Archive for category: Development

Information and stories on development news.

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Experts to Create a Global Health Risk Framework

What is the Commission on Global Health Risk Framework
In response to recent outbreaks of infectious diseases such as Ebola, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and H1N1, the National Academy of Medicine is coordinating a new Commission on Global Health Risk Framework. The framework will address the need for better local and global health infrastructure to stem the spread of diseases on a global scale.

The Commission is a multinational, independent board made up of 18 members from 11 countries. The National Academy of Medicine serves as the secretariat. Those serving on the board are members of their countries’ health ministries and funds while others work in universities and the insurance industry.

To create the framework, the Commission will convene four workshops, each lasting up to three days. Topics include governance for global health, financial responses to pandemic threats, resilient health systems, and research and development of medical products.

A wide range of experts will address the layout of related global initiatives, challenges and lessons learned from past health threats, and the reactions of governments, communities, and the private sector during threats.

The first public meeting was held in Washington D.C. on July 29, 2015. At the conclusion of the four workshops, the commission will publish a consensus report on how to address the issues raised and will provide detailed recommendations for fixing  problem areas. The report is scheduled for release by the end of 2015.

– Katherine Hewitt

Sources: NAM 1, NAM 2, News Medical
Photo: Flickr

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UNLV’s New Research on HIV

UNLV’s New Research on HIVResearchers from the University of Nevada Las Vegas have begun working on new research on HIV, human immunodeficiency virus, by finding ways to stop the virus from infecting human cells.

UNLV has already earned several financial grants for the research, including one from the National Institutes of Health.

The researchers are looking at genetic codes called minimotifs that direct cellular function. Their goal is to understand how the codes can help cells fight off HIV by blocking the virus from interacting with the cells.

“We chose HIV as our model system because we know viruses depend solely on cells to live,” said Kiran Mathew, a researcher at UNLV, in an interview with the Las Vegas Review Journal. “It’s a great model system we can use to test out the effects of (the codes) in the cell.”

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 1.2 million Americans were infected with HIV as of 2012, with roughly 50,000 new cases each year.

By the end of 2014, close to 37 million people were living with HIV/AIDS worldwide and about 15 million people living with HIV were receiving antiretroviral therapy. The World Health Organization cites sub-Saharan Africa as the most affected region by HIV/AIDS globally with 26 million people infected in 2014. The region also accounts for almost 70 percent of the global total of new HIV infections.

There is currently no cure for HIV. The Food and Drug Administration has approved more than 25 antiretroviral drugs to help fight infections and improve quality of life for patients. With successful treatment, HIV infection can become a chronic, manageable disease. But therapy must be life long and there are limitations to diagnosis, treatment and care in geographical areas that are most heavily affected.

The promising new research coming out of UNLV might help develop new HIV drugs, code for other diseases and make personalized drugs specific for a patient’s genetic makeup. But first the findings must be published and patented before pharmaceutical companies could begin the process of bringing it to market where patients can benefit.

– Megan Ivy

Sources: Review Journal, CDC, WHO
Photo: Flickr

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New Orleans: 10 Years After Hurricane Katrina

On August 23, 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated a region known for having a good time, especially on Mardi Gras. Ten years later, experts are looking beyond the beads and glitter, wishing to improve demographic and social discrepancies that were present before Katrina.

Before Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in 2005, concentrated poverty was mostly overlooked with 40 percent of individuals residing in New Orleans living at or below the poverty line.

Out of the people who evacuated in the wake of the category 5 hurricane, a majority of the poor without means of transportation were left to wait out the storm as 80 percent of the city was submerged.

As of 2013, the poverty rate in the city of New Orleans has decreased to 27 percent, but with a drop in the city’s overall population since before Katrina, this number remains unchanged.

Fortunately, data shows that the number of the city’s poor residents has dropped from 39 percent in 2000 to 30 percent between 2009-2013.

Since Katrina, $71 billion in federal funds has improved both levees and created an improved disaster management plan to help improve the city and learn from the mistakes for future natural disasters.

Now, the city’s focus is to continue improving and finding different solutions to make the city great once again. This starts with educating the children.

Before Katrina hit, New Orleans had one of the worst school systems in the country.

Due to a majority of public schools being converted into charter schools after Katrina, New Orleans outperforms the rest of the state in terms of high school graduation rate, rising from 54 percent in 2004 to 73 percent in 2014.

With students having a greater chance of graduating from high school, future students will have a greater chance of attending college and preventing their families from becoming impoverished.

In the words of Allison Plyer, executive director of the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, “Greater New Orleans is in some ways rebuilding better than before.”

