Migrants reduce poverty in their home countries

According to an IFAD study, money transfers of migrant workers towards their home countries total USD 300 billion per year, three times the amount of net official development aid (USD 100 billion).

For Africa alone, transfers (USD 40 billion) are still much higher than ODA (USD 26 billion in 2008).

In Uganda and Ghana, remittances have reduced the percentage of poor people by 11 per cent and 5 per cent, respectively.

Global Hunger Index 2009
After decades of slow progress in combating global hunger, the number of malnourished people is now rising as a result of recent events," said the report, published by IFPRI, German aid group Welthungerhilfe and Irish aid group Concern Worldwide.

Brain drain or skill flow?
Is the migration of large numbers of doctors, engineers, and other skilled workers from developing counties a threat to development? The answer appears so obvious that their movement is most commonly known by the pejorative term “brain drain.” This paper fundamentally reconsiders the question. Much existing evidence and some new evidence suggests that regulating skilled-worker mobility itself does little to address the underlying causes of skilled migrants’ choices, generally brings few benefits to others, and often brings diverse unintended harm. The paper concludes with examples of effective ways that developing countries can build a skill base for development without regulating human movement. The mental shift required to take these policies seriously would be aided by dropping the sententious term “brain drain” in favor of the neutral, accurate, and concise term “skill flow.”Download the full report.

Cash transfers are the new darlings of proponents of welfare programmes. Joseph Hanlon: 'Just Give Money to the Poor'

Dambisa Moyo - The Next Big Thing: Africa
Africa is rising, and it could emerge from the crisis stronger than most people think.

Mwila Chigaga, regional senior gender specialist at the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) African headquarters in Addis Ababa: African Women are worst affected by global economic crisis.

A new SIPRI report reveals that 90 per cent of the air cargo companies identified in arms trafficking-related reports have also been used by major UN agencies, EU and NATO member states, defence contractors and some of the world’s leading NGOs to transport humanitarian aid, peacekeepers and peacekeeping equipment. In some cases, air cargocompanies are delivering both aid and weapons to the same conflict zones.

The Legislative Assembly of Ontario has passed a historic Poverty Reduction Act on 6 May 2009

Fahamu has established a web site AU Monitor to enable African CSOs to engage constructively with the African Union (AU) and its organs in the interests of promoting justice, equity and accountability through the provision of high-quality and timely information. The logo is taken from the Adinkra symbol Hwe Mu Dua, or measuring stick, the symbol of examination and quality control.

The global economic crisis has created a development emergency that is taking a human toll on many poor countries, say the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. In its Global Monitoring Report 2009: A Development Emergency, experts estimate that the crisis will make it difficult to meet most of the globally agreed Millennium Development Goals.

Global capitalism and the search for alternatives
After highlighting why neo-liberal globalisation cannot be sustainable and how it destroyed livelihoods in Africa, Herbert Jauch (LaRRI) presents two alternatives: the Basic Income Grant approach in Namibia, as well as Venezuela's "Socialism of the 21st century".

A new report from the Oakland Institute, Voices from Africa: African Farmers & Environmentalists Speak Out Against a New Green Revolution in Africa, issues a direct challenge to Western-led plans for a genetically engineered revolution in African agriculture, particularly the recent misguided philanthropic efforts of the Gates Foundation's Alliance for a New Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), and presents African resistance and solutions rooted in first-hand knowledge of what Africans need.

UNEP has published a report on the linkages between environment, natural resources, conflict and peacebuilding: From conflict to peacebuilding. The role of natural resources and the environment.

Extreme poverty will continue to blight sub-Saharan Africa for another 200 years unless action to overcome it is intensified, a new Social Watch report has suggested.

"We are now at a critical mid-point between the millennium and 2015 and still the implementation of commitments that would help alleviate the lives of the poor is consistently delayed. Delivering on the promises of the Millennium Development Goals is one of the main challenges confronting the international community. Gender mainstreaming must be a cornerstone of the process towards achieving poverty eradication, good governance and sustainable development. Increasingly, however it is being used as an instrument to achieve a programmatic goal or as a tool to be applied in some cases and not in others."

Read the concept note and the full report of the Africa Women's Forum at the High Level Meeting on Africa’s Development Needs on 22 September 2008.

concept note - - -full report

Lydia Polgreen in the New York Times: “This is Africa’s resource curse: The wealth is unearthed by the poor, controlled by the strong, then sold to a world largely oblivious of its origins”.
The journalist describes how renegade soldiers control a tin ore mine in Bisie, North Kivu, D.R.Congo and tax miners, including children, without any return for the population. Nobody dares to touch them: the democratically elected government and the provincial authorities remain powerless. For eastern Congo’s citizens, nothing has changed.

LEADERS URGED TO OPTIMIZE MINING REVENUES
The Environmental Programme Officer of Third World Network-Africa, Mr. Abdulai Darimani posits that while mineral resources have been integral to the social and economic development prospects of mineral endowed countries and local
communities in Africa, domestic measures have not been adequate to optimize the benefits of the resource.

Center for International Policy report:
If the DRC would have been successful in stemming capital flight through prudent macroeconomic policies and better governance, not only would the DRC have paid off its entire external debt at end 2006 (US$ 11.2 billion), another US$4.3 billion would have been left to add to the country’s foreign exchange reserves or used to invest in infrastructure and human capital.