Half of 245 million widows live in poverty

An organization that is devoted to helping widows is surprised to learn that there are 245 million widows worldwide. The Loomba Foundation had assumed there were 100 million, but conducted a new study to determine a real figure.

Cherie Blair, wife of the former British Prime Minister, unveiled the report at the United Nations yesterday. Blair says that out of those 245 million widows, over half are living in poverty.

The Loomba Foundation is dedicated to raise the awareness of the injustices that widows face. Most women are widowed because of war or disease. The Foundation is named after Shrimati Pushpa Wati Loomba who became a widow at the age of 37 after her husband died of tuberculosis. Loomba then had to raise and educate seven children by herself.

From this Associated Press story that we found at Idaho's Local News 8, writer Edith Lederer recorded Blair's statement.

The most dire consequences are faced by 2 million Afghan widows and at least 740,000 Iraqi widows who lost their husbands as a result of the ongoing conflicts; by widows and their children evicted from their family homes in sub-Saharan Africa; by elderly widows caring for grandchildren orphaned by the HIV/AIDS crisis, and by child widows aged 7 to 17 in developing countries, the report said.

"Across the world, widows suffer dreadful discrimination and abuse," Blair said. "In too many cases they're pushed to the very margins of society, trapped in poverty and left vulnerable to abuse and exploitation."

She said many are cheated out of their husbands' assets and property and expelled from their family home -- and since they have no money they can't support their children, "so misery is heaped on grief."

Blair was in New York to launch the report entitled "Invisible Forgotten Sufferers: The Plight of Widows around the World," commissioned by the Loomba Foundation which works in a dozen countries to help widows and educate their children.

"The plight of widows -- in the shadows of the world -- is a human rights catastrophe," said Blair, the foundation's president. "It's really a hidden humanitarian crisis."
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According to the report, the countries with the highest number of widows in 2010 were China with 43 million, India with 42.4 million, the United States with 13.6 million, Indonesia with 9.4 million, Japan with 7.4 million, Russia with 7.1 million, Brazil with 5.6 million, Germany with 5.1 million, and Bangladesh and Vietnam with about 4.7 million each.

Unjust ends to rape cases in Sierra Leone

From IRIN, a story on rape in Sierra Leone. Many rape cases never come to a just conclusion in the country.

Police records in Sierra Leone show that after months of court appearances, Janice*, 35, dropped charges against the four men she said gang-raped her and then filled her vagina with sand. This is one of nearly 1,000 cases of sexual assault filed in 2009 in which the perpetrators were never punished.

Rape was rampant during the 1991-2002 civil war and has continued in peacetime. In 2007 the government passed legislation that made violent or sexual abuse of women – including within marriage – a criminal act, but law enforcement and social services organizations struggle to implement the law.

Statistics from the family support unit (FSU) of the police, recently released in the capital, Freetown, did not list a single conviction in any of the 927 cases of sexual abuse reported to police in 2009. Pressure exerted on women appeared to be the main cause for the lack of prosecutions.

In Janice's case, neighbours urged her to back out. "One of the main reasons I decided to drop the matter was that the principal witness, my landlord, came under pressure by the entire community to convince me to settle out of court," she told IRIN in Freetown.

She said her attackers, who lived in the neighbourhood, "have shown great remorse for what they did to me", and noted that they had spent 14 days in detention in a Freetown prison.

Janice's decision to abandon the case was "a big disappointment in our fight against sexual and gender-based violence," said Emmanuel Saffa Abdulai, head of the Society for Democratic Initiatives, a Freetown-based human rights group, which provided her legal assistance.

Social workers said a fear of visibility and retaliation were among the reasons people hesitated to pursue rapists. "People living in the same community as the victim are sceptical about coming to police, or to go to court to present evidence, as they fear revenge by the perpetrators," Isha Bangura, director of FSU, told IRIN.

"Most times victims compromise [cases] by accepting money from perpetrators and withdraw charges; this is largely due to poverty," Bangura said, but the stigma attached to rape was also a potent factor. She said women's tendency to abandon charges against rapists was widespread and put all women in danger.

Bangura said she commonly saw apparently false rape allegations, which also hampered the fight against sexual violence. She suggested there should be a law punishing anyone who brought a case of sexual or gender-based violence then withdrew it.

*not her real name

GAVI says it needs 4 billion dollars by 2015

The Global Alliance of Vaccines and Immunization is warning against cutting money for giving vaccines to the under-developed world. GAVI says that it needs 4 billion dollars through 2015 to continue it's work of providing low coast vaccines.

From the BBC, we read more about the statement from GAVI.

Many developing countries now have, with foreign assistance, built up the infrastructure so that routine immunisations can now be offered to up to 80% of the world's poorest children.

Gavi, a public-private partnership which draws together organisations including the World Health Organization and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as the vaccine industry, is now trying to secure funding for 15 countries to add further vaccines to those existing programmes.

These include immunisations against pneumococcal disease - the most common form of bacterial pneumonia - and rotavirus - the most common cause of diarrhoea.

"Children have a right to health and we have it in our power to set them on a path to healthy and productive lives. There comes a time to stop talking and start doing. I sincerely hope that we will see donors put their money on the table," said the chair of the Gavi board, Mary Robinson.

"Without this funding for immunisation, the world will not reach Millennium Goal 4 to reduce under-five mortality by two-thirds by 2015," she said.

