What to do with more oil money in Brazil

After the America's biggest oil discovery in over 30 years, Brazil's President promises to put the money to good works. A discovery of oil just off of Brazil's coast could contain over 150 billion barrels.

From this article from the Guardian, Tom Phillips gives us the details on Brazil's hopes for the money.

Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva today vowed to pump billions of petrodollars into the war on poverty in the wake of one of the world's biggest oil discoveries this decade.

Speaking on his weekly radio show, president Lula said: "Monday, 31 August, represents a new independence day for Brazil.

"We are talking about a discovery of oil that is almost 6,000m [under the sea], huge reserves that place Brazil among the biggest oil producers in the world."

He claimed that new legislation he is planning would allow profits to be used to "take care of" education and poverty once and for all.

Brazil has been celebrating an unexpected oil boom since November 2007, when state-controlled energy company Petrobras discovered the Tupi oilfield off Brazil's southeast coast.
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The discovery of the region led Brazil to suspend the auctioning of all offshore oil blocks pending new legislation, intended to give the government a larger slice of profits. Lula is expected to create a "social fund", designed to channel oil profits into poverty-reduction initiatives, and should hand greater control of "strategic" oilfields to the government.

The China-Africa Development Fund

China has been putting more and more money into Africa, in projects ranging from infrastructure improvements to profit businesses. That has caused some concern in the West, as some fear it will limit their interests in the continent.

One project that the Chinese government set up is a China-Africa Development Fund which has 5 billion dollars in the bank to fund joint businesses. An article that we found in All Africa explains some of the work the fund does and some frustration in finding good projects due to lack of infrastructure.

From this Business Day story, writer Hopewell Radebetells tells us more about the fund.

The fund established offices for the Southern African Development Community (Sadc) in Johannesburg in March . Since its establishment in June 2007, the fund has facilitated more than 20 investments in Africa, amounting to nearly 400m .

The fund was established by President Hu Jin tao after the 2006 Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Co-operation.

Wang says the fund is speaking to the embassies and trade officials of African states represented in China to encourage them to take the information to their respective countries.

The fund is finding it increasingly challenging to fund infrastructure programmes in most African states because of the lack of essential facilities, including sound telecommunications systems, says Wang.

"We find that they (prospective business partners) expect countries to have basic technology and sufficiently operational ports, airport and roads ...unfortunately these facilities are not necessarily available in some countries on the continent," he says.

Liu Xiaolei, the fund's Sadc head , says it is looking at supporting major regional infrastructure ventures such as the envisaged electricity transmission lines between SA and Mozambique, SA and Zambia, as well as Zambia and Botswana and Namibia and Zimbabwe.

TOMS gives away shoes in New Orleans

The company TOMS not only sells comfortable shoes, they also give them away. Last week, TOMS gave away thousands of pairs to children in New Orleans.

From this story that we found in the New Orleans Times Picayune, writer Susan Langenhennig tells us more about the unique company.

Two years ago, Blake Mycoskie came to New Orleans to sell some shoes. He came back last week to give some away.

You might not know his name, but you've probably seen his face. Mycoskie is the founder of TOMS, Shoes for Tomorrow, a company with an unusual business model: For every pair of shoes it sells, it gives away a pair to a child (or in some cases, adult) in need.

Mycoskie is the first to admit his mission is as compelling as his shoes -- a comfortable canvas slip-on modeled after the traditional Argentine alpargatas. His story is a good one: young, idealistic guy out to prove philanthropy can be fashionable and profitable. His business card lists his title as "chief shoe giver."
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On Thursday, he arrived at Langston Hughes Elementary School in Gentilly with an entourage of 20 volunteers from around the country and one from Canada. A total of 33 volunteers paid their own travel expenses just to be part of the New Orleans TOMS "shoe drop."

In three days, the company gave away 2,000 pairs of shoes to students at Langston Hughes, Lafayette Academy, ARISE Elementary, Akili Academy and Martin Behrman Elementary schools. TOMS staff contacted local social workers and the KidSmart organization to identify schools with serious needs. ABC's "Good Morning America" was here to capture it all on camera.
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Though he enjoyed joking around with the local kids on Thursday, Mycoskie remains committed to fighting poverty abroad, particularly in Ethiopia, where one of the company's factories is located.

"There's an illness there that people get that creates leg and foot swelling, and it's really awful and completely preventable," he said. "A doctor we're working with thinks we can eradicate this disease in 20 years."

The illness affects 15 percent of the population of southern Ethiopia. "I don't know who I'm going to marry or if I'll ever have kids," Mycoskie said. "But I do know that every year for the next 20 years, I'm going to Ethiopia."

Child puts on garage sale to benefit World Vision

We love these stories about children getting involved, we wish we were just as smart when we were young! Erin Gowin already spent her summer collecting food for the local pantry. Now, the fourth grader will have a garage sale to benefit World Vision. If you are in the Lincoln, Illinois area tomorrow stop by.

From this article in the Lincoln Daily News, reporter Candra Landers tells us about Erin.

Erin's efforts to save the world don't stop there. This weekend she's planned a special sale to benefit World Vision, a Christian organization that fights poverty and injustice in underdeveloped nations. "She's been asking to do it all summer, so I thought this would be the best time," said her mother, Suzanne Gowin. Erin's sale is scheduled to coincide with a garage sale her parents are having this weekend, Friday and Saturday.

The money raised by the family's garage sale will help fund their international adoption process, but Erin's funds are earmarked for World Vision. Erin's sale will feature handmade necklaces and children's books she wrote with stories and activities. She'll also offer homemade chocolate chip cookies and lemonade. As an added incentive, Erin's parents have promised to match whatever Erin raises to go to World Vision.

Erin first became interested in World Vision at Christmas. Michael and Suzanne Gowin, Erin's parents, both sponsored children through organizations before they met, and they made regular giving a priority in their marriage as well. This year they brought their three children in on the action by helping them use some of their Christmas money to buy gifts from the World Vision gift catalog.

"I bought seeds and Maura bought two chicks, but Liam had pneumonia then so he bought medicine," Erin said. All the Gowin kids' gifts were delivered to needy families by World Vision.
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Erin's sale will take place at 220 Delavan in Lincoln on Friday afternoon from 3:30 to 7 and Saturday from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m

Oxfam blames poor farming yields in Nepal on climate change

The charity Oxfam says extreme food shortages in Nepal are to due to climate change. Oxfam says that weather pattern changes has effected farmers yields in the country.

The poverty fighting charity calls on government and NGO's to provide assistance to rural farmers during the upcoming planting season by introducing new crop varieties and assistance with irrigation.

From this Associated Press story hosted at Google, writer Binaj Gurubacharya details Oxfam's statement.

Changing weather patterns have dramatically affected crop production in Nepal, leaving farmers unable to properly feed themselves and pushing them into debt, Oxfam International said in a report released in Katmandu.

The British aid agency described the situation as "deeply worrying."

"Communities told us crop production is roughly half that of previous years ... Last year many could only grow enough (food) for one month's consumption," said Oxfam's Wayne Gum, adding that less precipitation has been forecast this winter, which will make the situation worse.

More extreme temperatures, drier winters and delays in summer monsoons have all compounded the situation, the report said.

More than 3.4 million people in Nepal are estimated to require food assistance, and food stocks in farming communities will last only a few months, it warned.

Oxfam said Nepal will likely suffer more frequent droughts because of climate change. River levels will decline due to the reduced rainfall and glacial retreat, making it harder to irrigate crops and provide water for livestock.

"The predicted impacts of climate change will heighten existing vulnerabilities, inequalities and exposure to hazards," the report said.

New tax might come up during G-20 meetings

Momentum is growing on establishing a new tax on global financial transactions. The pressure will be great with the upcoming G-20 meetings. Finance ministers for the 20 countries meet in London later this week, and the heads of the states meet in a few weeks in Pittsburgh.

From this Guardian story, writer Nick Mathiason tells us more about the tax and why the pressure is accumulating now.

G-20 Finance ministers meeting in London next Friday will face concerted pressure to introduce a tax on financial transactions as a coalition of anti-poverty campaigners aim to force the issue onto the agenda.

An unprecedented coalition of health charities and development campaigners will ratchet up pressure on the G20 in the wake of comments made todayby Financial Services Authority chairman, Lord Turner supporting a Tobin-style tax on foreign exchange transactions.

Pressure on the G20 grew as senior officials at the United Nations also threw their weight behind a currency transactions levy. Philippe Douste-Blazy, the former French foreign minister now the UN's secretary-general's special adviser on innovative financing for development, told the Guardian: "I hope one head of state will propose this tax. I don't know who it will be. I think it's a good idea for two reasons.

"Firstly, this economic crisis is going to have serious consequences on developing countries. The price of commodities will fall because investment from western countries will decrease and aid commitments will not come through. And second, this is a crisis of ethics, a problem of cynicism with the system. We can't continue like this. We have to redefine the system."

His intervention is crucial because he was the architect of a groundbreaking tax in France that skims a tiny sum from airline ticket sales to buy cheap medicines for those suffering from Aids, malaria or tuberculosis. The scheme now extends to 30 countries with more set to follow. In two years it has raised $1bn.

Next week's G20 finance meeting will be followed by a co-ordinated push by campaigners to persuade leaders of the world's 20 most powerful countries meeting at Pittsburgh in four weeks to adopt a currency transaction levy.

Nokia launches mobile phone banking services for the poor

Mobile phone banking has been another way to bring the poor the same economic access as those with more money. Many poor in the under-developed world may have phone, but not a bank account. So new mobile banking technologies have expanded to reach those people.

From this Reuters article, reporter Brett Young tells us about Nokia's latest foray into mobile banking.

The world's top mobile phone maker Nokia said on Wednesday it would launch a mobile financial service next year targeting consumers, mainly in emerging markets, with a phone but no banking account.

Nokia said its Nokia Money service was based on the mobile payment platform of Obopay, a privately-owned firm that Nokia invested in earlier this year, and it is now building up a network of agents.

Obopay, which uses text messaging and mobile internet access, charges users a fee to send money or to top up their accounts.

"Mobile-enabled financial services has tremendous growth opportunities," Nokia Chief Development Officer Mary McDowell said, noting there are 4 billion mobile phone users globally but only 1.6 billion bank accounts and 1 billion credit cards.

"There is pretty significant gap between people, especially in emerging markets, who have a mobile device yet don't have a bank account," she said.
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Mobile money is one of the hottest topics in the wireless world, but so far take-up of services has been limited mostly to a few emerging markets, as in developed countries, the popularity of online banking has been a brake on mobile money.

The Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), a U.S.-based microfinance policy and research center, has said the market for mobile financial services to poor people in emerging markets will surge from nothing to $5 billion in 2012.

Senator Edward Kennedy's role in creating CHIP

In the myriad of articles and tributes to Senator Edward Kennedy we found one this morning that focused on his work to expand programs to help the poor. Kennedy was instrumental in creating CHIP, the federal program that brings universal health care to children in the U.S.

From this article from South Coast Today, writer Becky Evans tells us more about the creation of S-CHIP.

“I don't think you will see a U.S. senator anytime soon who will contribute as much to helping the poor and the working class, particularly in SouthCoast, but all over the country,” said Sen. Mark C. Montigny, D-New Bedford.

Montigny, who collaborated with Kennedy on numerous local projects throughout the years, said one of his most rewarding experiences was working with the senator during the 1990s to develop a universal health care program for uninsured children.

Kennedy, with his extensive health care knowledge, helped advise Montigny and former state Rep. John McDonough on legislation that created a state health insurance program for uninsured children. The Massachusetts program, which delivered health care to thousands of uninsured children in SouthCoast, later served as a model for a nationwide program, Montigny said.

The federal program, known today as the Children's Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, provides matching funds to states that offer health insurance to families with children.

“Here he was advising us on how to do it in Massachusetts and then soliciting advice from us on how to do it nationally,” Montigny said of Kennedy.

“There is no one who has done more to push health care expansion in this country,” he added.

Bob Dylan to donate proceeds of new album to hunger relief

We are kinda surprised that Bob Dylan is doing an album of Christmas music, but once you see the cause it supports it makes sense. Dylan will donate all royalties from the upcoming album to Feeding America.

From this press release that we found at PR Newswire, we learn more about the arrangement.

Bob Dylan will release a brand new album of holiday songs, Christmas In The Heart, on Tuesday, October 13, it was announced today by Columbia Records. All of the artist's U.S. royalties from sales of these recordings will be donated to Feeding America (http://feedingamerica.org), guaranteeing that more than four million meals will be provided to more than 1.4 million people in need in this country during this year's holiday season. Bob Dylan is also donating all of his future U.S. royalties from this album to Feeding America in perpetuity.

Additionally, the artist is partnering with two international charities to provide meals during the holidays for millions in need in the United Kingdom and the developing world, and will be donating all of his future international royalties from Christmas In The Heart to those organizations in perpetuity. Details regarding the international partnerships will be announced next week.

"When we reached out to Bob Dylan about becoming involved with our organization, we could never have anticipated that he would so generously donate all royalties from his forthcoming album to our cause," said Vicki Escarra, president and CEO of Feeding America. "This major initiative from such a world renowned artist and cultural icon will directly benefit so many people and have a major impact on spreading awareness of the epidemic of hunger in this country and around the world."

Bob Dylan commented, "It's a tragedy that more than 35 million people in this country alone -- 12 million of those children -- often go to bed hungry and wake up each morning unsure of where their next meal is coming from. I join the good people of Feeding America in the hope that our efforts can bring some food security to people in need during this holiday season."

Christmas In The Heart will be the 47th album from Bob Dylan, and follows his worldwide chart-topping Together Through Life, released earlier this year. Songs performed by Dylan on this new album include, "Here Comes Santa Claus," "Winter Wonderland," "Little Drummer Boy" and "Must Be Santa."

Asian Development Bank releases it's 2009 "Key Indicators" report

The Asian Development Bank released the 2009 version of it's "Key Indicators" report. The report notes the many ways the global economic slowdown has hurt poverty reduction efforts in the continent.

The report pays special attention to small business and ways to help them fuel growth. The bank uses part of the report to focuses on small business because it says that a majority of Asians are employed in such companies.

From the Forbes article on the report, writer Teresa Cerojano details some of the economic indicators described within. You can download the full report from this link.

In 19 Asian economies, including the most populous China and India, more than 10 percent of people live on less than $1.25 a day and more than 10 percent are malnourished. This is despite the region's success over the last 15 years in cutting the number of poor from one in two to around one in four, the report said.

Nepal is the worst off with 55.1 percent of its population surviving on less than $1.25 a day. In China and India, 15.9 percent and 41.6 percent of the population live below the poverty line, respectively.

Income gap remains wide in many other countries.

More than 30 percent of Tajikistan's population suffers from hunger, as do 20-30 percent of the people in Armenia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Mongolia, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and East Timor, the ADB said.

Among the so-called U.N. Millennium Development Goals is cutting in half extreme poverty and hunger by 2015 and reducing maternal mortality by three-quarters over the same period.

The report said that Asia faces serious challenges in meeting goals linked to sanitation and maternal deaths, which remain unacceptably high in countries such as Afghanistan, Nepal and Laos.

About 1,800 out of every 100,000 Afghan women die in childbirth while more than a quarter of urban households in 13 countries still lack access to improved sanitation, the bank said.

WFP ask for 230 million dollars for Kenya

The U.N.'s World Food Programme is asking for 230 million dollars to help drought stricken Kenya. The WFP says that will amount to 260,000MT of food, the WFP is already distributing 32,000MT a month to 2.6 million people.

From this IRIN article that we found at Reuters Alert Net, we learn more about the other moves taking place to help the people.

The government is also trucking water to drought-affected communities and buying livestock at a cost of KSh8,000 (about $105) per live cow, significantly above prevailing market prices.

A 2009 long rains assessment found that "3.8 million pastoralists, agro-pastoralists and marginal agricultural farm households require urgent humanitarian food assistance".

The assessment, conducted by the Kenya Food Security Steering Group (KFSSG) in May and July, covered 30 districts, including 27 drought-prone ones and three affected by the 2008 post-election violence.

Failure of the long rains in the marginal agricultural lowlands and some pastoral and agro-pastoral areas have caused a substantial decline in both crop and livestock production, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS Net).

High cereal prices have further accentuated food insecurity. The average price of the main staple, maize, has doubled over the last year.

Expected long-rains maize production will be about 28 percent below normal because of insufficient rains - further tightening supply.

The spread of AIDS along aboriginals in Canada

Medical officials are warning of an AIDS epidemic amongst aboriginals in Canada. Some of them are comparing it to the AIDS epidemic in Africa. Some of the factors are certainly similar, stigmas against the victims, and a lack of education on the disease.

