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'Diseases that disproportionately affect the developing world cause immense suffering and ill health. Medical innovation has the potential to deliver new medicines, vaccines, and diagnostics to overcome these diseases, yet few treatments have emerged. Current efforts to resolve the crisis are inadequate: financing for research and development (R&D) is insufficient, uncoordinated, and mostly tied to the system of intellectual property rights. Delivering appropriate medicines and vaccines requires reforms to the existing R&D system and a willingness to invest in promising new approaches.'

A Case Study of Aid Effectiveness in Kenya: Volatility and Fragmentation of Foreign Aid, with a Focus on Health

Millions of women have no access to reproductive health services; many more have little or no control in choosing whether to become pregnant. As a result, every year, some 19 million women have no other choice than to have an unsafe abortion. Many of these women will die as a result; many more are permanently injured. Nearly all the women who die or are injured are poor and live in poor countries. Preventing these deaths and injuries will not be achieved without stopping unsafe abortions which cause around 13 per cent of all maternal deaths. Virtually all the deaths of women from unsafe abortion are in fact preventable. . Full document in PDF format (695kb); Number of pages: 20p; Source(s):

Building on a legacy spanning three decades, UNFPA Country Offices in the Asia-Pacific region and their faith-based partners came together for a two-day consultation to assess the nature and impact of these partnerships in the areas of maternal health, gender equality, migration and youth welfare. This report documents the experiences and lessons learned from the varied initiatives of faith-based organizations, as well as the best practices emanating from these strategic alliances around the region. The discussions, recommendations for action and the many voices of critical faith-based actors, are all documented in this report.

'This paper presents an analysis of Official Development Assistance (ODA) flows to the water and sanitation sector, based on data gathered from the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) and Creditor Reporting Systems (CRS) databases, as well as current knowledge in the sector. As part of this analysis, ODA flows to the health and education sectors, as well as to broader topics including governance and finance, are also considered. Where possible, policy implications and specific discussion about small towns is provided, however there is a general lack of information about financing flows to small towns, due to the nature of the accounting systems used by donors (and reported to the OECD).'

Improving the reproductive health of young women in developing countries requires access to safe and effective methods of fertility control, but most rely on traditional rather than modern contraceptives such as condoms or oral/injectable hormonal methods. We conducted a systematic review of qualitative research to examine the limits to modern contraceptive use identified by young women in developing countries. Focusing on qualitative research allows the assessment of complex processes often missed in quantitative analyses.

Improving lives through the alleviation of poverty is central to the UNDP approach to development. Some 1.2 billion people around the world live on less than a dollar a day, while almost 850 million go hungry every night. Poverty is not just about money: lack of access to essential resources goes beyond financial hardship to affect people's health, education, security and opportunities for political participation. Solutions, then, need to address many dimensions while remaining targeted and measurable, and sensitive to the wider impact of poverty on women. At the same time, solutions must derive from local conditions and enhance local capacity to respond and adapt to new challenges.

invest in women, invest in change

This booklet provides a snapshot of UNFPA's programming efforts to advance gender equality and empower women. It reports on activities undertaken in various priority areas like empowerment, reproductive health, youth and adolescent, conflict and emergency situations, etc. The report is based on contributions from the global, regional and country levels over the course of two years (2007-2008).'

'During every dry season from (March to June) Dhaka City dwellers suffer from an acute water crisis. In many parts of the city people get sticky and straw coloured water from the Wasa supply line. Such contaminated water, which causes many water-born diseases, is a public health disaster.' Source: The Daily Star Magazine, 2009

This paper addresses high population growth rates, high fertility rates and low contraceptive coverage. It was presented at the international symposium 'Population Change in Asia and the Pacific: Implications for Development Policy', Australian National University. The pacific region still has high population growth rates, high fertility rates and low contraceptive coverage. Getting the basics right, means that more training is required for senior supervisory levels and front line health staff.

Call for abstracts: 8th International Conference on Urban Health (ICUH), 18-23 October 2009, Kenyatta International Conference Centre, Nairobi, Kenya

'The global financial crisis and the high cost of food mean different things in different places. In those parts of the world where hunger is on the march, their impact can be measured in empty stomachs and blighted lives. So serious is the food-security situation in the central state of Madhya Pradesh (MP) that, when inserted into the country table of the Global Hunger Index, the state falls between Ethiopia and Chad which are among the 10 poorest-performing countries in the world. One third of the children under five in MP suffer from wasting (too thin for their height) and 60 per cent are underweight (too thin for their age), according to India's most recent National Family Health Survey.'

The aim of this paper is to provide a systematic review of the estimation of the cost of illness (COI) related to maternal- newborn ill-health (MNIH). The methodology used for the review includes a systematic search on electronic databases for published literature and manual searches for the identification of grey (unpublished) literature.The published study estimates most of the cost components associated with a particular complication of MNIH - emergency obstetric care (EmOC) - and reports a total average cost per user of EmOC in the range of US$ 177-369 in Bangladesh. The unpublished studies based on the REDUCE model illustrate the MNIH issue more directly and elaborately; however, they estimate merely the productivity cost for four African countries. The model estimates a huge amount of productivity losses associated with MNIH: an annual total of about US$ 95 million for Ethiopia and about US$ 85 million for Uganda.

sustainable solutions in Mumbai