Kids Count, which is funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Illinois ranked 24th among the 50 states in the Kids Count report, while New Hampshire ranked best in the nation, and Mississippi ranked worst.

Illinois did better than the national average at keeping students in school, with six percent of Illinois teens reported as high school dropouts in 2004 compared with eight percent nationwide.

The state's teen birth rate in 2003 also was better than the national average.

But in Illinois, 17 percent of children lived in poverty in 2004 compared with 15 percent in 2000.

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[Ireland] risk-of-poverty rate among EU's highest

from Ireland On Line

Ireland has one of the highest rates in the EU of people at risk of falling into poverty, according to a report published today by the Central Statistics Office.

The proportion of Irish people at risk of poverty, after pensions and social transfer payments were taken into account, was 21% in 2004, one of the highest rates in the EU.

The effect of pensions and social transfers on reducing the at-risk-of-poverty rate was low in Ireland compared with other EU countries.

In 2002, social protection expenditure in Ireland was less than 16% of GDP. This was half of the rate in Sweden and the lowest of the EU 15 countries.

The report - Measuring Ireland’s Progress, 2005 - was published today.

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[UK] Mixed aid agency reaction to Blair G8 poverty pledge panel

from Ekklesia

Leading UK development agency ActionAid has accused G8 countries of passing the buck on Africa, and says that British Prime Minister Tony Blair's announcement of a panel to hold world leaders to their promises needs to be a spur not a sop to real action.

In a report published this week, the charity declares: “At present, a mix of backsliding, buck-passing and half-measures by rich countries risk undoing much of the progress of last year.”

It goes on to say that the G8 countries are not on track to double aid by 2010, that unfair trade deals continue, and that most of the world's poorest countries remain in debt. While poverty cannot be rendered history overnight, there are too few signs of progress, ActionAid argues.

Mr Blair gained global publicity yesterday in announcing the setting up of an independent Africa Panel, to be chaired by UN secretary general Kofi Annan. The idea to evaluate progress on promises made by the G8 at a summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, last July (2005).

Campaigner and musician Bob Geldof, who is also pushing David Cameron’s ‘New Tories’ to take world poverty seriously, has been enlisted for the panel. So has Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo and Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates – who has helped fund the panel and secretariat.

The panel will produce an annual report for the G8 and for the United Nations over the next few years.

The announcement has received a mixed response from aid and church agencies, with many reluctant to ‘sound negative’ about it, but some underlying concerns about its composition and how effective it is going to be.

G8 leaders promised an extra 50 billion US dollars a year in total aid for all developing countries by 2010, including an expected 25 billion dollars for Africa.

Mr Blair says that “steady progress” is being made on this pledge, but critics in the churches and in development groups believe it is too early to tell – and say that some debt and aid commitments are being ‘double counted’.

Plans to cancel 100 percent of the debt of many poor states are on track and have allowed Zambia to provide free health care for people living in rural areas, the Prime Minister claims.

Again, agencies operating on the ground are more sanguine, and express the hope that the panel, constituted centrally by ‘the rich and famous’ will not simply seek to spin elements of the pledge record which might embarrass G8 governments.

On fairer trade, which is many say is the most important long-term change generator in the Gleneagles package, talks have been fitful and little progress made.

But the wealthy countries have “a genuine and urgent choice” to act now and to make “real inroads into poverty”, says ActionAid. Either that, or they will continue to let their pledges slip, with “grave consequences for people living in poverty.”

A church aid agency insider told Ekklesia yesterday: “Many of us have mixed feelings about the new panel. Monitoring is vital, and cynicism isn’t going to deliver progress against poverty. But at the same time it is easy to lose the issues in PR spin – and the question remains about how the voices of the poor get heard, not just the rich and powerful.”

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[Kids Count Report] Fewer teens having babies, but more are living in poverty

from WTNH

Connecticut is one of the best states in the nation when it comes to the health and well-being of children and teens.

The latest Kids Count report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation charity measures each state's progress on ten statistics, including infant mortality, poverty rates, single-parent families and babies born with low birth weights.

States in the Northeast and upper Midwest scored the best. At the top: New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Minnesota and Iowa. Southern states did the worst: Mississippi, Louisiana, New Mexico, South Carolina and Tennessee.

Louisiana was ranked 49th, even before Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast last year.

The report says fewer teenagers are having babies or dropping out of high school since the start of the decade, but slightly more live in poverty with parents who don't work year round.

The report also found that measures of health and income for children and teens are no longer improving as much as they did in the 1990s.

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[Kids Count Report] Getting a grip on poverty

from The Detroit Free Press

More state, metro Detroit kids worse off as agencies seek answers

Ask 10-year-old Quashawn Willis of Detroit what he plans to do this summer and his answer is pretty simple: "Nothing." Ask him what he'd like to do, and the answer is quick: "Go to Disney World."

That isn't likely to happen, because Quashawn lives with his mother, Michelle Griffin, 31, and sister Quachelle Williams, 3, in Brightmoor, a west-side neighborhood that is among the city's poorest. Griffin lost her last job at a Warren factory a year ago and now relies on help from her family to get by.

Her children are among a growing number of Michigan kids whose families are in poverty, according to the 2006 Kids Count study released today.

At the same time, the state's sluggish economy is also affecting programs for poor families.

Representatives from some of the nation's largest philanthropic organizations began arriving in Detroit on Monday for a conference convened by the Skillman Foundation on ways to strengthen private philanthropy in view of public cuts.

"No child should live in poverty," said Carol Goss, president and chief executive officer of the Detroit-based Skillman Foundation. "We're pleased that foundations across the nation are rallying around this issue."

In 2004, about 18% of the state's children lived in families with incomes below the poverty level, $19,311 a year for a family of four, according to the Kids Count study.

That was a 29% increase over the number of poor children in Michigan in 2000.

Advocates for children already look back on the late 1990s as "the good old days" for kids, when the state and nation had programs targeting tough problems such as poverty.

"We had an economic boom the likes of which the state had not seen before," said Jane Zehnder-Merrell, senior research associate for Kids Count in Michigan. "And we thought it was going to last forever, as did the policy makers, so they gave away state revenue when they should've saved it for a rainy day," she said.

In Wayne County, including Detroit, 30% of children ages 16 and younger in 2004 lived in families with incomes below the poverty level, compared with 25% in 2003.

The childhood poverty rate also rose in Macomb County, from 8% in 2003 to 9% in 2004. In Oakland County, the rate fell from 11% in 2003 to 5% in 2004. Zehnder-Merrell attributed the decrease to the generally brighter economic picture in Oakland County.

The poverty rate also figured into other areas that measure child well-being in Michigan, especially the infant mortality rate.

According to the study, Michigan's 2003 infant mortality rate of 8.5 deaths per 1,000 live births meant the state ranked 43rd among all states in rates of children who die before their first birthdays.

Overall, using 10 measures of child well-being, Michigan improved in six areas, including teen death rates, which dropped from 64 to 55 deaths per 100,000 youths from 2000 to 2003, compared with a national average of 66 deaths. Also, the percentage of the state's children who dropped out of high school fell by 30%, and births to teenagers dipped by 15% during the same period.

Michigan's overall ranking dropped from 26th to 27th.

Among the organizations attending this week's conference at the Omni Hotel are the Ford Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Heinz Endowments and the Foundation for Child Development.

Goss of the Skillman Foundation is expected to discuss her foundation's Good Neighborhoods initiative, launched in January in six Detroit neighborhoods chosen because they hold about one-third of the city's kids.

The hope is that the programs that are developed will have a wide impact, said William Hanson, Skillman's communications director.

Brightmoor, where Griffin and her two children live, is one of the communities, and the Rev. Dennis Talbert, pastor of the Rosedale Park Baptist Church, is one of the leaders of the Good Neighborhoods project in Brightmoor.

"You only have to drive through the neighborhood, or walk through the neighborhood, or hang out with the kids here to understand that socially we are declining, as well as economically," Talbert said Monday.

These are some of the organizations that offer programs to help poor children and families:

• ARISE Detroit (Activating Resources Inspiring Service and Empowerment) is a Skillman Foundation-funded initiative looking for volunteers and donors willing to work with community and school groups in Detroit. Go to www.arisedetroit.org or call 866-942-7473 anytime.

• Think Detroit, a nonprofit, works to provide recreational and educational programs for kids. Go to www.thinkdetroit.org or call 313-833-1600.

• The Coalition on Temporary Shelter, or COTS, provides shelter for homeless families. Call 313-831-3777 anytime.

• Forgotten Harvest, which collects and distributes tons of fresh food from area grocery stores and restaurants, can use donations of money, food or time. Go to www.forgottenharvest.org or call 248-350-3663 anytime.

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[UK] Indonesian volunteers on scheme to help poor in Britain

from The Hindu

Volunteers from Indonesia are being deployed to help fight poverty, drug and alcohol abuse in one of Britain's biggest cities.

Nine Indonesians between 17 to 25 years of age have been selected by Britain's Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO), a charity organistaion, to work alongside British volunteers in areas of Glasgow infested with social evils, The Sunday Times reported.

They will work in Maryhill and Milton areas for three months under VSO's Global Xchange scheme.

The areas are among the most socially deprived in the UK and have life expectancy rates that are below those of the volunteers homeland.

The average life expectancy in Indonesia is 66, whereas men born in Maryhill and Milton have life expectancies of below 60, the report said.

The volunters have been asked to brace themselves to face the harsh life of inner-city Scotland, Rebecca Metcalfe, the project supervisor said.

"They see the West, as very glamorous with everyone being affluent and having access to high-technology gadgets. But the next three months are really going to challenge those preconceptions," she was quoted as saying in the report.

The visitors, who are members of the Indonesian Scout Association, will live with families in Glasgow during their stay.

"They have been told that there are areas of the city, where there are problems of drink and drug abuse and they have been briefed about the countrys growing secularisation," according to Metcalfe.

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[Philippines] Trade exhibit to give organic farming a boost

from Sun Star

KORONADAL CITY -- Organizers of the upcoming Yamang Mindanao trade exhibit are confident the event will greatly benefit organic farming industry and will give growers of organic vegetables and other agricultural products a chance to attract domestic and international buyers.

"Particularly in the European and Asean markets, the consumer trend lately is on healthy foods, meaning those grown the organic way," John Ray dela Cruz, head of the Advocate of Philippine Fair Trade Inc., told a press conference in this city.

European buyers had already confirmed their attendance to the trade fair that will showcase products from the six regions of Mindanao.

The event would be held in General Santos City from July 15 to 17.

Dela Cruz said institutional buyers such as the Manila-based SM Mall and Robinson's would also be coming over to forge possible agreements with producers of organic crops.

"These domestic buyers have vowed to help link Mindanao producers to other buyers," he said.

Ibrahim Guiamadel, regional director of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), said they are also expecting expansion among existing businesses or producers in the region with the holding of the island-wide trade fair.

"Definitely, there would be additional investments resulting in more generation of jobs by way of this trade exhibit," he said.

Dorecita Delima, DTI-Central Mindanao assistant regional director, said they have projected the trade expo to generate P75 million sales for all exhibitors.

"The figure could go higher given the likely bulk orders but we have not included this in our projections for Yamang Mindanao," she said.

Yamang Mindanao, which loosely translates to "riches of Mindanao," is aimed at highlighting the Philippine's best products particularly in Mindanao.

Organizers of the event said that around 100 products from across Mindanao will be exhibited during the trade fair.

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[Zimbabwe] Call to fight spread of malaria in

from African News Dimension

ZIMBABWEANS should intensify taking preventive measures against contracting diseases such as malaria to enable the Government to channel resources towards other development issues, Vice President Cde Joice Mujuru said yesterday

She said resources being used by the Government on treatment could easily be diverted towards development programmes if people took preventive measures seriously.

Although malaria is a largely preventable and curable disease, it continues to be one of the top killers of people in the country, a situation that needed to change, she said.

She was speaking during the commemoration of the Africa Malaria Day at Dotito High School in Mt Darwin, one of the malariaprone districts.

This year’s Africa Malaria Day was commemorated under the theme “Get your ACT together” accompanied by the slogan “Universal access to effective malaria treatment is a Human Right, which advocates for the promotion of Atermesinin Based Combination Therapy (ACT) in the treatment of malaria”.

The World Health Organisation has recommended ACT for effective malaria treatment.
“Every household should have some basic knowledge about health. They should know how important it is to be able to prevent diseases.

“If a family ensures that it keeps healthy, then fathers and mothers can work in the fields and their families as well as the whole country will have enough to eat,” Cde Mujuru said.

It was every mother’s duty, she said, to strive for hygiene in their homes, as this was the best way of ensuring that their families would remain healthy.

She appealed to people to play their part in maintaining good health saying while the Government and partners like the United Nations, Population Services International, World Health Organisation and others could fight to provide drugs, spray households as well as insecticide treated nets — it was up to the people themselves to make these useful.

Some people have in the past refused to open their homes to spraying teams while others use the nets as fishing nets or for display.

“I urge those in mosquitoprone areas to support our efforts by opening their homes and also those who are given mosquito nets to make use of them,’’ she said.

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[Kenya] Lucrative cash crop or leaf of poverty?

from The East African

Kenyans pay up to 17 times the internationally-recommended prices for some branded medicines, and up to three times for their generic forms, reports DAGI KIMANI

KENYAN CONSUMERS OF khat, known in Kenya as miraa are routinely spending more than half their household incomes on the intoxicant, deepening poverty in vulnerable households, a new study says.

According to the study, some households in drought-ravaged North-Eastern province are committing as much as Ksh800 ($11.3) to khat every day, more than they spend on education or healthcare.

The study by researchers from the University of Nairobi and the Catholic University of Eastern Africa (CUEA) says that, in addition, most users of the stimulant chew it during the day, seriously affecting their economic productivity.

Khat is one of the most lucrative cash crops in Kenya's Eastern Province, with revenues estimated at over Ksh2 billion ($28 million).

Although the psychoactive substances in the plant are restricted under international drug conventions, possession and use of the raw khat plant itself is not controlled in many countries.

The psychoactive substances in miraa are close relatives of the restricted drug amphetamine.

"The majority of khat consumers spend more than half their domestic budget on the habit at the expense of such vital needs as education and medical care," says a report on the study appearing in the latest issue of The East African Medical Journal (EAMJ). "At least 40 per cent of subjects themselves blamed khat chewing for low economic productivity and inefficiency at work, while 32 per cent associated it with absenteeism."

IN KENYA, THE SHRUB HAS BEEN cultivated, traded, exported and consumed without any prohibitive measures since legalisation in 1977.

Miraa is the intoxicant of choice among non-alcohol using Kenyans, although it is also widely used concurrently with alcohol. In East Africa, only Tanzania has imposed what can only be termed a "soft" ban on the consumption and marketing of the plant.

Historically, consumption of miraa has been confined to the areas in which it is produced, mainly because its active ingredients are degraded within days after harvesting.

But the emergence of efficient transport systems, especially air transport, has seen the plant become an important export commodity to markets as far away as the UK, Europe and North America.

Six months ago, the British government said it was exploring the possibility of banning the plant, sparking loud protests from its Kenyan producers and exporters who said a ban would be unwarranted and contrary to the principles of free trade.

However, a detailed study by a British academic across Uganda and Kenya over the past two years has concluded there is no overwhelming case for a ban on the use of khat.

Susan Beckerleg’s survey findings, which were published in May in the Oxford, UK-based academic journal African Affairs, say that while opinions on the taking of khat across the region were strongly held, the medical evidence for a ban was not overwhelming.

Kenya currently exports at least 150 tonnes of the plant every week, mostly to Somalia, the UK, the Netherlands and Yemen. Hundreds more tonnes are consumed locally, mostly in the North-Eastern and Eastern Provinces as well as most of Kenya's urban areas.

More than 1.5 million people are thought to have experimented with miraa at one time or another.

"Despite the growing public concern about the increasing consumption of khat and other associated drugs in Kenya, few systematic studies have been conducted on the socioeconomic effects of khat chewing," the EAMJ report says, adding that as a consequence, no significant efforts have been made to educate the public on the financial or medical costs of the intoxicant.

The study says that, among the possible complications of khat use are psychiatric problems such as schizophrenia as well as conditions such as as heart disease, liver damage and hypertension. Kenyan health experts also say that the unhygienic manner in which the plant is handled during harvesting, transportation and marketing has led to the transmission of communicable diseases such as gastro-intestinal infections.

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[US] City by City, an Antipoverty Group Plants Seeds of Change

from The New York Times

GARY, Ind. — The teller's eyes widened as a customer poured thousands of pennies onto the counter, an intentionally obnoxious way to pay a high heating bill. Still looming in line at the utility payment center, on a street of boarded-up buildings in this rusted city, were 10 more people carrying hefty bags of pennies, all wearing the red T-shirts of the national community organizing group Acorn.

It was a pinprick protest, intended to grab the attention of utility executives over what members of this newest Acorn chapter charged was the company's overly quick shut-off of strapped customers.

That same day in Chicago, scores of Acorn members and volunteers fanned out in lower-income neighborhoods, gathering signatures in favor of a law that would require giant retailers like Wal-Mart to pay employees $10 an hour plus benefits. In dozens of other cities, members lobbied for the rights of Hurricane Katrina victims, protested "predatory lending" and registered low-income voters.

With offices in 106 cities and a membership reported to be 200,000, Acorn has emerged in recent years as the largest neighborhood-based antipoverty group in the country, using old-fashioned methods of door-knocking and noisy protests to push for local and national causes. It plans to open an office in 20 new cities each year for the next five years, an expansion in response to the strong grip conservatives have in Washington and to the travails of the working poor.

"We feel the Acorn program is popular wherever we go," said Wade Rathke, 57, who founded the group 36 years ago in Arkansas and goes by the title of chief organizer. "It's like a hot knife in butter."

Conservative critics say Acorn and similar groups are pushing antimarket, unrealistic answers that will not help the poor in the long run.

But the increased mobilizing efforts, often in alliance with the growing union movement among low-end service workers, have earned the attention of Democratic politicians.

Those scheduled to speak at Acorn's annual meeting in July include Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York; former Senator John Edwards, who has worked with Acorn on minimum wage initiatives; Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts; and John J. Sweeney, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.

The expansion of Acorn, whose formal name is the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, is part of a broader surge in populist organizing around the country centered on issues like wages, gentrification, environmental disputes and immigrant rights.

"Over the last 10 years we've seen pretty explosive growth in the number and scale of community groups working in poor communities and with people of color," said Deepak Bhargava, of the Center for Community Change, a Washington-based support center for local organizers. Mr. Bhargava said the activism was "approaching a scale that could have a transforming effect on American politics and society."

But the number of people involved is still limited, and while many groups share similar "social justice" philosophies, they are often fragmented.

Mr. Rathke said he had no illusions about the strength of "government policies promoting inequality." But he added: "If there is going to be a change in politics in a progressive direction, we are going to be part of that. That wasn't true 10 years ago."

Mr. Rathke spoke at the bustling Acorn headquarters in New Orleans, where the group has sought to involve poor, displaced residents in the Hurricane Katrina recovery effort. He had just returned from a week in India, where he met with private groups worried about the possible entry of Wal-Mart and similar chains.

Acorn has a budget this year of $37.5 million, which does not include its spinoff research and housing organizations. Only $3 million of that comes from membership dues. Most of the rest comes from foundations, private donations and "partnerships" in which onetime corporate targets, like the Household Financial Corporation, pay Acorn to run programs, in this case to educate people about mortgages and loan terms.

Local offices pursue local issues of concern, like pressing an agency to clean up a vacant lot or, in the case of the powerful chapter in New York, opening schools and cosponsoring the Working Families political party.

What sets Acorn apart from most community groups, said Peter Dreier, an urban planning expert at Occidental College in Los Angeles, is its ability to combine local projects with coordinated national action on larger issues.

In a current campaign in several cities, for example, Acorn is demanding that the Sherwin-Williams paint company contribute to lead paint abatement.

The utility protest in Gary illustrates how Acorn creates a new chapter. Eric Weathersby, 43, is a church leader in Gary who wanted to get more involved in politics. After brief training in Chicago, Mr. Weathersby started as head organizer for Acorn in Indiana on April 17.

Heating bills soared last winter, and many poor residents resented their utility, the Northern Indiana Public Service Company, for what they saw as harsh policies for delinquent payers. Mr. Weathersby used the issue to recruit, going door to door himself, and by early June had 113 members.

Oscar L. Buggs Jr., 69, who lives on a pension from his career as a sanitation worker, was drawn in. He said he had inherited a house with past-due bills, had found himself owing $1,300 that he could not pay and had had his utilities cut off for several months. He used a flashlight to see at night.

"It seems like they do good deeds for people who need help," Mr. Buggs said of Acorn. "Maybe I can do some good for somebody else."

In early June, as members began unloading their pennies at the payment center, a company officer quickly appeared. He promised to relay to the company's president Acorn's demands for more aid to poor customers and a moratorium on shut-offs, and to try to set up a meeting with him.

In an e-mail response to a query by The New York Times, the company condemned Acorn's tactics and claims.

"They use threats of protests and other attention-grabbing techniques to bully local utilities and get media coverage," Tom Cuddy, a spokesman for the utility, said in the e-mail message. "Most of Acorn's 'demands' are already addressed in existing assistance programs."

The wage campaign in Chicago, where Wal-Mart is opening its first store this fall, had a visceral appeal for many residents and has gained the support in principle of a majority of the City Council.

Steven Malanga, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and author of "The New New Left" (Ivan R. Dee, 2005), said this campaign, for a law tailored specifically to giant retailers, showed how out of step Acorn was with the national mood and economic realities. "The only thing such laws ever do is to deprive shoppers in low-income neighborhoods of those stores," Mr. Malanga said.

Illustrating the philosophical divide, Madeline Talbott, a veteran Acorn organizer in charge of the Chicago office, said of Wal-Mart, "They're the world's largest employers, and if they can't pay a living wage, who can?"

Ms. Talbott added, "If we're going to have a middle class in the city of Chicago, we have to set some kind of standard in the sectors of the economy that can't just move to China."

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[UK] Childcare expert recruited as poverty tsar

from The Guardian

Will Woodward, chief political correspondent

A child poverty tsar is being appointed to reinvigorate the government's efforts to reach one of its key targets. Lisa Harker, former chair of childcare lobbyists the Daycare Trust, is to act as an independent adviser amid concerns that the goals of halving child poverty by 2010 and ending it by 2020 will be missed.

