What kind of development does the world need? How should we set our priorities after 2015, the target date for the fulfillment of the UN Millennium Development Goals? Listen to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, President Macky Sall of Senegal, and other leading African policy experts on the importance of justice.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

Elected president of Liberia in 2005, and joint coordinator of the High Level Panel on the post-205 development agenda established by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon:

“Human security at all levels should be one of the new goals. And certainly, that should include justice.”
Macky Sall

President of Senegal since 2012. A former prime minister and head of the national assembly, he defeated a bid by his predecessor Abdoulaye Wade to win a controversial third term:

“There are new challenges, regarding the safety and security of nation states, with the development of terrorism, which has moved from Asia to Africa and settled in the Sahel region.”
Neville Gabriel

Head of the Southern Africa Trust, an anti-poverty group that promotes coordination between governments and independent groups, and board member of the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA):

“We need to be addressing issues of justice in the economic sphere, of justice in the governance and political sphere, to be ensuring that the benefits of economic growth, progress, natural resources, are distributed more evenly across the societies so that everyone benefits.”
Aminata Touré

Senegal’s minister of justice in 2012, she previously directed the human rights policy of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA); her career has included leading work in Africa on reproductive health, gender and HIV:

“The MDGs were lacking a human rights lens... I believe that for the next decade we need to come up with a set of goals which are more inclusive, and more ambitious.”

Thierno Kane

Founder of a number of grass-roots organizations in Senegal, specializing in issues of popular participation:

“If think the issue of justice is a critical element which needs to be taken into consideration, because if we develop health care, or a number of other issues, without justice or fairness, where are we heading?”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smqvx7hj_2I&;feature=player_embedded

In London on 8 June, UK Prime Minister David Cameron, together with an array of presidents, prime ministers, businesspeople and philanthropists, signed the Global Nutrition for Growth Compact, an agreement to improve the nutrition of children and pregnant women around the world. Inside the meeting room, organizers said they had secured new commitments of up to US$4.15 billion to tackle undernutrition between now and 2020; outside, in Hyde Park, activists laid a carpet of flower petals to represent the lives of children lost each year through malnutrition.

The children represented by those petals do not starve to death. Rather, many of them die of diarrhoea, pneumonia, malaria or measles - the usual child-killer diseases - but under-nutrition is an underlying factor in many of these fatalities. Being poorly nourished more than doubles a child’s likelihood of dying.

A major new Lancet series on maternal and child nutrition attempts to quantify the damage done by poor nutrition. Taking into account infant mortality linked to undernourished mothers and nutrition-linked birth defects, the authors of the study estimate that poor nutrition is the root cause of 45 percent of child deaths - 3.1 million deaths among children under age five each year.

Mortality figures would seem to be the ultimate measure of the world’s failure on nutrition, but the broader damage, say many in the field, is to children’s long-term development.

Sally Grantham-McGregor, of the Institute of Child Health, said, “Really, we have to move on from the outcome being death. We know that once children get severely malnourished, their development is going to be bad. Once a child is severely malnourished, feeding alone will only save their lives, not their brains. We are perpetuating the cycle of poverty, and we have got to break it.”

Life-saving steps

There has been progress since the last such report was published five years ago. The number of the world’s children who are stunted - who never grow to their potential height - has dropped steadily over the past two decades, from more than 253 million in 1990 to 167 million in 2010. The drop has been especially dramatic in Asia. In Africa, the percentage of stunted children has dropped, but population growth means that the numbers affected have actually risen.

In the past five years, there has also been a steady accumulation of knowledge about what works to reduce malnutrition. This new Lancet series aims to go further than its predecessor by presenting a list of 10 interventions whose effects are backed by scientific evidence.

It recommends: universal salt iodisation; the promotion of early and exclusive breastfeeding; micronutrient supplementation for all pregnant women; calcium supplements for pregnant women who need them; food supplements for pregnant women who need them; vitamin A supplements for children between six months and five years old; zinc supplements for children between one and five years old; education about appropriate complementary feeding, backed by supplements where needed; proper management moderate acute malnutrition; and proper management of severe acute malnutrition.

The authors estimate that if this package achieves 90 percent coverage in the 34 countries with the highest malnutrition burdens, it could save nearly a million lives a year at a cost of $9.6 billion.

The lead author of the paper on interventions, Zulfiqar Bhutta, of Pakistan’s Aga Khan University, said, “We believe that these 10 nutrition-specific interventions have the potential to save lives. The cost is affordable for a world which spends close to a hundred times more than this on conflict.”

The World Food Programme (WFP) has welcomed the proposed package. Its executive director, Ertharin Cousin, told IRIN, “We believe that it’s very helpful, a recognition that the provision of interventions does make a difference in an area where WFP has a comparative advantage - distributing micronutrient support to mothers and to children… And we have now announced a partnership with UNFPA [the UN Population Fund] where we will support pregnant and lactating women’s access to nutritious food, as well as adolescent girls.”

Interventions that do not directly involve nutrition also have a role to play. The health of adolescent girls, their education level, and the age at which they marry and start to have children all affect the nutritional status of their children. Targeted agricultural programmes can improve child nutrition, as can social safety nets and other programmes to reduce poverty. But one of the hurdles to improving mother and child nutrition is that it must bring together many different disciplines and agencies.

