Former Finnish President and career peacemaker Martti Ahtisaari.

Ahtisaari is perhaps best known in UN circles for the "Ahtisaari Plan" for a stable, self determining Kosovo. But he has had a long career as a peace negotiator and conflict manager. From the Washington Post

The Nobel committee cited the "significant part" he played in resolving the Aceh crisis, a success which came on the heels of a tsunami that had devastated the province and other parts of Indonesia.

That was only a recent success in a long career of mediation that included efforts in Kosovo, Namibia and more recently in Northern Ireland, where he helped inspection weapon's caches as part of efforts to disarm the Irish Republican Army. The [conflict management nonprofit he founded] also has been active trying to improve security for United Nations personnel in Iraq.

"Throughout his entire adult life, Ahtisaari has worked endlessly to solve several long-lasting conflicts," said Ole Danbolt Mjoes, chairman of the five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee. "He's an outstanding international mediator. His efforts and achievements have demonstrated the important role of mediation in solving international conflicts."

Ahtisaari, in a radio interview quoted by the Associated Press, said he felt his work in Namibia was "absolutely the most important" negotiation he helped manage. Then a South African-occupied territory, Namibia was the scene of a decades-long conflict between South African troops and the South West Africa People's Organization, a liberation movement that drew support from neighboring Angola.

(picture from Flickr)

Here is a higher quality video of Jay-z at the United Nations Association 50th anniversary gala, via MTV.

AND, by way of introduction, the Secretary General of the United Nations tries his hand at rapping. Lyrics via OG Hip Hop. The video is below. (N.B. Bill Luers is the head of the United Nations Association of the United States.)

Global Classrooms are a cinch
With the help of Merrill Lynch
When you put the org in Google
Partnerships go truly gloooobal
There is hope for Earth's salvation
With the Cisneros Foundation
With Jay-Z there's double strife
Life for children and water for life
Human health will get ahead
With the valiant work of (RED)
For the poor and doing good
Stays the job of Robin Hood
UN stays on the front burner
Thanks to our champ Ted Turner
And whole revolutions stem
From the work of UNIFEM
But tonight my special shout-out
Goes to one I can't do without
We have traveled up and down
Frisco, Atlanta, Chicago town
Yes, the king of all the doers
Is my trusty friend Bill Luers
Bill, I cannot say goodbye
So take the floor and take a bow.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Ambassador Bill Luers"

My advice to the Secretary General: A valiant effort, but don't quit the day job, which, you know, includes trying to save the world.

An actress, a diaper manufacturer, and UNICEF join forces to help eradicate tetanus.

Actress Salma Hayek appealed on Thursday to mothers to support a global campaign to eliminate tetanus, which kills a newborn baby every three minutes in a poor country.

Hayek, spokeswoman for the Pampers/UNICEF campaign against tetanus, went to Sierra Leone last week to take part in an vaccination drive against the disease.

For each specially-marked pack of Pampers diapers sold through year-end, Procter & Gamble has pledged to donate a vaccine. UNICEF hopes to wipe out the scourge, blamed for the deaths of 140,000 babies and 30,000 mothers each year, by 2012.

"I had no idea how much it was going to really personally move me ... to actually see it in Sierra Leone," Hayek told a news conference in Geneva.

Sierra Leone is among 50 countries where newborn babies and mothers die of tetanus, which has been eradicated in industrial countries, according to the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF).

Read the full article here, and contribute to the campaign here.

Here at CGI, the United Nations Foundation - Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership, along with Merck & Co, Inc, the Kessler Family Foundation and the American Red Cross, announced a $9 million commitment to vaccinate 76 million children in 25 countries.

In the photo below, representatives from groups committing a combined $9 million to the Measles Initiative.

Learn more about the Measles Initiative

At a panel discussion this morning on poverty, the Nobel Prize winning pioneer of micro-lending (and UN Foundation Board Member) Mohammed Yunis explained why he decided to take his Grameen Bank to the United States. Initially, he brought micro-lending to the United States in 1986, when then-Governor of Arkansas Bill Clinton invited him to the state to help him combat rural poverty. More recently, Grameen supports the working poor right here in New York City. According to its website, Grameen supported microfinance institutions have provided over $300,000 of small loans to nearly 400 people. As with micro-lending across the world, the loans primarily go to women, and the default rate is virtually zero.

Asked why he brought his Grameen Bank to New York, Yunis replied that the city provides banking to the world, so why not to its neighbors?

