STWR - Share The World's Resources

Britain's leading international aid agencies yesterday called for emergency food programmes to be overhauled as the soaring price of grain and other staple crops threatens to bring further misery to many parts of the developing world.

The sharp decline in deaths among infants and children worldwide during the past century is "one of the great success stories in international public health", the U.N. children's agency UNICEF said Tuesday.

There is good and bad to the news that Britain surpassed the United States for the first time ever in donations to the World Bank's unit to combat world poverty.

More must be done more quickly to make the world fit for children by 2015, the UN children's agency, Unicef, has said.

The millennium development goals set by the UN at the turn of the century made up the most aspirational development programme ever devised. But a progress report published today by Unicef says that even though more babies are surviving, more children are in school and fewer families live in poverty, urgent action is needed if the goals are to be met by the target date of 2015. Here Sarah Boseley and Larry Elliott look at seven of the goals and assess how much progress has been made.

Halfway through a process initiated by world leaders in 2000, the world is still facing a daunting task in its way to realize the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of eight goals that all U.N. member states have agreed to try to achieve by the year 2015.

Remittances have become a lifeline for families in the developing world and there’s an effort underway to turn these payments into the foundation of a new grassroots development fund that bypasses the World Bank and IMF with their built-in agendas. It’s not as far-fetched as it might seem.