- One billion people forgotten in fight against poverty, By Annie Kelly, February 25, 2011, The Guardian: “This year Unicef’s annual flagship State of the World’s Children report, released on Friday, focuses exclusively on adolescents. A recognition, says Unicef, of the increasingly urgent need to invest in the world’s 1.2 billion 10-19 year olds, an invisible generation who are nevertheless pivotal in global efforts to reach the UN millenium development goals targets by 2015. The report argues that adolescents are often marginalised in development budgets and programming, and that if this is not corrected then investment in global poverty, health, education and employment goals will be compromised. Many of the world’s teenagers were babies or young children when the MDGs were established in 2000. Since then, many of them will have been the direct beneficiaries of the significant global gains in child survival, primary education, access to safe water and sanitation…”
- Indian teen girls most ill-fed: UN, By Chetan Chauhan, February 25, 2011, Hindustan Times: “Indian adolescents girls are worse than even those in world’s poorest region — Sub-Saharan Africa – in terms of nutrition and empowerment whereas a majority of boys are at high risk because of their sexual activity, a new United Nations report on adolescents on Friday said. The report, ‘Adolescence an Age of Opportunity’, released three days before the union budget had found that 63 per cent of the Indian boys in the age group of 15-19 were engaged in high-risk sex with non-marital, non-cohabitating partner as compared to just one percent girls in the same age group. Still it was lowest in the developing world with the highest being in South Africa with 95 % boys and 99 % girls reporting high risk sex. The report found sexual activity among Asian children below the age of 15, including India, to be lowest in the world…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty