Picture courtesy of UNICEF

The State of the World’s Children report highlights how severe the problem of maternal mortality is in developing nations like India.

On the 20th anniversary of the Child Rights Convention, the UN has released a special edition of its annual State of the World’s Children report.

“The Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most ratified human rights treaty in human history,” said UNICEF executive Director Ann M. Veneman. “It has transformed the way children are viewed and treated throughout the world.”
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A new report from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) says that women, particularly those in developing countries, are most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Women make up a large share of the agricultural work force, which is directly impacted by the effects of climate change. They also manage households and care for family members– which restricts their mobility–and often lack the social capital necessary to deal effectively with climate change.

“Given women’s significant engagement in food production in developing countries, the close connection between gender, faming and climate change deserves far more analysis than it currently receives,” says the UNFPA report, which comes a few weeks before the Copenhagen talks. Read more…

World Food Program Map showing per capita calorie consumption on a nation by nation basis via Huffington Post, Princess Haya Bint Al Hussein

Wealthy nations at the UN’s World Food Summit have failed to commit to concrete targets to eradicate global hunger

It’s not just climate change that’s polarizing the world. At the 3-day UN World Food Summit, which began in Rome on Monday, aimed at combating world hunger, rich countries showed themselves to be decidedly at odds with the targets advocated by the world’s poorer countries.

For one thing, Berlusconi was the only leader from a G8 nation present at the summit. For another, richer countries effectively removed the Millennium Development Goal to end world hunger by 2025 and also did not endorse the UN’s call to commit $44 billion annually to agricultural projects in the developing world.

Instead, the draft declaration, issued at the beginning of the 3-day meeting, reiterated the goal of halving world hunger by Read more…

While this post comes a bit late given Children’s Day was on Saturday, here it is anyway!

All through childhood, I associated Children’s Day with something special. At school, we’d be given sweets and allowed a longer lunch break, and all our teachers seemed to make at least a marginal effort to give us less homework.

My passage out of childhood however, has been marked by an evolving recognition of the many strata that comprise the “children” celebrated on Children’s Day. While sweets may have been the order of the day for my friends and I, for many of the children in the country I call home, Children’s Day is yet another day to survive — rather than celebrate.

This past Children’s Day was particularly significant because it marked the 20th anniversary of the UN Child Rights Convention. We talked to Angela Walker, spokesperson for Unicef India; Deepa Bajaj, chief executive of Child Survival India, and Thomas Chandy, CEO of Save the Children in India, to get their thoughts on Children’s Day. Read more…

Image credit: Martin Canchola

Social networking is all the vogue. In, He’s Just Not That Into You, Drew Barrymore’s character, Mary, says: “If I want to make myself more attractive to the opposite sex, I don’t go get a new haircut – I update my profile. That’s just how it is.”

Everywhere, people are tweeting, blogging, uploading pictures, updating statuses, sharing, commenting, liking, disliking. And it’s not just with regard to personal relationships: Companies are tweeting madly about their latest promotions or events, CEOs have Facebook profiles and Obama has inspired stodgy politicians everywhere to look beyond traditional platforms for voter appeal and at least consider experimenting online.
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