Latest news with #lowIncomeCountries
Bloomberg
4 days ago
- Health
- Bloomberg
Five Questions for Melinda French Gates
① Critics say philanthropy has been astonishingly ineffective at solving societal problems—that giving has increased, but problems have gotten worse. I would beg to differ. We know millions of people are alive because of the lifesaving vaccines that have been developed and given around the world. Moms and dads in low-income countries line up to get measles vaccines for their children, because you know what? A measles outbreak in their community means that kids die. Has all of philanthropy been great? No. Philanthropy is only one tool in the toolbox. Philanthropy can take a risk that we wouldn't want government to take with our taxpayer funding, but it can prove things out at scale, and then governments can come in to scale that up.
Washington Post
6 days ago
- Business
- Washington Post
The retreat from aid is a costly mistake
It has been easy to dismiss efforts to raise the prospects of the world's poorest as an abject failure. The United Nations reported 712 million people living in extreme poverty in 2022, 23 million more than in 2019. The share of the world's population suffering hunger rose from 7.9 percent to 9.2 percent over the period. And 2.1 billion people still cook with dung, wood, charcoal and the like. But, if you zoom out, the track record of some of the world's poorest nations in improving the living standards of their own people has been surprisingly robust — better than anyone could have guessed just a quarter-century ago, when the United Nations laid out its Millennium Development Goals. 'There has been a tremendous amount of progress,' noted Esther Duflo, the economist who co-directs the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 'Often without much outside money.' Much of that progress is at risk. Still picking themselves up from the devastation of the covid pandemic, and trying to work themselves out of a mountain of debt, the world's low-income countries are now being walloped by President Donald Trump's trade war. Trump's trade policies will likely dim the world's economic prospects, increase uncertainty, trigger tighter global financing conditions and weigh on demand for commodities — the poor world's main export. As the World Bank Group's chief economist Indermit Gill noted this month, 'Outside of Asia, the developing world is becoming a development-free zone.' To top this all off, some of the world's most affluent countries have decided they have had enough with development aid. It's not just the Trump administration, which tossed USAID into the wood chipper. Britain cut its aid budget to 0.3 percent of its gross domestic product, from 0.7 percent before the pandemic. Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden have also cut their development assistance budgets. Justifications for the cuts include the emergence of other fiscal imperatives, such as the need for additional defense spending. But they are often wrapped up in a blunt proposition, most famously articulated by Elon Musk, formerly of the Department of Government Efficiency: that foreign aid is either wasted or frittered away by fraud. This is not only cynical posturing. It is based on the popular-yet-flawed proposition that aid fails because it cannot make poor countries un-poor. This ignores how aid actually improves the lives of people in the world's poorest countries. Leaders in Washington, London, Paris, Helsinki, Amsterdam, Oslo and Stockholm might want to observe what the world stands to lose if the efforts to improve the prospects of the poor were to falter. Consider maternal mortality. In Malawi, one of the poorest nations on earth, at the turn of the century 942 mothers died for every 100,000 births. By 2016, the number had fallen to 451. In Mongolia they declined from 200 to 49. Between 2000 and 2023 life expectancy at birth in sub-Saharan Africa increased from 52 to 63 years. In Bolivia, the share of adults who completed at least primary education rose from 51 percent to 76 percent over this period. Across all low-income countries, the share of people aged 15-49 with HIV declined from 2.7 to 1.7 for every 1,000 uninfected people. Regarding poverty, the share of people living on less than $3 per day (in 2021 dollars at purchasing power parities) across the set of low-income countries declined from 68.8 percent in 1995 to 51.8 percent in 2014. Since then, however, abject poverty's footprint has rebounded to 55.4 percent of the population. The most important upshot from these numbers is that while there still is a long way to go to provide for a decent living for hundreds of millions of destitute people around the world, there is a plausible path to get there. While most of the progress has been funded from the budgets of low-income countries themselves, disappearing aid will make their road harder. Aid plays an indispensable role, providing the sorts of things that poor countries cannot. It will be difficult, for instance, for governments in sub-Saharan Africa to replicate PEPFAR, launched in the George W. Bush administration to provide broad access to antiretroviral drugs, saving tens of millions of lives from the scourge of AIDS. It's easy to point the finger at 'waste and fraud.' One reason it is difficult to assess the value of aid programs is that their effectiveness is not usually measured carefully. Another is that the goals are often muddled, mostly by donor governments that want to please a variety of constituencies — such as, say, U.S. farmers who see food aid as a tool to increase sales. 'Corruption and waste is maybe a fourth-order issue,' said Abhijit Banerjee, the other co-director of MIT's Poverty Action Lab. But there are numerous, well-documented examples of how aid can help the prospects of the poor. Indeed, the broad story of aid, in recent decades at least, has been a felicitous one. The effort to help millions out of destitution cannot be sacrificed to the flawed idea that spending money on the poor somehow doesn't work.
