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This
page carries news and reports about poverty reduction events around the
world. It also provides links to 12 news feeds on poverty related issues from Eldis
as well as an icanews.coop feed.
Launch of Co-operative Facility for Africa - COOPAfrica
The Cooperative Facility for Africa - COOPAfrica was launched on the 1sI and 2nd October 2007 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The project which the ICA has been involved in preparing, will be implemented by the ILO. Agencies cooperating with the ILO on this project are, among others, the Department for International Development - UK (DFID), the Committee for the Promotion and Advancement of Co-operatives (COPAC), the Co-operative College of the United Kingdom, and the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), and the ICA. The project to be located at the ILO Office in Dar es Salaam will work in close collaboration with national co-operative organizations, government ministries responsible for co-operative development, co-operative training institutions, and relevant NGOs.
The project aims at improving the governance, performance and efficiency of local co-operatives in order to strengthen their capacity to create jobs, access markets, generate income, reduce poverty, provide social protection and give people a voice in civil society. In the Eastern and Southern Africa region. The project will initially be implemented in 15 countries, namely: Botswana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, South Africa, Southern Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
The launch was preceded by a workshop of stakeholders (representatives of apex organizations, co-operative training institutions, governments, and international organizations) who had constructive discussions on project content, delivery, roles and functions.
The launch was attended by large number of co-operative leaders from the Africa region and international representatives who heard testimonies from Tanzanian co-operators. The ICA was represented by the ICA Vice President for Africa, the ICA Director-General and the ICA Director of Development who is also acting Regional Director for Africa. The project was officially launched by the Minister for Agriculture, Food Security and Co-operatives, Hon Stephen Wasira, in the presence of the ILO Director for Africa, Mrs Regina Amadi-Njoku,
The Rebuilding Agricultural Markets Program (RAMP)
The Rebuilding Agricultural Markets Program (RAMP) was a three-year
initiative (2003-2006), which has helped strengthen the competitiveness of Afghan agricultural products. The RAMP project has developed the value
chain in agribusiness & food...Contributor: Carmen V. Caballero, Published date 26 Jun , 2007
Fragile States: Defining Difficult Environments for Poverty Reduction
Fragile states take many forms. What is the most useful way of defining them? This paper, by UK Government's Department for International Development (DFID), adopts a definition of `difficult environments' grounded in the role of the state in...Contributor: Carmen V. Caballero, Published date 27 Jun , 2007
The USAID Development Experience Clearinghouse
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Development Experience Clearinghouse (DEC) is the largest online resource for USAID funded technical and program documentation, with over 46300 documents available for electronic download. Search...Contributor: John Daly, Published date 24 Jun , 2007
Understanding Children's Work project
As part of broader efforts toward durable solutions to child labor, the
International Labour Organization (ILO), the United Nations Children's
Fund (UNICEF), and the World Bank initiated the interagency Understanding Children's Work (UCW) project in...
Getting All Girls into School
Despite the huge benefits of education for girls, the UNESCO estimates that 43 million school-age girls are not enrolled in schools. This is partly the reason for the educational gap between boys and girls in some countries. Sub-Saharan African...Contributor: Chijioke Evoh, Published date 27 Jun , 2007
Companies valuing social factors better equipped to lead markets,
Companies that effectively manage environmental, social and governance factors may be better equipped to achieve and retain market leadership, the managing director of Goldman Sachs International said today at the United Nations. Presenting his...
Contributor: Shambhu Ghatak, Published date 26 Jun , 2007
Making the Market Work for Ultra Poor Rural Women
Private sector can play a crucial role in creating employment for the Ultra poor rural women with a viable business model. Project SHIKHA, a rural distribution network of rural women in Shibganj, Bogra can be food for thought for development...Contributor: Dilir Khan, Published date 27 Jun , 2007
UNFPA - State of the World's Population 2007.
Peering into the Dawn of an Urban Millennium. In 2008, the world reaches an invisible but momentous milestone: For the first time in history, more than half its human population, 3.3 billion people, will be living in urban areas. By 2030, this is...Contributor: Anuradha Bhattacharjee, Published date 27 Jun , 2007
The Future of Urban Growth: Rates, Speed and Size
From UNFPA - State of the World's Population 2007. Over the last 30 years, two patterns have gripped public and media attention: the speed of urban growth in less developed regions and the growth of mega-cities (those with 10 million or more people)....Contributor:Anuradha Bhattacharjee, Published date 27 Jun , 2007
The G8 Summit 2007, 6 - 8 June 2007, Germany
National Co-operative Housing Federation The National Cooperative Housing Federation of India (NCHF) is the nation wide organization of the Indian Cooperative Housing Movement. It was founded in September, 1969 by the apex cooperative housing federations.The basic thrust of its formation...Access article
Housing and Urban Development Corporation Ltd. (HUDCO)
The Housing and Urban Development Corporation Ltd. (HUDCO) focus on the social aspect of housing and utility infrastructure provision. Preferential
allocation of resources to the socially disadvantaged. In spite of being commercial in its...Access article
CHF International CHF International's first overseas programs were focused on housing microfinance in Central America. Since the 1960's, CHF has focused increasingly on international issues. With experience, it quickly became clear that addressing one linear area of...Access article
Article on Housing Cooperatives in India. The study of Ahmedabad land ownership issues by individual vis-a-vis community organization reflects importance of various community organizations in development of city. Half of the property is owned by community organization, the spatial growth of...Access article
Pro-poor avian flu research programme launchedLondon, 14 May 2007 - An innovative US$ 7.8 million research programme for
Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) has been launched by the UK Department for International Development (DFID). The programme acknowledges the critical relevance of...Access article
UN-HABITAT
Governing Council backs women in land and property rights
Governments give UN-HABITAT
new incentive on public-private partnerships.
