This week saw world leaders gathering in New York to review progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals. The solutions to meeting the goals, says Charles Abugre, are proven and cheap. And donor nations, African leaders and citizens must work towards a common future.

With five years left till the Millennium Development Goals' 2015 deadline, civil society groups say South Africa has made progress on some goals but regressed on others. Pal Mfunzana’s sole source of income is a couple of corrugated tin shacks, indistinguishable from many others in Diepsloot, a deeply impoverished slum on the northern edge of Johannesburg.

Despite the Southern Africa region sustaining an annual growth rate of six percent, the U.N. Summit on the Millennium Development Goals will hear that the majority of Southern Africans remain among the poorest people in the world. While economies in the region are growing, inequalities between citizens of the same countries have also increased. "In South Africa, for instance, there is a growth in inequalities on the basis of provinces, gender, classes and races," said Dr Agostinho Zacarias, the United Nations Development Programme resident representative in South Africa.

With Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi speaking at Columbia University in the US this week, Alemayehu G. Mariam calls upon the institution’s President Lee C. Bollinger to extend the same reservations towards Zenawi that he did towards Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2007.

This latest report from the International Crisis Group, analyses the fragile political and economic situation following the devastating war with Ethiopia (1998-2000). Just a decade ago, Eritrea might reasonably have been described as challenged but stable. Today it is under severe stress, if not yet in full-blown crisis. While not likely to undergo dramatic upheaval in the near future, it is weakening steadily. Its economy is in free fall, poverty is rife, and the authoritarian political system is haemorrhaging its legitimacy.

As world leaders prepare for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) summit on 20 - 22nd September at the United Nations in New York, aid agencies and development organisations have released colossal amounts of research outlining the progress of the MDGs. Amid this information overload, there are missing voices: those of the developing world, whose poverty the MDGs are meant to address.

Despite Nottingham University’s Professor Oliver Morrissey’s claim that Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) will accrue only 0.01 per cent of Ghana’s GDP to consumers, and imports from the European Union will go up by six per cent, he is emphatic that Ghana should “not fear the EPA.”

Preparations for an independence referendum for Sudan's oil-rich south are behind schedule, putting the country at risk of renewed civil war, diplomats and activists say. Plans for the January 11 vote, meant to decide the fate of the Southern Sudan, were signed as part of a 2005 peace deal between the government and southern fighters, and any postponement could reignite civil war in Africa's largest country.

Omar Abdirashid Sharmarke, Somalia's prime minister, has resigned after a prolonged dispute with Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, the country's president. Sharmarke said on Tuesday he "resigned as the prime minister of the transitional federal government of Somalia after being unable to work with the president". The federal government has failed to end a three-year insurgency by hardline Muslim fighters who now control much of the capital and huge chunks of south and central Somalia.

Equality Now has called on the UN Human Rights Council to create a new mechanism to
assist member states to achieve women’s equality before the law. "The Human Rights Council is responsible within the UN system for strengthening the promotion and protection of human rights around the globe and ending discrimination against women falls squarely within this mandate. One very concrete action that could be taken by the Human Rights Council to promote women’s equality would be creation of a new special mechanism to focus on women’s equality with men before the law," said the organisation in a written statement to the UN last month.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/496/66982_logo_tmb.jpgIn October 2010 we will publish the 500th issue of Pambazuka News as we reach our 10th birthday. Over that time, we have built up a database of some 60,000 articles and news items on the website - all available for free. Some 2,500 authors have contributed articles, poems, audiovisual materials and commentary. Pambazuka News has become the oldest and largest (and of course most dynamic) citizen journalism site for social justice in Africa.

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A father asks his daughter:
Study? Why should you study?
I have sons aplenty who can study
Girl, why should you study?

'My name is Sali Samaké and I live in Tamala, one of the villages in the region of Djitoumou, in Mali. We’re proud of our past. We always refer to Djitoumou, an ancient land name, to indicate our village’s position to outsiders. I was born in Defara, a neighbouring village, but my parents no longer live there. I was 15 when I got married. Now I am 56 years old.' - This is one story from a Panos project called Voices from the Ground, which follows five people in the developing world and reveals how progress towards the Millennium Development Goals is affecting them.

The September National Imbizo (SNI) is a historic meeting sixteen years after Democracy in South Africa. Ours leaders are fighting amongst themselves whilst the people suffer. We can no longer leave things in the hands of the politicians. It is for this reason that have we called for the SNI which is a gathering of ordinary South Africans who want to see change in the lives of our people.

Southern African countries have some of the world's worst income distribution, but can often afford social transfers, which have proved an efficient means of reducing the number of poor, regional experts said at a two-day meeting in Pretoria, South Africa. "Money can always be found – where there is political will there is always a way," said Nicholas Freeland, director of the Johannesburg-based Regional Hunger and Vulnerability Programme (RHVP) funded by the UK and Australian governments, and one of the co-hosts of the meeting.

Nigeria's science and technology policy, widely seen as inadequate, will be rewritten to serve the wider goals of the country, its science and technology minister said at a stakeholders' meeting in Abuja. Mohammed Ka'oje Abubakar told representatives from government ministries, international agencies and professional bodies that a review of the policy is necessary to harmonise it with socio-economic policies in the country.

More than a decade ago, cocoa producers in Sao Tome and Principe were suffering because of falling global prices for cocoa. Many of them abandoned their cocoa plantations, while others cut down the trees to clear land for maize or other crops. Thanks to IFAD and its partners, nearly 2,200 farmers are now growing cocoa certified as organic or fair-trade for the international chocolate industry.

The Commission for Africa has criticised the “glacial” progress of talks aimed at eliminating the regime in which rich countries stack the odds in favour of their traders and farmers at the expense of those in developing countries. An excerpt from the commission’s new report, dealing with talks being conducted through the World Trade Organisation, the current round of which began in Doha, Qatar, in 2001

Namibia has called on the European Union (EU) to “take a step backwards from the current excessive demands in the economic partnership agreement (EPA) negotiations to allow Africa the policy space which it requires to advance its development”. Speaking at the Parliamentary High-level Conference on EU-Africa in Brussels, Peter Katjavivi, Swapo Chief Whip in the National Assembly (NA), on Wednesday called for greater understanding by the EU towards Africa, “as the consequences [of the EPA] will greatly affect Africa, far more than Europe”.

Although there are signs of improvement in Niger, which is in the midst of a severe food crisis, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) warned that child malnutrition rates are alarmingly high in neighbouring Chad.
“We’ve seen the positive impact of timely, well-coordinated food and nutrition assistance delivered in partnership with the Government in Niger,” where almost half of the 15-million strong population are hungry, said WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran. But in Chad, which experienced a long and crippling lean season, “children are weak and need to continue receiving food and nutritional support,” she stressed.