As championed by the United Nations and other NGOs, the international commitment to providing ‘health for all’, universal basic schooling and adequate shelter has long been contradicted by a development approach based upon a market fundamentalism that subordinates human welfare to corporate profits – necessitating an enormous shift in global priorities.
Many international assistance programs fail because they are badly designed and/or too complicated. The result is that the poor don't get the help they need, and taxpayers in rich countries lose confidence in the use of their aid funds.
As authoritatively stated in an editorial in Nature, vol. 436, issue 7049 (July 2005), “Cuba has developed a considerable [scientific] research capability—perhaps more so than any other developing country outside of Southeast Asia.” Cuba has been especially successful in establishing a biotechnology industry that has effectively introduced drugs and vaccines of its own, along with a nascent pharmaceutical industry that has achieved considerable success in exports. Its agriculture and health sectors have been strong beneficiaries of its scientific research. As Nature observed: “It is worth asking how Cuba did it, and what lessons other countries might draw from it.” Indeed, the Cuban case is all the more surprising since it is not only a poor country, but one that has been confronted for decades by a ruthless embargo imposed by the United States, which has been extended to scientific knowledge. Moreover, much of Cuba’s scientific progress has occurred in the decade and a half since the fall of the Soviet Union, which previously had aided it economically and technologically.
Advance of HIV/AIDS is markedly reducing economic and employment growth in countries hit hardest by the epidemic, jeopardising their efforts to reduce poverty, create new jobs — especially for youth — and fight child labour, according to a report by the International Labour Office (of the International Labour Organisation) on the eve of World AIDS Day.
Each year at least 1.16 million newborns die in sub-Saharan Africa within the first 28 days of life, making the region the world’s most dangerous to be born in, yet more than two thirds of these infants could be saved with low cost, low tech action, according to a United Nations-backed report.
On the eve of Children's Day, 80 children and representatives from schools and NGOs met to deliberate on this question in New Delhi.The group comprised of activists of the "Nine Is Mine" campaign - an initiative of children, schools, communities and organizations across 15 states of India to ensure that the government commits 9% of the GDP to public expenditure on Health & Education, as promised in the National Common Minimum Program.
