Instead, the government has created a record number of cabinet posts, refused to release a probe into the controversial sale of a luxury government-owned hotel and has asked for $400 million in donations to help avert a possible famine for more than 10 million Kenyans.
"This government is robbing the people blind with one hand and holding out the begging bowl with the other," said Gladwell Otieno, head of the Nairobi-based Africa Society for Open Governance.
Her group has organize protests over the size of the Cabinet - 93 ministers and assistant ministers - and the salaries of parliament members. Kenyan lawmakers earn about $132,000 annually, of which nearly four-fifths is untaxable benefits.
Politicians argue that they spend much of their salaries assisting impoverished constituents: Nearly 60 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day.
The perks are particularly galling when food prices are rocketing and the government is investigating a grain scandal. The head of the country's tourism board was also mired in scandal and nearly $100 million worth of gasoline disappeared from government storage last year.
Mutua said the government was investigating those scandals and would prosecute where necessary. More than 150 officials have been charged with corruption in the past five years, although a congested judiciary had secured only a handful of convictions.
Oxfam, which has been based on High Street for the past 38 years, will shut its doors for the final time this Saturday, February 28.
The organisation was the first to open a charity shop in Halesowen but bosses have reluctantly decided to leave the town, blaming a fall in sales over the past two years and the end of the current lease agreement.
Kit Humpage, a volunteer who managed the store for 16 years until last August, said it was a sad day for everyone connected with the shop.
Kit, aged 87, said: “We are exceedingly sad.
“Many of us have been here a long time – we are all feeling down at the moment.
“We had hoped they might change their minds but once a decision has been made that’s it.”
...
Oxfam area manager Lisa Milner said the shop has seen a sharp drop in donations and sales since work began on the town’s regeneration two years ago – with only a minor improvement since it’s completion last November.
McGruder bought her home by opening an Individual Development Account (IDA). IDAs match monthly family savings with public-private funds toward purchase of a home, a small business, or education—all asset-building pursuits typically reserved for those in wealthier tax brackets who typically receive thousands of dollars in tax benefits for such investments. IDAs are increasingly touted by groups such as the Poverty Forum as a way to build responsible home ownership—and at far less cost than the $75 billion housing bailout announced by President Barack Obama on Feb. 18.
In McGruder's case, two years of saving in an IDA under a program supervised by Houston's Covenant Community Capital Corporation (CCCC) led to a matching grant that allowed her to put a $7,000 down payment on a $40,000 used home in the city's Fifth Ward. McGruder, who's held jobs like Medicaid and public health counselor, herself spent years as a homeless child in this enclave of 40,000 residents northeast of downtown—raised by family friends and getting along by washing dishes and doing other odd jobs.
Covenant requires IDA participants to attend classes on financial planning where they learn how to pay an electric bill, to budget income, and to request a credit rating. Six years later, by making monthly payments plus continuing to save via her IDA, McGruder paid off the home loan balance of $21,000 last month.
"All my adult life I have lived in apartments. When you live in an apartment you have no say-so, not even about who walks onto the porch," said McGruder. "And renters aren't always counted properly in the census. Now I can be counted. And I have something to leave my children."
In Houston over 700 low-income residents are actively enrolled with IDAs through Covenant, and the average home purchase price for IDA "graduates" is $97,105. Since Covenant began the program in 2001, a dozen Fifth Ward residents have purchased homes and 33 more are currently saving money. Three Fifth Ward participants qualified for matching funds just last week.
"No one is so poor that they cannot save," is the radical premise of Stephan Fairfield, who started CCCC in 1998 as a faith-based organization combating urban decline with "long-term solutions." In addition to the IDA program, Fairfield also has developed two senior housing communities as well as new housing for low-income families. In 2000 his organization opened a call center that has grown to employ over 700 people from the community and is now run by the for-profit outsourcing customer service firm Interactive Response Technologies (IRT). This year Covenant is launching Bank on Houston, a cooperative effort with the FDIC, the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, and 19 local banks and credit unions, to help "the unbanked" open starter checking accounts.
According to the latest report on the state of food insecurity in rural India, more than 1.5 million children are at risk of becoming malnourished because of rising global food prices.
The report said that while general inflation declined from a 13-year high exceeding 12% in July 2008 to less than 5% by the end of January 2009, the inflation for food articles doubled from 5% to over 11% during the same period.
Foodgrain harvest during 2008-09 is estimated to be a record 228 million tonnes. However, the requirement for the national population would exceed 250 million tonnes by 2015.
India ranks 94th in the Global Hunger Index of 119 countries, the report said.
Brought out by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), the report points to some staggering figures. More than 27% of the world's undernourished population lives in India while 43% of children (under 5 years) in the country are underweight. The figure is among the highest in the world and is much higher than the global average of 25% and also higher than sub-Saharan Africa's figure of 28%.
More than 70% of children (under-5) suffer from anaemia and 80% of them don't get vitamin supplements. According to the report, the proportion of anaemic children has actually increased by 6% in the past six years with 11 out of 19 states having more than 80% of its children suffering from anaemia.
‘‘Where is one of my favorite photos?’’ Chilton scans a wall of frames inside an exhibit hall at Drexel University. She stops at one, brushing the glass as if to caress the child herself. ‘‘Let me tell you about this kid.’’
The little girl, 15-16 months old, wears a striped top that swallows her tiny arms. Her nose is runny, her eyes empty.
Hers is not the picture of hunger that Americans are accustomed to seeing. She isn’t emaciated, like those living in squalid conditions in famine-stricken countries, but she is underweight and malnourished, often fed chips and sugary drinks instead of milk and formula.
The very word, hunger, means something different in 2009 in America. It manifests itself in poor diets lacking in fruits and vegetables, in children who are fed fatty, cheap foods like hot-dogs or ramen noodles and may be overweight but also hungry. It shows in a child’s health, and in the everyday hard choices of mothers and fathers: Buy Pampers or formula? Pay the heating bill or fill the fridge?
Even before the economy tanked, some 36 million adults and children struggled with hunger in 2007, including 12 million the government considers to have ‘‘very low food security’’ — meaning they suffered a substantial disruption to their food supply at some point during the year.
The number of Americans receiving food stamps reached an all-time high last year, topping 30 million in September, October and November, even though the maximum benefit for a family of four — $588 — still falls $78 short of the cheapest possible government-established plan to feed a family that size.
President Barack Obama, whose own mother once received food stamps, has pledged to end childhood hunger; the administration’s stimulus package raises food stamp benefits by 14 percent.
It gives low-income people the chance to qualify for a low-interest five-year loan. The applicants have to show they have enough money to afford payments, typically between $100 and $200 monthly. If they qualify, they can choose a car from a nonprofit dealership in Glenwood City, Wis., that buys auction cars with low miles.
Denise Lewis of Duluth remembers scraping together $500 two years ago to buy a 1996 Dodge Neon with 200,000 miles. It looked great but quickly wound up in the repair shop for a broken transmission, and Lewis went without the car for six months until she could afford the repair bill.
Lewis says she nearly cried when she learned this week that she had qualified for the Jump Start program.
Hanh, a Vietnamese woman with HIV who lost her husband and child to the disease, works to prevent AIDS and destigmatize its sufferers. In a town whose population and buildings were decimated by the Bosnian war, single mother Nada creates an agricultural co-op run by Serbs and Bosniaks united to rebuild their home. And in one of the world's poorest countries, matriarch Madame Urbain educates and represents exploited migrant girls in the slums of Bamako, Mali.
"These women are making a powerful noise. They're instigating change up against all odds," said ABC 7 Entertainment reporter Janet Davies, the local ambassador for international humanitarian organization CARE. "It makes a difference in their world, and eventually it makes a difference in our world."
"A Powerful Noise" will be shown in dozens of local movie theaters on one night only, March 5, in conjunction with hundreds of cinemas around the nation. The event is sponsored by CARE and an impressive coalition of international aid groups, and concludes with a live town hall meeting held in New York City but simulcast to the local theaters.
During the post-film discussion, Chicago-area audiences will be able text their questions to panelists -- including former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, activist/model Christy Turlington Burns and actress Natalie Portman -- as they discuss the role of women in the fight against global poverty.
"CARE has evolved over its 64 years into being an organization that targets women and children, because they are most marginalized in this world," Davies said. "It's the women and children who, when given the tools, thrive and survive."
British-based charities are suffering additionally from the pound's decline, making their money worth less abroad.
The squeeze has come as the needs of many crisis-hit communities, such as those in Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka and Sudan's war-torn Darfur region, are rising.
"The problems in Darfur haven't changed one iota because of Western bank failures. If anything, it's just gone off the agenda," said John Low, chief executive of the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF), which helps charities manage money.
A CAF survey in January of 322 British charities -- including groups working on overseas aid -- found half expected their income to fall in the next year and 41 percent had seen their income drop in the previous three months.
...
British charities working overseas say the most harmful effect of the crisis so far has been the weakness of the pound. The CAFOD agency estimates the dollar value of British government aid may fall by as much as $41 billion between 2008 and 2014.
Groups funded by CAFOD in developing countries have already seen the dollar value of their sterling grants drop 25 to 30 percent compared with the middle of last year. "We're basically passing on the pain to our partners with profound apologies," said policy adviser George Gelber.
But Premier Dalton McGuinty says the law won't include guarantees or penalties for missing the target.
"We'll certainly be held to account on our progress or lack thereof when it comes to meeting our targets," McGuinty said. "We stand by that and we'll work as hard as we can to achieve that."
The government has promised to cut child poverty by 25% in five years and the new law will require any future government to lay out its own plan for further improvements.
"The legislation itself does not require a government to adopt our 25 in five target," McGuinty said. "What it does mandate is that every government have in place a poverty strategy.
"It hardens up our collective commitment to address poverty."
...
Critics said the strategy itself is an empty promise and the only firm commitment is to force future governments to make even more similarly empty promises.
"It's another fluffy McGuinty bill that will ultimately deliver nothing," Progressive Conservative Tim Hudak said.
Coffee farmers only earn 3 to 4 cents per pound. Why so little?
Coffee is one of those commodities that, even though it’s the second highest-traded legal commodity after oil, coffee farmers are about the only people who don’t get to say what the price is for their coffee. It’s a world-market price. The coffee cherry will rot in 24 to 36 hours if it’s not processed, so it’s a take-it-or-leave-it price.
So what does the world market mean for coffee?
Here’s an example—it depends largely upon what happens in Brazil. If Brazil has a frost or any kind of trauma to their coffee crop, the prices can go up, and the rest of the world’s farmers are happy. If not, there’s a glut of coffee, and the farmers don’t know what else to do besides grow more coffee to try and make more money. But that doesn’t really solve anything. That’s why Coffee Kids is about alternatives to coffee so that farmers can continue to harvest their coffee, even when prices are low. Because coffee farming is what they do—it’s their culture; it’s their passion.
What is it about coffee that is so unsustainable?
