Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta (L) and former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at the United Nations Offices in Nairobi, October 30, 2014. Credit: REUTERS/Thomas Mukoya
NAIROBI, Kenya, Dec 12 2018 (IPS) – One of my proudest accomplishments as the former UN secretary-general was playing a part in the ambitious global agenda for sustainable development (SDGs), including the goal of universal health coverage (UHC) by 2030.
Kenya’s leadership was key. To give momentum to the SDGs an was established in 2013. One of the co-chairs of the working group was Ambassador Macharia Kamau, who was the Permanent Representative of Kenya to the UN.
As the world celebrates …
Meretha Pierson, a nurse in the leprosy clinic of Majuro, Marshall Islands, shows the medication to cure leprosy that are provided for free. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS
MAJURO, Mar 28 2019 (IPS) – Meretha Pierson has been a nurse for the past seven years, working in the government-run leprosy clinic in Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands. Her patients come in all ages, from different economic backgrounds and different professions. But, aside from their diagnosis, they all have something else in common: everyone wants to keep their illness a secret.
“Everyone requests me not to tell their neighbours. But women who are young, request me to not infor…
Why Governments Must Prioritise Sustained Tobacco Control Investment in Low- & Middle-Income Nations
Ryan Forrest is Policy and Research Advisor; Sara Rose Taylor, PhD is Research Officer; Mafoya Dossoumon is Communications Manager;
Credit: WHO/2017
OTTAWA, Sep 2 2019 (IPS) – Trends in global consumption of cigarettes haven’t improved since the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) came into force, according to a published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) earlier this summer.
Perhaps this is because the FCTC on its own is not a magic bullet. Governments have paid the issue of tobacco-use a lot of lip service but they have invested very little to match the global burden of the epidemic.
Simply agreeing on what …
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Dec 17 2019 (IPS) – Malnutrition remains a formidable challenge in most societies, with less than a tenth of countries in the world not experiencing at least one major malnutrition problem.
In relatively more food secure countries, where almost everyone has enough to eat, and few live in fear of a sudden loss of access to food, micronutrient deficiencies and diet-related non-communicable diseases (NCDs) often still loom large.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
One such country is Malaysia where rice is, by and large, available and affordable to almost everyone. However, what else Malaysians eat is quite problematic, causing to undernutrition in terms of micr…
PHILADELPHIA and NEW DELHI, Mar 11 2020 (IPS) – About 15% of the world s population lives with some form of disability, of whom 2-4% experience significant difficulties in functioning. Disability is part of the human condition, and almost everyone will be temporarily or permanently impaired at some point in life, and those who survive into old age will experience increasing difficulties in functioning. Here the focus is on empirical validation of whether disabilities are associated with economic hardships through loss of employment and consequently impoverishment in rural India. The motivation stems from continuing neglect of health in the budgetary allocations –including the allocations for 2020-21.
STOCKHOLM / ROME, Apr 1 2020 (IPS) – The experience and interpretation of the Coronavirus pandemic oscillates between the personal and the general spheres. The official discourse and measures taken by authorities have a direct impact on our lives, change our daily existence and foster worries for the future. A dark cloud of uncertainty hovers above us. What do decision makers know? What can they do? What can we do? Many of us are secluded in our own homes, others in wards or hospitals, or even alone and far away from the ones they love:
All you who sleep tonight
Far from the ones you love,
No hands to left or right,
And emptiness above –
Know that you aren’…
Nearly 400 Rohingya refugees have been rescued in Bangladesh after being at sea for two months. Experts are concerned about the spread of coronavirus if these refugees are housed in the Rohingya refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar along Bangladesh border with Myanmar. Credit: ASM Suza Uddin/IPS
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 16 2020 (IPS) – Nearly 400 Rohingya refugees have been rescued in Bangladesh after being at sea for two months.
Bangladesh coast guards reported rescuing 382 Rohingyas, including many women and children, who were starving and stuck on a boat as they were trying to reach Malaysia, the on Thursday.
Coast guard spokesman Lt Shah Zia Rah…
Credit: UNFPA
UNITED NATIONS, May 7 2020 (IPS) – The world’s poorer nations, reeling under an unrelenting attack on their fragile economies by the COVID-19 pandemic, have suffered an equally deadly body blow: being buried under heavy debt burdens.
Abiy Ahmed, prime minister of Ethiopia who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019, said last week that in 2019, 64 countries, nearly half of them in sub-Saharan Africa, spent more on than on health.
Ethiopia alone, he said, spends twice as much on paying off external debt as on health. “We spend 47 percent of our on debt servicing”, he wrote in an oped piece in the New York Times.
According to the UK-base…
SINGAPORE, May 26 2020 – Despite all the preoccupation with the current raging pandemic, it sadly appears that there has been no let-up in the global arms race among the major powers. In mid-May, the United States President Donald Trump, at an event for his new Space Force at the White House made a significant announcement, It was that the US was building right now an “incredible” new missile which would travel faster than any other in the world “by a factor of almost three”. This was obviously a response to the latest Russian ‘Avangard’ missile, which Russian President Vladimir Putin claims in invincible, with a speed of twenty times that of sound. The Chinese, reportedly are also feverishly working on their own hypersonic counterparts. All these would be strategic tools to…
Credit: United Nations
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 8 2020 (IPS) – The coronavirus—which has claimed the lives of over 538,000 people and infected more than 11.6 million worldwide—has destabilized virtually every facet of human life ever since its outbreak in late December.
Providing a grim economic scenario of the devastation caused by the pandemic including rising poverty, hunger and unemployment UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned last week of the possibility of a…