Corruption continues to increase in Nigeria

In Nigeria, efforts to fight corruption have been increasing by each successive government. However, the amount of corruption that goes on has increased as well. Nigeria actually has a lot of anti-corruption laws on the books, but the problem only seems to worsen.

From the Vanguard, corruption expert Dr. Peter Langsett weighed in on the problem.

An Anti-Corruption expert, Dr. Peter Langsett who stated this at a two-day Anti-Corruption and Financial Crimes Summit in Abuja, maintained that unless there is a considerable improvement in the per-capita income of the average citizenry, corruption would continue to undermine the socio-economic and political development of the country.

While advocating for the establishment of State Anti-Corruption agencies to complement the efforts of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC), Dr.Langsett tasked these anti-graft agencies to be more proactive and to go after those he described as the ‘big fishes’ whom he said should be held responsible for not only plundering the nation’s economy but for the geometric rise in poverty induced crimes in the country today.

According to him, “it is a pity that a recent survey indicated that Nigeria’s GDP per capital, is much lower than what obtained in the 1970’s due to corruption which is a major predicate of money laundering, what baffles me however, is that this country has the highest number of laws and anti-graft institutions in the whole world.”

More on what motivates China

As always the IPS has a great analysis on the new pledges of aid from China. It is not a part of our snippet below but it ther is an uncomfortable quote from Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe praising the aid pledges.

Reporter Antoaneta Bezlova tells us about a proposal that was recently debated in China's government to send Chinese workers into Africa to grow rice.

Beijing has always denied it harbours any intentions of replicating the West’s colonial expansion in Africa. But earlier this year, delegates to the annual session of China’s parliament debated a proposal to seek employment for up to one million Chinese in various African countries.

The proposal was put forward by delegate Zhao Zhihai, a researcher with the Zhangjiakou Academy of Agricultural Sciences in China’s breadbasket province of Hebei.

Zhao, who had visited Ethiopia and Guinea to explore possibilities for agricultural cooperation in cultivating hybrid rice on the continent, told delegates that Africa’s vast land and underdeveloped agriculture could provide employment for up to one million Chinese labourers.

"In the current economic climate, with so many of our people unemployed, China can benefit from finding jobs for them and Africa can benefit from our expertise in developing any type of land and crop," Zhao told the parliament.

He suggested Beijing should draft a long-term strategy of dispatching Chinese labourers to Africa in order to solve two of China’s greatest challenges—food security and unemployment.

Zhao’s proposal may have not been endorsed at the top level, but its having been publicised by the media has provoked comments of approval in some of the popular Internet forums here.

"At last we have heard of something useful from our delegates to the parliament," wrote one netizen in a sarcastic jab at China’s National People’s Congress, often derided here as a "rubber stamp".

Another, writing in ‘tianya’ forum (www.tianya.cn), suggested that Angola, Congo and Equatorial Guinea should be developed as "outposts" of China’s overall strategy of transforming Africa into a "China-friendly backyard" and Beijing should seek to buy land and send labourers to those countries in order to relieve China’s "food and land bottlenecks".

Voucher program for child birth care in Uganda

For mothers-to-be in remote villages of Uganda bringing a baby to the world can be very difficult. Walks can be long to any hospital, so the thought of receiving any prenatal care is out of the question, let alone going to the hospital for the delivery itself. Besides, who could afford any of the care or supplies the hospital would charge you?

An article in All Africa today examines a new voucher program that gives full pregnancy care at a reduced cost. The funds for the voucher program are put up by the World Bank and the German Development Bank. However, the drawback to the card program is not everyone can afford it, even with the reduced cost.

New Vision writer Irene Nabusoba examines the voucher program.

EVERY pregnant woman has one foot in the grave," goes an African adage. This may sound crude today but it is the reality for many rural poverty-stricken women like Consolata Kebikali, 38. She has survived death nine times during childbirth, but has traded her luck for four of the babies she was trying to give life.

With a small plot just enough for their two-roomed house in Kibale village, Ndeijja sub-county in Mbarara district, Kebikali had never known the inside of a health facility or a gloved hand of a midwife during childbirth.

Her labour suite had always been the banana plantation, under the instruction of an elderly neighbour and at some extremes by herself. What with the nearest government health facility - Itojo Hospital, 25 miles away?

Besides, she could not afford sh35,000 - sh50,000 charged by Kathe Medical Care Clinic located on Kabale Road (17 miles from her home). Thus from conception, through pregnancy to childbirth, everything is 'up to God to see her through'.