– Alexandra Korman

Sources: Brookings, Forbes, The Washington Post, USA Today

Photo: Unsplash

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Senate Pushes Through Green Climate Fund

Senate Appropriations Committee Pushes Through Action on Green Climate FundThe Green Climate Fund, an “operating entity of the financial mechanism” of the United Nation’s Framework for Climate Change Convention, is a critical component of the successful outcome of the Paris climate negotiations in December. Without it, an agreement is “impossible,” says French President Francois Hollande.

The fund, headquartered in South Korea, is essentially a financial intermediary between developed and developing nations. Developing nations — many of which stand to face harsher climate-related incidents — are not keen on signing a climate deal to cut emissions.

Their rationale is that economic development, which is badly needed, is difficult in the absence of hydrocarbons and abundant, cheap energy. A global deal on cutting emissions would hurt the poor countries more, which are the same countries that have historically contributed substantially less greenhouse gas emissions than the developed nations.

Instead, they are demanding reparations and assistance from developed countries in exchange for signing onto any binding climate deal. The money will go toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries and helping them to build resilience to future climate shocks.

Some developed countries including the United States have, until recently, been balking at the idea of giving developing countries money for climate-related disasters and paying for them to reduce emissions. This stance has thwarted previous climate talks and threatens the COP21 negotiations.

However, the Senate Committee on State and Foreign Operations has pushed through action on funding for the Green Climate Fund. Although the legalese wording in the subcommittee document effectively blocked funding by requiring that a subsequent act of Congress was needed to approve funding, the wording was removed during the Full Committee Markup.

The bill includes an unidentified amount of “limited funding” for the Green Climate Fund. The president’s $500 million request represents one-hundredth of 1 percent of the federal budget. The United States is now one of more than 30 countries that have dedicated money to the Green Climate Fund.

– John Wachter

Sources: Green Climate Fund, The Hill 1, The Hill 2, RFI, Sierra Club, United States Senate 1, United States Senate 2, United States Senate 3
Photo: Flickr

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Public-Private Partnerships in Africa

Public-Private Partnerships in Africa
While over the last few decades the economies of Africa have, as a whole, grown quite substantially, the economic problems Africa faces are still monumental in scope. On a continent that supports around a billion people, nearly 600 million lack access to electricity and almost 300 million have no access to safe water.

A promising solution to help combat these vast problems concerning infrastructure and service delivery is Public-Private Partnerships (PPP). Although there are many distinct models for PPPs, in essence, they are contracts between the public sector and a private party in which both entities share their skills and assets in delivering a service or facility for the use of the general public.

Each party shares in the risks and rewards of the venture. PPPs have taken place mainly in economic infrastructures such as power, transportation, telecommunications and water and sanitation.

Unsurprisingly, the most developed country in Africa, South Africa, has had the most experience with PPPs. Fifty PPPs have occurred on the national or provincial level and 300 at the municipal level between 1994 and 2005.

Furthermore, between 1992 and 2012, there were a total of 51 PPPs in the water and sewage sector in Africa, with a total investment during this period totaling a little more than $3 billion. This limited number of PPPs in these sectors are due to certain constraints that hinder the further success and development of PPPs in Africa.

These constraints include: inadequate legal and regulatory frameworks for PPPs, lack of technical skills to manage PPP programs and projects, unfavorable investor perception of country risk, Africa’s limited role in global trade and investment, small market size, limited infrastructure, and limited financial markets.

More simply, many companies believe the potential reward of a PPP venture into Africa is outweighed by the potential risk. Yet encouragingly, the belief that Africa is an attractive investment destination is much more likely held by a company, if it has already ventured in Africa.

According to data gathered from the Ernest Young 2014 Africa attractiveness survey, while only 39 percent of respondents without businesses in Africa thought that Africa’s attractiveness has improved over the past year, 73 percent of those with businesses in Africa thought the continent’s attractiveness improved over the past year.

It seems that the perception of Africa that many businesses hold does not match what is actually happening in the continent.

The likelihood that those numbers are primarily fueled by a mismatch of perception and reality rather than positive bias by companies willing to venture into Africa in the first place, greatly improves in light of another encouraging finding.

According to the same EY 2014 survey, Africa was the second most attractive region in the world to invest in. In 2010 it was the eighth most attractive region out of the world’s 10 regions and in 2012, the fifth.

While comprehensive, holistic data on PPPs in Africa is scarce, it is fair to think that their potential is vast on the continent. A World Bank report on PPPs found in Uganda’s 10-year experience in small town water PPPs, water connections have almost tripled since PPPs introduction in 2002. More than 1.5 million people are now served through PPPs in small Ugandan towns.

