STWR - Share The World's Resources

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.

Too much aid to Afghanistan is wasted -- soaked up in contractors' profits, spent on expensive expatriate consultants or squandered on small-scale, quick-fix projects, a leading British charity said on Tuesday. Despite more than $15 billion of aid pumped into Afghanistan since U.S.-led and Afghan forces toppled the Taliban in 2001, many Afghans still suffer levels of poverty rarely seen outside sub-Saharan Africa.

Legal action worth almost £1bn by "vulture funds" against some of the world's poorest countries poses a threat to the debt cancellation deal agreed by the G8 at Gleneagles in 2005, the International Monetary Fund warned at the weekend.

A new study by the U.S.-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) indicates that a vast majority of the world's poor will likely continue to suffer from hunger in the next eight years.

Critics of US food aid subsidies say they help cause obesity among Americans and starvation among Africans.

Gordon Brown has used his first speech to the UN as prime minister to warn the world that it is a "million miles" from meeting its promises to relieve poverty, HIV and illiteracy in poor countries.

Rising prices for food have led the United Nations programme fighting famine in Africa and other regions to warn that it can no longer afford to feed the 90m people it has helped for each of the past five years on its budget.