More on the G-8 not meeting aid pledges

From IRIN, here is more on the story of the G-8's own analysis on keeping it's aid pledges.

Leaders of G8 countries will meet in Canada on 25 June, with international development aid high on the agenda. Ahead of the summit, the G8 has issued the Muskoka Accountability Report outlining commitments met and not met, with mixed results.

At Gleneagles in 2005, donor members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) pledged to commit US$50 billion to overseas development aid by 2009. Thus far, they are $11 billion short.

Some donors are setting the pace: Canada and Germany pledged to double overseas development aid (ODA) between 2004 and 2010 and by 2009 had upped assistance by 54 and 59 percent respectively. But increases from the US, UK and France lag behind at 45 percent, Italy at 34 percent, and Japan just 6 percent.

Most donors fell short of targets to direct 0.51 percent of gross national income to overseas aid by 2010. The UK, which has steadily increased the proportion of its budget spent on aid over recent years, did achieve it, channelling 0.56 percent, but it is estimated that in 2010 the US will reach only O.2 percent; Italy 0.16 percent; Canada 0.3 percent; Germany 0.35 percent and France 0.47 percent.

While G8 donors promised to target their aid towards the most vulnerable, just 41 and 43 percent of Germany and France’s aid respectively goes to low-income countries versus 69 percent of Canada’s.

OECD donors promised to reach a $25 billion aid target for Africa by 2010, but have achieved less than half that, according to NGO Oxfam.

"Despite their best efforts to put a positive gloss on their progress, the G8 report shows clearly that the promise made in Gleneagles in 2005 to increase aid will be broken," said Oxfam spokesman Mark Fried. "The draft G8 communiqué conveniently ignores the commitment to increase aid by $50 billion, when it should have an emergency plan to fill the $20 billion shortfall over the next two years. These are not just numbers. They represent vital medicines, kids in school, help for women living in poverty and food for the hungry."

Child mortality rates increase for six African nations

A new report on the progress of meeting the Millennium Development Goals shows increases in child mortality. Six Sub-Saharan African countries have seen increase in child mortality according to the United Nations.

From this Associated Press article that we found at WNOL-TV, we find out which countries have seen the slip in child health.

The countries that halved their poverty rates since 1990 include relatively populous countries such as Ethiopia and Egypt and post-conflict countries such as Angola, the report said. However, in Nigeria and Zimbabwe, the proportion of the population living in extreme poverty has risen.

Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region in the world registering an increase in the under age 5 mortality rate, which has risen in Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Kenya and Zambia. Thirty-four of the world's 36 countries with child mortality rates above 100 per 1,000 births are in sub-Saharan Africa. The others are Afghanistan and Myanmar.

The Millennium Development Goals Report Card, which was sponsored in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, was released Tuesday to coincide with meetings of G-8 and G-20 countries in Canada beginning Friday.

The report said that the key message concerning the millennium goals is that progress is possible.

Harsh words from US on Haiti rebuilding

The US Senate Foreign Relations Committee has issued a new report that contains harsh critiques of the Haitian government rebuilding efforts after the January earthquake. The committee led by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass; says that the rebuilding efforts have stalled and asks from more international pressure on Haiti.

From their outstanding Miami Herald coverage of Haiti, writer Jacqeline Charles received an advance copy of the report to be released on Tuesday.

``Key decisions remain in flux and critical humanitarian issues related to shelter and resettlement are not resolved,'' the report said.

The report, to be released Tuesday, also notes that fragmentation and lack of coordination among donors ``are undercutting recovery and rebuilding.''

Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, who co-chairs the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission, defended the government's handling of the crisis, saying that Préval's leadership has allowed for Haitians to remain united despite the challenges.
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Foreign Affairs Committee staffers compiled the report after site visits and extensive interviews with those involved in Haiti's recovery.

It cites the lack of scaffolding on a crumbled presidential palace as emblematic that the rebuilding has stalled.

While the rebuilding must be Haitian-government led, the United States has to take an active role in the process, Kerry wrote.

The report cites 10 critical issues for Haiti's rebuilding that require urgent attention by the Haitian government and Obama administration. They include conflicting messages from donors to Préval, setting an election schedule and the lack of government guidance about its plans.

``The government has not done an effective job of communicating to Haitians that it is in charge and ready to lead the rebuilding effort,'' the report said. ``President Préval should take a more visible and active role, despite the difficulties confronting his government.''

Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/06/21/v-fullstory/1693152/worry-harsh-words-on-haiti-recovery.html#ixzz0raYXqRct

Troubling signs for microcredit in India

A new study shows that there are troubling signs for the future of microcredit in India. The repayment failures of microcredit loans are beginning to increase. For some lenders, repayment defaults may be as high as 10 percent. Failures at that high of a rate may make it impossible for the microcredit bank to operate.

From Bloomberg Businessweek, writer Ruth David gives us more details.

"Globally, microfinance is showing characteristics of the Western financial markets before the collapse," says Sanjay Sinha, managing director at Micro-Credit Ratings in Gurgaon. "In the U.S., homeowners were given loans at 120 percent of the value of their properties. In rural India, people are being lent to at 150 percent of the value of their enterprises."

Microfinance firms make loans in poor areas largely shut off from traditional banking services. The past two years have been marked by surging defaults in some countries. Microfinance markets in Nicaragua, Morocco, and Pakistan have seen default levels climb to more than 10 percent, the threshold that marks a "serious repayment crisis," according to a February report from policy and research firm Consultative Group to Assist the Poor.