But thanks to the health baby vouchers under the Out-put Based Aid (OBA) project, Kebikali's last-born baby, now aged two months, was born in hospital, guaranteeing it a safe arrival.

She says: "I went to Kathe Clinic earlier than necessary because of false labour. I was referred to Mbarara Hospital where I was told my baby was okay after a scan. All expenses were paid courtesy of the card."

What is 'the card'?

The German Development Bank (KfW) and the Global Partnership on Output Based Aid (GPOBA), a World Bank-managed trust fund, are jointly financing a three-year Reproductive Health Voucher project for the management of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and provision of safe delivery services in Mbarara, Kiruhura, Isingiro and Ibanda districts.

Under the project managed by Marie Stopes International, a UK-based health and social marketing organisation that advocates for quality reproductive health care, patients buy a card at sh3,000 to access STI screening and treatment (health life vouchers) or medical care during pregnancy and delivery (health baby vouchers), at accredited health facilities.

"The card entitles a mother to four antenatal visits, malaria screening and prophylaxis, STI and HIV screening, delivery (normal and C-section), transportation for referral in case of emergency and post-natal care within six weeks after delivery," says Richard Semujju, the project coordinator.

He says only 15% of mothers in Isingiro give birth at health units, about 20% in Kiruhura, 30% in Mbarara, while Ibanda hardly has any statistics on skilled deliveries. Nationally, 42% of mothers deliver in health units under skilled care.

Angela Mbahwejje, a midwife and proprietor of Angela Domiciliary Clinic in Kashari sub-county, who has participated in the project since its inception in 2006 with the STI vouchers, says: "So far, we have attended to 231 mothers.

We have had 43 deliveries, three emergency deliveries which were referrals to Mbarara Hospital and three mothers returning for post-natal care."

World of Good still doing it through the recession

The global recession hasn't avoided fair trade businesses. World of Good has had to cut back on staff here in US, but they have avoided any cutbacks in purchasing from their artisans across the globe.

From the San Francisco Chronicle, reporter Carolyn Said has this profile on the fair trade company.

For Indian beadworkers who craft intricate necklaces and earrings, Haitian metalworkers who recycle oil drums into sculptures, and Guatemalan weavers who make rainbow-hued tapestries, the economic downturn that has choked off consumer spending could mean a devastating plunge back into poverty.

Priya Haji is determined to stop that from happening.

As CEO and co-founder of World of Good, a small Emeryville company that creates market opportunities for craftspeople from the developing world, Haji has acted nimbly to respond to the recession without slashing the orders her far-flung workers depend on.

"Other retailers can quickly turn off their factories to reduce excess inventories, but fair traders can't do that," said Haji, 39, whose calm demeanor belies her fervent sense of purpose. "We have a commitment to pay a fair price and fair wages to producer groups."

Thousands of artisans in 70 countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe fabricate the handmade jewelry, clothing, housewares and art that World of Good sells online and in stores.
...

Don Shaffer, CEO of San Francisco's RSF Social Finance, which provides financing to World of Good, said he appreciated that Haji refused to cut corners at the expense of her artisans. RSF expanded its loans to the company so it could continue to prefinance its inventory.

"They have stuck to their commitments through good times and bad, which a lot of other folks wouldn't do," he said. "World of Good is a shining example of a fair-trade organization functioning at a very high level as a business and having a tremendous social impact."

Some coping mechanisms have been painful. Haji said she had to trim staff, bringing the Emeryville workforce to its current size of about 25 people.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2009/11/09/MNE71AF93P.DTL#ixzz0WNHJxzJW

China pledges to go 'all out' to help Africa

Over the weekend, China pledged another 10 billion dollars in conditional loan money to governments across the African continent. China says they are making the pledge to help Africa's agriculture and infrastructure.

However, many say the Chinese are only making the loans to improve their power within the continent. Human rights advocates are concerned that China may give the loans to corrupt officials.

From this AFP story that we found at Google News, writer Samer al-Atrush attended the Chinese announcement of the loans.

Wen said the new measures would focus on reducing poverty and assistance in infrastructure and agriculture, while China is also vowing to remove tariffs on most goods from the least developed African countries.

China's assistant commerce minister, Fu Ziying, said on Sunday that China would build a permanent exhibition centre for African products.

It will also set up "three to five modern logistical centres to help African entrepreneurs to increase logistical capacity to ship out African products," Fu said.

The pledges have been received with enthusiasm by African delegations, but China is fighting off accusations that it is only interested in Africa for its resources.

An assistant foreign minister, Zhai Jun, insisted that China was not seeking to impose its "hegemony" in the continent.

