STWR - Share The World's Resources

WaterAid marked the midway point in the agreed timescale for achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) with the launch of a report, 'Global cause' and effect: How the aid system is undermining the Millennium Development Goals', which demonstrates how progress towards achieving the goals is being held back by donor preferences for 'global causes' which undermine the development priorities of recipient countries.

Bribery is costing the world $1 trillion a year with the burden falling disproportionately on the billion or so people living in extreme poverty, the World Bank said yesterday.

Early in his tenure, outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair made a high-profile commitment to reducing the excruciating poverty afflicting hundreds of millions in Africa, keeping it on the media’s front burner by numerous high-level initiatives. 

Despite rapid economic growth, economic disparity is increasing in South Asia, according to the annual Millennium Development Goals (MDG) report by the UN, which also says that a massive 30 percent of the population still lives on a dollar a day in the Indian subcontinent.

The whole of sub-Saharan Africa - the poorest region of the world - will fail to meet the goals set seven years ago for eradicating global poverty by 2015 - the United Nations warned today.

Up on stage in Rostock last Thursday, Bono and Bob Geldof took time off from haranguing the leaders of the G8 to churn out a passable version of Carry That Weight, the old Beatles song. By the next morning they probably wished they had chosen Won't Get Fooled Again by the Who instead.

Since the 1960s countries with around a billion people have been diverging from the rest of the world at an accelerating rate, a trend which will generate unmanageable social pressures.