From this Reuters story that we found at ABC News, reporter Rod Nickel describes the spread of AIDS in Canada.

Many aboriginals, a broad term that includes Indians, Inuit and Metis, live in poverty and suffer poorer health than most other Canadians. They make up about 3.3 percent of the population, living mainly in western cities, the North and on rural reserves.

Despite their relatively small population, aboriginals accounted for almost one-quarter of Canada's reported AIDS cases in 2006 for which ethnicity was known, double the rate six years earlier, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada.

Intravenous drug use, especially among women, is the cause of more than half the infections with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which leads to AIDS. Canadian non-aboriginal infections are mostly linked to unsafe sex.

Aboriginals with HIV infections also tend to be younger than other infected Canadians and more often women.

"(It's) partly because of the vulnerabilities of that group -- (especially) if they're addicted and dependent on the sex trade for their income," said Dr. Moira McKinnon, chief medical health officer for Saskatchewan.

The rate of HIV infection in Saskatchewan has risen rapidly among natives, McKinnon said. The province of 1 million people, had 174 new HIV cases last year, up 40 percent from 2007. Sixty-five percent of the new cases were aboriginals.

IT volunteers in the under-developed world

Yes, even geeks can volunteer, and they may be in just as high of demand in the volunteer world as they are in the professional world. A non-profit from the UK gives IT professionals a chance to teach their skills in the under-developed world. The NGO called Voluntary Services Overseas says the numbers of techs applying to volunteer is increasing.

From this article that we found at Silicon.com, writer Jo Best explains the work of VSO.

he international development organisation places volunteers in developing countries to share their skills and help local communities fight poverty.

Of the hundreds of people the VSO places abroad every year, 15 or 20 will be IT workers, leaving their comfort zone behind for a stint in the developing world.

Mostly, techies are needed in countries including Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia to help communities in sub-Saharan Africa learn about and deploy IT.
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Repeat volunteer Don Carney, agrees: "I don't think technical skills matter so much as the willingness to pick up a tool and see how it can be made most effective."

Carney's placements include being a database specialist in the Philippines and working as an information communications specialist in Cambodia - experiences he describes as "challenging, and at the same time satisfying".

"I spent some years in commercial organisations back in the UK and although professionally challenging I couldn't help but feel that my life focused on the next paycheck and the personal satisfaction seemed to diminish over time. Volunteering in development gave me a refreshing new way to look at life and work, as well as feeling that I could do a lot more for others than I did in the commercial world," he added.

http://management.silicon.com/itpro/0,39024675,39497506,00.htm

Battles in Northern Yemen mean less help for refugees

This morning we found many stories and news releases about the armed conflict in Yemen. Battles there are making it difficult for aid groups to take care of the people who have fled due to the fighting.

U.N. agencies have pulled out almost all of their staff and are instead giving aid to those in calmer areas. The International Red Cross still has workers in the area and say they are attempting to take care of 16,000 people.

From this IRIN story that we found at Reuters Alert Net, we read more about the battle in Yemen.

Aid organizations are finding it increasingly difficult to help civilians in the northern Yemeni governorate of Saada after renewed clashes there between the army and the al-Houthi Shia rebels.
"Saada is an active, armed confrontation with a very volatile security situation, so the World Food Programme [WFP] has to carefully balance staff security on one side and its mandate to assist affected people [on the other]," Gian Carlo Cirri, WFP's Yemen representative, told IRIN.

Fighting in Saada flared up again on 12 August. Aerial bombardments of Houthi strongholds in Saada have forced many to flee into neighbouring governorates.

According to UN agencies, there are some 150,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Saada and the governorates of al-Jawf, Hajjah and Amran as a result of the conflict.

The Yemeni Red Crescent (YRC) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) are the only two organizations running IDP camps in Saada Governorate, according to Abbas Zabarah, secretary-general of the YRC.

Other international NGOs are also working in the region, but with great difficulty because of the insecure roads in and out of Saada.

"The difficulties of travelling the main roads hinder access to the population, and especially the injured, [and] to health structures," said a recent statement by Médecins Sans Frontières.

$500 million loaned to the Philippines for economic stimulus

The Asian Development Bank is lending money to nations to help with their own economic stimulus programs, and the first such loan went the Philippines. $500 million dollars will be lent to the country. The ADB started the program because many governments were having trouble raising money as credit markets have been very tight during the global recession.

From the Peninsula On-Line, reporter Roel Landingin tells us more details about the loan program.

The bank said it had received applications for more than the $3bn available, with Bangladesh, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Vietnam also requesting help.

Bangladesh, like the Philippines, has asked for the maximum $500m. The International Monetary Fund is allocating special drawing rights worth $735m to Dhaka to strengthen its foreign exchange reserves amid the global downturn, a fund official told Reuters yesterday.

The Philippines is struggling to fund its stimulus measures, which include labour-intensive infrastructure projects and increased cash transfers, amid falling government revenues and a widening budget deficit. The economy shrank 2.3 percent quarter-on-quarter in the January-March period and the government sharply cut its full-year growth forecast in June to only just 0.8-1.8 percent, from the previous target of 3.1-4.1 percent. Manila warned of the budget deficit reaching as much as 250bn pesos ($5.2bn), equivalent to 3.5 percent of gross domestic product, because of revenue shortfalls.

Yesterday, the ADB said the new loan would “help close the government’s budget financing gap for this year”.

Jaquelene Novogratz of the Acumen Fund gives her background story

Jaquelene Novogratz was inspired by her father and by Catholic School Nuns to help children. So, after studying economics and working for Chase Bank, she began the Acumen Fund, which helps the lives of the poor through microcredit.

In this New York Times essay, Novogratz explains how her background helped her evolve into microcredit.

Chase trained me in finance and cash flow and how companies work, and I did work in 40 countries. It was a gift from the universe and the perfect beginning of a career.

I loved being a banker, but I felt that banks were missing an opportunity in not extending their services to more low-income people. I decided to leave Chase and move to Rwanda, where I helped build its first microfinance institution. I also helped start a bakery with six Rwandan women. Their stories became the starting point for “The Blue Sweater,” a book I wrote about how to assist developing countries in building organizations that help their citizens.

The key is giving access to affordable services like clean water, adequate health care and energy sources so they can make their own decisions and change their own lives. That’s where dignity starts.

I returned to the United States to attend Stanford for an M.B.A and heard the president of the Rockefeller Foundation give a speech about microfinance. We started talking and got to know each other. I worked for him for a year and helped start several programs.

In 2001, I started the Acumen Fund, a nonprofit global venture fund. We manage more than $40 million in investments in Africa and Asia. We raise charitable funds and invest in and loan money to enterprises that provide services to low-income people. We use any financial returns to invest in other innovative projects to help the poor.

For example, drip irrigation lets farmers raise production on drought-prone fields. In India, we invested in a company that reconfigured the technology for local farmers. To visit one, I flew from Mumbai to Aurangabad, took a three-hour bus ride, then walked a long time on dirt so dry it cracked. Finally I met a man growing lemon trees and eggplant. He was in his canvas house with his wife, who offered us a meal. Halfway through it, he said he wanted to show me something, and we walked to the concrete slab that was the foundation of the house they planned to build. He has dreams for the first time in his life.

Providing water to the driest area of Pakistan

The Tharparket district of Pakistan has many water problems. The area has no rivers, wells are controlled by an elite minority, there is a lot of nasty water, and it's one of the driest parts on the country. A local NGO is teaming up with the United Nations to try to solve the district's water issues.

From the IRIN, we read more of the water project to help the 900,00 people who live in the area.

However, an innovative project by local NGO Thardeep Rural Development Programme (TRDP) in conjunction with the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Government of Sindh is helping alleviate Tharparker's drought problems.

Following a survey conducted jointly by the UN children's agency (UNICEF) and TRDP in 1998, which identified the potable water issues faced in Tharparker, the concept for the Rain Water Harvest Project (RWHP) was born.

The idea was to enable villagers to collect rainfall, which is generally limited to a short annual monsoon season, store it and use it throughout the year.

"Given decreasing levels of rainfall as well as depleting water tables, it is important that we focus on conservation. RWHP allows us to store drinking water as well as replenish the water table," Jhuman Lalchandani, a senior manager at TRDP's Community Physical Infrastructure Unit, said.
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Keeping low cost intervention in mind, RWHP has provided some 1,350 villages and settlements out of 2,100 with underground water storage tanks since 2000.

"At the moment, we have three types of RWH projects, which include rain water harvesting at household levels, also known as cisterns or tankas; at hamlet level ponds are used for saving water for the community; and at the village level we have delay action dams. Also, in low-lying areas, flood protection walls not only save houses from getting flooded but also allow for water to pool up and be used for other purposes," said Lalchandani.

He said the average family of six to seven people in Tharparker needed around 10-12 litres of drinking water a day just for drinking and cooking. The cost of cement and materials to make a cistern with a capacity of about 2,000 litres is less than PKR 1,000 (US$12). Twenty percent of that cost is paid by the household receiving the cistern in the form of in-kind labour over the three to four days in takes to dig and construct a cistern.

"Each house is given a catchment area and from there the rain water is channeled to cisterns. As of June 2009, at the household level RWHP covers 92,415 homes with the number of beneficiaries being 406,833, with 219,896 of them being women," Lalchandani said.

Aid workers feel threats from both sides

Aid workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo hear it from both sides. The government accuses them of being spies from the West, and the rebels accuse them of being spies for the government.

From this AFP story that is hosted at Google News, reporter David Youant asks a humanitarian about the danger.

"Each side accuses us of being spies," said Kapuya, a Kinshasa-area lawyer in his forties who is also coordinator of the Congolese Group for Training and Development (RECOED).

"The militia suspect us of being government agents, and the government accuses us of being spies for Westerners," he said of the conflict in which government forces have been fighting Ugandan and Rwandan rebels for several years, mainly in the northeast.

"We're working between two fires."

With 30 or so members, his non-governmental organisation identifies vulnerable people -- notably women and children caught up in the warfare -- and steers them towards international aid groups for help.

It works out of Ituri, in Orientale province, the northeast corner of Congo -- one of the most unstable parts of the country, where several armed groups have been active for a decade.

Working under a blanket of suspicion "does not make our task easy, because we are obliged to work clandestinely in some areas, especially those areas in which there is great insecurity," Kapuya said.

"If you're suddenly found to be gathering information from local people, you risk getting shot," he added. "The slightest suspicion ... and anything can happen. You need a lot of willpower to go into those areas."

"What's more, there's the fact that you cannot tell a militia fighter from a mere villager. They have melted into the population and it can happen that you're unknowingly riding a taxi scooter driven by a militiaman."

Malawian Children exposed to tobacco plants suffer ill-health

An NGO that works in Malawi has completed an investigation of child laborers who work in the countries Tobacco fields. The study shows that the children suffer nicotine poisoning due to exposure of the plants. Plan International asks that the tobacco growers provide protective clothing to the children. Plan says that the exposure that is similar to smoking 50 packs a day.

From this summary of the report that we found at The Age, writer David Smith reveals more of the children's illnesses.

Plan International cites research showing that Malawi has the highest incidence of child labour in southern Africa, with 88.9 per cent of five-to-14-year-olds working in the agricultural sector.

It is estimated that more than 78,000 children work on tobacco estates - some up to 12 hours a day, many for less than two Australian cents an hour and without protective clothing.

Plan International's researchers invited 44 children from tobacco farms in three districts to take part in workshops. They revealed physical, sexual and emotional abuse and spoke about the need to work to support themselves and their families and pay school fees.

The children reported common symptoms of green tobacco sickness, or nicotine poisoning, including severe headaches, abdominal pain, muscle weakness, coughing and breathlessness.

''Sometimes it feels like you don't have enough breath, you don't have enough oxygen,'' one child said. ''You reach a point where you cannot breathe because of the pain in your chest. Then the blood comes when you vomit. At the end, most of this dies and then you remain with a headache.''

Green tobacco sickness is a common hazard of workers coming into contact with tobacco leaves and absorbing nicotine through their skin, particularly when harvesting.

Vultures of third world debt

A coalition of 50 advocacy groups are calling on the U.S. Congress to stop the practices of Vulture Funds. The funds buy countries debt at pennies on the dollar but charge them huge interest on the purchases. Once the payments are late, the funds sue the governments for what they feel is owed to them.

From Afrik.com, writer Muritala Bakare gives us a further description of the vulture funds practice.

According to the group of fifty advocacy institutions which discovered the “unscrupulous loan transfer” called VULTURE funds, Highly Indebted Countries’ debt are purchased at pennies to dollar and the financial firms "aggressively pursue their claims through the seizure of assets, litigation and political pressure, seeking repayments that are far in excess of the amount that they paid for the debt," the group say.

For instance, FG Hemisphere Fund based in the United States was successful in its court case against the Democratic Republic of Congo for US$105million for a US$30million loan borrowed in 1980 by the government of Mobutu Sese Seko. The DRC was ordered to pay nearly US$80,000 a week by a US judge.

"The DRC is being forced to siphon these desperately needed resources from initiatives like healthcare, education, combating HIV/AIDS, and access to clean water to its impoverished citizens to pay off wealthy corporations such as FG Hemisphere," said Melinda St. Louis, deputy director of the Jubilee USA Network.

"This runs totally counter to the progress made by the U.S. and the international community on debt cancellation, through the World Bank’s Highly Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) effort," St. Louis added.

Renowned experts have been campaigning hard against financial aid to Africa and have argued it does more harm than good. Dembisa Moyo in her controvercial book: Dead Aid, warned that aid damages and impoverishes Africa’s economies.

Michael Stulman, associate director of policy and communications at Africa Action said: "Since 1996 donor countries - including the U.S. - have committed 90 billion dollars in bilateral and multilateral debt relief to over 30 countries. VULTURE funds profit from this debt relief.”

Kenya will spend 118 million dollars on more food

Kenya's government is freeing up more money in it's budget to buy more food. The country is in an emergency situation as the rains did not arrive during the recent monsoon season. The U.N.'s World Food Programme recently called on the world to bring in more donations to Kenya.

From Bloomberg, writer Eric Ombok tells us more about Kenya's move.

Kenya’s government allocated 9 billion shillings ($118.1 million) to buy more food imports, as up to 10 million people are at risk of “severe hunger” due to drought, said Finance Minister Uhuru Kenyatta.

The government will “reprioritize expenditure” to come up with the funds, Kenyatta told reporters today in the capital, Nairobi.

Drought reduced crops, lowered hydropower electricity production which led to power cuts, and caused widespread water shortages. Corn production may fall 65 percent below consumption this year, Prime Minister Raila Odinga said on Aug. 12. The United Nations’ World Food Program said on Aug. 21 an additional 1.3 million people in the East African nation are in need of food aid. The agency is currently distributing food to 2.5 million Kenyans and gives meals to more than one million schoolchildren.

A visit to a health care clinic in Kansas

The U.S. Congress is on vacation, not working on details on health care reform, but the health care debate has only gotten louder. Members are back in their districts and are trying to talk to the public, instead many times they talk to operatives of one side or the other, only making the public's true voice quieter.

For a story on health care, a reporter from the Guardian visited a poor area in Kansas. Soon, the area will have only one doctor serving it, as most medical services have moved to affluent areas. However, reporter Ed Pilkington does find a Health care clinic that operates via donations instead of insurance reimbursements. For many in this poor area of Kansas, it's the only place they can turn to for health care.

Lee's clinic, Family Health Care, is a refuge of last resort. It picks up the pieces of lives left shattered by a health system that has failed them, and tries to glue them back together. It exists largely outside the parameters of formal health provision, raising funds through donations and paying all its 50 staff – Lee included – a flat rate of just $12 an hour.

Lee has just opened an outpost of her clinic in the outlying neighbourhood of Quindaro, an area of boarded-up houses and deserted factories where work is hard to find and crack plentiful and a per capita income is $11,025. A third of the population is below the federally defined poverty line.

And yet the local health department has decided the only health centre in the area will be closed by the end of this year and moved 30 blocks west to a much more prosperous part of the city where income levels are five times higher. Before long, one of the poorest areas of Kansas – of America – will be left without a single doctor, with only Lee's voluntary services to fall back on.

Even that is academic. Many of the residents of Quindaro were unable to see a doctor in any case – because they were uninsured. In Kansas, anyone who is able-bodied but unemployed is not eligible for government-backed health insurance as is anyone earning more than 39% of federal poverty levels. That leaves a huge army of jobless and low-income working families who are left in limbo. "It's the working poor who are most at disadvantage," Lee says.

