Bezalel

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.

An article on the Guardian Katine website about an innovative solution to the lack of transporation to take women in labour to the nearest hospital. The eRanger is being used in Malawi and costs less than cars to buy and maintain. Could this be a cost-effective life saving solution?

This publication highlights the link between rainwater harvesting, ecosystems and human well being and draws the attention of readers to both the negative and positive aspects of using this technology and how the negative benefits can be minimized and positive capitalized.

This report is one of the primary outputs of the Vulnerability Assessment of Freshwater Resources to Environmental Change project, and presents a situation analysis with regard to the vulnerability of water resources systems in South Asia. In addition to the more general issues addressed herein, this report considers three South Asian transboundary river basins as case studies: (i) Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna (GBM); (ii) Indus; and (iii) Helmand. Collectively, these basins provide South Asia with a variety of waterrelated challenges that encompass floods in the monsoon season; water shortages in the summer; sedimentation and erosion in the river and associated flood plains; drainage congestion in low-lying areas; and environmental and water quality problems.

For some people, the water crisis means having to walk long distances every day to fetch enough drinking water - clean or unclean - just to get by. For others, it means suffering from malnutrition or disease caused by droughts, floods or inadequate sanitation. Many people suffer these hardships due to lack of funds or inadequate knowledge of how to solve local water use and allocation problems. Full document in PDF format (280.31kb); Number of pages: 12p

Clean water and sanitation are not only about hygiene and disease; they're about dignity, too.… [E]veryone, and that means ALL the people in the world, has the right to a healthy life and a life with dignity. In other words: everyone has the right to sanitation.' Prince Willem Alexander of the Netherlands, Chair of the UN Secretary General Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation. 2.5 billion people lack access to basic sanitation. Tellingly, the Millennium Development Goal sanitation target, to halve by 2015 the proportion of people living without access to sanitation, remains the most off-track of all the MDG targets. The impact of a lack of sanitation on health, education and economic growth is profound. Every day, at least 5,000 children under the age of five die due to diarrhea, a disease directly related to poor sanitation. Lack of adequate sanitation in schools is a critical barrier to school attendance, particularly for girls. The resulting economic cost to individuals and to governments of ill-health and under-education is at least nine times greater than the cost of addressing this problem. Full paper in PDF format (1.53MB); Number of pages:

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

There are growing signs that the global economic crisis has reached both poor countries and poor people in those countries. In February, for example, the World Bank's forecast for Africa's growth in 2009 was revised downward from 6.8 percent to 3.5 percent. Another World Bank document suggests that the crisis has pushed more than 50 million people below the $1.25 per day poverty line. This type of evidence has convinced many world leaders that a problem exists: U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has called 2009 "a development emergency" and this past weekend the boards of the World Bank and the IMF both recognized that the global economic crisis had metastasized into a "human and development calamity." Full paper in PDF format; Number of pages: 10p

Fragile states matter, as an ODI public event in London last week confirmed. Internal conflict and instability contaminates and infects neighbouring countries and entire regions, contributing to global security problems. In development terms, a failure to address and meet the challenges presented by fragile states means that, at the current rate of progress, the global Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will not be met, regardless of how much progress is made in other developing countries. According to the UK Department for International Development (DFID) people living in countries affected by violent conflict, or where governments are chronically weak, are three or four times more likely to suffer from extreme poverty, or die before the age of five, than those living in other developing countries.

How to engage more effectively in fragile states is now a key concern in the international development community, and several new books outline different diagnoses and recommendations. Seth Kaplan presented his book: Fixing Fragile States: A New Paradigm for Development, at a recent ODI public event, with ODI's David Booth as the discussant. Kaplan brings a fresh, if not entirely new, perspective to the discussion on fragile states that has, to a large extent, been missing in international development debates. He offers a critique of the existing aid paradigm in fragile states, and proposes an alternative strategy to bring security and development to such settings.

'What are the impacts of of parental death and chronic poverty on children's education and health in Indonesia? This paper estimates the short- and long-term effects of maternal and paternal death on children's school enrolment, educational attainment and health in Indonesia, and compare it with the effect of chronic poverty. The authors also investigate whether there are any gender dimensions of the effects.'

'This paper investigates whether the death of a parent during middle childhood affects child schooling and subjective well-being (SWB) in Ethiopia. The data comes from two rounds of the Young Lives survey, conducted in 2002 and 2006, of an initial sample of 1000 children across 20 sentinel sites in Ethiopia. The children were seven to eight years of age in 2002 and 11 to 12 years of age in 2006, with around 80 losing a parent between rounds.'

The unprecedented turmoil in the world's financial markets has resulted in a significant loss of trust in the global financial system. Financial institutions and the market as a whole have been criticised for short-termism, for lacking transparency, and for not being properly accountable to regulators or to wider society. The credit crisis has also raised wider questions about the proper role of investors in society, both in terms of the specific investments that they make and the manner in which they use their influence to ensure that the positive social and environmental impacts of their investment activities are maximised, and the negative impacts minimised.

'Access to essential goods at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) is limited by high prices, and inadequate rural distribution, which also restricts the poor in distributing their produce. This paper examines specific strategies for reaching the BOP using three socially responsible distribution case studies of multinationals, government and NGO initiatives in India. It identifies how socially responsible distribution can be achieved by strategies that take cost out, reinvent the distribution channel or take a long-term perspective that invests for the future.'

'This paper analyses the relationship between low pay and corruption in developing countries, using studies from public hospitals in Latin America.One of the most important ways that pay can deter corruption is if it increases the penalty of being caught and dismissed. If an individual earns a premium in their job above what they would otherwise earn in another job, then that premium is at risk if that individual should commit fraud and be caught and dismissed.'

'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.'

Even in hard times, it can make commercial sense for companies to develop markets that include poor people, and business models that address poverty. Businesses that create decent jobs, access to markets or goods and services that benefit low-income groups in emerging economies help to build healthier, wealthier, and more highly skilled communities. Those communities will provide the customers, suppliers, and employees that companies need for sustainable growth. Full paper in PDF format; Number of pages: 12p

The growing of the Microfinance Institution (MFI) movement has created great expectations because the MFIs have been seen as an instrument to tackle poverty and promote micro entrepreneurship. However the exponential expansion of the industry and the newly business consciousness need to be properly tackled to avoid the microfinance movement going adrift, namely where the industry could become a tool of wealth redistribution without accumulation in presence of spot areas where it could evolve by neglecting its genuine mission.'

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.

This guide has been produced by the World Health Organization to assist countries with limited resources in their efforts to reduce neonatal mortality and to ensure care for newborn babies with problems due to complications of pregnancy and childbirth, such as asphyxia, sepsis, and low birth weight or preterm birth. The main section of this guide is arranged by clinical signs or findings, which facilitates early identification of illness, and provides up-to-date guidelines for clinical management. Use of these guidelines is essential in promoting and assessing the quality of health services and training providers and supporting quality services through supervision and feedback on performance.