News and blog

PovertyMatters Blog, Guardian.co.uk We know that the Malian cotton industry has been systematically undermined by rich countries (and India and China) driving down the international price by subsidising a relatively small number of relatively well-off cotton farmers. And we know that, as a consequence, millions of...

PovertyMatters Blog, Guardian.co.uk Criselda Gallo sits in a white coat behind the desk of a small one-room building that serves as a health centre to the South Field resettlement area in Laguna province. There are more than 12,800 people living in the long streets of single-room...

PovertyMatters Blog, Guardian.co.uk Over the past few years a large number of once-poor countries have reached middle-income country (MIC) status, set by the World Bank at $1,000 per person per year. The global poverty problem has changed: most of the world's poor no longer live in...

Ivy Mungcal, Devex The protests sweeping the Middle East and North Africa prompt questions on how the international community conceptualize, promote and measure development, according to a U.K.-based researcher. Alasdair McWilliam of the Overseas Development Institute notes that several of the countries where those demonstrations are...

Ma. Rizza Leonzon, Devex After garnering positive marks in the U.K.’s multilateral aid review, UNICEF will receive nearly double in British contributions, U.K. Secretary of State for International Development Andrew Mitchell announced Feb. 22. The British government will nearly double its core funding for UNICEF through 2013...

Esther Nakkazi, Science and Development Network [KAMPALA] Treating infectious diseases in developing countries might lead to an increase in allergies, according to scientists in Uganda, raising moral issues about the treatment. A study in Uganda has found that when pregnant women were treated for Schistosoma mansoni worm...

ScienceDaily Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have developed an experimental vaccine that appears to protect against an increasingly common and particularly deadly form of pneumococcal pneumonia. Details of the new vaccine, which was tested in an animal model, are reported in...

IRIN, UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs THABA-TSEKA, 22 February 2011 (IRIN) - A new joint programme is changing the way the Lesotho government and its development partners deliver aid by getting different government departments, UN agencies and civil society organizations working together to...

John Zarocostas, BMJ New ways are needed to enable manufacturers to produce cheaper, generic products while ensuring that innovation is encouraged through appropriate patent protection, experts say. This would ensure that public health systems in poor countries can provide universal access to lifesaving drugs, they argue. The...