As a result, she sees the same pattern repeating itself over and over. People with no insurance avoid seeking medical help for fear of the bills that follow, until it is too late. "When people come in they are already very, very sick. They have avoided seeing the doctor thinking that something may clear up, hoping they may be getting better."

Beth Gabaree, who came in to see Lee for the first time this morning, has experiences that sound extreme but are in fact quite typical. She has diabetes and a heart condition. Until two years ago they were controlled through ongoing treatment paid for by her husband's work-based health insurance. But he was in a motorbike crash that pulverised his right leg and put him out of work.

That Catch 22 again: no work, no insurance, no treatment. Except in this case it was Beth who went without treatment, in order to put her husband's dire needs first. He receives ongoing specialist care that costs them $500 a go, leaving nothing for her. So she stopped seeing a doctor, and effectively began self-medicating. She cut down from two different insulin drugs to regulate her diabetes to one, and restricted her heart drugs. "I do what I think I need to do to keep four steps out of hospital. I know that's not the right thing, but I can't justify seeing the doctor when my family's already in money trouble."

The problem is that she hasn't kept herself four steps out of hospital. Her health deteriorated and earlier this year she became bedridden. Even then, it took her family several days to persuade her to go to the emergency room because she didn't want to incur the hospital costs. "It was hard enough without that," she says.

After an initial consultation, Lee has now booked Gabaree for a new round of tests for her diabetes and is arranging for free medication. "It's wonderful," Gabaree says. "I'm so blessed. I didn't know you could get this sort of help."

That she sees basic healthcare as a blessing, not as a right, speaks volumes about attitudes among the mass of the working poor. Also revealing is the fact that Gabaree has absolutely no idea about the debate raging across America. She hasn't even heard of Obama's push for health reform, nor the Republican efforts to prevent it. "I don't watch much television," she says.

Selling cows cheaply for food

Yes, another story on Kenya, but this describes a good description of the realities on the ground.

The price of cattle has severely dropped, due to the owners of the cows just wanting to sell them for a little food. In some areas of Kenya, cattle farming was very good thanks to the open grassy land. Now, due to a few years of poor rains, and almost none this year, even the cows don't have much to eat.

From this IRIN that we found at Reuters Alert Net, we read more about the price of Kenyan's cattle.

A few months ago, cattle traders in Kiserian livestock market in Kajiado District, southwest of Nairobi, could sell a cow for up to KSh15,000 [US$200], but that has drastically changed.

"There is a lot of hunger; most pastoralists are selling their cattle at the market to buy other foodstuffs," Jane Sayena from Magadi, another town in Kajiado, said.

Four years of consecutive poor rains, experts say, have pushed communities in Kenya's eastern, northern and southern pastoral zones to the limit, finally forcing them to hurriedly sell off their herds for a pittance.

"It hurts to see the pastoralists selling their cows for as little at KSh500 [$6.50]," Sayena told IRIN. "Sometimes [they] cry... but it is better than seeing animals dying at home."

Livestock accounts for 80 percent of household income in some pastoral areas. Since the drought, the pastoralists have tried to cope by feeding their goats wet paper and slaughtering new-born calves to save lactating animals, but most animals have ended up in poor health.

Others tried to migrate to other areas, but the situation has grown worse. In northern Marsabit and Samburu, up to 20 percent of cattle and sheep have died - and the figure could rise to 50 percent if the drought continues, according to the Kenya Food Security Steering Group (KFSSG).

"If I sell even one cow, the children can at least get food," said John Ole Kopito, a pastoralist from Kajiado, which borders Tanzania to the southwest.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/3ee1f1adf6e7061b8622c40fb5f434d9.htm

Some stats on the Kenyan food shortage

A Kenyan government report gives some numbers to the shortfalls in food that could be experienced in the country. The report says that the food staple maize could be completely gone by September.

From this IRIN story that we found at Relief Web, we receive some quotes from the report.

"At the beginning of August 2009 the country had about 500,000MT of maize against a monthly requirement of 300,000MT, suggesting possibilities of serious shortfalls by the end of September," the Kenya Food Security Meeting (KFSM) said on 20 August in its 2009 Long Rains Assessment (LRA) Report.

According to the KFSM, 9.9 million Kenyans are food insecure: of whom 3.8 million are drought-affected, 1.5 million vulnerable school-children, 2.5 million urban food-insecure, 2.5 million affected by or living with HIV/AIDS and some 100,000 internally displaced (IDPs).

The LRA report was prepared by the Kenya Food Security Steering Group (KFSSG), which comprises representatives from various government ministries, some UN agencies, the Famine and Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS Net), Oxfam GB and World Vision.

The KFSSG conducted the long rains food security assessment in late May and July 2009, covering 30 districts, most in the drought-prone arid and semi-arid (ASAL) areas of northern and northeastern Kenya. It was a follow-up to its short rains food security assessment in February.

"Continued export bans in neighbouring countries of Tanzania and Uganda are likely to reduce cross-border maize inflows by 46 percent. The reduced levels of production and imports are likely to compound the tightening maize supply situation," the report stated.

More on the emergency aid plea for Kenya

We did mention this same story a couple of days ago, but we wanted to do another post on the request for emergency assistance to Kenya. The U.N.'s World Food Programme is asking the world for donations and food for the country. Kenya is experiencing their worst drought in a decade. The usual rainy season through August and July did not have much any rain.

From this story from the BBC we read more about the request and a scandal that has made matters worse,

The World Food Programme (WFP) has described the crisis as a "very difficult situation" and appealed to donor countries to offer funds.

Currently some 2.5 million people are receiving emergency food aid in the country but the effect of the drought has meant that a further 1.3 million now also need help.

"People are saying it is the worst drought since 2000," said WFP spokeswoman Gabrielle Menezes.

The regions affected normally harvest their crops once a year, planting them in April and collecting in September after the rains. But this year those rains have failed to come.

The Kenyan government was supposed to have built up a sizeable stock of maize but, following allegations of a corruption scandal, it only has enough to last another six weeks, says the BBC's East Africa correspondent, Will Ross.

Many subsistence farmers are reported to be abandoning rural areas - where they rely on aid - and moving into already over-congested slums in the towns and cities.

A story and a video on the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis

Myanmar's government has decided to stop flights into the Ayeyarwady Delta for aid to the victims of Cyclone Nargis. The flights took only an hour, now it will take aid workers a lot longer to get supplies to the cyclone victims. Cyclone Nargis killed 140,000 in Myanmar.

From the IRIN, we read more about the impact this decision makes on aid.

"It is back to six-hour-long road trips or boat rides," grumbled an aid worker.

Chris Kaye, WFP country director, confirmed that the service had been discontinued. The agency had started off with a fleet of 10 helicopters after Cyclone Nargis struck Myanmar on 2 and 3 May 2008. The service delivered 1,119MT of life-saving supplies, including food and shelter materials, and transported thousands of aid workers and people needing urgent assistance.

The operation was reduced to a single helicopter in recent months but continued to provide critical access to the delta not only for WFP but the entire humanitarian community as roads are often inaccessible after rains.

"The service was a great convenience also for government officials and donors conducting assessments of the various post-Nargis programmes," said Thierry Delbreuve, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Myanmar.

Last night PBS aired a program about the plight of the survivors of the cyclone. The show Wide Angle focused on orphans who now have to take care of themselves. The below video is an introduction to the show.

U.S. poverty rate expected to increase

Census figures due to be released next month will show an increase in the U.S. poverty rate. The numbers are sure to throw a whole new spin on the health insurance debate in Washington, for both sides of the isle.

From this Associated Press article that we found at Oregon Live, writer Hope Yen interviews a government worker about the numbers.

Rebecca Blank, the Commerce Department's undersecretary of economic affairs, spoke to The Associated Press in advance of next month's closely watched release of 2008 census data. Noting the figures are not yet final, Blank said the numbers will likely show a "statistically significant" increase in the poverty rate, to at least 12.7 percent. That would represent a jump of more than 1.5 million poor people last year.

"There's no question that 2008 economically was a much worse year than 2007," she said Wednesday. "The question is how much and how bad."

The number of Americans without medical insurance is also expected to notably increase due largely to rising unemployment and the erosion of private coverage paid for by employers and individuals, but Blank declined to say by how much. In 2007, the number of uninsured fell by more than 1 million mostly because government programs such as Medicaid for the poor picked up the slack.

The census figures, set to be released Sept. 10, could have important ramifications as Congress returns from its August recess to debate health reform, its cost, and the ways to pay for it. Republicans also have traditionally pointed to the intractable poverty rate as a sign that government programs do not work, a claim likely to be repeated often in light of the federal economic stimulus package.

In a 30-minute interview, Blank said the census figures released next month could possibly understate the actual number of poor people, since the poverty rate is a lagging indicator that tends to accelerate over time. As a result, the 2008 data could prove to be the tip of the iceberg, with more significant declines reflected in 2009 figures released next year.

She estimated earlier this year that poverty could eventually hit roughly 14.8 percent or more if unemployment reaches 10 percent as some analysts predict-or nearly one out of every seven Americans.

The new Yunus Centre in Thailand

The new Yunus Centre at the Asian Institute of Technology will be a school that will experiment with ways of ending poverty. Nobel Piece Prize winner Muhammad Yunus has established the school in Thailand to help develop his ideas on non-profit/non-loss businesses that help the poor.

From Channel News Asia, reporter Anasuya Sanyal gives us more details on the new school.

In developing countries in Asia, 690 million people live off less than US$1 a day, and many earn their meagre living by subsistence farming. But the global economic crisis and volatile prices of staple foods have made it all the more difficult. Yet there is much that can be done.

Microcredit pioneer, Professor Yunus, who is also the founder of Grameen Foundation, maintains that targeted and sustainable assistance can be a vital key to lifting people out of poverty.

He said: "The whole idea of the Yunus Centre is to bring the ideas and the concepts that I have been promoting and the imagination of creating a new kind of world. The one description of the world I want to see is a world where nobody will be a poor person - because there is no reason why anybody, anywhere in the world, should go through the misery and indignity of being a poor person."

At the Yunus Centre at AIT, scholars will be able to research ways to improve the lives of the poor and apply what they have learnt in those communities.

A precursor to the new centre is a project which aims to train mid-level government officials in development issues. And in Laos, this approach has proved effective.

World Humanitarian Day: a study on the danger

One of the goals of World Humanitarian Day is to shed light on the danger that aid workers are in. Those who provide food and comfort to the poor are at high risk of being kidnapped for ransoms, or being killed by anti-government extremists.

A study from the the British Overseas Development Institute gives us some stats at the increased threat that aid workers face. We learned of the study from this Reuters article written by Patrick Worsnip

Last year, 260 aid workers were victims of violent attacks, according to the British-based Overseas Development Institute. Some 122 of them lost their lives against 36 deaths in 1998.

"The 2008 fatality rate for international aid workers exceeds that of U.N. peacekeeping troops," the group said in a recent report.

It said there had been a particular upswing in kidnapping of humanitarians, which jumped 350 percent in the past three years, with expatriates preferred to nationals as they brought higher ransoms and a "more visible political statement."

The three most violent countries for aid workers are Sudan, especially the Darfur region, Afghanistan and Somalia, it said. This year has already seen killings and other violent acts in Pakistan, Somalia, the Philippines and Sudan.

Somalia, scene of a two-year insurgency led by Islamist militants against the government, has one of the highest per capita incidents of aid worker attacks in the world, U.N. officials say. So far in 2009, eight aid workers have been killed and 13 remain in captivity since 2008.

China, Congo agreement severed to obtain debt relief

In order to get a chance to have 11 billion dollars of debt forgiven, the Democratic Republic of Congo had to sacrifice 3 billion dollars in infrastructure improvement financed by China.

An agreement that would have allowed China to build copper mines in Congo in exchange for 3 billion dollars in infrastructure had to be altered. The International Monetary Fund wouldn't grant debt forgiveness unless the deal was changed.

For a further explanation of the announcement, we go to this snippet from Financial Times reporter Barney Jopson.

Under the original deal, a consortium of state-owned Chinese companies agreed to build roads, railways, hospitals and universities in return for the right to develop a copper and cobalt mine.

But pressure to alter it had come from western donors that refused to offer Congo relief on historic debt of $11bn because of concerns over state financial guarantees the deal contained, which could threaten Congo’s ability to manage its debt.

“During our visit, the authorities … told us that the partners have accepted the amendments in the project of the Sino-Congolese agreement, including the removal of the government’s guarantee on the mining project,” Mr Ames said.

Congo is eager to take advantage of a debt relief scheme for poor countries and to access new forms of western development aid, but it cannot do so until the IMF approves a new programme for the country, which it had not been ready to do.

The $9bn financing was split into three tranches of $3bn: one for setting up the mining operation and two for nationwide infrastructure investments, including more than 3,500km of roads and nearly 3,000km of railways.

But Jean-Claude Masangu, governor of Congo’s central bank, told the same press conference that the second $3bn infrastructure part of the project, which had also raised IMF concerns, had been suspended.

The IMF and the Paris Club of creditors had led western opposition to the state guarantees in the overall deal, which earmarked government revenues and made China a privileged creditor.

Natalie Portman: microcredit spokesperson

Actress Natalie Portman works as an Ambassador for FINCA International, a microcredit program. Portman's role as ambassador as taken her to poverty stricken nations where FINCA makes loans. She was also the star of a documentary produced by FINCA that shows some of the success stories of their loans.

From MSNBC, Elizabeth Chang asked Portman about her work for the microcredit cause.

Question: Can you tell me about FINCA International and the Village Banking Campaign?

Portman: FINCA International provides microloans, small loans, to primarily women in developing countries to start their own businesses. It has an incredible effect on all aspects of their lives, obviously economically, but it also improves their children’s education, nutrition and health care … their shelter, and their general sense of pride and agency in themselves. The campaign is seeking to reach more and more individuals and trying to go into more remote places where you can reach really the poorest of the poor.

Q: Please describe your role as the "Ambassador of Hope" for FINCA International and co-chair of the Village Banking Campaign.

Portman: My role is primarily one as a communicator. The people who are really doing the work are the ones on the ground and the women themselves who are working so hard to create their own businesses. My job really, within the organization, is to communicate it to the public and help fundraise, occasionally talk to politicians about helping finance our programs and also how to improve them.

Q: How did you learn about microfinancing and what attracted you to the idea?

Portman: I originally got into the whole world of microfinance because I was looking into things I could do that would affect the Middle East, because I am from Israel originally. When I was looking into it, I had the great opportunity to meet Queen Rania of Jordan who is also the most, probably, high-profile Palestinian woman in the world right now, and she was the one who guided me into microfinance. She said microfinance is a way to even out the hope gap, which is what exists between the poor and the rich; this is a way to improve the status of so many people who are suffering and that’s what leads them to … that kind of despair. So, if we want to create a sort of social equilibrium, we have to create an economic equilibrium first.

Q: How can microloaning improve the lives of women, who make up a large percentage of the world’s poor?

Portman: You are very correct in saying that women and children make up 70 percent of the world’s poor, and microfinance is an incredible way to give women the tools and the access themselves to change their own destinies. That is exactly the best thing you can do, because you’re empowering women at the same time you are helping them. They really feel that they’re in control of their own futures. They don’t have to wait for someone to help them; they can create their own business, and send their children to school as opposed to having to have them work at home. The kids get better health care, they eat better, and you just see sort of all the side effects of poverty really improved by this one sort of assistance.

World Humanitarian Day: threat of being kidnapped in Afghanistan

Aid workers in Afghanistan have to keep their employment secret. Many tell friends or relatives that they work for private business instead of working to provide food. They do this because kidnapping is a constant threat, they fear putting themselves or their loved ones in danger if their true occupation is known.

For World Humanitarian Day, this commentary from the Times Online explains some of the threat in Afghanistan, the writer did not reveal their identity.

I’ve never programmed the numbers of my international colleagues into my mobile phone because I don’t want someone to find them there if I’m searched at a roadblock. I leave my work phone behind when I travel to the south to visit relatives and friends.

None of this is unusual. Many of my Afghan colleagues at WFP do the same things, and some take even more precautions against the risks we face just coming to work every day.

There are people here who believe that working with non-Muslims is forbidden. Some are willing to use violence to enforce this belief, and may not differentiate between someone working for a foreign military force and someone working for a humanitarian agency.

The gap between rich and poor is also an issue. Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries on Earth, and some people assume that those of us working for international agencies are wealthy — which could make us and our relatives targets for kidnappers seeking ransom.

There was a time, not so long ago, when a UN job was something people would be eager to show off. A position like mine would bring prestige and social status.

But for me and for so many of my colleagues, our motivation is something much deeper, and it inspires us to face the risks that now accompany the work we do.

World Humanitarian Day

Today is World Humanitarian Day, August 19th. It's a day to salute the aid workers throughout the world and to remember those who have died while trying to help.

