After a year without a polio outbreak, India was crossed off the World Health Organization’s (WHO) list of polio epidemic countries last month, leaving only Pakistan, Nigeria, and Afghanistan. However, experts warn that mitigation and containment are not enough. Using strategies proven successful in India, final efforts in the world’s vulnerable regions are being implemented [...]
Approximately 50 percent of global biotech crops were grown in developing countries in 2011, the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Agriculture reported last month. The non-profit claims that economic incentives are the driving force behind the growing use of genetically modified (GM) crops in developing countries. Organizations such as Greenpeace, though, are unconvinced [...]
Every day, according to Amnesty International, thousands of people are killed, injured, raped, and forced to flee from their homes as a result of armed conflict, armed violence, and human rights violations and abuses perpetrated using conventional arms. As violence continues unchecked around the world, a coalition of humanitarian and health organizations is rallying support [...]
Landlocked by Kenya, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and Tanzania, Uganda has seen more than its fair share of the violence that long plagued central Africa. Mass killings and civil wars displaced hundreds of thousands of people, while claiming the lives of tens of thousands more. After a 2006 peace treaty, Ugandans [...]
Schools in South Sudan’s Pibor county were due to open their doors on 14 January but with the escalation of violence class has been postponed. In the last month, inter-communal clashes between the Lou Nuer and the Murle, two distinct ethnic groups, displaced tens of thousands of people in Jonglei state. The [...]
For centuries, indigenous peoples throughout the world relied on hunting, farming, and fishing for their subsistence. Today, many traditional foods have become life-threatening dangers, contaminated by pollutants and pesticides. Over 355,000 people are poisoned every year, and hundreds of thousands more are made ill. Andrea Carmen comes from a Yaqui Indian community in northern [...]
Every year, approximately 360,000 women die in pregnancy or childbirth. Up to two million infants die within the first day of life. This is largely because there is a lack of access to well-trained health care, according to the United Nations. In an effort to reduce pregnancy and childbirth-related deaths around the world, the United [...]
Already reeling from years of famine and civil war, another disaster now threatens East Africa: a new variety of cassava virus is devastating the region’s primary food crop. Without urgent action, the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) warns that the disease is in imminent danger of becoming an epidemic. A sustainable solution will necessitate [...]
It has been a year and a half since the earthquake devastated Haiti. The humanitarian response has saved millions of lives but hundreds of thousands of people are still homeless and in desperate need of basic amenities. “Around 600,000 people displaced by the earthquake are still living in camps and are dependent on humanitarian aid [...]
Sub-Saharan Africa has the lowest coverage for access to sanitation services worldwide, with more than 70 percent of the population still lacking access to toilets and hand-washing facilities. In 2000, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set the target of reducing by half the number of people without access to adequate sanitation by 2015. If current [...]
In a bid to increase awareness of the challenges facing the world’s poorest countries, the United Nations has partnered with MediaGlobal to assist newspaper editors, broadcasters, and owners of media companies in advancing human development by featuring stories that raise international awareness of issues of poverty, disease, and hunger in the most vulnerable countries.
The Global Media Compact aims to assist newspaper editors, broadcasters, and owners of media companies in advancing human development by featuring stories that raise international awareness of issues of poverty, disease, and hunger in the most vulnerable countries in Africa. READ MORE
Recent Comments