The government failed to reach an interim target of cutting child poverty by a quarter by 2005. Ms Harker has been called in ahead of a welfare reform bill, due next month, which will announce details of a "carrot and stick" approach, to encourage parents to seek jobs. The Department of Work and Pensions will deliver a strategy on tackling child poverty in the autumn.

Part of her brief will be looking at how to involve the voluntary and private sectors in tackling child poverty. "I genuinely don't believe we can personalise welfare from Whitehall," Mr Murphy said. "I think it's got to be grassroots up."

In the past Ms Harker has criticised the government for being "risk-averse" over backing innovative schemes, calling for a national campaign on child poverty, and for benefits for pregnant women.

The welfare reform bill will enshrine the plans unveiled in a green paper which replace incapacity benefit with an employment and support allowance. This benefit will give more money to those judged permanently incapable of working and require those thought capable of doing some work, now or in the future, to undergo training. The bill will announce new conditions covering benefits for single parents, including a requirement to attend back-to-work interviews.

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[World Bank] ...says South Asia could reduce poverty by two-thirds in a decade

from Khaleej Times

WASHINGTON - A World Bank report says South Asian countries can significantly reduce poverty in the next 10 years by increasing investment, improving labor quality and addressing gaps in income.

The Economic Growth in South Asia report, released Sunday, says South Asia’s decade-long economic expansion has made life better for many poor people. But, it said, without changes to economic policies, that rapid economic growth may be difficult to keep up.

Shantayanan Devarajan, co-author of the report and World Bank chief economist for South Asia, said the region “must create the conditions and incentives necessary to sustain and accelerate growth that benefits all. The economic well-being of several hundred millions of people depends on it.”

The report said the number of people living in poverty could drop by two-thirds if economic growth jumps to 10 percent a year until 2015.

The report praised East Asian countries, where growth rates of 7 to 10 percent have lifted millions from poverty.

Bangladesh, India and Pakistan have had annual average growth of more than 5 percent for the last five years, the report said.

Such growth over the last decade, the report said, has contributed to drops in poverty in Bangladesh, India and Nepal.

But more should be done, the report said, including improvements in infrastructure and business environment in the region.

The World Bank reported, for example, that while it takes 41 days to start a business in China, it takes 89 days in India.

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[UK] Blair urges more action on G8 poverty promises

from Reuters UK

By Kate Kelland

LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister Tony Blair said on Monday that the Group of Eight had failed to make progress on some of the commitments it made at a summit last year to tackle global poverty.

Writing in the Independent newspaper, Blair said the problems of poverty and climate change could not be solved "overnight", but urged more action, particularly on trade.

"These are long-term problems and the solutions will be long-term too," he wrote in a joint article with his Chancellor Gordon Brown and Development Minister Hilary Benn.

"But millions who campaigned in the run-up to the G8 summit (in Gleneagles, Scotland, in July 2005) have every right to expect immediate action to start to put things right."

Blair singled out trade as the "one key element of the 2005 agenda where we have failed to make the progress we hoped" and urged World Trade Organisation members to have the "courage and imagination to remove obstacles" to a deal.

WTO members are struggling to strike a deal on basic formulas for cutting farm subsidies and reducing agricultural and manufacturing tariffs after more than four years of talks.

GELDOF AND ANNAN

In a speech later on Monday, Blair will say he has enlisted rock star Bob Geldof and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to track how G8 industrialised nations live up to their aid promises to Africa.

Blair will announce he is setting up an independent Africa Progress Panel, to be chaired by Annan and to include Geldof, organiser of a series of Live 8 concerts last year, and Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, to evaluate progress.

Millions attended rock concerts around the world to press for action by the G8, which promised an extra $50 billion (27.4 billion) a year in total aid for all developing countries by 2010, including an expected $25 billion for Africa.

Archbishop of Cape Town Njongonkulu Ndungane, who set up the African Monitor watchdog which gets local communities to track the progress of aid pledges, told BBC radio the rhetoric was strong, but was not always matched by delivery.

"People are good at talking," he said. "What we are seeking to do is to ensure that there is translation from talk to action -- that the actual cash is delivered."

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[Viet Nam] World Bank provides $100m for poverty fight

from The Viet Nam News Agency

WASHINGTON — The World Bank’s Board of Executive Directors approved a US$100 million non-interest loan to support Viet Nam’s poverty reduction efforts.

This is the fifth Poverty Reduction Strategy Credit (PRSC5) provided to support the country’s poverty reduction and hunger elimination campaign. It is good for 40 years and has a grace period of 10 years.

The PRSC5 was developed and finalised by the Vietnamese Government, the World Bank and other multilateral and bilateral donors in Ha Noi in mid May of last year.

This project will support the implementation of Viet Nam’s reform agenda embodied in the Comprehensive Poverty Reduction and Growth Strategy (CPRGS). The reform agenda broadly rests on three pillars: the transition to a market economy; socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable development; and the creation of modern governance systems.

The credit will be used to help improve the regulatory framework for private sector development and enhance transparency and accountability in State-owned enterprise operations and in the banking sector. It will also support fundamental changes in the financial sector, designed to transform the State bank of Vietnam into a modern central bank and to strengthen the commercial orientation of State-owned commercial banks, and will develop capital markets.

It will also fund human development through upgrading the quality of education (particularly in poor zones), promoting inclusive education for children with disabilities, improving access for the poor to health services, and helping them secure asset ownership through the implementation of the new Land Law.

It will also be used to encourage important policy measures leading to more sustainable management of natural resources, including through strategic environmental assessments.

In addition, the credit will fund actions to implement the government’ s public financial management reform agenda and more effective public resource allocation. It will also support the overall development of the legal system strategy. — VNS

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[Pakistan] WB validates govt’s poverty estimates

from The Daily Times

The World Bank has validated the Government of Pakistan's official poverty estimates as recently published in the Pakistan Economic Survey, 2005-06, says a WB statement issued Thursday.

“The Government has maintained consistency with past measures using the same poverty line and inflation indices as used for the 2000-01 estimates," the Bank statement said.

Using this same methodology, it added, "the latest Government estimates show poverty to have fallen from 34.4 percent to 24 percent."

"Several international agencies, including the World Bank have validated this result independently."

"It is clear that poverty has indeed fallen sharply between 2000-01 and

2004-05. Of course, there are other ways to calculate poverty estimates useful for analytical purposes but using the same methodology for the official estimates is important to maintain comparability over years," said John Wall, World Bank Country Director for Pakistan.

“These most recent estimations have pointed out weaknesses in the inflation indices used in the calculations, which should be strengthened over time," the statement added. APP

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[WTO Talkes Doha Round] 'Big Picture' Blindness Dogs Doha Talks

from Forbes

With an end-of-June deadline looming, WTO ministers and senior officials meet in Geneva next week to discuss key elements in Doha Round negotiations. Time is running out for the Doha Round trade negotiations and governments seem unable to resolve their differences. One reason is that the consequences of success or failure are difficult to assess and understand.

WTO ministers and senior officials will try to reach agreement on key elements of a liberalization package for agricultural and industrial products and services. They face a wide range of choices. There are few grounds for optimism about the outcome, since participants have shown little readiness to make significant concessions to each other's views.

An element in the reluctance to take difficult decisions is the lack of measurable evidence of what is at stake in the round. Two recent World Bank reports have attempted to calculate the effects of a successful Doha Round on poverty in developing countries and on global welfare. Neither has proved very persuasive.

In a recent speech, WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy set out gains that could emerge from a successful Doha Round. He argued that the round is "deeper, larger and fairer across the board" than previous trade negotiations. Lamy's points are crucial for governments engaging in the Geneva talks. However, much more is at stake in the round. In an upbeat speech designed to enlist business support, Lamy did not mention the equally unquantifiable, but very serious, risks of failure:

Negotiated agreements require compromise. However, it seems widely agreed that if a compromise in the coming weeks requires a result that falls seriously short of what Lamy outlined, at least some participants may reject it as not offering a worthwhile balance of advantage. If this happens, negotiations could continue for a while. However, since no one can be certain of this outcome, all need to be aware of the dangers inherent in a possible collapse of the negotiations:

1. Immediate consequences: Failure of the Doha Round would have a number of immediate consequences:

-- An immediate result of failure would be the loss of the market opening and other changes under discussion in the negotiations.

-- To the extent that changes in national trade policies are already programmed, these would continue, but without the influence of external commitments to liberalize.

-- Agricultural and industrial tariffs in developed and developing countries would remain as they are now.

-- Subsidy commitments would be unchanged from those made in 1994 in the Uruguay Round.

-- Commitments on services would also remain very limited.

-- WTO rules would remain as they are.

2. Longer-term consequences: The longer-term consequences of a Doha Round failure are serious:

-- Loss of WTO credibility: As a forum for negotiation of trade liberalization, the WTO would be seriously discredited. In the absence of any other global instrument, multilateral trade negotiations would be blocked, probably until the next decade.

-- Free trade agreements: Bilateral and regional agreements would proliferate still further, at the expense of the core WTO principle of non-discrimination.

-- Dispute settlement: The WTO's second main function, adjudicating disputes between member countries about the application of its rules, might initially be reinforced. However, this aspect of its work could also eventually suffer.

-- Multilateral cooperation: More broadly, the setback to the WTO would be damaging to the whole concept of multilateral cooperation.

The Doha Round risks collapse because participants, preoccupied with concerns about the effects of opening their markets, are reluctant to make concessions needed to achieve a deal. Possible consequences of failure for the future of the international trading system could be much more serious.

To read an extended version of this article, log on to Oxford Analytica's Web site.

Oxford Analytica is an independent strategic-consulting firm drawing on a network of more than 1,000 scholar experts at Oxford and other leading universities and research institutions around the world. For more information, please visit www.oxan.com. To find out how to subscribe to the firm's Daily Brief Service, click here.

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[Fair Trade] Wal-Mart brews fair-trade project

from The Redding Record Searchlight

Coffee farmers in Brazil co-op may get deal

By Ylan Q. Mui, The Washington Post

POCO FUNDO, Brazil -- Rosevaldo Jose Pereira has never been to Wal-Mart. The name doesn't mean anything to the lifelong coffee farmer in this remote village in southeastern Brazil.

But Wal-Mart Stores Inc. knows who he is. And the world's largest retailer is changing his life.

Wal-Mart is in the midst of overhauling its tightfisted image to win over shoppers searching for more than low prices. That effort has taken the company that built an empire on the principle of high volume and low costs into previously uncharted territory, into the realm of trendy apparel and organic food.

Now, with the help of Pereira, it is embarking on one of its most radical undertakings to date: fair trade.

Pereira, 40, is part of a small cooperative of growers living in the heart of coffee country, where the rolling mountains are lush with trees. The late afternoon sun is strong. Pereira wipes the sweat from his brow with his forearm as he works his six acres. Dirt is jammed deep underneath his fingernails. He has been picking coffee cherries since 5 a.m., stripping them off the branches with his bare hands. They will be dried, and eventually only the pit will be left -- the coffee bean.

Pereira gets a premium for his harvest. His co-op is one of only seven in the country that is fair-trade certified, charging above-market price for beans because it meets certain social and environmental standards.

Wal-Mart is considering bringing Pereira's beans into its namesake stores. It would be a novel arrangement for a company infamous for squeezing pennies out of its suppliers -- and a test of how deep its makeover will really go.

For Pereira, the deal could mean more money, new computers for the co-op or a bigger school for the village. Already some children talk about college and life away from the farm. But it also would inextricably bind the co-op's fortunes to the company from Bentonville, Ark. -- putting all its beans, so to speak, in one basket.

Wal-Mart executives are planning to visit Poco Fundo at the end of the month before making a decision. It's part of the new corporate philosophy outlined by chief executive H. Lee Scott Jr.: "Doing well by doing good."

It is a work in progress.

Wal-Mart discovered Pereira and his co-op five years ago when Mark Hoffman, a buyer for its Sam's Club membership warehouse stores, visited Brazil on a scouting trip. There was nothing particularly philanthropic about his visit.

Hoffman worked for the company's global sourcing team, a now-defunct group that traveled the world finding ways to buy products for less money. The Brazil list included beef jerky, cashews and, of course, coffee.

Brazil produces roughly 30 percent of the world's coffee, exporting 26.4 million bags weighing 132 pounds each in 2004. About half of that is grown in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais, known for its iron mines and orange-red earth.

Pereira's village is there, the farms connected by dusty dirt roads. Donkeys plod along the cobblestone streets of the town center next to cars. About an hour and a half away is the air-conditioned headquarters of a company called Cafe Bom Dia.

Bom Dia is Pereira's link to the global economy, buying beans from the co-op and selling them to Wal-Mart. It counts itself among the five biggest coffee roasters and exporters in Brazil. Much of its production includes organic and fair-trade coffee from small growers such as Pereira.

Bom Dia buys beans directly from farmers and roasts them, eliminating a middleman. The company, run by the wealthy Marques de Paiva family, also grows, roasts and exports beans from its own farm.

To Hoffman, that all meant one thing: cheaper prices.

"I really didn't think five years ago when I was down there that I'd be talking about a national organic or fair-trade program," he said in an interview from Bentonville. "That had not crossed my mind."

Sam's Club already was selling fair-trade coffee from Millstone Coffee but wanted to work directly with Bom Dia to create a new line that could undercut the prices of the big names, controlling a supply chain from the ground up.

Supporting fair trade presents a paradox for Wal-Mart. It is a tacit admission that there is a point at which no more efficiencies can be squeezed out of the system without harming the people who make it work. Fair-trade beans are sold at a minimum of $1.26 per pound, compared with the world average last month of 90 cents. But Wal-Mart is still determined not to pay more than it must.

The company has forged partnerships with hundreds of social and environmental groups to develop sustainability initiatives. TransFair USA, which certifies farms as fair trade, is working with it on Pereira's coffee. The Rocky Mountain Institute is helping reduce the fuel consumption of its trucking fleet.

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[Effects on Health] Bed nets problematic in malaria prevention

from Monsters and Critics

NEW ORLEANS, LA, United States (UPI) -- A U.S. scientist says she`s found simply giving insecticide treated bed nets to families in malaria-affected areas may not be enough to stop the disease.

Tulane University health researcher Kate Macintyre and colleagues recently published research showing 17 percent of children and 50 percent of adults in Eritrean households with a bed net did not regularly use the nets.

Insecticide treated bed nets are one of the main strategies used globally to prevent the spread of malaria. They are affordable and effective as long as they are used, says Macintyre.

The research team surveyed 2,241 households in Eritrea and found bed nets were more likely to be used by households close to a clinic, where bed net use can be explained. Knowledge of malaria transmission also increases bed net use.

The next step, according to Macintyre, is to study the factors that might affect bed net use, such as prioritizing the household net for children or for difficulty hanging the net every night. Understanding factors effecting use can help health managers promote net use more effectively, said Macintyre.

The research appears in the June issue of the journal Tropical Medicine & International Health.

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[Malawi Aid - World Bank] pumps K5m to NGOs to fight poverty

from African News Dimension

By Hastings Mbewe

Blantyre (AND) The World Bank has given small grants to selected NGOs in Malawi totaling K5 million to be used in the fight against poverty.

Presenting the grants World Bank Acting Country Manager Constantine Chikosi said the civil society is so important to the bank as it has important alternative views that are worthwhile in the whole process of trying to improve the lives of Malawi.

However during discussion it was noted that the K5 million grant, was not sufficient to address the problem of poverty in Malawi. The civil society organizations were in a quandary as to whether the bank took into account the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) when deciding the grants. However others hailed the bank for the grant. “I feel that the World Bank has assisted most of us greatly,” said Benito Odala Elias Farmers Union executive director whose organization received K732, 200.

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[California] Student is animated about fighting poverty

from Sign on San Diego

By Meredith Wade
UNION-TRIBUNE COMMUNITY NEWS WRITER

June 23, 2006

CARMEL VALLEY – Steven Yuan believes that people working together can change history. "Learning about problems people in the world are facing is enlightening."

To help raise awareness in his Carmel Valley community, Steven created a short, animated video about poverty and hunger in Africa. The 16-year-old's creation was one of 20 finalists in a Flash video contest sponsored by Citizens for Global Solutions. The nationwide, nonprofit organization encourages Americans to address global issues such as: infectious diseases, global warming, deforestation and terrorism.

Steven's father Ronnie Yuan said his son's video is "intended to bring awareness about poverty to the public and offer suggestions to fight the problem."

In Steven's animated film, statistics about poverty and hunger rapidly cross the screen while a fast dance song plays in the background. The story compares a teen's life in California to a youth living in a poor area of Africa.

"There is such a stark contrast between life there and life here," Steven said. "It is really horrifying. I wanted to do something to raise awareness and help people."

Yuan said, "Steven is very passionate about these causes and in addition to making the Flash movie, he has been working with a group of Torrey Pines High School students to buy school supplies for an orphanage in Tanzania."

Steven is the co-founder and vice president of The Melting Pot Club of Torrey Pines High School. The group has 30 members who meet once a week to complete community service projects. All projects are designed to have a multicultural focus.

One project involves pairing club members with a pen-pal living in an African orphanage. The letters the group has received have taught them that AIDS had affected many children's families and that hunger is an almost constant concern in many countries.

"I am really interested in letting other people know how different life in Africa is from life here. I also watched a video on the child soldiers by the Invisible Children organization, and it really opened my eyes. It is depressing to know that these things really happen," Steven said.

He hopes to combine his passion for helping youths in Africa with his love of art and graphic design. Even though Steven did not win the contest, he is happy he participated.

"I am not bummed at all. I would have just given the prize money to the Melting Pot Club anyway. It was good to see how competitive the field of animation is. It was really a humbling experience."

Although the short film was created with a complicated computer program, Steven's message is simple. He wants everyone to know how important it is to help other people. "If everyone donated money or started a project or a club that worked to help others, the world would be a better place," he said.

To see his movie or learn more about the Flash video contest visit www.globalsolutions.org.

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[Canada] We're declaring war on poverty

from The Hamilton Spectator

The Poverty Project
By Bill Dunphy
The Hamilton Spectator

A small group of community leaders and activists take the first step this morning in enlisting the entire city in a four- year war on poverty.

"Poverty issues need to be part of the conversation around the dinner table, around the lunch table and around the board room table," said Paul Johnson of the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction.

The Roundtable, a joint effort of the Hamilton Community Foundation and the city, was formed a little over a year ago to bring leaders from industry, business, education, media, and social services together to build a community plan for the reduction or elimination of poverty in a city that holds some of the deepest urban concentrations of poverty in the country.

It unveils that plan today.

Nearly one-fifth of the city, about 95,000 people, is living in poverty, while for some segments of society (women, children, natives, recent immigrants and visible minorities) the poverty rates run even higher.

Among the hardest hit are children -- census data shows that 22,525 Hamilton children, one in four, are living in poverty.

Roundtable members, like many working in the social service sector, believe frankly that our "system" isn't working.

They believe that agencies and departments and governments and foundations are so swamped trying to meet the daily needs of the city's poor that they are focused on alleviating poverty, not eliminating or preventing it.

The Roundtable wants to change that, to find a different way of doing things.

Supported by the Hamilton Community Foundation, the city's community services department and the Social Planning Research Council, the Roundtable set about building its plan. Following the advice of an American Jay Connor, founder of The Collaboratory for Community Support, the group set about choosing an aspiration, a goal to try and rally the whole community behind.

After months of research, consultation and discussions, the Roundtable settled on a deceptively simple aspiration: Make Hamilton the Best Place to Raise a Child.

"We have a great opportunity to reduce poverty in our city by focusing on ways we as a community can ensure the development of children and youth," Johnson said.

Fellow roundtable member Carl Turkstra put his motivation a little more plainly -- "25 per cent of our children are living in poverty? That's just barbaric!"

The 200 people gathered at the Hamilton Convention Centre this morning will be asked to adopt this aspiration and begin planning how to turn it into a reality.

"This is not about short-term report generation or short-term activity -- this was about thinking long-term," Johnson explained. And it's also about thinking differently.

And this morning they'll be signing people up for that task.

bdunphy@thespec.com

905-526-3262

(For a copy of the Roundtable report visit thespec.com)

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[John Edwards] Sounding Like a Candidate, Calls for Fighting Poverty

from Bloomberg

Former Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards says he will do ``anything'' to get ordinary Americans to pay attention to poverty -- even at the risk of sounding like a 2008 presidential candidate.

Edwards, who ran for the Democratic nomination in 2004 before joining Massachusetts Senator John Kerry on the ticket, has focused on the issue since he left the Senate last year, as director of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

While the job has given him the opportunity to raise the visibility of poverty in the U.S., it has also given him plenty of opportunities to keep himself visible. One came yesterday, when Edwards, 53, visited Washington for a speech at the National Press Club.

``Anything I can do to get poverty on the national radar screen, I am going to do,'' Edwards said in an interview before his speech, which he said was the first of several on issues he considers important, including energy costs and education.

``Edwards really found his voice and calling after the last election,'' said Anna Burger, international secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union. ``He talks about rebuilding the middle class; he talks about his poverty-center work. And he is out and around the states taking up the cause of working people.''

Labor's Candidate

If Edwards does run for president, he intends to be the candidate of organized labor. He has walked picket lines with International Brotherhood of Teamsters President James P. Hoffa, spoke at the United Mine Workers convention in Las Vegas in April, championed the cause of hotel and restaurant workers and met with small gatherings of workers and union leaders around the country.

''I think that he is out working to win the hearts and minds of working people and union activists,'' said Burger, whose union represents 1.8 million workers. `And he is not shy about saying he is interested in running for president.''

Bob Kerrey, a former governor and senator from Nebraska who ran for president in 1992, recruited Edwards to run for the Senate from North Carolina when Kerrey was chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Kerrey said that as the presidential campaign heats up in the fall of 2007, ``I think Edwards could open up a strong second; he might even be the front-runner. It is not impossible. He will be labor's favorite Democrat.''

Strong in Iowa

Another Edwards advantage in a presidential run is a strong organization in Iowa, whose caucuses begin the primary season. Edwards came in a strong second to John Kerry in Iowa in 2004 by campaigning hard in rural areas. He also carried Polk County, the most populous county in the state.

Edwards visited Iowa four times in 2005 and five times so far this year, the most visits of any 2008 Democratic hopeful. Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, who is campaigning for re- election to the Senate this year, hasn't been to Iowa since 2003.

Two weeks ago, Edwards came in first in a Des Moines Register poll of Iowans who say they are likely to vote in the caucuses. He received 30 percent in the poll to Clinton's 26 percent, one of the rare times that Clinton hasn't come in first in a presidential poll.

