News and blog

PovertyMatters Blog, Guardian.co.uk There is plenty of good news in the international development story. Living standards across the world have shot up in the past few decades, for the very wealthy, yes, but also for many of the world's poorest people. Things can reverse, of course, as...

GAVI Alliance Geneva, 30 March 2011 – To further increase transparency of the oversight of its cash-based support, the GAVI Alliance announced today that it will make public when it suspends a cash programme to investigate possible misuse of funds. “Our mission is to make sure life-saving...

The Great Beyond, Nature.com The GAVI Alliance, which focuses on getting vaccines into low-income countries, has announced that it will suspend cash handouts to some programmes in Niger, Cote d’Ivoire and Cameroon, while it investigates possible misuse of funds. Together with another investigation in Mali –...

PovertyMatters Blog, Guardian.co.uk Lord Ashdown's review of how the UK responds to humanitarian emergencies points to a major shortcoming in today's humanitarian aid system: the absence of a systematic effort to assess whether beneficiaries are satisfied with the efforts made on their behalf by UN agencies...

Reuters (Reuters) - An epidemic of measles in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is "spiraling out of control," the international medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said on Tuesday. Read more....

Devi Sridhar, DPhil, Lawrence O. Gostin, JD, JAMA In December 2010, Jack Chow, the former World Health Organization (WHO) assistant director-general, asked, “Is the WHO becoming irrelevant?” A month later, the WHO's executive board considered the agency's future within global health governance. After a year-long consultation...

PovertyMatters Blog, Guardian.co.uk Over the last 10 years I've been looking at the question of how the UK public engages with global poverty. I've done this research with a variety of NGOs, including Comic Relief, and have reviewed the evidence on public engagement for DfID on...

Todd Summers, ONE Blog A little while ago, we asked our friends on Facebook and Twitter to submit their questions on vaccines to me. We picked a few to answer, and here they are. Take a look: Ali Gohar Jamali from Pakistan (via Twitter) and Unimke Nawa from...

Ben Doherty, Brisbane Times The world's biggest philanthropist has urged Australia - now reviewing its foreign aid program and defending it against allegations of corruption - to put more money towards vaccinating Third World children. In an exclusive interview with the Herald, Bill...