Height: Very poor women are shrinking, as are their chances at a better life, By Donald G. McNeil Jr., April 25, 2011, New York Times: “The average height of very poor women in some developing countries has shrunk in recent decades, according to a new study by Harvard researchers. Height is a reliable indicator of childhood nutrition, disease and poverty. Average heights have declined among women in 14 African countries, the study found, and stagnated in 21 more in Africa and South America. That suggests, the authors said, that poor women born in the last two decades, especially in Africa, are worse off than their mothers or grandmothers born after World War II…”
Tag: Africa
Child Poverty – South Africa
Apartheid-style neglect of kids continues, By Charl Du Plessis, March 24, 2011, Sunday Times: “So says a report, a collaboration between the UN Children’s Fund (Unicef) and the SA Human Rights Commission, released yesterday. It details how the country fails the most vulnerable. The report said that 64%, or 11.9million of the country’s 18.6million children, live in poverty, and four out of 10 children live in households in which none of the adults work. About 1.7million children lived in shacks, 1.4million relied on rivers or streams as their main source of water, and 1.5million had no toilet in their home. African children were 18 times more likely to grow up in poverty and 12 times more likely to experience hunger than white children. The worst-hit areas of ‘multiple deprivation’ were still former homelands, said the report, which drew on data from the Statistics SA general household survey and other surveys. Children are failed primarily by the health and education systems…”
Telecommunications in Developing Nations
Nokia taking a rural road to growth, By Kevin O’Brien, November 1, 2010, New York Times: “On Saturday at dawn, hundreds of farmers near Jhansi, an agricultural center in central India, received a succinct but potent text message on their cellphones: the current average wholesale price for 100 kilograms of tomatoes was 600 rupees. In a country where just 7 percent of the population have access to the Internet, such real-time market data is so valuable that the farmers are willing to pay $1.35 a month for the information. What is unusual about the service is the company selling it: Nokia, the Finnish cellphone leader, which unlike its rivals – Samsung, LG, Apple, Research In Motion and Sony Ericsson – is leveraging its size to focus on some of the world’s poorest consumers. Since 2009, 6.3 million people have signed up to pay Nokia for commodity data in India, China and Indonesia. On Tuesday, Nokia plans to announce it is expanding the program, called Life Tools, part of its Ovi mobile services business, to Nigeria…”