The poll also found Clinton's ``very unfavorable'' rating was 11 percent, nearly four times that of Edwards' rating of 3 percent.

`He's Running'

``If he wins the Iowa caucus, he will be No. 1 in New Hampshire, and the people in New Hampshire are very smart when it comes to presidential politics,'' said Bob Kerrey, who is now president of New School University in New York City. ``They want a winner.''

Gordon Fischer, former chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party, who isn't aligned with any presidential campaign, says Edwards has ``great support'' in Iowa. ``He has phoned folks here and e-mailed folks here and done guest editorials in the Des Moines Register,'' Fischer said. ``He is working it. That pays off.''

Fischer said the Iraq war is very important to the Democratic activists who dominate the Iowa caucuses, and ``Edwards' apology made a big difference to Democrats here.''

Fischer was referring to a Nov. 13, 2005, opinion piece Edwards wrote for the Washington Post that began, ``I was wrong.'' He went on to say that his 2002 Senate vote authorizing President George W. Bush to use force in Iraq was a mistake, and ``I take responsibility for that mistake.''

Withdraw From Iraq

Yesterday, Edwards called for the immediate withdrawal of 40,000 U.S. troops from Iraq. ``We need to be getting out,'' Edwards said in the interview. He said all combat troops should be withdrawn ``within 12 to 18 months.''

In his Press Club speech, Edwards also addressed energy policy, saying ``I want to live in an America free from dependence on fossil fuel'' and that ``sacrifice, conservation and innovation will be required.''

In the interview, Edwards touched on immigration, saying those workers already in the country illegally should be placed on a ``path to citizenship'' as long as they pay their taxes, pay a fine and learn English. He said he also favors improved border security.

He called the possibility of Iran gaining a nuclear weapon ``the most serious threat the world has seen since the Cuban missile crisis.''

Chief Issue

In both his speech and interview, he returned repeatedly to the issue of domestic poverty. He proposed that the number of poor Americans be cut by a third in the next 10 years and poverty be eliminated in the next 30 years. In his speech, Edwards also stressed concern for the ``forgotten middle class.''

Edwards said America must build a ``working society'' that would create ``new opportunities for work,'' plus ``affordable housing near good jobs'' and a million ``last-chance'' jobs ``for people who cannot find work on their own.''

As Bill Clinton did when he ran for president in 1992, Edwards also emphasized the importance of individual responsibility, saying ``we would expect everyone who can work to work'' and that it is time to finish the job of welfare reform by giving low-income men the opportunity to work and ``challenging them to take responsibility for doing so.''

``If they don't work, they don't get paid,'' Edwards said. ``If they owe child support, their children will get paid first, because women shouldn't have to raise children on their own.''

Populist Message

In 2004, Edwards stressed a populist message of two Americas, ``one America that is struggling to get by, another America that can buy anything it wants, even Congress and a president.''

Independent political analyst Charles Cook, editor of the Cook Political Report in Washington, said Edwards has honed his message since that campaign, and that now ``it is less class- warfare oriented.''

Cook said that among Edwards' Democratic rivals, former Governor Mark Warner of Virginia and Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana ``are competing for the cautious middle,'' while John Kerry is an ``old-style populist.''

``Edwards is now offering a hybrid of populism and liberalism that works,'' Cook said.

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[Comment] A Dollar A Day

from Relevant Magazine

I get all my best ideas when I'm out running. I also happen to get some of my worst ones too. Last Saturday as my stomach continued to revolt at the bland regime of lentils and water that I was inflicting on it, I began to curse the moment I put on my spandex speed suit and headed for the hills. For it was there that the thought first infected my brain: Could I survive for seven days on just seven dollars?

The answer, as it turns out, is yes. For a week I was able to feed, clean and transport myself for a mere 53 of our English pence per day. (Actually, that's close to being true, but you'll have to check my blog for the confession.)

Why was I doing it? Because with more than 1.2 billion people living on a similar amount—or less—each day, extreme poverty claims the lives of 50,000 mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and friends every single day. It seemed like the least I could do.

Day 1
Within a few hours of beginning my challenge of living on 53p a day, I'd spent £299. Not a very good start, I admit, but the new, expensive washing machine was actually bought by my wife. Still, it hardly left me brimming with confidence about my chances of making it through the week. If this was how things kicked off on Day 1, would I end up buying a yacht and small Caribbean island by the end of Day 6?

Day 2
The caffeine withdrawal kicked in, and I felt pained and unable to concentrate all day. I also had a long-standing engagement to attend—one which involved free transport, free food and free drinks. I had big plans for the event, mainly focused on getting as much orange juice and high-carb food down me as quickly as possible. Then someone shoved a glass of wine in my hand, then another and before I knew it, after two lentil rissoles and a feta wrap, I was overly full and a little lightheaded. I returned home on the train, praising my good fortune but cursing my inability to stick to the game plan.

Day 3
This was the tipping point. You know that bit about man not being able to live on bread alone? Well, I took it seriously and decided that if I was going to last the rest of the week, I ought to start getting some decent grub inside me. So I bought lentils, carrots and other things. I made Lentil and Bean Surprise. The surprise was that its taste failed to resemble that of any remotely edible food.

Day 4
The soap wasn't showing me the love as I found out that my hair now squeaked to the touch. And then there was the matter of hunger—it was starting to build. But so were my thoughts. Gradually I found myself thinking, reading and writing more about how my life usually revolves so firmly around my own wants and desires. Did it really have to be this way?

Day 5
OK, this was the low point. Friends came over for lunch, and I watched as they tucked into all the good stuff that was beyond my budget. Worse, my offer to let them try a little of my lentil and processed pea soup was taken up a little too enthusiastically. I watched in horror as they sucked up an entire portion that I'd earmarked as Day 6's breakfast.

Day 6
With 48 hours left and way less than a dollar in my pocket, I was glad of the invite to a family birthday party. It didn't seem like hypocrisy though, more like an offer marked by generosity and grace. I don't think I've enjoyed a meal out quite as much ever before.

Day 7
The last day and it was back to the beans and bread. But despite the prospect of getting back onto proper food, I found myself wanting to hold on to much of what I'd experienced during my week of Poverty Lite. More than cutting out dairy and caffeine, I ended the experiment with a rock-solid understanding that my life locked into the hamster wheel of consumerism was not a done deal.

And here I am, a few days after the experiment ended, and I'm sure of two things:

That what I call "liking nice things" or "looking after myself" or "spending the money which I earn to treat myself" has another name. Gluttony. Forget images of clinically obese, aging emperors gorging themselves on global delicacies, the truth about gluttony in the 21st century is that it wears a thousand perfectly respectable, blinking, flashing, shining, enticing masks. Gluttony is not the preserve of the ultra wealthy; it is the driver that powers our materialism.

And if I'm sure that I've got a long way to go, then I'm even more assured of this eternal truth: that change is possible, that my life does not have to conform, that nothing is written.

Craig Borlase is the author of God's Gravity: The Upside-Down Life of Selfless Faith (RELEVANT Books), which releases this week. You can read more about him and the wonderful world of lentils at his blog, Nothing Is Written, at www.craigborlase.com.

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[Indiana] Poverty Awareness Week kicks off Sunday

from The Star Press

By NASEEM SOWTI
nsowti@muncie.gannett.com

MUNCIE -- The Poverty Awareness Week kicks off this Sunday to help Delaware County residents understand what it is like to live in poverty.

"I think there's such a misconception that if you don't work, you're in poverty," said Molly Flodder, executive director of TEAMwork for Quality Living, one of the organizations involved in facilitating the event.

But "minimum wage is not living wage in this country," she said.

A couple with two children has to work a combined 3.3 full-time minimum wage jobs in order to meet their basic human needs, according to Common Dreams News Center.

The Poverty Awareness Week features a variety of events that mirror what people in poverty often experience.

A bus simulation will focus on what it is like to travel to work and to run errands without private transportation.

A week of living on $1.67 per meal for a week, called the Food Frugality Challenge, will give those involved a glimpse of what it is like to survive on food stamps.

And a tour of local social service agencies will showcase a few of the organizations that work to help those in poverty.

There are also going to be discussion groups on the book Nickel and Dimed and viewing of PBS documentary Waging a Living, both of which focus on the working poor.

In Delaware County nearly 15,000 people live in poverty, a fact that impacts everyone.

"Our community spends between $1.2 to $1.4 million a month on food stamps, and that's just the direct cost," Flodder said.

Through the Poverty Awareness Week, Flodder and her team hope to help people realize that there's something they can do to help.

"We really hope to create camaraderie and a team spirit. This is really a wonderful opportunity to help people whose resource for community compassion is missing."

The event has been organized by the Eliminating Poverty Initiating Committee, a citizen leadership group convened and coordinated by TEAMwork for Quality Living and the Center Township trustee's office.

For more information, visit www.teamworkql.org.

Contact news reporter Naseem Sowti at 213-5829.

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[IMF - Mauritania] Executive Board Approves 100 Percent Debt Relief Under the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative

from all Africa

The Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved today 100 percent debt relief for Mauritania under the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI) amounting to SDR 32.9 million (about US$49 million), including SDR 2.7 million (about US$4 million) of assistance remaining under the enhanced Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative. The Board's decision brings to 21 the number of countries that have received 100 percent relief from the IMF under the MDRI, and the total amount of relief granted by the Fund under the initiative to SDR 2.54 billion (about US$3.67 billion).

Mauritania has implemented all the remedial actions that were required for MDRI qualification, including the resolution of data issues, six months of satisfactory macroeconomic performance, and remedial actions in the areas of budget formulation, execution, and reporting (see Press Release No. 05/308).

"Mauritania has made important strides since last autumn, including the resolution of data issues and the implementation of reforms in the management of public finances, prominently in the context of oil revenues and the tracking of social expenditures," said IMF Deputy Managing Director Agustín Carstens, who chaired the Executive Board session on Mauritania. "These are steps that will help Mauritania reach its ambitious poverty-reduction targets under the Millennium Development Goals. For our part, the IMF is supporting the government's efforts through sweeping debt relief."

The purpose of the MDRI is to accelerate eligible countries' progress towards the Millennium Development Goals by providing relief on their eligible debt to the IMF and by ensuring that the corresponding resources are allocated to poverty reduction (see Public Information Notice No. 05/164).

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[WTO Talkes Doha Round] Bush Pledges All Out Effort to Salvage Stalled World Trade Talks

from The Voice of America

President Bush told European Union leaders in Vienna Wednesday Washington will do all it can to revive the stalled global negotiations on reducing trade barriers. The pledge met with skepticism among trade analysts.

After meetings with European Union leaders, Mr. Bush said the trade negotiations aimed at opening world markets have to succeed. "My pledge to our European counterparts is that we'll do the best that we can to reach an agreement that satisfies all parties desires. But make no mistake about it, it is hard work. My view is that we can't let this round fail. A failed WTO round would be a missed opportunity, particularly to help people who are impoverished," he said.

The Americans and Europeans are at odds over how to reduce farm subsidies, while richer developing countries like Brazil and India are refusing demands to open their relatively closed markets. The trade talks were launched in Doha, Qatar in 2001 and were to have been completed last year.

Daniel Ikenson, a trade specialist at the Cato Institute, says the Doha Round is likely to fail. "The bottom line is that there simply is not enough interest across countries in trade liberalization at this point. More specifically, there isn't enough interest in trade liberalization that commits countries to new rules and new requirements," he said. Ikenson, who advocates free trade, spoke at a Washington trade forum Wednesday.

Jagdish Bhagwati, an economics professor at Columbia University, also advocates free trade. He says there can no longer be any doubt that trade liberalization boosts economic growth and lifts people out of poverty. Recent market based reforms in China and India, he says, are case studies for how trade liberalization reduces poverty. "Poverty declined after all these reforms and shift into outward oriented policies, which is why the two countries are busy trying to do even more of that rather than less of it," he said.

But free trade is resisted in many developing countries, which fear that their industries are too inefficient to compete with imports from developed nations. While in Europe and North America, trade unions and some politicians oppose free trade, saying their mature industries cannot compete with imports from low-cost producers.

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[Fair Trade - Canada] Via Rail up On fair Trade Coffee

from Hour Canada

Meg Hewings

This week VIA Rail became the largest Canadian corporation to offer exclusively fair trade-certified coffee to customers. It seems big business is following on the heels of many public institutions, including the National Assembly, universities and hospitals who currently sell the ethical brew.

"Historically, a farmer producing fair trade coffee receives at least double the revenue on average of a farmer producing other kinds of coffee," says Rob Clarke, executive director of TransFair Canada, the major not-for-profit certification body that monitors fair trade licences.

While coffee has become the most valuable trading commodity in the world after oil, working conditions for farmers have remained paltry, market access restricted and environmental standards and prices unregulated.

Travelling with VIA now means you can enjoy your cup of joe knowing producers were paid an equitable price for their product (there is a fixed minimum price guarantee per pound), which is itself grown in strict adherence to environmental standards. "Also, a social premium always goes to the community, towards development projects like building schools, health clinics, sending kids to high school and even providing medicine," says Chantal Havard of TransFair Canada.

According to the latest statistics, fair trade is one of the world's booming markets, and in Canada, products that have been fair
trade certified have seen an average growth of 55 per cent since 2001. Quebec gets top rank in terms of fair trade commerce, which over the years has grown to include tea, handicrafts, sugar, cocoa, fresh fruit, rice and, soon, wine.

Havard hopes VIA set a precedent this week and that consumers and citizens will now lobby other big Canadian companies to make the same choice. "Wouldn't it be wonderful if Air Canada would decide to follow suit? It's actually very easy to make simple gestures that make a difference."

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[Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation] Centre gets £7m malaria funding

from The BBC

The University of York is being given £7m by Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates to help source a treatment for malaria.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is backing research on a plant that could help to ease the global shortage of effective drugs for the disease.

Malaria kills more than one million people every year.

The Centre for Novel Agricultural Products is trying to breed new strains of Artemisia Annua, the sole source of anti-malarial drug artemisinin.

The goal of the fast-track breeding programme is to a create a non-genetically modified variety of the plant with increased yields of artemisinin for use in combination therapies.

Satisfy demand

Artemisinin Combination Therapies (ACT) have been identified as the most effective treatment for malaria by the World Health Organisation.

Demand for the drug has increased in recent years due to the malaria parasite developing a resistance to traditional single drug treatments.

It is estimated that up to half a billion courses of ACTs may be needed to combat the deadly disease.

The new plant varieties being developed by researchers could help to ensure that there is enough artemisinin to satisfy that demand and make the drug cheaper to produce.

Director of the centre, Prof Dianna Bowles, said the project was an excellent example of how modern plant science could benefit society.

"This work could lead directly to making an effective cure for malaria cheaper and more accessible for people who need it most," she said.

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[Bolivia] Wiping out Poverty

from Prensa Latina

Bolivian Planning and Development Minister Carlos Villegas ratified his government´s willingness to eradicate poverty over a five-year period as part of the newly-announced economic strategy.

The official told Prensa Latina that the first stage of the National Development Plan identified the 80 rural municipalities most affected by that social scourge.

He referred to Municipalities in Action program, which envisages actions in production sectors to offer new jobs mainly for youth.

With that plan, people in central municipalities will be provided with better conditions and services in health, education, housing, drinking water, sewage and electricity.

About full-time employment, the minister said the areas to be fostered are industry, manufactures and crafts.

He affirmed the five-year economic strategy, which is the result of the efforts of planning experts in all institutions, offices and ministries, will be permanently consulted with the national grassroots movements and organizations.

Villegas added this plan buries neoliberalism in Bolivia as it has a new concept of development, social inclusion, decentralization and social-community power.

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[Urban America] From poverty to prosperity

from The Long Beach Press-Telegram

18-year-old beats the odds, graduates despite life's hardships.
By Rachel Uranga, Staff writer

LOS ANGELES -- Brian Reynolds was never really a child. Before he started first grade, he watched his father hustle drugs.

By his 8th birthday, he had moved in with his grandmother, where he rotated between sleeping on the couch and the floor in a crowded, three-bedroom South Los Angeles duplex.

Now, while many of his childhood playmates are in jail, on drugs or dead, the 18-year-old is heading off to Temple University with aspirations of opening his own business.

“It's a wonderful feeling to know that I beat the odds when there are so many out there that didn't,” Reynolds said.

Donning a black cap and gown, Reynolds will graduate from Taft High School today with a 3.7 grade-point average.

With about half of Los Angeles Unified School District's black and Latino seniors failing to graduate on time, he is a statistical oddity coming from poverty to create a future, a world he never saw in his own life.

His South L.A. neighborhood, a once-storied African-American jazz district on the outskirts of downtown, now sends its children to a poorly performing high school where 94 percent qualify for a federally funded lunch program for the poor and the dropout rate is considerably higher than the district's average.

Raised by his 61-year-old maternal grandmother, Reynolds entered into one of the district's busing programs in junior high school.

The program provides 6,600 children from underperforming schools with one predominant ethnic group with transportation to an ethnically diverse and academically stronger school.

“He is one of those that realized he could get out of the hood through the education.

It sounds like a cliche but it's the truth,” said Bridget Brownell, a health education teacher who early on befriended Reynolds.

Every school day for the past six years, Reynolds rose at 5:30 a.m. to ready himself for the 28-mile, 90-minute bus trip.

During his bleary-eyed passage along the city's traffic-choked freeways, Reynolds entered into a different world where students speak Spanish, Farsi and Mandarin, where the gangs from around his tattered home seemed to disappear, and where, for better or worse, there are fewer reminders of home.

Freshman year, he joined the basketball team and vowed to keep his head in his books rather than roam the streets with his childhood friends.

“I just wanted to make my grandmother proud,” he said.

Nobody in his immediate family had graduated from college and the idea seemed far off.

But by his junior year, he had gotten all A's with one B, and he was eager to share the good news with his father, whom he rarely saw.

But he never got a chance. When he called, his dad cut short the phone call, promising to see him over the weekend. The next day, he learned his father had died of natural causes. He was 37.

“I didn't want to go on,” Reynolds said, adding that setbacks like his father's death often derail many teens from reaching their potential. “But I just picked myself out and I am going to come out on top.”

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[Ethiopia] Poverty Limiting Treatment Options for HIV-Positive Children

from All Africa

Addis Ababa

With an estimated 2.6 million children orphaned by HIV/AIDS over the last decade, Ethiopia faces an uphill battle in its attempts to care for these children.

Five-year-old Tesema Asamnew (not his real name) is one of the children being cared for at the Abebech Gobena Child Care and Development Organization. Abebech Gobena, founder and manager of the organisation, remembers the day Tesema came to the home four years ago.

"This boy was abandoned in the street and found by the police, who brought him to my organisation. He was just one-year-old at the time," Abebech said. "When we receive any orphaned children, they undergo HIV testing, and Tesema was unlucky to have the virus with him."

Abebech's centre, through various partners, cares for thousands of children across Ethiopia, 420 of whom have tested positive for the HI virus. It provides children with basic necessities, including food and shelter, education, skills training, psychosocial rehabilitation and HIV/AIDS prevention and awareness.

Tesema attends school and benefits from all the services Abebech's organisation provides. However, he has not been given life-prolonging antiretroviral (ARV) therapy, as the organisation lacks the funding to provide ARVs to its young clients.

Woldesemayat Tamene, the Addis Ababa HIV project coordinator for the organisation, said the centre concentrated on providing nutritional support to its HIV-positive children.

"The reason we are treating the AIDS orphaned children with nutrition is that we found it difficult to start the drug because once you start to treat the children with the drug, you can't stop it," he said. "We are giving special care and support for those living with the virus. Each of the children living with the virus has a baby sitter who closely follows their health status and care."

The government officially introduced ARVs for children six months ago, but they remain out of reach for most people caring for HIV-positive children in desperately poor Ethiopia, where almost half of the country's 71 million people live on less than one dollar a day.

HOPE Enterprise, another organisation working with children orphaned by AIDS, is also using nutrition to keep HIV-positive children healthy. "The drug has many problems. It requires special health officials and huge money, which we cant afford now," said Mekonnen Mandefro, HIV/AIDS coordinator of Hope.

Mandefro said if the government intended to reduce the number of children orphaned by AIDS, it needed to start by putting more resources towards lowering the country's 4.4 percent HIV prevalence.

"Once we are able to reduce the spread of the virus, we can control the rising of AIDS orphaned children in the country," he said. "They are not getting enough care and treatment because of financial constraints and ignorance."

At the launch of a report on orphans in the capital, Addis Ababa, recently, Alexandro Concicini, a child protection official with the United Nations Children's Fund, UNICEF, noted that the number of orphans in Ethiopia was rising at an alarming rate.

"The overall number of orphans in Ethiopia was estimated to be 4.6 million, or 13 percent of the total number of children in Ethiopia," he said. "This figure is estimated to rise to 14.8 percent by the year 2010. In absolute terms, this is going to be the largest number of orphans in any country in the world."

"Children orphaned by HIV/AIDS suffer from greater social isolation, stigma, discrimination and social and emotional adjustment problems," he added. "They are less likely to be adopted and have more difficulty in securing employment."

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[UK] Pensioners face 'poverty-ridden retirement'

from Monsters and Critics

Fourteen per cent of all pensioners are existing on under £5,000 each year, a report by investment firm Prudential has claimed.

Publishing its bi-annual retirement savings monitor, Prudential shows that the 14 per cent of retirees receiving the basic pension rate of £4,381 per annum are being forced to make cutbacks in their everyday spending in attempts to remain solvent.

Belt-tightening when it comes to leisure activities and grocery and clothing purchases appears to be the result of the low levels of income faced by the 1.4 million pensioners receiving under £5,000, which after bills, council tax and rent is reduced to an average of £3,092 per annum.

'How many of us could truly say that we could manage on what works out to be just £8.49 a day?' asked Angus Macaiver, director of Prudential UK.

'What’s more, this struggle isn’t just for a couple of years. Retirement is now roughly 25 years long for the average person, but who wants to spend what’s nearly a third of their life struggling by on less than a ‘tenner’ a day?'

Many pensioners have responded to falling levels of income by returning to work, borrowing from friends or family or dipping into assets set aside for their children.

Five per cent have even turned to gambling, while the situation is so severe for one in a hundred that crime is the only way out, the report indicates.

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[Israel] Hirchson promises to tackle poverty

from the Jerusalem Post

Finance Minister Avraham Hirchson told the Caesarea Forum Wednesday that his economic policy would be based on fiscal responsibility, increasing Israelis' disposable income, and reducing government intervention in the economy.