It is no wonder he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Here at CGI, the World Food Program and Yum! Brands announced an $80 million commitment to fight world hunger. In partnership with the World Food Program the World Bank committed for the first time to open its $1.2 billion global food crisis fund so that developing country governments can provide school meals and de-worming to more than 5 million children. Wyclef Jean, who founded the Yele Haiti NGO, and World Food Program Ambassador Against Hunger Drew Barrymore were on hand for the announcement.

From the left, Wyclef Jean, Yum! Brands CEO David C. Novack, Drew Barrymore , WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran and World Band President Robert Zoellick.

More pics below the fold.

As Matt mentioned earlier, across the city from where world leaders are gathering today to take stock of the Millennium Development Goals, Democratic nominee Barack Obama announced earlier that as president he would commit to ending deaths from Malaria by 2015.

This is big news.

Malaria kills 1 million people each year, the vast majority of whom are children under the age of five living in sub-Saharan Africa. The thing is, these deaths are entirely preventable. A relatively modest investment in preventative measures like bed nets and in treatments like ARV drugs can have a profound impact on the health and welfare of poor, Malaria endemic communities. First Lady Laura Bush has been an outspoken advocate on Malaria. It is very heartening to see that one of the two men who may become president has committed himself to ending this global scourge once and for all.

There will be more news on Malaria coming out of CGI today and tomorrow. In the meantime: Send a Net, Save a Life.

Hundreds of world leaders gather at the United Nations today to take stock of the Millennium Development Goals. Here's an excerpt of my op-ed today in The Guardian on the topic.

This week, over 150 world leaders are gathered at the UN for the opening of the general assembly. If recent years are any indication, news outlets will focus on the disagreements aired on Tuesday, when George Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took the podium.

But the real drama occurs today (Thursday), when the same global leaders that butted heads earlier in the week take stock of one of the most far-reaching and noble statements of international cooperation ever agreed upon, the millennium development goals.

Click over The Guardian to read the rest.

Hip-Hop star Wil.I.Am released a new video, "In My Name," which launches a new online collaboration between the artist and a number of global poverty-fighting NGOs around the Millennium Development Goals. Watch for the celebrity cameos in the video, each of whom sign their name in support of the MDGs.

Now, sign your own name. And if you submit your own video Will.i.am may include it in a create a mash-up of the best user-submitted videos.

By Oisin Walton

I am among the two teams of Telecoms Sans Frontieres (TSF) emergency telecommunications specialists who deployed to Haiti as it was hit by four cyclones--Fay, Gustav, Hanna, and Ike--all in less than a month. TSF's teams deployed from bases in Nicaragua and in France to support communications both among humanitarian relief workers, and for Haitians who had been driven from their homes by flood waters.

The hub of humanitarian relief efforts in Haiti is in Gonaives, a northern city that has been mostly destroyed by the hurricanes. Local authorities estimate that as many nearly 56,000 families have been affected by the cyclones, and living conditions here are extremely difficult.

Although water levels in Gonaives' streets have lowered, mud has taken over. Gonaives is surrounded by hills devastated by deforestation, triggering mudslides that pour into the city. Daily storms make removing mud from homes and roads impossible, and aid agencies fear the stagnating water will spread diseases if it is not removed quickly.

Haitians forced from their homes by the storms are now crowded into schools, churches or hospitals that have been converted into temporary shelters, even while these buildings also have been affected by the storms. In other instances those left homeless are staying with family or friends. Our driver, for example, has been sheltering 20 people in his house for more than 2 weeks.

I am on the TSF team that is running a 'humanitarian calling operation' that provides affected populations with free, 3-minute phone calls to reconnect with loved ones. Since we launched our operation two days ago, it has been a tremendous success. Already more than 500 families were able to contact a loved one to ask for money or just give news to their family for the first time since the cyclones.

Each day, the TSF team providing calls for the local population travels from shelter to shelter, reaching on average 2 shelters per day. We use both satellite and mobile phones--satellite phones for international calls, and mobile for domestic ones. Access to satellite phones is very important since 80% of calls being placed go abroad--of those calls, 90% are to the United States, mainly to Florida but also to New York, Boston, Washington or Kansas.

Today, a 53-year old woman was able to call her father in Miami for the first time since the disaster. She thanked us because even if her father wasn't able to send any money they were both very happy to give news. "It was so good to hear his voice. You gave me 3 minutes of happiness," she said before leaving. Later, a man cried after calling his wife in Boston.

