United Nations

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October 11, 2011 | 9:12 AM | By

Murder map

The Guardian has published a global map of murder rates based on data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. The story accompanying the murder map said:

Comparing murder rates of countries can really highlight the countries with problems – the ones in serious need of attention. A high murder rate gives a “tip off” that something needs to change.

Yes, to start with people need to stop killing each other. The U.S. is in the orange category, like much of Sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe — and unlike the less murderous “green” regions of Europe, Canada and even the Middle East.

 

FILED UNDER: Basics, map, murder, United Nations
October 5, 2011 | 10:41 AM | By

How should U.S. respond when Somali militants threaten famine relief?

UN

Somali mother cradles her malnourished, ill child

The Al-Shabaab Somali militants affiliated with Al Qaida have vowed to continue their attacks on civilians after taking responsibility for a suicide bombing in Mogadishu that has killed anywhere from 70 to 100 people.

The UN refugee agency says this is likely to make the already difficult famine relief effort harder. An estimated 750,000 are at risk of dying from starvation and malnutrition.

CNN reports ‘scores dead’ and that many of those killed were students:

A truck filled with explosives barreled into a government complex in the heart of Somalia’s restive capital Tuesday, a brazen strike killing dozens of people, including students registering for an education program.

As the Boston Globe reports, many had thought the capital city was safe after the militants fled in August: Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, Politics, famine, Hillary Clinton, Somalia, United Nations
September 29, 2011 | 10:46 AM | By

Bill Easterly: One of the nicest aid grumps you’d ever want to meet

Tom Paulson

Bill Easterly at Bruno's Bakery

While in New York last week to cover a (potentially) historic United Nations meeting on global health, the Clinton Global Initiative and other confabs aimed at devising grand and ambitious schemes to help the world’s poor, I figured I should go talk to a guy famously skeptical of such things.

Bill Easterly: Aid grump

Easterly is the author of several provocative books such as The White Man’s Burden and an NYU professor of economics. He got into academics after leaving the World Bank due to a celebrated flap over freedom of expression (his expression of what he felt were failed World Bank policies and the bank’s claim that he violated protocol by saying so).

Bill Gates also doesn’t think too highly of Easterly’s ideas (You’ll have to read down to the bottom of this Wall Street Journal article stating that Gates “hated” Easterly’s book. Here’s Easterly’s rebuttal). Gates continues to be a staunch defender of the value of foreign aid and the moral obligation of wealthier countries to assist the poor.

To brutally summarize Easterly’s views, he doesn’t think foreign aid works very well and development (which he distinguishes from aid) is often done more to serve the interests of donors and Western government or corporate interests rather than, and usually at the expense of, the poor.

He doesn’t believe in Big Ideas or large-scale “top-down” assistance programs — basically, most of what I was in New York to cover at the UN, the Clinton Global Initiative and other such events.

So I met him at Bruno’s Bakery near NYU to ask him a few questions before he ran off to play the French version of bocce ball (I think it’s called pétanque). Easterly’s very soft-spoken and chuckles a lot. Didn’t come across like a crank at all. Here’s what he had to say: Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, Bill Easterly, Bill Gates, foreign aid, United Nations
September 23, 2011 | 2:57 PM | By

Final wrap on UN Week and the ‘historic’ global health confab

Tom Paulson

Someone important going to the UN

A news analysis:

As I head home from the Big Apple, the big news here today is that Palestine formally requested membership at the United Nations as a step toward becoming an independent nation. The actual vote comes later but the UN isn’t really a democracy. The U.S. has vowed to kill it with a veto in the UN Security Council.

Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s antics at the UN are already old news. Other top stories today include a satellite coming down and some Swiss nerds claiming they sent subatomic particles faster than Einstein said they can go.

An earlier meeting by the UN General Assembly was repeatedly hailed by those who care about poverty, health and social justice as “historic.” But it seemed to come and go with little notice.

I reported earlier this week on this much lower-profile UN High-Level Meeting on Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs), admitting the entire time that I wasn’t quite sure what happened at this global health confab, or if it will matter much.

I couldn’t tell in part because of the byzantine manner which the UN does things, beginning with the apparently common UN practice of deciding on the outcome of a meeting before you have the meeting. I also couldn’t tell because the media is highly constrained and can only talk to participants at about the same level of engagement as someone jailed in solitary confinement.

That said, the UN meeting on NCDs does have the potential for something great … to emerge from this fog of sound-bites, press briefings and celebrity appearances. This could actually turn out to be historic, an expansion and re-ordering of the global health agenda.

It isn’t yet, however. As several of us who follow global health closely (obsessively, sometimes angrily) have noted, the UN didn’t really accomplish much of substance this week. As Laurie Garrett, perhaps the top global health journalist (or former journalist?) now with the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote on her blog:

After months of haggling, millions of dollars’ worth of meetings and travel costs and a prodigious mountain of studies and documents prepared in anticipation, the final Declaration of the UN High Level Meeting  is little more than a wishy-washy rendition of problems and vague solutions that are obvious to even casual observers….

Laurie, who is a friend, goes on to cite my earlier reports saying much the same thing and then calls me “super-insightful.” Wow, and I only paid her $20. Others just call me cranky. But I think we all want this thing to move forward, to expand the reach of the fight against the diseases of poverty. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Health, Ann Keeling, Jamie Love, Lautrie Garrett, NCD Alliance, non-communicable diseases, UN Week, United Nations
September 23, 2011 | 7:27 AM | By

Progress against poverty: A video celebration of the evidence

The U.S. Agency for International Development, once one of the most bureaucratic and boring agencies in the federal government, is doing a pretty lively, entertaining job of educating us about our work in the world.