"I intend to judge each step, each reform and each structural transformation in light of these [three central] principles," he said.

Hirchson said that unidentified "parties" were attempting, through private investigators, to harm him and his family, so that he would put an end to market reforms.

The threats, carried out over the past few months, were "in response to the reforms of yesterday and with the aim of foiling the reforms that are on the threshold," he said, adding that he informed the attorney-general of the threats.

"This won't work... Despite the threats, I will continue to do what is right for the economy of Israel," he pledged.

Key fiscal goals for the period 2007-2011 set by Hirchson include:

• At least 3% growth in per capita GDP

• "Uncompromising" compliance with the 1.7% governement spending growth target

• Gradual reduction of public spending to 44% by 2011

• Cutting national debt to 80% of GDP by 2011

• Balancing the budget by 2009

"We won't succeed in meeting these goals if we base the economy's growth on increased public spending," Hirchson warned, adding that changing priorities required "dividing the budgetary cake differently," without exceeding the budget.

Fiscal restraint would also directly help increase the amount of disposable income available to individual citizens, boosting economic growth, Hirchson said.

"The less the government spends, the less [tax] it levies from its citizens, leaving more disposable income in their hands," leading to "more consumption, more commerce, more employment, more savings, and therefore more welfare," he said.

Hirchson also said he would have surplus tax revenues directly refunded to citizens, increase public services, and speed up reforms aimed at increasing competition and bringing down the prices of goods and services. Once goals to cut debt are met, further tax reforms would be pursued, Hirchson promised.

"We must reach competitive tax levels relative to the Western world - both in the level of marginal tax and in corporate taxes," he said.

Hirchson also promised more market reforms, "above all, structural change in the electrical market," which would be carried out in 2007.

"I am determined to ensure the country's residents an available and reliable supply of electricity at lower prices," he said, noting that "monopolies strangle growth, make living costs more expensive, and hurt primarily the weaker [social] strata."

Hirchson and Finance Ministry Director-General Yossi Bachar are currently working on a reform of the structure of supervision of the capital markets.

Government intervention should be used only when market failures are proven "beyond a doubt," he said.

Israel's quick rate of economic growth - more than 5% annually - is "powered by significant growth of private consumer [spending], and as such, is healthy and sustainable," Hirchson said, adding that the growth was not "ex nihilo," but the result of economic policy that the ministry would continue under his leadership.

"If we act responsibly, there is no reason for it not to continue."

The growth is also accompanied by a "clear and consistent trend" of dropping unemployment and increased participation in the work force, Hirchson stressed.

"More Israelis are looking for work and more Israelis are finding work," Hirchson said.

Hirchson said another of his ministry's key goals would be to stop the growth of poverty in Israel in the course of 2007, calling widening social disparities "the central threat to further growth and flourishing of the Israeli economy."

"The economy is growing, but unhealthy. ... There are some who claim that if we wait long enough, the growth will trickle down to 'other' strata of the population," he said, referring to former finance minister Binyamin Netanyahu's earlier speech.

"I think otherwise. We don't have the privilege to wait. We must take effective and immediate steps that will bring the fruits of growth to every home in Israel," Hirchson said, but stressed the need to maintain fiscal restraint.

During 2007, he said the ministry would implement several steps to improve the condition of Israel's less wealthy and make it easier for the unemployed to find jobs, such as expanding provision of day care facilities; lowering the cost of public transportation; increasing provision of professional training and strengthening enforcement of labor laws.

Workers in Israel - whether employed directly or as "independent" workers - must also be assured a pension for retirement, to help prevent their descent into poverty as retirees, Hirchson said.

Hebrew University Professor Momi Dahan, one of the researchers leading the conference, presented data Wednesday morning showing that the rate of poverty jumps from 5% before retirement to "more than 20%" after retirment.

Poverty among children would be tackled through efforts to provide equal opportunities and improve education, Hirschson said.

Meretz MK and member of the Knesset Finance Committee Haim Oron praised Hirchson on the apparent "change of direction" within the Finance Ministry toward social concerns, but suggested that the fiscal limits Hirchson placed would lead to a "large disparity between the goals and their execution."

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[Israel] Health minister: Poverty is health hazard

from Y Net News

Yaacov Ben Yizri puts poverty at top of list of health threats along with high blood pressure. Minister details plan to reduce charges on various health services, extend discounts and exemptions for poor, transfer certain services to HMOs
Aviram Zino

Poverty is harmful to one’s health: Health Minister Yacov Ben Yizri said Wednesday there was a clear connection between the economy and health: “Poverty and social disparities are becoming a health hazard no less significant than high blood pressure,” Ben Yizri said at the Caesarea Conference Wednesday during a panel to gather recommendations for a long-term plan to decrease poverty in Israel, under the sponsorship of the Israel Democracy Institute.

“There is no doubt that the trend of growing social gaps is expressing itself in health indexes as well, such as life expectancy, infant deaths and other health problems,” Ben Yizri said. “The gaps in health are affected by economic gaps. Certain financial problems lead to health problems.”

Plan for health care reform

Addressing the Health Ministry’s plan to improve the situation, Ben Yizri said, “In the upcoming period we plan to extend the array of discounts and exemptions (offered the poor) on a long list of health services.” He explained that he would act to cancel various charges on health services and for the expansion of public funding of those services.

The ministry will also work to make doctor visits, infant immunization, and medications for the elderly free of charge and reduce the costs of nursing handicapped patients.

“I have no doubt that anchoring the subsidy of mental health and nursing will reduce the gaps,” the health minister explained the aim of the future plan. Health services are slated for reforms starting in 2007, in the framework of which the responsibility for providing and funding services is meant to pass from the state to HMOs, a step which hopes to improve certain services.


“The combination of health policy that promises universal entitlement on the one hand and aid for the disadvantaged populations on the other is the right way to reduce health gaps,” Ben Yizri recapitulated.

Meital Yasur Beit-Or contributed to the report

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[World Urban Forum 3] Cities to replace rural areas as centres of poverty –UN

from African News Dimension

A United Nations report on State of the World’s cities, 2006/2007, has projected that by next year, for the first time in human history, the majority of people will live in the cities.

Lagos, according to the report would remain the largest growing city in Africa and would habour even the largest population next to India by 2030, it added.

The UN report, which was released at the weekend also indicated that even at that, nearly a billion people will still be stuck in slums.

The world report added a warning that if care is not taken, cities would replace rural areas as the world's centres of poverty.

According to the "State of the World's Cities 2006/7" report from the U.N. Human Settlements Programme, an estimated 3.7 billion people will live in urban areas this year out of a world population of 6.45 billion . The UN Human Settlement Programme which seeks to promote better living condition for the human race also states that with cities growing and rural populations shrinking, especially in Africa and Asia, the likelihood of a shift in the urban-rural balance next year is quite imminent.

Eroding with the shift is the assumption that countries' urban populations are healthier and better off, said Anna Tibaijuka, the director of the U.N. program in her note to the report.

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[Canada] Poverty Myths

from The Hamilton Spectator

Tomorrow, the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction reveals its community plan after a year of study and discussion.

In preparation, The Spectator is presenting a daily exploration of poverty in Hamilton and commonly held beliefs about its causes and consequences.

MYTH FIVE:

"POOR PEOPLE JUST NEED TO LEARN HOW TO BUDGET"

Well, actually, many start the month in the hole. In 2004, the Social Planning and Research Council of Hamilton compared top welfare benefits to average local costs of food and shelter.

They called the extra money -- which has to cover heat, hydro, phone, clothes, laundry, toiletries, cleaning supplies, school supplies and tuition, and anything unexpected -- the "remainder."

For a single man age 25 to 49, the remainder is less than nothing: it's negative $146 a month. For a single mom with one child, $157 a month. For a two-parent family with two kids, it's $66.

And Paul Johnson, project director of the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction, says many of the poorest Hamiltonians are learning to budget.

They do so in community kitchens, in nutrition classes, at social agencies, at early-years centres and more. Mentors are also teaching immigrants about Canadian life: for example, that a grocery store is a better place to buy groceries than a corner store.

And, at the extreme end of the poverty spectrum, hundreds of Hamiltonians in extreme need have their welfare cheques managed by trustees at places like Wesley Urban Ministries. Their rent and bills are paid first, and they can be given an allowance, perhaps daily.

"Circumstances could be fine for many people as long as life doesn't have any blips," said Johnson noting pay-day loans and credit cards can get low-income people into a debt spiral.

MYTH SIX:

"THE POOR ARE POOR BECAUSE THEY HAVE TOO MANY CHILDREN"

This is an old saw, one you can find in the portrayal of the ever-growing, impoverished Catholic family in the film, Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. Or, you know, the one about single moms having kids to boost their monthly cheques?

But it falters with scrutiny.

According to 2001 Census data, nearly three-quarters of all single-parent low-income households have just one or two kids. And low-income couples look pretty average when you add up their kids: 64 per cent have one or two kids, just 4 per cent below the city-wide rate.

However, Hamilton is seeing the arrival of large immigrant and refugee families. Still, less than 10 per cent of poor local families have five or more kids. This is just 1.5 per cent higher than the city-wide rate for families that size.

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[Rwanda] Governor Tells Mayors to Act On Poverty, Hunger

from All Africa

Provincial governor Eraste Kabera has urged all the district mayors to prioritise strategies like agriculture and income generating activities aimed at eradicating poverty and hunger. The governor made the call during a one-day meeting meant to evaluate the implementation process of performance contracts signed between the president and all district mayors early this year.

In his opening remarks, Kabera decried the poverty level in the Province, calling on the district leaders to come up with clear plans aimed at increasing income levels of residents in their areas through increased production in agriculture and other developmental activities.

"We must come up with clear strategies that will lead to a radical change of the economic status of our areas. You must mobilise residents, especially youths, on new methods of agriculture that will boost their quality and quantity output to generate more incomes. Residents should be mobilised to form associations into which financial assistance can be extended for income generating activities," Kabera told the mayors, pointing that the prolonged drought, which had made the area come to a standstill, should never get them unawares again, as residents must be sensitised on food security in case of such catastrophes.

The meeting took place at the provincial premises and was mainly attended among by district mayors who resolved to appeal to the Ministry of Agriculture and animal husbandry to start donating cows for restocking to residents as all procedures and required formalities have been finalised by the districts' authorities.

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[Mozambique] Further IMF Loan

from All Africa

Maputo

The Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), meeting in Washington on Monday, agreed to release a further 1.62 million Special Drawing Rights (SDR), equivalent to 2.4 million US dollars, to Mozambique.

This is part of a package of 11.36 million SDR (about 16.7 million dollars) agreed under the IMF's Poverty Reduction and Growth Faculty (PRGF).

Funds under this facility are released piecemeal, after the IMF board reviews the economic performance of the beneficiary country. So far Mozambique has undergone four of these quarterly reviews, and total disbursements under the PRGF have reached 8.1 million SDR.

According to an IMF press release received by AIM, the Fund's Deputy Managing Director, Takatoshi Kato, announcing the new disbursement, praised Mozambique's "strong economic performance, despite exogenous shocks".

When Kato visited Mozambique in 2005, he complained that the government was not collecting enough taxes, but he seems to have changed his mind subsequently. He declared that "fiscal results have been commendable and all performance criteria through end-March 2006 have been met". Kato claimed that the main challenges facing Mozambique in the medium term were "sustaining broad-based economic growth and making further inroads in alleviating poverty through the implementation of a poverty reduction strategy for 2006-09".

In order to achieve the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), Kato added, the Mozambican government "should ensure that additional external financing, including Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI) resources, are allocated to the most economically and socially productive areas in a manner that does not compromise macroeconomic stability".

The MDRI is the debt write-off proposed by the G8 group of most industrialised nations in their July 2005 summit in Scotland. It covers debts owed by 18 poor countries, including Mozambique, to three multilateral institutions - the IMF, the World Bank and the African Development Bank.

Using the coded language typical of IMF statements, Kato did not specify exactly what he meant. What are the possible uses of funds from debt relief that the IMF imagines might "compromise macroeconomic stability ?" Kato declared that "The authorities' commitment to create sufficient fiscal space for priority investments is welcome" - which is a marked change from his line of a year ago, when he was querying the fiscal incentives offered to investors.

Kato praised the Bank of Mozambique for its restrictive monetary and flexible exchange rate policies which "have served the country well", and gave the IMF's blessing to the currency reform now under way.

This involves lopping the final three zeros off the currency, so that the current 1,000 metical coin, for example, will be worth just one "new family" metical, in the terminology adopted by the government and the central bank. The new notes and coins will enter circulation on 1 July.

"Supported by a public information campaign covering the entire country, the introduction of the new family of metical banknotes should protect price stability and secure the savings of the poor", claimed Kato. "Mozambique's external debt levels will remain well below its indicative thresholds for debt distress in the foreseeable future", the IMF official said. "In that context, the authorities' commitment to financing the transfer of majority ownership of the Cahora Bassa dam operating company through non-recourse financing that does not increase the government's liabilities to commercial creditors is welcome".

Kato seems to know rather more about the arrangements for the purchase of Cahora Bassa than the Mozambican public does.

Under the memorandum signed in Lisbon last November, the Portuguese government will sell off most of its shares in the dam operating company, HCB, to Mozambique, so that the Mozambican state will own 85 per cent of the company, and Portugal 15 per cent.

This involves paying the Portuguese treasury about 950 million dollars. It is expected that 250 million will come from HCB itself, but the Mozambican government must find the other 700 million - and so far it has made no public statement as to the source of these funds.

The IMF's resident representative in Maputo, Felix Fisher, told AIM on Tuesday that, although the IMF's loans were small, compared with the sums disbursed by those donors who provide support directly to the Mozambican state budget, the IMF played a key role in reassuring Mozambique's other partners.

"That's how the IMF has been supporting the country in the area of reforms", he said. "The result is that the partners feel safer in continuing to support the government".

The IMF describes the PRGF as its concessional facility for low-income countries. PRGF loans carry an annual interest rate of 0.5 per cent and are repayable over 10 years with a 5-year grace period on principal payments.

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[Bush Initiative on Malaria] Uganda: America Helps in Fighting Malaria

from All Africa

Pascal Niwebyona
Kampala

THE American government is to help Kabale district to spray homes against mosquitoes.

The district director of health services, Dr. Patrick Tusiime, said they were carrying out indoor residual spraying using ICON insecticide.

Spraying has started in Maziba sub-county but will cover all the 19 sub-counties in order to reduce the incidence of malaria.

The funds came from the President Bush Initiative on Malaria, a pilot programme that will roll-out to other highland districts.

He said at least five tones of the insecticide and equipment had already been procured and delivered to the district.

Tusiime said the spraying was being supervised by the Ministry of Health, United States Agency for International Development and implemented by RPI, an American company.

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[East Africa] Poverty, Power, Top EAC Budgets

from All Africa

Ben Moses Ilakut
Kampala

Finance ministers from the three East African countries last week demonstrated that poverty and power shortage are perhaps their biggest challenges today and years to come.

But the ministers also showed that amidst all odds the East African Community must grow if they have to overcome common challenges.

Like his colleagues Dr Ezra Suruma (Uganda), Mrs. Zakia Meghji (Tanzania), Kenya's finance chief Mr Amos Kimunya said despite the strong economic performance in the last three years, poverty and unemployment remained a big challenge. In fact, analysts said last week that rapid rejuvenation of Kenya's economy has had little effect on the lives of the majority poor.

Figures show that the gap between the country's poor and the rich has continued to widen in spite of a three-year sustained economic growth.

The same message came out strongly in Tanzania as it did in Uganda. In Uganda, the eradication of poverty came top on the list of government priorities, only second to power.

Unlike in the past when defence was top most in the agenda, this time round poverty, social services and scientific research made it to the priority list.

In Tanzania a whole 45.8% of the national budget was allocated to the National Strategy for Poverty Reduction and Economic Development (MKUKUTA), which will be spent on economic growth.

Mrs. Meghji said the funds would be spent on infrastructure, such as the completion of road projects, completion of the large-scale water project that extends from Lake Victoria to the towns of Shinyanga and Kahama.

But the budgets laid lots of emphasis on the power crises which have cause regression, especially in Tanzania and Uganda.

Uganda's Ezra Suruma gave an extra Ush70billion to thermal generation to procure 100MW of electricity in addition to the deferral of loan repayments to government amounting to Ush33billion per year.

The budget also allocated Ush99billion to the Energy Fund, a newly created outfit, which is expected to be ring-fenced for dam construction only.

The fund is expected to facilitate the development of large hydropower generation facilities at Bujagali and Karuma to address the power crises in the long term.

Tanzania on the other side took pragmatic measures to diversify and enhance the country's electricity generation capacity, upgrade the national electricity grid and distribution network.

The funds will be spent to increase generation capacity for TANESCO by approximately 145MW.

And like Uganda and Kanya, Tanzania will this year amend the East African Community Management Act 2004 in order to effect a number of aspects related to Common External Tariffs (CET) and harmonization of several other rates.

Mrs. Meghji said the intended amendments to the EAC-Common External Tariffs (EAC-CET) "will be effected through a Legal Notice that will be published in the East African Community Gazette."

In Uganda Suruma announced similar measures including the reduction of duty imposed on selected goods from Kenya from 10% to 8% in addition to exempting from import duty, energy saving appliances in response to the current power crisis.

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[Rwanda] Country Gets $11.8 Million IMF Grant to Fight Poverty

from All Africa

Peter Munaita, the Eastafrican
Nairobi

The International Monetary Fund has granted Rwanda $11.8 million over the next three years to support policies aimed at accelerating growth and reducing poverty.

The approval follows the signing of a technical agreement between the fund's managing director Rodrigo de Rato and the country's Finance and Economic Planning Minister James Musoni on a new Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF).

Although the new facility took effect on June 12, only $1.7 million can be accessed immediately. The other disbursement is tied to periodic reviews, the first in November this year and the next in March 2007.

PRGF, the IMF's concessional facility for low-income countries, carries an annual interest rate of 0.5 per cent and is repayable over 10 years with a 5.5-year grace period on principal payments.

On June 8, the IMF concluded a review of its Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility with Rwanda, which was negotiated in 2002. It released a final tranche of $0.85 million, bringing the total disbursements under the facility to $6 million.

The funds were released despite Rwanda's delay in meeting two critical benchmarks related to priority spending and an audit on the Prime Holdings hotel business, which were due in September last year.

"Supported by debt relief under the Enhanced HIPC and the Multilateral Debt Reduction Initiatives, the government of Rwanda is well placed to accelerate its reform agenda aimed at enhancing economic growth and reducing poverty," the letter of intent says.

Besides targeting a growth rate of between 5 and 7 per cent by 2009, the government intends to focus on a new wave of reforms to raise productivity, particularly in the agriculture and export sectors, where tea exports are expected to be boosted by the recent privatisation of three factories.

The key medium-term objectives also include maintaining inflation at around 5 per cent; keeping an import cover of reserves of at least four months and increasing the ratio of revenue to 14 per cent of the total value of the country's goods and services.

The country expects a moderation in import growth when electricity generated by the Lake Kivu project replaces diesel-generated electricity, reducing fuel imports from 2007 onward substantially. Overall, agriculture, trade, and private sector-driven initiatives are expected to be the main sources of growth.

The National Bank of Rwanda is also expected to be strengthened through amendments to the banking law that were submitted to stakeholders in December to deal with problem banks. The managers say NBR has reached an agreement on a restructuring plan, including a possible capital injection by shareholders.

But the problems of transparency with regard to the running of two hotels held by Prime Holdings remain following a recent audit. "It was not possible to determine if proper books of account were kept by the hotels, the auditors concluded.

The findings forced the government to cancel the contract with the management company and is in negotiations with the Intercontinental group to take on the management of the hotels. The hotels were one issue on which the IMF executive board granted waivers for non performance when they released the sixth tranche of $0.85 million under the previous PRGF.

The IMF deputy managing director Agustin Carstens said Rwanda's economic performance strengthened last year with agricultural recovery pushing growth to 6 per cent.

"Macroeconomic policy implementation was broadly on track. On the structural side, progress was mixed, partly due to capacity constraints. In particular, reforms in public expenditure management remain pending," Mr Carstens said.

He said the new program will improve the quality and efficiency of fiscal spending with priority given to critical sectors like education. He said the MDRI would free resources for food imports arising from drought and the Lake Kivu project that will generate electricity from Methane gas.

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[Canada] Poverty Myths

from Hamilton Spectator

On Friday, the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction reveals its community plan after a year of study and discussion.

In preparation, The Spectator is presenting a daily exploration of poverty in Hamilton and commonly held beliefs about its causes and consequences.

MYTH ONE:

"Welfare lets the poor live well"

Only if you consider living below the poverty line to be good-living. Every province's welfare rate keeps people below the poverty line, one attempt to get people to work.

And rates sure don't keep pace with the cost of living. In Ontario, the 1995 creation of Ontario Works cut welfare 22 per cent (or 35 per cent when inflation is factored in).

As the cost of living rose 25 per cent since 1995, benefits stayed flat. Rates rose 3 per cent in 2005, and another 2 per cent this year, but those were the first increases in 12 years.

So, how well can you live on welfare? Here's how close recipients get to the poverty line, using the 2003 Low-Income Cut-Off (LICO) as this line.

* Single people get just 38 per cent of the poverty line;

* Single parents get 62 per cent of the poverty line;

* A couple with kids gets 55 per cent of the poverty line.

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[Canada] Poverty myths part 3

from The Hamilton Spectator

On Friday, the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction reveals its community plan after a year of study and discussion.

In preparation, The Spectator is presenting a daily exploration of poverty in Hamilton and commonly held beliefs about its causes and consequences.

MYTH THREE:

"POOR PEOPLE JUST WON'T WORK"

Wrong. It's based on a stereotype of the poor as lazy, or drunken, or irresponsible compared to the general population.

British critic John Berger put it well when he wrote, "the modern poor are not pitied ... but written off as trash."

Here's the reality: more than one-quarter of Hamilton's poor work, but still can't reach the poverty line. To reach what Statistics Canada calls its Low Income Cut Off, a single mom with a child would have to earn $11.30 per hour. An adult with two kids would have to earn $14.11 per hour.

But within this number is a huge divide. Poor couples are much more likely to work than are poor seniors (just 3 per cent work). And immigrants, aboriginal people, women and visible minorities are all more likely to work than the typical poor Hamiltonian.

