DEVELOPMENT: Chances of Achieving MDGs “Slim” Without Civil Society

Global civil society leaders called on non-governmental organisations (NGOs) Thursday to use both international channels and their muscle on the ground for applying pressure on governments to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

JAPAN: Shrinking Aid Budget Spells Trouble for Poor Countries

Heavy cuts in public spending continue to dig a deep hole in Japan’s influential aid budget, which latest figures say has already reduced Tokyo from being the world’s leading donor at one point to third place among the top 22 major international lenders.

SOUTH AMERICA: AIDS Meds for All, But at Higher Prices

In under a decade, programmes providing universal free access to antiretroviral medicines have greatly decreased AIDS mortality in countries like Argentina and Brazil, but this progress is now threatened by the rising prices of new formulas patented by the big pharmaceutical companies.

POPULATION: World&#39s Poor Abandon Rural Past for Big Cities

A dramatic population explosion in the world's urban centres will be the single largest influence on development in the 21st century, the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) says in a new report released Wednesday.

DEVELOPMENT: EU Failing to Support Health and Education

The European Union is failing to prioritise health and education in its plans for spending aid in poor countries, according to a new study.

ARGENTINA: Poverty Bites Deeper in the Northeast

"It just crushes you: children here, aged eight or nine, are sniffing glue to dull their hunger," says a rural medical doctor in Corrientes, 1,000 kilometres north of the capital and the province with the highest childhood poverty indicators in Argentina.

IRAN: Temporary Marriages Just a Way to Degrade Women – Critics

A key Iranian minister calls ‘temporary marriages’ a pragmatic way to deal with young people’s sexual needs and to prevent prostitution, but a wide range of critics lambasts them as little more than ways to give religious sanction to practices that degrade women.

RWANDA: A Difficult Trade-Off to Protect Lake Kivu

Sylvestre Munyalibanje has been accustomed to farming in the Rwandan district of Rutsiro, on the shores of Lake Kivu. But now, he's facing the end of an era.

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC: Child Labour Seen as Normal

The three-wheeled cart piled high with scrap metal slowly makes its way down one of the main avenues in the capital of the Dominican Republic. It is pedalled by smiling 12-year-old Julio, who with his little brother Miguel goes out every day to scour the city’s outlying neighbourhoods in search of recyclable waste, which they sell to help support their family.

HEALTH: Hope for 20 Million Emaciated Children

When 189 world leaders met at U.N. headquarters in New York in 2000, they pledged to take a number of steps to make a real dent in poverty and hunger.

DEVELOPMENT-ZIMBABWE: Food a Political Tool?

Zimbabwe’s escalating food crisis comes amid resurgent accusations that food aid is being abused as a political tool.

HEALTH-ZIMBABWE: Fighting the Spread of Polio – Again

Richard Chirew’s prominent stoop makes him look older than his 30 years. He is a resident of Kambuzuma, a dusty and poor Harare suburb where he survives as a street vendor.

DEVELOPMENT: “If Anything Goes Wrong, Africa Is Blamed” – Sachs

Development plans like the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are "just words" if financing is not made available to implement the plans, says Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at New York's Columbia University.

Q&A: Nicaragua Is Not Likely to Meet the MDGs

Managua Mayor Dionisio Marenco does not believe that Nicaragua can meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which he describes as a wish list rather than an action plan, and underlines that his country is in need of enormous foreign investment in order to overcome its high levels of poverty.

TOGO: Trees Disappearing, Even as Some Believe the Supply “Will Never End”

In the southern Togolese village of Yoto Kopé, Akoua Amouzouvi and several other women emerge from the bush with bowls of charcoal balanced on their heads - hands and faces smeared with black dust.

DEVELOPMENT: EU Not Matching Promises for MDGs

Increases in development aid will not be sufficient to reach the United Nations targets on improving health in poor countries, a new European Parliament report has warned.

Q&A: “Too Few African Governments Have Had the Guts to Say ‘No'”

While Kofi Annan was the United Nations' secretary-general, he handpicked Eveline Herfkens to be the executive coordinator of the Millennium Campaign, a body which mobilises support for the achievement of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Herfkens had previously worked as the Dutch minister of international development and as an executive director at the World Bank.

BRAZIL: Floating House Made of Garbage – Art or Eyesore?

In a fetid canal filled with garbage from this Brazilian city, a bricklayer built a floating house and turned it into a symbol of recycling, leaving the authorities by turns applauding or frowning.

LATIN AMERICA: Inequality Undermines Development Goals

The main reason that Latin America is not making faster progress towards the Millennium Development Goals adopted by the international community in 2000 lies in the various forms of inequality that prevail in the region, former Dutch minister of development cooperation Eveline Herfkens told IPS Thursday.

TRADE-AFRICA: Libya to Supply Kenya with Cheaper Oil

Kenya is set to receive oil from Libya at preferential rates according to a bilateral agreement signed earlier this month between the leaders of the two countries.

RIGHTS-ASIA: Women’s Quotas – No Magic Formula But a Start

Setting quotas designed to have more women in politics and government may not have been the magic formula for more balanced political representation in many countries, but it has certainly been a key first step in many cases.