China "will not treat Africa in an imperialist way. China will not be pointing fingers or bullying African countries," he said on Sunday, adding that his country would not "practice colonialism in African countries."

Ahead of the launch of a more robust diplomatic involvement in African conflicts, he denied that China throws a lifeline to leaders accused of human rights violations such as Sudan President Omar al-Beshir.

IdeaAid: the worldwide brainstorm

We received the following press release from Heifer International about a unique global brainstorming event. The event called IdeaAid will gather people around the globe to think of ways to solve the world's problems. The first problem on the agenda; how to raise a billion dollars a year to bring the world's poor out of poverty.

Set to launch on Nov. 14, the first Idea Aid™ challenge seeks to find novel ways to raise $1 billion annually to help eradicate global hunger and poverty. Ideas will come from people all over the world who will brainstorm online and share their best thinking with Heifer International, a global nonprofit dedicated to ending world hunger and poverty.

“We believe the time is right for Idea Aid,” said Mensa Process Managing Director David Wynett. “It’s a revolutionary way to identify potential solutions to problems, and it’s especially relevant in today’s economic climate, when people may not be able to donate money, but still want to give back.”

Idea Aid is sponsored by Mensa Process, a brain trust that helps its corporate clients solve complex problems and identify new growth opportunities. Mensa Process works with some of the world’s brightest minds — members of Mensa, an international organization of 100,000+ people, open to the top 2 percent in intelligence.

For Idea Aid, Mensa Process is inviting everyone, everywhere, to help change the world. Mensa members, along with technology, finance, development and public health experts, students, educators and informed consumers, will brainstorm online to find new solutions. Mensa Process believes that combining high intelligence, creative minds and cause-directed energy will generate remarkable results.

How Idea Aid Works
For a single week — Nov. 14-21, 2009 — people around the world will come together online to brainstorm about the complex problem of global poverty. Those interested in participating can register at www.ideaaid.com. Ideas will be collected, assessed and refined and then shared for implementation.

What’s needed to put an end to global poverty? According to Heifer International, one of the things that make a big difference is money. At this point, however, there’s no single way to efficiently and consistently generate the level of funds necessary to combat hunger and poverty.

“The problem demands new ideas and new methods of collection to make giving easier and more efficient,” said Tom Peterson, director of Innovation for Heifer International. “We need methods, ideas that can be used online, offline, globally, locally. Something simple that everyone, anyone can participate in,”

Donating Ideas to Change the World
Mensa members are also excited about the challenge. “Many Mensa members are active in volunteering in their communities through our service programs,” said Pam Donahoo, executive director of American Mensa. “Idea Aid gives us a unique way to use our knowledge to serve the world.” Idea Aid is open to everyone. Those interested can register at www.ideaaid.com.

About Mensa Process
Mensa Process is the only consulting firm in the world with exclusive access to the unrivaled brainpower of Mensa — a highly respected, international organization whose membership represents some of the world’s most intelligent people. By tapping into this group’s unparalleled intellect and combining it with the creativity of other bright minds, Mensa Process helps businesses grow, innovate and solve problems. www.mensaprocess.com

About Heifer International
Heifer International’s mission is to end hunger and poverty while caring for the earth. Since 1944, Heifer International has provided livestock and environmentally sound agricultural training to improve the lives of those who struggle daily for reliable sources of food and income. Heifer is currently working in 50 countries, including the United States, to help families and communities become more self-reliant. http://www.heifer.org

About Mensa
Founded in 1946 in Oxford, England, Mensa is a respected international organization whose membership is open to individuals scoring in the top 2% on accepted, standardized intelligence tests. Mensa members are geographically and occupationally diverse, representing more than 100 countries and thousands of professions and passions. www.mensa.org, www.us.mensa.org, http://www.mensa.org.uk

The 58 well challenge

An engineering club at Montana State University had an immense challenge. Build wells for each of the 58 school districts in Khwisero, Kenya.

The students had no idea where to start, but have come around to build six wells so far. Future classes of the engineering club will continue the work.

From the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, writer Gail Schontzler describes the joy that one such well brought to a village.

Fresh, clean water gushed from the new water pump, and J.J. Larsen took a drink.

"Obulayi muno," which means "very good" in Kiluhya, he said to the Kenyan villagers gathered around him. "They all cheered."

And with that, the people of Mwisena celebrated their new water well with speeches, dancing and a chicken feast.

The well is the sixth installed by students from the Engineers Without Borders chapter at Montana State University.

Larsen, a 27-year-old from Seattle who just earned his master's degree in mechanical engineering from MSU, was co-project manager this summer. He was one of 19 MSU students who traveled to Kenya to tackle one little part of the vast problem of poverty in Africa.