And those on welfare? Surely, they don't work. Can they even work, if they get benefits?

Actually, at least 14 per cent of the 10,205 Hamilton households on Ontario Works contained a working person in 2005. Their average pay was about $500 a month.

More than 23,000 people in Hamilton depend on Ontario Works to live. Nearly half of these (11,000 people) are job-searching or training full-time.

Another 3,500 or so are in school (excluding high school students). That's many more than the nearly 2,300 who've deferred job-related activities, due to health problems, abuse or because they are raising pre-schoolers.

Changes to Ontario Works in 1997, which required recipients to try to find employment when their kids are school-aged, has decreased the caseload. So, the stereotype of a single mom having kids for money is certainly changing.

New rules now let Ontario Works recipients keep half of their work earnings, on top of their benefits. And, while welfare doesn't come with a time limit, it's not a permanent option for most: the average time on Ontario Works is 25 months, but this varies widely between singles, who are quicker to get jobs, and single parents who take longer.

MYTH FOUR:

"IMMIGRANTS COME HERE TO SPONGE OFF OUR COUNTRY"

Think again. Even though recent immigrants are 2.5 times as likely to live in poverty as other Hamiltonians, they are also much more likely to work.

The odds of a poor Hamiltonian having a job: 1 in 4. The odds a poor, recent immigrant has one: 1 in 3.

It fits the classic immigrant story of the first generation willing to do menial work so their kids get a better life. Data from the 1980s and 1990s shows, however, that immigrants are having a harder time escaping poverty.

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[World Urban Forum 3] U.N. poverty conference warned it ignores the poor

from Reuters India

By Allan Dowd

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) - Officials and activists meeting to craft an international response to growing urban poverty were warned on Tuesday they don't understand many of the people they are trying to help.

Jockin Arputham of India's National Slum Dwellers Federation also said the United Nations was not doing enough to stop the forced evictions of urban poor by private developers and government-sponsored aid programs.

"Where is the teeth of the United Nations?" Arputham asked the World Urban Forum, a U.N.-sponsored conference in Vancouver that has drawn more than 8,000 urban planners, academics, activists and government officials.

The week-long meeting follows last week's U.N. report that warned that governments cannot ignore growing urban slums as people continue to move into already strained cities to escape rural poverty.

The report said the world will reach a critical point in 2007 when the majority of the globe's population will be urbanized. By 2030, 80 percent of people will live in cities, it predicted.

The report cited evictions as a growing problems faced by the urban poor. It estimated that 6.7 million people were forced from their homes between 2000 and 2002, up from 4.2 million people between 1998 and 2000.

Housing planners who are developing programs to aid slum dwellers are often ignorant of the cultural concerns of the people they are trying to help, Arputham said.

"And you call yourself experts?" he asked sarcastically.

Arputham also told the conference that many of the delegates were less interested in reducing world poverty than in holding more international meetings and writing academic reports.

Arputham's message that private-sector aid programs do not help the poor contrasted sharply with that of U.S. Housing and Urban Development chief Alphonso Jackson -- who is using the forum to promote private home ownership.

Jackson told the conference that governments alone cannot solve the problems of poverty and need to work with both private developers and "faith based" organizations.

"The army of compassion lives in the community not in government," Jackson said.

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[Pakistan] US to provide $200m for promotion of health, poverty alleviation

from The Pakistan Tribune

America will provide $ 200 million aid to Pakistan for promotion of public health and education and alleviation of poverty. An agreement in this regard was signed by Pakistan and America.

Chairman Pakistan American Business Council, Iftikhar Ali Malik, said that the aid, which would be provided under the agreement to Pakistan would help in construction of schools in Northern Areas including other part of the country. He said that the aid for health sector would help in controlling and combating many diseases.

He said that the living standard of masses would be enhanced due to the steps taken for promotion of education and alleviation of poverty.

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[Pakistan] WB, UNDP question poverty estimates

from Pakistan Dawn

The World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) have estimated that poverty rate in Pakistan ranges between 25.7 per cent and 28.3 per cent as against the government’s estimates of 23.9 per cent.

The two institutions have asked the government to improve the methodology of arriving at poverty estimates to depict a genuine picture of the overall condition and standard of living of people in the country. They also raised questions about poverty surveys that did not portray the condition of majority of rural people.

The government had announced early this month that 23.9 per cent people lived below the poverty line and that poverty rate had declined by about 10.6 per cent from 34.46 per cent in 2001. It said the estimates and methodology had been endorsed by development partners, like the WB, the DFID of the United Kingdom, the Asian Development Bank and UNDP’s expert Prof Nanak Kakwani.

Prof Kakwani said in a written reply to Dawn’s questions that he had got the poverty estimates of 25.7 per cent in 2004-5 and 35.7 per cent in 2001-2 by using a refined methodology.

“In my report, I also expressed the views that the CRPRID (Centre for Research on Poverty Reduction and Income Distribution) methodology could be improved considerably,” he said.

He, however, confirmed that by adopting the poverty estimates and methodology used by the government’s CRPRID, he arrived at the poverty estimates of 34.46 per cent in 2001-2 and 24 per cent in 2004-5.

He said the earlier poverty figure of 32.1 per cent being used by the government for 2001-2 “cannot be justified by any methodology”.

He said: “The new methodology which I am proposing brings greater dis-aggregation. It provides separate poverty lines for food and essential basic non-food items of consumption such as clothing, housing, education, health, transport and so on. It is more transparent and can identify the genuine poor.”

The World Bank Country Director for Pakistan John Wall told Dawn that his institution had no hesitation to endorse the numbers arrived at by the CRPRID to avoid confusion and it had adopted the government’s definition of poverty line.

He, however, said that according to the World Bank’s estimates based on the government’s survey the poverty rate in the country was about 28.3 per cent in 2004-5, compared with 33.3 per cent in 2001, showing a decline of five per cent. He argued that the government used the consumer price index (CPI) to gauge the poverty rate from 2001 to 2005 but it did not adequately represent the price situation, particularly in rural areas, and that was why the government was now working on expanding the CPI coverage. He said there was a wide difference in prices situation indicated by the CPI and the Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement (PSLM) survey.

He said the CPI-based and survey-based poverty rate was put at 30 per cent in 1998-9 but the difference between the two methods was very big during the period between 2001 and 2005.

He said the results of 2001 and 2005 were not comparable because 2001 was a drought year and 2005 emerged as a bumper crop year.

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[World Urban Forum 3] Poverty serious RP problem, De Castro tells world meet

from INQ7

POVERTY has remained a serious problem in the Philippines despite government measures to improve the lives of the urban poor, Vice President Noli de Castro told a United Nations-sponsored forum in Canada.

Speaking at the third session of the World Urban Forum (WUF3) organized by UN Habitat in Vancouver, De Castro said the urban poor in the Philippines had endured “mixed” conditions in the last 16 years.

While poverty incidence went down from 44.2 percent in 1985 to 30.4 percent in 2003, the number of poor families rose as a result of population growth, migration to urban centers, and limited resources, De Castro said.

De Castro spoke at the session “Achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs): Slum Upgrading and Affordable Housing,” which opened with a clip from the 1990 documentary film “On Borrowed Land.”

The documentary examined the urban crisis in Manila arising from the post-EDSA flood of rural migrants and the emergence of sprawling squatter communities along Manila Bay.

“Perhaps the most dramatic symbol is our successful transformation of the erstwhile icon of urban poverty in the Philippines -- Smokey Mountain --into a commercial and residential center,” he said.

However, there are many more urban poverty problems that the government still needs to address, De Castro admitted.

On the issue of “voluntary evictions” undertaken by the government to pave the way for the rehabilitation of major railways, De Castro stressed that demolitions and evictions were avoided or deferred “as long as the continued stay of informal settlers in their present sites do not pose a danger to others or to themselves.”

Whenever feasible, the government would regularize the tenure of informal settlers through presidential proclamations disposing of public land as socialized housing sites, he said.

De Castro also explained that “voluntary eviction” was part of the “beneficiary-led and localized” resettlement program for informal settlers affected by the clearing operations as in the case of the North-South Rail Linkage project.

The resettlement program has resulted in the peaceful relocation of all the families of Phase 1 of the NorthRail alignment, De Castro said.

He also said that the government remained “committed to wage a relentless battle against poverty in our cities and urban areas.”

De Castro also met with UN Habitat Executive Director Anna Tibaijuka during which he reiterated the country’s support of the goals of the habitat agenda “both at the national and international levels.”

He assured Tibaijuka that the government would continue to champion the principles of the twin campaigns on secure tenure and good urban governance supported by UN Habitat.

Some 15,000 participants from different countries attended the WUF3, whose theme was “Our Future: Sustainable Cities -- Turning Ideas into Action.”

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[Effects on Health] INTERVIEW-Poverty raises risk of bird flu pandemic -official

from Reuters

By Dina Kyriakidou

ATHENS, June 21 (Reuters) - Poverty stops African and Asian nations from taking measures against bird flu, raising the risk of a pandemic from the virus that has so far killed about 130 people, a top European health official said on Wednesday.

While European countries have culled millions of birds and taken precautions to stop the spread of the disease, little is done in Asian and especially African countries, said Zsuzsanna Jakab, director of the EU's disease prevention agency, ECDC.

"They cannot afford to cull chickens and they eat even infected animals. This is very serious," she told Reuters in an interview. "This situation in Africa is a new situation for the global public health and therefore we have to keep it under scrutiny."

The deadly H5N1 remains mainly a virus for birds but experts fear it will change into a form easily transmitted among humans, sweeping the world, killing millions within weeks or months.

Since 2003, it has spread rapidly from Asia to Europe and Africa, taking 130 human lives among 228 cases in 10 countries. About 50 countries around the world have reported cases in animals.

"If the pandemic is to come from the H5N1 virus ... I would assume that it would come from those countries where the disease is endemic, so it's quite likely from Asia or Africa," Jakab said. "There, they are not culling infected animals, the main strategy of fighting avian influenza."

Unlike Europe, where the disease is believed to spread from migratory birds to domestic poultry, in Africa it is mainly contracted through cross-border commerce, both legal and illegal, she said.

GOOD NEWS

The good news is that the virus appears not to be mutating quickly to a strain that easily moves from human to human.

"What we have seen is that the genetic set up of the virus in the last 10 years has not changed in humans," said Jakab, who is in Athens for a meeting of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).

"In animals there has been some change in the genetic set up but not in humans and that is a good sign," she added.

But strict precautions must be in place, especially during the wild bird migration seasons when risks are higher.

"In Europe, the main route of transmission has been the migrating birds ... and therefore we have to be prepared," she said. "I think that we have to get used to a seasonal pattern of bird flu."

While measures taken within the EU were satisfactory, she said, European countries outside EU borders were still struggling to enforce them -- mainly culling, isolating domestic farm animals and protecting farm workers.

The more human cases that appear, the higher the risk avian flu will mingle with human flu and jump from human to human.

"The risk rises with every human case. The (bird) migration ... puts some populations more at risk," she said.

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[India] Poor health keeps UP farmer in debt

from The Times Of India

LUCKNOW: UP has the highest population of indebted farmer households in the country. And the main reason is that a large portion - around 60% - of their earnings is spent on health. As a result of which 25% of those falling ill end up in belw poverty line strata.

What is more disturbing is the fact that proportion of India's poor living in UP has risen from 17% in 1983 to over 20% in 1999. Studies show that UP has high concentration of people living around the poverty line and their nutritional status leaves them vulnerable to poor health.

Moreover, the worst hit are the indebted farmer households. They are estimated to be well around 40.3% (6.9 million) of the total 17.6 million farmer households in the state. Average outstanding loan per household is around Rs 6706.

Studies show that diseases are rampant among them and over 40% of those hospitalised are forced to borrow heavily or sell assets to cover medical expenses. As a result, over 25% of them fall below poverty line because of hospital expense.

These facts were pointed out in the UP development report, prepared by the Planning Commission; the Twelth Finance Commission's report, annual plan document of the planning department of UP and the World Bank's document entitled 'Poverty in India: The Challenge of UP'.

An assessment of utilisation patterns of public and private healthcare facilities shows that despite the provision of free or low-cost services at government healthcare facilities, demand for public sector outpatient services are low even amongst those of BPL category.

The poor are increasingly turning to private providers, even for treatment of infectious disease such as TB and Malaria, which are designated as primary responsibilities of the public health system.

The high percentage of outpatient curative services sought from the private sector, even by the lowest income group of the population suggests that the public health system is not adequately fulfilling the health needs of the poor, particularly in rural areas.

At present, the major problems at the primary level in healthcare can chiefly be attributed to shortage of around 3200 qualified doctors at primary health centres (PHC), non-availability of proper infrastructure - including equipment and consumables - besides poor motivation of the public to seek timely help mainly because of misbeliefs, superstitions and lack of health education.

The result of non-functioning PHCs has been that in many cases, diseases are neither diagnosed in their early stages, nor treated.

The rural population has to often travel to urban areas when they can no longer bear the suffering caused by the disease, thus increasing the load on hospitals in the urban areas and ending up with serious complications that, in many cases, could have easily been treated at their early stages.

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[WTO Talkes Doha Round] Managing Globalization: WTO chief fields queries from readers

from the International Herald Tribune

Global free-trade talks, known as the Doha round, are facing a new, end-of- June deadline for progress. The International Herald Tribune's global economics columnist, Daniel Altman, recently moderated an online discussion between readers and the director general of the World Trade Organization, Pascal Lamy, on issues surrounding the talks.

Here are the questions and excerpts of Lamy's responses to them posted at blogs.iht.com/globalization.

To what degree have bilateral and regional trade agreements hampered progress in the Doha round negotiations?

Jonathan Dingel, United States

So far they have not proven a distraction. Bilateral agreements are not in and of themselves a bad thing. But they don't cover important areas. Trade-distorting farm subsidies, for example, will never be covered in a bilateral agreement. Such agreements, furthermore, can create disparate rules which can be confusing to entrepreneurs. Often the poorest countries are left on the sidelines with respect to bilateral negotiations. The bilateral route is open to the United States, the European Union, India or China but not for the vast majority of poor countries. Furthermore, developing countries have a limited clout in bilateral negotiations with developed countries. In the WTO by contrast, developing countries have worked together to establish much more powerful platforms from which to negotiate with developed countries. The WTO is a kind of UN for trade, but without a security council!

Trade among the poor

Given the (general) consensus behind the benefits of south- south foreign direct investment flows, how can these be encouraged through international trade policy?

Marc Andrew, United Kingdom

In fact, WTO members were faced with a choice on whether to include negotiations on investment rules in the Doha round. Members decided this was not the time for such negotiations to commence. Even so, I am of the view that scaling down trade barriers and creating new trade rules through the Doha round would spark greater south-south trade and investment. Investment being often the flip side of trade. In fact, this negotiation has shown that the traditional north-south focus of the trade talks is now solidly accompanied by an equally intense south-south angle.

What do you think about the argument that says that the only solution to the "race to the bottom paradox" is setting a global minimum wage (and other global labor and ecological standards)? Do you think that the WTO can, or should, be a force that pushes in that direction?

Shimri Zameret, Israel

The question of labor standards has confronted our members before. At the Singapore ministerial conference in 1996, WTO members agreed not to take steps that would undermine the comparative advantage developing countries have with respect to labor costs. Attempts to link trade rules and core labor standards as per the International Labor Organization (ILO) failed at the launch of these talks in Doha in 2001 due to a lack of consensus. But this does not mean that the WTO and the ILO should not enhance their collaboration. In fact, our two secretariats are currently working together on a report concerning the impact of trade on work.

How is the WTO working towards the international recognition of credentials and experience to facilitate the mobility of labor? What should we learn from the European model?

Michael Izen, Canada

This very question is the subject of intensive negotiations right now at the WTO. As part of the negotiations on opening trade in services, WTO members are discussing the temporary movement of professionals across borders. Part of these negotiations concerns mutual recognition of credentials, standards and practices. These are not easy negotiations because often people confuse this with the issue of immigration. The two are not the same, but as you know the fact that the immigration debate in North America and Europe has been contentious does not make matters better.

In the public's perception, the WTO is concerned mostly with managing international commerce in a very basic manner, i.e. which considers all goods and countries to be essentially comparable, and equivalent. Why is there no room for an ethical dimension? Must we accept cheap goods originating in countries where the workers are denied basic rights, safe and healthy workplaces, and political freedoms? If so, does this not mean that the WTO, in effect, is merely a husband for the trade interests of super-wealthy corporations and billionaires, at the expense of propagating what the Monde Diplomatique calls "social dumping" (Ignacio Ramonet, January 2006)?

Peter Marteinson, Canada

Part of the problem has been that the international community has not accepted the notion of applying economic sanctions against countries for failure to meet labor standards. It's not clear that sanctions would be more effective in addressing the problem than incentives to improve workplace conditions.

"Social dumping," as you call it, would also need to be more precisely defined by an international consensus. You can expect that Canada and Bangladesh, for instance, may not easily agree on such a concept.

On the question of cheap goods, it is true that goods manufactured in many developing countries tend to be cheaper than goods made in the West. Lower labor costs are among the few areas where poor countries have comparative advantage over their industrial country partners. Economists widely agree that trade is an essential element in assisting countries in their efforts to climb the ladder of development and alleviate poverty. There are many examples of the beneficial effects of trade in this respect. Economic development can also be a catalyst for political reform as we have seen in places like South Korea.

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[India] Rent-a-wife business grows as poverty spreads

from The independent On Line

Mumbai - A shortage of eligible single women has prompted some poverty-stricken husbands in western India to rent out their wives to other men for a monthly rate, according to a news report on Monday.

One man allowed his farm labourer wife, and mother of two, to stay with her boss for 8 000 rupees a month, said the Times of India citing police officials.

Poor families and middlemen have also cashed in on the shortage of women by selling off their daughters to men in Gujarat, one of India's wealthiest states.

Brokers can make up to 200 000 rupees a month from finding and selling wives to single men in the state of 50-million people, according to the newspaper.

"We cannot take action against this activity as no one comes forward to lodge a complaint," deputy superintendent of police, Naresh Muniya, at Ankleshwar in southern Gujarat, told the newspaper.

"We do not rule out the possibility of minors being married off to the rich," he said.

India's 2001 census showed there were 921 women to every 1 000 men in Gujarat. India has a widespread problem of female foeticide because of fears of the high dowry costs linked to having girls.

The practice of giving dowries, while banned in the 1980s, remains common in India's male-dominated society with families impoverished by the giving of cash and goods to the groom on marriage.

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[Effects on Health] Child poverty linked to mental health

from In The News

Children who have experienced poverty or other disadvantages are more likely to develop mental health problems, the British Medical Association (BMA) has claimed.

A report published today suggests that children coming from disadvantaged backgrounds are suffering from a number of mental health-related problems, including insomnia, unstable tempers and depressive and obsessive disorders.

Those who have witnessed domestic violence, been brought up in care or as asylum-seekers also face a heightened risk, the report argues.

Dr Vivienne Nathanson, head of BMA ethics and science, has highlighted the 45 per cent of children looked after by local authorities who have mental health issues.

"These children may have come from socially and economically deprived backgrounds, and are more likely to under-perform at school," she claims.

"Children from deprived backgrounds have a poorer start in life on many levels, but without good mental health they may not have a chance to develop emotionally and reach their full potential in life."

One reason for the link between poverty and mental health problem could originate from physiological rather than the more obvious environmental factors.

Today's report suggests that diet and physical exercise are both crucial elements to mental health – a link with poverty which correlates with the lower levels of concern about such matters among those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

In response the report has called for renewed scientific research into these links, as well as for the government to improve the innovation and flexibility of the care services it provides.

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[Massachusetts] Study: Poverty high in region

from The Republican

By STAN FREEMAN
sfreeman@repub.com

Impoverished once meant jobless, but increasingly in the Pioneer Valley, even the employed are poor.

New figures show the Pioneer Valley has a dramatically higher percentage of low-income students in its schools than any other region of the state, with working poor families accounting for many if not most of those children. According to figures from the University of Massachusetts Donahue Institute, 40.2 percent of students in schools, grades kindergarten through 12, in Franklin, Hampshire and Hampden counties in the 2004-2005 academic year were from low-income families.

Low income was defined by the study as $34,872 for a family of four.

No other region of the state had even 30 percent low-income students.

"The figures are striking. We were surprised," said Eric T. Nakajima, senior research manager at the institute.

"Chicopee, Holyoke and Springfield are known to have quite high concentrations of low-income families, but in fact there is a wide distribution of school districts in the valley that have a high percentage. Even in rural areas, you sometimes get a high percentage," he said.

In 2004, the poverty level was defined as an income for a family of four of $18,850 or below. Low-income was defined for the UMass study as a household income for a family of four at or below 185 percent of the poverty level, or $34,872.

Federal census figures show that in 2000, 12.4 percent of the three counties' residents were living in households at or below the poverty level. The fact that nearly 40 percent of students were from low-income households implies that most were from families whose income was above the poverty level but below the low-income level.

"That group is almost certainly the working poor," Nakajima said.

Gail D. Pisacane, who has worked for 23 years with the Valley Opportunity Council, which offers financial aid to the region's poor, said, "When I started, I would say maybe 20 percent of our clients were working poor. Now I'm going to say, without a doubt, 50 percent."

"People have one vision of what poverty is like. They think of people who are on welfare. But many poor people are out there working hard, at least 40 hours a week, often working more than one job, just to make ends meet," she said.

U.S. Rep. Richard E. Neal, D-Springfield, said the figures are a "real challenge to educators" and he called for greater federal investment in public schools.

Timothy W. Brennan, executive director of the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission, said the widespread poverty in the region "is why there is a great need for assistance out of Boston, assistance for more programs that will generate additional jobs, particularly those with a career ladder, rather than minimum-wage jobs."

As expected, the region's larger cities, Holyoke and Springfield, had the highest rates of low-income students, 76.3 percent and 75.8 percent respectively. However, some small communities also had rates much higher than the statewide average, which was 27.8 percent. Orange had a rate of 48.7 percent; Rowe, 44.3 percent; and Ware, 42.3 percent.

The school districts with the lowest rates, all below 7 percent, were Longmeadow at 4 percent, East Longmeadow at 6 percent, Whately at 6.6 percent and Hampden-Wilbraham at 6.8 percent.

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[Canada] Poverty Myths

from The Hamilton Spectator

On Friday, the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction reveals its community plan after a year of study and discussion.

