Tsunami hits Samoan islands

An aid situation is developing in the islands of Samoa, where a tsunami hit the islands earlier today. 99 people are dead and hundreds are missing, feared swept out to sea, from the earthquake triggered tsunami.

From this Associated Press story that we found at the Star Press online, reporters Keni Lesa And Fili Sagapolutele tell us what happened.

Survivors fled the waves of water for higher ground on the South Pacific islands after the magnitude 8.0 quake struck at 6:48 a.m. local time (1:48 p.m. EDT; 1748 GMT) Tuesday. The quake was centered about 120 miles south of the islands of Samoa, which has about 180,000 people, and American Samoa, a U.S. territory of 65,000.

Four tsunami waves 15 to 20 feet (4 to 6 meters) high roared ashore on American Samoa about 15 minutes after the quake, reaching up to a mile (1.5 kilometers) inland, Mike Reynolds, superintendent of the National Park of American Samoa, was quoted as saying by a parks service spokeswoman.

Less than 24 hours later, another strong underwater earthquake rocked western Indonesia on Wednesday, briefly triggering a tsunami alert for countries along the Indian Ocean. The 7.6-magnitude quake toppled buildings, cut power and triggered a landslide on Sumatra island, and at least 75 people were reported killed. Experts said the seismic events were not related.

The Samoan capital, Apia, was virtually deserted by afternoon, with schools and businesses closed. Hours after the waves struck, sirens rang out with another tsunami alert and panicked residents headed for higher ground again, although there was no indication of a new quake.

In American Samoa’s capital of Pago Pago, the streets and fields were filled with ocean debris, mud, overturned cars and several boats as a massive cleanup effort stretched into the night. Several buildings in the city – just a few feet above sea level – were flattened. Power was expected to be out in some areas for up to a month.

In Washington, President Obama has declared a major disaster for American Samoa. Obama said in a statement early Wednesday that he and his wife, Michelle, “will keep those who have lost so much in our thoughts and prayers.”

Hampered by power and communications outages, officials in the South Pacific islands struggled to determine damage and casualties.

Samoan police commissioner Lilo Maiava told The Associated Press that police had confirmed 63 deaths but devastated areas were still being searched.

Poverty in Marion County Ohio at 18 percent

A county just north Columbus, Ohio has 18 percent poverty according the US Census Bureau. The numbers continue to climb for Marion County, who has suffered even more job losses since the US Census recorded this data from 2008.

From the Columbus Dispatch writers Catherine Candisky and Alan Johnson take a look at the numbers and their devastating consequences on Ohio. The newspaper also has graphics that show the concentrations of poverty in Ohio and throught the US.

Marion County's 2008 poverty rate of 19.4 percent represents a jump of more than half in only two years for the county of 66,396 people about an hour north of Columbus.

New statewide figures from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey show that 13.4 percent of Ohioans were living in poverty in 2008, up slightly from the previous year and just above the national average of 13.2 percent.

Still, poverty holds a fierce grip on Ohio, particularly in the state's urban centers.

Of America's top 10 poorest cities, three are in Ohio -- Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo. No other state had more than one.

Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, executive director of the Ohio Association of Second Harvest Foodbanks, said the poverty level is almost certainly worse than the numbers indicate because the statistics are for 2008, and things have gotten only worse this year.

"Ohioans are getting poorer every day," she said. "We know, from our food pantries, it has gotten worse day after day, week after week."

Ohio is in "a race to the bottom," Hamler-Fugitt said.
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According to the census report, 19.4 percent of Marion County residents were living in poverty in 2008, up from 15.7 percent in 2007 and 11.9 percent in 2006. The poverty threshold is about $18,000 a year for a family of three and $22,000 for a family of four.

The survey measures counties with at least 65,000 population, meaning virtually all of Ohio's Appalachian counties are not included.

Poverty in Franklin County actually dropped to 15 percent from 16.3 percent in both 2007 and 2006.

Robert Zoellick says world recession changing currency forces

World Bank head Robert Zoellick had a recent speaking engagement at Johns Hopkins University in Washington. In his comments, he told the audience not to expect the US dollar to continue to be the world's major currency.

From the Voice of America, Mil Arcega attended the speech.

World Bank president Robert Zoellick says the U.S. dollar's role as the world's reserve currency may be diminishing as a result of the financial crisis. Although he says the dollar will remain a major economic force, Zoellick says the balance of power is shifting. And as the global financial system evolves, Zoellick says other currencies, including the Euro and the Chinese Yuan could become increasingly attractive alternatives.

In the aftermath of the global economic meltdown, the head of the World Bank says the U.S. should not assume the dollar will always be the world's business currency. Speaking at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, Robert Zoellick says world finances are undergoing a seismic shift.

"The United States would be mistaken to take for granted the dollar's place as the world's predominant reserve currency," he said. "Looking forward, there will increasingly be other options to the dollar."

Among the options, Zoellick says the 16-nation Euro and China's Yuan --also called the Renminbi -- are quickly gaining acceptance.

Zoellick cites China's recent move to list foreign companies in its stock exchange as a step towards making the communist country a global financial powerhouse.

"China is making it easier for trading partners to do business in Renminbi, for example, through currency swaps. We are likely to see this shift in the world of investment as well," he said.

Zoellick also questioned the role central banks played in the economic crisis. And he injected himself into the Congressional debate over how much power the U.S. Federal Reserve should have -- saying the Treasury Department may be better suited to regulate the U.S. financial system.

"In the United States, it will be difficult to vest the independent and powerful technocrats at the Federal Reserve with more authority. My reading of recent crisis management is that the Treasury Department needed greater authority to pull together a bevy of different regulators. Moreover, the Treasury Department is an executive department and therefore Congress and the public can directly oversee how it uses any added authority," Zoellick explained.

Regarding the Pittsburgh summit last week for the world's biggest economies, Zoellick applauded the resolution making the G20 the premier forum for global financial cooperation. But to maintain legitimacy, Zoellick says the major developed and developing nations who make up the G20 must recognize the voices of the 160 countries left outside.

"It needs to help offer a hand to the poorest and weakest countries, the 1.6 billion people still without electricity and the 'bottom billion' trapped in poverty because of conflict and broken governance," he said.

Zoellick's comments come as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund prepare to hold meetings in Istanbul next week.

I'm sure Zoellick's bosses at the US government have a entirely different opinion on currencies.

Less donations, more demand for charities

Charities in America have suffered in two different ways during this recession. First, through a decrease in giving; second, through an increase in demand for their services.

The double effect has been too much for some charities to bear. The effects of the economy have caused some non-profits to close and stop taking care of those in need.

From the Janesville, Wisconsin Gazette Extra, this Associated Press article written by David Crary talks to some charity leaders on the effects of the recession.

The casualties so far include countless needy clients losing assistance and thousands of nonprofit workers who've been laid off. Some local charities have shut down; even many of the largest nationwide operations have made painful cutbacks in staff, spending and programs.

"Nonprofits are generally at the whim of the economy ... but we've never seen anything like this," says the Rev. Larry Snyder, president of Catholic Charities USA. "Increasing numbers of our own volunteers and employees have been forced to become clients of our services."

The cutbacks are forcing charities to rethink how they operate and make changes that are likely to outlive the recession. Nonprofits, like regular businesses, are learning to do more with less. Those that survive will emerge more efficient.

"It gives you a mindset to be more creative," American Heart Association CEO Nancy Brown says. "We're thinking even better and more innovatively than we were 10 months ago."

Numbers help illustrate the magnitude of the challenges.

Giving to social-service charities fell by 12.7 percent in 2008, according to the Giving USA Foundation, and there's been little evidence of a resurgence so far this year. Simultaneously, many state and local governments are cutting back on funding for nonprofits or delaying payments as they struggle to assemble their budgets.

That double hit to charities' revenue comes at a time when the national poverty rate has reached an 11-year high of 13.2 percent.

Jacqueline Novogratz on lessons learned outside of the classroom

The Acumen Fund's Jacqueline Novogratz arrived in Africa as a young woman with dreams to change the world. After some success and some failures, she returned to the states to receive more education. But it was lessons learned from her experiences in Africa and her childhood that led her to create the Acumen Fund, a large venture fund that gives capital to start up businesses in Africa and Asia.

From Success Magazine, writer John Ostdick interviews Novogratz on what she learned outside of the classroom.

Her March 2009 book, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World (Rodale Books), chronicles her passionate journey to the creation of the 8-year-old Acumen Fund, a nonprofit global venture fund using entrepreneurial approaches to solve the problems of global poverty. “As our world becomes increasingly interconnected, we need to find better solutions that will include everyone in today’s opportunities,” she writes. “Monsters will always exist. There’s one inside each of us. But an angel lives there, too. There is no more important agenda than figuring out how to slay one and nurture the other.”

Acumen Fund manages more than $40 million in investments in South Asia and East Africa, all focused on delivering affordable basic services to the poor (her immediate goal is to increase that to $100 million).

Novogratz’s change-the-world passion began early. “I grew up very disciplined, with nuns, a military family of seven, all the rest boys,” she says during a break from a frantic day of meetings in Acumen’s New York offices just before leaving on another far-flung trip. “I was very tough, and hard on myself, and had high expectations for myself.”

The compassion of the West Point, N.Y., nuns who taught her—particularly a first-grade teacher, Sister Mary Theophane, whom Novogratz recalls with special affection—helped hone her lofty determination.

“It was from her that I first heard that ‘to whom much is given, much is expected,’ ” Novogratz says. “I wanted desperately to be one of those kids who delivered. I wanted to commit to do something big.”

In a way, she took her own set of vows in those formative years. She would later embrace the writing of Thoreau and Shaw, extracting from the poets what it meant to live a full life. “When I would read Thoreau talk about people living lives of quiet discontent, I would say, ‘That is not going to be me. I am going to live out loud,’ ” she says.
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Her education and her early efforts in philanthropy, banking and microfi nance would eventually contribute to her innovative Acumen Fund vision. The bottom line, she concluded, is that charity alone cannot end poverty. Rather than handing out grants, Acumen invests in fl edgling companies and organizations that bring critical—and often life-altering—products and services to the world’s poor.

“Early on, it was all about developing the confidence and earning respect to be effective,” she says. “One of my favorite Martin Luther King Jr. lines is: ‘Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.’ When I fi rst went to Africa, I felt this great sense of compassion and was making excuses for people…. Once I let go of the idea of being Mother Superior trying to save the masses and instead found the joy of building systems that really do allow people to change their own lives, then I could be much more myself and challenge people to reach higher. What I learned is people live up and down to the expectations others place on them. That was incredibly liberating to me.”

Who is to blame for high infant death rate in Sierra Leone

The country of Sierra Leone has the second highest child mortality rate in the world. The medical professionals in the country blame the high death rate on midwifes or traditional birth attendants.

The health professionals say that midwifes do not have the proper training if pregnancies get complicated. However, the midwifes way that they are needed to reach remote villages where there is no access to medicine.

From the Voice of America, writer Chinedu Offor frames the debate in this story.

Sierra Leone has the second highest child mortality rate in the world, according to a recent survey by UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO). The report found that more than one out of four children die before their fifth birthday.

The death rate among newborns in Sierra Leone is above the average for Africa, at 56 per 1,000 live births, says the WHO.

Doctors in government hospitals blame traditional birth attendants (TBAs) for the high death rate. They’re blamed for not being able to handle problem births, including hemorrhaging.

But the attendants say they have a major role to play, especially in a country where poverty, poor transportation and cultural practices keep many women from going to the hospital.

Dr. Ibrahim Thorlie is the chief medical officer of the Princess Christian Maternity and Child Health clinic in East End, Freetown. .

“In my own opinion, the TBAs have no role to play in the reduction of maternal mortality because they deal with the normal case that does not cause maternal mortality. Therefore, we should stop training them.”

A traditional birth attendant supervisor, Mohammed Masere, disagrees. He says Dr. Thorlie’s views are extreme.

“At (the) primary healthcare level, TBAs have a role to play because they are closer to the people in the community. They do deliveries, cases that are unable to reach the health facilities on time.”

Television personality Woteh Camera was delivered by a TBA, and she agrees. With most of the population living in rural areas and unable to access hospital services, she says, traditional birth attendants remain relevant. But they should be trained in modern methods of delivery, she adds.

“Though they are not well trained, I think they are doing a good job, as most people will say, [in view of the fact] that we don’t have qualified people in our rural areas, most especially the remote villages where…the roads are bad and it (the clinic or hospital) is far.”

Oklahoma saw a decline in poverty in 2008

One area that saw improvement in poverty levels before the recession was Tulsa, Oklahoma. In fact, the poverty level dropped for the entire state in 2008, except for the senior population.

From the Tulsa World, Curtis Kilman breaks down the US Census Bureau numbers, and the fears for 2009.

Tulsa County residents whose income in 2008 was below the poverty level declined from 16.2 percent of the population in 2006 to 13.8 percent in 2008, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey.

Statewide, an estimated 15.9 percent of the population was living in poverty in 2008, compared to a 17 percent poverty rate in 2006.

The latest census figures indicate "some progress" was made in terms of fewer families in poverty, said David Blatt, policy director for the Oklahoma Policy Institute.

"Clearly you still see a substantial segment of the population that is living in dire circumstances," Blatt said.

The poverty threshold in 2008 was an annual income of about $22,000 for a four-person family.

In the city of Tulsa, an estimated 18.3 percent of the population was living in poverty in 2008, census data indicates. In 2006, 20.3 percent, or one in five city residents lived in poverty.

A greater percentage of the population lived in poverty in Tulsa than in Oklahoma City, where 16.4 percent of the residents were poor in 2008.

OXFAM's appeal for emergency aid to East Africa

With millions hungry in East Africa, OXFAM is now calling on emergency donations of aid to the drought stricken region. OXFAM says that the drought is really in it's fifth year.

Rains are due to come next month, if that does happen the next harvest for the region is in early 2010. Until then, the millions of people in East Africa will have to depend on donations of food to survive.

From the New York Times, this Reuters piece relays OXFAM's statement on the emergency.

Launching a $9.5 million (6 million pounds) appeal, it said the situation was being worsened by high food prices and conflict. The most badly hit nations are Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia and Uganda.

Malnutrition is now above emergency levels in some areas and hundreds of thousands of valuable cattle are dying.

"This is the worst humanitarian crisis Oxfam has seen in east Africa for over ten years," Paul Smith Lomas, Oxfam's East Africa Director, said in a statement.

He said failed and unpredictable rains were ever more common in the region, and that broader climate change meant wet seasons were becoming shorter. Droughts have increased from once a decade to every two or three years.

"In Wajir, northern Kenya, almost 200 dead animals were recently found around one dried-up water source," Lomas said.

"People are surviving on two litres of water a day in some places -- less water than a toilet flush. The conditions have never been so harsh or so inhospitable, and people desperately need our help to survive."

Some 3.8 million Kenyans, a tenth of the population, need emergency aid, Oxfam said, partly because food prices have risen to 180 percent above average.

Angola's fight to restore life after decades of war

Just coming off of a three decade long civil war, Angola has a lot of work to do to improve life in the country. Once ranked the worst for child well being in the world, there has been a little improvement since the war ended in 2002.

From the IPS, reporter Louise Redvers fills us in on the slow progress to restore services in Angola.

Angola is ranked 16th in the world for child mortality. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), one in six children here die before they reach their fifth birthday - the main causes of death being malaria, respiratory infections, diarrhoea and other infections.

The ranking, although dire, is at least some improvement from the 2001 count of one in four - which had Angola ranked worst in the world - but there is still some way to go if the country is to reach the 2015 Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of reducing child mortality by two thirds.

Angola’s high child mortality rates are a direct hangover from the country’s three-decade-long civil war, which ended in 2002.

The few health services which existed for Angolans before they gained independence from Portugal in 1975 when the conflict began were soon decimated, and despite its enormous oil and diamond wealth, the country was wracked by poverty.

Millions fled the countryside, where landmines rendered agricultural land useless, and moved to Luanda, now home to an estimated seven million people. The majority lives in shantytowns, known in Angola as musseques, with little access to running water or sanitation.

Since the end of the war, government has undergone a programme of national reconstruction, literally rebuilding or building from scratch all public services.

In addition to building new hospitals and clinics, there has been a focus on training community health workers to promote basic household health, such as hand-washing, water treatment and sleeping under a mosquito net.

New statistics from UNICEF, Angola’s Ministry of Health and the World Bank are due to be published jointly later this year and will be the litmus test to see if government spending has been making a difference.

It will also help government hone in on the worst problem areas and target its spending.

Koen Vanormelingen, UNICEF representative in Angola, believes there has been tremendous progress: "The government is really committed, and it is putting its money where its mouth is. There is of course a time laps between the moment interventions are implemented and when you see the results in terms of lower mortality."

"We are strong believers that Angola will be able to meet their MDGs for reducing child mortality," he said optimistically.

The everyday reality of poverty in Angola's musseques, where children play among piles of litter and stagnant water breeds diseases, seems a long way off Vanormelingen’s colourful statistical bulletins, however.

Acknowledging this, he said: "There is so much to be done at the same time that it gives the impression of anarchy and inefficiencies, but I do believe there is a sense of strategy and direction."

Recession increases US income gap

We talk often of how the global recession has hurt the poorest countries the hardest, but an article we found today examines how the recession has hurt the poorest Americans the hardest. The many job layoffs that took place throughout the recession has hurt low to middle income Americans, while the wealthiest Americans only had reductions in pay or benefits.

The US Census Bureau says that the income gap between the poorest and richest Americans is now at it's widest ever. Income gap from country to country is important to consider because the wider a gap is, the harder it is for the poorest to climb up the income ladder.

From this Associated Press article that we found at the Sun News, writer Hope Yen takes another angle at the Census Bureau numbers.