Coffee is harvested three to five months out of the year. Farmers are supposed to make enough money in those three to five months to feed themselves for a year, but they barely make enough to feed themselves through the harvest. So when Coffee Kids can provide alternative projects like microcredit [for funding gardens or small non-coffee businesses], people who haven’t had access to the local economy are contributing when there is no money from coffee. People like to talk about sustainable coffee, but there is no such thing as sustainable coffee. It’s sustainable communities.
...
What’s it like to visit the farmers?
They often live in wooden shacks. They give you the one chair that they have in the house to sit in. And I learn so much from the coffee farmers when I visit. One woman, a member of a microcredit group in Veracruz, Mexico, in a very rural area, said to me, ‘You know, some days we have meat, and some days we don’t. We’re doing pretty good.’ And I still get teary right now saying it. Why is that OK? You really get a perspective on what poverty is.
The long-term effects could fuel corruption and contribute to a "resource curse", whereby a tiny elite soaks up the profits instead of using oil and mining revenues to alleviate poverty, London-based Global Witness states in Country for Sale.
Cambodia is Southeast Asia’s second-poorest country after East Timor, with 35 percent of its population living on less than US$1 a day, according to government statistics.
Revenues from the 2005 oil find, which could total more than $1.5 billion annually, according to some estimates, should be directed to achieving its 2015 Millennium Development Goals, say critics.
"I see the rise of Cambodia's mining and oil sectors as just one part of the wholesale diversification of natural resource and state asset exploitation in Cambodia," Eleanor Nichols, a campaigner for Global Witness, told IRIN.
"Historically, the revenue generated by their misappropriation has reinforced the position and impunity of elites, further strengthening their hold on the levers of power," she said.
Global Witness has had a rocky relationship with the government, having closed its office in Phnom Penh in 2005 after threats over a report implicating top officials of illegal logging.
The Nobel-prize nominated group first monitored the country's forestry resources in the 1990s when international donors urged logging reform.
Polly Veazey-French, 23, from Matlock, will be cycling from Vancouver in Canada to San Diego and into Mexico with other volunteers to raise money for Global Agents for Change.
The charity helps young developing world entrepreneurs and supports sustainable solutions to global poverty.
Polly said: "I'm looking in to doing social work and along the way we will be doing community work with children, which is what I'm interested in.
"Raising money for a developing country is important to me."
Polly will be setting off on May 31 and will be cycling for seven weeks. She hopes to raise 3,000 US dollars.
During a meeting attended by various government departmental heads, it emerged that 97,618 people need relief food compared to 42,706 during a similar survey conducted in December.
For the last two months, a Catholic relief agency, Caritas, has been distributing food to those affected.
However, due to crop failure the number of people in need of food continues to rise and Friday’s meeting had been convened to review the situation.
The meeting, held in Nanyuki town, was chaired by senior district officer Denis Ogola. It heard that all divisions in the three districts were affected except Nyahururu and Ng’arua. Laikipia North District, which is home to pastoralists, is the worst hit, with over 50 per cent of the residents facing hunger.
The pressing need to feed the nearly 1 billion people around the world who are chronically hungry has faded from public attention, McGovern said.
"It's back on the back-burner right now, but there's still a flame there. It's a focus now on our own domestic economic problems that transcends the focus on anything else in government," he said.
Food prices soared last year, causing riots and hoarding in some countries. But commodity prices have since plunged, and the economic crisis has preoccupied policy makers.
McGovern said the groups want Obama to create a White House Office on Global Hunger and appoint a coordinator for U.S. efforts, which have been criticized as fragmented.
The organizations are also set to recommend a shift in the type of food aid provided, balancing traditional donations of U.S.-grown commodities for emergencies with longer-term aid to help countries develop agriculture and food security.
The plan will call for more flexibility to allow emergency aid to be bought locally rather than spending extra money and time to ship it from the United States.
The idea could face strong opposition from farm groups and shipping companies who prefer food for aid is bought in the United States and transported via American carriers overseas.
...
McGovern, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1972, has been part of U.S. efforts to decrease hunger abroad and at home since the early 1960s when he was appointed by the Kennedy administration to coordinate food aid.
He said he first resolved to try to help tackle the problem after he was stationed in Italy during World War Two, and witnessed people on the brink of starvation.
"I saw women, young housewives, selling themselves on the street to get a few dollars to get their children fed. I saw them pawing through our garbage dump at the air base ... to get scraps of food," he said.
IPS: What are the regions urgently in need of help to meet their sanitation goals? Africa? Asia? Latin America? According to the U.N., 62 percent of Africans do not have access to improved sanitation. If so, why are they lagging far behind other regions?
SY: About 40 percent of the world population lives without proper toilets. They primarily reside in Africa and Asia, two regions that are most urgently in need of toilets and sanitation aid. Residents live under the constant threat of contracting typhoid [enteric] fever, cholera, enteritis, and malaria.
For example, a lack of toilets makes it impossible to separate drinking water from waste water. As a result, drinking water becomes polluted. People must either buy water or drink polluted water. Yet, the average income of a slum resident in Africa is less than a dollar per day; when they are forced to buy drinking water they use more than 30 percent of their income. This contributes to the never-ending cycle of poverty.
In addition, polluted water and an inadequate water supply for people to wash their hands cause waterborne diseases, which ultimately prevents people from working. Unemployment then increases the poverty level. In extreme cases, these diseases result in death, since people cannot afford medical treatment. It is clear that the lack of toilets is intricately related to poverty and sickness.
The improvement of sanitation, therefore, can advance the improvement of other social problems. Without proper sanitation, poverty aid is but a temporary expedient.
IPS: What are the major shortcomings in meeting the sanitation needs of developing nations? Funding? Lack of support from governments? Absence of political will?
SY: The most urgent is changing people's mindset and behaviour. People must recognise the importance of defecating in toilets instead of open spaces. In order for this to happen, there needs to be proper education programmes. National and local governments must assume this responsibility.
There must also be adequate funding, political will, and popular support in place. These factors are crucial. People must first become aware of the importance of toilets and sanitation to motivate central and local governments to implement such programmes.
Ethiopia, one of Africa's biggest and poorest countries, has more than 80 languages. Experts say a quarter of those are on the verge of extinction, and the government faces a tricky balance between protecting its linguistic heritage and training workers to compete in a globalised world.
As a result, the five-year-olds at Medhamiyalus Church's tiny primary school have to tackle three different tongues: their local language, Amharic -- the official language of Ethiopian business and politics -- and English.
"English is most important for our students, otherwise they cannot cope, they cannot get the proper education intended for them," school principal Fikre Teferra told Reuters TV.
"If these children succeed in getting to high school, and colleges, what else can they do? It is English that everything is given in."
The pupils are playing various interactive computer games that teach them the notoriously difficult 256 characters and variations of the Amharic alphabet.
Like the majority of the estimated 150,000 street children in the Ethiopian capital -- most of whom are from families that migrated to the city from rural areas -- it is not their first language.
After the brutal Derg government was overthrown in 1991, the constitution was changed to safeguard the country's scores of local languages by giving ethnic groups the right to set up "mother tongue" primary education systems.
The UCLA Center for Health Policy Research report measured economic stability by the real costs to eat, travel and pay for medical costs and housing in each of California's 58 counties.
Its findings reveal 47 percent of state residents 65 and older are unable to pay for their basic needs. That's 864,000 seniors, more than half of whom struggle at home alone.
The new data reveal far deeper poverty rates among seniors than was previously known. According to the decades-old standard of measuring poverty, only 9 to 10 percent of California seniors were considered poor, that is, earning less than $10,000 a year. Researchers note that amount is peanuts in high-cost California, failing to reflect the true cost of survival.
"For us, what's striking is that these numbers are not even taking into account the latest economic crisis," said co-author Susie Smith, a program director at the nonprofit Insight Center for Community Economic Development. She noted the report used 2007 census data. "We can only imagine when we update this information next year, what the numbers are going to look like."
One additional hardship is already known: The recently passed state budget cuts aid to thousands of seniors.
In Silicon Valley, more than 48 percent of seniors fell below the survival standard. In Santa Clara County — where homeownership for many has shifted from a poverty-buffer to a neck yoke — there are signs that homeowners face particularly dire trade-offs as nonhousing costs grow making mortgages more difficult to meet.
"The figures were alarmingly high, such that we do not know what is the real cause because we have employed every strategy to combat the spread of the epidemic," Health Minister Benedict Xaba told state radio.
The ante-natal study conducted every two years has been on the rise since the first survey in 1992, when the rate was 3.9 percent.
Xaba said that infection rates appeared to be stabilising among teenage mothers.
"However, the age group 25-39 still shows a steady increase over the years and this is a cause for concern as this is the productive age group," he added.
AIDS activists have criticised government's inadequate distribution of medications in a country where close to 40 percent of the adult population is infected with the disease.
King Mswati III exerts absolute rule over the tiny mountainous kingdom, with a lavish lifestyle in a country mired in poverty.
MSF has been granted access to groups of Rohingya detained by the Thai authorities on a number of occasions during recent years. “On arrival their medical condition speaks volumes about the experience that they have undergone at sea. We generally treat people for dehydration, skin disease and bruising, varying in severity - depending on the length of their journey,” explains MSF head of mission in Thailand, Richard Veerman, “Last year we found out that one immigration detention centre was holding six hundred Rohingya, many had been detained for around three months and were showing signs of stress. Some appeared to be suffering from severe psychological trauma”. Over the past two years, the number of Rohingya arriving in Thailand has reached an all time high. “This is a clear indication that more needs to be done, not only to ensure adequate assistance on the spot, but to address the root cause of the problem back in Myanmar”, concludes Richard.
Cox’s Bazaar, on the eastern shores of Bangladesh has seen countless Rohingya come and go over the years; those who have fled from Myanmar and those who pile into overcrowded boats headed for Thailand and beyond. For those who stay, living can be extremely tough. MSF began providing health services for the Rohingya in Bangladesh in 1998, most recently assisting about 7,500 people who struggled to survive, otherwise unaided, in atrocious living conditions in Tal Makeshift Camp. “The overcrowded, unhygienic living conditions were a breeding ground for respiratory tract infections and skin diseases; diarrhoea was rife and many of the children were malnourished. Mental health problems added to the burden and an MSF programme was started to support those struggling with the psychological impact of life in the camp”, tells MSF medical coordinator in Bangladesh, Gabi Popescu.
“Over the years I have heard many reasons for people fleeing Myanmar. A woman and her three children left following her husband’s arrest, in fear for her family. Another couple left, the woman some months pregnant, out of fear of the repercussions they would face for being unable to afford the official marriage license, not to mention the child birth license”, Gabi continues. The Rohingya living in Northern Rakhine State Myanmar, are legally obliged to purchase expensive marriage permits, unlike the rest of the population. Children being born out of marriage often results in high informal fines or imprisonment and a two child only policy applies.
