-AP   Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Nepal and some of the world’s other poorest countries helped lead the way over the past year as U.N. member states began meeting their unprecedented pledge of more than $40 billion for maternal and child health, a new study of the spending says. The spending report is being released Tuesday at a high-level event chaired by U.N. Secretary-General Mr. Ki-moon, who has made raising money for the health of...

Amid policy battles over food production, energy resources and economic decline, one untapped natural resource that is guaranteed to boost production on a global scale has been stubbornly overlooked – the power of women in the labour force. According to the World Bank's 2012 World Development Report (WDR) "Gender Equality and Development", ensuring equal access for women farmers would increase maize yields by 11 to 16 percent in Malawi and 17...

China has reduced deaths among newborn babies by almost two-thirds in little over a decade — an unprecedented success rate that a new study says holds lessons for countries like India still struggling with high neonatal and maternal mortality rates. Deaths among newborn babies fell from 24.7 per 1,000 in 1996 to 9.3 in 2008 — a 62-per-cent decrease — according to a paper published in The Lancet medical journal on...

The famine in the Horn of Africa is being seen as an inevitable consequence of drought, "the worst for 60 years". But this famine was almost entirely preventable, and presenting it as a natural disaster doesn't help; nor does our insistence on waiting for a major crisis before responding. Even though lessons about how to prevent famines have been documented time and time again, we don't learn. The conflict in Somalia...

The foreword — to the Draft National Land Acquisition and Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill 2011 — that says “urbanisation is inevitable” (I.p.1) signifies danger. The Bill, if enacted in its present form, is likely to worsen, and not stop, displacement of tribal, Dalit and other backward communities. The Bill states: “The issue of who acquires land is less important than the process of land acquisition, compensation for land acquired and...