The wealthiest 10 percent of Americans - those making more than $138,000 each year - earned 11.4 times the roughly $12,000 made by those living near or below the poverty line in 2008, according to newly released census figures. That ratio was an increase from 11.2 in 2007 and the previous high of 11.22 in 2003.

Household income declined across all groups, but at sharper percentage levels for middle-income and poor Americans. Median income fell last year from $52,163 to $50,303, wiping out a decade's worth of gains to hit the lowest level since 1997.

Poverty jumped sharply to 13.2 percent, an 11-year high.

"No one should be surprised at the increased disparity," said Richard Freeman, an economist at Harvard University. "Unemployment hurts normal workers who do not have the golden parachutes the folks at the top have."

Analysts attributed the widening gap to the wave of layoffs in the economic downturn that have devastated household budgets. They said while the richest Americans may be seeing reductions in executive pay, those at the bottom of the income ladder are often unemployed and struggling to get by.

Large cities such as Atlanta, Washington, New York, San Francisco, Miami and Chicago had the most inequality, due largely to years of middle-class flight to the suburbs. Declining industrial cities with pockets of well-off neighborhoods, such as Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Buffalo, N.Y., also had sharp disparities.

VIDEO: Illegal migrants caught in poverty-trap

Reuters Helen Long reports on African migrants who travel to Europe in the hopes of good jobs. However, the migrants instead get caught in a poverty trap.

A summary of the G-20

Here is a look back as to what the G-20 agreed upon in regards to poverty at the meetings completed last week in Pittsburgh. Anti-poverty advocates like that the G-20 continued on the pledges to poor nations made earlier this year in London. However, the same advocates say the G-20 could have done more.

From the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, writer Karamagi Rujumba tells us what happened.

The leaders of the world's largest economies at the G-20 summit yesterday took great steps to address some of the issues that affect the world's poorest.

They started from the moral and pragmatic premise that there can be no sustainable global economic recovery without strengthening the support systems of the most vulnerable.

But even as they commended the G-20 for its proclamation that "all parts of the globe participate in the [economic] recovery," the international advocates who lobbied the summit on behalf of the poor said the challenge of developing impoverished countries, particularly in Africa, remains the same.

Key among the challenges, they said, remains a need to infuse short-term capital and development aid toward agriculture and food security, access to clean and affordable energy and steps to slow the devastation caused by climate change.

"We were very encouraged that they reiterated their commitments from [the April G-20 summit in] London," said Tom Hart, director of U.S. government relations for the advocacy group ONE Campaign, which is committed to fighting extreme global poverty and disease.

The commitments include agreement on the need to help poor countries weather the tumultuous financial climate; reform the membership of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to include more of the poorest countries; carry forward the framework of the G-8 agreement on food security in Italy; and to deliver on the $100 billion the G-8 promised to loan developing countries.

In addition, the Canadian government also committed to provide $2.6 billion in capital to the African Development Bank to help it increase its lending by 75 percent.

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09269/1000975-482.stm#ixzz0SQbZj2Rn

Jordon receives 411 million dollars in US aid

The United States has given 411 million dollars in aid money to it's ally Jordan. The US says this money will be used for reform efforts in the tiny kingdom.

From this AFP story hosted at Google News, we read more of what the aid money will be used for.

The grants included 261.4 million dollars in regular assistance and 150 million dollars in supplemental aid, bringing the total US economic aid to Jordan in 2009 to 513.5 million dollars, the US embassy said in a statement.
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The money will help Jordan, which got similar funds last year, increase investment, create jobs, improve water management, boost political development and alleviate poverty.
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Jordan is a major beneficiary of US aid having received around six billion dollars since 1952, the embassy said.

Washington state's Kids Count says 40,000 children slip into poverty

The annual Kids Count survey for Washington state says that 40,000 children will into poverty by 2010. The numbers will wipe out any gains the state has made in fighting poverty since 1975.

From The Spokesman Review, writer Shawn Vestal talks to a Kids Count director and also cites an additional survey.

When Lori Pfingst considers the statistics that will tell the tale of this recession, she isn’t thinking about GDP or unemployment.

She’s thinking about teen pregnancy. Low birthweight babies. WASL scores and college enrollments.

As the recession swells the ranks of the impoverished, it takes a particular, long-term toll on children, experts say. In Washington state alone, nearly 40,000 children are expected to slip into poverty by 2010; nationwide, an additional 800,000 kids entered poverty between 2007 and 2008, before the recession really hit.

And however quickly the economy begins its official recovery, the consequences for kids living in poverty are wide-ranging. Children who grow up in poor households tend to do worse in school and end up in trouble with the law. They’re less likely to go to college and more likely to get pregnant at a young age. They’re more likely to commit crimes or become victims of crimes, and more likely to grow up and live in poverty themselves.

“The impact of this really can’t be overstated,” said Pfingst, assistant director of Washington KidsCount, an annual statistical survey of children’s well-being. “When children are born into poverty, it affects every single outcome of their lives.”

A new report from Duke University asserts that the recession will undo decades of progress for children and families. Duke’s Child and Youth Well-Being Index measures a range of categories; it estimates that all progress made in “family economic well-being” since 1975 will be wiped out by this recession.

The Duke index predicts that families will suffer from the expected kinds of effects, such as joblessness, lower incomes or homelessness. But it also suggests that children will pay other prices, in greater obesity and health problems, because families will be more likely to rely on low-cost fast food; on social relationships and stability, as families are forced to move; and on increased behavioral problems and crime, with young people as both victims and perpetrators.

“The impact of the current recession on children will be dramatic,” the Duke report concludes.

Sharecropping keeps millions in poverty in Pakistan

A type of slavery exists in Pakistan that forces people into indebtedness to landowners. Millions of people in the country either rent or sharecrop land from wealthy landowners. These people are stuck doing this for generation after generation. Activists say that land reform needs to take place in the country to get themselves out of this practice that keeps millions form getting out of poverty.

From the IRIN, we read more about what the Anti-Slavery International is calling Pakistan to reform.

Dotted around Pakistan are vast estates run by feudal landlords who command enormous economic and political power, condemning their tenants to poverty, reform activists charge.

On some of these estates, debt bondage has forced 1.8 million people to work the land for no pay, generation after generation, according to the campaigning group Anti-Slavery International. On others, sharecropping systems are practised, under which landless tenants hand over between two-thirds and half of the crops they produce to the landowner.

"Without distributing land among tenants and landless peasants, there is no possibility of progress. The end of feudalism is a must for modernizing society. Until effective land reforms are carried out, poverty can never be eliminated," Farooq Tariq, secretary-general of the Kissan Rabita Committee, an alliance of 22 peasant organizations, told IRIN.

Unlike other countries in the region, including India, Pakistan did not carry out land reforms after 1947, and attempts in the 1950s and 1970s to reduce the size of land holdings had limited impact.

"Land reform has not taken place because the lawmakers in many cases themselves have large land holdings and will never want to transfer ownership to tenants. There will be no land reform until [the] people are in control of governance," Mubashir Hasan, a former finance minister and social activist, told IRIN.

About 2 percent of households control more than 45 percent of the land area. Powerful farmers have also taken advantage of government subsidies in water and agriculture, and benefited from technological improvements which have boosted yields, according to the World Bank.

Little progress

By 1977 the biggest estates had only surrendered about 520,000 hectares, and nearly 285,000 hectares had been redistributed among some 71,000 farmers. Around 3,529 landowners have 513,114 holdings of more than 40.5 hectares in irrigated areas, and 332,273 holdings of more than 40.5 hectares in non-irrigated areas, according to the government's annual Economic Survey.

"We manage to earn a little for ourselves by selling the surplus corn and wheat that we take from the land. It is hard work, but despite this we have not been able to escape poverty. None of my four sons is educated beyond the eighth grade. We needed their labour on the land," said Kareem Muhammad, a landless tenant on a farm near the town of Okara, about 110km south of Lahore.

In Punjab, both sharecropping and fixed-rent contracts - where a rent per acre farmed is paid to the landowner by tenants - are practised. In Sindh, about one third of the land falls under fixed-rent contracts and about two thirds of the land is sharecropped, government surveys show.

Discontent

The sense of injustice created by the continued hold of feudal landlords and the poverty this gives rise to has been a key factor in rising social discontent - aided and abetted by militant groups.

"I am a landless farmer. Last year my teenage son was persuaded by members of an organization engaged in jihad [holy war] to come away with them. They told him it is better to wield a gun and learn to use it than eke out a miserable existence tilling land," Riazuddin Ahmed, from Vehari in southern Punjab, told IRIN.

"My son is only 17. He saw no hope ahead of him, and therefore went away with these people. His mother and I are distraught. But we believe he has gone to the northern areas and we have no means of finding him," he said.

Former finance minister Hassan blamed this on oppression and misery. "Today, governance has collapsed. Extremism has grown and weapons have proliferated," he said.

According to the World Bank, 33 percent of Pakistan's 162 million people live below the poverty line.

Farming contributes 21 percent to gross domestic product (GDP) and employs 44 percent of the workforce, according to the government's annual Economic Survey. Of the total land area of 80.4 million hectares, about 22 million are cultivated, according to official data. Nearly 65 percent of this cultivated area is in Punjab, about 25 percent in Sindh and 10 percent in the North West Frontier Province and Balochistan.

Pre-school education in Malawi

Malawi is one of the poorest countries in Africa. One of the greatest contributing factors to this is the lack of free education in the country. Even tougher is finding pre-school for children as it is something only the elite of the country can afford.

From this IPS article we see how school for children is considered a luxury in the country. Writer Claire Ngozo tells us just how few pre-schools there are in the country.

Less than a third of Malawi's children attend pre-school; the others will lag behind their peers for their entire school careers.

For most Malawian children, school only starts at the age of six - or sometimes even later - when they enter primary school. Pre-schools are mainly privately-owned and regarded as a luxury since most families cannot afford to pay the fees.

In Malawi, up to 60 percent of the population lives below the poverty line of $1 a day, according to United Nations statistics, while pre-school fees, for the few Malawians who earn a good income, range from $50 to $800 per term.

Not attending a pre-school means that most of the country’s children miss out on early learning and stimulation, according to the country’s secretary for gender, children and community development, Olive Chikankheni.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) indicates that early childhood development is critical for the formation of intelligence, personality and social behavior. The effects of neglect in these formative years can be cumulative and lasting.

"Most nursery schools are in urban areas and demand very high school fees, which most people cannot afford," confirmed Chikankheni. About 60 percent of Malawi's population live in the country’s rural areas, however, where poverty is rife.

Chikankheni says children who do not attend pre-school find it difficult to socialise with their peers and teachers when they start primary school. "These children take long to adapt to the school environment because they find that they are suddenly surrounded by strangers. As such, they fail to concentrate on their studies," said Chikankheni.

She says such children lag behind in their studies, and some perform below their potential throughout their school-life. 2008 government statistics indicate that not even a third of Malawi's children have access to pre-school education.

Limited access to pre-school is apparent even in urban areas, and within the country’s capital Lilongwe. Small children are seen playing unattended in township and suburb streets during the day instead of being in school. Many families rather spend the little money they have on food and other basic necessities, than on nursery school fees.

The film "The End of Poverty"

A new film opens in theaters November 13th that asks the question if the world has so much, why is there so much poverty? The film "The End of Poverty" is produced by Cinema Libre Studios. You can learn more about the film through it's very own blog. What follows in this post is a press release about the film, as well as the film's trailer.

After premiering at Critics’ Week during the Cannes Film Festival and subsequently screening at twenty-five international film festivals, a powerful new feature length documentary that has been impressing critics and economic justice activists worldwide, will be released nationwide starting in New York (at Village East Cinema) on November 13, 2009, followed by Los Angeles on November 25, 2009 (at Laemmle’s Sunset 5) with a platform release to follow.

Award-winning actor and activist, Martin Sheen, provides the narration for THE END OF POVERTY?, directed by Philippe Diaz, which connects the dots from colonialism to modern times in an indictment of the creation of the free market system, the system now blamed for the worst global recession in decades.  The film was produced in association with the New York based non-profit, Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, and will be distributed by Cinema Libre Studio.

“Most of the experts interviewed in the film had predicted the current economic crisis more than two years ago, when we started to film, explaining that a system based on a neoliberal policies and the fraudulent trickle-down theory can only collapse one day or another.” says filmmaker Diaz. “It is great that Michael Moore is attacking the bankers and the financial establishment in his new film, but the end of greed on Wall Street will not end poverty in the world. The problem is much deeper than that: it is centuries old. Our economic system since colonial times requires cheap labor and cheap resources from the global South to succeed and to finance our lifestyle in the North. Without changing that we will never alleviate poverty. “

Filmed in the slums of Africa to the barrios of Latin America, THE END OF POVERTY? explores how the true causes of poverty stem from actions taken during and since colonial times to perpetuate exploitation:  first by forcing people from their land and their access to natural resources, then through unfair trade, debt repayment and unjust taxes on labor and consumption.  This system was carefully built and maintained by free market policies, resource monopolies and structural adjustment programs by the World Bank, the IMF and other international financial institutions.

The documentary features:  Nobel prize winners in economics Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz; expert authors Susan George (“Another World Is Possible If”), Eric Toussaint (“The World Bank: A Never Ending Coup d’Etat”), John Perkins (“Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”), Chalmers Johnson (“Nemesis: The Last Days of the America Republic”), Brookings Institute fellow and author, William Easterly (“White Man’s Burden”); government ministers such as Bolivia’s Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera, and leaders of social movements in Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, Kenya and Tanzania.

The film has since been embraced by activists and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) worldwide for its ‘direct talk’ about the role of debt, free trade, and neo-liberal policies and poverty.  Groups including: Amnesty UK, ATTAC (Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions to Aid Citizens), CADTM (Committee for the Abolition of the Third World Debt), Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP), InterAction, Jubilee Debt Campaign, Make Poverty History, Tax Justice Network, Transnational Institute, and the UN Millennium Campaign, shared the film with thousands of activists, educators and politicians during the “Week of Action Against Poverty” and during the Stand Up Take Action events this past October.

Synopsis:

The End of Poverty? is a daring, thought-provoking and very timely documentary by award-winning filmmaker, Philippe Diaz, revealing that poverty is not an accident. It began with military conquest, slavery and colonization that resulted in the seizure of land, minerals and forced labor. Today, global poverty has reached new levels because of unfair debt, trade and tax policies -- in other words, wealthy countries exploiting the weaknesses of poor, developing countries such that today 20% of the planet's population uses 80% of its resources and consumes 30% more than the planet can regenerate.

Produced by Cinema Libre Studio with the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 104mins, 2008, USA, documentary in English, Spanish, and French with English Subtitles.

More information as well as trailer, clips and images for download are available at www.TheEndofPoverty.com.

About Cinema Libre Studio:
Cinema Libre Studio has been a leader in the distribution social issue films that tackle timely issues.  The company is a haven for independent filmmakers offering one-stop shopping for production and distribution. Headquartered in Los Angeles, the company is best known for distributing social-issue documementaires that include: Outfoxed, Uncovered, WMD: Weapon’s of Mass Deception, Darfur Diaries, The Future of Food, A River of Waste, and Desert Bayou and The Beautiful Truth.  The company has recently released the films of French auteur Jean-Jacques Beineix and has partnered with Iranian director Masoud Jafari Jozani to bring the first film crew to shoot in US since the Iranian revolution. For more information, please visit www.cinemalibrestudio.com.
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Media Contact:                                                                                                                         
Publicist                                              
Cinema Libre Studio
8328 De Soto Avenue
Canoga Park, CA  91304                              
Ph: (818) 349-8822
Press@cinemalibrestudio.com

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Tourists guided through the slums of Kenya

Some call exploitative, some say is inspires compassion. Despite the wide ranging opinions poverty tourism is a thriving business in Kenya.

A story in today's Guardian profiles a couple of the outfits that charge tourist to walk through the slums. Writer Xan Rice tagged along with one such tour.

The Dutch tourists came well prepared for the walking safari: strong shoes and sunscreen, backpacks and bottled water. Ahead lay an afternoon visiting one of Kenya's most recognisable sights – but one that rarely features in tourist brochures.

"It might seem a bit strange to come here," said Eric Schlangen, as the guide led him towards the sea of tin-roofed shacks that constitute Kibera, often described as one of the world's largest slums. "But I wanted to see how people live in this country, not just the animals."

Slum tourism is taking off in Kenya. Several local organisations have started selling guided trips through Kibera, a short drive from the luxury hotels that serve most foreign visitors in Nairobi.

For about £20, tourists are promised a glimpse into the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people crammed into tiny rooms along dirt paths littered with excrement-filled plastic bags known as "flying toilets", as one tour agency explains on its website.

While Kibera has long been an obligatory stop for foreign dignitaries and film crews shooting movies such as The Constant Gardener, its addition to the tourist circuit has stirred debate.

Critics say that unlike township tours in South Africa, which help tell the story of the apartheid struggle, Kibera's sole attraction is its open-sewer poverty – with residents on parade like animals in a zoo.

"You might argue that it is good for business and that might be truly so, but it smells," wrote one critic when one of the first tours began in 2007.

Unpleasant whiff aside, the tours have proved popular and at least two new operators have started up in recent months.

Martin Oduor guided the Dutch group for Kibera Tours, which promises that its profits will stay in the local community. He said that the aim was to humanise residents, not degrade them. "We want to demystify this place, that it is so dangerous and sad," said Oduor as he walked through the slum where he was born and still lives. "People are poor, but they have normal lives."

A new microcredit program in Malaysia

A commentator for the Malaysian website Sun2Surf introduces us to a new microcredit scheme. The new lending is a joint effort between the countries government and a University.

Commentator Himanshu Bhatt first tells the story of a poor single mother who may benefit from the program.