Last week I saw this in action in Rwanda. Just 15 years ago, the country was utterly devastated. They are now rebuilding their economy, with organised smallholders at its heart. Just 15 years ago, Maraba village was one of the country's poorest, their low-quality coffee was sold straight off the bushes for passing prices to passing middlemen.
Today, the Maraba farmers have organised themselves into a Fairtrade-certified cooperative, have four washing stations – the first stage in processing coffee – have trained the first generation of cuppers, or tasters, who are constantly improving quality, and are commanding record premiums for their prize-winning beans. They are roasting and selling their coffee all over Rwanda as well as exporting it through Union Handroasted to UK shop shelves.
These are the most innovative farmers I have ever met – constantly researching new ways to improve productivity, such as making organic compost, or to add value, such as roasting at a village level using traditional techniques. And they have sparked an economic revival that sees Maraba now as among the more prosperous villages in Rwanda, as evidenced by the bustling bank and choice of hairdressing salons, while the farmers are now building and running a nursery school.
It is an economic revival that, with the right support, smallholders could lead worldwide. Some 450 million smallholder farming households cultivate two hectares or less, and with their families they make up a third of all humanity. Increasing their incomes will therefore be vital to improving the incomes of the poor. Indeed, because smallholders tend to spend more income on local goods and services, they could be the impetus that stimulates virtuous economic circles in local economies.
Organised groups of smallholders can also play a catalytic role in stimulating wider progress – on the environment and on social issues.
And smallholders hold the key to increasing food production. Small farms produce the bulk of many developing countries' food: up to 80% of Zambia's, for example. Much evidence points to their productivity – if given the right support.
That support is needed now more than ever. In Uganda, some tea-growers today spend more than 50% of income on food, up from 30% in the past. Some estimate the price of maize will rise by 27% over the next 10 years.
A United Nations Development Program report released two weeks ago says India's slums are likely to get even bigger. Currently, 42 million people, a number roughly equal to the population of Spain, are struggling in India's slums. By 2030, the report predicts, almost half the country's population will be living in cities that are already crowded.
Meanwhile, India is grappling with the world's largest number of malnourished children under the age of five – an estimated 57 million.
It's a harsh situation that has been developing for decades. But it seems that the success of Slumdog Millionaire has shone a fresh light on these issues. In particular, the film has prompted more international offers of assistance, including some from Canada.
“I think what is shown in the movie is reality,” says local relief worker Deepashree Medar. “But personally, I don't like the title. It's true this is a slum but these people don't deserve to be called dogs. They struggle too much and must work very hard.”
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YUVA India gets assistance from the Canadian International Development Agency and its partner Rooftops Canada.
Bharti Bagde is a widow who struggled to support her two children on less than a dollar a day by scavenging for paper to fold and sell as bags before she began cooking for YUVA.
“I haven't seen this Slumdog movie,” Ms. Bagde says. “But this is a good place to live. In the rainy season, the gutters do overflow and that affects our health, but we help each other.”
“It is a constant challenge to keep up with increasing
patient numbers. We are running out of ward space
and beds for the patients.” - MSF staff
The cholera epidemic, which started in August 2008
has been unprecedented in scale for Zimbabwe and
still continues today. MSF has treated more than
45,000 cholera patients during this time – which
represents approximately 75% of all cholera cases
since the outbreak began. The level of MSF’s
response has been necessitated by the scale of the
epidemic and the inability of local health structures to
cope.
Cases have been found in all provinces. More than
500 MSF staff members are presently working to
identify new cases and to treat patients in need of
care. As of early February 2009, the focus of the
outbreak had shifted from the cities to rural areas,
where access to health care is particularly limited,
but the number of cases in some urban areas are still
significant. The epidemic is far from under control. In
the first week of February 2009, 4,000 new cases
were treated in MSF supported structures alone.
The reasons for the outbreak are clear: lack of
access to clean water, burst and blocked sewage
systems, and uncollected refuse overflowing in the
streets, all clear symptoms of the breakdown in
infrastructure resulting from Zimbabwe's political and
economic meltdown.
Although MSF has been able to respond to the
outbreak on a massive scale – delays and restrictions
have been encountered. In December, when the
number of cholera patients in Harare had reached a
peak with close to 2,000 admissions a week, it took
weeks to get permission to open a second empty
ward in Harare’s Infectious Disease Hospital to
increase the capacity for cholera treatment.
"In richer countries this crisis is resulting in bankruptcy, unemployment, personal misery and fear for the future," the former U.N. chief said. "But for many in Africa, the effects are life-threatening."
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Annan, who is chairman of the Africa Progress Panel, a group devoted to promoting development, warned that lives and progress were at risk in Africa because of the financial downturn. And he urged rich nations to keep up their commitments in the face of the crisis.
"The impact is profound, and deepening," said Annan, citing decreasing trade and foreign investment, drying up credit and slumping revenues. He said hunger will likely increase, school attendance will drop, and women and children will be the hard hit.
The IMF has revised downward its estimate for growth in Africa in 2009, Annan told a meeting organized by the Italian chapter of the Aspen Institute.
Geldof challenged Berlusconi to prove his leadership and be at the forefront of efforts to halve extreme poverty around the world by 2015.
"Don't talk to me about the financial crisis," Geldof told reporters. "Whatever financial crisis we meet, it is life or death" for people in Africa.
"This money does not go into some black hole, it goes into an empty stomach," Geldof said
Paul Risley, WFP's regional communications advisor, says the levels of food shortages and malnutrition is adding to a sense of desperation among the Rohingya community.
"Poverty is still the greatest challenge," he said. "The people in Rakhine State are often found to be without food between harvests. There is a growing sense of desperation that's measured by the very high malnutrition rates we found in the recent assessment."
Recent WFP briefing papers say one third of Burma's children under five are underweight, with over 100,000 of them dying each year.
Currently the WFP plans to provide some 1.6 million people across northern Rakhine state, Shan state and the Magway Division - covering Chin and Kachin states - with food assistance.
The WFP is already providing food relief for over one million people in the Irrawaddy Delta region devastated by cyclone Nargis in May last year. The cyclone claimed thousands of lives.
Risley called on Burma's authorities to ease restrictions on the movement of goods and food from elsewhere in the country where the WFP and other non-government organizations are currently operating.
"The question is begged:" Has the World Bank and IMF perhaps unwittingly made Africa poorer through unwholesome policies? "wondered Obasanjo.
He told the plenary session of the Social Summit that it was pointless for developed nations and international financial institutions to demand eradication of poverty and promotion of social justice if they failed to address the issue of external debt, and protectionism in the north, which are marginalising the world's poor .
"Developed countries must commit themselves to debt remission for developing countries, so as to provide these countries with the basis of economic renewal and social advancement," Obasanjo said .
Citing the latest World Bank report, which indicates that the heavy flow of aid to developing countries has done little to improve social development in the countries, Obasanjo, who also is president of the Group of 77 said, as a result of the discriminatory policies, some 48 African countries have a collective economic output that does not surpass that of Belgium .
The report, 'New Paths to Social Development : Community and Global Networks in Action' the World Bank notes that rich countries collectively spent $300 billion to subsidise and protect their markets against foreign competition, a figure which equals Africa's total annual output.
He said poor governments are constrained by policies of fiscal and budgetary austerity which were imposed on them by the international financial institutions, leaving them without resources to initiate job creating programmes that will lead to gainful employment for their youths," he said .
Sub-Saharan Africa whose population of 700 million people is most affected, he said, is suffering double jeopardy, first from the burden of debt which leaves them no resources for social renewal, and secondly, from the protectionist policies of the advanced countries against imports from developing countries .
'The world has a capacity to eradicate poverty, and this summit should give us the opportunity to reaffirm the commitments to give our peoples hope and assurance of enhanced quality of life," he said .
Among the companies giving cash and in-kind contributions to help with the cocoa and cashew project are The Hershey Co., Kraft Foods, Mars, Inc., Archer Daniels Midland Co., Cargill, Armajaro, Olam International Ltd., and Starbucks Coffee Co.
Cocoa is West Africa’s largest agricultural export and accounts for 70 percent of the world’s supply.
The Gates Foundation has committed $23 million to the World Cocoa Foundation to administer the cocoa project. It will hire local scientists, agriculture outreach workers and educators to help the farm households.
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The cocoa project hopes to increase farmers’ income by improving their knowledge and productivity, cocoa quality, crop diversification and supply chain efficiency.
Improving their growing and processing technology, including getting access to fertilizer and how to use it, could significantly impact cocoa farm production in West Africa, Shah said.
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The new grants are aimed at helping about 200,000 cocoa farmers in Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Liberia and Nigeria in West Africa over the next five years, Shah said. The foundation hopes to help those farmers double their income by 2013.
A grant of $25 million to the German development organization Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Technische Zusammenarbeit will support the cashew project, which aims to help 150,000 small cashew farmers in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana and Mozambique increase their incomes by 50 percent by 2012.
Of all the unhappy women and men whose paths cross author E. Benjamin Skinner's in his book on present-day slavery, the saddest is undoubtedly the nameless Romanian girl with Down syndrome in a Bucharest brothel. "Mascara ran from pools of tears around deep-set eyes," Skinner writes. "Below her right bicep were no less than ten deep, angry red slashes, raised, some freshly scabbed."
Her image pervades "A Crime So Monstrous," a devastating exposé of the millions of suffering enslaved human beings around the world, including children.
Under threat of brutality, they toil in wealthy Haitian households, European brothels, and Indian quarries. Skinner encountered many such cases as he traveled to these sites with John Miller, the former head of the US State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. Field action to halt slavery is carried out through private groups funded from the office's annual budget of $375 million.
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To document more of the stark horror of slavery in other countries, he traveled widely, from Haiti, to the former communist countries of Eastern Europe, where severe poverty was endemic, to the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, and to India, where peasants and quarry workers who amass even small amounts of debt can remain in virtual slavery to their creditors for generations. In Moldova (part of which was once known as Moldavia and belonged to the former Soviet Union), some 400,000 women have disappeared since independence into slave prostitution.
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The problem of winning emancipation in so many countries is huge, but there are isolated bright lights. In Moldova, psychologist Dr. Lidia Gorceag operates a shelter for former sex slaves, funded by the International Organization for Migration in the United States. Many of these women come to her with physical injuries; their emotional scars are even deeper. Gorceag and the IOM help them to start their own small businesses such as selling sunflower oil or working in hair salons to gain economic independence. And in Washington, D.C., Kevin Bales runs Free the Slaves, an umbrella organization working to halt trafficking.
"The $8.5 million isn't going to do it," said Evelyn Behm, vice president of Mid-Ohio FoodBank, which serves central Ohio. "The demand will continue to grow as the economy continues to dive. We get calls every day asking how to access food pantries from people coming to us for the first time."
