Development Watch | News . Analysis . Comments

[DEVELOPMENT WATCH | By R. Nastranis]

Imagine a physician telling you to get a haircut to reduce your weight. This sort of a spurious argument has been apparently used by some of the major givers of official development assistance (ODA) which fell by nearly 3 percent in 2011 for the first time in 14 years.

Disregarding years of exceptional debt relief this was the first drop since 1997, and experts expect continuing tight budgets in OECD countries to put pressure on aid levels in coming years.

[DEVELOPMENT WATCH | By Jaya Ramachandran]

Global development cooperation, which surged in the early 1960s amidst post-war optimism and enthusiasm, and has since continued to evolve, is recognised as a key factor in advancing international development.

"But lack of co-ordination, overly ambitious targets, unrealistic time- and budget constraints and political self-interest have too often prevented aid from being as effective as desired," says a background paper by the Development Co-operation Directorate (DCD-DAC) of an international grouping branded as "rich man's club".

[DEVELOPMENT WATCH | By Ramesh Jaura]

As the international community struggles to provide all possible assistance to more than 11 million people in Ethiopia, Somalia, Djibouti and Kenya – adversely affected by the lack of food and long spell of drought – Executive Secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), Luc Gnacadja, has drawn attention to an often ignored fact that "droughts do not happen overnight."

UNCCD emerged from the Earth Summit in June 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, along with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). UNCCD was adopted in Paris on June 17, 1994.

(DEVELOPMENT WATCH | By Melissa Julian - ECDPM) 

Last week (beginning July 11), with little fanfare, not even a press release, the European Commission’s 2011 Annual Report and accompanying staff working paper annex on the European Union’s development and external assistance policies and their implementation in 2010 and the 2011 EU Donor Atlas were posted online.  The 196-page annex to the annual report provides detailed information on the delivery of EU commitments, a geographical and thematic overview of implementation and an assessment of the management of aid for results. The EU Donor Atlas provides a detailed mapping of EU donor activities to facilitate planning and programming and assist partner countries in strengthening their capacity to exercise leadership in development.

(DEVELOPMENT WATCH | By Richard Johnson)

Whereas poverty and rampant corruption stand in the way of healthcare facilities in most of the developing lands, ageing population in Western Europe is posing a serious challenge to levels which presently make countries of the region outshine, says a new report.

(DEVELOPMENT WATCH | By Daniela Estrada)

The movement for tribal peoples, Survival International, has raised the alarm that an outbreak of respiratory disease has struck one of the Amazon's last nomadic tribes – whose numbers have already been decimated by flu and malaria.

Some 35 Nukak-Maku, including nine children, have been admitted to San José del Guaviare hospital in the southern Colombian Amazon, Survival said in a media release on June 23, adding that health advisor Héctor Muñoz had told Colombian radio that the hospital was well over capacity, leaving some Nukak with only make-shift beds.

(DEVELOPMENT WATCH | By Jerome Mwanda)

The United Nations has taken the wind out of the sails of world's rich countries that never tire of complaining about the citizens of developing lands burdening their rather stressed economies, by pointing out that about 80 per cent of refugees around the world live in poor countries.

(DEVELOPMENT WATCH | By Ramesh Jaura)

Leaders of three eminent international institutions have underlined the critical role of smallholder farmers in achieving much-needed global food security and preventing food price volatility. The clarion call comes in run-up to the first-ever official meeting of agriculture ministers from the world's 20 major industrial and emerging economies, and ahead of Rio+20.

(DEVELOPMENT WATCH | By Jerome Mwanda) - A new global research project has come up with an upbeat message that sounds like a truism: "Progress in African development happens best when it is led by African states and citizens". This message emerges from industrious research by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI).

ODI's report 'Mapping Progress' identifies the crucial role of effective leadership, smart policies, proper institutional foundations and international partnerships in driving development and calls for a new outlook on development.

(DEVELOPMENT WATCH | By Johannes Reichert) - While the prospect of halving poverty by 2015 as proclaimed by the United Nations at the turn of the millennium looks bleak, yet another UN conference has resolved to halve to 24 the number of world's poorest and most vulnerable nations -- known as the least developed countries (LDCs) -- by 2021.

In order to enable least developed countries -- many of them in sub-Saharan Africa -- to move out of LDC category, the conference resolved to work out a smooth process of transitioning when countries attain the required social development benchmarks.

(DEVELOPMENT WATCH | By Johannes Reichert) - If the fourth UN Conference on the Least Developed Countries (UNLDC IV) "does not look promising at all," as former Under-Secretary-General and High Representative, Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury, pointed out bluntly ahead of the gathering concluding on May 13, it is because the root causes of the problems of the world's poorest are not being tackled.

Instead of curing root causes of poverty and hunger that plague LDCs, the focus is on curing symptoms. Poverty and hunger are related to each other and to environmental degradation. This is underlined by the fact LDCs are primarily agricultural economies with nearly 70 percent of the population engaged in agriculture. But productivity of LDC agriculture is relatively low. Land degradation is a major problem, due to increasing population pressure, erosion, water scarcity and the breakdown of traditional systems for soil fertility.

(DEVELOPMENT WATCH | By J. Brian Atwood*) - Spreading demand for change in the Middle East and North Africa has Western governments scrambling to calculate appropriate diplomatic responses. As happened when Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union yielded to democratic forces, there will soon be demand from new and/or reforming governments for cooperation in political and economic institution building. Donor nations must be ready to respond.

Video of street demonstrations from Morocco to Yemen accurately emphasize the desire for freedom from authoritarian rule. It is also the failure of Middle Eastern economies to produce professional livelihoods that propels the youth of these nations to revolution. Paradoxically, the tool they are using to organize dissent is also their window to the future, the new technology of the information age.