• Millennium Development Goals

     

    Despite Hard Times, Partnerships in Development Progress

    by  • October 4, 2012 • Development, Millennium Goals • 5 Comments

    A mall in Manila

    While the recent global financial crisis has affected numerous targets meant to measure progress on the Millennium Development Goals, the blow might logically be expected to fall heaviest on No. 8, which calls for global partnerships in aid, trade, debt relief and the sharing of new technologies. Surprisingly, given financial constraints, there have been some [...]

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    Epidemics and Fake Drugs Hurt Global Health Improvements

    by  • September 5, 2012 • Millennium Goals • 6 Comments

    Polio vaccination team crosses the Ganges in India

    A viral illness in Cambodia that killed scores of children this summer is a potent reminder that improving global health is not only a matter of measuring success against known diseases but also a constant battle to contain new ones and ensure that medications are safe. As cheaper generic drugs or reduced prices on rich-world [...]

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    WORLDVIEWS  

    What the General Assembly Wants From the Secretary-General

    by  • August 13, 2012 • General Assembly, WORLDVIEWS • 2 Comments

    General Assembly president and Ban Ki-moon

    When the United Nations has been fortunate to have a secretary-general who has great charisma and skills in settling conflicts, the world tends to consider him a figure with his own political status and powers. People like this idea because in difficult times they want to have an authoritative mediator, a moral guide. But does [...]

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    How Bad Is It? The UN Development System Needs an Overhaul

    by  • July 17, 2012 • Development, Special Report • 5 Comments

    Voters in Libya

    The clamor for United Nations reform has not stopped since its first days in 1945. Although ideas for changing the UN rise and fall each year, the newest calls for an overhaul involve development, one of the largest sectors of the world body’s system. With a Kafkaesque bureaucracy consisting of at least 30 agencies and [...]

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    GOINGS-ON  

    Top New UN Assignments, and Syria Deputy Envoy Leaving

    by  • July 18, 2012 • GOINGS-ON • 6 Comments

    Adama Dieng, a Senegalese who is the new special adviser for prevention of genocide at the United Nations. MARK GARTEN/UN PHOTO

    Adama Dieng, the registrar of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, has been named the United Nations secretary-general’s special adviser on the prevention of genocide. Dieng, a Senegalese, replaces Francis Deng of Sudan, who has been in the post since 2007 as an under secretary-general and is a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings Institution in [...]

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    Promoting Women Starts Early, in First Grade

    by  • July 9, 2012 • Millennium Goals, Women's Issues • 14 Comments

    Women marching and chanting for an antislavery protest in Nouakchott, Mauritania's capital, on May 26, 2012. JOE PENNEY

    With only three years left to reach an ambitious global deadline, tracking the eight Millennium Development Goals often seems like going around in circles. Perhaps no goal is better evidence of this than Goal 3: promote gender equality and empower women. So often does the empowerment of women, in one way or another, figure in [...]

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    Schools Fail the Youngest Where Population Grows the Fastest

    by  • June 20, 2012 • Africa, Education, Millennium Goals • 10 Comments

    Congolese children in an unfinished classroom at a primary school near the Kahe refugee camp in Goma, North Kivu Province.

    Optimists in many developing countries are convinced that their expanding youth populations will be engines of economic growth in coming decades. They call this the “demographic dividend.” Social scientists and demographers in those same nations, however, are usually more wary of the future, as they focus on how those children, on whom so much hope [...]

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    Misogyny Resurfaces, Everywhere

    by  • June 4, 2012 • Women's Issues • 1 Comment

    women solar engineers

    As the first United Nations agency for women struggles for more sweeping support from governments, and advocates raise alarms that another international conference on women would be more dangerous than helpful to the cause, women in the United States also find themselves defending their rights as politics erode gains that have been made in the [...]

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    Nagging Hunger Undermines Millennium Poverty Goal

    by  • May 2, 2012 • Development, Human Rights • 12 Comments

    eradicating hunger

    The first of the eight Millennium Development Goals makes an ambitious demand: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger worldwide. It is now widely accepted that progress has been made in many countries on cutting the percentage of people living with less than the rock-bottom $1.25 a day. But decreasing hunger by half is another sadder story. [...]

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