It is unlikely U.N. member states will push for a cut in the number of proposed sustainable development goals – and risk undoing painstaking talks – despite concerns there are too many of them, the head of the U.N. Development Programme said. From Reuters:
The current draft of SDGs, produced after formal discussions, panels and U.N. working group meetings, includes 17 goals and 169 targets ranging from ending hunger to combating climate change and conserving oceans.
Critics say the list to replace the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that expire this year, is too unwieldy to be effective, too costly to monitor and will be hard to measure because of a lack of data in many countries.
“If you go back to what was the beauty of the MDGs – they were limited in number and they had clear targets and because of that, they set the global agenda,” UNDP Administrator Helen Clark told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a brief interview.
“The question is with this bigger, bolder, more transformational agenda, how does it get traction? You don’t want it to be everything so it’s nothing.”
However, asked whether the list was likely to be narrowed, she said: “No, I don’t think so.”
“What we sense is that the member states are reluctant to open that up too much because they feel they did a lot of that discussion with the open working group,” Clark said, speaking at Britain’s Department for International Development on Monday.
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Global Health and Development Beat
Mali’s health minister declared the West African nation free of Ebola on Sunday following a 42-day period without a new case of the deadly virus.
A Cuban health worker sent to Sierra Leone as part of a team to help fight Ebola has died of malaria.
Officials In Guinea have begun an effort to try to rid the West African nation of Ebola. The Ebola czar says the new initiative is needed because pockets of resistance and denial remain in Guinea.
Aid agencies raced on Monday to reach tens of thousands of people displaced by catastrophic floods across southern Africa, as more heavy rain was forecast in the coming days.
An Egyptian woman died of H5N1 bird flu, the health ministry said on Monday, the fourth person to die of the illness in the country this year.
This past week, more than 2,000 mental health workers for the HMO health care giant Kaiser Permanente in California went on strike. The strike was organized by the National Union of Healthcare Workers. The union says Kaiser Permanente patients have been the victims of “chronic failure to provide its members with timely, quality mental health care.”
Climate change threatens the genetic diversity of the world’s food supply, and saving crops and animals at risk will be crucial for preserving yields and adapting to wild weather patterns, a U.N. policy paper said on Monday.
The story of how an app developed to hold the Nigerian government accountable for an ecological disaster that caused lead poisoning deaths saved some 1,000 lives.
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Buzzing in the Blogs
The case for focusing on nutrition as the MDGs wind down, by Jessica Johnston in the Lancet Global Health blog. She writes:
Recent nutrition collaborations across several development actors have provided a platform for greater impact and set the stage for success. In 2013, the Nutrition for Growth Summit successfully mobilised over US$4 billion in commitments, including a $700 million commitment from the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) together with UBS Optimus Foundation and the UK Government. In 2014, the Canadian government committed CA$3.5 billion to maternal and child survival with an explicit focus on nutrition, and the Innovative Finance Foundation announced an innovative financing facility that will leverage a US$0.10 tax on natural resources to create a fund aimed at reducing malnutrition in Africa. Also in 2014, a Global Financing Facility for Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn and Adolescent Health (RMNCAH) was announced, with initial investment of nearly US$4 billion; however, it is still unclear what, if any, explicit focus will exist for nutrition investments.
It is critical that new funding prioritises the populations where the most deaths can be prevented. According to 2013 UNICEF data, ten countries made up 60% of the global burden of acutely malnourished children: India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Egypt, and the Philippines. These are also the populations where child deaths from pneumonia and diarrhoea are concentrated, and any efforts to improve the nutritional status of children will also reduce morbidity and mortality from these leading infectious disease killers. Focusing on improving nutrition in these most vulnerable populations presents an opportunity to save hundreds of thousands of children’s lives in 2015 and beyond.
There are a number of “ready-to-implement” programme opportunities that, if funded now in the most vulnerable populations, could save hundreds of thousands of children’s lives in 2015 and greatly accelerate MDG4 achievement:
(1) Distribution of nutrition interventions (eg, therapeutic foods, micronutrient supplements, education campaigns) as part of existing, planned polio and measles vaccination campaigns, child health weeks, general food distribution, and seasonal malaria prevention campaigns, prioritising the populations with the greatest numbers of undernourished children. For example, seasonal malaria prevention campaigns, led by the Malaria Consortium, Médecins Sans Frontières, the US President’s Malaria Initiative, and UNICEF will expand to reach millions of children in Africa in this rainy season.
There is an opportunity to build upon a 2014 programme in northern Nigeria to integrate the delivery of nutrition with seasonal malaria prevention campaigns planned for the 2015 rainy season and save thousands of children’s lives in this year and into the future.
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Capital Events
Tuesday
11:00 AM – Supporting Myanmar’s Economic Development – CEIP
Wednesday
9:30 AM – Breaking the Cycle: Creating Solutions for Water Security in the Middle East – Hollings Center for International Dialogue
Thursday
1:30 PM – Reflections from the Frontline of the Ebola Response in Liberia – O’Neill Institute
Friday
8:00 AM – Collaborate: The Innovator’s Conference – Fosterly
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By Mark Leon Goldberg and Tom Murphy
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