From the Huffington Post, this commentary from Navi Pilay explains why we have such a day.

August 19 is a date that is etched deep in the consciousness of the United Nations and the memories of those involved in humanitarian and human rights work around the world: the day in 2003 when 22 people, mostly UN staff, were killed in cold blood by a single bomb at the Canal Hotel in Baghdad.

It was by no means the first time that humanitarian aid workers, human rights defenders, peacekeepers and others working to improve the lot of the disadvantaged had been deliberately targeted by ruthless forces determined to create instability or subvert the basic laws and norms on which civilized society depends. My own organization, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, experienced its first loss of staff on 4 February 1997, when five members of the Human Rights Field Operations were killed in Rwanda.

And sadly, since 19 August 2003, there have been numerous other assassinations of individuals and further bombs -- most notably the one in Algiers on 11 December 2007 which took the lives of a further 17 UN staff members -- targeting UN and NGO staff. And I have just learned that two more UN staff are among those killed on Tuesday by a suicide bomber in Kabul. I would like to offer my deepest condolences to their families and colleagues.

In the case of the Baghdad and Algiers bombs, the perpetrators of these crimes were terrorist organizations. However, in other cases, the killers have sometimes acted on behalf of a government, or for organs meant to be under the control of governments.

Killing those who are trying to help others is a particularly despicable crime, and one which all governments should join forces to prevent, and -- when prevention fails -- to punish. It is therefore appropriate -- as a first step -- that last December the global forum for all the world's governments, the UN General Assembly, agreed to designate 19 August as World Humanitarian Day.

Humanitarian aid workers are on the frontline, trying to provide at least a minimum of material support and protection for the displaced, and for populations affected by conflict, chronic poverty, food shortages, natural disasters and other crises.

Emergency food needed for Kenya

A drought is effecting 1 million Kenyans and the U.N.'s World Food Programme says they are not getting the food they need to survive. The WFP called on emergency donations of food aid to Kenya, who is experiencing their worst drought since 2000.

From this Associated Press article that we found at Google News, Tom Odula writes more about the emergency situation.

More than 1 million Kenyans affected by a prolonged drought are not getting the food aid they desperately need, the U.N.'s World Food Program said Tuesday.

The agency already is providing emergency food aid to some 2.5 million people in this East African nation, but another 1.3 million still need help, said Gabrielle Menezes, a spokeswoman for WFP.
...

The areas hardest hit by the drought are the semiarid southeastern regions and parts of central Kenya.

Those areas generally have only one harvest a year of maize — Kenya's staple — usually after autumn rainfall called the short rains. But the rains have largely failed this year

The Guatemalan angle on immigration

We find another angle on illegal immigration today with an article from Reuters India. The story concentrates on immigrants from Guatemala. Once immigrants are deported back, they find themselves with less money than before, and become easy recruits for street gangs.

Guatemala is ranked as the most violent country in Central America. Caused in part by Mexican gangs fleeing to Guatemala after being flushed out by the military.

For our snippet, reporter Sarah Grainger talks about immigration enforcement and gives the example of one deportee.

As successive U.S. governments have responded to pressure to crack down on undocumented immigrants, the size and frequency of deportations has risen steadily.

In 2008 the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency sent home nearly 30,000 Guatemalans, a rise of 21 percent on 2007, and the figure is on course to rise again in 2009.

Still scarred by a 36-year civil war which ended in 1996, Guatemala is ill-equipped to deal with the thousands of people returning, jobless, to a shaky economy.

Crime rates are sky-high, with more than 6,000 murders last year in the country of just 13 million people. Mexican drug gangs, under pressure at home from an army crackdown, have moved into Guatemala and are seeking recruits there.

Easy money from being a cartel lookout, driver or hitman is tempting in countries where wages are pitiful.

Carlos Aguilar, 26, recently swapped the neatly clipped lawns of the Royal Wood Golf and Country Club in Naples, Fla. where he made $600 a week as a groundsman, for back-breaking work on his uncle's coffee farm near the mountain village of El Bosque, where he is lucky to pocket $40 in a week.

Arrested after a decade in the United States and placed on a deportation flight with 90 other Guatemalans, he is finding it hard to adjust, especially having left his wife and children in Florida, where they are legal residents.

"Here there's no way out and you're worried about having enough money for food just to survive. But there it's very different because each week you get your paycheck from work and the banks even offer you credit," he said.

Follow up on the Chinese lead poisoning

Here is a follow up to a story we had a couple of days ago on the lead poisoning in China. A factory is said to have poisoned 300 children, so far only a fraction of those families have been moved away from the area. Also, people had to take to the streets and into the plant itself to get it shut down to prevent more poisoning.

From this Reuters story we see more about the slow response to the people's safety.

Protests against pollution are increasingly common in China, although the police normally try and nip them in the bud before they become violent. In other cases, officials show up and mollify residents with promises of financial or other aid.

So far only around a quarter of villagers have new homes in a settlement around 1.3 km (0.9 miles) from the factory, and even they may not be safe. Experts will test the site this week, the China Daily said on Tuesday.

Villagers who moved homes say tests on 30 children in the new area showed two-thirds had excessive lead levels in their blood, and at least one had been admitted to hospital.

"Its not safe here," parent Zhang Yongxiang told the paper. "Its not appropriate to move the rest of the families."

A child who swallows large amounts of lead may develop anaemia, muscle weakness and brain damage. Where poisoning occurs, it is usually gradual.

China's pollution and lax product safety standards have long been a source of tension and unrest, particularly when residents of pollution hotspots -- dubbed "cancer villages" because of high disease rates -- feel they are being ignored.

Eating pig feed to survive

People who live in the slums of Kenya have taken to pig feed to keep from starving. Giant sacks of the pig feed called "Pollard" can be had for very little money.

Slum dwellers will mix the pig feed with a little bit of grain to make a bread. Although it keeps the people from starving it does give them diarrhea and stomachaches, for the pig food... isn't really meant for humans.

From this Daily Nation article that we found at All Africa, reporter Muchiri Karanja describes the use of the pig feed. You can also click on the link to the article for pig feed cooking tips!

Pollard - the brand name for animal feed normally fed to cattle and pigs - is easily available in shops for Sh1,200 per 90-kilogramme bag, compared to Sh3,000 for maize and Sh4,000 for wheat flour.

Now the animal feed has become a staple food in Nyeri's poverty ravaged slum villages of Muringato, Chania, Mathari and Githuri, where relief food is rare.

"The last time they brought relief food here was a month ago. I got three tins of maize and two of beans. They ran out within a week," said 65-year-old Ziporah Wangari.

The slum dwellers say, that unlike the relief food that runs out quickly, the animal feed comes in larger quantities, and at a cheaper price.

"One sack of Pollard feeds six families for more than a week," says 35-year-old single mother, Jane Wanjiru. She does odd jobs in town to feed her four children.

"We contribute Sh200 each. Then we send someone to the animal feed shop," confessed Jane.

At the animal feed shop, no questions are asked. The shop owner, they say, has no idea that the pig food he sells actually goes to feed human beings.

Comment: the roots of microcredit

In his latest commentary, Sam Daley Harris touches on the Medal of Freedom that was awarded to Muhammad Yunus. Harris recounts the story of microcredit's beginnings, and how the same concept of non-profit/non-loss business is spreading into other ventures.

From The Daily Journal is this snippet of Harris' commentary. Harris is the founder of the Microcredit Summit and Results.

He was so shaken by the sight of people dying of starvation that when he set foot into Jobra, the village next to his campus, all he wanted to do was to see if he could be of use to one person for one day -- not 40 million -- just one.

It was in that village that he met a stool maker who horrified him when she explained she earned only 2 cents a day for her beautiful craftsmanship. With no money to buy the bamboo she needed, Sufia Khatun was forced to borrow from a moneylender who demanded that she sell her finished stools back to him at a price he set -- a price so low that she made only 2 cents a day profit.

When he asked whether she could earn more if she was freed from the moneylender, she told him, "Yes I can." Yunus had a student look for other villagers who were in the same dilemma. The student found 42 people who needed a grand total of $27 to pay off the moneylender, buy their raw materials and sell their wares to the highest bidder. That's right; all they needed was an average of 68 cents each. With her loan of less than $1 the stool-maker's profits soared from 2 cents a day to $1.25 a day.
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Now, Yunus has set his sights on titans of business and industry with his social business concept, and the chairmen of Dannone, Intel and BASF are beating a "yes we can" path to his door to create new nonprofit/non-loss businesses that have as their sole goal improving people's lives. The corporations can recover their initial investments in the social businesses, but after that, all profits are plowed back into these new companies. They include a joint venture with Dannone producing nutritionally fortified yogurt for malnourished villagers, another with BASF producing chemically treated bed-nets to protect people from mosquitoes carrying malaria, and still another with Intel bringing information technology solutions to rural villages.

When the U.S. president shook the hand of the Bangladeshi micro-banker at the White House ceremony last week, Obama touched his own past and the microfinance work his mother did in Indonesia. And when Yunus opens the Microcredit Summit next April in Nairobi, Kenya, the micro-banker from Bangladesh will launch the next phase of microfinance in the birthplace of Obama's father and throughout the continent.

Hiding slums

Sure, economists praise India for the rapid growth that has brought hundreds of thousands out of poverty. However, a story about a sporting event reminds us that a lot of work needs to be done.

India will host the Commonwealth Games next year, and instead of moving the slums out of New Delhi, India will hide them from the games. As we find out from this Dean Nelson story from the Telegraph.

The Games was supposed to be India's moment to show off its rapidly rising wealth and banish memories of a country once synonymous with chronic poverty.

But with barely a year to go officials have conceded defeat. Vast supplies of bamboo poles have been ordered from the jungle states of Mizoram and Assam to keep the poor out of sight during the games.

New Delhi is littered with makeshift slums which house the millions of migrants who pour into the city searching for work to escape the poverty of rural life in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. Their inhabitants are often seen naked at the roadsides washing at standpipes or defecating astride open sewers.

Officials had planned to shift their settlements to the outskirts of the city so the city that television viewers and visitors see is restricted to the capital's gleaming new Metro system and world-class airport, and its smart new roads, pavements and streetlights.

But yesterday they revealed they simply could not resettle enough slum-dwellers or street-sleepers, and that they had opted to hide the problem instead.

One ophthalmologist for eight million people

There is only one permanent ophthalmologist in all of Southern Sudan. So this poor eye doctor has to serve over eight million people. When a mobile ophthalmologist visits a village, hundreds of blind or sight limited people will show up, too many for the staff to care for.

From this IPS article that we found at All Africa, writer Skye Wheeler describes the eye diseases that are prevalent in South Sudan.

Dozens visit the eye clinic in the semi-autonomous region's capital every day from across the South trying to have their sight restored, mostly old and silent, waiting their turn with a helper. The Ethiopian doctor has performed hundreds of cataract operations - removing the protein build-up that covers the eye - that miraculously bring back sight.

Reversible cataract is probably responsible for half the cases of blindness in the South, but Mulugeta and government officials in the health sector know there are thousands who have no access to treatment. They also know - although no comprehensive studies have been done - that many thousands are at risk from two of the world's leading blindness-causing infectious diseases; river-blindness and trachoma.

"South Sudan looks to be the worst. Maybe two percent of the population is blind," Mulugeta, who works with the Christian Blind Mission, said. This estimate is an extrapolation of numbers from neighbouring Ethiopia where 1.6 percent of the population is visually impaired but where there are far more public health services and infrastructure.

The Director of Eye Health at South Sudan's health ministry, Ali Yousif Ngor, oversees the South Sudan part of an Africa-wide attempt to combat river blindness, also known as onchocerciasis (O.V). It is a disease spread by the black fly that carries larval forms of a worm parasite. These worms grow and breed, releasing thousands of larvae that move all over the body causing intense itching and blindness.

River blindness is prevented by widely dosing communities in affected areas with a drug called ivermectin. For the last two decades ivermectin has been provided free of charge by a U.S. pharmaceutical company in an attempt to eradicate the disease in endemic countries, mostly in Africa.

It was only at the end of the 22-year civil war in Sudan in 2005 that international health organisations and government officials were given a chance to reach many rural communities. "It is so hard to get everyone to take the drug at the same time, twice a year. That would really hit the transmission of the disease," Ngor said.

Part of the problem is that officials like Ngor simply do not know how widespread the disease is. Ngor said that the government does not even know if O.V is more or less common than trachoma, another major cause of blindness in the South. Trachoma occurs when untreated, repeated infections of the eye by bacteria eventually causes scarring so extensive the eyelid partially turns in on itself. The lashes scratch the cornea causing intense pain and often first reversible and then irreversible blindness.

Protesting the lack of water and power in India

Protests flare up often in India. Water and power shortages are prevalent in the country, so people will take to the streets and block traffic to demand more from their government.

An article from the Los Angeles Times provides an eyewitness view of one such protest. Reporter Mark Magnier was present at a protest that did bring out a government official.

The rage surged through the crowd, mixing with the heat, the sweat and the frustration to create a volatile stew, as several hundred locals incensed over power and water shortages blocked the main Alwar Road here Wednesday.

Most residents said they hadn't seen a lightbulb's worth of energy come through their wires in the last 60 hours, and this after suffering protracted cuts for the last month. With no power to pump well water, some said they had to walk miles to find a hand pump. Others said they were paying up to a third of their meager incomes to price-gouging drivers of water trucks.

Localized eruptions like this one, most unreported, occur hundreds of times each week across India, where this year the situation has been made worse by unusually light monsoon rains. The states of Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Bihar and Rajasthan are among the hardest-hit areas.

Experts say the shortages could be the result of global warming or natural cycles. That hasn't provided much solace to farmers like these in eastern Rajasthan as they watch their crops die, their livelihoods wither, their children go thirsty.

Rajasthan, which abuts Pakistan, is heavily dependent on hydroelectric power, as are many other drought-hit states. With water levels down, turbines aren't turning, taxing India's overextended infrastructure and fraying tempers.

Blocking roadways is a time-worn way to draw a response from officials, particularly for rural communities. A protest last year in Rajasthan over access to government jobs shut down the national highway for a month.

"No one ever listens to us unless we block the road," said Kishan Saini, 27 and unemployed, one of the leaders of the 2 1/2 -hour protest here Wednesday. "This is the worst shortage I've seen in my lifetime. We'll keep doing this for as long as it takes to get some action."

Population growth could also put MDGs out of reach

The Millennium Development Goals are facing another setback, population rates rising too fast. The MGDs already suffered a set back from the global economic recession, but experts fear population growth that is faster than expected could put the goals out of reach.

From this IPS story, reporter Thalif Deen examines what effect population has on the MGDs.

The goal of halving the number of people living in extreme poverty and hunger by 2015 could be jeopardised by soaring population growth, mostly in the developing world.

World population is expected to reach seven billion by 2011, a year earlier than expected, according to the latest figures released by the Population Research Bureau last week.

"The population will hit seven billion in the second half of 2011," predicts Jose Miguel Guzman, chief of the Population and Development Branch at the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA).

Since 1975, he said, world population has been increasing by about a billion every 12 years.

"Given that the six billion mark was reached in 1999, the attainment of seven billion seems to be more or less on track," Guzman told IPS.

Of the growth between 1999 and 2011, he said, 95 percent is in the developing world.

Asked how the rise in population growth will impact on developing nations reaching their MDGs by 2015, Guzman said that many developing, and particularly the least developed countries (LDCs), will face a continuous increase in the demand for services, specifically in education and health.

That means there will be an increasing need for social investment just to catch up with population growth, giving fewer opportunities to increase the quality of services, which is needed to generate the changes requested to attain the MDGs, he added.

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

7.3 million orphans in Nigeria

A new report says that Nigeria has over 7.3 million orphans. In addition, the report says that another 8 million children are "vulnerable" meaning they have one parent, or have parents that are ill.

This All Africa article from the Daily Trust breaks down the survey.

This is contained in "The 2008 Situation Assessment and Analysis on Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC) in Nigeria" released in Lagos on Tuesday.

The survey, conducted by the Federal Ministry of Women Affairs and Social Development with the support of UNICEF and USAID, spanned from 2006 to 2008.

It revealed that "one tenth of Nigerian children are orphans translating to about 7.3 million orphans in Nigeria".

According to the report, studies by UNICEF and other agencies in Nigeria have projected population of different categories of OVC at different levels as street children, abandoned children, child beggars, street urchins and children orphans by AIDS.

It listed other vulnerable children to include those who have lost one or both parents, children living with terminally or chronically-ill parents, those living with aged grand parents, hawkers and married children.
...