The Western Union office here has now reopened, making TSF's calls even more important as people will now be able to arrange money transfers. The Haitian Diaspora is indeed a huge source of revenue for many families living in Gonaives.

Normally, a 3-minute call from Haiti would cost around 135 gourdes. To put that in context, a cup of rice here (people don't count in kilos or in pounds but in "cups") costs 35 gourdes. For a population devastated by the food crisis and then these storms, access to TSF's phone lines may mean not only moments of comfort connecting with loved ones, but possibly also a lifeline to friends or family who could send money.

TSF's calling operations should last another 10 days depending on the needs. Our deployment to Haiti--which also includes telecommunications support for United Nations Disaster Assessment and Coordination (UNDAC) teams, as well as for relief workers with UNICEF and NGOs such as Médecins Sans Frontières and the Spanish Red Cross--is supported by partners including the UN Foundation and Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership, which supports the use of emergency communications for disaster relief.

--

Oisin Walton is head of communications and international relations for Télécoms Sans Frontières. For more information about TSF visit www.tsfi.org. For more information about the UN Foundation-Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership, visit www.unfoundation.org/vodafone.

Cross Posted at On Day One

Last year 43,716,440 people in 127 countries demonstrated their determination to fight global poverty by taking to their feet at events around the world. Today, we are precisely one month away from this year's Stand Up Against Poverty and for the Millennium Development Goals. Organizers hope to break last year's Guinness Book of World Record feat. Click here to organize a house party on from October 17-19, where you can join with millions across the globe to stand united in support of the Millennium Development Goals.

Here is some inspiration:

Regular readers of this blog know that we have been following the work of DataDyne--the nonprofit (sponsored by the UN Foundation and Vodafone Foundation) that developed a software application for mobile phone devices that enables public health workers in developing countries to collect data more efficiently. Yesterday, the UN Foundation (which sponsors this blog) and the Vodafone Foundation, together with the World Health Organization announced that its EpiSurveyor program will expand to 22 sub-Saharan African countries by the end of the year.

Over on the ZDNet blog Tech for Change, a Kenyan public health worker who participated in the EpiSurveyor pilot program last year describes how this technology made his work much, much easier.

It used to be that much of this work was done on paper, but following a pilot project that took place in 2007 that is beginning to change. I was a participant in the pilot PDA project using EpiSurveyor--an open-source software for mobile devices--to support our data collection activities in the country. The pilot was led by the non-profit organization DataDyne, and funded by the United Nations Foundation and Vodafone Foundation partnership.

This technology brings much greater efficiency to what I do. Being able to electronically collect health data means that I don't have to use paper, recording survey data with a pen, and filling out numerous forms and questionnaires. I just input the data into the PDA and then synchronize it to the computer to be analyzed.

In related news the San Jose, California based Tech Museum of Innovation announced yesterday that it had named DataDyne a 2008 Tech Awards laureate for its groundbreaking work with EpiSurveyor. Congrats!

Five years ago today an explosive laden truck pulled rammed into the Baghdad headquarters of the United Nations killing 22 people, including the head of mission Sergio Vieira de Mello.

Sergio was a legend at the United Nations. His extraordinary talents as a peacemaker and diplomat touched the lives of millions of people around the world. Early in his career, he single handily negotiated (with the Khmer Rouge) for the repatriation of thousands of Cambodian refugees. From 1999 to 2002 he oversaw the building-from-scratch of the newest country on earth, East Timor. His great success at nation building led Secretary General Kofi Annan to appoint him as head of mission in Iraq where he would apply his gifts as a peacemaker, humanitarian and troubleshooter to the world's most complex conflict. Sadly, a terrorist's bomb took his life only a few months into his mission. Iraq descended into chaos not long thereafter.

Sergio may be gone, but his legacy lives on. The Pulitzer Prize winning author Samantha Power wrote a book about him this year. An HBO documentary and a feature film (by the director of Hotel Rwanda) are both on the way. And now, there is a new blog on the block to keep Sergio's vision of peacemaking fresh and build a movement for a smart foreign policy built upon the values he embodied as an international civil servant.

Chasing the Flame blog (which shares the title of Power's book) is written by Sergio's friends, admirers, and assorted foreign policy experts. Annick Stevenson, Sergio's former spokesperson, opens the blog.

