HIV/AIDS could "destroy the global economy" and threatens to disrupt international efforts to combat terrorism, U.N. Deputy Secretary General Louise Frechette told delegates on Monday at a meeting of the International Chamber of Commerce in Denver, the Denver Post reports.

A consortium of key humanitarian agencies has adopted a policy statement designed to prevent sexual abuse and exploitation in humanitarian crises throughout the world. In the statement members of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) pledged to ensure that their staff and implementing partners do not abuse their power and influence to exploit and harm victims of conflict, particularly women and children.

The board in New York City met to discuss a wide range of issues including; i) First round of proposals and their management, ii) The overall strategy and mission of the fund, iii) The appointment of the Fund's first Executive Director and the Trustee Agreement that the Fund is undertaking with the World Bank to manage the Fund's financial resources; iv) Monitoring and evaluation tools for tracking proposals in countries; v) Procurement; vi) Partnership strategies for different organizations and entities including international agencies, local governments, NGOs and national ministries of health, companies and foundations; vii) WHO/Administrative Services. The Board also reviewed documents pertaining to many issues, including the ones listed below. In many cases, these issues were tabled but discussion deferred to the next Board meeting. This report summarizes some of the key points and issues raised by these documents so that the NGO community and other civil society groups can have insight and contributions into the decisions that will be taken at the next Board meeting.

In the last five years, the term globalization has been debated at almost every world forum and is said to be the best way to address extreme poverty in developing countries like Zambia. The international community led by the United Nations has been working with other donors to try and meet the so called development targets which is a vision and strategy to reduce the current world's poverty levels by 50% by the year 2015.That is reducing the number of people living in poverty in Zambia from the current 8 million to about 4 million before 2015.

Chocolate manufacturers, human rights groups and the Ivory Coast Government have signed pact aimed at ending the abuse of child labour in the chocolate industry. The agreement aims to address the use of children in West Africa's cocoa fields, and measures designed to crack down on mistreatment are set to be in place before the harvest season in autumn.

In order to save some of the services provided by natural ecosystems, such as carbon sequestration supplied by rapidly disappearing forests and other human-driven ecosystem changes, we have to start paying for them. So argue Gretchen Daily, a conservation biologist at Stanford University, and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Katherine Ellison.

As the AIDS crisis reaches staggering dimensions globally, the result is an explosive coupling of AIDS with long-standing global challenges in areas ranging from health care and human rights to economic development. This session addresses how philanthropy can and should answer this challenge on an issue that defies narrow categorization and business-as-usual models. Panelists include Adrienne Germain, president, International Women's Health Coalition, and Michael Sinclair, senior vice president, Health and Development in South Africa, Kaiser Family Foundation. Virginia Davis Floyd, director, Human Development and Reproductive Health, The Ford Foundation, moderates.

More than 90 countries mobilized for global EFA week(22-26 April). The week celebrates the second anniversary of the World Education Forum (Dakar, April 2000) and is an annual opportunity to renew the momentum generated in Dakar and to provoke public debate on Education for All.

1. Decisions made by GF Board re. fifty-eight of the proposals submitted
as part of the first round application process.
2. Countries NOT receiving grants (or fast-track responses) in this round,
but where CCMs were understood (by BTS) to be preparing proposals.

President George W. Bush has proposed a huge increase in U.S. foreign aid, potentially reversing years of declining aid budgets. His new push for aid has only two parallels in modern U.S. history: John Kennedy's Alliance for Progress and Harry Truman's Marshall Plan. In those cases, the fear that poverty would breed communism, in the developing world in the 1960s or in Western Europe in the late 1940s, was the motivating factor. Today Americans have found a new reason to take poverty abroad seriously: It will breed terrorists who will strike them at home. Developmentalists, who have long pushed for greater foreign aid on various moral and practical grounds, are not entirely comfortable with the anti-terrorist rationale. But after years of losing arguments about the importance of foreign aid, proponents of aid are not about to look this gift horse too closely in the mouth.

"An intellectual disinclined to be a leader, but who was pervasively influential all the same." This is how, some years ago, Federico Caffè summed up the figure of James Tobin, underlining the noteworthy contrast between the American economist's shy and soft character and his extraordinary, trailblazing influence on the development of economic research. This contrast has been greatly accentuated in recent times with the rise to prominence of the Tobin tax on the international political scene. With his good manners and sense of balance, Tobin has tended to treat the fame that this has brought him with self-deprecating irony. This gracious humility is of a different era to that of today¹s brimming narcissism, but it never went so far as to affect his civic passion and political commitment.

Ever since 140 countries launched a new round of global trade talks in Doha last November, the backroom boys at the EU have been busy running a fine-tooth comb over their trading partners' economies. Just how busy they have been was revealed recently, when the extent of the concessions the EU is demanding from some of its trading partners was leaked to the Guardian.

The international community must give greater
attention and support to internally displaced persons (IDPs) around the
world, according to the nongovernmental refugee advocacy organisation
Refugees International (RI). In a statement issued on Thursday, the group
stated that its recent assessment missions "suggest that the international
community continues to struggle to provide protection and assistance to
IDPs".

AS Zimbabwe celebrates its 22nd independence anniversary on Thursday, many people are reflecting on how far they have gone in shaking off the shackles of colonialism. Drifting back 22 years or so to the colonial period is very easy after visiting some of the country's institutions. Bow-tied waiters still serve afternoon tea from ageing silver teapots engraved with the initials of King George VI of England at some institutions. Blacks are generally not welcome in such institutions. The racism is subtle with high fees and other demands designed to keep the doors firmly shut to black patrons.

The global battle to fight Hiv/Aids, Malaria and Tuberculosis received a major boost when the US set aside $500-million for global Aids fund. The US says $300-million of it will be distributed immediately to help finance new programmes to tackle the killer disease.

The global battle to fight Hiv/Aids, Malaria and Tuberculosis received a major boost when the US set aside $500-million for global Aids fund. The US says $300-million of it will be distributed immediately to help finance new programmes to tackle the killer disease.

Contributions to the Global Fund should be equitably shared among the countries whose citizens live the most comfortable and unthreatened lives. This means that the wealthiest countries, such as the US, should contribute considerably more than they currently do. But it also means that contributions should come from the likes of Australia, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates ­ relatively wealthy countries that have not yet contributed a penny.

The United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator, Kenzo Oshima, and the Representative of the Secretary-General on Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), Francis Deng, on Wednesday signed a memorandum of understanding in New York to improve UN efforts to respond to the severe crisis of internal displacement around the world, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported on Thursday.

The African Institute of Corporate Citizenship is hosting the first ever African Corporate Citizenship Convention over 24 & 25 April 2002 at the Sandton Convention Centre, Johannesburg.

Foreign development aid to African countries has dwindled to its lowest level in at least a decade despite deepening poverty and the growing ravages of Aids in the region, new statistics compiled by the World Bank show.