The new well is another step toward the MSU students' long-term goal of bringing clean water to all 58 primary schools in the Khwisero district of western Kenya.

Installing wells means villagers no longer have to drink from muddy watering holes that can carry water-borne diseases. It means children, especially girls, no longer have to miss out on hours of school while walking miles to fetch water in cans carried on their heads.

"Being a college student, you can still make a difference somewhere in the world," Larsen said. "That just feels good, feels right."

The MSU chapter of Engineers Without Borders has come a long ways in five years. When the first MSU students expressed interest in 2004, the national EWB handed them a huge assignment -- answer a plea from Nairobi architect Ronald Omyonga to help children in his home district get clean water and a better chance at an education.

The students started from scratch, with no organization, no money and no idea where to begin.

Since then, students have learned a lot -- how to get wells drilled, build latrines, collaborate with Africans and raise money back home (each well costs $15,000 to $25,000). They have managed to build a student organization that keeps going, despite constant turnover and graduation, passing on inspiration and lessons learned to each new generation of student members.

This summer, in addition to one new well, the MSU students installed two sanitary composting latrines, ran a health clinic, distributed 200 eyeglasses, researched a water pipeline system and oversaw construction of the group's first bio-gas latrine, based on design work done last year by an MSU engineering class.

A Chinese way to fight malaria, with friends

A plant that is found in China is being used by it's government in diplomacy with the African continent. A wormwood shrub that is prevalent in Asia contains artemisinin, one of the drugs used to fight malaria. The Chinese government ships artemisinin to countries that it has diplomatic relationships with. However, the Chinese are reluctant to teach Africans how to grow the shrub on their own.

From Reuters, reporter Tan Ee Lyn explains how this health issue becomes international diplomacy instead.

China hopes to improve and use the drug as a uniquely Chinese weapon to fight malaria not on its own soil, where the deadly disease has been sharply pruned back, but in Africa, where it still kills one child every 30 seconds.

Already, a Chinese-backed eradication programme on a small island off Africa has proven a huge success.

Away from its practical application, scientists back in the lab in Guangzhou are also achieving results. In one of the lab's refrigerators sit a dozen triangular test-tubes holding seedlings of the sweet wormwood shrub, also called Artemisia annua, which has only been found in the wild in China, Vietnam and border areas in Myanmar.

"There are about 0.6 parts of artemisinin in every 100 parts of the plant in the wild, but we have managed to increase the artemisinin content to between 1.2 and 1.8," said Feng Liling, assistant professor at the Tropical Medicine Institute in Guangzhou University of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

China pledged to help Africa fight malaria at the triennial Forum on China and Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in 2006 and has since set up 30 anti-malaria and prevention units. The next FOCAC meeting is in Egypt on November 8-9.

Helping developing countries eradicate malaria will help China project its influence and prestige as a global power, said politics professor Joseph Cheng at City University in Hong Kong.
...

Tanzania, Kenya and Nigeria have begun farming hybrids of the sweet wormwood shrub with Chinese and Vietnamese ancestry, said Li Guoqiao at the Tropical Medicine Institute.

"I inspected the plantations and the plants are growing well," Li told Reuters in an interview.

Asked if China would export the high-yielding Artemisia annua to Africa, Li said: "We want to grow them in China and whatever we export depends on bilateral relationships."

A perspective on LBJ's launch of the 'War on Poverty'

We thought this was a good perspective on a piece of American history. From West Virginia's State Journal we find this interview with Barbara Bayes, a woman who has spent a lifetime helping the poor in the Appalachian Mountains. The interview focuses on the start of the "War on Poverty" when President Lyndon Johnson created programs to try to help the poor.

Writer Christine Miller Ford had Bayes recall when college aged strangers arrived to Appalachia in the 1960's.

Growing up in eastern Kentucky, 60-year-old Bayes got her first glimpse of LBJ’s anti-poverty initiative when she and fellow teens began to spot Volunteers In Service To America, or VISTA, workers in their community.

“We started noticing these young college kids coming around who didn’t talk like us or look like us,” said Bayes, a lifelong social worker who heads the Good News Mountaineer Garage, the statewide program that provides motor vehicles to low-income West Virginians. “They’d come through asking for directions, and we loved to send them off the wrong way. Our reaction was, ‘Who are you to look down on us because we’re different? Because we have an outhouse?’”

But with each repaired roof, free meal program and other project completed by the young people involved in the VISTA program — a domestic version of the Peace Corps created through Johnson’s Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 — Bayes said she and her neighbors began to see these visitors in a new light.