India, where more than 600 million people live on less than $1.50 a day, is the world's largest microfinance market. Most microfinance loans in India range from 5,000 to 20,000 rupees ($108 to $431), with interest rates ranging from 18 percent to 33 percent. Although Indian microfinance firms have reported bad-loan ratios of about 2.5 percent on average, levels may be higher because some lenders roll over loans to struggling borrowers to avoid defaults, says Micro-Credit's Sinha.

Microfinance lending in India may surge by about 40 percent annually over the next few years, says Sinha. SKS, betting the potential for growth will attract investors, is seeking regulatory approval for an initial public offering. Basix Group, which focuses on poor households in rural areas and provides loans averaging about 3,000 rupees, may sell shares in an IPO next year, says Chairman Vijay Mahajan. Others are likely to follow. Until now, microfinance companies have relied on loans and grants from banks, insurers, and foundations for funding, he says.

Opiate addiction doubles within five years in Afghanistan

Over the past five years opiate addiction has doubled in Afghanistan. It is believed that more and more people are turning to the drugs to escape the war.

From this Associated Press article that we found at NPR, we read more about the increase in addiction.

Nearly 3 percent of Afghans aged 15 to 64 are addicted to opiates, according to a study by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. The U.N. defines addicts as regular users.

That puts Afghanistan, along with Russia and Iran, as the top three countries for opiate drug use worldwide, according to Sarah Waller, an official of the U.N.'s drug office in Kabul. She said a 2005 survey found about 1.4 percent of Afghan adults were opiate addicts.

The data suggest that even as the U.S. and its allies pour billions of dollars into programs to try to wean the Afghan economy off of drug money, opium and heroin have become more entrenched in the lives of ordinary Afghans. That creates yet another barrier to international efforts to combat the drug trade, which helps pay for the Taliban insurgency.

"The human face of Afghanistan's drug problem is not only seen on the streets of Moscow, London or Paris. It is in the eyes of its own citizens, dependent on a daily dose of opium and heroin above all — but also cannabis, painkillers and tranquilizers," said Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

Afghanistan supplies 90 percent of the world's opium, the main ingredient in heroin, and is the global leader in hashish production. Drug crops have helped finance insurgents and encourage corruption, particularly in the south where the Taliban control cultivation of opium poppies and smuggling routes.

The Afghan government and its international backers have made a massive effort in recent years to discourage farmers from growing opium poppy, and its cultivation dropped 22 percent last year. Some of the drop is likely due to lower market prices, but the government has said it also shows that the Afghan war on drugs is having some success. Twenty of the country's 34 provinces were declared poppy-free in 2009.

G-8 is short by 10 billion dollars from pledges

A self-produced report shows that the G-8 has given 10 billion dollars less than the amount it has pledged to poor nations since 2005. This year's chair of the G-8, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper wants to use this weeks G-8 conference to bring some accountability to the group.

From the Montreal Gazette, writer Juliet O'Neil tells us what is in the report.

The report said the Group of Eight countries account for about 70 per cent of official development assistance, suggesting the G8 share of the $10-billion shortfall from 2005 summit pledges in Gleneagles, Scotland, is about $7 billion.

The report prompted Oxfam, World Vision and other non-government agencies to call for the establishment of a clear plan to get back on track at the G8 summit Prime Minister Stephen Harper hosts in Huntsville, Ont., next weekend.

The G8 countries are Canada, the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia.

The report by G8 officials was designed to showcase “accountability” — a theme Harper has singled out to define the June 25-26 summit.

But other than the official aid shortfall, the nearly 90 pages did not contain much clear information on how close or how far the G8 countries are, as a group, from delivering on more than 50 development-related pledges and plans from past summits that it examined.

The report was partly an exercise in finding standard measures, language and currency to try to track G8 member progress.

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/business/countries+have+fallen+short+commitments+report/3181349/story.html#ixzz0rWD9yr9l

Study says Africa needs to spend more on farming

From IRIN, a new study says that Africa is not spending enough money on improving agriculture.

"Africa is now facing the same type of long-term food deficit problem that India faced in the early 1960s", says a paper by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a US-based think-tank.

In the early 1960s India faced a major food crisis.

African countries are not spending enough on agriculture and the overall productivity of the continent has dropped since the mid-1980s, said the paper which looked at trends in public spending on agriculture in Africa.

"Since the 1960s, Africa has lost ground in the global marketplace. Its share of total world agricultural exports fell from 6 percent in the 1970s to 2 percent in 2007," said the paper entitled, Public Spending for Agriculture in Africa: Trends and Composition.

The paper was produced by researchers who work with IFPRI's Regional Strategic Analysis and Knowledge Support System (ReSAKSS).

Spending money on food production is critical in Africa, where 70 percent of people live in rural areas and depend on agriculture for food and income.

There are also going to be more people to feed in Africa in the next few decades. Sub-Saharan Africa's population is expected to grow faster than elsewhere by 2050, increasing by 910 million people, or 108 percent; East and Southeast Asia's population is set to rise by only 228 million, or 11 percent, according to UN projections.

Ten percent target

Only eight African countries have reached or surpassed the 10 percent target, according to CAADP.