It said that the OVC were more likely to be recruited to carry out anti-social activities in times of conflict.

An 8 year old who is President of his own non-profit

A little boy is the President of his own non-profit that aims to fight hunger in the Miami area. Joshua Williams began helping the poor when he was 5 by giving 20 dollars to homeless man, now with the help of his mom they raise thousands of dollars to provide food.

From the Miami Herald, writers Andrea Robinson and Carli Teproff profile the child with a big heart.

Three years later, at the ripe-old-age of 8, Joshua Christopher Williams is president of Joshua's Heart, a foundation that tackles an issue daunting to most adults. At least once every two months you can find Josh and his staff -- mom, grandma, aunts and other volunteers -- feeding homeless and low-income families somewhere in Miami-Dade County.

``He just made up his mind that this is what he wanted to do,'' said his mom, Claudia McLean. ``And there is no stopping him.''

In the two years since he created his nonprofit organization, the Miami Beach boy has collected thousands of dollars in donations and led a growing band of adults to feed thousands of people throughout North and Central Miami-Dade: Liberty City, North Miami, Miami Gardens, Little Haiti and Hialeah. He has used money from the organization to help renovate a teen center in Hallandale Beach, lobbied local governments for financial help, set up shop at community festivals and won several awards -- including Miami-Dade County's Do the Right Thing award and a $1,000 scholarship prize as one of the regional winners of Kohl's Kids Who Care annual competition.

``He is a blessing from God,'' said Earl Laird, who came to get food during a recent Joshua's Heart distribution at the Church of God of Prophecy in Miami Gardens. Laird said he receives disability checks and depends on the food to help him get through tough times.

``It's amazing that such a little boy can do something like this,'' he said.

On a recent Friday, the curly-haired boy donned white latex gloves -- big enough for another set of hands to fit inside -- and took his place in front of a tower of canned pasta in the church's meeting room.

He grabbed a can of spaghetti and meat sauce and waited for his first client.

Exodus from Somalia

An exodus of people continues from Somalia. The people are leaving due to drought and high food prices. Some rains have begun in Somalia, but those close to the situation say it may be too little or too late to make the people return.

From this IRIN article that we found at Reuters Alert Net, we read more about the new humanitarian situation.

"We know that hundreds of thousands have [been] displaced to urban centres," said Abdihakim Garaad Mohamoud, Deputy Minister at the Somaliland Ministry of Resettlement, Reintegration and Rehabilitation.

"Every city in Somaliland has a huge number of displaced people because of the recent drought," he added. "It has affected 60 percent of the rural population, whether they are pastoralists or agro-pastoralists. From east to west, south to north, every place in Somaliland has been affected."

Across towns in the self-declared republic, such as Burao, Berbera, Erigavo, Las'anod and Badhan, temporary shelters have sprouted as rural dwellers arrive from the countryside.

"The government has planned to deal with the problem, but our capacity is limited," Mohamoud told IRIN in Hargeisa. "Sixty percent of animals have been lost. One [man] who had 200 sheep has lost 110-120, and one who had 20 camels lost half."

The governor of Togdheer region, Jama Abdillahi Warsame, said his government, with local NGOS, was trucking water to 78 villages.

"We estimate [that] more than 8,000 people moved to Burao [the main livestock market town] from rural areas," he told IRIN.

How the Millennium Villages got started

A very long profile of Jeffrey Sachs can be found in the Globe and Mail.

The article gives us a history of his work. One of the youngest to ever receive tenure at Harvard, Sachs was used by some governments in Europe to solve hyper-inflation and other economic problems. Since then, Sachs was called on by the United Nations to solve the problems of poverty.

For our snippet, writer Stephanie Nolen gives us the history of the Millenium Villages project.

The United Nations General Assembly had adopted a list of targets, the Millennium Development Goals, which aimed to cut extreme poverty in half by 2015. But it was clear by 2002 that many of the poorest countries, particularly in Africa, were not on track to meet the targets and, in many cases, were headed in the other direction.

That year, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed Prof. Sachs, then the director of a big-budget Columbia University think-tank called the Earth Institute, as his special adviser on the Millennium Goals, charged with drawing up a blueprint, complete with price tags, to meet them.

He delivered his plan in January, 2005. But he added a twist: He wanted to demonstrate, in his test-tube villages, that it could be done.

They started in Sauri because it had so many of the typical characteristics of extreme poverty. Two-thirds of its people were living on less than $1 a day, a quarter of them with HIV-AIDS, almost half infected with malaria parasites and half the children victims of chronic poor nutrition.

In addition, the community had some history of working with international organizations, which Prof. Sachs believed would remove several steps of groundwork.

In August, 2004, they met with the villagers, whom Prof. Sachs said were wildly enthusiastic. They also got a warm nod from the government of Kenya, which promised to support the project's infrastructure needs, with paved roads and an extended electrical grid. Medical advisers began testing everyone for malaria. The soil experts started analyzing samples.

Six months after Sauri, they went to Koraro in the desolate Ethiopian highlands. And now, the Millennium Villages Project is six months into setting up in Ghana, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda.

Each village is located in a distinct environmental zone. Some have farmers, some nomadic herders; some are chronically short of water, some in an equatorial fug. Each poses particular problems in terms of disease, agriculture and infrastructure.

These factors of geography help explain why so much of Africa remains terribly poor: Having endemic malaria all year long and being 15,000 kilometres from a railway line are huge issues, not just a local quirk.

Work has also begun on expanding the Sauri interventions to 10 surrounding villages, and in Malawi the plan has been rolled out to 13 villages around the original one. The goal is to cover 560,000 people by the end of this year.

"We're running because we think every country needs this push. And we're running because we're trying an interesting thought experiment — treating the Millennium Development Goals as real and not just a nice thing," Prof. Sachs said during a recent visit to Kenya.

"I'm kind of desperately rushing, hurrying everyone to the point of distraction, because I'm watching the clock — because every year lost is 10 million deaths. I can't believe we live in a world like that. I can't understand why it's not the biggest damn cause on the planet."

Food going to waste

An article from the Nigerian paper Next talks about the wasting of food in the country. Nigeria produces enough food but some of it goes to waste, as technologies to can or preserve the foods are not used.

From this article by writer Abiose Adelaja, we visit a shop keeper who talks about prices being a lot more than they should be.

“Tomatoes is too dear nowadays,” says a pepper seller at the Mushin Olosha market in Lagos. Before, this measure [a saucer] used to cost ₦20 and we even used to sell it at three for ₦50. At bigger markets like Mile 12, a measure like this [slightly bigger than the saucer] is ₦50.”

Pointing at the content of another seller’s baskets, she says, “Many people are now using this type of dry pepper and tin tomatoes to make stew.”

The situation is not peculiar to Mushin. It is the same thing at Ijora, Ajegunle and many other markets where pepper and other vegetables are sold at high rates. A buyer, Sylvia Ekezie, says: “A bunch of Ugwu leaves (a green leafy vegetable) now costs ₦50. Before, I used to buy it for ₦20. Now, to make a pot of stew is so much money.”

Commenting on the food situation, the national secretary of the Nigeria Institute of Food Science and Technology, Osaretin Ebuehi, says the high food prices are caused by a lack of technology for storing food when in season.

“We do not have technologies for food preservation and storage, so when these foods are in season, there is a lot of post-harvest loss and wastage,” he says. “When in season, the food item in question can be so cheap - available because it is surplus - but once the season is gone, scarcity and food shortage begins.”

According to him, the government has not funded food technologies, not invested in agriculture and not encouraged the nation’s youth to go into agriculture. He also says that banks are not ready to give loans to encourage farmers.

The Barbara Ehrenreich explosion

We usually skip by opinion pieces, unless it's a slow news day. August 8th was a busy news day, it was also the day that Barbara Ehrenreich had her latest op-ed published by the New York Times. Since it's release it has set off a flurry of comment, blog posts, and debates.

Ehrenreich cites a recent study that was conducted by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, which ranks the meanest towns to the homeless. The city is deemed "mean" if it's laws treat the homeless unfairly, such as prohibiting overnight sleeping or begging. Some cities are even going further by outlawing giving food to the homeless. You may remember our post about the survey from July.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After citing the study Ehrenreich moves on to some interviews she did with homeless people and asked them about their treatment by the law. For our snippet, we jump to Ehrenreich's conclusions, which have helped to fire up the discussion. We hope that it begins turning people to this question; Which is ultimately cheaper for society, prosecuting the poor, or helping them out of poverty?

Some of the community organizers I’ve talked to around the country think they know why “zero tolerance” policing has ratcheted up since the recession began. Leonardo Vilchis of the Union de Vecinos, a community organization in Los Angeles, suspects that “poor people have become a source of revenue” for recession-starved cities, and that the police can always find a violation leading to a fine. If so, this is a singularly demented fund-raising strategy. At a Congressional hearing in June, the president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers testified about the pervasive “overcriminalization of crimes that are not a risk to public safety,” like sleeping in a cardboard box or jumping turnstiles, which leads to expensively clogged courts and prisons.

A Pew Center study released in March found states spending a record $51.7 billion on corrections, an amount that the center judged, with an excess of moderation, to be “too much.”

But will it be enough — the collision of rising prison populations that we can’t afford and the criminalization of poverty — to force us to break the mad cycle of poverty and punishment? With the number of people in poverty increasing (some estimates suggest it’s up to 45 million to 50 million, from 37 million in 2007) several states are beginning to ease up on the criminalization of poverty — for example, by sending drug offenders to treatment rather than jail, shortening probation and reducing the number of people locked up for technical violations like missed court appointments. But others are tightening the screws: not only increasing the number of “crimes” but also charging prisoners for their room and board — assuring that they’ll be released with potentially criminalizing levels of debt.

Maybe we can’t afford the measures that would begin to alleviate America’s growing poverty — affordable housing, good schools, reliable public transportation and so forth. I would argue otherwise, but for now I’d be content with a consensus that, if we can’t afford to truly help the poor, neither can we afford to go on tormenting them.

Zuma's first 100 days

There seems to be a protest a day in South Africa. As people take to the streets to protest the slow work of the government there, sometimes the protests grow violent. The demonstrations have been a big part of South African President Jacob Zuma first 100 days in office.

This analysis from today's Financial Times shows how the demonstrations have effected Zuma's start as President.

A hail of stones greets the two armoured cars as they rumble past the tree trunks, concrete blocks and burning tyres that litter the main road in Thokoza, an impoverished black township a dozen or so miles south-east of Johannesburg. Policemen wearing riot helmets, their rifles primed with rounds of rubber bullets, jump out and for the next hour or so play cat and mouse with demonstrators mainly in their teens and 20s.

Most of the youths are armed with sticks, batons or sjamboks (rawhide whips) and since first light they have been out on the streets protesting against deprivation and the area’s dismal public services.

Scenes like this are becoming ever more common across South Africa as President Jacob Zuma – who on Monday completes his first 100 days in office – struggles to contain a wave of community protests and labour disputes. In the last month alone, striking municipal workers have dumped rubbish in the streets of the big cities; work on new soccer stadiums, railways and power plants stopped for a week as tens of thousands of construction workers downed tools; and wildcat action by doctors halted normal service in public hospitals.

Barely a day goes by without a protest somewhere as the poor fret at the absence of improvements promised by Mr Zuma ahead of April’s election. “It is so slow,” says Bongani Santos, 33, a member of the ruling African National Congress’s youth league in Thokoza.

“People feel dissatisfied,” says William Gumede, a Johannesburg analyst. “The election campaign whipped up expectations and increased people’s impatience. There has clearly not been a long honeymoon.”

Mr Zuma, who won a landslide victory and promised to make the fight against poverty a cornerstone of his administration, denies that the protests amount to a pattern of “national unrest”, arguing that “we should not claim these events to be more than they are”. Nevertheless, the tensions of recent weeks have begun to stain what in some ways has been a solid and optimistic beginning by his government.

In office, Mr Zuma has been more pragmatic politically than many expected. Fears that he would back the policies favoured by the leftwing allies that supported him in a long power struggle with Thabo Mbeki, Nelson Mandela’s successor as president, have proved exaggerated. Important ministerial appointments – such as the nomination of Pravin Gordhan to the Treasury and the retention in the cabinet of Trevor Manuel, formerly finance minister and now in the potentially powerful position of planning minister, have been welcomed in the private sector.

Financial markets also applauded the more recent decision to bring Gill Marcus to head the South African Reserve Bank. Ms Marcus is a former deputy both to Mr Manuel and to Tito Mboweni, the central bank’s outgoing governor, and is chair of Absa, one of the country’s biggest commercial banks. Other crucial positions have been filled quickly. For example, Mr Zuma named a new national police commissioner as soon as he was legally able to do so. The post had remained open since Mr Mbeki suspended its previous occupant early last year, an absence of leadership that did not help the fight against a high rate of violent crime.

Moving to Kenya to help the street children

A young woman from the UK has moved her life to Kenya to help the street children there. Action for Children in Conflict helps to get the children off of the streets, reunited with families and into school. Eleanor Harrison now calls Kenya home and says its a wonderful country but it still has it's problems.

From this interview with Harrison in the Oxford Mail, reporter Dan Hearn records her activities in Kenya.

“AfCiC tries to break cycles of violence, hatred and despair by providing psychological, emotional and educational support to those affected by conflict."

“We focus on children and young people because they have the greatest capacity to transcend the conflicts of their communities and to bring about change in the future.”

The charity launched in 1995 as Action for Peoples in Conflicts, before concentrating on young people.

In July, a boy called Francis being cared for by the charity was killed when thugs beat him to death in an act of mob justice.

Ms Harrison said: “Francis was a child who many people loved. He had character, a wonderful smile and a good heart.

“To lose him in such an utterly futile, violent way is hard to come to terms with.

“He did not deserve to die in this way and yet the perpetrators will not be brought to justice because he was a street child.”

Comment: The story of an unemployed professor

Vincent M. Pellegrino was a former university administrator who just went through a year of unemployment. During the time he was unable to receive unemployment insurance through a loophole in law. He also had his home and car repossessed and almost got arrested for being unable to pay for gas.

In Pellegrino's essay that we found at Minnesota Public Radio, he details some of the experience and what he learned.

The year has been a journey through unemployment, bankruptcy, car repossession and foreclosure. I found out the hard way about a peculiar law, meant to apply originally to elected officials, that applies, as well, to university administrators. I was not eligible to apply for unemployment insurance, they said.

The message came in an e-mail. It stopped me cold -- not even a call. Where was the constituent service? How could this happen?

I am a father, taxpayer, voter and veteran. Where's the safety net? How will I feed my family, get their flu shots, dental care, school supplies, haircuts, pull-ups for my daughter? How will I conduct a job search and keep the family safe through the winter?

The moments with thoughts like these seemed to last for months. It was all I could do to get job applications out the door. I felt the very next moment would be the one to paralyze me.

With mindless grit, I made my way to Health and Human Services seeking health insurance, and we were provided with food stamps. OK. Later the federal government came forward with heat assistance. Hmmm. The schools provided reduced-price breakfasts and lunches. Thank you. We applied for and received scholarships for children's activities. Wow.

These things kept us grounded through the indignity of hearing,"No, we don't deal with EBT cards here." I thought: This is no way to treat a veteran and a taxpayer. But what did I expect? I was a poor veteran and taxpayer, subject to bad policy and bad law. This is what people in poverty know well.

After three months of job searching and with no hope in sight, I asked the bank and loan company to stop automatic withdrawal of my car loan and mortgage payments because we had run out of cash.

When checking goes to $0, the automatic deductions for car payment and mortgage continue, and the overdraft fees mount. The calls and letters rain down daily.

I explained that I had tried to get the automatic deductions stopped -- but you, car loan company, blamed the bank, and you, bank, blamed the car loan company, and now after six calls to each of you I will surrender the car to repossession and the home to foreclosure.

They were nice when I took out the loans. The minute I could not pay, they turned Scrooge on me. I had lost a job -- not my values and sense of commitment.
...

Living this way has helped me understand the effects of poverty on children and the family. We value each other more than ever, but our perceptions have changed.

We do not trust financial institutions, credit card companies and state policies for health and human services. We don't value a house and a car in the same way. At the end of each 12-hour day, I am reminded that the house is only a shell, and the home is defined by grandma's linens, grandpa's hat and Uncle Marvin's chair.

There is a postscript to this story: I used my experience to do postdoctoral research with children in poverty, and take a look at how state policy is shaped around their care and preparation for school.

"Swine Flu? We face greater problems..."

The swine flu may be spreading across India's slums, but the people there are not too concerned about. They don't worry about the swine flu because most of them are already sick. Many slum dwellers don't boil their water, either because they are unable to or can't afford it, so fevers and flu and worse run rampant.