IN the course of my many field trips, I once found a destitute washerwoman living in a wooden shack in George Town while struggling to support her family on a meagre income of RM300 a month. At 42, the woman was gritty enough to try and surmount her problems, managing to make other paltry earnings by cleaning toilets and doing household chores for people.

I still remember how deeply, when I spoke to her, she expressed a yearning to be self-reliant with a job or business that could alleviate her painful situation, for the sake of her children.

People like this washerwoman now have an opportunity to work towards a more dignified life with the help of a microcredit aid scheme recently initiated in Penang. Dubbed the "People’s equality bridging project", the scheme was announced last month as a joint effort between the Penang Development Corporation (PDC) and Universiti Sains Malaysia.

Backed by a revolving fund, the scheme, which involves the issuance of very small loans, is for those at the bottom rungs of the income pyramid. These include people like single mothers and the disabled who rely on welfare aid, as well as petty traders scraping on an income of less than RM400 a month each for their families.
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In Penang, the state government and PDC have each allocated RM1.5 million for the fund for a period of three years. The maximum loan allowed by a single applicant is RM5,000. The loans are scheduled to be distributed from Oct 1.
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But it should be noted that the microcredit scheme is only meant to kick-start the improvement of the poor. Financial critics have warned of the danger of societies becoming over-dependent on such aid from the authorities. Another factor to be addressed is the importance of a monitoring mechanism to ensure that money that is given out is genuinely used for the purposes stated by the borrowers and their families.

At the heart of the matter, however, the microcredit scheme is still regarded as a practical and proven instrument for socio-economic growth. It provides a family with a springboard to have sustainable sources of household incomes, leading to fulfilment of basic needs like improvements in food and nutrition, and better quality housing.

For the hundreds of impoverished people, like the struggling washerwoman, it may be the most opportune avenue provided by the state that they can now resort to, in order to stand on their own feet, with the dignity they have long craved.

Malawi denies farm subsides to people who don't have voter cards

Malawi has denied farm subsidies to those who do not have voter registration cards. The government claims that it will help prevent fraud in the system. But advocates for the poor and small farmers says it hurt those who need the subsides the most.

From the IPS, writer Claire Ngozo gives us the details.

Gina Champiti, a widowed mother of eight children aged between three and 12 did not register to vote in the May presidential and parliamentary elections. This is going to cost her her livelihood.

Because she does not have a voter identity card, she will no longer be allowed to benefit from the country’s agricultural subsidy.

The fertiliser and seed subsidy programme, introduced in Malawi in 2004, has turned the country into a bread basket for the Southern African Development Community (SADC). The programme focuses on smallholder farmers who cannot afford production needs such as seed and fertiliser at normal market prices.

In the past people who were poor and vulnerable were identified by chiefs and district assemblies to benefit from the subsidy. But most beneficiaries were selling the coupons to the "not-so-poor", who would collect the subsidised products for use in their own gardens.

And now, post election, Andrew Daudi, principal secretary in Malawi's Ministry of Agriculture, announced that the 1.6 million farmers to benefit from this year's subsidy will be only those who registered to vote in the presidential elections this year.

"The decision is discriminatory and will make many people suffer. I do not see a connection between registering for elections and agricultural subsidies," said Champiti, whose eight children are aged between three and 12.

Malawi suffered serious food shortages in 2005, and up to five million people were hungry, but just three years later the country produced a bumper harvest attributed to the agricultural subsidy system.

The beneficiaries of the system receive two coupons – one allowing them to buy seed and the other fertiliser at a subsidised rate. Champiti was one of the 1.2 million farmers who benefited from the subsidy.

Champiti told IPS she was too poor to afford fertiliser. "I couldn’t take time out to go and register. I am always busy working to ensure that my children have food," Champiti said.

Daudi said the decision had been made to make sure the government stamped out the fraud that had rocked the programme in the past four years. "The voter identity cards are backed by appropriate data. The number and the name on the card will be used to verify the intended beneficiary," said Daudi. He said this process would help the government in ensure that the coupon was used by the targeted beneficiary only.

Some civil servants administering the programme would also sell the coupons to people not on the list of beneficiaries. Some politicians – especially those within the government – were abusing the system by acquiring coupons and distributing them to family and friends.

Malawi has no national identity card, so the voter registration card fills the gap, and helps stop the ghost beneficiaries, Daudi says.

Adoptions from Haiti slow to a trickle

A very good story this morning talks about the delays and challenges in seeking adoption. The story focuses on Haiti, where the adoption process has slowed to taking up to 2 years. Many factors are blamed for the delays, including political unrest in the nation, the food riots of last year, and some are even blaming UNICEF.

From the News Journal writer Kelly Cuculiansky writes about expectant adopter Robin Garland who has been waiting to adopt Jennifer Casanave from Haiti. If you really want your heart strings pulled click on link to the entire story.

Garland left the orphanage that day bound for home, not knowing what troubles would lie ahead for the girl’s country. Within three weeks of her visit, she opened an e-mail from the adoption agency, detailing the beginnings of food riots that broke out earlier this month.

Youngsters normally receive snacks and three meals a day, consisting of goat or beef, black beans and rice. During the riots, Cayo said the orphanage experienced a food shortage, but “managed.” Rice was up to $80 for a 100-pound bag, while a gallon of gasoline was selling for $6.

“Last week was the first time we have seen something like that happen (in Petionville),” Cayo said.

The town, considered a wealthy suburb where most of Haiti’s political and economic elite live, is in the hills east of the nation’s capital, Port-au-Prince. During the riots, Cayo said storefronts and car windows were smashed, tires were set ablaze and there were some roadblocks, “but not much damage.”

SLOW ADOPTIONS

With the protests now mostly over, Lori Jones, executive director of the orphanage’s parent organization, A New Arrival Adoption Agency, hopes the recent ousting of the country’s prime minister will make a difference in the adoption system’s red tape.

“We’ve never had a failed adoption in Haiti,” she said from agency headquarters in Twin Bridges, Mont. “But about three years ago, the adoptions were processing in six to nine months.”

Now, it could take 16 to 24 months. According to the U.S. Department of State immigrant visa statistics, Haitian adoptions to U.S. families have been on a decline. In 2004, about 356 were adopted from Haiti. Last year, there were only 190.

“Haiti, by far, is one of the most difficult countries we’ve ever had to work in,” said Jones, whose agency has worked in 13 other countries.

It’s especially upsetting because nearly all the children in the orphanage have new moms and dads waiting for them in America, she said. The most recent adoption occurred in November.

Jones said most of the delays have to do with the nation’s political instability. The changes in government staff and officials tend to slow the processing of applications.

But Jones also said UNICEF could be affecting the pace of adoptions. She said UNICEF is expressing concern to government officials about the possibility of child trafficking and a high number of adoptions.

“I do believe that they have met and have tried to influence one side of a very complicated process,” Jones said.

Geoffrey Keele, a UNICEF spokesman, said while the agency makes it a priority to reunite children with their families in their country of origin, it has never opposed international adoptions.

“Our viewpoint is that families need to be supported so they can remain together as much as possible,” he said. “We just want to make sure that there is always a need for appropriate safeguards and transparency in these adoption processes.”

For Elizabeth Bartholet, a Harvard Law School professor who has written extensively about adoption, there is a disturbing trend among the declining inter-country adoptions over the last three years. She also blames UNICEF, saying the organization is “vigorously” opposing international adoption by encouraging countries to be more restrictive.

“They basically do not seem to see it as one of the appropriate solutions for children in need,” she said.

Some of the topics to come up during the G-20

From this NPR story, we find out some of the topics that will be discussed during the G-20 meetings today and tomorrow in Pittsburgh. Meetings begin tonight with a "working dinner" at the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens.

The president is expected to tell fellow leaders that the old economic model of massive Chinese exports being snatched up by borrow-and-spend consumers in America and elsewhere is unsustainable. In a preview of that message at the United Nations on Wednesday, Obama said, "Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges."

The leaders of the Group of 20 nations are meeting for the third time since the financial crisis threw growth into reverse a year ago. When the body last met in April, many economies, including the United States, were under severe strain, and world leaders largely agreed on common remedies such as dramatically increased government spending to provide some stimulus.

With the crisis calming, summit leaders are set to discuss how to redirect their focus on reinvigorating their economies without repeating past mistakes.
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European leaders are pressing for a deal on financial regulation reforms, but Obama's agenda is pressing for policies to even out the trade imbalances between China and the United States.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told reporters in New York on Thursday that Britain and the U.S. "would like to see China importing more from our countries."

Japan's new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, said his nation wants to be part of the discussion to "rein in the issues of poverty and economic disparity, which are difficult to coordinate by simply leaving them to market mechanisms."

A move to bring supermarkets to the inner-city

New York City has relaxed some regulations in the hopes of bringing more grocery stores that sell fresh food to the urban areas of the city. New York's planning commission passed the proposal that would give tax breaks and ease zoning rules.

From the New York Times, writer Diane Cardwell details the plan to bring fresh food to the inner-city.

Under a proposal the City Planning Commission unanimously approved on Wednesday, the city would offer zoning and tax incentives to spur the development of full-service grocery stores that devote a certain amount of space to fresh produce, meats, dairy and other perishables.

The plan — which has broad support among food policy experts, supermarket executives and City Council members, whose approval is needed — would permit developers to construct larger buildings than existing zoning would ordinarily allow, and give tax abatements and exemptions for approved stores in large swaths of northern Manhattan, central Brooklyn and the South Bronx, as well as downtown Jamaica in Queens.

“This is about being able to walk to get your groceries in those areas that are really, really underserved and basically have no place to buy fresh produce,” said Amanda M. Burden, the city planning commissioner. Residents in such areas, she said, have been spending “their grocery dollars at Duane Reade and CVS on chips and soda.”

The move comes as governments across the nation struggle to solve what public health advocates call an epidemic of obesity and diabetes. Schools have banned sugary drinks; lawmakers have helped urban farms spread like crabgrass on undeveloped lots; and cities like Los Angeles and Berkeley, Calif., have limited the concentration of fast-food restaurants in low-income areas.

But the New York proposal, adapted from a Pennsylvania program that provides grants and loans for supermarket construction, is unusual because it employs a mix of zoning and financial incentives to attract, rather than repel, a narrowly defined type of commercial enterprise.

“It is exciting to see that City Planning is taking an initiative to address food because the planning profession has really ignored the food system for the past 100 years,” said Nevin Cohen, an assistant professor of urban studies at the New School, pointing out that the Bloomberg administration’s elaborate blueprint to guide future development, PlaNYC 2030, barely mentions food.

The new zoning would break down some barriers that grocery stores face, said Ben Thomases, the city’s food policy coordinator, including competition from drugstores and other retailers that have higher profit margins than supermarkets do and can pay higher rents.

Under the proposed rules, a residential building with a fresh-food store could be up to 20,000 square feet larger than would normally be allowed, enabling developers to make more money by building more apartments.

Smaller stores in certain commercial and manufacturing districts would be exempt from a requirement that they provide customer parking. And in manufacturing districts, developers could build stores of up to 30,000 square feet — the current limit is 10,000 — without going through the city’s laborious and expensive land-use review process.

Festival food for prisoners in Cambodia

An annual festival in Cambodia will no longer have it's food go to waste thanks to the efforts of young woman.Thanks to the efforts of Sek Sarom, leftover rice cakes from the Pchum Ben festival will go to the prisoners of Battambang, Cambodia. Sarom determined the need for after seeing many malnourished prisoners through her volunteer work in the prisons.

From the Phnom Penh Post, writer Roth Meas tells us how Sarom got the effort started.

The morning sunshine splays over Pok Chhma primary school in Battambang, giving the orange robes of the monks who work there an especially vivid sheen. The festival of Pchum Ben has only just finished, but there will be no rest for these holy men.

The monks, along with many other volunteers, tend giant grills set up to dry thousands of rice cakes left over from the festival of the dead. These savoury treats will ultimately be distributed to prisons all over Battambang, where they will feed famished inmates.

Battambang’s Dhammayietra centre runs the initiative, which is the brainchild of one of its workers, 30-year-old Sek Sarom. She conceived the idea in 2000, while working as a volunteer language tutor in Battambang’s prisons.

“We taught languages to the prisoners, and in that time I observed that people did not have enough food in the prison. I know that after every Bonn Pchum Ben, there is a great deal of waste in terms of food at the pagodas, so we decided to begin collecting rice cakes for prisoners,” she said.
Sek Sarom felt there was not enough understanding from the wider community when it came to the inmates. This manifested itself in a great deal of hostility when she first floated the idea almost a decade ago – something for which she was not prepared.

A labour of empathy
“When I first sent letters to ask for rice cakes, even some monks complained and asked why we should help them. Prisoners are the bad guys; they attack, rape and even kill people, they said. Some monks even cursed me before handing over the rice cakes,” she said.
Yet Sek Sarom was determined to get her idea off the ground, with much of her resolve emanating from an empathy she was able to build for the inmates while teaching them.

“I think prisoners are human beings, just like me. I noticed that most of the prisoners are from poor backgrounds, and many of them fell into crime because of poverty and a lack of education,” she said.

The conditional cash transfers of Latin America

Conditional cash transfers have been applauded by many as a great way to help people in poverty. Instead of just giving people money because they are poor, the governments set conditions on receiving the money. For Mexico and Brazil, parents have to keep their children in school to receive the money. The idea has recently been tried in New York City.

From McClatchy Newspapers, writer Tyler Bridges introduces us to one of the program recipients in Brazil, Denise de Oliveira.

Unlike traditional government handouts, however, this popular anti-poverty program, which has spread throughout Latin America and even to New York City, requires that de Oliveira's children stay in school. The children also must have twice-a-year health exams and be vaccinated against diseases.

The program goes by different names — Bolsa Familia (Family Fund) in Brazil and Oportunidades (Opportunities) in Mexico, the most populous countries it's in — and has slightly different rules depending on the country. Analysts say it's become the most successful anti-poverty program in years because it requires the poor to do something meaningful and measurable in exchange for government charity.

"I have worked in this field for 30 years in every region of the world," said Helena Uribe, a senior anti-poverty specialist at the World Bank in Washington. "This is the one (program) that works. It has showed that you can reach poor people today and position them to improve opportunities over a lifetime."

"The programs are popular because they have quick impacts that are measurable," said Amanda Glassman, a specialist in the program at the Inter-American Development Bank. "Well-child visits go up. Vaccination rates go up. School attendance goes up. Kids are taller for their age, even if they've been in the program for only a year."

Fears that the program would encourage families to have more children, stay at home rather than work to collect benefits or become playthings of patronage-happy politicians have proved to be unfounded, Glassman added.
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(Sergei) Soares, who calls the program a huge success, said it had done little to reduce poverty in Brazil because its greatest impact had been keeping the poorest of the poor alive and making their lives somewhat more bearable. In other words, they've moved up from the bottom rung, but remain poor.

The program also has yet to lift classroom test scores in Mexico, the one country where data are available. It's barely raised school enrollment in urban areas throughout the region because most children already were in school.

Comment: G-20 still in crisis mode

Even though the economies of the developed world beginning to recover from the global recession, the G-20 however will still be in crisis mode. The G-20 meetings are about to begin in Pittsburgh, and the focus should be on the poor of the under-developed world still suffering from the global recession.

From Global Post, commentator Thomas Mucha desctibes some of the effects that the poor are still feeling from the increasingly connected world economy.

The question now is who will suffer the most from a crisis that swept from the casino canyons of Wall Street, to the smoke-choked factories of Guangdong, to the snowy peaks of the Andes. And, more importantly, what can be done about it?

We heard one troubling hint last week from World Bank president Robert Zoellick: the poor. The World Bank predicts an additional 89 million people will be thrown into extreme poverty by the end of next year, defined as those subsisting on less than $1.25 a day. “The poor and most vulnerable are at greatest risk from economic shocks — families are pushed into poverty, health conditions deteriorate, school attendance declines and progress in other critical areas is stalled or reversed," Zoelick said upon release of the Sept. 16 report, which focused on the world's 43 poorest nations.

So why does this matter, you ask?

While low-income countries contribute less in terms of output than G20 nations, they play an increasingly important role in the global economy. And most have been severely damaged by the darkness of the past 12 months, as GlobalPost coverage of the meltdown has consistently shown.

For starters, a drop in global trade is very bad news for countries that supply the raw materials and relatively cheap labor that go into making stuff. The World Bank says global export demand will drop as much as 10 percent this year. That's a staggering amount that has already triggered nightmarish consequences, from the 20 million Chinese migrant workers who lost their jobs last year, to the thousands of Mexican and Canadian auto workers laid off amid Detroit's collapse, to the army of South African and Zambian miners thrown out of work when global demand for copper, platinum and other industrial metals dried up.

Beyond trade there's private investment — money that goes to finance schools, hospitals, roads and other infrastructure projects critical to developing economies. This too, is way down amid the crisis: the World Bank estimates that net private capital flows to the world's poorest countries will drop to $13 billion this year, or less than half the amount in 2007 as private investors keep more money in their pockets.

A real doom and gloom report on population growth

The Green Revolution of the 1960s started by Dr. Norman Bourlag stopped any talk of population growth. But the prospect of climate change has many scholars thinking about population again.

A conference of experts conclude that the world's population could grow to 11 billion by 2050, and that would make life unsustainable on Earth. The conference warns that it could doom entire nations to poverty, and there would be no way to feed everyone. The experts say that family planning and contraceptive programs need to be put in place.

From Yahoo News, this AFP story from Marlowe Hood gives us more on what is contained in the report.

The researchers said that with one and a half million more humans climbing aboard the planet every week, a recipe is looming for ecological overload, famine and broken states.

