Faith Ecology Economy Transformation
Many of us have heard about the Millennium Development Goals, which set out to improve various indicators of well-being in impoverished nations by 2015. I was intrigued recently to learn of the Millennium Consumption Goals, a complementary initiative that calls for more sustainable consumption by developed nations while meeting the basic needs of persons who are poor. Continue reading
Category Archives: MDGs
Poor Struggle as Inflation Soars
As long as the Kenyan shilling is under pressure from the dollar, the price of fuel and food will continue rising. In August the shilling reached a record low of 95.05 shillings to the dollar. The low income segments are hardest hit by this situation. Continue reading
Gender Responsive Planning and Budgeting at Work
By Miriam Gathigah
NAIROBI, Jul 25, 2011 (IPS) – For the first time ever, the finance minister has allocated almost four million dollars from the current national budget to provide free sanitary pads to schoolgirls. Continue reading
How Poor Is Too Poor?
New Internationalist
The world is on track to meet the first of the Millennium Development Goals – to halve the number of people living below the poverty line by 2015. The trouble is that this line – set at a dollar a day – is a deeply flawed and unreliable measure of poverty. David Woodward explains why, and proposes a radical new rights-based measure.
More than a billion people live on less than $1.25 a day. Desmond Boylan / Reuters
How we define poverty is critically important. Poverty is a moral concept: ‘poor’ is something we consider that people should not be. So, by setting our poverty targets according to a particular poverty line, we are saying that it is quite acceptable for people to live at that level of income, just as long as they don’t fall below it.
Millennium Development Goal One defines poverty as having an income below the dollar-a-day line – although actually this is now $1.25 per person per day, at purchasing power parity (PPP), at 2005 prices. This means that it is an income which would buy the same as $1.25-a-day in the US in 2005. Continue reading
With cheap food imports, Haiti can’t feed itself
By JONATHAN M. KATZ,Associated Press Writer
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – The earthquake not only smashed markets, collapsed warehouses and left more than 2.5 million people without enough to eat. It may also have shaken up the way the developing world gets food. Continue reading
Nigeria and Millennium Development Goals
African Charter Article# 22: All peoples shall have the r ight to their economic, social and cultural development within the common heritage of humanity .
Nigeria’s Senior Special Assistant to the President on MDGs says to achieve the MDGs by 2015 Nigeria requires a whopping $170.30 billion within a period of six years starting by 2010. This raises the issue of what has actually been achieved. To cost the MDGs out of the expectation and hope of Nigerians is unacceptable.
The Millennium Develop-ment Goals (MDGs) is a UN initiative launched in 2000 and adopted by UN member states in 2001 under the auspices of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to improve the lot of humanity by 2015. Nigeria is a member of that international effort and so much money and personnel at state and Federal levels have been deployed to achieve the MDGs by 2015. Continue reading
Kenya losing 800 nurses yearly
By KENNETH OGOSIA
More than 800 nurses leave the country every year to seek employment abroad especially in the United States of America.
Most of them are women aged between 30 to 46 years working in the public health sector and are highly qualified, statistics at the Nursing Council of Kenya show. Continue reading
Impoverished Haiti Slips Further as Remittances Dry Up
By Mary Beth Sheridan
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Residents paint images depicting President Barack Obama, center, and Canada’s Governor General Michaelle Jean on a wall at the slum of Bel Air in Port-au-Prince, Wednesday, April 15, 2009. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa) (Ramon Espinosa – AP) |
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, April 16 — The U.S. economic crisis touched down recently in the dusty town where Marie Rosita Simon ekes out a living selling sandals. Her brother, a New Jersey cabdriver, slashed his monthly $400 transfer to her by half because his business was off.
For Simon, that amounted to a 40 percent plunge in income for her family of five. Coming after a horrendous year in which food prices soared and hurricanes washed away her plantain and bean crops, the 43-year-old street vendor decided something had to go: dinner. And sometimes she can’t provide breakfast for her children.
“They’re hungry,” she confessed. Continue reading
Access to Water: A Human Right or a Human Need?
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At Jiftlik on the West Bank, Oxfam plans to build a reservoir connected to this four inch-pipe to increase the amount of water reaching the village’s 800 households. (Photo by Sarah-Eve Hammond courtesy Oxfam |
ISTANBUL, Turkey, March 27, 2009 ([ENS) – Twenty countries have officially challenged the Ministerial Declaration released Sunday at the close of the week-long World Water Forum because it defines water as a human need rather than as a human right.
Latin American states played a key role in gathering signatures on a counter-declaration that recognizes access to water and sanitation as a human right and commits to all necessary action for the progressive implementation of this right. Continue reading
The Second Scramble for Africa Starts
by Julio Godoy
BERLIN – Sub-Saharan African countries have of late become the target of a new form of investment that is strongly reminiscent of colonialism: investors from both industrialised and emerging economies buy or lease large tracts of farm land across the continent, either to guarantee their own food provisions or simply as yet another business.
In doing so, investors even deal with warlords who claim property rights, as in Sudan. Continue reading