The report aptly concluded, “Involving the private sector has proven worthwhile even if the private party isn’t bringing much money in. Small-scale PPPs have a significant role in reaching the poor.”

Public, Private Partnerships are a valuable tool in solving Africa’s vast infrastructure deficits. Mitigating the impediments for these contracts would be an important step in providing basic services to hundreds of millions of Africans. But maybe more importantly, companies should dip their toes in the water holes of Africa, as they may be surprised with what they find.

– Connor Bohannan

Sources: African Development Bank, Earnest Young, National Treasury of South Africa, OECD, Venture Africa, The World Bank
Photo: Flickr

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UN 15-Year Executive Summary on AIDS: Hopes and Lessons

UN 15-Year Executive Summary on AIDS: Hopes and Lessons
Over the past 15 years, many lessons have been learned, and much hope has been gained toward the future of eradicating HIV. The U.N. Executive Summary on Aids, published this last month, highlights many hopes and lessons learned over that time period.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon writes in the introduction, “The AIDS response has been like no other. From the start it has put the focus on people and put their needs first. It has been a turning point for the recognition of health as a human right.”

The HIV response has been one of the greatest unifying factors in the modern world. Hundreds of countries have put aside their differences, be it social, political or economic, to combat the spread of AIDS. In 2001, $4.9 billion was invested in combattng HIV, today that number is over $32 billion.

With experience comes the opportunity to learn and share. Here are a few of lessons from the past 15 years:

Global access to antiretroviral treatment is key

As more and more people have received access to HIV testing, those who are infected are more likely to receive the proper treatment—helping them live better lives and preventing the virus from spreading to others. In 2001, one million people worldwide were on HIV antiretroviral therapy.

In 2014, that number had grown to over 15 million. The goal is to give medical access to all infected individuals by 2030.

The impact generated by people receiving treatment is the bar by which success is measured. This is because of the direct correlation between HIV treatment and death from AIDS. The summary states, “Treatment access has resulted in AIDS-related deaths declining by more than 42% between 2004 and 2014.

An estimated 1.2 million [1.0 million–1.5 million] people died of AIDS-related causes globally in 2014, but in the absence of antiretroviral therapy, AIDS-related deaths would have risen to 2.0 million by 2014.”

Transmission prevention among children

Infants born with HIV has been a focus strategy in AIDS globally. Millions of children were becoming orphans due to infected parents dying from AIDS. In 2009 14.4 million children were orphaned due to AIDS, over the last 6 years that number dropped to 13.3 million.

Another major concern was the transfer of HIV from pregnant mothers to children. In 2001, 580,000 children were infected with HIV. Today that number has been reduced by a little over 50 percent. The strategy educates and recognizes that childbirth is not the only means of infection, but even breastfeeding can lead to HIV infection.

The prevention strategy aggressively targets pregnant women who are infected with HIV. By providing testing, education and treatment, the transmission has been successfully halted and is now being reversed. The goal is to reduce the number to less than 50,000 HIV infections among children by 2030.

Safe Sex and HIV awareness

The youth are the leaders of tomorrow. Educating and preparing them to lead the world tomorrow is one of the keys in fighting HIV and AIDS. When HIV first became widely known in the 1980’s and 1990’s, many misunderstandings prevailed. The disease was thought to be only spread by homosexuals and many did not understand how it was contracted.

As time has gone by, campaigns to spread HIV awareness have led to young people understanding the two best methods of preventing HIV transmission—reducing the number of sexual partners and using condoms.

In 2001, awareness among youth worldwide about HIV was at 25 percent, with most being in developed nations. Today, that number is close to 35 percent. The goal is to raise awareness over 90 percent by the year 2030. The goal of reducing multiple sexual partners has been modest at the most, but still progressive.

Globally, condom use has increased, but levels are still too infrequent among youth in Central and Western Africa (large HIV-populated regions). Sub-Saharan Africa is a huge target population and conservative efforts have been made to allow access to contraceptives such as condoms.

Financing and Aid will allow us to reach the U.N. goals

Over the past 15 years, the fight has moved from millions of dollars to billions being spent annually. This has allowed the resources needed to be allocated appropriately.

The world has learned from HIV that political commitment for public health investments can continuously be created and when adequate levels of spending on health is allowed, it leads to unprecedented levels of success.

At this point in time, the United States cannot waiver in its support of programs funding HIV and AIDS prevention. Hard lessons learned have helped us unite and combat one of the deadliest outbreaks in world history. The road ahead is still going to be hard, but it is not out of reach.