"Continued rapid population growth in many of the least developed countries could lead to hunger, a failure of education and conflict," said Malcolm Potts at the University of California in Berkeley, which hosted the conference in February.

The papers, authored by 42 specialists in environmental science, economics and demography, are published by the Royal Society, Britain's de-facto academy of sciences.

"There is no doubt that the current rate of human population growth is unsustainable," summarised Roger Short, a professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

"The inexorable increase in human numbers is exhausting conventional energy supplies, accelerating environmental pollution and global warming and providing an increasing number of failed states where civil unrest prevails."

Ninety-eight percent of the expected population growth will occur in developing countries, especially in Africa, where numbers are set to double to almost two billion by 2050.

"How Niger is going to feed a population growing from 11 million today to 50 million in 2050 in a semi-arid country that may be facing adverse climate (change) is unclear," said Adair Turner, a member of Britain's House of Lords.

Yohannes nominated for Millennium Challenge Corp

The Obama administration has announced the next head of the Millennium Challenge Corp. Denver area banker Daniel Yohannes has been tapped to head the federal agency that works with poor nations.

From the Denver Business Journal, writer Mark Harden gives us more of Yohannes' background.

The MCC works with developing countries to promote economic growth and reduce poverty. If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Yohannes will succeed John Danilovich, who resigned as the agency's CEO; Darius Mans has been acting CEO.

Yohannes is president and CEO of M&R Investments, a private investment firm that focuses on the clean-energy sector.

He was an executive of Colorado National Bank and its successor, U.S. Bank, from 1992 to 2003, including a stint as CEO of U.S. Bank's Colorado division. Previously he was an executive for Security Pacific Bank, now part of Bank of America.

Yohannes, a native of Ethiopia, was a key organizer of local efforts to host the 1997 "Summit of the Eight" conference of world leaders in Denver.

He served as co-leader of Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter's transition team in the months before Ritter took office in 2007 and has since been a member of the governor's Jobs Cabinet.

Allan Jury of the World Food Programme on H.R. 2817

Bill H. R. 2817 is a measure being considered in Congress to give more money and support to the World Food Programme. Recently the WFP has had to make some cutbacks in the emergency feeding programs and school feeding programs for children in the under-developed world.

The WFP has been asking for mory money from governments around the world, but support has been slow due to the global recession. The WFP hopes that the passage of H.R. 2817 will bring in more from the US.

We found this interview with Alan Jury of the WFP in the American Chronicle that asks him about the bill and why the WFP needs more from the US.

U.S. leadership is needed to rally the world in the struggle to defeat hunger. There is legislation in Congress titled the Roadmap to End Global Hunger (H.R. 2817) that would craft the U.S. response to the crisis. Allan Jury, director of WFP US relations, recently discussed the Roadmap to End Global Hunger legislation.

More than 1 billion people now suffer from chronic hunger worldwide. How important is it for the U.S. Congress to act on the Roadmap to End Global Hunger legislation?

The world has made great strides against hunger and poverty in recent decades: starting in the 1960s, the percentage of chronically hungry people declined from 37 percent of the world's population to about 13 percent today. Tragically, the twin catastrophes of the global food and financial crises are starting to reverse these hard-won gains, producing an unprecedented rise in absolute numbers of the hungry.

Much of the progress the world has made is due in no small part to US foreign assistance and the generosity of American citizens. The Roadmap builds on this legacy of US leadership in helping the world's hungry poor to construct a broad framework of legislative actions that encompasses the spectrum of anti-hunger efforts - from food and interventions to agricultural programs that help small-scale farmers. The Roadmap legislation has bipartisan sponsorship from two of the leading Congressional voices in the fight against hunger - Rep. James McGovern and Rep. Jo Ann Emerson. The legislation is based on a report authored by six of the leading U.S. international humanitarian organizations which has been endorsed by more than 30 aid agencies.

We believe that this vision of invigorated US global leadership on hunger is vital not only for moral and humanitarian reasons, but for social, economic and political security in the longer term.

How would the Roadmap legislation change the way the international community works with the United States Government on fighting global hunger?

The legislation would require a comprehensive US strategy to fighting hunger that would increase investments in four areas - emergency food assistance, food safety nets, nutrition and agricultural development.

Increased investments in all four of these areas is essential to making a significant impact in reducing hunger. The roadmap highlights the need to broaden the range of activities supported by the US Government to support hunger reduction to complement essential existing food aid and agricultural development programs. More use of cash for emergency responses such as local and regional purchase and food vouchers; expansion of national food safety nets; focused interventions on prenatal and children under 2 nutritional needs, and innovative technical assistance programs to increase agricultural development are supported by the roadmap.


The Roadmap would also establish a US government coordination structure that would support effective implementation of a comprehensive US strategy on international hunger reduction. This would provide the policy, institutional, and program framework to secure the US role as the global leader in building an international coalition to fight hunger.

MIT studies poke holes in microcredit theory

Two new studies from MIT's Jameel Poverty Action Lab have evidence that calls into doubt microcredit's effectiveness in easing poverty.

The authors of the two studies say that microcredit does help the profit margins of micro-businesses that receives the loans, but that does not translate into better quality of life for the borrowers. The studies say that the borrowers do not enjoy greater health, income or more education.

Microcredit's defenders say that the studies have too short of time frame to prove anything. The studies were conducted over a two year period. Microcredit apologists say that the true effects of the loans are over a longer period of time.

From the Boston Globe, reporter Drake Bennett tells us how the studies were conducted.

At least one author of each of the papers is affiliated with MIT’s Poverty Action Lab, a research center that brings together economists with a determinedly experimental bent. In particular, its researchers all share a belief in randomized controlled trials - the same sort of test that new drugs have to undergo - as a tool for evaluating poverty alleviation measures.

Karlan and his co-author, Jonathan Zinman, an associate economics professor at Dartmouth, looked at a bank in the Philippines that offered microloans. They created their controlled experiment by altering the algorithm the bank used to evaluate creditworthiness so that some borderline applicants were randomly denied loans while other otherwise identical applicants had loans approved. The researchers then followed up with the borrowers and nonborrowers to see what difference the loan had made.

The answer was not much. Neither household income nor spending rose for those who got microloans. And borrowers who did put the money into their businesses - instead of using it, as many did, for household expenses - actually shrank rather than grew their businesses. Karlan and Zinman suggest that this might be because the business owners were taking advantage of the loan to fire unproductive workers to whom they owed financial favors, and those firings seemed to explain the very small gains in profit Karlan and Zinman found. In addition, the gains accrued only to male entrepreneurs, not the women usually targeted by microcredit programs.

The second study, co-authored by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, economics professors at MIT, along with Rachel Glennerster, executive director of the Poverty Action Lab, and an MIT economics doctoral student named Cynthia Kinnan, found a slightly larger impact, though a selective one. Working with a microcredit bank in India that was looking to expand in the city of Hyderabad, the researchers did find some small positive effects. Borrowers who already had a business did see some increase in profit. Households without businesses that the researchers judged more predisposed to start one were found to cut back on spending, suggesting they were saving to augment their loan for a capital business expense like a pushcart or a sewing machine. The researchers also found small but encouraging shifts in household spending across the board, with less money spent on “temptation goods” like alcohol, tobacco, and gambling.

Still, overall household spending - a key indicator of financial well-being - stayed about the same. And the researchers found no effect on children’s health or education levels, and the women in the borrower homes were no more likely to play a role in household decisions than those in the control group.

To Duflo, this only seems disappointing because expectations for microcredit are so high.

“I don’t see this as a negative finding,” she says. When asked why she thinks microcredit didn’t boost health and education outcomes, she says, “I would really ask the question, ‘Why did we expect all these things to happen?’ If you give people access to a financial instrument, it’s like any other instrument. It’s useful, but it’s not like the miracle drug to end poverty.”

We take the side of microcredit in this debate. Microcredit can help the people who receive the loans and it's effects only will accumulate for the next generation and the next. The loan reciepient will be able to make enough margin from their micro-business to keep their children in school. The children will in turn receive a better education and will be able to earn more money.

Besides, the continued growth of microcredit through the global recession is proof enough.

Ending poverty by investing in girls

Women are more likely than men to spend their money on their families. A new study from Australia puts some facts behind this statement.

The report says investing in girls is the best way to lift families out of poverty. The study from Plan International is urging Australian companies with interests overseas to make sure they have equal hiring practices for women.

From the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, we read more about the study of selfless women. you can download an mp3 of the radio story from here.

The report by Plan International Australia shows young women are the first to lose their jobs or have their education stopped so they can be placed in domestic work during an economic crisis.

Plan has been studying 140 girls since birth. The girls come from nine countries across the developing world.

Plan chief executive Ian Wishart says the report, called Because I am a Girl, shows many countries still have the attitude that girls are not as important as boys.

"The situation for girls starts pretty bleak. At least 100 million girls are missing from the world population statistics because of female foeticide," he said.

"In other words, gender-biased abortions are taking place when people learn that it's a girl. Then when a girl is born, many girls already get stripped of what we call economic assets. They won't inherit anything from their family just simply because they're a girl."

Mr Wishart says recent research by the World Bank shows economic growth is boosted by the number of girls who complete their secondary education and go on to earn higher wages.

"The stats show that the extra year of study of school results in 10 to 20 per cent higher income," he said.

"If you start multiplying that through five or six years of high school, it has a dramatic effect.

"And the other thing that happens is a young women who gets a fair job with a decent wage will invest 90 per cent of that in her family and children, compared to just 30 or 40 per cent for men, I'm afraid.

"What that results in is her children will almost certainly be well educated and live outside of poverty."

But Mr Wishart says it is hard for girls and women in developing countries to get an education and then employment.

"The difficulty is the pathway for girls through life is littered with what I call trapdoors to fall down; entry to primary school denied; pulled out of high school for an early marriage and perhaps an early pregnancy; the dangers of HIV/AIDS," he said.

"And even if you got through all of that maze, discrimination in actually the awarding of jobs. A lot of this needs to be changed for the potential of young women to be released and realised by national economies.

"Unfortunately there's still 20 per cent of girls who are not entering primary school. So it's not about discriminating against boys or neglecting boys, it's about bringing girls up to the same level, giving them an equal chance to participate in the national and global economy."

Another state with higher poverty; Rhode Island

After the US Census Bureau released the poverty figures last week, we are see stories for individual states that further break down the numbers.

In an area of the US that has very little poverty, the state of Rhode Island has seen the biggest increase in the past year. The tiny state now has more poverty than any other in the New England region. The increase is blamed on the global recession and the cuts in the number of jobs.

From the Providence Journal, writer Paul Edward Parker has this look at the census numbers.

From 2007 to 2008, Rhode Island displaced Massachusetts as the New England state with the highest poverty rate. The state also leap-frogged past Maine and Vermont in the process, going from fourth highest to highest in the six-state region.

Even so, Rhode Island didn't fare too badly compared to the national average because the New England had some of the lowest poverty rates in the country. New Hampshire had the lowest rate nationally, at 7.0 percent.

Connecticut was third, with 8.1 percent, and Vermont sixth, with 9.0 percent. Rhode Island's 12.7 percent rate tied it with Kansas for 26th lowest in the nation, and the state had less poverty than the country as a whole, which measured 13.2 percent.

"So many people have lost their jobs," said Linda Katz, policy director, the Poverty Institute at the Rhode Island College School of Social Work. " The increase in poverty is related to the fact that people have lost their jobs and their source of income."

Katz noted that Rhode Island's unemployment rate jumped more than two percentage points from July 2007 to July 2008. Revised numbers from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics show the rate increased during that period from 5.2 percent to 7.9 percent.

"Our concern, of course, is going forward," she said. "We're very concerned about what the data in 2009 is going to show because we've fallen much deeper into economic hardship."

A Quarter of West Virginians in poverty

A new report by a state budget think tank says that quarter of West Virginians live in poverty. The study says that the effects of poverty are even worse on the state's children. Every time that state's poverty percentage climbs just one percent, it puts another 8,000 children in poverty.

From The Charleston Gazette, Alison Knezevich has this analysis of the report.

The recession could increase the number of children living below the poverty line by more than a third, to 34 percent, say analysts at the West Virginia Center on Budget & Policy. Economists define the poverty line as a household income of $21,910 or less for a family of four.

On Thursday, the U.S. Census Bureau released data showing that 13.2 percent of Americans lived in poverty in 2008 -- the most since 1997. State and local figures are set to come out Sept. 22.

But "this data that's coming out ... is not going to really reflect the reality of West Virginia today," said Paul Miller, a policy analyst at the center. "The worst is still on the horizon for West Virginia's children."

That's because West Virginia entered the recession later than most states, he said. The U.S. Census poverty rates are based on data from last year -- when only 4.5 percent of West Virginians were unemployed. This July, the state's unemployment rate was 8.6 percent, according to Workforce West Virginia's latest data.

The state's poverty rates were high even before the recession hit. About one in five West Virginians lived below the poverty line, and one in four children did, Miller said.

Applications for public assistance are also growing at a staggering rate as more West Virginians turn to programs like the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps.

Between November 2008 and June 2009, food-stamp caseloads grew 20 percent, according to data the state Department of Health and Human Resources gave to Miller. In the 22 months before that, cases had grown only 6 percent.

Helping the world's poor to save money

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has issued a new grant that will help develop savings for the world's poor. The grant is 35 million dollars, and will go to help develop saving systems in the third world.

Those who are in poverty in the under-developed world have never had safe places to save their money. While microcredit has done a good job in extending credit to the poorest, savings services has been lagging.

From ABC News, this Associated Press story talks to an organization who will receive some of the grant to spur new ideas for extending savings accounts to the world's poor.

The Gates Foundation is providing an infusion of cash to facilitate the sharing of ideas among the innovators and to make sure the new systems offer a wide range of financial services.

Alfred Hannig, executive director of the Alliance for Financial Inclusion, said banking innovation is happening in developing countries without the foundation's help, but the money will help speed implementation.

The alliance has a goal of reaching 50 million of the world's "unbanked" by 2012.

In a phone call from Nairobi, Kenya, where the alliance was hosting a meeting for representatives of 42 countries, Hannig said that plans are being made for a delegation from Kenya to go to Brazil to learn about that country's efforts to bring banking services to small villages along the Amazon River.

"People were waiting for this," said Hannig, who works for the German Technical Corporation and is based in Thailand. "This was very timely. They have been waiting for such a mechanism for such a long time."

Hannig said 60 percent of the money from the Gates Foundation will be redistributed in smaller grants to groups like the delegation from Kenya to Brazil, and the Bank of Thailand, which wants to measure banking access around the world through a survey.

4 in 10 Wisconsin students need school lunch assistance

A new report from a Wisconsin non-profit finds that 4 out of 10 Wisconsin students need help with affording school lunches. The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism study says that the proportion of children needing free or reduced price lunches has been growing every year this decade.

Reporters Jacob Kushner and Kryssy Pease analyzed data from the Wisconsin public schools for their report. Our snippet of their story comes from the La Crosse Tribune.

The nonprofit center found the proportion of Wisconsin elementary students eligible for subsidized lunches hit 37.6 percent last year, up from 30.3 percent in 2000.

The proportion of low-income students grew at least two-fold in 47 of 411 public school districts during the period, reflecting the toll of the worsening economy and what some experts call a growing threat to education in Wisconsin.

This school year, a household of four earning $28,665 or less would qualify for free lunch. Families earning $40,793 or less qualify for reduced-price lunch.

More than 90 percent of the growth in the low-income elementary student population since 2000 occurred outside of Milwaukee, the center's analysis found.

Green Bay has the state's fifth-largest school district, but its low-income population grew by 2,398 elementary students, representing the largest increase of any school system. Districts in Madison and Kenosha also added more low-income elementary students in the past nine years than Milwaukee, Wisconsin's largest school district.

Since 2000, the La Crosse School District has seen participation in the subsidized lunch program rise from 35.5 percent to nearly 43 percent.

Two million children starving in Bangladesh

The UN's World Food Program says that two million children are barely able to survive in Bangladesh. The WFP worries that another economic crisis could push more people in jeopardy, as the country is starving from the hikes in food prices last year, and the global recession.

From this AFP story that we found at The Raw Story we read more of the situation in Bangladesh.

World Food Programme (WFP) country head John Aylieff said two million children aged under five in Bangladesh are suffering from acute malnutrition, which by World Health Organization standards represents a "nutritional emergency."

"The population is beyond the razor's edge, so that any other economic shock is going to have an immediate and direct impact on malnutrition," Aylieff told AFP.

Bangladesh was cushioned from the worst ravages of the global financial meltdown, but experts warn remittances and exports could be badly hit towards the end of this year.

In addition, the WFP is facing a global funding crisis, raising only 3.7 billion of the 6.7 billion dollars needed for its food assistance programmes worldwide in 2009.

In Bangladesh, it had planned programmes to help 6.9 million "completely destitute" people this year, but Aylieff said four million fell through the funding net.

"These are the bottom of the poverty scale. These are the ones micro-credit institutions wouldn't dream of looking at," Aylieff said.

Food prices in Bangladesh almost doubled in 2008 after the country's grain production was devastated by major flooding and a catastrophic cyclone the previous year, pushing an extra 7.5 million people below the poverty line, according to the WFP.

US health Care Plan may make it harder for the poor

Criticism continues to poor in on the US Health Care proposal that has just been released from the Senate Finance Committee.

Many of the reforms are based on the Health Care plan in Massachusetts. Since enacted in the state, the government has had trouble keeping up with the increasing prices for health care, especially during the global recession. In fact, some unintended effects of the plan have made it harder for the poor to receive health care. Critics say that the problem with the federal reform bill is that is patterned after Massachusetts plan.

From the IPS, Adrienne Appel explains how the Massachusetts plan has made it harder on the poor.