In this story from India's Jansa Machar newspaper, we read some reaction from those who live in the slums.

"What swine flu? We face greater problems of health and livelihood!" says Anisha, 35, a resident of south Delhi's Rangpuri slum.

"Every third day someone in our neighbourhood is down with high fever. Stomach ailments and diarrhoea are common and so many of us women are anaemic - a flu is the last on our list of worries," Anisha told IANS.

Her friend Majida, 28, who works as a domestic help in three households at the nearby middle class Vasant Kunj neighbourhood, says that health is the least of her worries.

"I have been running a high temperature for a week now. I keep having stomach problems. Still I go for work. I can't afford to lose even a day's income. We have bigger problems," said the mother of three.

Most slum dwellers here are "uneducated", said Anisha, a daily wager who works at construction sites.

"We don't even know what is happening to us. We go to the mobile health vans run by NGOs and local clinics for diagnosis. They prescribe medicine which often has no effect and then we find it tough to follow up -- travelling to hospitals takes up a lot of time and money."

A walk into the cluster of slums, where the small courtyards are plastered with cow dung, considered traditional sanitisers, and drains spew stench just a few metres from the open kitchens, reveal the poor state of hygiene.

Residents in the slums often use water drawn from bore wells for drinking and washing.

Income Inequality is still growing

The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development has released a new survey of income inequality in the developed world. The OCED report says that again income inequality has grown even during the global recession.

From the OCED press release is a summary of the key findings of the report. You can download this media fact sheet which also provides a good summary to the report.

Why is the gap between rich and poor growing?

In most countries the gap is growing because rich households have done significantly better than middle-class and poor households. Changes in the structure of the population and in the labour market over the past 20 years have contributed greatly to this rise in inequality.

* Wages have been improving for those people who were already well paid.
* Employment rates have been dropping among less-educated people.
* And, there are more single-adult and single-family households.

Who is most affected?
Statisticians and economists assess poverty in relation to average incomes. Typically, they take the poverty line to be equivalent to one-half of the median income in a given country.

* Since 1980, poverty among the elderly has fallen in OECD countries.
* By contrast, poverty among young adults and families with children has increased.
* On average, one child out of every eight living in an OECD country in 2005 was living in poverty.

What does this mean for future generations?
Social mobility is generally higher in countries where income inequalities are relatively low. In countries with high income inequalities, by contrast, mobility tends to be lower.

* Children living in countries where there is large gap between rich and poor are less likely to improve on the education and income attainments of their parents than children living in countries with low income inequality.
* Countries like Denmark and Australia have higher social mobility, while the United States, United Kingdom and Italy have lower mobility.

What can be done?
In some cases, government policies of taxation and redistribution of income have helped to counteract widening inequalities, but this cannot be their only response. Governments must also improve their policies in other areas.

* Education policies should aim to equip people with the skills they need in today’s labour market.
* Active employment policies are needed to help unemployed people find work.
* Access to paid employment is key to reducing the risk of poverty, but getting a job does not necessarily mean you are in the clear. Growing Unequal? found that over half of all households in poverty have at least some income from work.
* Welfare-in-work policies can help hard-pressed working families to have a decent standard of living by supplementing their incomes.

Odds and Ends: Chevron, Angola and microcredit

A story we passed over earlier this week was brought back to our attention today by a blog post at The ONE Campaign. Chevron recently signed an agreement with USAID to help boost Angola's economy. Chevron already has a large oil concern in the country. Now the donations of money to USAID will help improve other areas of Angola's economy.

First let's get the news story, from San Francisco Times business reporter Elizabeth Rauber.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton witnessed the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for the project in Angola’s capital, Luanda. According to the document, the partnership will support financial, educational, technical and training services to improve the viability of small and medium scale farmers in the southern African state.

According to Chevron spokesman Scott Walker, the MOU is an extension to the $56 million Angola Partnership Initiative, created in 2002. The original partnership was comprised of a $25 million investment by Chevron, and $31 million from USAID and other development organizations. The new MOU focuses on agricultural initiatives to increase yield and market share for small to medium scale farmers. This new agreement follows a 5-year, $5.6 million Agriculture Development and Finance Program that commenced in 2006.

Chevron didn’t say how much it will put into this program.

Now, a clarification on what the MOI will actually do for Angola from the ONE Campaign's Beth Adler.

As Secretary Clinton mentioned in her remarks, part of this investment will be directed towards smallholder farmers in an effort to boost agricultural productivity. Often oil-producers invest in support for non-oil business in order to bolster social and political stability in a country, which also helps protect their oil-related investments. The Memorandum of Understanding that was signed will provide continuity for the $56 million Angola Partnership Initiative between USAID, Chevron, and other partners that supports initiatives on education, food security, government capacity building, and small business development.

And also, the Wall Street Journal has a story today on the microcredit "bubble". Some economists cant figure out why microcredit is still running strong despite the global recession. The Wall Street Journal however is a subscription website, so we were unale to devote a single post to it.

In a reaction to the news story, Charlotte Connors knows very well why microcredit is sucsessful. We found her explanation at Accion International's blog.

Twenty-seven industry leaders and more than six hundred MFI’s, Investors, Donors, Networks and Associations have gotten behind the Campaign for Client Protection in Microfinance. First announced at the Clinton Global Initiative in September 2008, the Campaign, under the leadership of the Center for Financial Inclusion at ACCION International and the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), seeks to unite microfinance providers worldwide to develop and implement standards for the appropriate treatment of low-income clients, based on six principles, which the Campaign aims to embed within the fabric of the microfinance community. The first of these principles is avoidance of over-indebtedness (which has the subject of the WSJ article).

The Campaign aims to develop norms, knowledge and tools that will help MFIs develop and maintain a rigorous focus on client welfare. The first of such tools, available online, is a Client Protection Questionnaire that provides a detailed self-assessment of controls currently in place.

Photo focuses on poor children

A picture sent to a local newspaper caused quite a stir in Northern Canada, and has renewed the focus on helping poor children.

From the CBC, we learn more about the photo and just why it was so controversial. Our link to the story also includes this photo, if your curious.

A picture of two boys sleeping outdoors near an Iqaluit grocery store has prompted calls for more services to help vulnerable children.

The photo, submitted to a local newspaper by resident Evie Eegeesiak, shows two young boys curled up along an outside wall of the NorthMart store around 6:30 a.m. on July 26.

The boys, one wearing shorts, were trying to stay warm as they slept on the pavement surrounded by cigarette butts and litter.

"It's just now very 'in our face,' in the sense that they chose to sleep in front of NorthMart," said Iqaluit lawyer and social activist Madeleine Redfern, who applauded Eegeesiak for making the photo public.

"I think often children are not choosing to go home for whatever reason at night, and often sleep here on the beach, in the shacks, in porchways, in any sort of area that they can find a place to lie down their head for the night."

Iqaluit RCMP said Nunavut's Health and Social Services Department is now involved with the boys' case.

World Bank President visits Rwanda

World Bank President Robert Zoellick visited Rwandan President Paul Kagame Wednesday. After emerging from the meeting Zoellick told the press that he would like to do more for the country.

In this Reuters article, reporter Lesley Wroughton details some of Rwanda's current needs.

Zoellick said the World Bank wanted to bolster the areas of infrastructure, farming and private sector development.

After several years of strong growth, Rwanda has been hit hard by the collapse in global trade and commodity prices.

Lower levels of foreign direct investment are seen slashing growth to around 5 percent this year from 11 percent in 2008.

Over the past three years, World Bank assistance to Rwanda totaled about $400 million.

"I'd like to do more," Zoellick said at the end of his visit to the capital Kigali.

He said Rwanda could benefit from international investment in agriculture and revenues generated by new global climate change initiatives for nations that protect their forests.

"This is a country where you feel for every dollar you spend, or every hour you put in, you get a tremendous return," he added.

Comment: Challenges for social enterprise

Professor Scott Allard has a new book out that examines the changes in the "safety net" over the last 40 years. In "Out Of Reach", Allard surveyed over 1,500 non-profits that work to provide benefits to the poor. With the survey results Allard argues that assistance programs have become unreliable over the years.

In an accompanying essay, Scott Allard looks at social enterprise and the challenges it faces on improving the state of the poor. We found this commentary at TPM Cafe.

As Arthur Brooks notes, social enterprise and social entrepreneurship are becoming increasingly central to community-based antipoverty strategies. One's first reaction may be to dismiss these approaches, particularly if the preference is for government to bear the responsibility for alleviating poverty. Our safety net, however, is highly dependent upon private nonprofit organizations for the delivery of assistance to the poor. Much of the funding may come from federal, state, and local government sources, but much of the help is provided by nonprofits. This is a relatively new development in the history of our safety net. Today, entrepreneurs working through private nonprofits and foundations are developing some of the most innovative and successful strategies for alleviating poverty.

It is my opinion that social enterprise cannot replace the public safety net, but I think it can become a more important and sophisticated complement to existing government safety net programs.

To say that we need to cultivate enterprise and entrepreneurship among the poor could be taken to suggest that the poor do not work. Yet, as we know, most poor persons work, many more than one job, which they bundle with income from informal work and social networks to get by. Simply navigating the uncertainties of the low-wage labor market and safety net, demands that poor families are entrepreneurial.

So where does social enterprise fit into the safety net? We could think of social enterprise as helping poor persons start and cultivate their own business. Over time such efforts could create jobs and reduce the significant problem of asset poverty among low-income populations.

Increasingly we see nonprofit organizations using social enterprise strategies to create job opportunities for disadvantaged populations, strengthen communities, and generate new revenue streams that support other programs of assistance. It seems to me that these nonprofit-driven approaches to social enterprise hold much promise - not only do they provide meaningful help to people in need, but they provide employment opportunities and are able to attract private philanthropy.

Comparison of U.S. Government Health Care proposals

This is sort of off topic, but we found a good resource on the U.S. Health Care debate. The Associated Press has an article that compares all of the proposed plans that are being debated in Washington.

The most detailed is the House Democrats plan as it just passed through all of the committee's. The Senate plan still has at to iron out details on how to pay for the plan to be discussed in a particular committee. The article also has the bi-partisan proposal, and President Obama's original proposal. The House Republican's plan was simply an outline.

We found the Associated Press comparison at the Des Moines Register, click here to view the full article.

A George Soros donation helps with poor children back to school needs

Billionaire George Soros made a 35 million dollar donation in a New York State back to school program. New York State families that use food stamps found another 200 dollars in their accounts today thanks to the donation.

From Time Magazine, reporter Gilbert Cruz explains how the donation used a part of the US economic stimulus plan.

Soros was aiming his donation at a part of President Barack Obama's stimulus package that hasn't garnered much attention until now: a four-to-one federal matching program designed to help states assist poor families. This $5 billion pot of cash was set aside as an emergency fund to supplement the 12-year-old Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, i.e., the one that Bill Clinton boasted in 1996 would end "welfare as we know it."

TANF typically provides cash-assistance to families with no jobs. But as the recession has worsened, several states have seen a rise in the number of people needing welfare and food stamps. The stimulus fund allows states to do several things with their share of the $5 billion pool as long as they — or private groups such as Soros' — pony up 20% of the overall cost. The Feds cover the remainder. States can (a) provide more cash payments to families, (b) subsidize additional jobs, or (c) set up one-time, non-repeating benefit programs. New York's Back to School initiative, which used Soros' private donation as its initial seed money, utilized the third option, appealing to the Department of Health and Human Services, which runs TANF and its emergency fund, for the additional $140 million.

Some municipalities are using the money to create jobs. In Perry County, Tennessee, for example, 300 private- and public-sector positions are being subsidized through the use of several million dollars' worth of the state's emergency fund allotment. Some of these are just temporary, a short-term pick-me-up for the laid-off. Elsewhere, officials are eyeing the emergency fund for longer-term aid. Los Angeles, for example, has plans to kick off a year-long employment program that will give subsidized jobs to up to 10,000 people.

Analysis of Africa's priority in the Obama administration

Some analysis now of Hillary Clinton's trip to Africa. The U.S. Secretary of State just finished her visit of a couple of nations on the continent.

Many thought that Africa would become a priority for the Obama administration with new priorities and new aid. But the visit proved that it would be more of the same from this administration.

From this Associated Press analysis peace, reporter Sue Pleming surveys some of the reaction to the visit.

For the most part, experts said the 11-day, seven-nation trip was a goodwill and listening tour, following up after U.S. President Barack Obama's one-stop Africa trip to Ghana in July.

"I expected more than just the hugging of the status quo," said Africa expert Bronwyn Bruton of the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

"I have the impression that she reached out and let it be known that Africa is on the radar, but Clinton is also trying to make the most of the existing framework," she added.

The trip was her longest as secretary of state and aimed at proving Africa was a priority for the first African-American U.S. president, whose father was from Kenya.

But no major initiatives or "goodies" were announced, except for $17 million in new aid for sexual violence victims in Democratic Republic of Congo and funding for AIDS programmes.

"There were enormous expectations after Obama was elected and after the inauguration. People thought that the flood gate of aid will be opened but now they are aware of the limitations," said Tom Wheeler of the South African Institute of International Affairs.

Africa policies are still being formulated in two key places -- Sudan and Somalia -- and domestic politics from health care to the economic crisis are priorities.

Yunus received Presidential Medal of Freedom

Muhammad Yunus received the Medal of Freedom today from U.S President Obama. Yunus was recognized for founding microcredit, the practice of giving small loans to poor people without collateral.

From The Grameen Foundations blog, Grameen CEO Alex Counts wrote his reflections on the ceremony.

Today’s ceremony where President Barack Obama presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Professor Muhammad Yunus and other incredibly accomplished citizens was a moment when any American, and any person, who wants the world to be a better place to feel proud. When President and Michelle Obama entered the room there was electricity unlike anything I had ever seen. Clearly, the President was enjoying the opportunity to honor people he deeply admired. The medals were presented roughly in alphabetical order, so Professor Yunus was nearly the last to be mentioned in the President’s speech and the last to be called up to receive his medal. The two exchanged a few words before the President fastened the medal around Professor Yunus’ neck.
...

When Dr. Yunus’ invitees got their picture taken with the President and First Lady, I introduced myself and mentioned that I was President of Grameen Foundation. Michelle Obama said, “That’s great!” Dr. Yunus, standing nearby, said, “So, you should be talking to each other” – meaning Mrs. Obama and me. I can only hope that is what the future holds. For now, I am basking in a day where I can feel proud of my country and my association with Grameen, and appreciate my good fortune to be able to work under Dr. Yunus’ halo for a poverty-free world.

Zimbabwe's food security improving

A good harvest in Zimbabwe this year means less people will need food assistance. A new report says that food security is improving in Zimbabwe, thanks to the harvest, getting rid of the countries currency, and improved supply and demand.

From this IRIN article that we found at Reuters Alert Net, we learn more details from the food security report issued by the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) Food Security Outlook.

Food security has greatly improved since the 2008/09 season, when nearly 7 million people were receiving food assistance, compared with projections for the 2009/10 period, when an estimated 2 million to 2.4 million people will require assistance.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization and UN World Food Programme Crop and Food Assessment Mission forecast the 2009 cereal harvest at 1.3 million tons, compared to 690,000 tons in 2008.

A better harvest, lifting import duties on basic commodities, and the dollarization of the economy have ameliorated food scarcity, the FEWS NET report said. The Zimbabwe dollar, which was fuelling hyperinflation, was discontinued earlier his year.

The use of multiple currencies - South African rand, Botswana pula and US dollar - coupled with the introduction of an across-the-board US$100 monthly wage for government employees in February 2009, has seen market-driven forces providing the impetus to fill shop shelves. Donor organizations are also paying medical staff a US$100 monthly stipend.

According to the Consumer Council of Zimbabwe, in June 2009 the US$100 monthly salary was only sufficient for 20 percent of a family's monthly food requirements; even if other essentials, such as health, education, clothing and housing were discounted, it would only cover about 70 percent of household food expenses.

Zimbabwe's economy has been in recession for a decade and around 94 percent of the population are unemployed; many rely on remittances from family members working in neighbouring states or further afield in Britain and the US.

"Between January and June 2009, some basic food items fell by between 30 [percent] and 60 percent, but prices still remain between three and six times higher than the five-year average for June [2009]. Between April and June 2009, maize grain price dropped by 31 percent and maize flour went down by 15 percent," the report said.

Clinton presses Nigeria on corruption

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is visiting Nigeria, and is asking the nation's government to reduce corruption. The U.S. would like to buy more oil from Nigeria to reduce the amount it depends on from the Middle East. However, armed conflict between rebels and the government has disrupted oil production there. Many people are upset that the government pockets all the money from oil, instead of using the money to improve services in the country.

