In ten years, the living conditions of the poor have been improving—but not necessarily because of the UN’s goals EVEN at 70, Jiyem, an Indonesian grandmother, gets up in the small hours to cook and collect firewood for her impoverished household. Her three-year-old grandson is malnourished. Nobody in her family has ever finished primary school. Her ramshackle house lacks electricity; the toilet is a hole in the ground; the family...

Latin America, the poster child of bad economic policy in the 1980s and early 1990s, is leading the way in one rapidly evolving area of social development: conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes. These schemes provide cash payments to poor households that meet certain behavioural requirements, generally related to children’s healthcare and education. The idea here is to support minimal levels of consumption through income transfers, while encouraging long-term human development. The...

VISHAL, the son of a farm labourer in the west Indian state of Maharashtra, is almost four. He should weigh around 16kg (35lb). But scooping him up from the floor costs his nursery teacher, a frail woman in a faded sari, little effort. She slips Vishal’s scrawny legs through two holes cut in the corners of a cloth sack, which she hooks to a weighing scale. The needle stops at...

The prolonged monsoon and the diseases that come with it have really tested Delhi’s health-care infrastructure. There is a huge shortage of beds in government as well as private hospitals. You can find patients wreathing in fever in the corridors, emergency wards, everywhere. Why aren’t there enough hospitals around? Contrast this with the media: Nowhere in the world will you find so many newspapers, magazines and television channels than India....

While global food prices declined for the first half of this year, they have spiked in recent months, according to a new world bank publication, and this volatility could in turn push up the local food prices of the world's poorest and most malnourished countries. The Bank's grain price index had declined by 16 percent over the first six months of 2010 before rising that same amount between mid-June and August....