All the major plans in Congress are mirrored after the reforms in Massachusetts, including the requirement that everyone purchase insurance at market rates - which grow yearly - or face a hefty fine. The fine is up to 1,000 dollars in Massachusetts.

"Once failure to buy health insurance is a federal offence, what's next?" Steffie Woolhandler, a Harvard physician and member of Physicians for a National Health Programme, recently told a Congressional committee.

The Massachusetts reforms were crafted three years ago by Republican Governor Mitt Romney, the venture capitalist and presidential candidate.

"The Massachusetts plan is not sustainable. It contained no cost control and raised no new revenues. We're basically just spending money," Benjamin Day, executive director of MassCare, which campaigns for a single-payer system, told IPS.
...

The Massachusetts reforms are attractive to Congress because the state outlawed abuses by insurers and cut in half the number of people without insurance, meaning that 97.4 percent of residents were insured, the highest percentage of any state.

But, "Skimpy, overpriced coverage like this left one in six Massachusetts residents unable to pay their medical bills last year," Woolhandler said.

The requirement that all residents buy health insurance or be penalised is a centrepiece of proposals being debated by Congress, though it has proved highly unpopular in Massachusetts and surprisingly unsuccessful.

About 352,000 people in 2008 chose to be fined rather than pay 4,000 dollars or more per year for health insurance, according to figures just released by the U.S. Census.

The Massachusetts reforms were enacted two years ago to try to decrease the hundreds of thousands of people showing up at hospital emergency rooms desperate for health care and with no money to pay for it.

There was a system in place to cover this care, a tax on wealthier hospitals that was redistributed to poor hospitals that provided most of this free care, and it was working well. But the wealthy hospitals asked for reforms.

"The individual mandate is a huge boon for insurers. And hospitals got a huge rate increase," Day said.

"Patients are not an organised group and they had no voice, much less uninsured people. It's not quite the ideal political experience," he said.

"We had a free care pool for the uninsured and for many people it was better than what we have today," Day added.

The poor now have to purchase drugs that previously were free, and pay every time they see a doctor or go to the hospital.

Poor people continue to seek free care at hospitals and clinics, but under the reforms the hospitals are no longer compensated for this care. The clinics and hospitals are buckling under the stress, and have had to cut staff and programmes.

Boston Medical Centre, which treats anyone regardless of ability to pay, is reimbursed just 64 cents for every one dollar it spends, it says. It is suing the state as a last resort.

Health reform "should not and cannot be financed on the backs of the poor. We hope our suit serves as a cautionary tale to federal policymakers as they take up national health care reform," said the hospital's CEO, Elaine Ullian.

Another way to move out of the slums

Yesterday, we linked to a story about a microcredit bank in Kenya that is developing a livable neighborhood for former slum dwellers.

Today, we find a government program in Kenya that moves residents out of Nairobi's Kibera slum into a decent housing. Over half of the city's population lives in one of 100 Nairobi slums.

From this IRIN story that we found at Reuters Alert Net, we learn more about the step up the former slum dwellers receive.

"I can't believe I have left Kibera for good! My new home is so clean, we have a toilet inside the house; it is a dream come true," Pius Okello, 46, father of six, said.

Okello, who had lived in Kibera's Soweto East zone for 10 years, was one of those who moved on 16 September. The government provided trucks and workers to help the residents settle into their new homes, which they have dubbed 'Canaan', the Promised Land.

Kibera is one of the largest informal settlements in sub-Saharan Africa. According to HABITAT, estimates of its population range from 500,000 to 800,000, with densities of over 3,000 people per hectare - one of the most densely populated informal settlements in the world.

The monthly rent for a room in the new flats, about a kilometre from Kibera, is Ksh 500 (US$7) and tenants pay an additional Ksh300 ($4) for electricity and Ksh200 ($2.5) for water. The kitchen, toilet and bathrooms are shared but if a family takes three rooms, they get exclusive use of these facilities.

"I took three rooms because I have six children and I take care of four other children of my dead brother when schools close; at least now my wife and I have our privacy and the children have a bedroom for the first time," Okello said.

"The only problem is that I feel that water and electricity charges are high because they are charged per room; I should be charged a single fee for the whole house."

The ongoing $300,000 Kenya Slum Upgrading Programme (KENSUP) was mooted in 2000, and jointly funded by the government, UN HABITAT and the World Bank Cities Alliance.

New statistics from the UN

The United Nations has a new report out today that says that pledges in aid from the G-8 have not been fulfilled. The report from the Millennium Development Goal task force was put together for the General Assembly. The task force also says that there are now 1.3 billion people around the world below the poverty line.

We go to two different sources for this post as each story covers different aspects of the report. First, from this IRIN story that we found in Reuters Alert Net, we read more about the unfulfilled pledges.

The report, Strengthening the Global Partnership for Development in a Time of Crisis, by the UN Millennium Development Goal (MDG) Gap Task Force, highlighted an annual gap of US$35 billion in the 2005 pledge made by the Group of Eight (G8) industrialized countries at a summit in Gleneagles, United Kingdom.

This amount includes a $20 billion annual shortfall in its commitments to Africa, even though 2008 saw the highest levels of development assistance to the continent.

In a preface to the report UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon recognized that since the adoption of the MDGs in 2000 there had been "great progress" in reducing poverty and hunger, and promoting access to education and health services.

This New York Times story that we found at the Dallas Morning News has stats on the global recession's impact on the poor.

Other grim statistics:

• As many as 222 million workers run the risk of joining the ranks of the working poor.

• Remittance flows, which reached $328 billion in 2008, will drop by 7.3 percent in 2009, the World Bank says.

• Hunger rates are up in every region in the world, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.

Great examples of volunteerism

Too many times people who get into volunteering are looking for what they can get out of it, instead of what they can put into it. We found a couple of great examples of volunteerism in a story from Mississippi's Clarion Ledger.

The story profiles a trio of college students who went overseas to help. Some of the duties they did over the summer were just simple chores, or long walks to village to village.

We will focus on two of the students for our snippet. Writer Galen Holley introduces us to Ben Long, and Sally McDonnell.

"It was probably the most challenging and most rewarding experience of my life," said Ben Long, a sophomore in the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College at the University of Mississippi.

What started as a language immersion trip for college credit turned into a life-changing experience for the Corinth native.

Long spent a month learning Spanish with friends in Costa Rica but when his time was up he felt restless. Since nothing back home demanded his immediate attention he hoped a plane to Guatemala. Despite being pretty much alone, Long threw himself headlong into helping at hospitals and orphanages.

"I didn't really have a plan," he said, recalling how his shaky Spanish and willingness to do whatever was needed helped him navigate the native culture for almost two months.

"I just trusted God was leading me in the right direction," he said.
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Maria Presley of Shannon started the summer in Mozambique working with AIDS patients. A grant from Emory University, where she's enrolled in divinity school, allowed her to help destitute women and to study ethnic and religious conflicts. After a month of working with native people, Presley set out alone across western Africa.

"I just tried to engage in as many conversations as I could and to learn as much as I could about how people talk about conflict and how they deal with it," she said.
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Presley's motivation stemmed from her belief that everyone is "called to place ourselves outside ourselves and to push beyond what makes us comfortable."

The World Bank tries to influence the G-20 meeting

Whenever a meeting of industrialized nations approaches the World Bank usually issues a report to nation heads, with suggestions on what the leaders should discuss or decide. The G-20 will gather in Pittsburgh next week, so the World Bank is asking the leaders to not forget the poor nations.

The bank says it sees signs that the global economic crisis is over, but warns the under developed world will be the last to recover. The Bank is also calling on an increase in agricultural assistance which the G-8 promised to aid earlier this year.

From the Wall Street Journal we find out more about what World Bank has to say. Reporter Tom Barkley recieved some quotes from the Bank's president Robert Zoellick.

In a report prepared for G-20 leaders meeting in Pittsburgh next week, the bank warned that the global crisis is poised to push an additional 89 million people into extreme poverty by the end of next year if additional help isn't provided.

"The poorest countries may not be well represented on the G-20, but we cannot ignore the long-term costs of the global downturn on their people's health and education," World Bank President Robert Zoellick said.

The bank said recent developments suggest the global recession "may be coming to an end," including signs that the slowdown in production and trade may be over.

But low-income countries that were the last to get hit by the global slump are expected to take longer to emerge, still suffering from a drop in the capital, trade and remittance flows their economies depend on.

"With the world economy still fragile and signs of global recovery tentative, low-income countries face a long and muted recovery," the report said.

Low-income countries as a group are expected to face an external financing gap of $59 billion this year. With private financing flows on the decline, these countries will become even more dependent on external aid, the bank said.

Exports of low-income countries are poised to fall 5% to 10% this year, with remittances expected to decline 5% to 7%. Private capital flows are expected to drop to $13 billion this year from $21.4 billion in 2008, according to the bank.

Canada receives a grade on poverty

A new report shows that Canada has shown a little improvement on poverty levels since last year, compared to other wealthy nations. However, Canada ranks near the bottom on a scale of all the developed nations, with only the U.S. and Japan ranking lower.

From this story in the Canadian Press hosted at Google, we learn more about this new report.

A Conference Board of Canada ranking says with more than 12 per cent of the working age population in poverty, Canada ranks 15th out of 17 developed countries, ahead of only Japan and the U.S.

The annual report also suggests more than one in seven Canadian children lives in poverty, resulting in a 13th place ranking.

Conference Board president Anne Golden says considering how wealthy Canada is, "these rates of poverty are unacceptable."

In the overall society category - which measures 17 indicators - Canada ranks ninth, an improvement of one place from last year.

A microcredit way to move the poor out of slums

This is a story from last week, but it's a great one about moving people out of the slums of Nairobi. The microcredit firm Jamii Bora Trust is the subject of this Seattle Times article.

One of the products that the Trust offers is a low interest mortgage program. Payments are kept at about the same levels as paying rent in the slums. Once they escape the slums, the people can also easily escape poverty.

Writer Jim Simon visited the village that the Jasmii Bora Trust has built.

On the second night in her new house here, Jane Ngoiri told one of her children to get something out of the kitchen.

Then she started laughing.

"I told them, 'It is us talking about a kitchen. A kitchen!' " recalled Ngoiri, a former prostitute who moved with her four children earlier this year from a rented, one-room shanty in the Nairobi slum of Mathare.

"It's unbelievable."

Kaputei represents an audacious leap for both Ngoiri and the Jamii Bora Trust, a Kenyan microfinance organization that began a decade ago lending 50 women beggars money to start their own businesses.

About 22 miles outside of Nairobi, rows of cinder-block houses topped with red tile roofs spread across the plains — the first stage of a new, self-contained town that Jamii Bora hopes will someday be home to 10,000 people, schools, shops and small industry.

Ngoiri paid 350,000 Kenyan shillings — about $4,500 — for her two-bedroom house with a kitchen, toilet and bath. Her mortgage is around $40 a month — not much more, she says, than what she paid to rent the cramped room in Mathare.

To keep costs down, Jamii Bora is manufacturing the building materials on site, providing jobs to its members and others living nearby. Kaputei is also an eco-town of sorts, with houses powered by solar panels and an ambitious plan to recycle 70 percent of the wastewater through man-made wetlands.

"It's really beyond the wildest imagination of what most microfinance organizations are thinking about," said Ed Bland, who heads Seattle-based Unitus, which provides business and technical expertise and helps raise capital for Jamii Bora and other microfinance groups.

"They are taking on things that others just complain about."

An update on the hunger in Sudan

This is a story we meant to link to last night, but tractor repairs got in the way. From the IRIN, an update on the humanitarian and hunger situation in Sudan.

Recent assessments found that up to 1.3 million people were food insecure - an increase of 20 percent on earlier projections. Most of these were in Jonglei and Eastern Equatoria states where needs have tripled and doubled respectively, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (Fews Net) said in a September update.

Current food insecurity, it added, would persist until late October, when harvests were expected. Despite predictions of a high probability of normal to above normal rainfall between September and December, delayed crops were at risk of flooding - something which is common in Southern Sudan.

"Persistent inter-clan and inter-tribal cattle raiding conflicts since last year, and last year's crop shortfalls caused by June-August dryness followed by floods, have been the main causes of food insecurity," it noted.

"Below average rains from May through August have now dampened the prospects for recovery that were expected with the onset of the September-October harvest, which has now been delayed."

More on the life of Dr. Norman Borlaug

The recent passing of Dr. Norman Borlaug was probably the first time many Americans heard of one of their countrymen. However Dr. Borlaug's life work was so important that it resulted is saving over one billion lives.

From the Wall Street Journal, commentator Gregg Easterbrook tells us how important Dr. Borlaug was.

In the mid-1960s, India and Pakistan were exceptions to the trend toward more efficient food production; subsistence cultivation of rice remained the rule, and famine struck. In 1965, Borlaug arranged for a convoy of 35 trucks to carry high-yield seeds from CIMMYT to a Los Angeles dock for shipment to India and Pakistan. He and a coterie of Mexican assistants accompanied the seeds. They arrived to discover that war had broken out between the two nations. Sometimes working within sight of artillery flashes, Borlaug and his assistants sowed the Subcontinent's first crop of high-yield grain. Paul Ehrlich gained celebrity for his 1968 book "The Population Bomb," in which he claimed that global starvation was inevitable for the 1970s and it was "a fantasy" that India would "ever" feed itself. Instead, within three years of Borlaug's arrival, Pakistan was self-sufficient in wheat production; within six years, India was self-sufficient in the production of all cereals.

After his triumph in India and Pakistan and his Nobel Peace Prize, Borlaug turned to raising crop yields in other poor nations especially in Africa, the one place in the world where population is rising faster than farm production and the last outpost of subsistence agriculture. At that point, Borlaug became the target of critics who denounced him because Green Revolution farming requires some pesticide and lots of fertilizer. Trendy environmentalism was catching on, and affluent environmentalists began to say it was "inappropriate" for Africans to have tractors or use modern farming techniques. Borlaug told me a decade ago that most Western environmentalists "have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists in wealthy nations were trying to deny them these things."

Environmentalist criticism of Borlaug and his work was puzzling on two fronts. First, absent high-yield agriculture, the world would by now be deforested. The 1950 global grain output of 692 million tons and the 2006 output of 2.3 billion tons came from about the same number of acres three times as much food using little additional land.

"Without high-yield agriculture," Borlaug said, "increases in food output would have been realized through drastic expansion of acres under cultivation, losses of pristine land a hundred times greater than all losses to urban and suburban expansion." Environmentalist criticism was doubly puzzling because in almost every developing nation where high-yield agriculture has been introduced, population growth has slowed as education becomes more important to family success than muscle power.

In the late 1980s, when even the World Bank cut funding for developing-world agricultural improvement, Borlaug turned for support to Ryoichi Sasakawa, a maverick Japanese industrialist. Sasakawa funded his high-yield programs in a few African nations and, predictably, the programs succeeded. The final triumph of Borlaug's life came three years ago when the Rockefeller Foundation, in conjunction with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, announced a major expansion of high-yield agriculture throughout Africa. As he approached his 90s, Borlaug "retired" to teaching agronomy at Texas A&M, where he urged students to live in the developing world and serve the poor.

Often it is said America lacks heroes who can provide constructive examples to the young. Here was such a hero. Yet though streets and buildings are named for Norman Borlaug throughout the developing world, most Americans don't even know his name.

Political prisoners in Burma double in two years

Human Rights Watch released a report today that says that the number of political prisoners in Burma has doubled in only two years. Many of the prisoners were arrested after peaceful demonstrations in 2007, or for helping in the relief efforts after Cyclone Nargis in 2008.

The press release of the report from Human Rights provides more information of the cirumstances of the imprisonments. You can download the full report titled "Burma's Forgotten Prisoners," from their website.

Political opponents, activists and others with the courage to speak out against military rule or criticize government actions or policies have been routinely locked up in Burma's prisons for years. There are 43 known prisons holding political activists in Burma, while more than 50 labor camps where prisoners are forced to perform hard labor.

Repression increased after the popular uprising led in part by monks in August and September 2007 was crushed by the government. Closed courts and courts inside prisons have held unfair trials and sentenced more than 300 political figures, human rights defenders, labor activists, artists, journalists, comedians, internet bloggers, and Buddhist monks and nuns to lengthy prison terms. Some prison terms have been for more than 100 years. The activists were mainly charged under provisions of Burma's archaic penal code that criminalizes free expression, peaceful demonstration, and forming of independent organizations. More than 20 prominent activists and journalists, including Burma's most famous comedian, Zargana, were arrested for having spoken out about obstacles to humanitarian relief following Cyclone Nargis, which struck Burma in May 2008.

The world was reminded of the brutality of the military government after the arrest, protracted and unfair trial and conviction of Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi in August after an American intruder broke into her house. Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy party won the last Burmese elections in 1990, has been in prison or house arrest for 14 of the past 20 years.

"Gaining the release of Suu Kyi is important not just for her own well-being, but because it could facilitate a process that allowed the opposition to fully participate in elections and Burmese society," said Malinowski. "But Suu Kyi is not the only person facing persecution for her political beliefs. People like the comedian Zargana, imprisoned for criticizing the government's pathetic response to Cyclone Nargis, or Su Su Nway, a brave woman activist who led street protests, also deserve the world's attention."