A component of
the Desjardins Group, the largest integrated cooperative
financial group in Canada, Développement international Desjardins
(DID) is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to empower the
disadvantaged in developing countries and countries in transition by developing
community owned and operated financial institutions, mostly cooperative
networks, which will have an impact on the community. Read
the full paper on Développement international Desjardins (DID).
Global
Warming Will Make Water Crisis Intolerable (28/05/07)An international
meeting in Mexico City, Mexico, on the future of the world's fresh water
resources marked World Water Day with a renewed effort to ensure that
more clean drinking water reaches the 1.1 billion people who do not have
access to clean drinking water.
WHY
(World Hunger Year) - The Emerging Water Crisis and its implications for
Global Food Security (28/05/07)WHY with its mission of challenging
hunger and poverty is deeply concerned about the coming water crisis.
WHY has asked Robert Svadlenka to edit a number of articles exploring
this theme.
Water
is Life - A Story from the Niger (28/05/07) The 500,000 inhabitants
of the Azawak plains of Niger wage a daily struggle to find enough water
for their basic needs.
Gender
and Climate Change (28/05/07) The UN is formally committed
to gender mainstreaming within all United Nations policies and programmes.
In all societies, in all parts of the world, gender equality is not yet
realised.
Analysing Pro-Poor Growth
The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) has recently
developed a methodological tool for analysing pro-poor growth - Integrated
Economic Analysis for Pro-Poor Growth (IEA).The approach introduces a
strengthened poverty focus in economic analysis and allows for analysing
trade-offs between different constraints by identifying a country specific bundle of priority areas. By analysing the country specific circumstances
seen from the perspective of the poor, one can draw conclusions on the
binding constraints that will impact the degree to which economic growth
will lead to poverty reduction.
The approach underpinning the methodology rests on two basic premises.
Firstly, pro-poor growth requires that the poor are able to participate
fully and on an equal footing in economic development processes. Secondly,
employment and income derived from employment (self-employment or wage
employment) is seen as the singularly most important link between economic
development and reduction of income poverty. Hence, the overall objective
of the IEA methodological approach is to sharpen the poverty focus and not least to focus on the role of poor people as actors in the
conduct of country level economic analysis and in the assessment of economic analyses and policies. More specifically, it
aims to:
* Take the economic actors as the starting point, with special attention
to the poor, and make sustainable poverty reduction the chief objective.
* Operationalise pro-poor growth by integrating employment analysis, business
environment analysis and macroeconomic
analysis.
It should be stressed that this methodological guideline is to be seen
as an approach rather than a blueprint. A high degree of flexibility and
a genuine embedding of the analysis in the country specific context are
crucial for making the analytical work both manageable and relevant. The
methodology has been applied and tested in a series of country studies (to date, Kenya, Cambodia,
Uganda and Albania).
Access
methodological paper
Albania
case study
Cambodia
case study
Kenya
case study
Uganda
case study
Earth Day 2007 Earth Day 2007 was celebrated
around the globe on April 22 enabling an increased focus on environmental issues. Environmental degradation
is a significant barrier to achieving Millennium Development Goals (MDG).
Over the past decade, the International Development Association (IDA),
the World Bank's fund for the poorest countries, has lent US$4.5 billion
to support a range of environmental improvements, including mitigation
of urban and industrial air pollution and providing cleaner and more reliable
sources of water.
With the growing international consensus on the need to hasten the global
transition to low-carbon economies, and in line with
its Clean Energy for Development Investment Framework (CEIF), the World
Bank, with its development partners, will be shaping a greenhouse gas
(GHG) assessment methodology to track the ‘carbon footprint’ of its core development activities in the
energy (including oil and gas) and transport sectors.
The Carbon Footprint assessment will provide information about the current
carbon intensity of World Bank lending operations, and will identify opportunities
to reduce the GHG footprint of development activities while continuing
to support growth and poverty alleviation.
More
on the World Bank's work
and
here.
Each person on the planet contributes to climate change.
Determine
your "footprint" to see how you can reduce your footprint.
New Research
on the Urbanization of Global Poverty. Many people assume
that poverty is urbanizing rapidly in the developing world and that it
is now mainly an urban problem. It is true that the proportion of the
world's poor living in towns and cities is rising over time, but three-quarters
of all poor people still live in rural areas, say Ravallion, Chen and
Sangraula in a recent World Bank working paper. In fact, population urbanization
has in general helped to reduce absolute poverty. The paper reports results
from a new data set, drawing on over 200 household surveys for about 90
countries, and arriving at the first ever breakdown of international “$1 a day” poverty counts by urban and rural
areas. Even allowing for the higher cost of living facing the poor in
urban areas, the authors find that the “$1 a day” rural poverty rate in 2002 (30 percent) is more than double the urban
rate. Similarly, while the paper finds that 70 percent of
the rural population lives below $2 a day, the proportion in urban areas
is less than half that figure. The results suggest that it will in fact
be many decades before a majority of the developing world’s poor
live in cities and towns.View
the paper
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