Gov. Ted Strickland's budget proposal would provide $8.5 million a year to the Ohio Association of Second Harvest Foodbanks, which distributes food and groceries to pantries across the state. The allocation is the same Second Harvest received from the state this year and last.
The money is used to purchase canned goods and grocery items and to buy surplus produce and meats from Ohio farmers at discounted prices.
Budget hearings set to begin this week in the House were postponed because of uncertainty over the federal stimulus package and lack of a bill detailing the governor's proposal.
"We are hopeful that any federal economic stimulus package will provide opportunities for additional funding for Ohio's emergency food programs," Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, Second Harvest's executive director, wrote in a letter delivered to Strickland yesterday.
She said of the 1.8 million Ohioans served between Oct. 1 and Dec. 31, one in three households had at least one adult working. Nearly 705,000 of those served were children and more than 232,000 were senior citizens.
“When you have people in Parry Sound who can barely keep their homes heated, multiply the issues when they have a disability because they’re already on a low income,” said Marliese Gause from the Friends, a care centre that supports people with long-term health needs.
“That doesn’t even take into account the things that you and I take for granted.
Some entertainment. Socialization. A little bit of money so you don’t always feel like the poorest kid on the block. In times when we … worry about cutting and slashing and all the rest of it, the problem is these individuals have been living with this all along.”
Those with disabilities encounter problems that able-bodied people couldn’t imagine.
Jo-Anne Demick, executive director of Community Living Parry Sound, works with people with developmental or intellectual disabilities and says they are among the poorest groups in Ontario.
According to statistics from Community Living Ontario, people with developmental disabilities experience rates of poverty that are 13 per cent higher than others.
Community Living is a provincially-funded organization that provides a range of support services such as day support, education, respite, employment and housing services.
Demick says the reason people with disabilities live in poverty is because they don’t have the same access to support systems, education and employment.
It’s a vicious cycle because they rely on support — whether it’s an educational assistant in school or a support worker as an adult – to get education and employment to escape poverty.
Even worse, families that have a family member with a disability have a greater likelihood of living in poverty, says Demick.
Often that’s because a parent has to give up or will lose their job in order to provide support for their child.
The research predicts that the number of children in poverty will fall to 2.3 million by 2010, missing the target of 1.7 million set by former prime minister Tony Blair in 1999.
The recession may not increase the number of children living in poverty, the report suggests, but many will find themselves further below the poverty line as a result of increased unemployment.
The report said: "Overall, it is possible that recession will bring a net increase in children's hardship even though it does not raise the child poverty total. This is likely to raise the cost of tackling child poverty, since it is more difficult to lift children out of severe poverty."
Research carried out for the report by the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) said it would cost £4.2 billion a year to tackle the problem by raising the child element of child tax credit by £12.50 a week more than currently planned.
Failing to meet the 2010 target will make it more difficult to reach the 2020 goal of eradicating child poverty.
Report author Donald Hirsch said: "The challenge in a recession will be to build on the progress already made in reducing child poverty.
Before, when Malit Kuronoi needed to pay the cowherd who watched over his cattle in faraway northern Kenya, he made the 500-mile round trip himself. For four days, Kuronoi rode ramshackle buses across roads patrolled by bandits and bribe-seeking cops, sometimes sleeping by the roadside when a bus broke down, just to deliver the money.
Now he sends it by cell phone.
The Kenyan farmer is among millions who are at the forefront of a pocket-sized financial revolution that's sweeping Africa. Mobile banking, powered by cell phones, is allowing people who could never afford traditional bank accounts to send, receive and save money, often just by writing text messages.
Cheap and efficient m-banking services are cropping up from South Africa to Senegal. They're the latest example of how the cell phone has transformed life in sub-Saharan Africa, where over the past decade mass-market mobile networks have stitched together countries and families long separated by distance, poverty and shoddy infrastructure.
Less than one-fifth of Africans have bank accounts, and far fewer access the Internet. The continent, however, recently surpassed the United States and Canada with 340 million cell phone users and is adding another 70 million each year, according to Wireless Intelligence, a market research group.
Cell phone companies are racing to capitalize by offering banking tools that make it easier for city dwellers to send money to rural relatives, small businesses to pay their employees and parents to deposit their children's school fees. The amounts are relatively small, and the commissions are a fraction of those that major banks and wire services such as Western Union charge.
"It's absolutely changed lives," said Aly Khan Satchu, a Kenyan financial analyst. "This is bringing banking services to the 'un-banked' and the poor. It's very empowering."
On Tuesday, a new bipartisan group called the Poverty Forum released a series of specific proposals aimed at reducing domestic poverty and keeping Americans hit by the economic crisis from joining the ranks of the poor. The group of 18 leaders – headed by the Rev. Jim Wallis, president of Sojourners, and Michael Gerson, President Bush's former speechwriter and policy adviser – has worked since November to develop concrete antipoverty policies they hope will gain widespread support.
"We wanted to transcend political differences and find 'what's right and what works,' as opposed to what's left or right, or what's liberal or conservative," says Mr. Wallis, a progressive Evangelical.
At the same time, Christian Churches Together (CCT), the most inclusive ecumenical organization ever formed in the US, reached agreement on a poverty initiative last month, which it presented to members of President Obama's Domestic Policy Council. "For a group as diverse as ours – left, right, middle – to reach a consensus on on-the-ground strategies is significant," says Richard Hamm, CCT's executive administrator.
Both groups aim to make poverty a national priority. More than 37 million Americans lived in poverty in 2007, and from 7.5 million to 10 million more could slip into poverty in the next year or two due to rising unemployment, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.
"The reality of people on the margins pushed deeper in the current economic situation obligates us to work together in unprecedented ways on poverty," says forum member Mark Rodgers, who was chief of staff to former Sen. Rick Santorum, a conservative Republican.
In a bid to break down partisan barriers and offer a new model for political engagement, the forum involved antipoverty experts from such diverse groups as the Family Research Council, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Morehouse College in Atlanta.
* Federal incentives for individual savings accounts
• Business partnerships to link young adults not employed or in school to work experiences
• Financial education and planning for low- and middle-income households
• Creation of 2 million "opportunity" housing vouchers
• Increase in the federal minimum wage
• Expansion of proven prisoner-reentry initiatives to combat recidivism and crime
• Promotion of responsible fatherhood and healthy marriage
As the movie's popularity swelled, the filmmakers' plan began to fray.
Journalists swarmed the school, forcing Rubina and Azhar to stay home. The families started demanding more, asking for cash and new houses, Colson said.
When the city razed Azhar's neighborhood, Colson wired the family money for a new home. He doesn't know what happened to the money, but the family remains camped out in a lean-to.
Most troubling, he said, the parents' commitment to seeing their kids through school has waned.
So the filmmakers have agreed to buy apartments and allow the families to move in. But they won't transfer ownership to the parents until Rubina and Azhar finish school at age 18.
The filmmakers have also faced criticism that they didn't fairly compensate the children, but have declined to reveal how much they paid, again citing fear of exploitation.
"It's becoming a full-time job dealing with the daily hassle," Boyle said. Still, he added, "I'm glad we did it, even with all the headache."
When Amy Sokoloff and John Powell were trying to start their art restoration business in New York City, they needed some working capital. But banks weren't willing to take a chance on them.
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Sokoloff and Powell ended up on the doorstep of ACCION USA, a not-for-profit group patterned after the Third World microfinance institutions best known for providing money to Moroccan farmers for breeding chickens or to Bangladeshi women for weaving supplies.
The $15,000 loan they got in 2005_ which they paid back in two years — got them the sunlit studio where their Chelsea Restoration Associates brings aged, damaged oil paintings back to life. Last fall, after the U.S. recession began to cut into their business, they went back to ACCION USA for a $25,000 loan, "a tremendous help for cash flow" with an affordable 10.9 percent interest rate, Sokoloff said.
Sokoloff and Powell are among thousands of Americans using microcredit, a financing system originated in the Third World, to help open small businesses or get through rough spots. While the dollar amounts are much bigger in the U.S. than the tiny loans in developing countries — some for less than $10 — the principle is the same: a financial stake that lets people in need better their lives.
Now, with the recession deepening, U.S.-based microlenders say they are seeing an increase in inquiries from would-be borrowers, including startup entrepreneurs seen as too risky by banks and other traditional lenders.
And the still-small U.S. microcredit sector hopes for a boost from the new administration of President Barack Obama.
Obama's secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, is a big supporter of microfinance, praising it during her confirmation hearing for its ability to "raise standards of living and transform local economies" overseas. Obama also has a personal link to the industry because his late mother, Ann Dunham, was involved in microfinance in Indonesia.
These connections gave raised hopes among microloan advocates that some money from the administration's $787 billion economic rescue package will filter into their programs. U.S. microlenders already get support from the Small Business Administration and a Treasury community development fund.
"We're hoping for more funding" from government, said Wendy K. Baumann, vice chairman of the Association for Enterprise Opportunity, an advocacy group for microfinance based in Arlington, Virginia.
Microloans have been made in developing countries for more than 30 years. Bangladeshi economist Mohammed Yunis made the first one of about $27 from his own pocket to 42 women hoping to buy bamboo to make furniture. He later formed the Grameen Bank, which is now one of the world's largest microlenders and shared the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize with the founder.
In a new report, it said a 100-year trend of falling food costs could be at an end and that last year's sharp price rises had driven 110 million people into poverty.
Prices may have eased from those peaks in many areas, but experts say volatility -- combined with the impact of the global economic downturn -- has meant little respite for the poor.
"We need to deal with not only the way the world produces food but the way it is distributed, sold and consumed, and we need a revolution that boosts yields by working with rather than against nature," said UNEP executive director Achim Steiner.
More than half the food produced worldwide today was either lost, wasted or thrown away due to inefficiencies, he told a news conference at a major U.N. environment meeting in Kenya.
"There is evidence within the report that the world could feed the entire projected population growth alone by becoming more efficient while also ensuring the survival of wild animals, birds and fish on this planet," Steiner said.
The UNEP's "Rapid Response Assessment," released on Tuesday, said world food prices were estimated to rise by 30-50 percent over the coming decades -- while the global population is seen climbing to more than 9 billion from nearly 7 billion.
State Minister for the Development of Disadvantaged Regions Muhammad Lukman Edy said Monday the long-standing poverty problems had also worsened security relations with neighboring countries, which could make unilateral claims to Indonesian territory along the borders.
"The economic hardship along border areas can push people to engage in illegal activities and can degrade our people's sense of nationhood," he said Monday at a seminar on the development of border areas.
At present, 199 regencies are categorized as disadvantaged regions, with economic growth of less than 3 percent. Twenty-six of them lie in border areas.
The minister said residents of Belo regency on the border with Timor Leste, for instance, had a per capita income of Rp 1 million in 2005, compared with the national average of Rp 11 million.
Some 60,456 families live in poverty in Belo - 80 percent of its population.