From this Associated Press article that we found at The Sun News, reporter Matthew Lee recorded Clinton's statement.

"It is critical for the people of Nigeria, first and foremost, but indeed for the United States that Nigeria succeeds in fulfilling its promise," Clinton told a news conference after meeting Nigerian Foreign Minister Ojo Maduekwe.

"We strongly support and encourage the government of Nigeria's efforts to increase transparency, reduce corruption (and) provide support for democratic processes in preparation for the 2011 elections," she said.

U.S. officials regard Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation, as a bellwether for the continent's success and have expressed deep concern about the coup-prone country's political situation, especially after 2007 elections that were marred by fraud.

Maduekwe said there was a "national consensus on issues of enhanced democracy, a deep commitment to rule of law and electoral reforms" and pledged that President Umaru Yar'Adua's government would deliver on reform.

Nigeria is the fifth largest supplier of oil to the United States and U.S. officials are also troubled by unrest and kidnappings in the Niger Delta, where indigenous groups have complained vehemently about exploitation of oil reserves by foreign petroleum companies.

Violence in the region has led to cuts in production that in June led to Angola surpassing Nigeria in monthly oil production.

To deal with the situation, Yar'Adua has offered militants in the Niger Delta amnesty if they turn in their arms, register and take part in reintegration programs.

Maduekwe said the offer, which took effect earlier this month, was the result of a realization that a new method had to be used to deal with the unrest, which the government had previously tried to quell with military force.

Congo closer to debt relief

The World Bank says they are close to granting debt relief to the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Bank hopes to grant the relief next spring, but is waiting on negotiations between Congo and China to complete.

The World Bank wants Congo to change a minerals for infrastructure deal with China before giving the debt relief. However, changing the deal could cancel 3 billion dollars of infrastructure improvements to Congo.

From this Reuters article, writer Lesley Wroughton explains this give and take that Congo has to do.

The relief would cover some $7 billion of non-commercial loans from the IMF, World Bank and bilateral debt held bilaterally with governments. The savings to Congo would amount to $400 million a year in payments.

Zoellick said there had been progress in talks between Congo and China on amending a $9 billion infrastructure-for-minerals deal, components of which have held up the debt relief accord.

The International Monetary Fund fears the contract, which uses Congo's mineral reserves as a guarantee for infrastructure projects, could plunge the central African nation deeper into debt and has delayed forgiveness of most of the $10 billion Congo already owes.

A mission from the IMF is currently in Congo.

Agreed early last year, the contract with China is a cornerstone of Kabila's post-conflict reconstruction policy following decades of dictatorship and a 1998-2003 war that left the former Belgian colony's infrastructure in ruins.

The deal is comprised of two phases of infrastructure projects with a total price tag of $6 billion aimed at rehabilitating thousands of kilometres of road and rail connections and constructing schools and hospitals.

An additional $3 billion is slotted toward developing new Chinese copper and cobalt mines in Congo's mineral-rich Katanga province, where reserves will serve to pay back the costs of those projects.

A fourth of India in drought

A fourth of India could experience drought this year. The monsoon season in the country has failed to produce enough rainfall for crops. Officials are concerned about how this could effect growth in the county and that it could only deepen the impact of the global recession with an increase in food prices.

From the Hindustan Times, writers Gaurav Choudhury & Zia Haq tell us about India's weather.

After the driest June in 83 years, this year’s monsoon — which brings rain to the Indian subcontinent between June and September — has so far fallen short by more than quarter of the usual amount.

The meteorology department on Monday cut its forecast for the third time, saying monsoon would bring only 87 per cent of the usual rains this year. The monsoon is crucial for sowing of summer crops like paddy as nearly 60 per cent of the country’s farmland has no access to irrigation.

"A terrible situation has arisen due to the failure of monsoon in the country. The prices of common man’s food like dal are going up. The work should be done in the spirit of patriotic duty,” a Supreme Court bench headed by Justice Markandeya Katju said while hearing a public interest petition on water crisis.

In Mumbai, prices of pulses such as arhar and tur have increased 77 per cent from a year ago and 11 per cent from a month ago respectively.

Sugar now costs 35 per cent more from a year ago, while potato prices are up 89 per cent from August last year. There are signs of milk and egg prices firming up as fodder prices come under pressure.

Mukherjee said the administration was equipped to handle the problem. “There is no point in pressing the panic button,” he said. “This country managed the century’s worst drought in 1987. We transported drinking water through railways. We organised fodder for the cattle.” In 1987, the country received 29 per cent less than normal rainfall in July, affecting sowing across 6,500 villages and resulting in 7 per cent contraction in kharif crop.

The finance minister said GDP growth this year would still be more than 6 per cent -- a figure that might shine in comparison to economies elsewhere in the world, but not enough to pull millions of impoverished Indians out of poverty.

Africa needs many more health workers

Africa will need many more health workers in the continent if there is any hope of meeting the Millennium Development Goal of improving health by 2015. A study from the journal Health Affairs says the continent needs 800,000 more health care workers.

From the New York Times, writer Sarah Arnquis gives us more details on the report. This link goes to a handy map of the world that shows the concentration of health workers in each nation.

Africa has about 30 percent of the 1.16 million doctors, nurses and midwives it needs, according to a study published Aug. 6 in the journal Health Affairs. Researchers estimate it would cost $2.6 billion to pay the additional workers, if they were available.

The estimates are based on the World Health Organization’s recommendation that each African country should have at least 2.28 doctors, nurses and midwives per 1,000 people to care for the population and reach the Millennium Development Goals.

The authors recommend that policymakers improve productivity by using more community health workers, providing incentives to motivate and retain workers and increasing training capacity.

Another Health Affairs study says that in a recent survey the majority of Ugandan health workers reported low morale and dissatisfaction with their working conditions and wages.

The oil curse of Angola and Nigeria

As US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visits Angola and Nigeria, it's worth another look at how oil does little to improve the lives of people there. Politicians take all of the money from oil revenues for themselves. The money and the oil make the keep the politicians from having to court voters to keep their jobs, as the two countries are democracies only in name.

Clinton is visiting the area in an effort to improve relations with the two countries. The US hopes to purchase more oil from Africa instead of relying on the Middle East.

From this Associated Press article that is hosted at Google News, Katharine Houreld does another piece on the curse of oil.

Nigeria has a history of coups and the last elections here were marred by voting irregularities and police firing tear gas at lines of voters. In Angola's last parliamentary election, money, alcohol and even cars were dished out and many polling stations didn't open for lack of materials, international observers found. Angola was in civil war from the 1970s to 2002. It has not held presidential elections since the war ended.

Just last week, Global Witness, a London-based watchdog group, reported that several shareholders of a private firm authorized by Angola's state oil company to bid for lucrative contracts have the same names as top current and former Angolan officials, including the state oil company chairman. The officials have not responded to repeated requests from Global Witness and reporters for a response.

"Despite the widespread perception that government corruption at all levels was endemic, there were no public investigations or prosecutions of government officials during the year," said a report this year by the U.S. State Department.

More than two-thirds of 12 million Angolans and more than four-fifths of 150 million Nigerians live on less than $2 a day. Many feel neglected by their leaders.

"They don't care about the small man. Not at all," said Sam Olufemi, selling phone cards amid one of Lagos' perennial traffic jams. "It's pay-as-you-go politics."

Angola has suffered unrest in Cabinda, the main oil-producing region. Human rights groups have accused the military of atrocities and claim government officials have embezzled millions of dollars in oil revenue. The government has denied the charges.

Thousands have been killed over the years in Nigeria's oil-rich Delta, where the military battles criminal gangs by firing into slums from helicopter gunships and militant groups bomb pipelines and kidnap foreigners.

Opium addiction in Afghanistan at epidemic proportions

An Associated Press article paints the picture of rural Afghanistan that has an opium addiction problem of epidemic proportions. Entire families become addicted to the opium, and they begin to sell all they have in order to get more. People who are not addicted have to quarantine themselves to stay away from the addicted, fearing they will being opium into their homes. Many areas in rural Afghanistan do not have access to medicine, some shops don't even carry aspirin, so when a someone gets hurt they are given opium to treat the pain.

From the AP article that we found at the Taiwan News, writer Rukmini Callimachi profiles a family of addicts.

Open the door to Islam Beg's house and the thick opium smoke rushes out into the cold mountain air, like steam from a bathhouse. It's just past 8:00 a.m. and the family of six - including a 1-year-old baby boy - is already curled up at the lip of the opium pipe.

Beg, 65, breathes in and exhales a cloud of smoke. He passes the pipe to his wife. She passes it to their daughter. The daughter blows the opium smoke into the baby's tiny mouth. The baby's eyes roll back into his head.

Their faces are gaunt. Their hair is matted. They smell.

In dozens of mountain hamlets in this remote corner of Afghanistan, opium addiction has become so entrenched that whole families - from toddlers to old men - are addicts. The addiction moves from house to house, infecting entire communities cut off from the rest of the world by glacial streams. From just one family years ago, at least half the people of Sarab, population 1,850, are now addicts.

Afghanistan supplies nearly all the world's opium, the raw ingredient used to make heroin, and while most of the deadly crop is exported, enough is left behind to create a vicious cycle of addiction. There are at least 200,000 opium and heroin addicts in Afghanistan - 50,000 more than in the much bigger, wealthier U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and a 2005 survey by the U.N. A new survey is expected to show even higher rates of addiction, a window into the human toll of Afghanistan's back-to-back wars and desperate poverty.

Unlike in the West, the close-knit nature of communities here makes addiction a family affair. Instead of passing from one rebellious teenager to another, the habit passes from mother to daughter, father to son. It's turning villages like this one into a landscape of human depredation.

Except for a few soiled mats, Beg's house is bare. He has pawned all his family's belongings to pay for drugs.

"I am ashamed of what I have become," says Beg, an unwashed turban curled on his head. "I've lost my self-respect. I've lost my values. I take the food from this child to pay for my opium," he says, pointing to his 5-year-old grandson, Mamadin. "He just stays hungry."

The switch to a free market in Iraq a difficult one

The shift to a free market in Iraq has been a difficult one. Government jobs are plentiful and easy, it's factories have many more workers than needed. Workers in government run factories payed full time wages for only having to work 2 hours a day. Yet the fear is that removing the jobs will turn the workers into terrorists, as they will join the insurgency for food and money.

From this Reuters article that we found at the Qatar's Peninsula On-Line, we read more about the quandary.

Iraq has stuffed factories and other state bodies with legions of extra workers to lure the poverty stricken away from a well-funded insurgency, which has only waned in the last 18 months after more than six years since the US-led invasion.

At a state-owned electrical factory in Baghdad, a maximum of 2,500 workers are actually required, yet only a handful of the 4,370 employees on the payroll were visible in the forest of ancient looking machines in the cavernous factory halls.

Iraq hopes to entice foreign capital to such plants to rehabilitate them and turn them into profit-making ventures, but that could mean the sacking of thousands of extra staff.

“The security situation will go to pieces. The terrorists would employ them. They’d go to someone who would pay them to lay a roadside bomb,” said technical services chief Haady Ali.

The US military believes most Iraqis working with the insurgency do so only to earn a living, not through ideology.

Years of war and sanctions have worn down Iraqi industries, and before that decades of Soviet-style socialist economic policies under Saddam Hussein supported loss-making enterprises. Generations of Iraqis are accustomed to a government run economy in which the state provides for all, and a deep-rooted aversion to Western-style capitalism is part of the culture.

Yet a sharp fall in oil prices from last year forced Iraq to slash its 2009 budget three times, making it unlikely to be able to support a huge public sector indefinitely.

“Privatisation won’t work. There won’t be job safety - the country must protect its people,” said Faiq Marhoum, a worker at the factory for 37 years.

Lead poisoning in rural Northern China

300 children in Northern China have suffered lead poisoning. The cause of the poisoning is said to be from inhaling the fumes of a factory close by.

Many areas in rural China have high polluting factories in an effort to bring development and jobs to the region. In some cases, China has put regulations on polluting and other safety measures aside in order to speed development in the country.

From the The Daily Star, this AFP story tells us what is being released from China's state media on the subject.

The children, all living alongside the Changqing industrial park in Fengxiang county, Shaanxi province, were found to have as much as twice the safe level of lead in their blood, the China Daily said.

They sleep more than before, cannot concentrate and react very slowly, the report said, citing local residents.

Normal lead content in the blood is below 100 milligrams per litre, and above 200 milligrams is considered hazardous, but the lead in some of the youngsters' blood was more than 250 milligrams per litre, it said.

Local residents believe that the Shaanxi Dongling Lead and Zinc Smelting Factory, only about 500 metres (yards) from their homes, was to blame for the poisoning, the paper said.

The factory had been required to help relocate nearby residents, but so far only 100 out of nearly 600 households had been able to move, as most villagers lacked the money for new homes, the paper said.

Drought in West Java region of Indonesia

A province on Indonesia is suffering a severe drought, and the worst of it is expected to be in the months to come. The West Java province of Indonesia has suffered severe drought in the past three months. The drought has caused water shortages and could mean failure of the regions crops.

From the Jakarta Post, writers Agus Maryono and Nana Rukmana tell us more about the effects to the area's crops.

The peak of the drought is expected to take place from August to October, when demands for clean water from residents rise drastically.

Hundreds of hectares of farmland in Cilacap regency are facing the risk of harvest failure due to the extended drought.

More than 1,000 ha of rice fields in a number of districts, such as Cimanggu and Majenang in West Cilacap are currently facing crop failure due to water shortage as a number of rivers have dried up.

In Purbalingga regency, 11.64 percent of the total rice harvest is threatened with harvest failure.

Purbalingga Agriculture and Plantation agency head Lily Purwati told the media that the harvest failure would be caused by pest attacks as well as drought. ...

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people in Kuningan and Cirebon regencies in West Java are face a lack of clean water following the decreasing number of springs in the Mount Ciremai mountain area.

Deforestation, growing at an alarming rate, has contributed to the loss of springs. The extended drought and impact of El Nino, could further aggravate the situation.

An uncertain view of Indian development

Writer Akash Kapur grew up in rural India, and has seen many changes in his area with the growth of development in the country. But when he is asked about what he thinks of the growth, he's uncertain if it's good or bad. Along the development, resentment and violence has also been introduced into Kapur's homeland.

From Kapur's latest column for the New York Times, he describes some of what he has seen.

But development has also disrupted existing ways of living. It has strained the social and cultural fabric of the villages. Kuilapalayam, a village at the head of the road leading to the beach, has had at least seven murders in recent years. Gangs of young men roam the village, extorting money, exacting revenge. Once, the panchayat, a traditional assembly made up of village elders, would have controlled the violence. But the new generation has modern ideas; they don’t heed their elders, and the panchayat members are powerless, too scared to step in.

Development has led to new resentments and torn apart families. Farmers who used to toil over barren patches of land suddenly find that that land is worth a small fortune. They’ve built new houses, sent their kids to school, bought motorcycles and maybe even cars. A couple of universities up the road have widened people’s horizons.

But neighbors who didn’t own land, who watched their friends get rich, often don’t feel quite as sanguine about the changes. And long-forgotten relatives have appeared, perhaps returning from the cities to make a claim on the land. The papers are full of often violent stories about disputes over property.

A real estate contractor I know grew up in one of the villages around here. He started when he was 16, a dropout from school, as a helper on construction sites. He now has 75 people working for him. He has built mansions for the newly rich, and even a couple of beach resorts.

He told me recently about his hopes for his children. His eldest son wants to be a doctor; his middle boy plans to be an aeronautics engineer; and his daughter wants to be a teacher. He’s excited for their futures, happy to know they won’t have to leave the country to build better lives.

But he told me, too, about his fears. He worries about the violence in the villages; he won’t let his son go to school alone. He’s concerned, also, because his son refuses to go to the temple. He knows that his children will probably move to the cities. That makes him sad. He feels they’ll lose their sense of community.

World Vision receives an US grant for Mozambique work

The U.S. government has awarded 49 million dollars to World Vision for an aid project in Mozambique. The grant money will be used to improve health access, water and sanitation in Mozambique's Zambézia Province. World Vision is also using 12 million dollars of their own money for the project's budget.

From this World Vision press release, we read more about the details of the wide ranging project that will even include cell phones and bicycles.

Named “Ogumaniha,” which means “united for a common purpose” in the local Chuabo language, the program will be funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to address the health, water, sanitation and agricultural needs of the province’s children, women, and families in an integrated way. Training, technology, mobile phones and even bicycles will be part of the program.