– Adnan Khalid

Sources: UNAIDS, World Bank
Photo: UN AIDS

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Surprises in the Social Progress Index Rankings

Social_Progress_Index_Rankings
The gross domestic product (GDP) has become the primary way to evaluate how countries are doing. However, the Social Progress Index, launched in 2014 by the Social Progress Imperative, aims to provide a more comprehensive picture.

By only looking at the monetary value of goods and services produced within a country, it is easy for data to be skewed or not reflect the full picture. The GDP could be easily skewed by income inequality; consequently, developing countries with high levels of corruption or income equality would be seen as doing better than they actually are.

Purchases made on the black market and payments for cars and appliances besides original down payments are not included, even though this money is used for goods and services. Furthermore, goods produced but not necessarily sold are counted into the GDP, even if the products are sitting in a company warehouse.

The Social Progress Index looks at twelve different components within three different categories: Basic Human Needs, Foundations of Well-Being and Opportunity. In comparison with the GDP rankings, there are a few rankings that shouldn’t be a surprise: Norway, Sweden and Switzerland are the top three; all of the Scandinavian countries are in the top ten.

However, there are countries that, based on GDP, one might expect to be more highly ranked. The United States is sixteenth, China doesn’t break the top seventy and no Middle Eastern oil-producing country is ranked above 35.

Countries many consider to be more developing, such as Panama, Colombia and Malaysia, are in the top fifty countries. Ghana is ranked significantly higher than Nigeria, although they have similar GDPs.

To better understand these rankings, the Social Progress Index also includes scorecards for each country and categorizes elements of the data as either relative strengths or weaknesses.

China, for example, has many relative weaknesses in factors contributing to opportunity, including perceived criminality, political freedoms, average years women spend in school and private property rights. For the United States, freedom over life choices, maternal and child mortality rates and community safety net were among the relative weaknesses.

The Social Progress Index Rankings have much to offer organizations at all levels with regards to information and comparison building. This information can be used to help shape policy, guide partnerships and raise awareness on what can be improved in different countries.

Regardless, the Social Progress Imperative’s Social Progress Index, like other indices such as the OECD Better Life Index, raises important questions as to what individuals consider developed versus developing.

Looking at the Social Progress Index and the GDP, the differences between the more holistic Social Progress Index and the money-focused GDP are vast, thus supporting previous research and theories that place well-being at an individual or community level at equal or greater value to economic output.

Priscilla McCelvey

Sources: Quora, Social Progress Imperative, TED
Photo: Pixabay

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Innovative Policies that Spur Growth and Reduce Poverty

reduce_poverty
A handful of standard policies have been used throughout the world over many decades to attempt to decrease poverty. However, poverty is still a massive problem worldwide. It is also known that healthy economic growth is vital to reducing poverty. What are some new, innovative policies that can be used more widely in conjunction with existing policies to maximize poverty reduction and spur economic growth?

One of the most well-known innovative systems of reducing poverty has been the microcredit or microfinance system that has been perpetuated throughout areas with high densities of impoverished people. Bill Gates has said that he believes that providing more access to mobile banking (an extension of the ideas behind microfinance), will have huge impacts on the way the poor deal with money and will help reduce poverty.

Many innovative new policies are aimed at specific demographics in order to fully leverage the investment in a way that affects the poor best. For example, many of the poor live in rural areas and are involved in agriculture.

Due to the large role of agriculture in many impoverished people’s lives, one organization named Katalyst gives out small packets of high-quality seeds to farmers in Bangladesh. The result? Incomes for these farmers increased on the whole by over 300 million dollars.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has begun to fund proven methods of development. Two programs, one from Colombia and one from Haiti are being funded by the UNDP. Both programs focused on job training and development for people in vulnerable areas of the respective countries.

A third program was aimed at helping the government of Laos address the infrastructure concerns and problems in local areas, which eventually helped over 300,000 people to get better goods and services as well as local infrastructure.

Another idea which is incredibly simple is now being more widely accepted as a method that would prove valuable. Give poor people money. Giving unrestricted cash transfers to the poor has not been a popular policy in the past because many fear that the money would be wasted on nonessential goods or illegal activities.

However, a study based on a model like this was done in Uganda and resulted in a 38 percent increase in wages by the end of the study in the group that was given the unrestricted cash transfers. In addition, hours worked and business assets both increased significantly. The myth that the money would simply be wasted via this simplistic approach seems to be being dispelled.

Most of these ideas are not based on some new understanding of poverty. The existing rationale behind each one is held in commonly held knowledge about the different attributes of poverty and those in poverty.

The innovations are creative ways of tackling the most basic traits of the impoverished, unemployment (specific job training centers), lack of money (unrestricted cash transfers), and giving high quality seed packets (agriculture as a means of income).