In Kalimantan's border regions, per capita income of local residents is about US$300, far lower than that of their Malaysian counterparts just over the border, who make between $4,000 and $7,000.
# Between 2000 and 2007, the percentage of county children and youths living below the poverty level grew from 8 percent to 15 percent. The poverty level, set by the federal government, is a $10,400 income for a household with just one person, $21,200 for a household with four residents, and $35,600 for a household with eight residents.
# The percentage of families with children younger than the age of 5 living in poverty grew from 10 percent to 20 percent.
# During the 2007-08 school year, there were more than 600 homeless children in the Green Bay School District.
# The number of reported abuse and neglect cases involving county children increased from 597 in 1999 to 1,324 in 2006.
# An average of 34 percent of children enrolled in Brown County schools are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches.
"It's an issue that should concern us all because there's a cost down the road," said Sue Vincent, executive director of Start Smart. "The nation hasn't come forward with the times. There's still the mindset that this (raising a child) is a mother's issue. But if we invest early, there are results down the road."
The International Affairs group meets once a month for a meal based on the cuisine of various countries. Meetings also include speakers such as Carla Berlington, who recently talked about Burma, also known as Myanmar, where she rescues children as young as 5 who she said would be trained as soldiers for radical groups.
Berlington's group gives food, shelter, clothing and a safe haven to those children. She said she is in constant danger there, many times under live fire.
Members of the International Affairs group not only listen to stories about people in other countries, but also try to help those people.
This year the group has contributed to Berlington's program and to Heifer International, a nonprofit organization dedicated to relieving hunger and poverty through gifts of livestock and plants.
Through their contributions to Heifer International, members of the International Affairs group sent a goat to a family in the village of Muribe in northwest Tanzania. The goat will provide protein and income from milk and other dairy products that people can use to pay for medicine, housing and school for their children.
The group also sent 20 chickens to a family in Kosovo. The chickens will provide the family with a steady supply of protein-rich eggs and meat and a natural way of controlling disease-bearing insects.
Four months after arriving to help build orphanages near the town of Kitale, in March 2008, the couple was attacked by a group of nine men -including two guards assigned to protect them.
John was beaten with machetes and left in a bush - suffering several broken bones and dozens of serious cuts - while Eloise was attacked inside their home.
After several surgeries and months spent recuperating with family in Canada and the U.S., the couple began fundraising once again in August and returned to Kitale in January, not only to testify against the men who attacked them, but to continue helping people they say desperately need it.
"We've been able to move on purchasing two properties of land for the purpose of orphanages, schools, wells and gardens," said John.
"One of the parcels is a five-acre piece close to the seven-acre farm (where) we already have a number of boys off the streets."
And on that parcel, workers recently completed digging irrigational channels, which John said will be instrumental in lifting people living in the area out of poverty and despair.
MARK COLVIN: You say for the last 60 years that makes me think of say the Marshall Plan, which essentially reconstructed Europe; is aid itself a bad thing?
DAMBISA MOYO: From my perspective aid has not worked. Sixty years ago the architects of the aid model were essentially coming out of the Marshall Plan and there was this general euphoria that this type of large capital intervention could work. And in particular, could deliver long-term economic growth and reduce poverty.
And on those two metrics is basically how I'm judging aid in the past 60 years; has it increased growth? Has it reduced poverty? And on those two measures the answers are resoundingly no.
MARK COLVIN: So why would it have worked in Europe and not in say Africa?
DAMBISA MOYO: Europe was being reconstructed, it wasn't being constructed and in that sense there was already some semblance of infrastructure both political and economic infrastructure that was just simply being rebuilt. It had worked previously and all that interventionists were trying to do was rebuild and restructure a system that was already built, which is very different from the system or the situation in Africa.
The second thing, which I think is perhaps more important is that the Marshall Plan was short and sharp, it was five years, it was about $13 billion, in dollars at that time which is about equivalent to $100 billion now. It was very directed and targeted and it was finite.
I mean, if you compare that to the aid that goes to Africa now, essentially the money that goes to Africa's an open-ended commitment. There is no plan to reduce aid or to actively from the policy-makers perspective to try and wean these countries off of aid into a different, better model.
MARK COLVIN: All right; but is it possible to move abruptly from aid to no aid without at the very least a transition period of people having severe hardship and even starvation?
DAMBISA MOYO: First of all hardship and starvation is pretty much par for the course in Africa; I think we've seen enough pictures of that. It's not clear to me, in fact I argue in the book that most average people in Africa do not even see these aid revenues and so for us to worry as an international community to be concerned and to worry that Africans may suffer because the aid is cut off to me seems foolhardy.
I believe that most Africans would actually potentially see an improvement in their lives because they would start to be able to have their government's held accountable.
I don't think we should have another 60 years of aid. In my book I recommend sort of a five-year phasing out period. Ultimately, as an African I would like to see my continent participate on the world stage as an equal partner, not a drag on society.
“It is very different over there,” said Mrs Llewellyn. “I went out as a community nurse to try and improve the health in the villages, specifically tackling malaria and HIV.
“It is a very poor area, and it was quite an adjustment when I got out there. The contrast with back home could not be greater. We have everything and they have nothing.
“There is no transport, there are often no nurses in the hospitals and all the little things that we take for granted are just not there.”
A large part of Mrs Llewellyn’s work in Uganda was to give healthcare training to almost 100 local volunteers.
“The whole idea of VSO is that you go and set up a project and leave behind something that is workable and can carry on without you,” she explained.
Ahead of her return Mrs Llewellyn is trying to raise £10,000 to subsidise the purchase of mosquito nets for every household in the area she has been working.
More than 60 social service providers - public and faith-based - private citizens and representatives of charitable foundations met for two hours Wednesday morning at the Cincinnati-Hamilton County Community Action Agency in Bond Hill. They formulated the county's response to Strickland's request from 22 communities across Ohio for his anti-poverty task force.
Participants exchanged information about job-training programs, earned-income tax credits for the poor and services to the elderly.
"A lot of dots connected, but the themes of jobs and education kept coming up," said John Young, president and CEO of the Freestore Foodbank.
More than 3.4 million Ohioans live at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty level. The federal poverty level for a family of six is $28,400. Ohio's task force will aim to provide practical and short- and long-term solutions to the state's poverty in the form of a five- to 10-year vision.
Poverty has deepened and spread across the state since the governor organized the task force in May by executive order. From the 22 discussions and sets of recommendations, the process will narrow to regional meetings. Then the anti-poverty task force will make recommendations to Strickland, said Amanda Wurst, his spokesperson.
This process through the state's community action agencies does not deal with federal economic stimulus money that might come into Ohio.
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All major economic indicators for children show more strain on the Hamilton County's youngest citizens, according to a survey of the latest data available from the Children's Defense Fund and the Annie E. Casey Foundation's "Kids Count 2008" report for Ohio. The numbers and percentages of children under 18 living in poverty and receiving public health care, food stamps and free or reduced school lunches are up dramatically since 2001.
Jolie asked the Thai government to be 'just as generous to the Rohingya refugees who are now arriving on their shores'.
The Thai army has been accused of detaining and torturing hundreds of Rohingyas who in recent months have fled to Thailand to escape poverty in Myanmar, the website said.
Officials in Thailand have chastised Jolie for her comments, insisting that the UN refugee agency should not have allowed the star to visit the centre.
Said Virasakdi Futrakul, permanent secretary of the Thai foreign ministry: 'Angelina was not focused on the Rohingya, but was visiting Myanmar refugee camps. It was a coincidence that the Rohingya was a hot news issue at the time, therefore we must warn UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) that they should not comment on this issue because they have no mandate on this issue.
'The Thai government will issue a reprimand letter to UNHCR asking why it allowed Angelina Jolie to visit the refugee camps,' he added.
The Canadian Press has obtained a draft copy of a report prepared for the 25 in 5 Network for Poverty Reduction that warns the poor will be hit harder than anyone by the recession.
The report, to be released Thursday, calls on the province to invest $2.4 billion this year and $2.6 billion next year on social programs, or roughly 2.7 per cent of Ontario's gross domestic product.
It recommends a $100 monthly healthy food supplement to help adults on welfare or disability support payments, plus increased social assistance payments in the Ontario Child Benefit.
The report also calls for a new housing benefit to help low-income renters meet the high cost of housing, and says the province needs to build 7,500 new affordable child-care spaces.
A co-chair of the alliance is Jim Yong Kim, director of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University.
"So, what did we find when we looked at how children are faring in this epidemic? Statistics show that, one, over 90 percent of the more than two million children living with HIV are infected before or during birth. Yet, only one in three pregnant women with HIV in low and middle-income countries gets the treatment they need to help prevent infection of their babies. And still, only a very small proportion of children living with HIV receive the life-saving anti-retroviral treatments," he says.
What's more, fewer than 10 percent of children born to HIV-positive women are tested for the AIDS virus before they're two months old.
The report also finds that most children labeled AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa actually have a surviving parent or other family member willing to care for them. But those potential caregivers often lack the basic resources to give the children what they need.
Kim says, "Resources, though, are currently not reaching the families that need them. And in the most severely affected region families and communities pay 90 percent of the financial cost of caring for children affected by the epidemic with little or no assistance from government."
Extreme poverty is blamed for blocking their access to AIDS-related programs, with over 60 percent of children in sub-Saharan Africa living in poverty.
Kim says, "In countries in which HIV is endemic, the disease impoverishes entire communities. When we make relief too narrowly AIDS specific, we miss a large portion of children impoverished by the epidemic. In fact, only providing benefits for people living with HIV or with family members, who are living with or die from HIV, is probably counterproductive. It can create stigmatization and abuse for those in need of help."
The failure to provide an equivalent level of support to research on the other 27 diseases also examined in the project is of great concern. The authors of the report say that: “...the concentration of funding on AIDS, TB, and malaria ... suggests that investment decisions are not only influenced by scientific or epidemiological considerations, but may also be influenced by factors such as the presence of PDPs [product development partnerships] or civil society groups with active advocacy, fundraising, and investment activities”.
The project, the ‘G-FINDER survey’ is being conducted by the George Institute for International Health, Australia. According to the report (which appears as a ‘Policy Forum’ article in PLoS Medicine) pneumonia and diarrhoeal illness, which are major causes of mortality in developing countries, received less than 6% of funding. Kinetoplastid diseases such as sleeping sickness, leishmaniasis and Chagas’ disease, which affect more than 13 million people worldwide annually, receive less than 5% of global health funding, amounting to $125 million. Typhoid receives $9 million, 0.4% of total funds. The authors say that the funding provided “was not enough to create even one new product” to address many of these diseases.
Another worrying finding is that the number of donors was limited, with just two funders – the US National Institutes of Health and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – accounting for 60% of the funds provided. These two bodies mainly focus on HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. With regard to more neglected diseases, other funders often dominate; for example nearly 90 per cent of funding for the blinding bacterial eye infection trachoma comes from the Wellcome Trust. Such almost total dependency on one donor has been described as an ‘eggs in one basket approach’.
