STWR - Share The World's Resources

For many people in the world’s wealthy countries, the holiday season is often a time for overindulgence in food. But for the estimated 850 million people worldwide who suffer from hunger, this time of year only serves as a stark reminder of their often-constant struggle for adequate nourishment.

With a few radical ideas and a band of scrappy followers armed with hoes and pitchforks, a self-taught economist from Kenya is trying to set Africa free - liberate it from the billions of dollars in aid it receives every year from rich countries.

If Western donors deliver on their promises, official development assistance (ODA) to the world's poorer nations is expected to increase by about 50 billion dollars in the next five years, according to a new U.N. report released this week.

Global efforts to "make poverty history" will fail unless world leaders act now to end gender discrimination, according to The State of World Population 2005 report, released today by UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund.

Shipping food rather than cash to disaster-hit poor countries cuts the benefit of such aid by a third, according to a new study that raises a fraught issue in world trade negotiations.

The negotiations on the draft declaration for the World Summit - which opens on Tuesday - have been nothing short of bizarre. The United States government has fought a relentless battle to dissociate itself from specific obligations regarding international development, and has tried repeatedly to the quash obligations that it has taken on the past. All of this has been taking place at a time when the US itself has become an aid recipient, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

The world is heading for a "heavily signposted human development disaster" of needless child deaths, illiteracy and abject poverty