Erratic weather could be turning the screws on food security in Africa as well. Drought-hit Niger features in the eight countries to have allocated the required 10 percent of their budget to agriculture to become food secure, but failed rains have driven more than three million of its people into food insecurity and pushed Niger back onto the list of food aid dependent countries where it last featured in 2004.

The other countries to reach the 10 percent target are Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Mali, Ghana, Senegal, Zimbabwe and Malawi.

There has been a 75 percent increase in the amount governments spend on agriculture from 2000 to 2005 but the CAADP target "remains unmet because of the very low initial base and the declining trends prior to 2000", says the IFPRI paper.

The researchers used another measure - agricultural Gross Domestic Produce (GDP) - to assess the amount countries spend on agriculture. Babatunde Omilola, ReSAKSS coordinator explained how it was calculated. "This measure of government spending on agriculture weighs in the size of the sector in the overall economy and takes into account factors such as revenue generated and its impact on poverty reduction."

"With the exception of Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe, African countries have spent less than 10 percent of their agricultural GDPs on agriculture in recent decades."

Africa spends 5-7 percent as a share of agricultural GDP on food production, whereas Asia spent 8-10 percent. But the range in spending in Africa is quite considerable. "For example, Botswana had the highest percentage in 2005 at 60 percent, while Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana spent less than 2 percent in the same year."

Meanwhile, donor funding for agriculture in Africa has dropped dramatically - from 15 percent in the 1980s to 4 percent in 2006- but the amount countries allocate from aid to food production also varies quite considerably. In 2007 Botswana and Nigeria spent less than 1 percent of all aid received on agriculture. However, Burkina Faso in 2006 spent 8 percent of its total aid on agriculture.

Toilets needed in Nigeria to reduce risk of blindness

From IRIN, a story about how the lack of sanitation in Nigeria exposes people to a disease that causes blindness.

Lack of access to clean toilets or an adequate water supply, living in close proximity to animals, and poor public health awareness have helped put 2.3 million people in northern Nigeria’s Borno State at risk of contracting trachoma, a viral infection causing blindness.

But practising simple good hygiene and stopping open defecation can significantly reduce the chances of contracting the disease, says NGO Helen Keller International (HKI).

Two-thirds of Borno’s 15 districts are trachoma-endemic, according to an HKI survey, with half of those infected, primary-school-age children. The state also has Nigeria's highest river blindness prevalence levels.

“Poor sanitation, lack of personal hygiene and acute water shortages are major causes of this disturbing health problem,” HKI’s project manager in Borno State, Peter Aimankhu, told IRIN.

Trachoma is a chronic contagious viral disease marked by inflammation of the eye-membrane, eyelids and the cornea of the eye; the formation of scar tissue leads to impaired vision and blindness, making trachoma the world’s leading cause of preventable blindness. It is spread through eye-to-eye infection through people or through flies.

The virus, the world’s leading cause of preventable blindness, infecting 41 million people worldwide, is characterized by the World Health Organization as one of the world’s forgotten diseases.

Why Borno?

Northern Borno State, on the Niger, Chad and Cameroon borders, is particularly prone to trachoma because it is dominated by cattle-rearers, many of whom whom keep their animals in their homes, and use their dried manure as fertilizer or to plaster their mud houses, attracting flies, according to HKI.

Poverty and poor hygiene practices, whereby villagers defecate in the bush near their homes, rather than using latrines, helps the disease to spread, said Sarah Wakirwa, an ophthalmic nurse involved in an HKI trachoma prevention project.

"Most of the people are poor and the cost of digging pit latrines is far beyond their reach. Some have no option but to defecate in the bush even if they will want to have a toilet," HKI project manager Aimankhu said. The bulk of Borno State’s population lives on less than a dollar a day.

Northern Borno is arid and villagers must trek long distances to source water for domestic use, so many prioritize water use for drinking and cooking and only use it to wash every few days.

Not a priority

Between 2002 and 2007 HKI went from village to village to spread public health messages; helped people treat trachoma with a simple antibiotic (tetracycline) eye ointment; performed surgery on 781 people with advanced cases - called trachiasis - where the eyelashes turn inwards, scratching the cornea and causing blindness. The organization focused on 344 of the most at-risk villages in 10 of the 15 affected government areas in the state.

But the government has done very little to tackle the disease since, say villagers.

Because it is non-fatal and causes progressive rather than sudden damage, the virus is often not taken seriously by health practitioners or governments, says HKI.

According to a Borno State Ministry of Health official, who asked to go unnamed, “the government does not prioritize health in its budgeting, and trachoma is not one of its health priorities.”

However, it can ruin lives if contracted. “My life has not been the same since I lost my sight to trachoma six years ago,” Maiduguri resident Lado Bukar, told IRIN. “It started with reddening of my eyes followed by itching which I mistook for mild infection that could be treated with eye drops.”

“The ailment progressed for five years and I began to lose my vision. I lost my job as a private security guard and now live on begging.”

Interventions

HKI staff also constructed ventilated pit latrines for primary schools in 10 villages in the worst-hit area of Bama near the Cameroon border, and trained teachers to detect the signs of trachoma early in their pupils.

Trachoma rates in these schools declined, says HKI. The programme has been a success when teachers are included to encourage pupils to wash their hands and faces and avoid defecating in the bush.

“But it is a different thing when they return home because compliance then depends on parents’ disposition to personal hygiene,” HKI’s ophthalmic nurse Sarah Wakirwa, told IRIN. And despite public health campaigns, most villagers still keep their cattle in their homes and coat their houses in manure said Aimankhu.

