China Alone Abides by Commitments to World’s Poorest

By Raul de Sagastizabal The WTO member countries are moving towards the Eighth Ministerial Conference in Doha next December, again with no concrete results, even on issues relating to least-developed Countries (LDCs), recognized by the member countries’...

Is there a Role for Human Rights in a Free Trade World?

Up to 50,000 people a day die from poverty related causes with 22,000 of these fatalities being children under the age of five. The plight of the world’s most impoverished and vulnerable people have been further aggravated by the current global financial...

Tackling Financial Exclusion in Europe

The term financial exclusion was first coined in 1993 by geographers studying the impact bank closures had on those left unable to access basic banking services. During the 1990s there was a significant increase in research focusing on people experiencing...

100 Million Driven into Poverty By Healthcare

According to the latest annual report released by the World Health Organization (WHO) this Monday healthcare costs force 100 million people into poverty every year. The report further highlights how around 1,000 million people around the world are deprived...

Trade Not Aid?

Despite pledges on the part of donor countries in 1970 to spend 0.7% of GNP on official development assistance (ODA), this target is still proving elusive 40 years later. However, many would argue that ODA is not the best way to tackle poverty and its...

In Rwanda: A helping hand (and an exit strategy)

By Jim Devries, Executive Vice-President of Programs for Heifer International based in Little Rock, Arkansas and Danielle Nierenberg, senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute. Recovery is a word you hear a lot in Rwanda . From public service...

Time to Revisit the Millennium Development Goals?

In the midst of the economic and financial ‘bonfire of the vanities’, which continues to smoulder around us, it becomes even more difficult to consider the plight of the poor and the destitute who reside in distant, ‘exotic’ lands. Indeed, it...

Poverty in the Southern Hemisphere

Despite the wondrous technological developments and global wealth generated since the start of the 19th century, billions of people continue to live in the direst conditions of poverty. One of the most prevalent and widely quoted of these poverty measures...

The ongoing persecution of Haiti

Today Haiti is most commonly known for being the poorest country in the ‘western’ hemisphere and a land wracked by destitution and despair. This picture has only been reinforced by the horrific consequences of the January 12th earthquake, 15 kms south-west...

Global Inequality

To a large extent, the reality of global inequality is ignored or at best downplayed. However, this has not always been the case. Indeed, in the early 1950s, the first UN resolutions on development focused on inequality rather than poverty. Unfortunately,...