Imagine a world in which everybody would speak to his/her neighbor, would listen to his/her views and would try to understand them, would, more generally, always wish to know the will of others before deciding, would negotiate before envisaging any military reaction, would never ever view war as the solution to any conflict whatever the reasons may be...A world in which war would become impossible because it would too difficult to think of killing someone you share so much with. This world existed. It was in the mind of Sergio Vieira de Mello. This is how he conceived it and lived it, as much as he could, or at least as a matter of principle.

(Image credit: SergioVM Foundation)

The first United Nations flight carrying humanitarian aid since fighting broke out in South Ossetia on Thursday arrived in Tiblisi, Georgia today. From the UN News Center:

The Boeing 707 cargo plane, chartered by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), is the first UN humanitarian flight to reach the country since heavy fighting erupted last Thursday between Georgian and South Ossetian forces, leading to a large number of casualties and the displacement of thousands. Russian forces have since become involved in South Ossetia, and in Abkhazia in the northwest.

The flight brought 34 tonnes of tents, jerry cans, blankets and kitchen sets from UNHCR's central emergency stockpile in Dubai. A second UNHCR flight is scheduled tomorrow from Copenhagen, another of its central logistical hubs.

"The two flights will provide more than 70 tonnes of aid supplies for up to 30,000 people and will augment other relief items already distributed by UNHCR from its warehouses in Georgia," the agency's spokesperson, Ron Redmond told reporters in Geneva.

According to the latest figures provided by Georgia and Russia, the total number of people uprooted in the conflict is approaching 100,000, UNHCR said. Officials in North Ossetia, Russia, say some 30,000 people from South Ossetia have fled to that Russia region.

...introducing "Rattus Holmes in the Case of the Spoilsports," in which a rat detective and his feline sidekick help restore honor and integrity to the summer games by investigating doping and steroid use.

UNESCO launched the cartoon this week, in advance of today's opening ceremony, to help garner support for the International Convention Against Doping in Sport.

I am off to catch a plane to Addis Ababa then going to Rwanda, Liberia, Senegal -- and Mexico City for next week's big HIV/AIDS conference. I'll be following President Clinton and his entourage as they visit his Foundation's project sites, and will be posting updates to UN Dispatch and Twitter. Efforts to combat HIV/AIDS (particularly mother to child transmission) and Malaria will be the focus of our many stops...and we will even catch up with the Secretary General in Mexico. Check back for updates throughout the week. I'll take lots of pictures and post them here.

Via the UN News Center, an announcement that the UN is helping to create global standards for the ways in which rescue workers can notify the next-of-kin of injured people.

Next-of-kin information for injured people will now be easier to find thanks to a new telephone code from the United Nations telecommunications agency.

By adding prefixes such as "01," "02" and "03" before contacts -- for example, "01husband" -- in a person's mobile telephone directory, rescuers will be able to notify relatives or friends worldwide.

"This simple addition to a person's next-of-kin or nominated contact details has the potential to greatly reduce stress for overworked emergency workers around the world," said Malcolm Johnson, Director of ITU's Telecommunication Standardization Bureau. "Anything that can be done to reduce the workload of these remarkably brave people and assist in getting injured people the right care and attention is commendable."

The code "ICE" -- short for "In Case of Emergency" -- has appeared in some mobile phones in English-speaking nations, but ITU members stressed the need for a global unified standard that would be effective regardless of language or script.

Via the UN News Center, Jay-Z is headlining the HoveFestival in Norway -- a concert that has signed onto the United Nations Environmental Program's Climate Neutral Network. What does this mean? UNEP explains:

Morten Sandberg, the festival's organizer, said that the carbon footprint of the 2007 festival accounted for just over 1,300 tons. This was calculated among others by the use of a specially developed online carbon calculator and in close cooperation with CO2-emissions data experts. This year's carbon footprint is now being quality checked, and we are eager to see the difference and analyze this further in order to learn more about how we can continuously reduce our impact on the climate.

Participants, including staff and acts, where invited to pay by SMS or credit card for their individual carbon footprint caused by their travel to the festival and during the event's operations.

The funds are being used to support a methane-into-electricity project on a landfill in China approved by the United Nations as a Clean Development Mechanism project.

Other energy saving measures at the Hovefestival included solar charging points for mobile phones, electric golf carts for on site travelling, and LED lighting systems powered by wind and solar power.