“We saw how much good they were doing for people who were really struggling,” she said.

Now thanks to the range of programs begun with the War on Poverty and Johnson’s Great Society, low-income citizens, seniors and others can live more dignified lives, Bayes said.

“So many of the programs begun in the 1960s have become so integrated into society that we don’t think about what life would be like without them,” said Bayes, who has lived in Charleston since 1984. “But before the War on Poverty, there was no mechanism for low-income senior citizens to have nursing home care paid for. Grants and loans weren’t available for low-income students to go to college. No job training for a displaced homemaker trying to get back on her feet. No legal aid for a woman trying to leave an abusive marriage. No money for winterizing an elderly person’s home for fuel efficiency. It’s a long, long list.”

Video: Tunnel con-men in the West Bank

From CNN comes this story of con-men taking advantage of desperate Palestinians. Tunnels that run into Egypt try to step around the Israeli blockade. New tunnels need to be built often because Israel keeps blowing up any they want. Con-men often look for investors for the new tunnels, but don't plan on paying them back.

New head of IFAD wants food that provides more than sustenance

In an interview with the Christian Science Monitor, the UN's International Fund for Agricultural Development Kanayo Nwanze talks about food production as a security issue. Nwanze wants to guide the IFAD past simply raising production of food into food production that provides income.

Writer Howard LaFranchi interviewed Nwanze on his goals for the IFAD.

"People now have a clear sense of the linkages between food security and national security," says Dr. Nwanze. That understanding is helping bring questions of hunger and rural development to a broader audience, he says, "as well as to some very high places."

Hunger now can mean increased cross-border and international migration. And the riots that accompanied recent food shortages and price hikes in several parts of the world show how hunger can destabilize governments in regions of critical importance to the international battle against extremism.

That's why issues of rural hunger and food security are increasingly cropping up in venues ranging from the US Congress to the G-8 group of industrialized countries, Nwanze says. It is the emergence of food as an international security issue, Nwanze adds, that raises the odds that the international community will help developing countries come up with sustainable answers to food production challenges.

"Sustainability is determined inside a country, the answers to food production and development have to come from within," says the agronomist who studied in Kansas State University and who is recognized for developing a high-yield, drought-resistant rice for Africa. "But we also need the participation of the broader international community to answer these challenges that today have an impact on everyone."

In Washington recently in advance of this month's World Summit on Food Security in Rome, Nwanze noted that the security dimension of hunger and food production is translating into greater interest in places like the US capital. IFAD, which Nwanze describes as a cooperative among 160 countries that provides grants for rural development projects, benefited from a US-led initiative this year to increase the organization's funding by two-thirds to about $100 million.

At the same time, the US Congress is considering the Global Food Security Act, a five-year authorization that seeks to improve US response to food crises, provide new funding for university research in agriculture and for rural development projects.

Comment: Why aid never reaches the poor

A very controversial opinion piece that is going viral asks why aid never seems to reach the poor. Writers Caroline Boin and Julian Harris accuse the British government on giving aid dollars to pet projects instead on those that would do the most good. The duo recently wrote the book "Fake Aid: how foreign aid is being used to support the self-serving political activities of NGOs."

Our snippet of the piece comes from All Africa.

Aid activists Oxfam complained recently that "it is time for G20 leaders to stand up and deliver the money needed to protect poor people," as heads of the world's biggest economies met in Pittsburgh in September.

The real problem is that aid is actually rising but much of it never reaches poor countries and, when it does, it causes economic, social and political damage.

In fact, over $119 billion was budgeted for aid from rich to poor countries this year, up $16 billion from last year.

But about half of that stays with donors in "tied aid" and other domestic spending.

"Almost 50p of every pound of donor aid fails to target poverty, but instead aims to meet other donor priorities," charity and pressure-group ActionAid said in 2006, an estimate largely confirmed in 2008 by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Britain budgeted $8 billion for aid to countries such as Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania last year but recent research has uncovered numerous examples of waste and mismanagement within government.

The British government pays pressure groups to campaign and lobby governments abroad and citizens at home, at the expense of actual aid projects.

This year alone, the Department for International Development (DfID) put £140 million (about US$170 million) in its "communications" budget -- much of it propaganda within the UK. By 2011, a total of £1 billion ($1.2 billion) of public money will have been spent on this.

Most of it is given away in unrestricted grants to hand-picked activist groups, with little accountability and transparency - and, worse, little evidence that the programmes are helping the poor.

Many of these are at best controversial and often hostile to development.