"Burma's Forgotten Prisoners" spotlights the cases of political prisoners including:

* Zargana: In November 2008, a Rangoon court sentenced prominent comedian and social activist Zargana to 59 years in jail - a sentence later reduced to 35 years - for disbursing relief aid and talking to the international media about his frustrations in assisting victims of Cyclone Nargis. Zargana was previously detained for a year following the 1988 pro-democracy demonstrations in Burma, and jailed for four years in 1990-94 for making political speeches. Police rearrested Zargana in September 2007 for publicly supporting the protests by monks, and detained him for 20 days. Zargana is serving his sentence in a prison in Myitkyina, Kachin State, in northern Burma, which is known for its bitterly cold winter and is difficult for relatives to reach. His mother Daw Kyi Oo died in March 2009, while Zargana was in prison.
* U Gambira: On November 4, 2007, Burmese authorities arrested 28-year-old U Gambira, one of the main leaders of the All-Burma Monks Alliance, which had spearheaded the September 2007 protests. On the day of U Gambira's arrest, the Washington Post published an opinion piece in which he wrote: "The regime's use of mass arrests, murder, torture and imprisonment has failed to extinguish our desire for the freedom that was stolen from us so many years ago." On November 21, 2007, U Gambira was sentenced to a total of 68 years in prison (since reduced to 63 years), including 12 with hard labor. His brother Aung Ko Ko Lwin received 20 years in prison for hiding him, and was sent to Kyaukpyu prison in Arakan state, while his brother-in-law Moe Htet Hlyan was also jailed for helping him while he was being pursued by the authorities.
* Su Su Nway: In 2005, labor rights activist Su Su Nway became the first person to successfully prosecute local officials for the imposition of forced labor, a common human rights violation in Burma. Su Su Nway, who suffers from a heart condition, was subsequently sentenced to one and a half years of imprisonment in October 2005 on charges of "using abusive language against the authorities." In 2006, she was awarded the John Humphrey Freedom Award by the Canadian human rights group Rights and Democracy. She was rearrested in November 2007, after leading peaceful protests earlier that year. In November 2008, she was sentenced to 12-and-a-half years in prison after being charged with treason and "intent to cause fear or harm to the public."

The US health insurance bill unveiled

The compromise health bill that the U.S. Senate Finance Committee worked on is to be unveiled today. Some compromises have been achieved on the health insurance bill, and that seems to give the bill only more opponents. More Democrats are citing concerns that the bill will be too costly to middle income Americans.

For some of the nuts and bolts within the bill, we turn to this article from the Wall Street Journal. Writers Greg Hitt and Janet Adamy give us the details.

The Baucus bill would provide federal subsidies to individuals and families with incomes as high as 300% of the federal poverty line. For people whose incomes fall between 300% and 400% of the poverty line, the bill would cap premiums at 13% of income.

Critics complain the 13% cap is too high and would impose unreasonable costs on middle-income family budgets. But Finance Committee aides argue that tens of millions of Americans would still benefit from the cap.

Republicans, meanwhile, have been seeking other changes to the bill. In private negotiations led by Mr. Baucus, Sen. Charles Grassley (R., Iowa) made a push this week to drop the proposed mandate requiring individuals to buy insurance. Instead, he has proposed creating a new "reinsurance pool" to help spread the risks associated with high-cost patients.

In a statement released late Tuesday, Mr. Grassley complained the Senate Democratic leadership is imposing an "artificial deadline" on the bipartisan talks led by Mr. Baucus, but vowed to "continue to work with" the chairman.

Health Care for America Now, a liberal advocacy group, estimates that a family of four earning $77,175 a year could pay as much as $10,033 a year for health insurance under Sen. Baucus's proposal. That is about $2,000 a year more than they would pay under a health bill passed through the Senate's Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, as well as under two of the three bills passed through House committees.

Mr. Baucus's bill would also place higher caps than other versions on the amount consumers would pay for out-of-pocket health-care expenses. It would allow insurance companies to charge older customers premiums that are as much as five times as high as those for younger customers, a provision sought by insurance companies. The other bills would restrict them from charging older customers more than twice as much.

Oxfam warns against raiding funds for climate change

Oxfam is warning against diverting funds away from poverty fighting to pay for climate change funding.

A new report from Oxfam estimates that 4.5 million children could die if funds are raided from poverty fighting measures, and are used instead for global warming. Oxfam is calling for the international community to raise another $50 billion dollars a year for environment measures.

From this Press Association article that we found at The Guardian, we read more of Oxfam's warning against aid "raiding".

And it says the money must be provided in addition to the 0.7% of GDP developed nations have pledged as aid to improve the lives of people in some of the world's poorest countries – or efforts to tackle poverty will stall.

A report by Oxfam warns that diverting $50bn from existing aid pledges to fund climate measures would lead to the death of 4.5 million children, while 75 million fewer youngsters would be likely to go to school and 8.6 million fewer people would have access to HIV/Aids treatment.

It could prove a major setback to efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals which aim to end hunger and poverty and boost education, health, gender equality and environmental sustainability by 2015, the report warns.

Oxfam said it was already seeing people going without food, pulling their children out of school or selling livestock to pay for debts caused by failing crops and other climate-related problems.

According to the aid agency, just three countries including the UK are in favour of additional funding for climate measures – and the issue could prove to be a deal breaker in the upcoming crunch talks aimed at agreeing global emissions cuts in Copenhagen in December.

A failure by developed countries to address the problems surrounding adaptation funding has led to distrust between the two sides and could undermine efforts to secure a deal to cut emissions.

2009 World Development Report from the World Bank

This year's Global Development Report from the World Bank has a lot to say about global warming. The Bank is calling on the world to act differently in regards to climate change and begin to put development money into green energy sources. The Bank says that the effects of climate change through higher temperatures, flooding and natural disasters will be felt first by under-developed nations.

However, the Bank does this while admitting it funds coal-fired plants for development. This enters the Bank onto a double edged sword of development. Sometimes, coal-fired plants could be the most viable option for development. When the costs of bringing green energy to an under-developed nation are too great, and the need for energy by those who don't have it is even greater. However, the coal plants could do harm to developing nations if they do contribute to climate change.

From The Times analysis of the report, writer Ben Webster looks into coal projects the World Bank funds. For the full report, you can download it from the World Bank's website.

The 260-page report advises against “locking the world into high-carbon infrastructure” but makes no mention of the bank’s plans to subsidise coal power plants in India, South Africa, Botswana and other developing countries.

Last year the bank and its partner, the Asian Development Bank, approved $850million in loans to finance a coal-fired plant in Gujarat, western India.

The Environmental Defence Fund, a US lobby group, said that the plant, the first of nine planned in India, would be one of the biggest new sources of greenhouse gases on Earth, emitting 26.7million tonnes of CO2 a year for the next 50 years.

The bank is also contributing $5billion towards South Africa’s power generation expansion plan, which includes six coal plants.

Marianne Fay, the bank’s chief economist for sustainable development, said that coal was the cheapest and most secure way to deliver electricity to the 1.6billion people without it. She said: “There are a lot of poor countries which have coal reserves and for them it’s the only option. The [bank’s] policy is to continue funding coal to the extent that there is no alternative and to push for the most efficient coal plants possible. Frankly, it would be immoral at this stage to say, ‘We want to have clean hands, therefore we are not going to touch coal’.”

Tim Jones, policy officer of the World Development Movement, which campaigns to reduce poverty, said: “The World Bank is acting in the interests of Western countries and companies and not in the long-term interests of the world’s poor.

“It is an absolute disgrace that money meant for clean technologies will actually be used for building new coal power stations. Every pound of green aid that will be spent on funding coal power through the World Bank is money that should be spent on supporting renewable energy in developing countries.”

The bank said that it had lent $5billion for fossil fuel projects in the past three years and $11billion for “low-carbon” alternatives.

WFP stops feeding Somalia

The World Food Programme has decided to close feeding centers in Somalia. In most cases it's the only access that people there have to food. The WFP says they have run out of money and blame a lack of funding from governments throughout the world.

The WFP is also out of food for Kenya, who is experiencing their worst drought in decades. WFP feeding programs in Ethiopia and Uganda have also had cutbacks.

From the BBC, reporter Martin Plaut explains this sad development.

The decision has been made despite the ongoing crisis in Somalia, and the WFP says the reductions are now hitting people across east Africa.

Despite the depth of the need, the WFP says the international community has failed to rally round with the funding it requires.
...

The cuts could hardly have come at a more serious moment - the conflict in Somalia has driven tens of thousands to flee from their homes.

And the country is also suffering from a severe drought.

As a result the UN estimates that more than three million Somalis need food aid - half the total population.

Put another way, one child in five is acutely malnourished, yet the WFP is having to close the services on which they depend.

Canada tries to give Haiti "everything"

Canadian aid is very important to Haiti. Canada will give more than a half a billion dollars to Haiti in the span of five years. It's a lot, but Haiti is a country that needs "everything" and very few Canadians are aware of the great amount of work that is done there.

Writer Laura Payton has a long piece in the Canada's Ottawa Citizen tries to explain the work of aid to Haiti.

Outside government circles, few people are aware of the work Canada is doing in Haiti, says Carlo Dade, executive director of the Canadian Foundation for the Americas (FOCAL). "Without us, a lot of children wouldn't get fed every day."

Without Canada, there are a lot of things that wouldn't get done.

Brazil, the U.S. and other countries in the Americas are also benefactors to the troubled island nation.

Last week, in a status report on the country, the UN Security Council expressed "cautious optimism." Former U.S. president Bill Clinton, a UN envoy, said, "I am convinced that Haiti has a remarkable opportunity to escape the chains of its past."

Everyone interviewed about security, aid and development work in Haiti agrees on one thing. Asked what the country needs most, their response was unanimous and emphatic: "Everything."

Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere. Its population is just more than nine million, crammed into an area roughly one-third the size of New Brunswick. Per capita GDP was only $1,300 U.S. last year (Canada's was $39,300 U.S.). Eighty per cent of Haitians live below the poverty line, more than two-thirds of the population don't have a formal job, and just more than 52 per cent can read. Without proper sanitation, infectious disease rates are high. Food is so scarce there were riots in 2008 when prices rose.

While it was once rich, that wealth was built on the backs of slaves. The French who colonized Haiti brought in nearly half a million slaves, who overthrew them in a revolt in 1804.

Two hundred years later, Haitians are still waiting for stable, democratic government.

Haiti is perched on the western third of Hispaniola Island, which it shares with the Dominican Republic. When planes fly over, passengers can see the border: the Dominican side is lush and green, while the Haitian side is dull and brown. Rampant deforestation — to make charcoal so people can cook without electricity — worsens the natural disasters that hit the island every year, allowing flooding and landslides to flow unabated. In 2008, for example, four hurricanes killed 800 people, left thousands homeless and caused $1 billion in damage.

Corruption in Bangladesh

In a country where 40 percent of the population lives less than a dollar a day, corruption is keeping the Bangladesh economy from improving. People have to pay bribes to get jobs, shop keepers raise their prices to keep up with bribes they have to pay and there are many more examples. Foreign investment dollars will not come into the country until corruption is cleaned up, but do government officials really want to clean it up?

From this great analysis from Reuters, reporter Anis Ahmed details how corruption keeps Bangladesh's economy from moving up.

Global watchdog Transparency International rated Bangladesh the world's most corrupt nation for five consecutive years from 2001. Subsequently the rating improved, to 10th in 2008, after a military-backed interim government took tough anti-graft steps.

However, TIB says its latest research confirms widespread corruption remains, and some others say it is getting worse again. The authories deny that, saying the monitors base their judgment mainly on often inflated media reports.

But people struggling day in and day out to make a living blame corruption for many of their problems.

"You will face it everywhere," said Shahadat Hossain, a teacher at a government primary school.

"I had to pay 100,000 taka ($1,430) as bribe to get this job. But the poor salary I get covers only a part of my expenses," he told Reuters.

"Grocery sellers ask higher prices every next day, doctors at government clinics won't treat my child without money or give me medicine supposed to be a free handout."

The government admits efforts to contain prices and introduce graft-free practices have largely failed, even though populist Prime Minister Hasina, who took office in January following a widely acclaimed democratic election, promised to address them.

"Corruption has spread like cancer in our country and society," said Mahabub Hossain, executive director of Bangladesh's biggest NGO and leading micro-credit agency, BRAC.

Hotline to Zuma

Fiveteen years after apartheid ended the lives of many South Africans have not improved. During the summer, the poor of the country took to the streets in violent protest over the lack of basic services.

Reacting to the protest, recently elected President Jacob Zuma has started a hot line to his office. The purpose of the hot line is so people can complain about the lack of water or electricity or any thing else.

From Reuters Alert Net, we read more about Zuma's efforts to reach out to the rioters.

Zuma, who took office in May, has pledged to do more for the poor, but financial woes in Africa's biggest economy have limited his ability to carry out the main plank of his party's election manifesto.

"You may receive calls from very angry people," Zuma, who took calls himself as the hotline opened, told call centre staff.

"They will say there's no water, there's no electricity," Zuma was quoted by government news agency BuaNews as saying.

Vusi Mona, head of communications in the president's office, said 2,420 calls to the toll-free number were being handled each hour.

States who already having trouble paying for Medicaid

Proposed plans in the U.S. Congress to expand Medicaid have some state governors worried. They fear the proposals could force the states to help pay for the expansion.

State government budgets are already being stretched due to more and more people applying for Medicaid benefits, especially during the recession. Some states are already over budget with their Medicaid programs, and fear an expansion will bust their budgets.

From this story that we found at the Press of Atlantic City, we see some examples of states that having trouble paying for all the people who need insurance.

In New Mexico, 18.4 percent live below the poverty level, well above the national average of 13.3 percent. Medicaid enrollment there has increased nearly 10 percent since mid-2008, and Human Services Secretary Pam Hyde said the program could overspend its budget by $35 million to $40 million this fiscal year.

_ In Michigan, where unemployment hit 15 percent in July, Republicans who control the state Senate propose saving money by trimming 8 percent from the Medicaid reimbursement rates for physicians, hospitals and other health care providers in the state fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.

_ In Georgia, Republican Gov. Sonny Perdue ordered 3 percent funding cuts for Medicaid and public schools and 5 percent cuts for most other state programs because of weak state tax collections in late July, just three weeks into the new fiscal year.

"If we're asked to pick up on state increased costs in health care, it's going to take away from infrastructure, it's going take away from environment, transportation, education, public safety _ all the other things that we as states do," said Perdue, who leads a state where 14.5 percent of residents live below the poverty level, according to the U.S. Census.

In Mississippi, where 21.1 percent of residents live in poverty and 20 percent are enrolled in Medicaid, paying for health care has long been a struggle. Barbour said a mandate to cover more people could lead to tax increases.

Barbour won the Mississippi governorship in 2003 after criticizing a 33 percent growth in Medicaid enrollment in four years under his Democratic predecessor. Enrollment has grown 5 percent since Barbour took office in January 2004. Mississippi saw an unexpected hiccup in Medicaid numbers in March, when enrollment jumped by 21,620. It was the largest single-month increase the program had seen since April 2001.

Flooding may bring disease in West Africa

Rains and floods are hitting West Africa hard. Aid groups on the ground fear that diseases may soon breakout. Standing water that is a meter deep in some areas could cause outbreaks of malaria and cholera.

From CNN, reporter Mark Tutton relays the aid groups concern.

Philippe Conraud, Oxfam's regional humanitarian co-coordinator in Dakar, told CNN that those living in the city's densely populated suburbs have been worst affected by the flooding and are most at risk from diseases such as cholera and malaria.

"The most worrying thing for us is that people are leaving their houses and moving into schools and empty buildings, which brings sanitation problems," he said.

"If the flooding continues and nothing is done to improve sanitation then we may see diseases."

Conraud said Oxfam plans to distribute soap, detergents, mosquito nets and cooking pots to displaced people.

The United Nations reported this week that torrential rains have affected 600,000 people in 16 West African nations since June.

On Tuesday the town of Agadez in northern Niger was deluged by rainwater running down from the Air Mountains, destroying an estimated 3,500 homes and leaving 30,000 people homeless.

Giancarlo Pepe, field coordinator for Doctors Without Borders (DWB), is based in Agadez. He told CNN that the floodwater had subsided but there is now a considerable risk of malaria, cholera and measles as displaced people crowd into schools and other impromptu shelters.

Dr Norman Borlaug, the man who fed the world

A Nobel Peace Prize winner who is credited with expanding food production and fighting world hunger has passed away. Dr. Norman Borlaug died Saturday night at the age of 95.

From this Associated Press story that we found at North Jersey.com we read more of Dr. Borlaug's contribution to the world.

The Nobel committee honored Mr. Borlaug in 1970 for his contributions to high-yield crop varieties and bringing other agricultural innovations to the developing world. Many experts credit the green revolution with averting global famine during the second half of the 20th century and saving perhaps 1 billion lives.

Thanks to the green revolution, world food production more than doubled between 1960 and 1990. In Pakistan and India, two of the nations that benefited most from the new crop varieties, grain yields more than quadrupled.

Equal parts scientist and humanitarian, the Iowa-born Mr. Borlaug realized improved crop varieties were just part of the answer, and pressed governments for farmer-friendly economic policies and improved infrastructure to make markets accessible. A 2006 book about Mr. Borlaug is titled "The Man Who Fed the World."

"He has probably done more and is known by fewer people than anybody that has done that much," said Dr. Ed Runge, retired head of Texas A&M University's Department of Soil and Crop Sciences and a close friend who persuaded Mr. Borlaug to teach at the school. "He made the world a better place — a much better place. He had people helping him, but he was the driving force."

Mr. Borlaug began the work that led to his Nobel in Mexico at the end of World War II. There he used innovative breeding techniques to produce disease-resistant varieties of wheat that produced much more grain than traditional strains.

He and others later took those varieties and similarly improved strains of rice and corn to Asia, the Middle East, South America and Africa.

"More than any other single person of his age, he has helped to provide bread for a hungry world," Nobel Peace Prize committee Chairman Aase Lionaes said in presenting the award to Mr. Borlaug.

