Rural women in Latin America continue to face serious obstacles to land tenure, which leave them vulnerable, despite their growing importance in food production and food security.
There are different ways to measure how the Right to Information (RTI) regime is working in a country. A common measure is to see if citizens' demand for information to public officials is increasing steadily. This would indicate that they are becoming more aware of the law and its importance in exercising their democratic right to monitor the work of the government and its machinery. By doing so, they also seek to ensure that public officials are transparent in their work, abide by the laws and are accountable to citizens.
Last month, the Government of Kenya (GoK) in partnership with United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) at the sidelines of the 60th Session of the UN Commission of Women in New York, launched the
report on the
‘Assessment of the UNFPA Campaign to End Preventable Maternal and New-born Mortality in support of the Campaign for Accelerated Reduction of Maternal Mortality in Africa’ A dire humanitarian and security crisis continues to worsen in the Lake Chad Basin with severe consequences for youth, said Regional Humanitarian Coordinator for the Sahel Toby Lanzer.
Offshore accounts are nothing new. Their semi-legal and unethical status is well known. Corporate and crony capitalism produce outrageous inequality and concentrations of economic and political power. The wealthy and powerful of the world have secretly stashed away in excess of $20tr in offshore and other tax havens. Moreover, the vast majority of such activity is criminal, illegal or politically unacceptable. Even the inimitable Donald Rumsfeld might agree all this is a “known known.”
The financial secrecy and tax evasion revealed by the Panama Papers has an extraordinary human cost in developing countries and threatens the realisation of the UN’s ambitious Sustainable Development Goals.
There is a misconception, by some, that the World Trade Organization (WTO) is a barrier to regional integration. It is one of a number of misconceptions that do not match up with the facts like the perception that the WTO is a rich man's club. Today the WTO has 162 members and rising at all stages of development. 43 of those members are African countries and rising. The organization now covers around 98% of world trade. It is a truly global organization, one where everybody has an equal say. And it is an organization which supports regional integration in Africa. Indeed, I would say that the need for better integration across the continent is indisputable.
Calls for low and middle income countries to contribute an additional 6.1 billion dollars to the global HIV response by 2020 could see some vulnerable groups left behind, said HIV activists meeting at the United Nations last week.
Delegates from 83 countries came together at the United Nations from March 28 to April 8 for the first in a series of landmark meetings on ocean protection. This Preparatory Committee will help forge an agreement to determine how nations move forward to protect the high seas—the 64 percent of the ocean that belongs to everyone but is governed by no one.
The emergence of a global village, where people from different civilisational bacle grounds are coming together in increasing numbers to work, study, and live together, is creating fault lines that often erupt in violence.
Diabetes, which now affects more than 400 million people worldwide, is closely linked to poverty in most regions of the world, World Health Organization Medical Officer Alessandro Demaio told IPS Thursday.
The Chinese character for crisis combines the characters for ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’. Our ability to improve the human condition depends critically on our ability to recognize and address dangers, but also to seize opportunities made possible by recognizing that crises offer rare opportunities to pursue extraordinary options not normally available.
Spring has not shed its bloom, yet its roses have turned the colour of congealed blood. The latest massacre of our innocents took place this time at Gulshan-i-Iqbal Park Lahore on March 27. Over 75 children, their parents and other holiday-goers died. More than 340 were injured. It was a cruelly premature Easter resurrection for the Christians amongst them, and a hellish holiday for their Muslim co-victims.
Sri Lanka is facing the heat from a scorching sun for the past one month. In recent times, the country has imposed power cuts after almost a decade. The main reason was the stoppage at a coal power plant, but engineers at the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) admit that the island’s hydro-power generation capacity is at such a critical low that without additional coal, diesel and renewable generation, the country’s full demand for power cannot be met.
Voluntary guidelines on land tenure adopted by the international community to combat the growing concentration of land ownership and improve secure access to land have begun to make headway in Latin America, a region that is a leader in the fight against hunger and that is taking firm steps towards achieving food security.