The ministers agreed at the end the two-day conference Tuesday to raise agricultural production levels and provide enough food for the bulk of the continent's population, which is wallowing in grinding poverty.
"We support the call for a uniquely African Green Revolution to help boost agricultural productivity, food production and national food security. We support the work of the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa (Agra) in spearheading efforts to achieve a sustainable green revolution, working with African governments, farmers, donors, private sector and civil society," the ministers said in a communiqué issued at the end of the meeting.
The communique said that African green revolution should be complemented by investment in rural areas, a preserve of the public sector.
The ministers also said that financial institutions in Africa and other funding agencies should be ready to fund food and agricultural input purchases.
"We are convinced that the challenges facing African agriculture need to be addressed with a sense of urgency...what is needed now is strong political will of governments to take the necessary actions and of the international community to support those actions," they said.
A target set under the Millennium Development Goals stipulates that African countries should attain food security and reduce by half the population of undernourished people by 2015.
The bumper harvest has also benefited hunger-stricken neighboring countries like Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Swaziland. Recently president Bingu wa Mutharika, who is also Malawi’s minister of agriculture, has received international recognition for achieving food security. But a number of studies show that most Malawians are still affected by food shortages.
A recent nutritional survey says approximately 30 percent of Malawi’s rural population consume less than the 2,200 kilocalories per day, needed to stay healthy. The report says women of child-bearing age and children under five lack iron, vitamin A, and other nutrients.
As a result of malnutrition, half of the country’s children suffer from stunted growth, with over a third of these children considered dangerously underweight.
Related to this, a study by the NGO Action Aid International indicates almost half of the country’s population experience food shortages up to six months a year. It says most households lack the minimum food requirement of 200kg of maize per person per year.
Chandiwira Chisi is the man in charge of the anti-hunger effort for Action Aid, “When the government says that there is progress, it’s in the macro context, that’s to say if we look at national level, yes, there is food availability in the past three years [but] that is not enough. I am sure that the government would like to see the situation where everyone has got food in this country in the right amounts, right quantities and the right nutritional value.”
"Eight of the 11 countries in which almost all residents (at least 98 percent) say religion is important in their daily lives are poorer nations in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia," the report said.
The poverty rate in Alabama was 17 percent in 2007, according to the US Census Bureau, while World Bank statistics show around 20 percent of Iranians live in poverty.
In Zimbabwe, a country where the economy has been plummeting for a decade and inflation is running at several billion percent annually, at least 80 percent of the population live below the poverty line.
Also giving weight to the analysts' theory is the fact that the most religious US state, Mississippi, is also the poorest.
Eighty-five percent of Mississippians say religion is a key part of daily life, according to the poll, for which 1,000 adults each were interviewed in 143 countries between 2006 and 2008.
One in five Mississippians live in poverty, US Census data shows.
"On the opposite end of the spectrum, the 10 least religious countries studied include several with the world's highest living standards, including Sweden... and Japan," the report said.
Religion was a key part of daily life for 17 percent of Swedes and 25 percent of Japanese.
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) sponsored study said an estimated 23.7 per cent urban populace was living in slums amid squalor, crime, disease and tension, but not all slum dwellers exist below the poverty line. Poor city planning and poorer urban land management and laws are to be blamed for the rise in numbers of urban poor, revealed the India:Urban Poverty Report, 2009, released at a function here by the Union minister of housing and urban poverty alleviation, Ms Kumari Selja.
Urban poverty, the report said, was not about only nutritional deficiency but deficiencies in the basic needs of housing, water, sanitation, medical care, education, and opportunity for income generation. “It is not a report on the poor in urban areas but a report on the process of urbanisation in India keeping poverty at the centre of analysis,” said social scientist Prof. Amitabh Kundu, who has played a key role in bringing out the report.
The report revealed that urban workers were being increasingly pushed into the informal sector and the urban poor were a street vendor, a rickshaw puller, a rag picker, a cleaner, a washerman, a load carrier or a domestic servant.
The report that deals in detail with the problem of small and medium cities, said while these workers contributed to the growth of cities, there was a growing trend to push them to the urban periphery. A near absence of rights to land and livelihood, and the higher cost that the poor have to incur on transportation and travel to workplace are some of the highlights of the study.
The report focuses on middle-class and lower-income workers with annual incomes of about $44,100 for a family of four, or about double the poverty level.
Only one in five unemployed workers within that income level has private insurance or military coverage. Meanwhile, only one in four unemployed workers at that level got coverage through Medicaid, the government sponsored insurance program for the poor.
In December 2008, there were an estimated 5.8 million people out of work with incomes below twice the poverty level, and about 3.1 million of them did not have insurance, Families USA estimated.
The report was compiled as lawmakers consider expanding access to Medicaid and subsidizing the cost of maintaining private coverage, also called COBRA, through an economic stimulus bill.
"Most laid-off workers can't afford COBRA coverage and do not qualify for public health safety-net programs," said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA. "As a result, millions of middle-class and lower-income workers become uninsured."
Karak Mayik, country director in Sudan for the group Women for Women, says women face many war-related and other obstacles.
"The war destroyed everything. There is lack of infrastructure. No development. No basic needs for human beings, especially women. And also, after the peace agreement, women are facing another war, which is the culture. They can't own land. They can't do some other major activities for themselves," she says.
She says that until the entire country is at peace, it will be difficult to help all those in need.
"If there is a wound in one of your body parts, you cannot feel peaceful and you cannot feel well. So, the war in Darfur is challenging us. The war in Abyei is challenging us. The peace agreement is a challenge to be implemented.
Abyei is a town in South Kurdufan, linking north and south Sudan. It's the site of much of the country's oil production and the cause of much tension. A 2011 referendum may determine whether Abyei belongs to the north or south.
To help deal with poverty and lack of development, Women for Women has obtained land for farming in the town of Rumbek.
"Last year, we got 90 hectares of land from the community leaders. They give it to use forever, 99 years, and we call it CIFI – Commercial Integrated farming Initiative. It is an agro-business for the women. Women are cultivating more than 21 types of vegetables," she says.
Many communities and businesses now depend on produce from the farm. And Mayik says that income from the farm has changed women's lives.
"They benefit from the farm in many ways. First, for themselves. They say we're looking smart now. We've changed our lifestyles. They are sending their kids to the schools, to the hospitals," Mayik says.
In the beginning, men were opposed to women starting their own business, saying it went against the culture. Now that they've seen the benefits, they support it, even to the extent they make sure their wives wake up in time to get to work.
They have their own Olympic mascots - Itchy the Bedbug, Creepy the Cockroach and Chewy the Rat - their own torch, made from a toilet plunger, and a catchy marketing phrase: "End poverty. It's not a game."
But what the Poverty Olympics doesn't have is money - and that was the main point being underscored yesterday by a celebration/protest march through the Downtown Eastside.
About 200 people joined in the parade down East Hastings Street as the Poverty Olympics, an event that serves as a rallying point for low-income advocacy groups, marked the one-year countdown to the 2010 Olympic Games.
The event was organized by several non-profit groups to draw attention to the way governments are spending billions of dollars on the Olympic Games even while intense poverty can be found in the Downtown Eastside, a neighbourhood that will be one of the main urban backdrops to the sporting spectacle.
"If the money that was spent on the Olympics was spent on ending poverty and homelessness, we could end poverty and homelessness. It would be that simple," said Jean Swanson of the Carnegie Community Action Project, an advocacy agency for the poor.
The 2010 Olympics will open and close with ceremonies at BC Place Stadium, just a few blocks from the southern edge of the Downtown Eastside, one of Canada's poorest neighbourhoods.
The government of British Columbia has estimated the cost of the Games at about $600-million, but a report by the provincial Auditor-General has put it at about $2.5-billion.
It will be the 32-year-old's fourth trip to Central America's poorest country, which he has visited every two years since 2001 as a member of the Wales Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign, which was founded 20 years ago to help struggling families, promote fair trade and create links between the two countries.
David, of Mynydd Isa, and six other campaign members from across Wales will leave on their latest trip on Valentine's Day and will visit Los Quinchos Centre, which works with children who live and work on the huge la Chureca rubbish dump in the capital city of Managua, and who have no choice but to scavenge in order to survive.
The group will also travel to Bilwi on the Caribbean coast, which suffered huge amounts of damage when Hurricane Felix struck the region a year ago. The hurricane killed hundreds of people and destroyed tens of thousands of homes, including entire villages.
David said: "One of the reasons why we are travelling to Bilwi is to see if there is any support we can provide, to help with the long term reconstruction of the area."
Before returning home to begin raising money for those in desperate need of help, the group will stay on a Fairtrade coffee farm in Matagalpa, in the mountains in Nicaragua.
David said: "The campaign has promoted Fairtrade coffee and sesame from Nicaragua for over a decade.
"You have some viable projects here where the financing has simply dried up," the World Bank president, Robert Zoellick, said by telephone from Berlin, where he and the heads of other leading economic organizations met with Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The microcredit investment fund is part of a broader effort by the bank and other development agencies to mobilize rich-country cash for poorer countries during the credit crisis, Zoellick said. Other funds are focused on infrastructure projects, bank recapitalization and trade finance.
Microcredit institutions, which generally make tiny loans of $100 or less to individuals or small businesses, gained attention in the 1990s as a way to foster private enterprise in poor countries. In 2006, Mohammed Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, one of the first microbanks, won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work.
Though many banks were seeded with money from western aid agencies, a long process of drawing more investment from private sources was well under way - until the credit crisis began in August 2007.
"In general, there was a lot of momentum from the private sector," said Jack Lowe, president of BlueOrchard Finance, one of the firms that have been selected to manage the new fund. "But when you have the wind at your back and financial markets are heady, it is easier to raise money."
Under the plan, the World Bank would initially provide $150 million alongside another $130 million from the German government. Zoellick said the bank was soliciting contributions from other countries and agencies, and hopes to mobilize up to $600 million. That would be enough to help 150-200 microfinance banks based in 40 developing countries, he said.
Isa earns a hard living pushing a heavy water cart around the rutted streets of the suburbs of Nigeria's capital, Abuja.
He is one of tens of thousands of water vendors who deliver jerry cans full of water to houses built without any kind of sanitation.
"Kai! it is hard work, pushing my cart," the 20-year-old says.
Nigeria is Africa's most populous nation, and according to analysts has made over $1.1 trillion in revenues from the oil industry over the last 30 years; but most Nigerians still rely on people like Isa for their water.
He and a dozen of his friends sleep in a makeshift shelter behind a small household goods shop.
They wake before dawn to queue up at a nearby borehole, where they fill 14 yellow 25-litre jerry cans on their handcarts before setting off around the streets looking for customers.
Heavy load
Fully loaded, the carts weigh at least 350kgs.
The roads they push them over are dirt tracks, rocky and pitted, with sewers running down the middle.