The government health officer told IRIN: “It all boils down to environmental and personal hygiene. The government can only tell the people what they should do to avoid preventable diseases, including trachoma, but cannot force compliance. That is a personal issue.”

With insufficient funding to treat the five remaining government areas, HKI’s Wakirwa worries the 12,000 treated people risk being re-infected by those in the five as-yet untreated government areas. A prevalence survey has to be carried out to assess the impact the project has had on the communities covered, Aimankhu said.

HKI is optimistic it will find the funding to complete the treatment, but even when money does become available, it will have to rebuild its medical teams as the existing ones have been disbanded by Borno State health management who appointed the staff to clinics and hospitals across the state.

CSEM; helping women entrepreneurs in Guatemala

There are a greater percentage of women in poverty in Latin America then men. The percentages for women are almost double than those for men. So the women who do want to strike out on their own with a business need a little extra support. An organization called Centros de Servicios para los Emprendimientos de las Mujeres helpes women in Guatemala to receive funding and draw up business plans.

From IPS, writer Danilo Valladares gives us one CSEM sucess story.

Rosenda Gómez, a 53-year-old mother of five, knows all about challenges. To overcome them, she started a modest sausage business in Guatemala, and thanks to her leadership skills and training and other support she received, she is now an example of the economic empowerment of women.

Sixteen years ago she began to make homemade sausages in her village, Laguna Ocubilá, to sell in the nearby city of Huehuetenango, the capital of the northwestern province of the same name.

But her business was a micro-enterprise that allowed her family to just barely scrape by -- until things changed radically three years ago, when the Centros de Servicios para los Emprendimientos de las Mujeres (CSEM) came to her village.

CSEM, a network of centres providing technical and financial services for women entrepreneurs, is sponsored by the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) in association with Guatemalan institutions.

"We began to receive support, in the form of credit, training to improve our products, and promotion of our chicken and pork sausages in markets and fairs -- none of which we had before," Gómez told TerraViva.

With that boost, Gómez, who only went to school up to third grade, managed to increase production from five to 50 kgs of sausages a week, and demand continues to grow.
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Social organisations point to the vicious circle of poverty, lack of education and lack of health care suffered by so many in this country of 14.3 million people, where the poverty rate is slightly higher for women (51.5 percent) than for men (48.4 percent), according to the 2006 national survey on living conditions.

Rita Cassisi, UNIFEM coordinator in Guatemala, told TerraViva that the CSEM helps women set up businesses by offering loans, organisational training, assistance in improving products, marketing techniques and other support.

"One of the vacuums that we have seen is women's access to financing, which is why the programme is focused on a strategy of economic empowerment at the local, national and regional levels," she explained.

Video: the threats of less AIDS funding in Uganda

From CNN, a lengthy video on Uganda's fight against AIDS.

Accusations of "blood diamonds" from Zimbabwe

Human Rights Watch says it has uncovered cruel oppression by Zimbabwe troops against diamond field workers. The new report says Zimbabwe troops have beaten and tortured the workers of a diamond site the government took over in 2008. Zimbabwe's government denies the allegations.

Human Rights Watch wants Zimbabwe kicked out of the "Kimberly Process," which is a group of nations that sets human rights standards to ensure it's exports are not "blood diamonds". Kicking Zimbabwe out of the group could have buyers staying away from diamonds coming from Zimbabwe.

From the UK's Telegraph, we learn more about what is in the report.

The 20-page report was published as industry leaders gathered in Tel Aviv for a Kimberley Process meeting. As its current chair, Israel is hosting the meeting.

Boaz Hirsch, the group's 2010 chairman, said this year's meeting will focus heavily on ensuring that the "minimum standards" are maintained in Zimbabwe.

The gathering will hear a report by the special Kimberley Process monitor to the Marange area, Abbey Chikane, who visited the region twice. Earlier this month, Chikane said Zimbabwe was "on track" to meet international diamond mining standards and should be allowed to resume selling diamonds in international markets. The body is expected to follow the recommendation.

The 140,000-acre Marange diamond fields were discovered in 2006, at the height of Zimbabwe's political, economic and humanitarian crisis. Villagers rushed to the area and began finding diamonds close to the surface.

The military took over the Marange diamond fields in late October 2008.

Last year, the Kimberley Process sanctioned Zimbabwe for "significant non compliance" but stopped short of expelling it.

Human Rights Watch, which previously charged Zimbabwean troops with killing more than 200 people, raping women and forcing children to search for the gems in Marange, wants the sanctions to go further this year.

The opportunities that come with the World Cup

The World Cup brings with it a chance to get a temporary lift in the economic fortunes of many in South Africa. About a dozen women took the opportunity to sell meals to the construction workers building the new soccer stadiums. These enterprising women hope that the money earned from cooking will keep their children in school and help to grow their businesses.

From the Washington Examiner, Associated Press writer Donna Bryson tells us the story of one of these women.

Cecilia Dube's dream has taken her from dust-choked building sites to university classrooms, from the rubble of demolished food stands to cooking meals in a park in an upscale neighborhood where fans watch World Cup soccer on a giant screen.