ActionAid, for example, doing the "other donor priorities" mentioned above, used government funds to campaign against free trade, on one occasion stating: "There is very little evidence to support claims that free trade lifts people out of poverty."

This assertion simply ignores all the millions of people around the world who have been allowed to escape poverty through freer trade after decades of economic oppression.

Child labor just might help to rebuild Afghanistan

School is optional in the under-developed world, and nowhere is this more true than Afghanistan. In a country where drastic steps must be taken to put food on the table, many children work to help feed their siblings or parents. Sometimes the small pay of the parents is not enough, so some of the boys of the family will have to work instead of attending classes.

From the Telegraph UK, writer Phil Hazlewood profiles one such family.

"We came here to earn money," said Chaman Gul, leaning on the handle of a shovel in a pile of wet sand at the Gahiz brick factory, which makes 42,000 bricks every day for building sites from Kabul to Bamiyan.

"My five sons are here and I have four daughters at home in the village."

Chaman is 36 but looks two decades older. Four of his sons - Omar, 15, Amin, 13, Taza, 12, and 10-year-old Anam - squat nearby, looking up occasionally as they fill cast-iron brick moulds.

His fifth, Stana, 18, is busy elsewhere on the site.

The children, whose small footprints are left in the powdery dust amid tyre and hoof marks, are not playing though.

They are working and Chaman's youngest son - four years below the minimum working age in Afghanistan - is by no means an exception.

Elsewhere in Kabul, other school-age children can be seen in grimy workshops, pushing wheelbarrows, struggling with heavy sacks or, unseen behind the walls of housing compounds, weaving carpets by hand on large metal looms.

UNICEF said in 2007 that a quarter of Afghan children aged between seven and 14 worked, despite legal and constitutional protection and Afghanistan being a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) estimates that 60,000 children are currently working in Kabul alone.
...

At the brick factories, children spend their days in the choking air of dust and acrid charcoal smoke from the kilns, stacking and sorting rectangles of wet bricks laid out to dry in long rows.

Poverty, inflation and the human cost of war - death or disability among parents - mean they must work to feed their families, said Nadery.

Even when parents do have jobs, and free government schools exist, attendance is often dependent on whether a family can afford pens and paper, he added.

Final round of testing for new malaria vaccine

A new malaria vaccine enters it's final stage of testing. The vaccine could cut in half the number of malaria deaths each year.

GlaxoSmithKline has been developing the vaccine, and it may be provided for free if there is enough funding from sources such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Health Organization and others.

From the Associated Press, writer Jason Straziuso gives us plenty of hope in this story.

There is new hope, however, in this verdant area where President Barack Obama's relatives live. A vaccine that appears to be able to prevent the disease in about 50 percent of children, is now undergoing the final stage of testing.

If regulators determine the vaccine is safe, it could be on the market in three to five years — the first vaccine against a human parasite.

Tens of millions of Africans are plagued by malaria every year, and more than a third of the hospital beds in this rural Kenyan region next to Lake Victoria are dedicated to its victims. More than 1 million children die of the disease in Africa annually, a crippling economic drain that prolongs a cycle of disease and poverty throughout the continent.

Malaria is also prevalent in parts of Asia, the Middle East and Central and South America.

This vaccine was developed specifically for Africa and will only prevent the African strain of the disease. Experts say it would be a historic advancement.

"Some may say, '50 percent, that's not great.' And that's true. If you get a measles vaccine, you're not going to get measles again," said Dr. Dave Jones, a U.S. Army colonel and director of a clinic in nearby Kombewa operated by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and the Kenya Medical Research Institute.
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More than $500 million has been spent on the combined efforts by drug maker GlaxoSmithKline and the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative, which is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Phase III testing is being done at 11 sites in seven African countries on 16,000 children under the age of 18 months.

The goal is to immunize children against malaria during their youngest high-risk years, and then for them to develop their own natural immunities as they age.

Almost half of US children are on food stamps

What we find interesting about the following story is that it is on the EU News Wire instead of an American source. A new study has found that 49% percent of American children live in a household that uses food stamps. We're assuming that this is at one point in the childhood, and not throughout.

From this story that we found at Official Wire, we read more statistics from the study conducted at Washington University.

"Food stamp use is a clear sign of poverty and food insecurity, two of the most detrimental economic conditions affecting a child's health," Mark R. Rank, a poverty expert at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis, says in a statement.

The substantial risk of a child being in a family that uses food stamps is consistent with a wider body of research demonstrating U.S. children face considerable economic risk throughout their childhood years.