In preparation for it, The Spectator is presenting a daily exploration of poverty in Hamilton and commonly-held beliefs about its causes and also its consequences.

MYTH TWO:

"THE POOR WILL JUST SPEND THEIR BENEFIT CHEQUES ON BEER AND POPCORN"

Of course, drug and alcohol abuse, problem gambling and just plain bad decisions can land people in poverty, (although divorce or the death of a spouse are probably more common causes). But the image of the poor as rampant partiers doesn't wash.

Social workers say drugs, alcohol and mental illness hit hardest within a small subgroup of the poor: the homeless.

What about welfare recipients? In 2000, the Mike Harris Tories announced mandatory drug tests for those on social assistance.

Toronto, Hamilton and countless social agencies opposed the idea. It never went through, and vanished with the Liberal change in government.

But at the time, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) explored the issue. First, it said, drug-use data is notoriously sketchy due to self-reporting. (It's likely higher than data show.) But among Ontario adults:

* Booze is the most common drug, used by 80 per cent

* 8.6 per cent used marijuana

* 4.6 per cent used cocaine

For welfare recipients, the CAMH said data is rare. U.S. studies show their use is comparable to those not on welfare; higher rates for women on welfare were found in one 1994 study.

A 1990 Ontario study found people in subsidized housing actually had lower drug use than those not in subsidized housing. And if the goal is to get people working, drug use is a poor indicator of employability: seven of every 10 drug-users already have jobs.

JUST WHO IS POOR, ANYWAY?

Here's a look at poverty in Hamilton by population group:

Total population: 20 per cent are poor

Children (0-14): 24 per cent

Seniors (over 65): 24 per cent

Lone-parent families: 56 per cent

New immigrants (1996-2001): 50 per cent

Disabled people: 29 per cent

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[UK] Plan for rally to mark success of historic anti-poverty march

from The Scotsman

ANTI-POVERTY campaigners today announced plans to hold an annual rally on the Meadows to mark the anniversary of last year's Make Poverty History march.

The World Development Movement - one of the organisers of last summer's historic march, which attracted 200,000 demonstrators to the Capital - will hold a small festival this year at the Augustine United Church on George IV Bridge.

But the festival is intended to grow into a major event in the city's calendar which will continue to promote the message of last summer's mass protest.

Harriet Grant, chair of the Edinburgh & Lothians World Development Movement, which is co-organising next month's inaugural World Justice Festival, said: "The Make Poverty History march in Edinburgh was a huge event that made a considerable difference in terms of helping to raise awareness about global poverty.

"But although it was a great success, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to make sure that the campaign stays a priority, which is why we want to hold an annual event to mark its anniversary. We would have liked to have a march or a big public event to act as a focal point for the festival this year, but unfortunately the event wasn't organised in time.

"But we're hoping that the festival will become a yearly event and that we will be able to have a big gathering or a march in the Meadows in future years.

"It is vital to try and keep the momentum from last year's march going."

The first World Justice Festival takes place on Saturday, July 1, featuring stalls, a drumming workshop and discussion forums looking at issues surrounding last year's G8 summit in Gleneagles, followed by a world music concert at the Left Bank on Guthrie Street.

The event is being co-organised and supported by a host of other organisations, who were affiliated with last year's Make Poverty History march and G8 events in the city, including Jubilee Scotland, Stop The War, Amnesty International and Mercy Corps.

Ms Grant added: "This festival aims to provide a focus for the people of Edinburgh to make a renewed commitment to bring an end to world poverty. We'll be hosting discussions and workshops for people to come and find out what has happened since the G8 summit in Gleneagles last summer and what they can do to make a difference."

Ben Young, joint national co-ordinator at Edinburgh-based anti-poverty organisation Jubilee Scotland, added: "What's so wonderful about Make Poverty History is that it has inspired people all over Scotland to take action and set things going on their own initiative.

"I believe that these many small events are just as important as the huge march last July. When the next great campaign comes, its strength will be drawn from events like the Edinburgh World Justice Festival, which are knitting together communities and keeping the issues alive."

The Meadows currently hosts the annual May Day parade, the free Fringe Sunday showcase in August and the breast cancer charity Moonwalk, which takes place this Saturday .

Council leader Donald Anderson said: "The city has a long history of hosting events, including last year's Make Poverty History March during the G8 period, which was one of the city's proudest moments.

"The council supported the march and its aims to do something meaningful about poverty and debt in Africa. We would be keen to work with MPH again and see how we can assist the World Justice Festival."
Did last summer's Make Poverty History march make a difference?

Simon Moriarty, 35, barman, East Fountainbridge: "I think the march has made a difference because it helped to raise a lot of awareness about the issue."

Alan Macdonald, 47, IT worker, Ferry Road: "I don't think it has made much of a difference. A lot of people came to Edinburgh and I suppose it helped to raise awareness. Ultimately, it's down to the politicians to make the changes."

Christine Marlow, 32, tax consultant, Lothian Road: "It hasn't made a difference because poverty hasn't been consigned to history. It's still there and it's still a huge global problem."

Warren Pike, 48, teacher, Lonsdale Terrace: "It was a great event and I think it really captured people's imaginations at the time. As it was all about raising awareness for the cause, I think it has had a lot of impact on the way people think about world poverty.

Danielle Taylor, 20, student Leith Walk: "To have so many people coming to Edinburgh for the march proved that it was a big issue that a lot of people were passionate about. The amount of publicity it gained around the world proved that it was definitely worthwhile."

Victoria Devine, 24, receptionist, Lauriston Gardens: "I think the Make Poverty History event probably had more of an effect than the Live 8 concert at Murrayfield. With Live 8, I think it was more about the celebrities rather than the message."

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[South Africa] 20 million may be living in poverty

from The Independent On line

South Africa could have at least five million more people living on R10 a day than initially estimated.

According to new research by the SA Labour and Development Research Unit (Saldru), previous figures speculating that the country has 15,4 million people are incorrect, and there could be as many as 18 to 20 million South Africans living in poverty.

Releasing the findings on Monday, Saldru researcher Dr Charles Meth explained that previous methodology used to come to the 15,4 million figure was not accurate.

He said his research was based on surveys that questioned people about both their income and their expenditure.

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[US] Analysis: Big business tackles poverty

from Monsters and Critics

The worldwide crusade against poverty has a robust new ally -- big business.

Business leaders from around the United States gathered last week in Washington, D.C., for the Initiative for Global Development`s National Summit. Founded in 2002 by five Seattle businessmen who saw the dire state of global poverty getting worse, the coalition has now grown to a network of over 252 members committed to the idea that expanded cooperation between the public and private sectors and growth of trade can drastically help poverty-stricken areas around the world.

'Around 9/11, a lot of people became curious about what they perceived as a dislike for America around the world,' said Bill Clapp, IGD co-founder and CEO of Global Partnerships. 'We decided that poverty was a key issue an organization could contribute to. It not only made sense, in terms of future security, to tackle issues of healthcare and the environment, but also because it was the right position for us to have in the world and that it was the right message for us to be sending.'

Such concern was the impetus for Clapp and his co-founders, former Sen. Daniel J. Evans, R-Wash., William H. Gates, Sr., former EPA administrator William D. Ruckelshaus and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John M. Shalikashvili to begin the IGD as a way for business leaders to collaborate and brainstorm new ideas to promote positive change.

Member businesses succeed through their ability to efficiently deliver products. In the case of the IGD, the products are tailored solutions to communities` individual needs. Businesses benefit because healthy communities can become a trade partners, and creating self-sustaining solutions to educational, health, human rights, environmental and developmental problems means less money is required for foreign aid.

The initiative is not meant to supplant other organizations, but to organize and enhance current efforts and bolster government and private-sector cooperation. In order for the IGD to implement programs in a country, the nation must undergo a corruption assessment and propose its own plan for development.

A successful initiative many leaders praised was the establishment of microcredits to nations with severe poverty. Microfinancing deals with the provision of financial services to those left outside the traditional financial system. Microcredit, or small loans, is part of microfinancing, and can be used for such purposes as starting or expanding businesses. Default on loans is low, and lenders receive interest on their money.

'These credits give people enough to develop some capital,' said Ruckelshaus. 'When you get growth started, it`s amazing how much progress you can make.'

A list of high-profile speakers on both ends of the political spectrum praised the IGD`s efforts, demonstrating that the elimination of extreme poverty is a global need that has no partisan divide.

'Poverty is the greatest problem in the world today,' former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who opened the summit, told United Press International. 'The greatest divides we have are between the rich and the poor.'

Albright also praised the collaboration between the public and private sectors promoted by the IGD. 'Government can`t do everything by itself, and businesses can`t do everything by itself. I really do see it as a partnership,' said Albright. 'There are various places where the government can do better and various places where businesses can do better.'

Albright`s successor at the State Department, Gen. Colin Powell, gave the summit`s keynote address, echoing her praise for the IGD`s work. 'I think this is one of the most important, dynamic, and far-reaching assistance efforts that we have seen,' said Powell.

President George W. Bush later addressed the summit, applauding the IGD`s efforts to foster more cooperation between the government and private businesses.

'The reduction of extreme poverty in our world must be a key objective of American foreign policy,' Bush said. 'And it is.'

Fighting global poverty coincides with American values and serves the nation`s interest in terms and of economics and security, Bush said, underscoring how increased prosperity improves lives, which opens markets for U.S. products and reduces the appeal of radicalism.

Trade is the most effective way to reduce poverty, Bush continued. He further warned against becoming a protectionist nation.

'Now is the time for the world to come together and make this world a free trading world,' Bush said. '(America is) ready to eliminate all tariffs and subsidies and other barriers to free flow of goods and services, and we expect other nations to do the same.'

President Bush also emphasized the need for civil liberties. 'Nations that build institutions that secure the rule of law and respect human dignity also are more likely to create an economic climate that fosters investment and growth,' he said, affirming America`s responsibility to promote liberty and help build institutions necessary for a free society and thriving commerce.

Through Millennium Challenge Accounts, the Bush administration has since 2004 provided foreign aid to countries who demonstrate efforts to establish just governments and stable economic systems.

'The mandate of the (program) is to reduce poverty through economic growth. An absolutely necessary compatible component of that is the participation of the private sector in the reduction of poverty throughout the world,' said Ambassador John Danilovich, head of the body that administers the MCAs.

'Our grants go a long way to initially alleviating (poverty), and the private sector`s subsequent involvement will continue that process,' Danilovich added.

However, accountability is still the underlying message of both the MCA program and global private sector involvement.

'Aid programs should be results-oriented and performance-oriented. If they are, they will produce results. The result is not to give people money -- the result is to alleviate poverty and produce economic growth,' said Danilovich.

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[Kenya] Ministry issues TB, malaria warning

from African News dimension

The Ministry of Health in Kenya has sounded an alarm on the increase of malaria and tuberculosis (TB) cases in Kajiado District.

Area public health officer, Paul Tikolo, said malaria prevalence had shot up to 27 per cent from 23 per cent in 2004. Infection rate of TB, he said, stood at 3 per cent from 2 per cent last year.

"We have been forced to come up with special TB manyattas at the district hospital so that the patients can complete their dosage," he said.

He said many people in the area failed to complete medication. Tikolo was speaking at the weekend in Loitokitok during the launch of a global campaign on HIV/Aids, TB and malaria.

The Government, he said, had embarked on an anti-malaria campaign in the district aimed at disinfecting all open draining systems in public places.

"The disposal of drainage in the open because of poor sewerage system has provided breeding zones for mosquitoes," he said.

He directed health officials to oversee the formation of TB and malaria community control systems. Tikolo banned direct discharge of raw sewage into River Kiserian whose waters he described as highly contaminated.

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[Indonesia] Poverty hits villagers as Merapi stays on high alert

from The Jakarta Post

Slamet Susanto, The Jakarta Post, Sleman

Mt. Merapi continued billowing hot clouds of ash and steam Sunday, leaving residents unable to work and forcing them to sell their livestock to raise money.

Some villagers who earn their living as traders are facing the bitter reality that their shops in the Kaliadem tourist area were buried by volcanic ash Wednesday. The volcano also sent massive heat clouds to the area, killing two men.

"I can't even think anymore. How can I cope with these problems?" Sri Wahyuni, a food stall owner in the tourist area, told Antara.

The Kaliadem hamlet resident has been living in a shelter at SMKN 1 vocational high school in Cangkringan for the past two months. She says she has no strength left to visit her house near the Opak river.

"My children are going to school without uniforms, and I have only two sets of clothes with me," she said.

With no money, it's been difficult to take care of her livestock. Water shortages have also become a problem. "I've decided to sell one of our two cows to cover our living expenses," she said.

But even selling a cow will not bring peace of mind. One of her two children, Resa, is about to enroll in junior high school, so she has to come up with more money. "I don't know what else to do or what our family's future will be," she said.

Another villager, Yamirah, 34, was not sure whether she could raise enough money to send her daughter, Dwi Astuti, to junior high school, since she has had to stop working as a sand miner on the volcano's slopes. "I want her to at least graduate from junior high," she told Antara.

She could only pin her hopes on her husband's plan to become a construction worker in the city. "My husband said he would try," Yamirah said.

With no work or money, the villagers have no plan to move out of the volcano's dangerous path. "We don't have another house to go to. Besides, we have a big family, and Kaliadem is home," she said.

The volcano showed no signs of cooling down Sunday, spewing hot clouds every 30 minutes that trailed four kilometers down its slopes.

The mountain continued to spit lava sparks; 57 were recorded just within six hours on Sunday morning, traveling as far as 2.5 kilometers down the slopes.

The head of the Merapi section at the Yogyakarta volcanology center, Subandriyo, said Sunday that a new lava dome emerged soon after the volcano spewed searing clouds of ash and steam on Wednesday.

"The position of the new lava dome, which was formed on May 14, is concealed because it's in a cavity around 100 meters wide. We don't know its height and volume yet," he said.

The formation of the new lava dome, he said, would help reduce the quantity of hot clouds and sparks of lava, but it did not mean the volcano is becoming less dangerous.

"Hot clouds of ash and steam are still posing a serious threat to residents living on Merapi's slopes," he said.

He said residents who live within seven kilometers of the crater should remain in shelters as the volcano will be kept on high alert.

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[Bolivia] ...outlines ambitious plans to fight poverty

from Reuters

The leftist government of Bolivian President Evo Morales has detailed ambitious public-private plans to ease poverty and create hundreds of thousands of jobs in South America's poorest country.

Morales was elected in December on pledges to champion the rights of the poor, indigenous majority and reject free-market economic policies that have done little to ease poverty in Bolivia.

The economic development plan aims to create 90,000 jobs per year, eliminate illiteracy, build 100,000 homes and cut extreme poverty from 35 percent to 27 percent within five years. It also aims at a sharp increase in economic growth.

"Here are the conditions ... and the transformation that we're searching for in Bolivia," Planning Minister Carlos Villegas said as he presented the plan at the presidential palace late on Friday.

The strategy envisages public and private investment of more than $12 billion by 2011, and Villegas made it clear that the government sees the plan extending into a second five-year term of the Morales administration.

Private investment will be concentrated in the key energy and mining sectors, Villegas said. Bolivia has South America's biggest reserves of natural gas after Venezuela and is also mineral-rich, with deposits of zinc, tin, silver and gold.

Villegas said small companies, farmers and artisans would be supported with low-cost loans and he emphasized the government's drive to invest in road-building and health and maintain macroeconomic stability.

Morales nationalized the country's energy industry last month and while Villegas did not detail similar plans for other sectors, he said the state would be the main actor in the development strategy.

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[New York] Fighting Poverty and a Decade of Welfare Reform

From The Gotham Gazette

When Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced this year that he was making the fight against poverty a priority, he started by talking about the success of the city's welfare reforms over the past decade. Then he conceded a failure.

"Even though we have become a national leader in promoting welfare-to-work, our great city remains home to the nation's poorest congressional district," he said in his State of the City speech this January.

Indeed, New York is in the strange position of being the national model for welfare reform -- which conservatives describe as the most effective anti-poverty program in decades -- but also the only large city in the country where the number of people facing poverty is increasing. The city's welfare rolls recently hit a 40-year low mark, but one out of five residents of New York City now live below the federal poverty level. Some argue that as many as one third of New Yorkers should be counted as poor once the high cost of living is factored in.

While poverty touches almost every policy issue in New York, many look to the city's policies on social services to gauge the city's performance in serving its poorest residents. Because Rudolph Giuliani's policies were so distinctive, Bloomberg's will inevitably be seen in comparison.

Since taking office in 2002, Bloomberg has said that he will not tamper with Giuliani's aggressive practices to reduce the size of the welfare rolls.

But as mayor, Bloomberg has also taken steps that seem to fly in the face of the legacy that he claims to uphold. He has said he wants to make it easier for welfare recipients to access education and job training, and his administration has boasted of the increased number of New Yorkers who receive food stamps -- things unlikely to have been heard from City Hall during the Giuliani years.

After being criticized for ignoring poverty-related issues in his first term, Bloomberg is making them a higher priority in his second. Earlier this year, the mayor formed a task force on poverty, based on a similar task force he established around chronic homelessness. Over the summer, the public-private commission is planning to examine strategies on how to address the myriad of issues that affect those in poverty, and confront them in a comprehensive way.

PUBLIC BENEFITS AND THE GIULIANI LEGACY

In New York, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani began aggressively reforming welfare in New York City soon after taking office. His policies were already well underway by 1996, when Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act and ended "welfare as we know it."

The federal law's major effect was to put a five-year cap on welfare benefits, and to require welfare recipients to spend a certain amount of hours per week either working or engaged in activities defined as acceptable job training practices. State and local governments had some freedom to experiment, however, and throughout the 1990s New York City put its own restrictions on those applying for public assistance. They were consistently tougher than the standards set at the national and state levels.

The city required welfare recipients to participate in a simulated 35- hour workweek. Three days were spent working, often in unpaid Work Experience Program jobs, and the two remaining days were spent in job placement or job training activities. A defining characteristic of Giuliani's administration was its belief that the culture of welfare, not necessarily a lack of training or skills, was the main obstacle facing those on welfare and steady employment. Job training and education, therefore, were seen as ineffective.

"The administration was very committed to a policy of work first, which inherently meant discouraging education and training," said Don Friedman of the Community Service Society, a critic of Giuliani's policies.

The other major characteristic of the Giuliani years was called "diversion" - an administrative policy of making welfare less "user-friendly". Both supporters and critics of this practice said it discouraged people from seeking welfare benefits; advocates of education programs complained that people were also kept from those programs even when state law gave them the right to take them. The Giuliani administration regularly ended up in court over this practice and several times was forced to stop keeping people from accessing benefits and using education as a credit towards work requirements.

On both the national and local level, the welfare rolls plummeted in the late 1990s. Meanwhile, between 1996 and 2000, the number of single mothers - those most affected by changes in welfare law - holding jobs increased from 66 percent to 76 percent nationwide, and the national and local poverty rates dropped. When Giuliani left office, the number of people on welfare had fallen constantly for six years, from 1.1 million to well under 500,000.

Starting in 2000, though, the proportion of employed single mothers began dropping off significantly, and more people slipped into poverty. Both trends continue to the present day.

Those who opposed welfare reform believed that much of the gain made in the late 1990s had been due to the robust economy (a point contested by those who supported the changed policies). They called for changes in welfare policy reflecting the increased difficulty of finding work in the slowing economy. The Giuliani administration and other proponents of aggressive welfare reform rejected such arguments.

BLOOMBERG AND PUBLIC BENEFITS

Michael Bloomberg was a relative unknown when he first came to office, and supporters of welfare reform worried that he would agree with such arguments and change course on welfare. Maror Bloomberg has largely followed Giuliani's lead, keeping the basic framework of his predecessor's strategy in place. He has also made more of a show of providing assistance to those in need of social services and being more active in helping people move off the welfare rolls.

"It's brilliant the way he has convinced Giuliani conservatives that he hasn't changed the policy, and the way he has convinced liberals he has," said Joel Berger of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger told the New York Observer late last year.

If nothing else, Bloomberg has shifted the tone on welfare. This is a change that shouldn't be overlooked, say those who felt locked out of policy debates during the Giuliani administration.

Access to Education and Training

At times, Bloomberg has seemed to take a hard line towards allowing welfare recipients to use training or education to count as work requirements, echoing Giuliani's belief that actual work experience would prove more effective in allowing people to secure permanent jobs. In 2003, the City Council passed a bill that would have allowed GED and English language classes to count towards welfare work requirements. Bloomberg vetoed it, accusing the council of "reviving a dated, discredited policy that we long ago learned was a failure." The law eventually ended up in court, where Bloomberg prevailed.

At other times, however, Bloomberg has shown an interest in increasing access to education. Shortly after his fight with the council, the mayor settled a major lawsuit loosening work requirements to allow more education. He also played a strong role in lobbying Albany to further loosen such restrictions.

Some say that these changes have had little effect on the ground, though, because the city continues to make it difficult for welfare recipients to fulfill their work requirements through legally allowable education or training. The number of people being sanctioned for not complying with work requirements remains roughly the same as it was during the Giuliani administration.

"They close your case for any reason whatsoever," said Roxanna Henry, a welfare recipient who takes classes at Hunter College through the Welfare Rights Initiative as part of her work requirement. She says she is called in every three weeks and told - incorrectly - that she is not in compliance with the city's work requirements. "I keep going to these hearings and winning," she said.

Welfare Recipients With Disabilities

Many people who were on welfare in the past, when forced to find work, found it relatively easy to do so, argues the Bloomberg administration. Today, however, the welfare population has a higher proportion of people facing mental or physical disabilities than it has in the past.

Adjusting to this shift, the city has created a program called WeCARE, which the city says has assessed over 90,000 welfare recipients in order to help them confront "physical and mental health barriers" to employment.

The Bloomberg administration also urged Washington to take such barriers into account during the recent debate over the renewal of the national welfare reform law, lobbying against proposals which would have required states to make sure that a greater percentage of their welfare recipients were working. Arguing that over half of the city's welfare recipients now faced "substantial barriers to employment," the city's Human Resources Administration said that it could not meet the higher levels of work participation. Conservative supporters of welfare reform, who do not feel that there has been a significant change in the makeup of the welfare population, objected. "It's hard to decide which is more troubling: the Bloomberg administration's arguments or the evidence it cites for them," wrote the Manhattan Institute's Heather MacDonald.