Jacqueline Novogratz of the Acumen Fund on defining poverty

A breakdown of the compromise Medicaid expansion plan

A bi-partisan coalition of Senators in the Finance Committee will unveil their plan Medicare to insure more people in the U.S. The chairman of the committee Senator Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat will begin to debate the "Backus" health care plan this week.

Today's Atlanta Journal Constitution has a great breakdown of the plan, including how much it costs, who it will be paid for and more. The plan plans on covering 95 percent of Americans at a cost of 900 billion over 10 years. The plan will not cover illegal immigrants, and hopes to have the states pick up some of the cost.

For our snippet on this story, we go to the New York Times Blogs, writer By David M. Herszenhorn tells us some of the particulars of the plan.

The House legislation, as well as a Senate framework released by Mr. Baucus, calls for raising the income eligibility threshold for Medicaid to 133 percent of the federal poverty level — a figure that for 2009 translates to about $14,400 for an individual.

A big change is that childless adults under age 65 who are now typically excluded from Medicaid will be eligible. So will many parents who now often face tighter restrictions.

Currently, states must offer Medicaid to pregnant women and to children under age 6 from families with income under 133 percent of the poverty level. States must also offer coverage to children age 6 to 18 from families with income below the poverty line.

And though many states have set higher thresholds for children, typically at more than 200 percent of poverty, many parents of these children do not have coverage. Only 11 states cover parents earning more than 133 percent of poverty.

Experts estimate that roughly one-third of Americans who currently lack insurance earn less than 133 percent of the poverty limit — a group of 10 million people who might join Medicare under the proposed new rules.

Global recession lends to human trafficking

The lead investigator on human trafficking to the United Nations says that trafficking is likely to increase due to the global economic recession. The report given to the U.N. general assembly says this is because the root causes of trafficking has escalated as well. Poverty, unemployment, and inequality are said to be the root causes.

From this Associated Press story that we found at the Miami Herald, writer Edith Lederer details the report.

In a report to the General Assembly, Joy Ngozi Ezeilo expressed concern that trafficking ``continues to thrive'' because these root causes are not being sufficiently addressed and ``potential victims become more desperate to escape their unfavorable situations.''

Ezeilo, a human rights lawyer and professor at the University of Nigeria who was appointed by the Geneva-based Human Rights Council job in August 2008, also expressed concern that trafficking victims are sometimes deported ``without a sufficient period for recovery and reflection.''

People who are trafficked should not be detained, charged, prosecuted or summarily deported, she stressed.

``Often, victims of trafficking ... have suffered severe trauma of a physical, sexual or psychological nature and require an enabling environment and the specialized services provided by trained personnel to trust, feel safe to talk about their victimization to, and assist law enforcement officials,'' Ezeilo said.

She expressed concern that governments are not paying adequate attention to the identification of women, children and men trafficked for sexual exploitation and cheap labor, and to measures to protect and assist them.

Rioting in Uganda's capital

A land dispute is fueling violence in the capital of Uganda. Two people died during the second day of rioting.

An ancient kingdom that exists within Uganda claims that land belongs to their kingdom. Ruled by a ceremonial king, this kingdom is engaging in a power struggle with Uganda's government. Many fear more will come as this king plans to make a visit to the disputed territory on Saturday.

From Reuters, reporter Jack Kimball witnessed some of the violence.

Gunshots rang out in the Ugandan capital Kampala on Friday and at least two people were killed as security forces clashed with rioters for a second day.

The violence erupted over land and power disputes between President Yoweri Museveni's government and leaders from Buganda, one of the east African country's four ancient kingdoms.

The largely cultural and ceremonial Buganda king, Kabaka Ronald Mutebi, plans to visit the flashpoint town of Kayunga on Saturday, making it likely there will be more bloodshed.

A Reuters reporter in the capital saw the bodies of two young men with bullet wounds. Witnesses said they had been shot by security forces riding armoured personnel carriers.

One of the dead men was in his 20s and was shot in the chest. The other was a teenager who had been shot in the head and was wrapped in a shawl, surrounded by sobbing relatives.

"This kid was not in the protest. They shot him in a shop," the boy's mother told Reuters. She did not give her name.

Kampala's streets were mostly deserted, and thick plumes of black smoke from burning tyres rose over the city's hills. Police said four people had been killed on Thursday in similar clashes, but denied using excessive force.

Two foreign exchange dealers told Reuters the market was shrugging off the violence, and that they had seen no impact.

Child Mortality drops below 9 million

For this first time ever, the numbers of children dying before their fifth birthday each year are below 9 million. This stat according to new data from UNICEF.

Only four nations saw their rates of child mortality increase, the nations are South Africa, Chad, Congo and Kenya.

From this New York Times story written by Celia Dugger, we read more of the staticists.

The child mortality rate has declined by more than a quarter in the last two decades — to 65 per 1,000 live births last year from 90 in 1990 — in large part because of the widening distribution of relatively inexpensive technologies, like measles vaccines and anti-malaria mosquito nets.

Other simple practices have helped, public health experts say, including a rise in breast-feeding alone for the first six months of life, which protects children from diarrhea caused by dirty water.

Wealthy nations, international agencies and philanthropists like Bill and Melinda Gates have committed billions of dollars to the effort. Schoolchildren and church groups have also pitched in, paying for mosquito nets and feeding programs.

Taken together, they have helped cut the number of children under 5 who died last year to 8.8 million — the lowest since records were first kept in 1960, Unicef said — from 12.5 million in 1990.

“That’s 10,000 less children dying per day,” said Unicef’s executive director, Ann M. Veneman.

Even so, there is still a long way to go before achieving the goal set by leaders of 189 nations in 2000: to cut the child mortality rate by two-thirds by 2015. Pneumonia and diarrhea, the two leading causes of child deaths, are still relatively neglected, especially compared with malaria and measles, experts say.

The Kenyan drought is also taking a toll on elephants

As another example of how bad the drought is in Kenya, now even the elephants are dying. 40 elephants have died in the last two months, and there are no traces of disease found in them.

For more on the droughts effects on Kenya's nature, we go to this Associated Press article hosted at Google News, written by Katharine Houreld.

The bones of the elephants bleaching under a relentless African sun underscore how bad the drought is. It has killed hundreds of cattle and many acres (hectares) of crops, threatening the lives of people who depended on them for food. There are no tallies of deaths among people attributed to the drought but the U.N.'s World Food program said recently that 3.8 million Kenyans are at risk and need emergency food aid.

Zoologist Iain Douglas-Hamilton, who founded Save the Elephants, said the drought is the worst he has seen in 12 years and poses a serious threat to the large and majestic animals, whose striking silhouettes roaming Kenya's broad savannah help draw 1 million tourists each year.

"It may be related to climate change, and the effect is elephants, particularly the young and the old, have began to die," he told AP Television News on Monday. "When they do not have enough food they also seem to be vulnerable to disease, their immune system weakens and they catch all sorts of diseases."

Instead of majestic, many elephants are pitiable.

Elephants, which have no predators, must roam widely to get their daily ration of as much as 200 liters (52 gallons) of water and about 300 kilograms (660 pounds) of grass, leaves and twigs. But the water is disappearing and the grass is all but gone.

In the Samburu National Reserve, APTN video showed a baby elephant appearing to struggle to extract moisture from a dry riverbed. It repeatedly drew its empty trunk up to its mouth. Along the banks of a river in the shadow of Mount Kenya, whose glaciers have been shrinking, an elephant's carcass lay in the baking sun. A dirt field was littered with elephant bones.

As expected, poverty level in U.S. higher for 2008

It's official. The release of the new poverty rate in the U.S. has been released. As expected, the poverty level is higher, and is at it's highest rate since 1997.

From Reuters, writer Lucia Mutikani gives us the statistics.

The Census Bureau said the poverty rate rose to 13.2 percent in 2008, the highest level since 1997, from 12.5 percent in 2007. About 39.8 million Americans were living in poverty, up from 37.3 million in 2007.

The government defines poverty as an annual income of $22,025 for a family of four, $17,163 for a family of three and $14,051 for a family of two.

Real median household income fell 3.6 percent, the biggest annual drop since 1991, to $50,303 in 2008.

"This breaks a string of three years of annual income increases and coincides with the recession that started in December 2007," said David Johnson, head of Housing and Household Economic Statistics Division.

The longest and deepest recession in 70 years has been marked by rising unemployment as companies aggressively cut payrolls to cope with slumping demand.

As of August, the unemployment rate was at 9.7 percent, the highest in 26 years, and almost 7 million people had lost their jobs since the start of the recession.

Analysts said the poverty and income figures underscored the depth of the strain on households.

A Canadian plea for aid to East Africa

Yesterday, Kenya made headlines for the millions of starving people there. Today, a coalition of Canadian aid agencies and advocates broadened their scope to all of East Africa.

Citing the wars in Somalia, and the refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, the Canadian coalition says that 20 million people are starving in East Africa. The group says that years of drought added on top of the violence has led to the starvation.

From The National Post, writer Peter Goodspeed relays the statement.

The Humanitarian Coalition, which includes CARE Canada, Oxfam Canada, Oxfam-Quebec and Save the Children Canada, warns East Africa faces "a perfect storm of crop failures, a multi-year lack of rain, conflicts and political turmoil," which now threatens 20 million people with severe hunger.

In Somalia, where recent fighting between Islamist rebels and Somali government forces backed by African Union peacekeepers has claimed the lives of 2,000 civilians, half the population already needs food assistance and one in five children is severely malnourished.

But fierce new fighting in Mogadishu now threatens a further deterioration in the humanitarian situation and is sending a fresh wave of refugees fleeing.

On Monday, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees announced that more than 250,000 people have been displaced by fighting in Somalia since May, pushing the number of displaced people in the country to 1.55 million.

According to the aid agencies, most of the displaced are women and children who are living without access to water, sanitation or medical care in crowded and badly managed camps in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya.

The Dadaab camp in northeastern Kenya, which was intended to hold 90,000 people, is now one of the world's largest single concentrations of refugees, with almost 300,000 people.

Oxfam officials recently described the camp as "barely fit for humans," saying half the people in the camp have no access to water and women and children rarely have access to adequate latrines.

Yet Oxfam predicts another 100,000 refugees may flee increased fighting in Somalia this year and seek safety in Kenya.

Asking a city council why it's a crime to be poor

A homeless coalition for a small city of Washington state filled a City Council meeting. The Puyallup Homeless Coalition wanted to talk to the council about the "crime" of being poor.

Homeless people have complained of police smashing their tents and telling them to leave city parks, and are increasingly running out of places to stay. A church allowed homeless people to park their cars in their driveway overnight, but that was even stopped due to complaints of neighbors.

From Puyallup's The Herald, writer Neil Pierson attended the meeting.

Scott was just one of numerous homeless persons who filled the Puyallup City Council chambers on Sept. 1. For more than an hour, the group besieged officials to help them find solutions. Many said they simply needed a roof over their heads while they tackled other problems but are finding that task impossible because police officers have been destroying their tents and evicting them from public property.

Ted Brackman, co-founder of the Puyallup Homeless Coalition, said bringing the homeless to a council meeting was a necessary step in helping officials understand the problem’s scope. The coalition was formed nine years and has since grown to include Open Hearth Ministries and the Freezing Nights program, which offers temporary housing during cold weather.

“There’s little change in terms of the official policy in Puyallup towards homeless people,” Brackman said. “So we’re at a crossroads and we wanted the city council to face that.”

Puyallup doesn’t have a dedicated shelter for homeless residents, relying instead on a network of churches and non-profit groups to temporarily provide relief. The homeless say there’s a perpetual cycle: They can’t get a job without an address or phone number and they can’t get those things because they have no money.

Bev Cascio, volunteer coordinator for Open Hearth Ministries, said problems in East Pierce County are growing. Her organization provides temporary relief for the homeless at motels, but there simply aren’t any vacancies these days. The issue affects all age groups: At the end of the last school year, Cascio said, 318 children attending Puyallup schools were considered homeless.

“We are facing a crisis here in Puyallup and we know that as leaders of our community you want to know what’s happening,” Cascio told the council. “Many of the families I’ve been meeting with in recent weeks have hit a wall. They don’t want to be homeless. They are vulnerable and at risk. They are pregnant women and small children and very young parents. They are grandmothers with children.”

Peter Andrews, coordinator of the Puyallup Homeless Coalition, said the city had been donating $5,000 per year to Open Hearth Ministries. This year, in a national recession, the amount dropped to $2,500. Meanwhile, a recent report showed the city spent $860,000 in the past five years to maintain Woodbine Cemetery. Andrews wondered why volunteer groups such as the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts couldn’t take up such a cause.

Cholera outbreak in Ethiopia has infected 18,000 people

Reuters has found a document that tells of a cholera outbreak in Ethiopia that was unknown before now. African governments often keep such outbreaks under wraps for fears on how it will effect tourism and exports. The document that reveals this are minutes of a meeting that was attended by health NGO's and U.N. health leaders.

From the Reuters article, reporter Barry Malone found out that this cholera outbreak has afflicted 18,000 people.

"To date there are approximately 14,000 cases of AWD/Cholera (in the regions) and an additional 4,000 from Addis Ababa," the minutes of the meeting said.

Addis Ababa usually suffers less from diarrhoea epidemics than other parts of the country, but the city's health authorities are investigating the hygiene standards of hundreds of hotels and restaurants, according to local media.

Health workers, who declined to be named, told Reuters the fatality rate was 2 percent when the outbreak began but that it had been reduced as local and international agencies stepped up their response.

"The case fatality rate is falling as the response matures," the minutes of the meeting said. "The epidemic is now in its second phase, case load taking the form of a series of peaks over a protracted period."

Ethiopia's Health Ministry said last week that 34 people had died from AWD but it had not yet confirmed any cholera cases.

The government and international charities are distributing antibiotics and emergency treatment centres have been opened across the country -- including under tents in the grounds of several hospitals in the capital.

Jobless benefits begin to expire

Something is coming along the horizon that could put a further drag on the economy. U.S. unemployment insurance benefits are beginning to run out on those who were laid off early in the recession. Many people receiving jobless benefits have been looking for jobs, but have been unable to find any. State and federal governments are considering extending jobless benefits due to the poor economy.

From the http://www.ajc.com writer Michael E. Kanell gives us more on jobless benefits drying up.

Advocates have called for Congress to pass another extension, an idea that has some bipartisan support. Several bills to extend the benefits were introduced just before Congress took its August recess.

More than 6 million Americans are receiving unemployment benefits, although there are about 15 million officially jobless. In Georgia, only about 60 percent of the half-million jobless receive benefits. Others were not eligible because they quit or were fired, because they have stopped looking for work or were self-employed. Some already exhausted their benefits.

Unemployment checks are calculated from the worker’s former earnings, with a cap of $330 a week. A $25-a-week boost was added by this year’s federal stimulus package.

As more of the unemployed reach the end of their checks, “I think we will see more foreclosures, more descent into poverty,” said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist for the Economic Policy Institute.

The end of benefits also removes a stream of spending that aids the economy, she said.

“The money goes to people who are the most cash-strapped. These people have no choice but to go out and spend that money.”

The federal extension injects nearly $1 billion a week into the economy, according to a report by the National Employment Law Project.

In Georgia, 13,844 people will lose their federally-funded benefits during September, according to the NELP report. By the end of the year, 58,887 Georgians and 1.33 million Americans will have reached that destination.

4 million people are starving in Kenya

A story this morning has a gripping account of the situation faced in Kenya. The country is going through it's worst drought in over a decade. Over 4 million Kenyans are at the point of starving to death.

From The Age, reporter Jeffrey Gettleman Kokori profiles one such victim.

THE sun feels closer in Kenya, more intense, more personal. As Philip Lolua waits under a tree for food, heatwaves ripple up from the desert surface, blurring the dead animal carcasses sprawled in front of him.

His green pasture has turned to dust, his once mighty herd of goats, sheep and camels have died of thirst, his three-year-old son recently died of hunger, and he does not look to be far from death himself.

A devastating drought is sweeping across Kenya, stirring up tension in the slums where the water taps have run dry, and spawning ethnic conflict in the hinterland as communities fight over the last remaining pieces of fertile grazing land.

The twin hearts of Kenya's economy, agriculture and tourism, are especially imperilled. The game animals that safari-goers fly halfway around the world to see are keeling over from hunger and the savanna is littered with sun-bleached bones.

Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia have become almost synonymous with drought and famine. But Kenya is one of the most developed countries in Africa, home to a robust economy.

The aid community has been predicting a disaster for months, saying that the rains had failed once again and that this could be the worst drought in more than a decade. But the Kenyan Government, paralysed by infighting and political manoeuvring, seemed to shrug off the warnings.

So far, a huge international aid operation to avert mass hunger has not kicked in, or at least not to the degree needed. The United Nations World Food Program estimates that nearly 4 million Kenyans - about a tenth of the population - urgently need food. ''Red lights are flashing across the country,'' the agency said.

Promoting Rang De again

Rang De is a website that does peer-to-peer micro lending for start up entrepreneurs in India. People can sign in to Rang De to become investors and help contribute to loans. Investors can invest a little as 250 rupees for loans ranging from 3000 to 10,000. The difference between this site and Kiva is that investors can make a return on their loans.

From this write up on Rang De that we found at Silicon India, we find a profile of an business who is almost finished paying off such a loan.