“This is an exciting opportunity to substantially improve the lives of children, women and families in Zambézia province,” said Francois Batalingaya, MPH, the World Vision humanitarian affairs specialist who led the program’s design. “Health, including responding to the growing HIV and AIDS problem, will be the main focus while all the interventions are aimed to work together to strengthen the communities we reach.”

The people of Zambézia now have very limited access to healthcare, with only 179 health centers and fewer than 40 trained Mozambican doctors available for the nearly 3.8 million residents of the province, roughly the size of Washington state. A lack of infrastructure means many must walk more than 20 kilometers (12 miles) to obtain care at health posts that aren’t always equipped for maternity or emergency needs. The lack of health services and sanitation, along with food insecurity, contribute to the spread of diseases throughout the region. The HIV rate among adults jumped to 19 percent, from 13 percent, between 2000 and 2007.

World Vision and partners will train community health workers and equip them with mobile phones and bicycles to make rounds in remote areas so women with high-risk pregnancies, new mothers and newborns can have access to care and consultation. Insecticide-treated bed nets will be distributed to households to guard against malaria. Bicycle ambulances, mobile outreach teams and waiting huts for pregnant women will also be provided.

The program will improve sanitation through “Tippy-Taps” for handwashing in schools and building latrines, and boost agricultural development by creating “Junior Farmer” irrigation groups for orphans and vulnerable children. It will also promote and finance demand-driven investments for agricultural production and livelihoods, and build the capacity of community groups and government departments at provincial and district levels for decisions that impact living conditions for the rural population.

Anti-Poverty Meet-up

Of note: a meeting of 160 anti-poverty groups will be taking place near Charleston next week. The meeting was reported in The Charleston Gazette from AP.

Nearly 160 community and religious leaders from across the country are coming to West Virginia to talk about ways to fight poverty.

Leaders from more than 20 organizations, including Domestic Workers United in New York, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida and Jesus People Against Pollution in Mississippi, are expected to attend.

The weeklong event is a project of the Poverty Initiative at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

It begins Sunday at Camp Virgil Tate outside Charleston and runs through Aug. 15.

Rural Russia Neglected

Decline and alcoholism exist in the Russian country-side. The death-rate in many rural villages is high and is a cause of population decline. What is happening in rural Russia is summarized by Tom Lasseter of McClatchy.

The government administrator was bursting with optimism: More children are being born, many rubles will be invested in infrastructure and his region is weathering the global economic storm.

"The situation is so good," said Boris Zaitsev, a broad-shouldered man who spoke in a confident monotone.

Outside his office, some 170 miles northwest of Moscow, the front steps to the Soviet-era government building are falling into a pile of rubble. Deep, spine-rattling potholes that rival sections of Baghdad riddle the town's streets. The region's population has plummeted by more than a quarter.

Officials here like to point visitors to Kuvshinovo's new Russian Orthodox church, an elegant wooden structure. Work inside the church hasn't been finished, because the money ran out. Looters searching for icons and cash previously torched the office of another local church. Twice. A priest in a nearby village, who'd led an anti-alcoholism campaign, was burned to death with his family.

The area around this rural enclave is in steep decline; once-thriving fields are empty and the population is in free-fall. Along with many other towns and villages in vast rural Russia, it's a microcosm for a country that, according to recent studies, is withering away.

In Kuvshinovo and outlying hamlets, the population has dropped to 16,000 people from 22,000 in less than 20 years. Russia as a whole lost 12.3 million people from 1992 to 2008. An influx of immigrants, mainly from former Soviet territories, helped hide the extent of the problem. The population is now 142 million, but it would have been 136.3 million without that surge from outside.

The statistics help explain why Vice President Joe Biden struck such a sensitive nerve among Russia's ruling elite when he said recently that the country has "a shrinking population base; they have a withering economy," and added, "It's a very difficult thing to deal with, loss of empire."

Despite the Kremlin's posturing on the world stage and its hard line in what Russians call the "near abroad" — invading Georgia, shutting off natural gas to Ukraine, claiming a privileged sphere in other post-Soviet territories — the decay in the heartland suggests that Russia isn't a resurgent superpower so much as a nation that's trying not to come apart at the seams.

The mansions and gardens of old imperial Russia have faded or crumbled, as have many of the collective farms that fed communist Russia. Today, the hamlets dot a forsaken land of rampant poverty where men drink from morning to night. The interconnected crises of low fertility, high death rates and ragged infrastructure have left much of the nation barren.

Looking over the hayfields that lead to the onion dome and the glistening gold cross of a steeple a few miles outside Kuvshinovo, a Russian Orthodox priest mulled the question: What's happening to Russia?

"There are villages with only two people left, and others where nobody lives," Alexander Peshekhonov said, choosing his words carefully. Peshekhonov, his gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, added the obligatory caveat that, "Our country is great."

He then flicked a finger at his throat, a gesture meaning, "They drink."

When spring comes around, he said, the bodies of locals who fell drunkenly into the snowdrifts of winter are found in the pastures and roads. One man responsible for burning the church office in Kuvshinovo was caught in a market, selling icons and religious cassette tapes he'd swiped to raise money for vodka.

"If you read the newspapers and listen to our leaders' propaganda, you get the feeling that everything is OK," Peshekhonov said. "But I don't believe that."

A major study that the United Nations released in April, authored by leading Russian experts, projected that Russia would lose at least 11 million more people by 2025. Another U.N.-sponsored report said last year that the population could fall to as low as 100 million in 2050.

That report cited a recent improvement in fertility but cautioned that, "while these favorable trends may last another five or six years, all recent forecasts . . . predict that Russia's population decline will only intensify."

"There's a risk that in the most negative situation, Russia will stop existing as a state," said Olga Isupova, a senior demographic researcher at the Higher School of Economics, a leading private Russian university in Moscow.

Down a dusty road and then a dirt path from Kuvshinovo, Dr. Anna Voronova holds medical clinics in the village of Pryamukhino. Sitting behind her desk in a dimly lit room with warped floors and chipped paint, Voronova said she saw a lot of people with drinking problems. She didn't mean just vodka and beer.

"They buy household cleaners, or solvents used to clean a machine, and drink it because it's cheap," she said. "It's not one or two people; it's many people."

There were 720 people living around Pryamukhino in 1990. Today, there are about 500, a decline caused in part by an exodus to Russia's cities, but mostly by the fact that deaths outnumber births.

The talk of alcoholism isn't confined to handwringing clergymen and small-town doctors. A study published this June examined three Russian industrial cities with typical mortality trends and found that during the 1990s, more than half of the deaths of those aged 15 to 54 were alcohol-related.

The findings, authored by a blue-ribbon panel of experts including representatives of the Russian cancer research center and the University of Oxford, suggest that Russia is drinking itself to death.

Helen Clark Gives Overview of MDG

Former Prime Minister of New Zealand tells the AFP how her job is progressing. Helen Clark works for the UN Development Program.

As head of the U.N.DevelopmentProgram, Helen Clark is arguably the most powerful woman in the entire UN system.

The former New Zealand prime minister took over the reins at the world body's global development network last April, the first woman to do so.

Today, the affable and self-assured New Zealander oversees an annual UNDP budget of $6 billion and a global army of thousands of highly motivated people tasked with spearheading the U.N. drive to achieve eight poverty-reduction MillenniumDevelopmentGoals by 2015.

"I was looking for a new challenge commensurate with what I had been doing," she said in an interview Tuesday in her spacious New York office with a breathtaking view over the East river.

"When I heard that this job was being advertised, I sounded out various people and they said: 'Have a go, you would be terrific,'" Clark, 59, added.

"I was the only person who came forward with my sort of skills," she said.

"As prime minister, I got very involved in the Pacific, the primary focus of New Zealand's development program. I have been involved with leaders of developing countries probably to a greater extent than most (other) western leaders."

Clark explained that her organization's strategy is focused on crisis prevention and recovery; good governance; poverty reduction and last but not least climate change adaptation.

"Forty percent of all investment in development is vulnerable to climate change," she noted.

And the key to rolling back poverty is "capacity building, institution building," she said, citing the old adage: "You don't give a man a fish, you give a man a rod."

Clark doesn't subscribe to the notion that UNDP and the donor community in general have failed "the bottom billion," the world's poorest people.

"I look at development from an Asia-Pacific perspective and what I see in east Asia is that hundreds of millions of people have been brought out of poverty through a focus on growth and trade.

"The trick for me is to take that focus and combine it with the human development side of the equation. The rising tide has to lift everyone, particularly those at the bottom of the ladder."

Clark said that despite the financial crisis, development aid commitments from countries such as the U.K., Spain and Australia remain strong.

And she welcomes the fact that U.S. President Barack Obama's administration has pledged to double official development assistance by 2015.

"When I was in Ethiopia in June I was told that Indian investment had gone from a very few hundreds million dollars four, five years ago to 4.5 billion dollars today. Investment is part of what's going to drive growth and development," she said.

She conceded that many countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, are off track to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by the 2015 deadline.

The goals include eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, combating diseases such as HIV/AIDS, ensuring environmental sustainability and creating global partnerships for development.

"I'd like to see everybody achieve something," the ex-prime minister said.

She also underscored the importance of promoting women's empowerment in all areas of life, including agriculture.

"Seventy percent of Africa's farmers are women...if we can lift the status of women economically through education there's going to be consequences that are positive right through the chain."

Britain Wants Free Health Care in Poorest Countries

Britain announced plans to try to change the way many under-developed countries provide care. Heather Stewart tells us that aid will be used to influence governments to give free healthcare to pregnant women and children. The Guardian reports 6 billion pounds will be spent on health by 2015.

Gordon Brown has offered to help some of the world's poorest countries to make healthcare free – starting with pregnant women and children – in a push to widen access to doctors across Africa and Asia.

The Department for International Development (DfID) is among the largest donors to many developing countries, and has pledged to spend £6bn on health by 2015. Brown hopes to use an expanding aid budget to influence the way public services are delivered on the ground.

The prime minister has written to several governments, including those of Kenya, Nepal and Liberia, urging them to consider making healthcare free, and offering Britain's help with the transition. DfID said that could mean help with technical assistance, drugs and ensuring that doctors and nurses receive fair pay deals.

International development secretary Douglas Alexander said: "It is not right that people are denied basic healthcare because they are too poor. Poor health and poverty go hand-in-hand and so we must first improve people's health if we are to improve their lives."

A spokesman for DfID said the UK had been encouraged by the results of efforts to abolish up-front fees for healthcare in several countries, including Uganda, Ghana and Zambia. They argue that for a relatively low cost, doctors can reach many thousands more patients, who could not afford to pay for help.

Since Ghana began providing free healthcare for expectant mothers, with Britain's help, 433,000 more women have been treated; in Burundi, the number of health checks offered to the under-fives has trebled since fees were scrapped.

"This won't happen overnight but we hope in the years ahead we will see a historic shift that will revolutionise health services in the world's poorest countries," said Alexander.

World leaders promised to reduce maternal mortality by two-thirds by 2015, as one of the Millennium Development Goals, but a recent UN report said it was one of the targets against which least progress had been made. More than half a million women a year die in childbirth or as a result of falling pregnant. Brown and Alexander believe access to healthcare must be widened, if the goal is to be reached.

One Billion Hungry

The credit crunch has resulted in an increase in the number of people who are going hungry every day. Plus, NGOs are receiving less money to give aid. The Christian Post reports the number of people effected has hit an historic high of over a billion. (Reported by Ethan Cole.)

The number of people going hungry every day has hit a historic high of 1 billion, or more precisely 1.02 billion, according to the U.N. World Food Program.

Millions of people who were on the brink of hunger have now been thrown into this category by the global economic crisis that resulted in lower incomes and job losses.

According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, about an additional 100 million people are in chronic hunger and poverty this year compared to last year.

And while the number of people with urgent food needs has increased, aid agencies are reporting lower donations and budget cuts.

WFP executive director Josette Sheeran said Wednesday the agency is facing “dangerous and unprecedented” funding shortfalls this year.

“Our budget for this year of assessed and approved needs is $6.7 billion and we expect from our projections and working with government to come in at $3.7 billion,” Sheeran said at a press briefing ahead of meetings at the White House.

Sheeran said the agency is working to cut $3 billion from its program by reducing rations and programs throughout the world.

Its goal is to feed 108 million people in 74 countries this year.

In addition to budget cuts, aid groups are also struggling with the impact of high food prices.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization reports food prices are higher today than a year ago in more than 80 percent of developing countries.

Sheeran suggested that the food crisis is “not as dramatic at home” as in developed countries, resulting in less of a sense of urgency to help the world’s hungry.

But "one out of every six [people] today is on the official list of the urgently-hungry," she said, according to RTTNews.com. "One-third of the world's children in the developing world is stunted."

Since 1971, Food for the Hungry has responded to physical and spiritual hunger in more than 26 countries worldwide.

In response to the current food and economic crisis, the ministry calls on Christians to pray for the world’s poor and hungry and for long-term solutions to families at risk or on the brink of salvation, give financially to help the ministry respond to world hunger, and sponsor a child that will help to not only transform the child but also his/her family and community.

Brazil's Anti-Poverty Stipend Up

In an attempt to help families meet the increases in Brazilian food prices, lessen the effects of the economic crisis, and increase consumer spending--the Brazilian government increases their anti-poverty stipend. Reported in Bloomberg, by Iuri Dantas and Andre Soliani.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva raised the benefit in the country’s flagship anti- poverty program by 9.7 percent seeking to ease the impact of the economic crisis on the poorest citizens.

The minimum monthly amount paid by the so-called “Bolsa Familia” will be raised to 68 reais ($36.5) in September from 62 reais now, a decree published in the government’s gazette said.

Faster economic growth coupled with Lula’s social programs helped lift 16.5 million Brazilians out of poverty between 2003 and 2007, according to the government’s Institute of Applied Economic Research.


“The increase has a double effect: it helps protect the poor from the global crisis and stimulate the economy by increasing consumption,” Neri said.

The anti-poverty program, which was created in October 2003, provides cash payments to 11.4 million families, according to the Social Development Ministry.

The total budget for the “Bolsa Familia” this year will be increased to about 12 billion reais, from an original forecast of 11.4 billion reais, the ministry said today. The program is expected to benefit a total of 12.9 million families by the beginning of next year.

Poverty on British reality TV

On British television's Channel 4, there is a new reality series, titled, "How The Other Half Live." The premiss of the show is a rich British family helps out a poor British family. This is an opinion piece about the show by Tim Nichols, in the Guardian.

Belinda Webb may call it "poverty voyeurism", but frankly we should be looking directly into the lives of Britain's low-income families. It's a shame she judged How the Other Half Live before she watched it. Despite my reservations about its premise of a wealthy family sponsoring a poor family, I found the first episode moving, sensitive and informative.

In giving one of Britain's most disadvantaged families a rare primetime voice, it made visible many of the factors limiting the lives of the UK's 4 million children below the poverty line and that act as barriers to families moving out of poverty.

Yes, reality shows can exploit their subjects, but they don't always. When did you last see an hour-long prime-time programme driven by the voice of an intelligent and articulate 10-year-old girl stuck in a small, barely-furnished flat in a grotty London tower block?

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has spent over two years on a major stream of work researching public attitudes to UK poverty and media portrayals of those who lose out in Britain's culture of inequality. The research finds people are sceptical about UK poverty because it has so little visibility in mainstream culture. This leaves public perceptions to be distorted by misleading and stigmatising portrayals, ranging from tabloid hack jobs on families receiving benefits to the vulgar chav stereotypes in Little Britain and The Katherine Tate Show.

While Matt Lucas has never called up the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) to discuss the veracity and impact of his portrayals of low-income families, the producers of How the Other Half Live did. In fact they spoke to dozens of organisations working on behalf of low-income families and working in deprived communities. This kind of dialogue has also been facilitated by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's project, which has sought to bring together journalists and programme makers with organisations tackling poverty. As well as working to prevent media content that stigmatises those on low incomes and misleads audiences, we have challenged programme makers to innovate formats that make poverty visible and understandable to mainstream audiences, showing positive portrayals of people struggling hard in difficult circumstances and giving low-income families a voice.

As the series continues I hope we can move on to debating the poverty and inequality it brings into view. Issues like why families are struggling on such inadequate incomes, in such poor quality housing without the money to furnish them, crippled by debt and without access to the skills support and childcare that will help them into decent work. Barriers like the tremendous social exclusion the three young girls in the Gumpo family face, that could so easily see them failed by the education, system despite their obvious intelligence and potential.

I hope that, having now seen the programme, Belinda Webb is happy that the Gumpo family's voices were heard by a mainstream audience. Maybe her next comment will be about how we should all respond as a nation to end Britain's culture of inequality and ensure that the duty to end UK child poverty by 2020, in a bill currently before parliament, is met.