Suffering from extreme poverty and male oppression, the women of Darkali village in Madhya Pradesh, India, are now able to feed their families through employment under the MGNREGS. The wages obtained under the Scheme help them augment the family resource base. Jashmabai is working under the punishing sun on an earthen dam in her village of Darkali, in Madhya Pradesh's Alirajpur district, being built under the government-funded Mahatma Gandhi National Rural...

Safe and clean drinking water and sanitation is a human right essential to the full enjoyment of life and all other human rights, the General Assembly declared today, voicing deep concern that almost 900 million people worldwide do not have access to clean water. The 192-member Assembly also called on United Nations Member States and international organizations to offer funding, technology and other resources to help poorer countries scale up...

2010 will mark 20 years of UNDP’s Human Development Reports (HDRs). Consequently, UNDP wants to do something new. There cannot be any dispute that HDRs have been phenomenally successful in focusing attention on human development aspects, and the MDGs (Millennium Development Goals) may not have evolved without HDRs. There have been regional and sub-regional HDRs too, such as state-level ones in India. Among several development-cum-deprivation measures used in HDRs, HDI (human...

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Oxford University today launched a new index to measure poverty levels which they said give a “multidimensional” picture of people living in hardship, and could help target development resources more effectively. The new measure, the Multidimensional Poverty Index, or MPI, was developed and applied by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) with UNDP support, the two institutions said in a joint...

Women in many countries are being empowered through cooperatives, raising their incomes, becoming more self-reliant and in the process overcoming gender stereotypes, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today. In a message marking the International Day of Cooperatives, Mr. Ban cited the “egalitarian ethos, participatory decision-making, common ownership and commitment to goals beyond the profit motive” as reasons why business, social and economic cooperatives are expanding opportunities for women around the globe. The Secretary-General...