The World Cup. Biggest sporting event on Earth. The host nation's month in the world spotlight. Tourists in their droves. A jolt of adrenaline for a sluggish economy. Or so goes the promise of mega-events such as these. For Dube, some of the rewards have already arrived, but for her and millions of her fellow citizens, the route out of poverty has so far proved fickle and arduous.

Her dream is a humble one — to one day run her own restaurant. But for now, she must suffice with the title of "trained food handler," tending a food stand at the park consisting of a table, two chairs and a gas cooker. It's a long way from owning a restaurant, but at least she's no longer up before dawn frying doughnuts by candlelight.
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Life for her and many like her is a constant struggle. Two decades after South Africa broke free of apartheid, being judged fit to host the World Cup is a huge achievement. But what it most desperately needs is more jobs, houses, clinics and self-starting, taxpaying entrepreneurs.

Dube would love to be one. After her husband's death left her without income, she worked at a fast food restaurant and traded in cheap clothes. She took extra work selling sandwiches in a tavern with no kitchen. When the tavern owner took over her business, she decided to strike out on her own.

South Africa had been picked for the World Cup and needed to build facilities. In 2006 Dube opened shop — in a shack, then a trailer — where the soccer authority's new offices were going up. The following year she moved to the nearby site of Soccer City, the main World Cup stadium. It was being renovated and there were hungry workers to feed.
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For three years she was one of a dozen cooks providing meals at Soccer City. They called themselves the Soccer City Traders. A typical day would begin before dawn with Dube barefoot and hard at work by the light of a candle stuck in an empty soda bottle, making triple-decker bologna-and-cheese sandwiches and frying vetkoeke, South African doughnuts.

Then, one morning last October, came a catastrophe. Police arrived and told the Soccer City Traders they were in the way of construction. The police broke up the stalls, loading the scraps of wood, cardboard and broken plastic chairs onto trucks.

The men and women immediately held a protest march and headed to Johannesburg City Hall. They were told they could open shop in another area near the stadium. The next morning, Dube was serving breakfast as usual. Catastrophe averted.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/world/out-of-poverty-for-south-african-woman-one-of-many-world-cup-holds-out-an-elusive-dream-96779349.html#ixzz0rUMuaNeh

More on the end of WFP operations in Yemen

The World Food Programme may soon have to stop operations in Yemen due to a drop of donations from United Nations member countries. This comes at a time with international focus is on the lack of stability in Yemen, and the threat of al-Queda recruiting hungry people.

From Canada.com, this Reuters story describes the situation.

"With the current funding situation, we will have to cease operations by the end of August," said Gian Carlo Cirri, the WFP representative in Yemen, where one in three people suffer from chronic hunger.

"The situation is extremely serious."

The WFP says it would need $75 million to continue operations for the duration of 2010 in impoverished Yemen, which is trying at once to cement a truce with northern rebels, quell separatism in the south and fight a resurgent al-Qaida arm.

Growing instability in Yemen is a major global security concern since a Yemen-based regional arm of al-Qaida claimed responsibility for a failed December attempt to bomb a U.S.-bound plane.

Western allies and neighbouring Saudi Arabia fear al-Qaida could exploit poverty and chaos in Yemen to use it as a base for destabilizing attacks in the region and beyond.

They want Yemen to resolve its domestic conflicts and consolidate power.

But Yemen, strategically located next door to top oil exporter Saudi Arabia but with fewer resources, is also trying to avert economic disaster for many, including around 350,000 displaced by the northern war, most of whom receive WFP support.

A new colonialism?

Economist Paul Romer has a crazy idea that some say boarders on colonialism. He wants developed nations to create charter cities within under-developed countries. Similar to what Hong Kong was to China when Britain controlled it. The charter cities would operate under the rules of the free market, then business would flourish and spread throughout the country.

A couple of articles explain this idea. First, as a part of their G-20 preview series, Toronto Star writer Sarah Barmak interviews Romer.

Why has the aid model stayed in place if it’s ineffective?

I think what’s at the heart of the difference in how I see the world from many people is that many people think about aiding a nation. They see the nation as the entity that foreign aid is supposed to be directed to. I start from the perspective of the family. I say, I’m not so worried about what happens to nation X, Y or Z. I want to give this family more choices.

All we have to provide is a place with good rules, and the provision of good rules is not an expensive thing. In a sense, it’s like all we have to do is provide the referee, and then people can come play the game of modern life. And it’s not expensive at all to provide referees.

How is Hong Kong a model charter city?

In a way, (Hong Kong) is certainly a model for how to change the rules. You take a particular location, you say that different rules will apply there; in the case of many of the special economic zones in China, rules, for example, that let foreign firms come in and employ Chinese workers. Then you say to the Chinese, you have the opportunity to go and live in one of these special zones, but if you don’t want to, you’re not forced to. Then the mainland Chinese government created other places like that, and the demonstrated successes in those places ultimately made it possible for the government to move toward a more market-based economy throughout the entire country.
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Is it unfair to say that you’re trying to resurrect colonialism?

Imagine that (someone) moves to Vancouver or Toronto as a landed immigrant. Is that colonialism? I don’t think so. I think the respect for individual choice is what’s different about this, and the respect for the choices of the nations involved. Canada won’t do a deal with Cuba unless the leadership in Cuba wants it to happen.

(There is) one element of truth (that comparison) is trying to get at. Instead of saying to people in Haiti or people in another country where people have not developed a system of rules that’s as good as the system in Canada, ‘We’re just going to stand aside and wait for the centuries it might take for you to develop your own rules,’ we’re going to say, ‘Here’s a process where more of your people can get access to rules that are already up and running in other parts of the world.’

