As the Millennium Development Goals reach their deadline of 2015, the United Nations, international policy partners and governments are already tasked with creating a set of new goals to continue to work toward ending poverty worldwide. They ought to learn four crucial lessons from the MDG experience: 1. The targets and monitoring methods must be [...]
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LA DALIA, Nicaragua — Things are getting steamy between two cartoon characters kissing each other on the big white screen. The boy wants to have sex without a condom; the girl is worried he will walk out on her if she says no. Finally, she gives in but soon after finds herself pregnant. Raging with [...]
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BRUSSELS — George Gershwin certainly would not have been inspired to write a symphonic tone poem about an American academic on sabbatical attempting to interpret European reactions to the United Nations. Ten years ago, Robert Kagan wrote that “Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus.” Perhaps, but not regarding the UN. After years of [...]
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In 2000, I had the privilege to present Lasantha Wickramatunga, from Sri Lanka, with the Transparency International annual Integrity Award. Wickramatunga was a prominent and tenacious newspaperman with the courage to ask tough questions, call for government accountability and expose corruption. On Jan. 8, 2009, he was driving to work when eight unidentified gunmen on [...]
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It may have been a coincidence or maybe not. When the 67th United Nations General Assembly session opens in New York in mid-September, the president of Burma, Thein Sein, is expected to speak in what is still called, quaintly, the “general debate.” At almost the same time, Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize [...]
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On his first day in office on July 2, the new World Bank president, Jim Yong Kim, placed himself firmly in the footsteps of his predecessor. He announced that he was backing two recent decisions in the bank to halt the organization’s involvement in projects in Bangladesh and East Africa because of documented corruption. A [...]
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News on the humanitarian situation in the Horn of Africa continues to flare in the media ever since famine struck last summer and lasted through the fall. Although the famine was declared resolved by the United Nations this winter, relieved by good harvests and a flood of food aid, a crisis could reoccur. Droughts are [...]
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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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With only hours to spare before the deadline on Friday for nominating the next president of the World Bank, President Obama announced a surprise choice: Jim Yong Kim, the 52-year-old president of Dartmouth College and a global expert on HIV-AIDS. The World Bank is part of the United Nations system and its members have until April [...]
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This year’s edition of an annual report from the World Bank measuring how easy or hard it is to start and run a business around the world has good news for sub-Saharan Africa. In its 2012 Doing Business survey, the bank found that in 36 of 46 countries – 78 percent of the economies in [...]
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