Getting U.S. teens to “girl up”
The UN Foundation has launched a new campaign to raise awareness among teenage girls in the United States about the lives of teenage girls in developing countries. The program, Girl Up, asks American girls to “high five” their less empowered peers by learning facts (one in seven is married before she is 15, while many walk 15 hours a day for water and fuel) and donating $5 toward school supplies, clean water and health care.
Urgent relief is sought for Sri Lanka floods as victims seethe
The United Nations is requesting an emergency increase in aid — particularly mosquito nets, clean water and food — for Sri Lanka as the death toll continues to climb from floods that have destroyed several thousand homes and driven some 390,000 people to higher ground. Flood victims are accusing local government leaders of withholding relief supplies from the most needy, and instead divvying it among political supporters.
WHO targets drug-resistant malaria
The World Health Organization unveiled a $175 million a year plan to contain cases of drug-resistant malaria and prevent its spread from Southeast Asia to Africa. Artemisinin-resistant malaria first appeared in the border region of Thailand and Cambodia in 2007, and cases are believed to be popping up in Vietnam and in the Thai-Myanmar border area.
UN meeting to focus on poverty, globalization
United Nations officials say an upcoming conference on poverty will focus on the effects of globalization on the world’s poor. Representatives will examine ways to help developing countries increase domestic productivity, improve access to technology and assemble financial resources.
Homemade incubator saves Kenyan infant lives
An incubator designed by a traditional birth attendant and herbalist in a slum in Nairobi, Kenya, has been saving the lives of infants for some 20 years. Alice Sibour uses pillows, blankets, hot water containers and a mosquito net to reduce premature deaths in a country where some 55 out of 1,000 newborns do not survive.
Young children in Bangladesh are kidnapped, forced to beg
Human rights campaigners in Bangladesh have helped to uncover a practice by which criminal gangs abduct children and force them to beg on the streets of the capital, Dhaka, seizing their earnings of about $10 to $20 per day. Recently at least five children between 7 and 8 years old were held for months in confined spaces, including barrels, and deprived of food before being sent out on the streets.
