STWR - Share The World's Resources

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.

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.

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.