By addressing these known factors in new ways, these policies have proven to be of use in the instances they were used, and should be more widely spread across the globe to help increase the rate of poverty reduction.

– Martin Yim

Sources: OCED Insights, United Nations, Social Science Research Network
Photo: CNN

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How the UN Fights Global Poverty

How the UN Fights Global Poverty2015 represents an important year for the United Nations to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.

Among the goals that the United Nations has to eradicate poverty and hunger are: to reduce by half the amount of people that make less than $1 per day, accomplish employment and work for everyone including minorities such as women and to reduce by half the amount of people who are suffering from hunger.

The United Nations partners with different organizations and foundations in order to achieve these goals to eradicate poverty.

The Zero Hunger Challenge, the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement and the UNDP-IKEA Foundation are three movements that the United Nations are partnering with.

1. Zero Hunger Challenge

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon gives the invitation to every country to work for the future, a future in which every person has adequate nutrition and doesn’t lack food.

The Zero Hunger Challenge involves having no stunted children, 100 percent access to adequate food, sustainable food systems, 100 percent increase in smallholder productivity and zero food waste.

According to this challenge, the investment in agriculture, rural development and equality of opportunity helps to eradicate hunger.

This challenge promotes different strategies and cooperation in order to strive for results that combat hunger.

2. Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement

The principle of this movement is that everyone has the right to good nutrition and food. This movement is supported by donors, people from the government, the United Nations and various others.

This movement seeks to address malnutrition by activities such as implementing programs and collaborations.

The principles of engagement are to be transparent and honest about the impact that collective action has, bring solutions that can be proven and interventions to scale, have a commitment to support the rights and equity of all human beings, resolve conflicts if they arise, be responsible so stakeholders can feel collectively accountable to the commitments, establish priorities and be communicative toward what works and what doesn’t.

3. UNDP-IKEA Foundation

This is a foundation that is benefiting 50,000 women from India.

This foundation has helped 9,000 dairy producers to form a company through provided financial literacy training. Profits also double within a year through the participation of the members.

The United Nations also contributes with other organizations, such as the UNDP and Brazil’s Natura Cosméticos, which brings training to beauty advisors in areas that vary from direct sales to customer training.

It is clear that the United Nations uses different methods to obtain results in the different humanity issues that it focuses on.

While they address different issues such as climate change, terrorism, food production, human rights, health emergencies and many others, global poverty and the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger is under the Millennium Development Goals that the United Nations has, and partnering with different associations, movements, organizations and foundations has resulted in a way to reach for success in addressing these issues in the year of 2015.

– Diana Fernanda Leon

Sources: United Nations 1, United Nations 2, Scaling Up Nutrition
Photo: Flickr

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Philanthropy University Works to Empower Social Workers

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Education has always been heralded as a champion of peace and understanding. Worldwide, people from all walks of life understand that education is one of the best ways to provide better opportunities for their children, socially and economically.

A new nonprofit organization named Philanthropy University has attempted to combine both like no other has before. The organization offers leaders opportunities to strengthen their skills and grow their network of peers and mentors, ultimately gaining skills that will help them make a more meaningful and lasting impact in the world today.

Amr Al-Dabbagh, the founder of Philanthropy U shared his excitement for the project.

“Imagine a workforce of social change professionals who are primed, positioned and skilled to impact the lives of millions of people and effectively change the world with their work. This is the vision of Philanthropy University.”

The program offers free, dynamic courses online in leadership and management. Currently, courses on essential nonprofit strategies and global social entrepreneurship are starting late September.

Courses last 5-8 weeks and require a commitment of 2-3 hours watching videos, reading articles, participating in class discussion, and completing individual and/or team assignments.

The courses are taught by renowned instructors and reviewed by Philanthropy U’s curriculum and advisory committees—which contains educators from prominent schools such as Stanford and UC Berkeley.

The university is the first institution of its kind, providing free non-credit online education. Although the courses are not considered college or academic credit, learners can receive a Statement of Accomplishment upon the completion of any course.

Complete all seven courses to earn a certificate in social sector leadership from Berkeley Haas—the second-oldest business school in the United States nestled on the campus of the University of California Berkeley.

Such programs demonstrate the beauty of humanity, as free education drives social work and the selfless qualities needed to effect positive change in today’s volatile world. More than 10,000 learners have already registered to be in Philanthropy University’s inaugural session: will you be one of them?

– Adnan Khalid

Sources: Jakarta Post, Philanthropy University 1, Philanthropy University 2, Philanthropy University 3
Photo: Google Images