Rang De Microcredit:
These are loans provided to small enterprises in rural areas. Typically, the loans range in size from Rs.3000 to Rs.10,000 and is usually used as working capital by micro-entrepreneurs. Here's is Kusum's story and what she has done with her loan:

A woman is said to have many facets and Kusum is certainly one of them. The loss of her husband early in life, made this quiet homemaker, a sharp businesswoman. The small cycle shop that she runs, rents out bicycles and also services and repairs other bicycles in the area. A loan from Rang De helped give the shop a face-lift and it now boasts of six new bicycles. Kusum also keeps all the spare parts for bicycles and her shop has become a one-stop shop for everything to do with cycle servicing. She is the happiest when all her cycles are away on hire, as it assures her of a substantial income."Of late, I have handed over a part of the responsibilities of the shop, to my son." says Kusum with a sigh of relief. But she makes sure that her children pursue their education. "I don't want them to face the same problems that I faced." she says with a smile. Just another eight weeks - and she will be free of her loan. For more stories on Kusum and her peers, Check http://rangde.org/home.htm#s/109"

Rang De Education:
Rang De Education was started to provide loans for education needs of low income households. Rang De currently funds the school fees and expenses incurred at the beginning of the academic year by providing education loans. The current pilot is being run in association with an NGO in Hyderabad. For more information on how it works, check http://rangde.org/rangdeEducation.htm"

New study says public assistance should be about more than money

A new research journal challenges public assistance programs, and argues that aid programs should consider other quality of life issues besides money. The new study gives some research to prove that "Money can't buy happiness"

From the Press Release that we found at Science Daily, we learn more of the study from Professor Mariano Rojas.

These findings by Professor Mariano Rojas from Mexico's Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales are published online in Springer's journal, Applied Research in Quality of Life.

The reduction of poverty is one of the main considerations in the design of both domestic and foreign-aid programs. To date, the focus of these programs has been to get people out of poverty by increasing their buying power and there has been an assumption that raising people's income translates into greater well-being. Professor Rojas challenges this assumption and argues that measures of life satisfaction should also be taken into account when designing and evaluating poverty-abatement programs.

Professor Rojas used data from a yearly national survey run by the University of Costa Rica covering the years 2004-2006. In addition to questions about household income and dependency on household income, he added more subjective questions about life satisfaction in general, as well as satisfaction with health, job, family relations, friendship and self, as well as the community environment.

The majority of people rated their lives as satisfactory or more than satisfactory. Not all people who were considered ‘poor' experienced low life satisfaction and not all people who were not considered ‘poor' were happy with their lives. Professor Rojas observed that only 24 percent of people classified as ‘poor' rated their life satisfaction as low. Furthermore, 18 percent of people in the ‘non-poor' category also reported low life satisfaction. It is therefore clear that poverty alone does not define an individual's overall well-being and it is possible for someone to come out of poverty and remain less than satisfied with his life. On the other hand, a person can be satisfied with his life even if his income is low, as long as he is moderately satisfied in other areas of life such as family, self, health, job and economic.

Professor Rojas argues that social programs need to recognize that well-being depends on satisfaction in many domains of life, and that many qualities and attributes need to be considered when designing these programs, including leisure, education, the community and consumer skills (learning to spend higher income sensibly).

Changing the poverty measurement methodology

The method to measure poverty in the U.S. is very outdated. An alternative method to measure poverty has long been advocated by academics, and is only now being taken seriously by the US government. President Obama has said he would like the government Census to use the method as part of a poverty reduction plan.

The new methodology takes into account other expenditures a family has to make like health, transportation and other essentials. It also counts non-income assistance such as food stamps and medicare. The old method only used food as an expenditure and cash as income.

We have a look today at how the new methodt would effect poverty rates in the U.S.. It would mean a huge increase for the elderly, while a small drop for single mothers. From this Associated Press story, reporter Hope Yen crunches the numbers.

The overall official poverty rate would increase, from 12.5 percent to 15.3 percent, for a total of 45.7 million people, according to rough calculations by the Census Bureau. Data on all segments, not only the elderly, would be affected:
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_ The rate for children under 18 in poverty would decline slightly, to 17.9 percent.

_ Single mothers and their children, who disproportionately receive food stamps, would see declines in the rates of poverty because noncash aid would be taken into account. Low-income people who are working could see increases in poverty rates, a reflection of transportation and child-care costs.

_ Cities with higher costs of living, such as New York, Chicago and San Francisco, would see higher poverty rates, while more rural areas in the Midwest and South might see declines.

_ The rate for extreme poverty, defined as income falling below 50 percent of the poverty line, would decrease due to housing and other noncash benefits.

_ Immigrant poverty rates would go up, due to transportation costs and lower participation in government aid programs.

The changes have been discussed quietly for years in academic circles, and both Democrats and Republicans agree that the decades-old White House formula, which is based on a 1955 cost of an emergency food diet, is outdated.

The current calculation sets the poverty level at three times the annual cost of groceries. For a family of four that is $21,203. That calculation does not factor in rising medical, transportation, child care and housing expenses or geographical variations in living costs. Nor does the current formula consider noncash aid when calculating income, despite the recent expansion of food stamps and tax credits in the federal economic stimulus and other government programs. The result: The poverty rate has varied little from its current 12.5 percent.

"Imperative" to complete Doha round of free trade talks

The chief trade talker for the U.S. is saying all the right things on the eve of new global trade talks. U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk says it's "imperative" to reach a global trade deal in light of the economic recession.

From this story in the Mail and Guardian, we see this update of the preliminary talks being held in New Delhi.

President Barack Obama's top trade envoy said the US believed bilateral and multilateral discussions were needed for agreement in the eight-year-old World Trade Organisation (WTO) Doha round, which has been dogged by failure.

He declined to reaffirm 2010 as the deadline for concluding the trade deal, saying that "substance will drive this process, not setting a deadline and timeline".

"The toughest part of a marathon is the last two miles, there is a lot of hard work to be done," he said.

Wealthy nations, including the US, and emerging nations agreed at a summit in July to try to conclude the Doha Development Round in 2010.

Ministers agreed on Friday to resume high-level talks in Geneva on September 14 in a move hailed as a "breakthrough" by Indian Trade Minister Anand Sharma.

Kirk praised India for taking the initiative to host the meeting, which was aimed at setting out a roadmap for concluding the Doha round that seeks to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and boost world commerce.

Flooding in Burkina Faso

Sorry for the lack of post this week, before the an American holiday is usually busy for us, and we've had a schedule change to adjust to.

From Reuters Alert Net, Plan UK details the humanitarian need in Burkina Faso due to the recent flooding.

At least five people have died and thousands been left homeless after severe floods in Burkina Faso yesterday. Over 10 Inches of rainfall was reported on the capital city of Ouagadougou, the most in any 12-hour period since 1953.

Plan is coordinating relief efforts with the government and other agencies, and is appealing for urgent funding support.

It is currently estimated that about 700,000 are affected by the floods, and in the capital city of Ouagadougou 109,000 people have lost their homes and belongings. These people are being hosted in 30 sites around the city while many more are unaccounted for.

In rural areas there have been reports of dozens of collapsed houses and farms with growing crops flooded. Schools, mosques and churches are being used as temporary shelters

Stefanie Conrad, who works for Plan in Burkina Faso has experienced the floods first hand:

"Streets have turned into rivers and where water has started to recede, there is mud and dirt. Some areas of the city have become inaccessible as bridges have collapsed," she said.

More Rich Country vs Poor Country

In another round of the battle between Rich Country vs Poor Country. A mini-meeting of ministers of the World Trade Organization is about take place in India. Ahead of the meeting, comes a statement from over 125 NGO's on behalf of the poor countries. Among the accusations listed in the statement: a failed global agricultural system, a lack of access to food, an increase in hunger, and an erosion of farmers incomes.

From the IPS, reporter Isolda Agazzi tells us more of what's contained in the statement, and it's hopes of influencing the upcoming meetings of the WTO.

The signatories to the letter argue that the WTO talks at the moment do not constitute a "development round" and that greater trade liberalisation would not help poor countries recover from the economic and food crisis.

They point out that the deregulation of trade in agriculture has led to the abolition of commodities boards that helped to manage supply and to their replacement by volatile and speculative commodity markets.

Moreover, the global agricultural system allows rich countries to subsidise their farmers. The subsidised products flow into developing countries’ markets, "representing unfair competition to local farmers", destroying livelihoods and increasing hunger.

The NGOs point out that even where export subsidy limits exist, the U.S. and the EU regularly violate them and dump their agricultural products on developing countries’ markets, ruining farming communities.

Another serious problem, according to the NGOs, lies in the global trading system that does not allow developing countries to protect and support local food production for domestic consumption. Despite this having caused the food crisis and the erosion of farmers’ income, rich countries are still pushing Southern ones to open up their markets, while refusing to reduce the subsidies they provide to their own agribusiness exports.

A coalition of more than 46 countries, called the G33, is organising the resistance to these unjust policies and activities within the WTO: they are lobbying for so-called special products and special safeguards mechanisms that would allow developing countries to adopt protective measures in times of rising imports or crisis.

"Unity among these countries – supported by an even larger coalition of more than 100 countries - is an essential step towards improving the current agricultural trade system" stress the signatories. But this is precisely what rich countries don’t want, leading to the stalling of the Doha Round in July 2008.

A fair trade campaigner visits a coffee co-op in Uganda

From a UK paper we find this story of a fair trade campaigner visiting one of the coffee cooperates he advocates for. Jim Thomas visited the Peace Kawomera Co-operative in Uganda, a co-op that includes 25,000 farmers. The farmers have been able to put their children through school and save a little money thanks to the co-operative.

From the Bexhill Observer, we find this interview with Thomas.

"Sussex Downs College has been making links and working with communities and projects in South Eastern Uganda for over four years now.

"The college has organised study tours for students that allow them the opportunity to witness development work, as well as giving them a glimpse of what life is like for so many people in Africa and all over the world – a life trapped in poverty.

"Still, through all of the struggles and suffering we saw, there is hope. I spent seven weeks at a project called Bungokho Rural Development Centre (BRDC] and was privileged enough to go out to visit communities being trained through the centre's outreach work.

"The centre approaches vulnerable people and communities and forms a relationship. They then ask the people what problems they face, and cooperatively, as a group they try to find solutions. It is all about empowerment.

Since its establishment in 1995 BRDC has helped over 20,000 people through outreach work alone. BRDC offers knowledge and advice and does not give handouts. In the community they advise people on many issues ranging from getting safe water and making good compost for their crops to generating income from selling vegetables, etc.

"At the centre they give training in practical skills such as carpentry, building, tailoring and agriculture.

An update on the aid emergency in Yemen

Aid workers cannot enter the Yemen city of Saada where over 35,000 people are trapped due to armed conflict. The city lacks the water, food and electricity needed for those trapped people. Fighting has intensified between the Yemen government and Islamic rebels.

The World Heath Organization is currently giving out medicine and malaria bed nets to those who have managed to escape. The U.N.s World Food Programme has already had to cut back on food aid in the region due to the violence.

From this Reuters article, reporter Stephanie Nebehay fills us in on the aid emergency.

"We need access to these people, they lack water and electricity. Living conditions are more and more precarious for the displaced and residents," said Elisabeth Byrs of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

The U.N. refugee agency UNHCR has called for a ceasefire in the latest flare-up of fighting between Yemen's government and Shi-ite Muslim rebels, which has driven an estimated 100,000 people from their homes in the north of the Arab country.

"According to those who managed to flee the besieged city and our staff on the ground, the fighting appears to be concentrated in the old Saada city. They also report frequent air strikes (in the area)," said the UNCHR's Andrej Mahecic.

The government rejected a truce offer by Shi'ite al-Houthi rebels late on Monday, after accusing the Iranian media of stoking the conflict. [IDnL1563997]

Aid agencies are now trying to arrange a "humanitarian corridor" to get supplies into Saada through Saudi Arabia.

Malaria, measles and diarrhoeal diseases pose a serious threat to uprooted people without access to medical services, and areas of northwestern Hajjah province are showing high levels of malaria, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said.

Trachoma fighting drug may help overall health

A new study from the American Medical Association finds that a drug being used to treat trachoma may help fight other diseases as well. Trachoma is a blindness inducing disease that is only prevalent in poverty-stricken countries. Trachoma was wiped out in the U.S in the 1970s.

The study examined health benefits of the drug to children in Ethiopia. The National Institute of Health and the Carter Center helped to organize the treatments and study.

From this Associated Press article that we found at WSB-TV, writer Carla Johnson details the study further.

"Trachoma is almost part of the definition of poverty," said study co-author Paul Emerson of the Atlanta-based Carter Center. "Its victims are forgotten and without political voice, which is why this finding is so tremendously exciting."

The researchers compared villages where children received the antibiotic Zithromax to villages where treatment was delayed a year. The antibiotic cut the death rate in half, and the researchers speculate it helped prevent deaths from pneumonia, diarrhea and malaria, the biggest killers of Ethiopian children.

Among about 13,000 children in treated villages, there were 45 deaths. Among the 5,100 children in villages where treatment was delayed, there were 37 deaths.

Trachoma is caused by bacteria that spreads to the eyes from fingers, clothing or, some researchers think, from flies. Blindness develops over decades through repeated infections and scarring.

"Anything that has potential to reduce mortality is of large interest," said trachoma researcher Sheila West of Johns Hopkins' Wilmer Eye Institute in Baltimore. West was not involved in the new research.

The study would be stronger if it had compared death rates before and after the antibiotic treatment, she said. And she was puzzled there wasn't much difference in death rates among groups treated once, twice or four times during the year.

Photo galleries of Haitian children struggling for education

This story gives impressive photo galleries of a mission in Haiti. Shabach Ministry is a church in Haiti that operates two schools. The children who attend the schools are amongst the poorest in the tiny island nation. The children's struggle to obtain an education is a difficult one, as elites in the country try to limit free access to education to better control the people.

A photo-video duo from Michigan were sent to the schools to capture images of the children. The photos and video will be used to help raise funds for their education. From the Grand Traverse Record-Eagle , writer Carol South tells us of the experience Jared Kohler and Caleb Harris shared.

A gallery of Jared's work can be found here as well as at his blog.

Walking a fine line between documenting stories and exploiting subjects, who are people and families struggling to survive, Kohler -- seeing with "eyes of his heart," he was told -- found dignity amid the need. While there's a hard road ahead for residents of the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, families and the Shabach Ministry invest in the next generation.

"The hope of Haiti is when you look at the children, see their faces and they're excited about learning," said Kohler, who took more than 2,000 photographs. "I saw within the church, the family unit is being encouraged and strengthened."
...

"I view these images as stories that have been entrusted to me," he said. "My goal with this talk is to effectively communicate the stories of people who live in Haiti."

Pastor Jean Heder Petit-Frere founded the Shabach Ministry, which operates multiple church sites and schools. Petit-Frere and Kohler connected thanks to the minister's friendship with Norris' dad, Scott, who is a pastor with Church of the Living God in Traverse City.

Struggling to help as many people as possible, Shabach Ministry has a 1,200-member main church in Carrefour that meets in an unfinished structure, essentially a parking garage. Two schools, one in Carrefour and one in the country, have seen student populations drop recently due to hunger.

Literally.

Many students in the country, for example, walk for hours daily to attend classes. During dire economic times, the school cannot provide a midday meal so two-thirds of the 600 students dropped out. They would be too weak to walk home much less learn any lessons.

Co-operating to make change: Greg Mortenson and the Central Asia Institute

A builder of schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan says you have to listen and cooperate in order to solve the world's problems. Greg Mortenson founded the Central Asia Institute, whose mission is to promote peace though education.

Mortenson recently visited the campus of Colorado State to talk to students. From the Coloradan, writer Sara Hansen records some of Mortenson's remarks.

"You, yourself can never solve the problems of the world," he told a group of 90 students Monday afternoon in a ballroom at Lory Student Center. "It has to be a team effort."
...

He offered words of encouragement and also told students that for service work to be truly successful, the project must connect with the people it is trying to serve.

"The local people have to be consulted and that doesn't happen very often," he said. "Unless the people are consulted, unless they feel empowered, it doesn't work."

As an example, he cited relief efforts in Pakistan in 2005 after a major earthquake. Many relief agencies from the United States sent clothing. It ended up being burned for fuel.

Mortenson was involved in helping set up tent schools to educate the students. They set up the tents for classes, but no one came. It took a young girl to tell him that the students needed desks. When the earthquake hit and the schools collapsed, only students (primarily boys) who had desks were able to take shelter underneath and survive.

Once the volunteers scrounged up desks, the children were eager to learn.

"For them, the desks meant life," Mortenson said.

Doing Better for Children report released

A new survey on child well being along developed nations shows that the UK has the highest rates of teen pregnancy, drunkenness and unemployment. This is despite high spending by it's government to improve teen's health and well being.

The study from the Organization for Economic Development also shows that Turkey, Mexico, Greece, the US, New Zealand and Poland all do poorly in child well being. Iceland and Sweden are the best performing developed nations.

The Guardian story focuses on the results for the UK, writer Owen Bowcott gives us more details from the OECD report.

The report, by the Paris-based International Organisation for Economic Development (OECD), points out that Britain, although moderately well placed in the rankings, has relatively high rates of teenage pregnancy, drunkenness and young people not in education, employment or training (neets).

The survey, entitled Doing Better for Children, suggests that globally girls do better than boys and that, while bullying is on the decline, children are smoking and drinking more.

Controversially, the report proposes that "over-investment" in post-natal care may be a waste of health resources. It also says money is more effective if spent on younger children, who are more susceptible to positive change, rather than teenagers.

The UK, along with a handful of other countries, is criticised for spending "considerable amounts on single-parent benefits" that last until children are into their teens. "There is little or no evidence that these benefits positively influence child wellbeing, while they discourage single-parent employment," the study notes.

Out of 30 OECD countries, the UK does relatively well on schooling but not for social achievements. The UK spends more on children than most OECD countries, the report says, at just over £90,000 per child from birth through to the age of 18. The OECD average is just under £80,000.

But the proportion of neets in the UK is high, at more than one in 10 15- to 19-year-olds. "This is the fourth highest rate in the OECD, ahead of Italy, Turkey and Mexico," the survey says.