"In the future I want to get another job, but at least I make enough money to live doing this," Isa says.
Graph
The urban poor pay more for water than the urban rich
Prices for water from private boreholes vary in the suburbs.
Isa pays around 10 naira ($0.07, £0.05) per jerry can at the borehole and sells for double that.
He makes around 700 naira a day ($4.70, £3.20), to cover food and living costs.
A large Nigerian family may need around 10 of these jerry-cans every day, customers say.
About 80 women, who are or have been in drug-abuse treatment through Nicasa, are operating a fledgling jewelry-making business using ceramic Kazuri beads. The beads are imported from Nairobi, Kenya, where they are formed from clay, polished, fired, painted and fired again, by about 350 women, all single heads of household, some of them disabled.
The idea for the business jelled on several fronts after a suggestion two years ago by Nicasa counselor Candace Fuji, also a jewelry craftsman. Fuji was already using the beads -- Kazuri means small and beautiful in Swahili -- when the stones also came to the attention of both Nicasa CEO Bruce Johnson and a volunteer who both visited a fair-wage Kazuri factory on trips to Africa.
The beads seemed to insinuate themselves just as members of Women of Worth, a recovery maintenance group, expressed interest in starting their own businesses. Nicasa Executive Officer Judy Fried exercised her daughter's connection to Rising International, which helps women in developing countries sell their wares via house parties -- and Women of Worth Creations was born.
"It felt like a wonderful connection internationally and with women struggling worldwide," Fried said. "Women of Worth is determined to go from surviving to thriving. And we're all very committed to women's economic development."
Each piece of Kazuri jewelry -- earrings, necklaces, bracelets -- is handcrafted by women in treatment and recovery who are eager to learn the craft and express their creativity. The moderately-priced pieces, each tagged with a personal note of gratitude, are then marketed and sold by Women of Worth members, who are developing their business skills with the support of Nicasa's Women's Auxiliary. Proceeds go to help support Women of Worth activities.
Betty Simms, wife of the chairman of the Grameen board - an organization aimed at aiding the world's poor based on Yunus' microfinance model - introduced the Nobel Laureate. She explained how as a young, impoverished boy Yunus overcame numerous obstacles, rising above poverty and helping millions to do the same.
During the event, which celebrated the paperback publication of the Yunus' most recent book, "Creating a World Without Poverty: How Social Business Can Transform Lives," the author spoke about his social business model, outlining how self-sustaining businesses can yield major humanitarian benefits.
Since achieving a repay rate of nearly 99 percent in his Bangladesh-based project, Yunus has spread Grameen Bank to 183 other branches worldwide and has turned microcredit into an international phenomenon.
The success of Yunus' endeavors has led him into a number of other humanitarian projects. In addition to Grameen Bank, Yunus is working with distributors of food, water, shoes and even cars to give the poor access to these goods at a significantly reduced cost, allowing them to maintain a higher standard of living.
Yunus also touched on the current financial crisis, hinting that it offers a parallel to his own financial work. He said that although many have been skeptical of the "credit worthiness" of his borrowers, the bailout has put the American public in the borrowers' position.
"Now is the time to ask the question: Who is credit-worthy?" he said.
The reports revealed that the bulk of poverty is concentrated in four areas across Lebanon: Tripoli, Akkar, Minieh-Dennieh, Jezzine, Saida, and Hermel, Baalbek. These regions account for half of the entire poor population while only contributing to one third of the population.
Geographic distribution of poverty is also an issue of concern, as substantial disparities have been identified as existing between the peripheral and central regions of the country. Poverty rates are comparatively insignificant in the capital, with Beirut below 6 percent, while the North constitutes 53 percent of overall poverty, the Bekaa 29 percent, the South 22 percent and 20 percent poverty rates in Nabatieh and Mouth Lebanon.
According to the study, poverty impacts some vocations more than others. The poor are concentrated among the unemployed and skilled workers, in sectors such as agriculture and construction. Findings suggest that youth with a university degree are also struggling to break the poverty cycle, as the unemployment rate for non-poor university graduates holding a secondary degree is half of the rate for extremely poor university graduates.
The report highlights the inequal distribution of expenditure among the population, with the poorer 20 percent of the population accounting for only 7 percent of all consumption in Lebanon while the richest 20 percent accounting for 43 percent. Expenditure levels in the northern districts are alarmingly far below the poverty line. Studies showed that households in the north with a similar set of characteristics to households in Beirut are four times more likely to be poor. The northern regions have experienced the most significant decline in expenditure over the last 10 years, while Beirut, the South and Bekaa regions recorded improvements in their expenditure.
The report found that it would cost $12 per Lebanese person per annum to lift all poor individuals out of extreme poverty. Economist Hamadan stated that while the government does have the means to deliver, bad targets and misinformation prevent any such expenditure from effectively relieving suffering in problem areas.
Its main goal is to increase adult participants’ incomes by a minimum of 25 percent after three years, and also to train youth for jobs that will allow them to pursue higher education or a career path. The seven micro-enterprise projects help participants to start or expand small businesses.
Portland’s previous attempts to eliminate poverty only produced minimal results, especially among long-term residents. “There are multiple reasons why an individual is poor,” said Cutler. “Our goal was to use a people-centered strategy, [and] the projects are built around the strengths of the individual.” The essence of the “Portland model,” then, appears to be making a special effort to match individuals who are living in poverty with training and jobs matched to their individual interests and talents.
He announced that this past year the Initiative graduated its first class. Eighty percent of the participants were earning below the federal poverty level when they first enrolled in 2004-05; 51 percent are people of color, and 74 percent were unemployed at the time of enrollment.
According to Cutler, 25-30 percent of the participants “are [young] African Americans,” adding that the enrollees’ incomes have nearly doubled after completing the program.
“Every individual is tracked for three years to see if there is improvement,” he explained. “Our goal is to decrease poverty.”
Cutler said that there are now 2,000 Portland residents enrolled in the Initiative, adding that his program will be needed “as long as poverty exists” in Portland. For the past 18 months, Cutler has been a consultant for “Duluth at Work.”
Although welcoming a fall in poverty levels, Cori Justice Committee director Fr Sean Healy said the number of working households struggling financially had risen.
CSO data published today show the number of people claiming jobless benefits rose to 327,861 last month. The unemployment rate is now 9.2 per cent.
“Cori Justice notes that Government has said it is committed to protecting the most vulnerable in these difficult economic times,” Fr Healy said. “If it is to do this credibly then Cori Justice now urges Government to take initiatives to tackle the working poor issue, the rising level of unemployment and issues such as food poverty that were not addressed in Budget 2009.”
He said 31.3 per cent of households deemed at risk of poverty are headed by a person with a job, up slightly on the 29.5 per cent figure for 2006.
Cori accused the Government of failing to take the necessary steps to tackle the working poor issue, or using the Celtic Tiger boom years to roll out essential services. It also said more than half of all those at risk of poverty live in households headed by people outside the workforce, including those who are elderly, ill, in a caring role or have a serious disability.
Fr Healy also called on the Government to make additional resources available to support households at risk of poverty by boosting welfare and to continue benchmarking the lowest social welfare rates at 30 per cent of gross average earnings. He demanded improved social services, including education, health, childcare, housing and transport.
Participants were divided into discussion groups. At the end of the session, each group brought forward their recommendations. One said that there should be programs to ensure that all pregnant women and newborn babies should be guaranteed the necessities of life for life. That group also recommended making access to medical services available everywhere; this might include providing bus transportation, particularly for the elderly; and free education so students wouldn't be burdened with excessive debt.
Another group said that the challenge is creating self-esteem, something they said has to be built. They spoke of the difficulty in reaching those in need and providing adequate education so people are ready for the workplace.
One group called for an increase in the minimum wage and improved social benefits; education for all, and partnerships and exchanges.
One group defined poverty as being unable to participate in the community. Caused in part by the cost of food, fuel and child care. They said that there is too much emphasis on academic education at the expense of training for trades. They also said that the right people aren't always targeted in government programs.
Still another group said that there has to be trust of the system, and that people are losing faith in public consultations. They're burned out by the process and want to start acting now. They spoke about competition between government departments which wastes money and resources. As an example, they cited situations in which people are released from the Restigouche Hospital Centre without support. More support networks are needed, they said.
They called for a contribution of $100,000 from lottery revenue to support social programs.
It is high time for some good financial news in the midst of the economic turmoil, fear and uncertainty that swirls around us.
Recently in New York City, the Microcredit Summit Campaign announced it has officially reached its goal of providing small loans to 100 million of our planet's very poorest families living on less than $1 per day! And not to rest on their laurels, new goals were set to reach an additional 175 million poor families by 2015, and bring 100 million of those families above the official poverty line.
Among those participating in this historic announcement were leaders who have been dubbed the three wise men of microcredit--Dr. Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and winner, along with six million of the poorest women in his country, of the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize; Sam Daley-Harris, founder of RESULTS, one of the world's leading advocacy and educational institutions for ending poverty; and John Hatch, founder of FINCA, the largest microcredit organization in the Americas.
These visionaries put together the World Microcredit Summit, hosted by Hillary Clinton in Washington, D. C., in 1997, and set the now historic goal of reaching 100 million families by 2006.
Microcredit programs around the world have helped millions of the poorest families to care for themselves and their children. The official announcement stated that more than 106 million of the world's people living on less than $1 per day received micro-loans, and that this goal was reached in late 2007. It took most of 2008 to count and verify these numbers. This is a remarkable achievement. When the campaign was launched in 1997, there were only seven million very poor borrowers worldwide.
Microcredit funds a huge variety of small, self-employed businesses for people who wouldn't normally have access to credit. Interest is charged to sustain programs and organizations, and repayment rates are higher than 95 per cent. Microcredit provides hope and opportunity for the poorest who are often left out of the global economy.
The most famous example of microfinance, the Grameen Bank, now employs more than 16,000 people, has more than seven million clients--mostly women--and has lent more than $7 billion, stated its founder Muhammad Yunus.
Nineteen years ago, Yunus was asked, "What is the first thing a woman does with the proceeds from her micro-loan?" He was expected to say that she feeds her family or puts her children in school.
"The first thing she usually does," Yunus replied, "is bring her children home."He went on to explain that during hard times in Bangladesh, families were often unable to feed their children. So they would send them out to work for other families, even when they were as young as five or six years old, for a pittance of money or the promise of food.
In southeastern Kenya, which has been worst affected by the drought, widespread hunger has not yet fully begun to bite.
But farmers' stores, which should be bursting with a new harvest, are as empty as their pockets. Local television has screened pictures of families boiling underripe wild fruit to soften it enough to eat and living off of roots they would normally feed to livestock.
Aid workers say the situation will worsen in coming months.
The government, wracked by scandals in its oil, tourism and cereals boards, has appealed for international aid. But there is growing anger among Kenyans over official corruption and politicians' cushy lives - the government's annual entertainment budget tops $32 million.
