admin October 28th, 2010
Speaking two weeks ago at the London School of Economics (LSE), Andrew Mitchell, UK Secretary of State for International Development, set out a series of sweeping changes that he plans to introduce at DFID, centred around ensuring that the private sector has a strong role to play in encouraging economic growth in the world’s poorest countries.
You can listen to the podcast of the whole speech here and download a transcript too.
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Tags: Actis, Andrew Mitchell, Commonwealth Development Corporation, DFID, LSE, South Korea, Uganda, Zambia
admin October 27th, 2010
Largely unnoticed by the rest of the world – and certainly invisible when competing with stories from Pakistan or even Haiti, where cholera has now raised its ugly head – the West African state of Benin has been devastated by floods over the past two weeks.
Just over a week ago UNICEF reported that it was responding to mass flooding that had covered more that two thirds of the country. Unseasonably heavy rains had caused the Oueme and Mono rivers to overflow and the resulting floods destroyed homes, schools and health centres, claiming 43 lives and leaving nearly 100,000 homeless.
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Tags: Benin, Floods, Haiti, natural disasters, Pakistan, Plan International, Red Cross, UNICEF
admin October 25th, 2010
Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, has just finished his extraordinary radio series, A History of the World in 100 Objects.
The first object in the series was a chopping tool from East Africa that, MacGregor says, “allowed us to take control of our environment”. The future will be about avoiding the destruction of our environment that has led us to the brink of disaster.
The series also ended in East Africa and the final object in this race through two million years of human history was a portable solar energy panel that could power a solar lantern – or indeed any other rechargeable gadget.
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Tags: cooking stoves, Lord Stern, LSE, natural disasters, solar power
admin October 17th, 2010
Yesterday, October 16th, was World Food Day and to shine a spotlight what is not being done to help the world’s hungry, Medecins sans Frontieres has drawn attention to the way that donors supply nutritionally sub-standard foods to starving children – foods that they would not feed to their own children.
This highlights one reason why aid does not work – donor countries tend to pay more attention to their own needs than to the needs of the countries they are purporting to help.
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Tags: Food aid, Medecins sans Frontieres, WHO