Political will needed

Better nutrition is now a more high-profile cause than it has been in the past. The food price spike of 2008 brought the issue to the fore, and the UN high-level panel on post-2015 development goals has recommended the inclusion of a separate goal on nutrition.

But Lancet editor Richard Horton told a symposium on the series: “The high-level panel is only one strand of [a] series of political processes that are taking place over the next six to 12 months. So although we should feel good that nutrition and food security are there, we should not be complacent about its position in the political process.”

Talking about ways of building commitment on the issue, Lawrence Haddad, the director of the UK’s Institute of Development Studies, stressed the need for political action. “You don’t often see the words ‘politics’ and ‘malnutrition together’… but international development is political - no two ways about it. And malnutrition is potentially more political than some other issues because it needs lots of different actors to come together to act in concert towards something that none of them could achieve on their own, and that requires a lot of coordination and alignment of incentives… Also, we know that malnutrition in many of its guises is invisible.”

Haddad says malnutrition must be reduced through deliberate action. Improvements in nutritional status tend to lag behind economic growth, he said, meaning people must apply pressure to make their leaders fulfil their commitments.“ Let’s will the politicians to act,” he said.

Source: Irin

Niamey — In Niger, a country where 67% of the population is under 25 years of age, the problem of youth unemployment and underemployment is acute, given that the lack of job opportunities threatens to undermine the country's political and economic stability.

"You, the young people of Niger, have the potential to become an engine for development in Niger, provided that sufficient investments are made in health and human capital," said Sri Mulyani Indrawati, Managing Director of the World Bank Group, during her recent visit to Niger at a meeting held at the World Bank offices in Niamey with about 40 young entrepreneurs, civil society representatives, officials, and students.

To tackle youth unemployment, the World Bank has recently launched a program focused on vocational training and will invest $US30 million in the "Niger Skills Development for Growth Project" over a six-year period. The idea is to promote entrepreneurship (11,000 young people aged 15 to 25 will be targeted by this program).

"As a result of the poor quality of primary school education, the fact that secondary education is limited and ill-suited to current needs, and the lack of options for technical and vocational education and training (TVET), young people lack the academic, technical, and entrepreneurial knowledge required by the job market," explained Boubou Cissé, a World Bank economist based in Niamey.

"Consequently, unemployment, underemployment, and a shortage of skilled labor coexist, and this represents not only an impediment to development but also a source of frustration among youth. Clearly," he added, "it is also a contributing factor to social instability."

Although the socioeconomic conditions of young people have improved somewhat over the past few years, and the primary school enrollment rate rose from 37% in 2001 to 76.1% in 2010/2011, there are still sharp disparities between regions, socio-economic groups, and genders.

In 2011, the national gross enrollment ratio (GER) for boys was 84.9% compared to 67.3% for girls, while the GER in urban areas was 99.1% as against 70% in rural areas. In contrast, in secondary school, the gross enrollment ratio was 10% in 2010.

According to figures from the Ministry of Vocational Training (cited in a study on the vocational integration of youth in Niger by the economist Anne Le Bissonnais), a million and a half young people ages 13 to 19 are neither in school nor employed, and more than 50,000 graduates are unemployed.

The adult literacy rate (one of the lowest in the world) was estimated at 29% in 2009/2010. Among women ages 15 to 49, the rate is only 11.6%, compared to 27.8% for men.

"The objective of the skills development project is precisely aimed at enhancing the quality and effectiveness of technical and vocational education and training in Niger by offering on- and off-the job training in priority sectors such as public works, agriculture, and tourism," noted Boubou Cissé.

"Young people will be trained for jobs in the emerging sectors, since the purpose of this program is to boost their employability.

Courses in appropriate skills will be offered, and entrepreneurs will be trained so that they can contribute to the country's economic development, in close cooperation with the private sector," he added.

As noted in a World Bank report on youth employment and underemployment in sub-Saharan Africa, the creation of viable jobs for young people is a precondition for sustainable development in Africa.

Source: World Bank

The rich history of our global organization has been written every single day by brave women and men, young people and adults; people like you, who have dedicated their lives for our common cause.

Today we want to use this message to congratulate our movement for its 169th anniversary and invite everybody to start preparing for the biggest event ever organized by the World YMCA movement to celebrate the landmark 170 years of our existence.

For that reason we are happy to announce and officially invite the whole movement to join a day that will be in the history books:

The YMCA World Challenge: MOVE 2014

Our first World Challenge in 2012 mobilized 432,000 people in 85 countries. In 2014 we want much more and this will only be possible with your support. We did it once. We will now do it bigger, better, and with a powerful and lasting message from the YMCA to the world with everyone on board.

Last year was about basketball. Next year will be much more and different! We have some surprises coming to you!

The celebration will be big on June 6, 2014.

There will be much more information coming in the next few months to provide coordination, communication, and support to your national and local planning process.

The Global Staff Team (GST) will be working together to give the best possible assistance to make this event a great success by building on the lessons from the last world challenge.

Together we are the YMCA! Book the dates (June 6, 2014) and spread the word!

Happy YMCA Birthday!

Johan Vilhelm Eltvik, Secretary General

Romulo Dantas, Executive Secretary for Youth Empowerment

Source: World Alliance of YMCAs