The World Food Program says the only solution is to fund long-term projects to help farmers resist poor harvests, like breeding drought resistant seeds or funding irrigation projects.
"These are the programs that can make a real difference for the future and prevent crises like this one," said Menezes.
But most donors preferred to fund emergency response programs that will make the evening news, she said.
Kenya can expect little help from east African neighbors, which are also facing hunger crises.
Another drought on the Horn of Africa has hit food supplies there. Uganda does not have enough food to export and Tanzania has had to put export restrictions in place.
Even donor countries are affected, with pressure on governments to fund programs in their own recession-hit countries rather than send scarce resources abroad.
BUSOGA region, Mbale and Pallisa districts have the highest concentration of poor people, the Uganda Bureau of Statistics said in a report yesterday.
It said more than 100 poor people live per square kilometre in the areas.
In the districts of Iganga, Mayuge, Bugiri, Busia, Mbale and Pallisa, the poverty density per sub-county is more than 100 people, compared to Kibaale, Ssembabule, Mbarara and Kiboga which have less than 20.
The gap between the rich and the poor is highest in central and lowest in northern Uganda, it added.
Poverty density is the number of poor people (those living on less than a dollar a day) per square kilometre in a sub-county.
In the eastern region, the lowest poverty rate of between 27% and 30% was found in Busulani (Sironko), Sigulu Islands (Bugiri), Bumayoka (Mbale), Lumino and Buhehe (Busia), Bukigai (Mbale) and Muyembe (Sironko).
Food insecurity in Myanmar, much less Chin state - wedged along the northwestern border between India and Bangladesh, and undoubtedly the least developed area of the country - is far from new.
According to a 2005 UN Development Programme (UNDP) household survey, one third of Myanmar’s population lives below the poverty line.
Some 70 percent of Chin State’s 500,000 people, comprised of 10 highland townships, live below the poverty line and 40 percent are without adequate food sources, Human Right Watch (HRW) said in a report on 28 January.
Some 85 percent of Chins rely on rotational, slash-and-burn farming for their livelihoods, but steep mountains and deep gorges mean farms are prone to soil erosion, and soil exhaustion is also common due to a lack of viable farmland, the report said.
Few international organisations and NGOs are on the ground, due largely to issues of access and strict government guidelines governing humanitarian presence.
Only a few villages are easily accessible by road during the rainy season, making transport of food and other commodities particularly difficult.
One of Habitat's highest-profile volunteers, former President Jimmy Carter, called Fuller "one of the most extraordinary people I have ever known.
"He used his remarkable gifts as an entrepreneur for the benefit of millions of needy people around the world by providing them with decent housing," Carter said in a statement. "As the founder of Habitat for Humanity and later the Fuller Center, he was an inspiration to me, other members of our family and an untold number of volunteers who worked side-by-side under his leadership."
After running Habitat for Humanity with his wife for nearly three decades, Fuller lost control of the charity in a conflict with its board. When ousted in January 2005, he and his wife vowed to continue working on housing the poor and started The Fuller Center for Housing to raise money for Habitat affiliates.
The son of a widower farmer in the cotton-mill town of Lanett, Ala., Fuller earned his first profit at age 6, selling a pig. While studying law at the University of Alabama, he formed a direct-marketing company with Morris Dees — later founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center — focusing on selling cookbooks and candy to high school chapters of the Future Homemakers of America. That business would make them millionaires before they were 30.
When Fuller's capitalist drive threatened to kill his marriage, Fuller and his wife, who wed in college, decided to sell everything and devote themselves to the Christian values they grew up with.
"I gave away about $1 million," Fuller said in a 2004 interview with The Associated Press. "I wasn't a multimillionaire; I was a poor millionaire."
This reduction has been largely the result of pressure on two of the largest opium producers in Myanmar's Golden Triangle (bordering China, Laos and Thailand) - the Kokang and the Wa.
Both are rebel ethnic groups, with large guerrilla forces, who have ceasefire agreements with the Myanmar government.
The Kokang virtually ceased opium production in 2003 and the Wa in 2005. But in the past two years both poppy cultivation and opium production have begun to grow again.
"The trend is certainly upwards with a significant increase in the land under cultivation in Myanmar," said Leik Boonwaat, UNODC chief in Laos, who has also been stationed in Myanmar.
"Former opium farmers who already live in dire poverty are facing twin levers of increasing opium prices and falling commodity prices that may encourage them to resume poppy growing," he said.
The prices of most commodities grown or produced in Shan Sate in Myanmar, and in Laos, as alternatives to poppy - including maize and rubber - have fallen by more than 50 percent, according to the UN's annual drug report.
Most of the Wa and Kokang alternative crops - tea, rubber and fruit - are sold to traders across the border in China where demand for these products has all but dried up.
He discovered his calling four years ago when a devastating tsunami tore through Southeast Asia. SRAM, the company he started with his brother and a group of friends, wanted to help, so Day, 49, and his wife traveled to Sri Lanka and Indonesia, trying to determine how bikes could improve lives in countries racked by natural disasters and extreme poverty.
That led to the creation of World Bicycle Relief, which has distributed nearly 50,000 new bikes to support HIV/AIDS caregivers in Zambia and helped victims of the tsunami rebuild their lives. The nonprofit group has also dispersed hundreds of bikes in Tanzania, Rwanda, Kenya, Mozambique, Ethiopia and Lesotho.
Day has used SRAM's bike expertise to help create the workhorse equivalent of a bicycle: a 65-pound, steel-frame two-wheeler in the style of a postwar English roadster that's common in Asia and Africa. The bikes come with one or two racks that can carry an entire family or a farmer's produce to market and, more important, are sturdy enough to last a long time.
The group is planning to launch a program raising $7.5million for schools in Zambia to provide bikes to schoolchildren. Schools in the U.S. can adopt a school for $15,000, which pays for 100 bicycles. So far, Wheaton Academy in the western suburbs of Chicago has signed up and students volunteered for the program in Zambia.
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"We in the developing world forget the power of transportation at the bottom of the market," he said. "Our greatest transportation story in Chicago is getting stuck in traffic, whereas in the developing world they're losing hours and hours a day walking. If we can return two, three, four hours per day to these people, that productivity can be used to better the family and better the communities."
Day says he never set out to start World Bicycle Relief. News clips of the tsunami in late 2004 prompted him and his wife, Leah Missbach Day, 50, to call U.S.-based relief groups and ask whether they would be interested in distributing used bicycles to survivors. The nonprofits said they would rather have a donation, so the Days traveled to Sri Lanka and Indonesia for field work of their own.
The Ukazims are building an environmentally friendly school and clinic in Otampa, which still has no running water or electricity.
Called the Intercontinental Education Community Center, or ICEC2, it will feature a state-of-the-art school, powered by wind and solar energy, for about 700 kindergarteners through 12th-graders. Students will receive academic and vocational training and online learning will be available for adults.
A separate building will house a medical clinic, offering basic health services and HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention education.
"Coming to America, the very first second I thought, 'How can I get this back home?' " said Emenike, 60. "God has given us an incredible opportunity. That's what we're living for."
The Ukazims - who have already acquired 10 acres for the complex and are working on more - estimate it will cost $300,000 to $500,000, a relatively low figure in part because of cheap labor in Nigeria. The couple is pursuing grants from the World Bank and other national and international organizations.
The project is designed and ready to go as soon as they can secure funding. They are accepting public and private donations.
Prime Minister Raila Odinga said the image of poor Kenyans dying as they scrabbled in the road for fuel under darkness on Saturday was an indictment of the state of the nation.
"Poverty is pushing our people into doing desperate things just to get through one more day," he said, visiting victims of the Molo blaze. "There was no response by any disaster team because there is no such team."
In hospitals, the injured shared beds or lay on floors.
"I saw a wave of fire and before I knew it, my face and leg were burning," said Simon Mwangi, 22, in Molo district hospital.
"I tried to remove my trousers but they were stuck to my skin. That is all I remember until I woke up in this hospital."
Most officials said a cigarette caused the Molo blaze.
Some witnesses said a man angered at being stopped by police from scooping petrol threw a cigarette butt on the ground deliberately. Police were demanding bribes, some said, though authorities have denied that.
he explosion of an overturned tanker could be felt for miles, and the moments that followed haunted survivors: People ablaze, their clothes burned off, running to the bush in a futile effort to escape the pain and begging for help.
More than 100 people were killed and an additional 200 injured in the inferno overwhelmed hospitals Sunday, where victims lined the floors, hooked to drips and moaning in pain. Authorities expected the death toll to rise and were searching the scorched woods for corpses.
Hundreds of impoverished people had flocked to the overturned tanker Saturday to siphon fuel when it exploded, likely sparked by a cigarette.
"Everybody was screaming, and most of them were running with fire on their bodies -- they were just running into the bush," said Charles Kamau, 22, who was driving through Molo on Saturday night when he saw the road blocked by hundreds of people with jerrycans, plastic bottles and buckets -- anything to siphon some free fuel.
The blast as one of this East African nation's deadliest accidents and highlighted the desperation of people living in the poorest continent in the world.
"Remember that this continent, until a decade ago, was growing at a negative rate of growth on the average. At most it would grow at two percent," Ezekwesili said. "In the last decade or so, this same continent was growing at a rate of 5.8 percent."
Ezekwesili says the downturn is likely to dry up the important private-sector investments that have seen huge advances in telecommunications infrastructure that have led Africa's impressive economic performance.
"Once the enabling environment for the private sector to operate, deregulation, happened in the telecommunications sector, the private sector turned out, and today they are really cleaning up, big time," added Ezekwesili. "So it's evident the market has been a source of good outcome for the continent."
Ezekwesili says the World Bank is urging the United States and other developed countries not to turn inward at this time of economic uncertainty. He wants them to start a vulnerability fund to ensure more resources are available to help African countries keep developing the infrastructure they need to sustain economic growth.
"What we have seen is that, with adequate infrastructure, productivity can improve by 40 percent on the continent," Ezekwesili said. "With adequate infrastructure, the continent can add two percent growth to its current growth estimates."
Ezekwesili says it is important that market-oriented African countries receive help to ensure they do not abandon the reforms they have embraced, just as they were beginning to pull people out of poverty. She says concerned African leaders should be reassured that, in her words, "The idea that the market has failed is not right," and despite the atmosphere of uncertainty, she says they must continue policies that foster economic growth.
Yunus, who joined the Davos Philanthropic Roundtable as a panellist, said the world is busy talking about bailout packages for companies. But the design of similar packages for the poor is also be needed at the same time.
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Yunus, the founder and Managing Director of Grameen Bank, underlined that the crisis increased the need for special attention to the poor and that the rich still had plenty of money.
"Those who had billions and have lost half of it still have the other half. Their lifestyles will not change. But the real impact of the crisis will be on the people at the bottom," said Yunus, who was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his efforts to lift people out of extreme poverty.
