- Child poverty fight threatened by west’s cost cuts, says Unicef, By Larry Elliott, September 7, 2010, The Guardian: “The United Nations warned today that the patchy global struggle to lift children out of poverty was being threatened by budget cuts in the west, soaring food prices and climate change. In a report prepared for a New York summit this month to measure progress in meeting the 2015 millennium development goals, Unicef said the pressures on aid budgets would have knock-on effects in the world’s poorest countries. ‘Fiscal constraints in industrialised economies will likely have reverberations for developing nations, particularly those dependent on external assistance,’ the report noted. ‘Fiscal retrenchment may undermine social progress, particularly if the global recovery is uneven and halting.’ It added: ‘The austerity measures currently being introduced in some European Union countries call for sharp cuts in spending, and it is not fully clear how these reductions will affect child-related expenditures, either at home or abroad…”
- UNICEF refocuses on poorest of poor children, By Anita Snow (AP), September 6, 2010, Washington Post: “The U.N. children’s agency says it has failed to reach millions of the world’s neediest boys and girls in slums and remote countryside and is shifting to a strategy of getting critical health care services to the poorest of the poor. UNICEF’s new approach would likely concentrate more on such initiatives as training rural health workers and building schools in remote areas, and less on building big modern hospitals and universities in cities, said Charlie MacCormack of the non-governmental Save the Children, which UNICEF consulted. It would cost less but also demand more planning and effort, he said…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty