Ahead of the Millennium Development Goals Summit next week, India has expressed confidence that it would be able to reach its social and economic goals by the 2015 deadline. "India will not only have met the goals but it will be a shining example for other countries, Hardeep Singh Puri, India's envoy to the UN told PTI. "There is concern about some of these targets," Puri added, referring to child and maternal...
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Child mortality rates drop by a third since 1990 – UNICEF
Fewer children are dying before they reach their fifth birthdays, with the total number of under-five deaths falling by one third in the past two decades, according to fresh estimates by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Between 1990 and 2009, the number of children below the age of five who died annually fell from 12.4 million to 8.1 million. The global under-five mortality rate dipped from 89 deaths per...
More »Global efforts halt depletion of life-preserving ozone layer, UN reports
International efforts to protect the ozone layer shielding life on Earth from harmful levels of ultraviolet rays have stopped additional ozone losses, potentially averting scores of millions of cases of skin cancer and eye cataracts, according to a new United Nations report released today. At the same time they have helped to mitigate the global warming greenhouse effect. “Today’s report underlines that action to protect the ozone layer has not only...
More »Number of world’s hungry dips below 1 billion, UN reports
Although the number of hungry people in the world has fallen below 1 billion thanks to renewed economic growth, it remains “unacceptably” high, two United Nations agencies stressed today. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced in a new report that 925 million people will suffer chronic hunger, down nearly 100 million from 1.02 billion in 2009. “But with a child dying every six seconds because of undernourishment-related problems, hunger remains...
More »Women, Children Top UN's Anti-Poverty Agenda by Matthew O Berger
All eight of the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are critical to development, but numbers four and five on child and maternal health are the real priority areas for this year. That was the main takeaway from a series of briefings with U.N., NGO and country officials in which IPS participated this week. When the MDGs were agreed in September 2000, they laid out a clear pathway to the often vague...
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