The real issue is, do you want to give poor people a choice? There’s something deeply condescending about this Western attitude that we shouldn’t give poor people the right to make choices about where they live, because somehow they’ll make bad choices.

To further describe the charter city idea and some background on Romer, Atlantic magazine writer Sebastian Mallaby gives us this description.

Fast-forward several centuries, and Henry the Lion’s would-be heir is Paul Romer, a gentle economist at Stanford University. Elegant, bespectacled, geekishly curious in a boyish way, Romer is not the kind of person you might picture armed with a two-handed flanged mace, cutting down Slavic marauders. But he is bent on cutting down an adversary almost as resistant: the conventional approach to development in poor countries. Rather than betting that aid dollars can beat poverty, Romer is peddling a radical vision: that dysfunctional nations can kick-start their own development by creating new cities with new rules—Lübeck-style centers of progress that Romer calls “charter cities.” By building urban oases of technocratic sanity, struggling nations could attract investment and jobs; private capital would flood in and foreign aid would not be needed. And since Henry the Lion is not on hand to establish these new cities, Romer looks to the chief source of legitimate coercion that exists today—the governments that preside over the world’s more successful countries. To launch new charter cities, he says, poor countries should lease chunks of territory to enlightened foreign powers, which would take charge as though presiding over some imperial protectorate. Romer’s prescription is not merely neo-medieval, in other words. It is also neo-colonial.
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Inevitably, Romer’s big idea attracts some skeptical responses. “Paul is very creative,” says William Easterly, a development economist at New York University, “and sometimes creativity can cross the line into craziness.” The way Easterly sees it, charter cities (like charter schools in American cities) may provide an alternative to incumbent government systems, promising experimentation, competition, and perhaps a new way forward. But Easterly also worries that Romer has fallen prey to an old siren song—the idea that you can slough off debilitating customs and vested interests by constructing a technocratic petri dish uncontaminated by politics. Other critics are blunter. “Romer makes it sound as though setting up a charter city is like setting up a fairground,” Elliott Sclar, a professor of urban planning at Columbia University, told me. “We take a clear piece of land, we turn on the bright lights, and we create this separate environment that will stand apart from everything that’s around it. I wish it were that simple.”

However simple-seeming his ideas, Romer is no lightweight. Starting in the late 1980s, he produced a series of papers that changed the way his profession thinks about economic growth; his most celebrated contribution, published in 1990, “was one of the best papers in economics in 25 or 30 years,” in the estimation of Charles I. Jones, a colleague of Romer’s at Stanford. Before the Romer revolution, theorists had explained an economy’s growing output by looking at the obvious inputs—the number of hours worked, the skills of the workforce, the quantity of machinery and other physical capital.

But Romer stressed a fourth driver of growth, which he termed simply “ideas,” a category that encompassed everything from the formula for a new drug to the most efficient sequence for stitching 19 pieces of material into a sneaker. In statistical tests, the traditional inputs appeared to account for only half the differences in countries’ output per person, suggesting that ideas might account for the remaining half—and that leaving them out of a growth theory was like leaving the prince out of Hamlet. And whereas the old models had predicted that growth would slow as population expansion put stress on resources, and as new investment in skills and capital yielded diminishing returns, Romer’s New Growth Theory opened the window onto a sunnier worldview: a larger number of affluent people means more ideas, so prosperity and population expansion might cause growth to speed up.

A controversy over sex education in the Philippines

From IRIN a sex education plan proposal has generated a lot of controversy do to Philippines social stigmas.

A controversy is raging in the Philippines over a sex education programme aimed at cutting the population growth rate, which is blamed for massive poverty in the Southeast Asian country of about 92 million.

Openly talking about sex remains taboo in many quarters of Philippine society but all that is changing as the government introduces a controversial sex education programme to public school pupils.

The influential Roman Catholic Church is demanding the plan be scrapped, but the cash-strapped government is struggling to contain an annual population growth rate of more than 2 percent.

Education Secretary Mona Valisno said she was open to meeting church leaders about the sex education campaign, which was launched this week at the start of the school year. The plan is to introduce the Adolescent Reproductive Health programme to children from the fifth grade and older in 80 public elementary and 79 high schools, but it will soon be expanded nationwide.

“Our role here is to educate the young people on issues that directly affect them and empower them to make informed choices and decisions,” Valisno told reporters, explaining that the sex education modules would be integrated in various subjects, including science and health.

Topics will range from personal hygiene to reproductive health. Issues relating to pre-marital sex, teenage pregnancy, as well as HIV and AIDS, will also be discussed, she said.

“Among those who prepared the modules are psychologists because we want to ensure that specific topics for discussions will be made in the appropriate year levels,” she said.

Consultations

However, she said government was “still open for consultations” with the church, and it is not known if the programme will be fully implemented, revised or scrapped.

The Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), which in the past has succeeded in blocking a proposed law that would have provided public funds for information on and access to artificial birth control, quickly voiced its opposition to the programme, and demanded that it be scrapped on moral grounds. It also argued that sex education was better taught in the privacy of the home, not in the public sphere.

“These issues are not for children,” said Monsignor Pedro Quitorio, CBCP’s media director. “This is better left to the parents. This will just lead to promiscuity. Sex should be taught as a gift from God and not just the physical aspect of it.”

