Millennium Development Goals

Posted on September 2, 2010 by townsend

• UN reveals global disparity in broadband access, By Jonathan Fildes, September 2, 2010, BBC News: “The Central African Republic is the most expensive place to get a fixed broadband connection, costing nearly 40 times the average monthly income there. Macao in China is the cheapest, costing 0.3% of the average monthly income. Niger becomes the most expensive place to access communication technologies, when landlines and mobiles are also taken into account. ‘Access to broadband in an affordable manner is our greatest challenge,’ Dr Hamadoun Toure, secretary general of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), told BBC News. The statistics were released ahead of the UN 2010 Millennium Development Goals Summit in New York on 19 September…”
• World leaders urged to act on poverty, By Danny Rose, September 1, 2010, Sydney Morning Herald: “The world’s aid and charity organisations have resolved to again urge governments to pump billions of dollars into the global fight against poverty. Any suggestion that they lacked the resources to do so was a ‘nonsense’, the final day of the United Nations DPI/NGO (Department of Public Information/Non-Governmental Organisation) Conference was told on Wednesday. A fraction of the world’s military spending would fund the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), said Professor Phil Batterham, convenor of the three-day conference in Melbourne. Around 1600 delegates represented more than 350 Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) at the conference…”
• Some have progress at their fingertips, but for others pain and poverty linger, August 28, 2010, The Age: “A street beggar’s dirty hand is drawn to his mouth in the universal sign for hunger. A busy foreigner bustles past and shrugs, indicating he does not have any local coins. ‘I take SMS,’ calls the beggar. This truly is the digital economy. While Melburnians struggle to work out how to use a myki card, Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, buzzes on a banking system based on short messages sent from mobile phones. Known as m-pesa – ‘pesa’ is Swahili for money – the mobile service works on a debit and credit principle. A vendor nominates a price, the buyer sends a text message to transfer funds between accounts. Should a person need hard currency, booths are dotted around the country so people can make withdrawals. The service is booming. Almost 12 million Kenyans used m-pesa in the past year, sending $A462 million in small transactions. Ready access to cheap mobile phones, even for the poor, gives the mobile money system many advantages over a traditional cash-based economy. Security is one thing – for Kenya’s many slum dwellers, finding a safe place to stash savings is tricky…”