Credit Raj Shah, the former Gates Foundation wunderkind who CNN recently profiled as the Young Gun Fixing USAID. Whether he can actually “fix” the agency remains to be seen. But they are doing a pretty good job on getting the word out about our nation’s efforts in aid and development.

Below is a compelling video USAID released during UN Week to celebrate the progress being made in the fight against global poverty, disease and inequity.

Created in partnership with Britain’s aid agency, DFID, the video is part of a campaign called the MDG Countdown. The idea is to draw attention to the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (the international community’s eight poverty reduction targets set for 2015):

FILED UNDER: Basics, DFID, millennium development goals, United Nations, USAID
September 22, 2011 | 4:57 PM | By

At Clinton Global Initiative: Landless women at root of many problems

I’ve been reporting this week on the United Nations’ declared support (however vague) for expanding the global health agenda to go beyond the traditional focus on infectious diseases like AIDS, TB, measles or malaria and include non-contagious, chronic disease like cancer or heart disease.

Across town, the Clinton Global Initiative was also in New York City this week and has been exploring how to fight hunger, poverty, unemployment, gender discrimination as well as disease.

One organization from Seattle in attendance here at this high-caliber, invitation-only event, Landesa, is dealing with all these at the same time.

“Land rights are at the root of many of these problems,” said Tim Hanstad, president and CEO of the non-profit organization (formerly known as RDI, Rural Development Institute) which works to help poor people around the world obtain legal ownership of their land.

Tom Paulson

Seattle film-maker Stan Emert talks with Landesa CEO Tim Hanstad at Clinton Global Initiative

Did I mention that the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) is pretty high-faluting? Only select folks are invited. People like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, President Obama, Burmese activist Aung San Suu Kyi — and actually quite a few people representing organizations from Seattle such as PATH, Microsoft and a creative nerd working on a literacy device.

Media are allowed in, within limits. I got kicked out of a room (where I was interviewing physician-activist Paul Farmer) because I had inadvertently left the media quarantine area. For more on what it’s like to be a journalist at CGI, read this hilarious piece by the Wall Street Journal’s Ralph Gardner Jr.

But I digress. The point is it’s a high honor to be invited to attend the CGI event. It is also often a sign that your issue — aimed at creating a social good — is rising up on the political and philanthropic radar screen.

Hanstad’s been to this luminous event before, but he said there’s no question the issue of land rights for the poor is gaining more recognition. Part of this, he said, is due to the so-called “land grab” going on in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa. See this Oxfam spoof video for one view.

“It’s hard to get precise numbers on what’s happening out there, but it’s clearly huge,” Hanstad said. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, Justice, Clinton Global Initiative, girls, land rights, Tim Hanstad, UN Week, United Nations, women
September 19, 2011 | 8:15 PM | By

Weird and wonderful UN week

Flickr, morten gade

A general UN assemblage

As heads of state, officials and other bigwigs descend on New York City for the United Nations General Assembly meeting, key city streets are closed, the traffic replaced by police officers, patrol cars and vans, and New Yorkers are irritated. It’s UN Week and most of the buzz is about the Palestinian push for UN recognition as an independent state.

President Obama is already in town, scheduled to speak at the UN on Wednesday.

But I’m not here for all that. I just came to see the UN deal with a proposal to re-set the global health agenda — something that, arguably, could do a lot more to increase global stability, our national security and worldwide economic growth than all this other blather. Arguably.

It’s called the UN High-Level Meeting on Non-Communicable Diseases. As boring as it sounds, it could be a big deal.

But I discovered upon arrival that even though I’m registered as Official UN Media (yes, with capital letters) I’m not actually allowed into the meeting. I assume that’s because I’m hardly “high-level,” which is fine. I’m not sure I’d even want to get that close to UN headquarters right now.

It’s friggin’ crazy around here.

Instead, I am skirting around the edges of the meeting visiting with others who have come here for the variations on the theme of making the world better.

Tom Paulson

Ted Turner

Like Ted Turner, a so-called media mogul, rich guy and the founder of the UN Foundation. I’m here, along with about two dozen or so other journalists sponsored by him and this philanthropy that promotes black helicopter government takeovers and democracy-hating jihadists (Just kidding. That was how one of the UN press officers described the view some Americans have of the organization.)

I’m a global health fellow sponsored by the UN Foundation to come learn more about the UN, specifically its work on health issues.

We met with Turner briefly before he went on stage at the Social Good Summit – a new media event aimed at stimulating, well, social good, largely aimed at young people.

Somebody asked how can we make the world a better place? Here’s some of what Ted said:

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, Health, Mandy Moore, Michael Elliott, ONE Campaign, Ted Turner, UN Week, United Nations
September 19, 2011 | 7:00 AM | By

Guest post: Global health needs to focus on health, not disease

This is a guest post from Wendy Johnson, a physician at the University of Washington with extensive experience working health issues in low-resource communities in Africa.

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Wendy Johnson

The UN High-level Meeting on Non-communicable Diseases (NCDs) couldn’t come at a worse time.

While the delegates, disease experts and functionaries gather in New York to discuss how to create a more comprehensive global health agenda, political leaders in a smaller city to the south with much more power to set that agenda will likely be dismantling the infrastructure and funding needed to support the fundamental change needed – health systems improvement.

As this story from Reuter’s notes, all foreign aid, and especially the USAID budget, is under serious threat, both from the so-called “super-committee” on debt and the deliberations over current spending bills taking place in Washington D.C.  According to the article, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Kay Granger is a proponent of deep cuts in aid who believes in limited programs that demonstrate quick impact and further U.S. national security.

This does not bode well for those at the UN meeting who will be arguing that the U.S. and other rich countries should make the long-term commitments necessary to address the disparities in NCDs such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer treatment in poor and middle-income countries.  Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Health, Politics, health systems, non-communicable diseases, UN Week, United Nations, Wendy Johnson