Forbes
06-06-2025
- Health
- Forbes
Food Safety Depends On Every Link In The Supply Chain
Colorful fish and vegetables can be purchased at a public market. For communities to be nourished, their food supply must be safe to eat. This sounds obvious, but it's worth repeating, because every year, about 1 in 10 people worldwide (or about 600 million people) become sick from contaminated food, and 420,000 lose their lives. About 125,000 of those deaths annually are children under 5 years old—a disproportionate tragedy that comes at the expense of our future. And in low- and mid-income countries, US$110 billion is lost every year in productivity and medical expenses resulting from unsafe food, per World Health Organization (WHO) data. Addressing food safety is truly crucial not just to our lives but to our livelihoods, our economic success, and the well-being of every aspect of the food system. World Food Safety Day, on June 7, is a perfect opportunity for everyone around the globe to recommit to ensuring a safe food supply for all. 'Food safety is not just about preventing harm,' says Markus Lipp, Senior Food Safety Officer at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. 'It is about creating confidence and trust in the food we eat, in the systems that protect us, that protect food safety and in the institutions that serve the public good for safe food.' So how do we ensure the future of food is safe? First: Food safety is not isolated—every link along the food chain must prioritize safety. Food safety begins on fields and farms, with healthy soils and positive growing practices, and continues through processing, transportation, cooking, and serving. This whole-system approach can be truly transformative. In fact, many of the 200+ diseases 'that we know can be carried by food are preventable and sometimes even eradicable,' says Luz María De Regil, Director of the Department of Nutrition and Food Safety at WHO. Second: We can't just respond to challenges that currently exist; we have to be prepared to face unprecedented and complex challenges to food safety as the climate crisis worsens. According to the WHO, the changing climate will affect the persistence and occurrence of bacteria, viruses, parasites, harmful algae, and fungi—and the vectors that spread them. 'We're going to have emerging pathogens coming in, especially given that the climate is changing…microbes like hot, humid, wet environments,' said Barbara Kowalcyk, an Associate Professor at the Milken Institute School of Public Health. Third: Perhaps most urgently, we need to champion evidence-based policymaking and global cooperation. This year's World Food Safety Day highlights this, focusing particularly on the 'essential role of science in ensuring food safety and enabling informed decision-making.' Now more than ever, we need to devote more resources to scientific progress, international collaboration, and solid regulatory frameworks—not less. But recent cuts to research funding and staff in the United States by the Trump-Vance Administration, including in food safety inspection labs, are having concerning ripple effects across the globe. Foodborne illness outbreaks could become harder to detect and contain, leading to more people in more widespread areas getting sick, experts warn. In addition, the dismantling of the U. S. Agency for international Development (USAID) shuttered several Feed the Future Innovation Labs, which brought university research to countries including Kenya, Nepal, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Guatemala to design and implement food safety interventions in poultry production, post-harvest crop storage, farmers markets, households, and more. So this World Food Safety Day, WHO's calls to action encourage all of us—policymakers, business leaders, and eaters—to step up. Communities can find ways to apply the WHO's Global Strategy for Food Safety 2022-2030, to ensure that all people, everywhere, consume safe and healthy food. And initiatives like the GAIN's EatSafe program and the Codex Alimentarius Commission, which aims to standardize evidence-based food safety protocols in ways that respect local culture, offer models to learn from. I often think of something Abdou Tenkouano told me last year. At that time he was the Executive Director of CORAF, an organization in West and Central Africa that uses agriculture to build community resilience, and now he's Director General at icipe, which uses insect science to tackle food security, health, and environmental challenges in Africa. 'This is a global village,' he said. 'We are all interconnected, interdependent, interlinked.' And when it comes to food, we all have a responsibility to keep one another safe.
Times
19-05-2025
- Business
- Times
Use foreign exchange reserves to maintain overseas aid, Starmer urged
The government is being urged to consider leaning on Britain's £150 billion foreign exchange reserves to prevent deep cuts in overseas aid to low-income countries threatened by the withdrawal of US funding. A group of Labour MPs wants the government to maintain its commitment of nearly £2 billion to the World Bank's International Development Association, a facility for poor countries, which is in the line of fire as the UK cuts its foreign aid budget. The MPs, who include Alice Macdonald and Joe Powell, will write to Sir Keir Starmer asking the government to use the UK's Exchange Equalisation Account, a vast stock of foreign exchange reserves worth £150 billion, to offer low-interest loans to the world's poorest and most vulnerable countries. The exchange, which