-- 90 percent of black children and 37 percent of white children will be in a household that uses food stamps.

-- Nearly one-quarter of all American children will be in households that use food stamps for five or more years during childhood.

-- 91 percent of children with single parents will be in a household receiving food stamps, compared to 37 percent of children in married households.

New report exposes human trafficking into the UK

A new report from the UK reveals the hidden crimes of human trafficking that exists in the country. The report says that social workers fail the children by not rescuing them their slavery. The study could put more pressure on Britain's government to pass human slavery laws.

From the Independent reporter Robert Verkaik unpacks the study's details.

The findings suggest that when trafficked children
try to escape from imprisonment in Britain, their cries for help are ignored or negligently handled by UK agencies. The report, by the Children's Society charity, found that those who managed to escape their captors were often returned to domestic imprisonment, where they were forced to work as prostitutes in brothels or as slaves in British homes. Children who were allowed to leave their guardian's home were usually too frightened to disclose what was happening to them.

One young girl trafficked to Britain was groomed and sexually exploited while in the care of children's services. She did not know that what was happening was illegal, or that it was considered abuse.

The United Kingdom Human Trafficking Centre (UKHTC) is aware of 325 children from 52 countries who may have been trafficked in 2008. But the Children's Society, which looked closely at 46 cases in the UK, said these figures did not account for young people who feel they have no choice but to keep their ordeals a secret.

More than half of the young people in these initial case studies had attended school while in Britain, but when they asked for support from various agencies, the frontline workers did not know how to help or refer them. The charity said that some who had reported their situation found frontline workers unwilling to help, disbelieving the seriousness of their claims or unaware of where to refer them.

Even when a child is identified as being at risk of exploitation and taken into care, they still face kidnapping by traffickers. In May this year, it was discovered that 77 children had gone missing from a single children's home near Heathrow since March 2006. It is estimated that 1.2 million children worldwide are trafficked each year, in a trade worth £16bn annually.

"Whilst recent media reports have claimed that the problem of trafficking has been overstated, this new research brings into startling perspective the very real problems faced by children separated from their carers and exploited and mistreated by those responsible for them in the UK," said the authors of the report.

A second chance to help

A chance meeting with a disfigured Tanzanian boy effected a Baptist Bishop so much that it completely changed her worldview. Bishop Mary Gray-Reeves has since guided her entire church to raising funds for the boy's village.

From The Santa Cruz Sentinel, comes writer Kathy Kelly's touching story of the Bishop meeting Sadiki, the lesson learned, and the help that followed.

The woman who heads the area Anglican diocese has a question nagging at her, a question she spoke about passionately during a recent sermon at St. John's the Baptist Episcopal Church in the Seacliff area.

That question is whether a 12-year-old Tanzanian boy named Sadiki would still be alive if she had not encountered him one day, in March, in a remote area of that East African country.

Bishop Mary Gray-Reeves told of that brief encounter movingly and with self-reproach.

It is a story that changed her life, the boy's life and struck a chord with many others, Gray-Reeves said. It is undeniably tragic, yet growth has sprung from it.

The chance meeting with a disfigured child -- an epileptic scarred and infected after falling into a cooking fire during a seizure -- has led to a campaign by church members in the diocese to provide solar cooking classes, scholarships and other help to the boy's village.

The Sadiki story begins in March, as three bishops were visiting Africa after a partnership pact among congregations on the Central Coast, in England and in West Tanganyika.

As they drove a heavily rutted road and the driver stopped to adjust a window, a boy suddenly ran up to the Jeep, Gray-Reeves said. Later, they realized he had been holding a stick of sugar cane he wanted them to buy, but his face was like an open wound and it was somehow so frightening that they drove away.

"I gasped; it scared me," she said in a recent telephone interview. "It was devastating to me, I thought, what kind of Christian am I? I was overcome by it, and by not doing anything."

Gray-Reeves said she could see him running after them in the rear-view mirror.

Soon afterward, as Gray-Reeves preached and wrote about it, Bishop Gerard Mpango vowed to find the boy and located him, his parents and six siblings, arranging for medical care near his village.

They learned that Sadiki was an epileptic who had a seizure and fell into a fire near his family's mud hut, burning his face and causing a wound that became infected. Such fire-related accidents are fairly common there, Gray-Reeves said, adding that she spoke to one Saratoga doctor who said he came home after 20 years of treating such patients, as he "couldn't take it anymore."

On Oct. 25, the same Sunday the diocese kicked-off a fundraising campaign, President Obama's senior adviser, David Axelrod, and his wife, Susan, appeared on "60 Minutes," describing 20-plus years of severe seizures experienced by their daughter.
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For information, call 394-4465 or visit www.edecr.org. Write or send donations to PO Box 1903, Monterey, CA 93942. Send scholarship donations to St. John's, 125 Canterbury Drive, Aptos, CA 95003. Call the Aptos church at 708-2278.

World Pneumonia Day

$29 billion dollars is what the World Health Organization says it needs to fight pneumonia worldwide. Today is the first ever World Pneumonia Day, a disease that kills more than malaria, AIDS and measles combined.

From this Associated Press article that we found at the San Francisco Chronicle, writer Maria Cheng describes a new plan the U.N. has to fight pneumonia.

Today, the first World Pneumonia Day, the World Health Organization and UNICEF are releasing a global plan attempting to save more than 5 million children from dying of pneumonia by 2015.

The plea for money is less than what has been spent on more high-profile diseases such as AIDS, despite the fact pneumonia kills more children than AIDS, malaria and measles combined.

"This is very simply the biggest killer people never hear about," said Orin Levine, a public health expert at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health, who has advised WHO and UNICEF. Pneumonia accounts for about 20 percent of all child deaths every year; AIDS causes about 2 percent.

The United Nations is promoting a variety of strategies from vaccination to generalized interventions that address economic development. Pneumonia deaths are strongly linked to malnutrition and poverty.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2009/11/02/MNIP1ADMM7.DTL#ixzz0ViBFd9Nl

High costs of malaria drug cause millions of deaths

The cost of the anti-malaria drug Artemisinin combination therapy is more than poor people can afford. Researchers are saying that the high cost results in another million deaths a year from malaria. Poor malaria sufferers instead go to an an older, cheaper drug that is not nearly as effective as ACT.

From Reuters, reporter Kate Kelland tells us more about the study into malaria drug use.

Artemisinin combination therapy, or ACT, drugs made by firms such as Novartis and Sanofi-Aventis can cost as much as 65 times the daily minimum wage in some African countries, according to a study of 6 high-risk nations by Populations Services International Malaria.

ACTs can cost up to $11 to patients buying over the counter, while older drugs to less effective drugs cost just $0.30 cents.

"With most people accessing anti-malarial medication through the private sector, price becomes a critically important barrier," said Desmond Chavasse, director of PSI.

"A full course of an adult treatment of ACT can be up to 65 times the minimum daily wage. This provides an overpowering incentive (for patients) to make the wrong anti-malarial choice."

Malaria is a potentially deadly disease transmitted via mosquito bites. Children account for about 90 percent of the deaths in the sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia -- the worst affected areas.

Chavasse was speaking to reporters from Nairobi, where he was at an international malaria conference to present a study called ACTwatch -- a research project by PSI and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine on the malaria drugs market across 6 sub-Saharan African countries and Cambodia.

City council members of Boulder meet with the homeless

A forum at a homeless shelter invited city council members of Boulder, Colorado to hear their concerns. Only four of the 13 council members showed up.

Homeless people in Boulder and many parts of the U.S. don't have enough shelter beds available to them. So when they have to sleep outside instead, they often get ticketed or arrested for "camping".

From the Boulder Daily Camera, writer Erica Meltzer details the meeting.

Four of the 13 Boulder City Council candidates -- businessman and endurance athlete Barry Siff, artist and former university professor Jyotsna Raj, Landmarks Board chairman and attorney Tim Plass, and care provider and activist Rob Smoke -- attended the forum at the Carriage House Community Table. Carriage House provides a case manager, access to showers, laundry and computers, and a daytime shelter in downtown Boulder.

Homeless people and their advocates expressed frustration and, at times, flashes of anger over what they see as ignorance, indifference and even hostility from other segments of Boulder society.

On the one hand, there aren't enough shelter beds to accommodate all the homeless in Boulder. On the other hand, sleeping outside is illegal, and homeless people can be ticketed, fined and sentenced to community service for camping.

One man told of being issued a ticket for "camping" because he was sitting on a bench under a tree. Another woman told of being made to wait outside in the snow for over an hour, while other bus passengers without the large backpack that marked her as homeless got to wait inside the bus station.

Case manager Heather Pauze has seen 26 deaths among her clients over the last 18 months. A homeless man was found dead near Walnut and Ninth streets on Wednesday morning. Though the cause of death has not been determined, police believe the weather may have been a factor.

The homeless people at the meeting urged the city to place a moratorium on enforcement of the no-camping rules while changes to the law are considered; provide a central place for people to store belongings, shower and change clothes; and allow the construction of cheap, single-resident housing.