This morning at the World Economic Forum, Bill and Melinda Gates announced a new $10 billion, 10-year commitment to support vaccine development and delivery. They called for the 2010s to be the “Decade of Vaccines” and asked other donors to step up their own commitments to vaccines.
Global concern over hunger is on the rise, and agriculture is getting a lot of attention in a lot of ways. Most recently, Mauritius wants to lease farmland in Mozambique, multinationals are supporting small farmers, and the countries best at fighting hunger support either privatization or increased government control over commodity prices.
The urgency and relevance of the ongoing debate over negotiations with the Taliban was underlined on Wednesday when the UN removed sanctions imposed in 2001 on five former Taliban leaders.
President Hamid Karzai has said Taliban who are not part of al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups "are welcome to come back to their country, lay down arms, and resume life,” and plans to seek international support for a new reintegration plan at the intergovernmental conference on Thursday.
In a keynote speech delivered at a major civil society conference in London Tuesday, former Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General for Afghanistan Lakhdar Brahimi reflected on the past eight years of international engagement in Afghanistan and called for a new peace process to bring an end to the long-running conflict.
Though many, including me, have said that Obama didn't say much in terms of foreign policy (and related policies) last night in his State of the Union, there has been a lot said about the little he did say. Find a sample of those reactions below.
A very refreshing hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Haiti just concluded. Paul Farmer who is Bill Clinton’s Deputy UN Special Representative on Haiti, RAND’s Jim Dobbins (a UN Dispatch favorite), and Rony Francois, the incoming director of public health for the state of Georgia testified on what is needed for Haiti's long term recovery.
“We must ensure that development does not falter in Afghanistan,” Mercy Corps UK director Mervlyn Lee said in his opening remarks to more than one hundred leading development experts, community leaders, civil society activists and government officials at a civil society conference in London Tuesday. Organized by the British and Irish Agencies Afghanistan Group (BAAG), the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief (ACBAR) and the High Commission of Canada in London, the conference kicked off four days of events around a UK Government hosted summit on the way forward in Afghanistan.