The rules that were eventually passed this February were not as strict as those first proposed, though they were stricter than the city had hoped for. Currently about 37 percent of those on the New York welfare rolls participate in something that the federal government accepts as a work activity. If New York State cannot meet the new requirement - 50 percent of welfare recipients participating in some form of work activity - then it stands to lose $217 million, the lion's share of which would have been used in the city, according to the Human Resources Administration.

SUCCESS?

Proponents of welfare reform look at the number of people on public assistance as the primary gauge of success. By this measure, the Giuliani administration was wildly successful, and the Bloomberg administration has continued that success. This April the city announced that there were 402,000 people on welfare, a 40-year low.

The New York Post called on Bloomberg to " take a bow," calling the national welfare reform "one of the most successful pieces of social legislation ever enacted on a national level." The Post and others sharing this view focused largely on welfare reform's success in changing a culture of dependency. They have also pointed out that the dire predictions that opponents of welfare reform have made over the past ten years - huge increases in child poverty, for instance - never materialized. The poverty rate in New York City now is actually lower than it was before welfare reform was instituted. Critics of welfare reform acknowledge that their more dire predictions did not come true. They do point out, however, that New York City has seen its poverty rate rise during each year of the Bloomberg administration. Between 2003 and 2004, the last year for which there is data, the city was the only large city in the country where poverty got worse.

The rise in poverty is not necessarily being blamed on welfare policies - experts cite a weak job market, poor public education system and other factors as well. But when poverty is rising, some argue, welfare and other social net programs become that much more important.

"If the poverty rate is going up and the welfare rates are going down then something is wrong," said Maureen Lane of the Welfare Rights Initiative.

What Happens To Those Who Leave?

A more appropriate way to gauge whether welfare reform is working, some say, is to look at the fortunes of those who leave the rolls. Currently, the city has only a cloudy picture of what happens to such people.

The Bloomberg administration says that it has focused its efforts on job placement and retention through its Back to Work initiative. It has contracts with companies who place recipients in jobs, and has restructured these contracts so that they are paid not only for placing people in jobs, but also if people stay in these positions. Of welfare recipients who find jobs, 88 percent held the positions after three months and 75 after six months.

But the numbers of welfare recipients who have found work has dropped off sharply in the last several years. In 2005, the city helped approximately 85,000 former welfare recipients find work, according to the Human Resources Administration, as opposed to 101,000 in 2002. The city's Human Resources Administration says that this is at least in part to the fall in the overall rolls. It is not clear how many people leave the rolls and fail to find work, it adds, because the city only tracks those who it actually places in jobs.

Studies looking at specific job placement programs have shown disappointing results. Community Voices Heard, an advocacy group for low-income New Yorkers, examined the performance of the city's Employment Services and Placement Program, which works with about 4,100 people a month to place them in jobs. Only eight percent found work within six months, it determined.

The group recommends that the city's Back to Work initiative provide the companies that place welfare recipients with resources to train welfare recipients, as well as hire an outside consultant to analyze how well the city's job placement programs are working.

There is also a question of what types of jobs people are finding, and whether these jobs will move people out of poverty.

The city says that the most typical placements include food service, at an average wage of $7.30 an hour and clerical positions at an average wage of $9.26 an hour, but has no systemic numbers. In general, those who work in low-income jobs - whether they are coming off welfare or not - are having a tough time in recent years. According to Poverty in New York 2004, the most recent of a series of annual surveys done by the Community Service Society, the annual earnings for low wage workers fell by 6.5 percent over the past four years.

The problems of the working poor, say advocates, are the ones that must really be addressed if low-income New Yorkers are going to be able to lead stable, independent lives.

"This is not a matter of welfare," said David Jones, the president of the organization and a member of the mayor's task force. "This is a matter of low wage workers not making enough to make ends meet."

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[South Africa] 1 + 1 = 2

from The Mail and Guardian

The South African Human Rights Commission (HRC) has found that South Africa has two basic education systems -- the dysfunctional and impoverished schools used by the majority of children, and those for the privileged minority comprising well-resourced islands of educational excellence.

The HRC’s report on the right to basic education, released to the public and tabled in Parliament this week, follows public hearings last October on the provision of education for pupils aged between seven and 15 years, or grade nine, whichever comes first. It considered submissions from the government, teacher unions, social movements, academics, NGOs and community members, among others.

The Constitution guarantees the right to basic education for all, and since 1994 the government has poured resources into schools to eliminate apartheid-era inequalities. Despite this, the education sector generated most complaints received by the HRC’s legal services department, said Andre Keet, director of the commission’s National Centre for Human Rights Education and Training.

Thirty years after June 16 1976, some of the issues that ignited that struggle “still impact on our society”, said HRC chairperson Jody Kollapen. “There are big gaps between the promises of the Constitution and the lived reality of many South Africans -- and we are not doing well in bridging those gaps.”

In the one education system, the report says, are rural and township schools “characterised starkly by poverty ... dysfunctionality, vulnerability, alienation and a lack of social cohesion”. The other comprises formerly white, mainly urban schools that have maintained their quality because of legislation governing school fees. Between the two systems are “glaring inequalities” in every area of school provision, meaning that many children are still being denied their constitutional education rights.

“Resources are not enough,” the report says. “We are not seeing the outcomes in terms of quality education that were anticipated.” The context is poverty, which has a bearing on the costs of schooling -- fees, uniforms, transport -- and in less well-documented trends such as the drop-out rate.

The report urges the government “to move rapidly and at greater speed to increase no-fee schools”, and says primary education should be made free as soon as possible. It also recommends that the South African Schools Act be amended to make it obligatory for the state to investigate why a learner is failing to attend school. “Teachers and principals should be made accountable at district level to explain the non-attendance of children in their classrooms.”

The report says that the impact of HIV/Aids on education is not yet adequately understood. But it notes that “there is still clearly much stigma that pervades communities. Until HIV/Aids is spoken about openly ... it cannot be said that we are addressing the issue sufficiently. There may well be policies, but these will make little difference in the lives of learners who head households and whose teacher is oblivious of the fact or chooses to ignore it.”

It also finds that there is “a disturbing silence” on language issues in poor and rural schools. It cites the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s study of rural schools last year, which reported that 42% of the pupils surveyed said they had difficulty understanding their teachers.

Debates on the language of learning are dominated by former Model C schools, the report says, which have the resources to publicise or litigate the issue. But this ignores what is happening in the majority of schools, where mother-tongue learning is still a rarity. It says the Department of Education should re-evaluate the policy of granting school governing bodies the power to choose language policy, and amend the Schools Act if necessary.

The report adds that governing bodies work better in wealthier communities than poorer ones, and that “the model of schools raising their own funds for their own development simply does not work in impoverished communities”.

In the latter, parents often experienced schools as autocratic and alienating, resulting in loss of community participation. Alternative models, such as rural community forums, should be explored, and “active participation by civil society including social movements is necessary in order to ensure that social context is truly given effect in education”.

The report also finds:

# that teachers’ morale is generally low, and that many are underqualified and underperforming;

# high levels of school violence and sexual abuse of girl pupils; and

# many schools still lack electricity, running water, toilets and libraries.

Education Director-General Duncan Hindle welcomed the report. “Some of it is not pleasant for us to read,” he said, “but is has a range of authentic voices we don’t often hear.” The department would especially consider the recommendations and respond in due course.

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[Tanzania] Poverty Reduction Gets More Government Attention

from All Africa

The Tanzanian government has increased funds for programmes to reduce poverty in the East African nation, Finance Minister Zakia Meghji said when she unveiled the national budget for 2006-2007.

Such programmes include completion of roads projects, the supply of water from Lake Victoria to arid regions as well as increased generation of electricity.

Meghji, who read the 4.85 trillion shilling (US$3.88 billion) budget, said the government had allocated 1.4 trillion shillings ($1.1 billion) to civil servants' salaries in 2006/07, up from 682 billion shillings ($0.5 billion) in 2005-2006.

To empower people, Meghji said, the government plans to strengthen schemes to provide credit from commercial banks and other lenders to farmers and low-scale investors. She said efforts would also be made to establish more savings and credit cooperative societies, grassroots institutions that have proved successful in provision of credit services to people in rural areas as well as low-income earners in urban centres.

Meghji said the government had also taken measures to protect the environment. These included a ban, issued in April, on the exportation of timber to safeguard forests and water sources; the eviction of livestock keepers from riverbeds; and a ban on the production or importation of thin plastic bags.

She said 9.4 billion shillings ($7.52 million) would be allocated for implementation of strategies for environmental conservation, including the survey farms and pasture areas to avoid clashes between farmers and pastoral communities.

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[Bangladesh] Japan identifies 12 sectors to help reduce poverty

from The Daily Star

'Political feud a major destabilising factor'
UNB, Dhaka

Japan has identified 12 priority sectors, including private sector and power sector development, under its new country assistance programme to help reduce poverty in Bangladesh.

Japan, the single largest bilateral donor of Bangladesh, reaffirmed its support on the "recent high economic growth" in Bangladesh despite political and governance challenges that hinder the growth potentials.

"Its new assistance programme reaffirms that Japan will continuously support Bangladesh's self-help efforts in development in accordance with the PRSP issued by the Bangladesh government in October last," said a statement on Thursday.

The statement was issued marking the release of Japan's new Country Assistance Programme (CAP) issued on May 19.

Other priority sectors are information and communication technology (ICT), tourism, transport, agriculture and rural development, education, health, environment, arsenic mitigation, disaster management and governance.

The new CAP puts three priority goals -- economic growth, social development with human security and governance -- with the ultimate target of poverty reduction.

"Japan believes that the implementation of PRSP will bring to Bangladesh the achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)," the statement said, adding that the CAP also highlights the importance of cooperation with other development partners like the World Bank, ADB and DFID.

According to the CAP document made available yesterday, problems of governance, such as discontinuity in government policies, persisting corruption and worsening law and order, have become serious under a bipolar political confrontation.

"As a result, Bangladesh cannot maximise its potential for development and economic growth," it said, referring to the setbacks caused by recurrence of hartal, which are carried out by the opposition parties as part of their anti-government campaign.

"Hartals not only directly hit the lives of common citizens, especially those who live under the poverty line, but they also serve as an obstacle to investment and education," it said.

The document adds: "The continuing confrontation between the two main political parties even after three peaceful regime changes since 1991 is a major destabilising factor for people's livelihood and social stability in Bangladesh."

On the governance problem, the document pointed out that dealing with various issues of governance remained a great challenge in realising development, including economic growth and improvements in social indicators.

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[UK] Poverty 'driving' benefit fraud

from The BBC

People who work and claim benefits do so often because they are in dire financial trouble, a Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) study has said.

Many claimants took illegal cash-in-hand jobs to pay for food and heating or to make debt repayments.

The study's author said they were "hard-working, ordinary people trying to survive day by day".

The study called for reform of the tax and benefits system to move people from illegal jobs into legitimate work.

The JRF study was based on six years of work by the East London Community Links project.

The Community Links project offers those in deprived areas education, childcare provision as well as help and advice.

It found that people working and claiming benefits did so out of "need not greed".

Spokesman Aaron Barbour said: "If you're poor and living in a deprived area, informal work is actually helping people out of absolute abject poverty, helping them survive.

"It's providing for the basics like food and heating."

Despite the introduction of tax credits, designed to supplement the incomes of the low-paid, many people in the study said they felt the system trapped them in a poverty cycle.

In short, the tax and benefits system provided these people with few financial incentives to give up benefits and declare paid work.

More understanding

People with health and childcare issues were particularly prone to working in what is often called the "informal economy".

"They are hard-working, ordinary people trying to survive day by day," Aaron Barbour, study author and Community Links' policy development manager, said.

"The government needs to understand and include the informal economy in all its strategies if it is to reach its employment, anti-poverty and regeneration targets," he added.

The study called for there to be more support, training and development for people who wanted to move from cash-in-hand to formal work.

It added that there also needed to be tax and benefit reform, based on an understanding of why people worked cash-in-hand.

In addition, employers needed to allow more flexible working for those with health and childcare issues.

As for government measures to combat benefit fraud, the study concluded they had "limited success where poverty drives the decision to work informally".

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[US] ...must show more leadership on poverty: Wolfensohn

from Reuters

By Lesley Wroughton

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States needs to show greater moral and economic leadership if it wants to be an influence in the developing world amid the rise of emerging powers like China, former World Bank head and Citigroup advisor James Wolfensohn said on Thursday.

Addressing a private-sector conference, Wolfensohn said it was important that the United States remains the dominant global force in tackling global poverty.

"It isn't an option for the United States to withdraw, it just isn't an option," he told the Initiative for Global Development conference, a network of leading U.S. business leaders and former government officials pushing for increased U.S. involvement in ending global poverty.

Wolfensohn said U.S. contributions to eradicate global poverty were well below what the country should be spending and it needed business leaders to raise that awareness.

He said he recently traveled to Africa where increased Chinese business interests were evident, illustrating the Asian powers' economic push into developing economies.

"There is a changing balance of which we are now seeing the beginnings of," Wolfensohn said. "It's not just us rich people sitting in fancy hotels in the United States. We're seeing the beginnings of an emergence of a different perception."

"The framework is changing really quite dramatically and so as you look at the issue of poverty we're looking at it in a different way than we did 50 years ago, even today," he added.

Wolfensohn said it was a matter of priority, not money, that should get the U.S. to boost its efforts in eliminating global poverty.

"It's a question of how we look at our children, it's a question of what we say to the next generation ... it's a question you think of at the end of your life," he added.

Wolfensohn said he supported business efforts like the Initiative for Global Development because it illustrated a growing sensitivity and willingness by American corporations to make a difference in the lives of the world's poorest.

The initiative was co-founded by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, William Ruckelshaus, former Environmental Protection Agency head; philanthropist Bill Clapp, former governor and senator Dan Evans; and retired general and former chiefs of staff chairman John Shalikashvili to influence U.S. policymakers to help end poverty.

The conference included panel discussions by anti-poverty and development experts and former chief executives.

"The business voice has to be strengthened by assembling leaders from all over the country and be much more active in terms of advocating for things that we know work for development," said Jennifer Potter, managing director of the Initiative for Global Development.

Potter said the initiative would also try to bring expertise and skills of the business community to ensure aid was effective. "We think that the skills of the business community often aren't factored in to programs that are often done by the government or the nonprofit sectors," she added.

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[Washington] Group Pressures U.S. to Help End Global Poverty

from The LA Times

Seattle philanthropists try to get businesses and government to join forces and boost efforts.
By Evelyn Iritani, Times Staff Writer

SEATTLE — Alarmed by America's sagging image and the growing disparity in global wealth, a group of prominent Seattle business leaders is trying to educate, cajole and, if necessary, shame America into helping the poorest of the world's poor.

Although initially fearful of being dismissed as a group of West Coast idealists, the founders of the Initiative for Global Development have traversed the country for three years trying to convince skeptical company executives that they could ensure future prosperity and security by helping to provide clean water, schooling and adequate healthcare for the 1.2 billion people who exist on less than $1 a day. The group includes Bill Gates Sr., father of the Microsoft Corp. founder, and William Clapp, whose family helped found the Weyerhaeuser timber company.

"Poverty is the swamp," said Clapp, who funds micro-credit programs in Latin America. "It doesn't create all the problems, but it's the sticky goo you've got to wade through to solve anything, whether it's environmental problems or political instability."

In a world preoccupied by terrorism threats and rising gasoline prices, getting U.S. business leaders to focus on the plight of impoverished farmers and slum dwellers hasn't been easy. But the persistence of the Seattle-based organization has earned the support of anti-poverty experts such as economist Jeffrey D. Sachs and the attention of President Bush, who agreed to appear today at its national summit on global poverty in Washington, D.C.

The chief executives of many of the Northwest's leading companies, including Microsoft, Starbucks Corp. and Recreational Equipment Inc., have joined the cause.

The group's top priority is getting the U.S. to boost its annual spending on anti-poverty programs to $36 billion, an increase of $20 billion. Those funds, which would include government and private sector money, could go toward bed nets to prevent malaria or the elimination of school fees to boost education.

The World Bank and the United Nations have estimated that it would take an additional $40 billion to $60 billion a year to make "substantial progress" in eliminating extreme global poverty. The initiative has proposed that the U.S. contribute about one-third of that amount, which would equal its share of global gross domestic product.

Bush, whose administration has been accused of sullying America's image abroad by pursuing an unpopular war in Iraq and spurning multilateral initiatives such as the Kyoto environmental treaty, might not seem the first choice to headline an event aimed at shoring up America's position in the world.

But the elder Gates and others have said U.S. inattention to global poverty extends far beyond a single president or party. They pointed out that the Bush administration had more than doubled overall U.S. spending on foreign aid, although the U.S. remains in last place in per capita expenditures among 22 industrialized nations.

The group also strongly supports the government's Millennium Challenge Corp., which rewards countries that practice good governance and market-based economic development.

"The fact of the matter is our country is misrepresented in the world," said Gates, who runs the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Microsoft empire. "Part of the problem is that we're the biggest, richest guy on the block…. Not only are we not beloved but we're hated in many places."

Market-driven philanthropy, also known as "social entrepreneurialism" or "compassionate capitalism," has become a growth industry in the Pacific Northwest. The movement is being propelled largely by the Gates Foundation, which has made HIV/AIDS programs and the elimination of diseases such as malaria a priority.

Observers say Seattle has emerged as a center of global philanthropy because it's a major gateway for immigrants, global commerce and home for a new generation of tech entrepreneurs with the drive to change the world and the money to make it happen.

Finding ways for business and government to join forces in the anti-poverty battle is a key objective of the Initiative for Global Development. Another is the promotion of trade.

The group supports the current negotiations to eliminate billions of dollars of farm subsidies by the U.S. and Europe and lower tariffs for manufactured goods.

"I like to think I'm in the foreign aid business," said Skip Kotkins, chief executive of Seattle-based Skyway Luggage Co., a leading luggage importer. "But instead of a handout, I'm giving people work."

Over the last year, the group has broadened its recruiting to 10 cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Indianapolis. Those cities were selected because they were home for congressional leaders such as Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).

"We want people to have a drink with their officials and tell them how important this topic is," the elder Gates said. "That's how business gets done in this country."

These business leaders, many of whom are prominent Republicans, know the hardest part won't be persuading Americans to help the poor. It will be finding a way to pay for anti-poverty programs when the U.S. government faces a huge budget deficit, a growing tab for the Iraq war and an aging population worried about healthcare and pensions.

Gates has been a vocal opponent of the Republican-led campaign to repeal the estate tax, saying the wealthy should pay their fair share.

Sally Jewell, REI's chief executive, agrees that the "anti-tax sentiments" prevailing in Congress have made it hard for politicians to support many worthwhile initiatives, such as public education and health research. Congress has already balked at the Bush administration's request to increase funding for the Millennium program in 2007.

"When I talk to our senators, they say, 'Here are the choices we're facing, do we fund a road or do we fund HIV/AIDS or malaria research?' " Jewell said. "Now that's a lousy choice."

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[India] shows trade not aid way to fight poverty: Bush

from Hindustan Times

US President George Bush has cited the examples of India and South Korea to illustrate that more trade rather than aid was the best way out of poverty for the developing world.

"Prosperity as a result of trade is more likely -- ten times more likely to have a positive effect on somebody living in a poor society than just investment and grants," he said in a special address to the Initiative for Global Development's 2006 National Summit on Thursday.

Co-chaired by former secretaries of state, Colin Powell and Madeleine Albright, the summit brings together about 150-200 of America's foremost business leaders to set an action agenda for the private sector on what it can do to eradicate extreme global poverty.

"History has shown what I'm talking about," Bush said recalling the India success story. "India, for a long period of time, had restricted its markets. India opened its markets to global trade 15 years ago. It has doubled the size of its economy since then and created a middle class which is larger than the entire population of the United States".

Similarly, South Korea once one of the poorest nations in Asia, has thanks to export growth today become the 10th largest economy in the world after it reformed its economy and opened its markets to the world.

These are not isolated examples, said Bush, noting that a World Bank study had found that developing nations that lowered their trade barriers in the 1990s grew three times faster than those that did not.

"Economic growth is one important way to reduce poverty. It's the most effective way to reduce poverty. The best way to help millions mired in poverty is to expand the benefits of global trade," said the president, setting it out as his administration's new policy outlook.

Outlining the US position on the upcoming Doha Round of WTO negotiations, Bush said Washington was ready to eliminate all tariffs and subsidies and other barriers to free flow of goods and services, and it expected other nations to do the same.

"We're ready to make the move -- on agriculture and services and manufacturing, but we expect other nations to do the same thing. We expect other nations to give us market access," he said.

Similarly, European countries needed to make a tough decision on farming, while the G20 countries needed to do so on manufacturing, Bush said, declaring the United States is prepared to make a tough decision along with them.

Since 2002, the US had more than doubled assistance around the world from 10 billion dollars to 27.5 billion dollars -- the largest increase of foreign aid since the Marshall Plan - to fight poverty, Bush said.

At the same time US foreign policy now recognises true compassion being measured by real improvements, not just by the amount of money spent. "And real improvement is the goal of our assistance," he said.

But it did not stop US from moving when disaster strikes, said Bush noting, "We moved hard for the tsunamis, with a military presence that helped organize relief. When the earthquake came in Pakistan, we didn't hesitate, we moved."

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[Rhode Island] Union report says poverty hinders learning for children

from WPRI

Students from low-income urban families do not perform as well their suburban-rural peers.

That's according to a coalition of labor and teacher unions, which released a report yesterday saying poverty hinders students from learning. The report also says the voice of teachers have been left out when it comes to discussing how to improve education in the state.

The National Education Association, Working Rhode Island and Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals issued the report. The report looks at how to prepare children from low-income families for school and how to help them succeed once they are in school.

The executive director of NEA's Rhode Island chapter says for many students, the starting line is not the same.

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[Guinea] UNICEF sees poverty as root cause of unrest

from African News Dimension

Poverty in Guinea, with a collapsing economy that is especially dangerous for children, is behind a massive strike in Conakry, the capital, and international support is badly needed to support the West African country, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund.

“We can summarize the root cause of all the social problems in Guinea to high levels of poverty,” UNICEF country representative Marcel Rudasingwa said of the violence, in which at least 18 people have been killed in clashes between demonstrators and security forces, according to media reports.

“Poverty affects not only households in general, but children in particular. Today, about 63 per cent of Guinea’s people are living under the poverty line, and that classifies Guinea as one of the poorest countries of sub-Saharan Africa,” he added.

Yesterday, Secretary-General Kofi Annan today voiced deep concern at the killings and called on the authorities to exercise restraint.

