The IMF’s April 2025 Regional Economic Outlook for Sub-Saharan Africa presents a clear warning: regional growth is slowing, debt pressures are mounting, and donor assistance is declining. Yet the report outlines critical opportunities particularly in domestic revenue mobilization, structural reform, and private sector activation that can shape a more resilient …
"PREVENTION is better than cure" sums up the deliberations of scientists and doctors at the XVIth International Cancer Congress held in New Delhi(WHEN?) recently. This message is even more significant as scientists unveil the molecular mystery behind cancer. The XVI International Cancer Congress -- organised by Union Internationale Centre le …
SURVIVAL is still the most important factor in the lives of millions in the developing countries. Now is the time to look carefully at all its aspects. Recalling Darwin, learning to live with errors and malfunctions is essential to survival. Now, we are struggling to correct the previous errors of …
Vexatious questions continued to hover over the Convention to Combat Desertification even as government, representatives from all over the world assembled in Paris on October 14 for the signing ceremony of the Convention. The developing nations were apprehensive that the Convention's silence on financial resources could seriously cripple global efforts …
The international conference, BioResources "94, held in Bangalore from October 3-7, aimed to forge a new strategy to use biomass resources for sustainable development. However, at the end of the conference -- organised by the International Energy Initiative, the Biomass Users Network, the Commonwealth Science Council, and the Stockholm Environment …
DEVELOPING countries have reiterated their demand for more support from industrialised nations in their efforts to phase out the production and consumption of ozone depleting substances. At the 6th meeting of the Parties to the Montreal Protocol, held in Nairobi from October 3 to 7, developing country representatives said they …
TODAY, the gloomy scenario of blurred faces framed in countless tenement windows seems to have wafted right out of an Eliotsian elegy into the equally foggy reality of urban existence in the developing world. As the concrete jungle raises its teeming head, so does the clamour for its attendant needs: …
LAST week, Australians admitted to their interest in selling hazardous waste to India for recycling. It is telling that hazardous waste has been dumped in India before, often indiscriminately and irresponsibly. This lackadaisical attitude towards toxins was the reason for the signing of the Basel Treaty on the Transfer of …
AMONG the many grand schemes consigned to the commodious dustbin of the 20th century, a special place belongs to an oxymoron called democracy. Its disenchantments have directly given rise to the call for "another development", the notion of participatory movements on the ground which can, in theory, undermine existing power …
THE industrialised world seems to be sincerely following up on George Bush's swaggering statement in early 1992 that the lifestyle of us citizens is "not negotiable". It shows no inclination to thrash out the problem of rising greenhouse gas emissions, but instead wants to jump the gun and start "joint …
THE Cairo conference turned into yet another example of the governments of rich countries bullying the poor ones into accepting their self-centred perception of how the world's natural resources should be matched with people all over the world. Nobody argues for not keeping the world's population in check; nobody, also, …
To lessen the burden that the burgeoning world population puts on resources, family planning programmes will have to cover about 650 million people by AD 2000 and about 880 million by AD 2015, according to the Washington-based Population Action International. Financial resources have to be mobilised to meet the growing …
ABOUT 1.2 billion women live in the rural areas of the developing world and at least one-third of these are heads of households. These women bear a crushing workload -- at home and in the fields -- but their contribution to rural development is often overlooked. Environmental degradation adds to …
Round 1in the current wrestle between the hulking cigarette industry and the government goes to the US administration. Just when the tobacco lobby had heaved a collective sigh of relief at having squeeze in its favour a relatively mild tax of 69 cents per cigarette pack, when the government backhanded …
THE Human Development Report 1994 of the United Nations Development Programme reveals that economic relationships between the North and the South remain as skewed as before. Development assistance or aid to developing countries from developed nations is often driven by political expediency, ideological confrontation and commercial self interest. Some of …
The linkages between environmental degradation and human health are well established, but it seems that governments, especially in the developing world, are the last to hear the news. And because of their blinkered approach to health care, they have been slow to check problems which are clearly linked to a …
• Fertility rates (the number of children a woman can have during her reproductive lifetime)have declined dramatically since the '70s. In Thailand, It has plummeted 50 per cent, from 4.6 children per woman in 1975 to 2.3 in 1987; similarly, in Colombia. It fell from an average 4.7 children per …
What are the priorities of the United Nations Population Fund? When I became executive director of UNFPA, I emphasised on 3 things. I insisted on providing information and family planning services on a very large basis, starting at the individual level. Ways have to be found to create an environment …
WHILE resource- and consumption-intensive development depresses most environmentalists, their ideas are acquiring popularity in ways little suspected. When a heat wave scorched parts of north and central India recently, a leading newspaper waxed eloquent of Delhi becoming a solar cooker and protested that such a change was hardly sustainable. In …
THE world is a smaller place today; a Disneyland in France and Chinese heavy metal bands no longer raise eyebrows. Yet, vast differences also exist as industrialised countries continue to yoke poorer and newborn nation-states into the rhetoric of free market development and spiralling debts. Is it possible to imagine …
THE developed and the developing countries were locked in yet another standoff at the recent Asian Development Bank (ADB) meeting in Nice, France. At the heart of the dispute lay the insistence of industrialised countries, led by the US, that the ADB's capital increase be linked to a reorientation of …