Combating poverty and HIV

The UN, in a statement on 18 June, meanwhile threw its weight behind the programme, pointing out that the Philippines was a signatory to the Convention on the Rights of the Child that obliges it to ensure adolescent girls and boys are given accurate and appropriate information on how to protect their health and practise sexually safe behaviours.

“Since 47 percent of the population in the Philippines are below 19, a critical element to helping young people out of poverty is providing them with the information to enable them to grow up healthy and enable them to make the right choices for themselves and their families,” the UN said.

Suneeta Mukherjee, the Philippine country director for the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), sought to allay widespread fears among parents that the school lessons would encourage children to be sexually active.

“These are life skills modules. This is not necessarily about contraception. Sex education is a misunderstood term,” Mukherjee told IRIN.

“The young ones are excitable, willing to take risks. They must be properly informed of what is right for them, what risks they are taking. This will definitely not lead to promiscuity,” she said, adding that the UNFPA remains committed to seeing the programme through with the Manila government.

According to the UN, the country remains off-track in achieving most of the Millennium Development Goals, with 33 percent of Filipinos still living on less than US$1 a day. In addition, about 5.2 million school-age children are not enrolled in education, while 11 mothers die each day due to pregnancy-related causes.

But even worse is that the incidence of HIV among youth has increased five-fold just over the past two years, the UN said.

The new ways of corporate giving

More and more corporations are getting directly involved in projects to help develop the the rest of the world. Instead of just giving money or products away corporations are instead sending staff and resources into the under-developed world to bring solutions to it's people. Of course this makes for good business, because it could help to develop a new market in the near future.

From the Guardian, technology writer Meg Carter gives us a few examples.

Global printing giant HP changed its approach to addressing pro-social issues in December, moving from what it calls the "old-style corporate philanthropy" of donating money and technology such as printers, to creating a new office of social innovation with the goal of offering both engineering skills on the ground in affected regions and managerial help to NGOs.

"We are looking at what we can contribute not just for emergency response but for the longer term," says Paul Ellington, director of health initiatives for HP's office of social innovation. "For example, we don't want to parachute engineers into Haiti for just a few weeks after a natural disaster. We want to help create new jobs and train Haitian engineers, and we are partnering with the Clinton Foundation and Nethope.org to do that."

There are other ways that big corporates are putting their assets to good use and raising their pro-social profiles. The rock star Bono is the face of (RED), an AIDS research charity for Sub-Saharan Africa set up in 2006. However, for the big brands working with (RED) and raising money by selling (RED) branded products, the digital community is the source of the programme's underlying power.

"We have more than 2m followers on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, which allows for an intimate, two-way conversation with customers of our partner brands," says (RED) international chief executive Seb Bishop. "That creates deeper understanding and a more relevant, ongoing relationship."

Brands such as Nike, Gap, Apple and Penguin books pay a licence fee to use the (RED) brand name on their products – like the red-coloured ipod – and they donate a percentage of sales to Aids research. Some $150m has been raised through the sale of almost 1,000 different (RED)-branded products launched across 60 countries worldwide.

For the (RED) model to work, its partners must see sales as well as PR benefits, and digital communication plays a central role in both. "To get its message across, an organisation must develop a one-on-one relationship with its audience," says Bishop. "To do this it must prove it's multidimensional and closely in tune with that audience's daily lives."

How would you like 50 years of oil spills?

In the "you think you've got it bad category" we turn to the Niger Delta. While the Gulf of Mexico oil spill dominates the news headlines, the Niger Delta has seen far worse. The oil spills that have dumped millions of gallons oil into the delta's wetlands have rendered much of it dead. What has spilled into the Gulf is only a fraction of what is dumped into the Niger Delta wetlands over the last 50 years.

There are several causes for the continuous oil dumplings in Nigeria. Sabotage from the local militant opposition, aging and poorly maintained pipes cause another fraction of the spills, also an ineffective oversight from the government.

From this Associated Press article that we found at the Sarasota Herald Tribune, writer Adam Nossiter gives us this unique perspective.

Perhaps no place on Earth has been as battered by oil, experts say, leaving residents here astonished at the nonstop attention paid to the gusher half a world away in the Gulf of Mexico. It was only a few weeks ago, they say, that a burst pipe belonging to Royal Dutch Shell in the mangroves was finally shut after flowing for two months: Now nothing living moves in a black-and-brown world once teeming with shrimp and crab.

Not far away, there is still black crude on Gio Creek from an April spill, and just across the state line in Akwa Ibom the fishermen curse their oil-blackened nets, doubly useless in a barren sea buffeted by a spill from an offshore Exxon Mobil pipe in May that lasted for weeks.

The oil spews from rusted and aging pipes, unchecked by what analysts say is ineffectual or collusive regulation, and abetted by deficient maintenance and sabotage. In the face of this black tide is an infrequent protest -- soldiers guarding an Exxon Mobil facility beat women who were demonstrating last month, according to witnesses -- but mostly resentful resignation.

Small children swim in the polluted estuary here, fishermen take their skiffs out ever farther -- "There's nothing we can catch here," said Pius Doron, perched anxiously over his boat -- and market women trudge through oily streams.

"There is Shell oil on my body," said Hannah Baage, emerging from Gio Creek with a machete she used to cut the cassava stalks balanced on her head.