Despite its rich natural resources, Guinea remains underdeveloped. Poverty has an enormous impact on children and young people in a country where more than half the population is under 18 years of age.

“Out of every nine people, five are children or young people,” Mr. Rudasingwa said. “Because of poverty, they are made vulnerable to epidemics like HIV/AIDS.”

Although Guinea has abolished school fees, the cost of learning materials still takes a heavy toll on many families. In addition, many teachers are poorly trained and therefore unable to provide a quality education. As a result, many children are dropping out of school, either looking for work in the streets or falling victims of child trafficking.

To lift Guinea out of poverty, international support is badly needed, Mr. Rudasingwa said. Until then, even when the current crisis has passed, the well-being of the country’s children will continue to be under threat.

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[WTO Talks Doha Round] Bush: 'Tough Sledding' for Poverty Talks

from The Washington Post

By DEB RIECHMANN

WASHINGTON -- President Bush, trying to jump start global trade negotiations, urged European and developing nations Thursday to make tough decisions to finish a trade deal that he claims will curb poverty.

The United States is among 149 nations trying to finish the international round of trade talks known as the Doha Round. Negotiators have missed several deadlines.

"It's tough sledding right now," Bush said at the Initiative for Global Development's national summit focused on getting the public and private sectors to work together to end poverty across the world.

There are disagreements over cutting farm barriers in Europe, the United States and other rich nations. Major developing countries, such as India and Brazil, also are refusing to significantly reduce trade barriers that protect their manufacturing and service industries.

"We're ready to eliminate all tariffs and subsidies and other barriers to free flow of goods and services, and we expect other nations to do the same," Bush said.

He said countries in Europe have to make a tough decision on farming, and the G20 group of developing countries that is pushing for increased access to industrialized markets for their farmers have to make difficult decisions on manufacturing.

Bush said he planned to carry that message to next week's European Union summit.

"Now is the time for the world to come together and make this world a free trading world, not only for the benefit of our own economies, but as an important part of the strategy to reduce poverty around the world," the president said.

Bush spoke after attending a ceremonial swearing-in at the White House of the new U.S. trade representative, Susan Schwab, who is working to wrap up key elements of a deal by the end of July.

Former Secretary of States Colin Powell and Madeleine Albright co-chaired the summit, which was attended by some of the nation's top business leaders, philanthropists, policy experts, government officials and civic leaders.

"Americans have got to understand that when we talk about trade, we're not only talking about enhancing economic growth and vitality, we're helping people get out of poverty," Bush said, adding that impoverished states are attractive safe havens for terrorists and tyrants and international criminals.

The Initiative for Global Development was founded in 2003 by former Sen. Daniel Evans of Washington; Bill Gates Sr., father of Microsoft founder Bill Gates; Bill Ruckelshaus, former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency; Bill Clapp, chief executive officer of Global Partnerships; and Gen. John Shalikashvili, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

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[Kenya] Kimunya presents first Budget amid fears of growing poverty

from The Standard

By Benson Kathuri

Finance minister Amos Kimunya presents his first Budget on Thursday amid fears that the Government is losing the fight against poverty.

According to a survey conducted by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), most Kenyans want more funds channeled to the rural areas.

"Although the year 2005 recorded a growth of 5.8 per cent, a number of economic challenges remain," said Albert Mwenda, IEA executive director.

"These include continued poverty and inequalities across different geographical locations and unemployment."

Other challenges are an expanding current account deficit mainly due to rising wages for civil servants and teachers and near-stagnation of revenues collected by the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA). Though KRA and Treasury had agreed of an Sh309 billion revenue collection target for this financial year, the authority had collected Sh243 billion by the end of May.

There are fears that the authority might not meet the target though it will become clear whether the minister used the figure once he unveils the budget. Mwenda says though the recent drought that left over three million people in need of emergency food relief are over, food production was still very low.

This might keep prices high and undermine Government efforts to keep inflation low. The researcher fears that the General Election expected next year might also influence budgetary allocation. With political situation worsening in Somalia following renewed infighting, the Government might be forced to raise more money to cater for immigrants flocking in mainly in the arid northern Kenya.

"Regrettably on the social and political front, a population aged 15-34 and forming the majority of the total population present challenges to our development agenda," he said.

The group is mainly unemployed and therefore depend on those already working posing is a big financial burden. The perceived donor apathy that has led to reduced foreign aid inflows in the last three years worsens the situation.

Mwenda says the funds that mainly come from multilateral aid agencies led by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are no longer reliable.

"Kenya must find its own way of financing development and growth," says Mwenda.

"There is great potential to finance and spur development through revenues, innovative tax packages, private sector participation, creative banking and investment options as well as trade," he told the The Standard.

The Government has admitted that the revenue envelope is too thin to cater for the ever-rising demands. Senior Treasury officials maintain that pro-poor programmes will, however, continue to get top priority when allocating the funds in the next budget.

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[UK] Major poverty problem in rural areas

from IC north Wales

ONE in five people live in poverty in rural areas, a report claims.

But a survey from the Commission for Rural Communities (CRC) found almost half - 48% - of some 1,000 people polled did not recognise there was disadvantage in their area.

The CRC's report cites traditional attitudes as often being behind delays in seeking help, "cultural values of pride and self-reliance" meaning the disadvantaged don't want to draw attention to themselves.

Despite the majority of people (56%) believing schools tended to be good, the local area being a good place to bring up children (69%) and suffering from little crime (74%), some 78% said it was difficult to find decent affordable housing.

The survey also found 64% thought it was difficult to find a well paid job, more than a third thought some people struggled to find enough cash for the basics, while half agreed some people in their area were lonely because they do not have friends or family nearby.

The report has identified three priorities to be tackled, including financial poverty - in which wages as low as £3 a day are paid to workers and there is a low take-up of the benefits people are fully entitled to.

Rural Disadvantage: Priorities for Action also cites "network poverty", which can be improved by informal contact from friends and neighbours, but needs support with venues such as community halls, village shops and rural post offices, to enable social interaction.

The issue of rural transport or ways to overcome the need to travel should also be addressed to improve access to services and jobs, the report concluded.

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[Angola] Demining gives Angolan poor stake in postwar future

from Reuters Alert Net

By Christopher Thompson

HUAMBO, Angola, June 14 (Reuters) - At a minefield in central Angola, deminers display a map of the region that is littered with sinister red dots, the explosive legacy of the African country's 27-year civil war.

"The road ... went through minefields, so that was our priority," head of operations Albertino Manuel said, standing in a thatched hut. The entrance to the hut is flanked by two white markers signalling mines that have been found and destroyed.

The area at Canhama is just one out of 327 minefields in central Huambo province, Angola's former breadbasket. Small villages border minefields, while farms, water supplies and the local school straddle routes surrounded by "suspect areas".

With Angola's first elections in 14 years now likely to be held next year, demining will allow people to register to vote this July -- giving previously isolated citizens a stake in the political process of this oil-rich country for the first time.

Perhaps more importantly, demining also allows them to make a living.

"People are not so concerned by either party; they want the freedom to work," said Waldemar Fernandes, who works for demining non-governmental organisation HALO Trust. "Now they will have more power over their own future."

In the neighbouring province of Bie, roads have been cleared in and around 200 villages. U.S.-based mine watchdog Humpty Dumpty Institute (HDI) estimates that demining will allow an additional 200,000 people to vote.

"Everything was destroyed by the war," said Fernandes. "Armies put mines, which is easy. Demining is difficult, especially since the army doesn't have records - so we have to find them all."

WAR'S LEFTOVERS

Since the end of the civil war in 2002, Angola's economy has grown massively. But most of its 13 million people still live in abject poverty.

The former Portuguese colony is one of the most heavily mined countries in the world. An area about the size of Texas is still pitted with up to 4 million mines.

Mines strangle economic development, commerce and political participation. The dirt road from Canhama to Huambo's central San Pedro market was mined meaning villages could not trade.

"The road was our first priority or else people are cut off," said Fernandes.

The delicate work of clearing the land falls to "Sapadores". They kneel in small fenced rectangles, meticulously going over every inch of ground with a metal detector.

"When the long grass is cut, by machine, we can then proceed. After the first clearing it is checked over three more times by superiors," said Bruno Ferreira, a supervisor in charge of HALO's demining operation. "Concentration is all."

Further into the bush, paths grow narrow, with poles marking the slim walkways of safety.

Manuel Cotingo, who has been with HALO since 2000, is working at the end of the path in the shade of a tree.

"We have been two months in this area and now the population is returning to the fields to cultivate," he said.

NEW VICTIMS

Although mines are ostensibly aimed at enemy armies, the heaviest casualties occur amongst civilians, especially the young, with most victims aged between 15-35.

The government estimates that there are 70,000 to 80,000 mine survivors in Angola, representing 78 percent of all persons with disabilities. Approximately two-thirds of survivors are concentrated in Luanda, with others found in the mine-affected provinces of Bie, Huambo, Malange and Moxico.

"In Huambo, most mines came from the USSR, Germany, Cuba, China, Czechoslovakia and a few from France and Italy - these countries had no shame," Fernandes said.

Now, foreign countries are helping to eradicate the legacy of war: China is rebuilding roads and railways in return for Angolan oil, and Britain is funding demining operations.

Casualties caused by mines are declining, after a brief surge following the 2002 peace deal when hundreds of thousands of refugees began returning to the central Planalto region.

Landmine-related injuries rose dramatically and farmers were unable to safely transport their produce to and from markets.

"When HALO Trust arrived in Huambo there was an accident every day - just in the city - around 30 a month. Now, it's about 3 to 4 accidents a month in the whole province of Huambo," said Fernandes.

Clearing the field of long, golden grass in Canhama will directly benefit about 10 families living close by.

"The population can also register for next year's elections. To change things they have to vote," said Ferreira.

Justino Jose, a farmer from the nearby Chiva village, said he would now expand his operations.

"I grow maize, potatoes and beans. Now I can go down the road freely to the market. When HALO leaves, we will work to grow everywhere - the land is fertile."

But it is a measure of their poverty that some farmers, still knowingly risk their lives by cultivating suspect fields.

"It's dangerous, but they have to eat," said Fernandes.

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[Saudi Arabia] poor watch volatile stock market from sidelines

from The Washington Post

By Andrew Hammond
Reuters

RIYADH - The stock market rose. The stock market fell. But Migbil al-Anezi was only concerned about the lack of water and electricity in his shanty Nadhim district on the outskirts of Saudi Arabia's capital Riyadh.

While half of the country's 17 million Saudis have been counting their losses following the bourse's crash earlier this year after a spectacular rise in 2005, others only hope for more largesse from a state awash with cash thanks to record oil prices.

"There are no services," Migbil says dismissively, preparing cardamom-flavored coffee inside the wooden hut he calls home. "And I wouldn't dare ask in case they force us off the land ... There's talk of putting a recreational facility here."

While soaring oil prices have given the world's biggest oil exporter record revenues, many Saudis still find themselves living on the margin despite promises of reform and a more equitable distribution of wealth.

Migbil says he moved to this scrub land six months ago because of rising rents in the city's formal neighborhoods, putting a strain on the 2,000 riyals ($533) he earns a month as a driver for the Ministry of Agriculture.

"There's no water so I go around mosques or shops to take from their taps, and running the air cooler needs too much water in summer so I've sent the children to relatives," he says, embarrassed to entertain guests in such meager surroundings.

As he speaks, the engineer who installed the generator-powered air cooler passes by to check on the progress of the rickety contraption. "I put 50,000 riyals in the stock market," the visitor confesses, "but now it's all gone."

"What do I want with the bourse?" responds an incredulous Migbil, who has to provide for six children including a hospitalized daughter with kidney trouble.

"KING OF THE POOR"

Before he ascended the throne last year, King Abdullah had warned of the threat of growing poverty and unemployment while visiting a poor district in 2002.

But there are still no statistics on how many Saudis actually struggle to make ends meet and the topic remains taboo in a kingdom fabled for its tremendous wealth.

"There is a problem of figures. Maybe there's been a slight fall in the number of poor, but we must remember that five years ago no one even wanted to recognize this issue," said Turki Fadak, an analyst with the Saudi Economic Association.

Though the rise in world oil prices has offered a certain reprieve, the authorities still fear that an underclass who perceive they are left out of the kingdom's development drive could provide recruits for al Qaeda, which launched a violent campaign to topple the monarchy in 2003.

Last month, the king -- whom Forbes magazine says is worth $21 billion -- promised cheap housing. He also cut fuel prices, in a move which drew praise from the underclass and confirmed the political sway the question of poverty now carries.

"The rich don't feel it, but for the poor this fuel cut really makes a difference. It was a great idea and I thank him (the king) for it," says Hussein al-Walda, another squatter in Nadhim, sitting cross-legged in a makeshift tent.

Like Migbil, he says the stock market means nothing to him.

"I see it on television, but what capital do I have to put in there?" he said. "We've got scorpions and snakes here, and in the winter it gets really cold. Two years ago we had hailstones as big as this coffee cup."

FESTERING RESENTMENT?

Ali Sadek, an economist who used to work with the Arab Monetary Fund in the United Arab Emirates, said low-income Saudis were a festering problem for the kingdom with consequences that are hard to predict.

"There is no reason to have poor people in a rich country like Saudi Arabia," he said. "If there are poor in a country and they see conspicuous consumption, they are resentful of other people as well as the government because they should be doing something to help them."

Although the kingdom is striving to diversify its oil-based economy, the private sector is failing to provide jobs. Unemployment is officially put at between 6 to 12 percent, and most Saudis long for government jobs and state hand-outs.

A decade-old drive of "Saudization," intended to replace over 6 million foreign workers with Saudi nationals, has failed to produce major results and the government plans to bring even more Asian labor to fuel its industrial expansion.

"It's not a matter of just giving people food. The state has to train them to really earn their income," Sadek said. "Nobody really knows when the oil boom will change, so it's better for the government to create projects that will give jobs to the segments of the population who are unemployed and unskilled."

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[New York] Third of NY Jews live in poverty

from Y Net News

New poll shows one-third of New York Jews live under or near poverty line. Poorest: Ultra-Orthodox, elderly, Russian immigrants and illegal Israelis
Itamar Eichner

A new poll revealed that one third of New York Jews (329,000) live under or near the poverty line.

The surprising finding was revealed during a special session of the Jewish Council of Urban Affairs in New York. Among the participants were Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Israel's Consul General in NY Arye Mekel.

According to the poll, approximately one million Jews live throughout New York's five boroughs, 225,000 of them under the poverty line. New York defines a family of four with an annual income of less than USD 26,000 as being poor.

Additionally, the poll showed that 104,000 Jews live near the poverty line – meaning in families of four with an annual income of less than USD 38,000. Most of the poor Jews live in Brooklyn and include ultra-Orthodox, elderly, Russian immigrants, and illegal Israelis living in New York.

Mekel reported the findings to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Senator Clinton promised to fight poverty.

Mekel said at the council's session that just last week a poverty report in Israel classified 18 percent of Israeli families as poor, adding that “one could say that the number of poor Jews in America and in Israel is similar.”

He urged cooperation between Israel and City Hall in New York and an exchange of poverty experts between the countries in a bid to fight Jewish poverty; the council accepted Mekel’s suggestions.

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[UN] Basic Education for Rural People Needs US$ 1.64 Billion a Year

from All Africa

Donors would have to give US$1.64 billion each year to meet basic education needs for rural people in low-income countries, FAO Assistant Director-General Alexander Maller said at an international meeting on education (12-14 June) attended by FAO, Unesco, other UN agencies, civil society and donors' representatives.

Mr. Maller, who heads the Sustainable Development Department at the Rome-based UN agency, stressed that external assistance is badly needed for more than 94 million rural children who are out of school. He also invited the international community to address rural-urban education disparities.

Education for rural people requires major investments by governments and donors in order to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as well as the UN's Education for All targets.

Today, just over half of the world's population lives in rural areas. In the globe's poorest countries, where education is essential for poverty alleviation, the population will continue to be predominantly rural for decades to come, according to FAO.

Living in a rural area in a poor country frequently means facing poverty, hunger and illiteracy. In rural areas, the proportion of out-of-school children is almost twice as large as that of urban areas. A large number of these children will join the ranks of the next generation of illiterate and poor adults.

"Rural people with basic education are more likely to adopt new technologies and become more productive. They can deal better with change, improve their livelihoods, and foster gender equality and active citizenship," Mr. Maller said.

The meeting, organized by the International Working Group on Education, is hosted by FAO as part of the Global Education for Rural People initiative launched by FAO and Unesco at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Based on research on the interactions between education, skills development, agriculture and rural development, its objective is to empower the rural poor to become fully integrated actors in the development process.

Currently, this FAO-led initiative focuses on building national capacities to address the challenges of education for rural people.

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[Jamacia] PM concerned about Carribean poverty

from Hard Beat News

Jamaica’s Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller has expressed concern over the conditionalities attached to aid given to the Caribbean.

The PM, who addressed the Inter-American Development Bank's 'Building Opportunities for the Majority' conference Sunday, told Congresswoman, Maxine Waters in a private meeting that multi-national agencies should reconsider their approach to development financing as a means of helping governments to find ways of brining the poor into the mainstream of economic activity.

And she criticized the recent reclassification of some Caribbean nations as middle-income countries, stating that it has affected the flow of development aid to the region.

Prime Minister Simpson Miller began her three-day visit to Washington on June 11 by attending mass at the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. The IDB conference concluded yesterday with an address by former U.S. President Bill Clinton.

Clinton stated that Latin America should carry out microeconomic reforms to clear the path for more poor people to join the middle class, instead of locking itself in a debate over fiscal discipline and social spending.

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[US] Poverty a 'Moral Issue' In 2006 Elections, Author Says

from Cybercast News Service

By Nathan Burchfiel

Washington, D.C. (CNSNews.com) - The author of several books chronicling poverty in America on Tuesday said the gap between rich and poor is a "moral issue" that will help advance the "progressive" movement.

Barbara Ehrenreich, author of the bestselling "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" and its follow-up "Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream," made her prediction at the annual Take Back America conference in Washington, D.C.

Criticizing conservatives who argue that poverty is a natural result of capitalism or that it is caused by immoral behavior, Ehrenreich said "it's caused by a shortage of money."

"There is a war going on," she said, "and I don't just mean the shameful and increasingly sickening abuse of our American military force in Iraq. I mean a class war in the United States."

Wages are being held down, as consumer prices rise and the Bush administration pursues its policy of tax cuts, Ehrenreich complained. Those tax cuts, she added, are financed in part by "cuts in Medicaid and other programs for the poor."

Ehrenreich criticized what she called the division "between the gated communities on one end and the tenements and trailer parks on the other end." She encouraged the liberal activists attending the conference to have passion for "the common good."

The common good also has Biblical backing, Ehrenreich said. "There is no mention of stem cells in the Bible," she said, referring to the religious opposition to embryonic stem cell research. "There are hundreds and hundreds of mentions of the obligation of every community toward its poor and its oppressed people."

She encouraged the audience to make poverty a moral issue in the same way that conservatives made homosexual marriage a moral issue in the 2004 election. "We want more people to be motivated by that passion for advancing the common good."

Ehrenreich received critical acclaim for her 2001 book "Nickel and Dimed," in which she chronicled her adventures as an "undercover" low wage worker. She worked as a maid, a waitress, a nursing home assistant and a Wal-Mart salesperson to discover how difficult it is to live comfortably on a near minimum-wage salary. "Bait and Switch," released in 2004, applies the same model to the American middle-class.

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[New York] Liverpool to help tackle poverty and unemployment

from 24 Dash

The Deputy Mayor of New York is visiting Liverpool to see how the city is tackling poverty and unemployment.

Linda Gibbs is among representatives from New York's Commission for Economic Opportunity, visiting the city as part of a trip to the UK.

The delegates will study a number of schemes including Clubmoor Children's Centre - which provides child care, health and parental support.

They will also visit the employment initiatives Kensington Regeneration and South Liverpool JET, as well as the North Liverpool Community Justice Centre - which was based on a similar project in New York.

Liverpool City Council leader, Warren Bradley, said: "Liverpool has made tremendous strides in recent years in reducing unemployment and making the city a better place to live, work and visit.

"The city council and its partners are working extremely hard in order to transform life for local residents, and I hope that the delegation find their visit to Liverpool extremely useful.

"This is a good example of the close links that Liverpool is developing with New York - a city it has always had an extremely special relationship with."

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[Pakistan] Protest held against rich nations’ attitude at WTO

from The Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: Campaigners, activists, workers, farmers and poor people staged a protest demonstration here on Monday against what they call cheating of developing countries by rich countries monopolizing international trade negotiations in their favour.

The protest rally was organized by Actionaid, the Sustainable Agriculture Action Group (SAAG) and other partners as part of the “People’s Week Against WTO deal” being observed in different countries, including Pakistan.

The participants of the rally believed that the WTO is rushing towards an unfair, non- transparent and exclusive deal without respecting the rights of poor countries and commitments made with them.

The entire negotiation process of multilateral trading system has become hostage to the US Congress and is rushing towards a bad deal to meet US fast track authority. Developing countries, poor farmers, workers and consumer will be the net losers, they added.

“The deal on the table at the World Trade Organization will only serve to worsen poverty and Pakistan would be wise to reject it. It’s poor people who will lose out in this latest round of talks. Rich countries are in favour of continuing farm subsidies that will lead to dumping of produce in developing countries. This would put the small farmers out of agricultural trade”, said Abdul Majeed Cheena of the Pakistan Kissan Ittehad

Mustafa Talpur, head of the ActionAid International Pakistan’s trade justice campaign, and other speakers said: “This week there is a chance for the people affected by unjust trade rules to make their collective voices heard. Rich nations have not fulfilled their promise of Doha talks.

Their level of farm support has been increased from $243 billion in 1986-88 to $279 billion in 2003-4. In the European Union’s case domestic support will account for over 80% of its total agricultural expenditure by 2010. It is estimated that by 2013 direct payments in the EU-25 will total about 40 billion euros.

“Rich nations are attempting to force open developing country markets. Critical to this agenda is rich nations’ push to ensure that poorer nations open up industrial and service sectors. There is no development dimension to this agenda. Under these proposals, many developing countries will have to make deep cuts to their tariffs. These cuts will destroy the local industrial base, make the future development prospective bleak, cause mass unemployment and revenue loss. The emerging Pakistani industries such as footwear, electronics, leather, sports, surgical and other industries will face competition from technologically-advanced Western industries.

“The European Union’s push for intensive services liberalization will cause