I've been remiss in plugging Creative Capitalism -- a new project by Conor Clark and Michael Kinsley. Creative Capitalism is the public blog of a private website in which economists discuss and debate the premise of a speech Bill Gates delivered in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In the speech, Gates ruminates on the limits of private philanthropy and the need for free-market solutions to global health and development challenges. The contributions on the blog will turn into a book sometime this fall. But here's the interesting part: Clark and Kinsley (and Simon and Schuster) are not interested in publishing elusively the opinions of economists on their website. Rather, they are opening up the project to the blogosphere as a whole in the hope of soliciting contributions to their book from blog authors and blog commentators.

In a recent post, Lawrence Summers suggests a creative capitalist solution to the mortgage crisis:

Here is a really good creative capitalism idea. All Americans benefit from increases in home ownership because of the values like hard work, community, and respect for property that ownership instills. Families want desperately to own their own homes and accumulate equity. Yet it is very hard for conventional banks that borrow money over the short term to lend over the kind of 30-year horizons that best help families buy houses.

How can the objective of ownership be best supported and how can the most adequate financing be assured? Voila, creative capitalism! How about chartering private companies as government sponsored enterprises with the mission of promoting home ownership affordability? Give them boards with some private representatives and some public representatives. Make clear that government stands behind their capital market innovations so they can borrow more cheaply and pass the savings on. Exempt them from the state local taxes that others pay. Give them specific objectives on affordability that they must meet. Rely on a special government regulator to assure that they balance their social responsibility with their drive to profit. Harness the profit motive to meet a social objective.

In 2005 Omidyar gave $100 million to Tufts University to invest in microlending institutions, which provide small loans to people in the developing world to start businesses or other enterprises. These loans generally are under $200 and have a rate of return higher than normal bank loans. The University gets to keep interest earned on these investments, which is used to advance university goals. This past year, Tufts announced that it would spend a portion of this money on helping pay off the student debts of graduates who decide to take low paying public service jobs (like becoming a teacher, joining the peace corps, or working at a non-profit). The initial seed money for this grant has essentially turned into a win-win-win situation.

If readers have any of your own creative capitalist ideas, send them to Conor Clark.

Experts on the small arms trade gather at UN headquarters in New York to discuss the nexus between the phenomenon of child soldiers and the trade in small arms, like the AK-47.

"It is argued by many that it is the proliferation of small arms that has actually contributed to this rise -- the ready availability of small arms in the period 1970 -- 2000 led to the rise and the phenomenon of child soldiers as we know it today," Radhika Coomaraswamy, the UN envoy on children and armed conflict, said.

"For $5 one can find a serviceable weapon in most countries in the developing world," she added, noting that it takes a child on average only 40 minutes to master an AK-47, one of the most common weapons used around the world today. The UN envoy also stressed that there were 600 companies in 95 countries around the world producing small arms, in addition to the growing reach of private arms dealers "who sell arms to anyone and who are accountable to no one."

Emmanuel Jal, an emerging world music and hip-hop star and former child soldier in Sudan attended the meetings. He's now an advocate for child soldiers around the world--and is the subject of the new documentary War Child. Below is his first official music video release, which is for his song War Child.

The United Nations Development Program just released a potentially groundbreaking new report on how businesses may include the global poor as potential customers--and how the global poor might benefit from collaborating more closely with businesses. Creating Value for All: Strategies for Doing Business with the Poor is part of UNDP's Growing Inclusive Markets Initiative and explores 50 case studies of local and international companies successfully integrating the poor into their business models to "create wealth, spur growth and spark social change." Here are a few highlights from the report:

* In Colombia, the Juan Valdez company is offering higher, more stable incomes to over 500,000 smallscale coffee growers.

* In China, Tsinghua Tongfang markets computers loaded with distance education software to the rural population both for primary and middle school education and for minority language education.

* In the Russia Federation, over 80 percent of Forus Bank's clients are women, most of them in retail businesses; in 2006 the bank helped create 4,250 direct
and 19,950 indirect jobs.

* In Senegal, healthcare organization Pésinet provided an early warning method for monitoring the health conditions of children under age five from low-income
families--the infant mortality rate fell by more than 90 percent between 2002 and 2005--from 120 per 1,000 live births to 8.

* In Cabo Delgado, Mozambique, the liquefied petroleum gas supplied by VidaGas improves the sterility of medical instruments used to deliver babies.

* In the Philippines, Smart, whose network covers over 99 percent of the population, offers low-cost, prepaid mobile phone airtime cards and eases financial transactions through the option to send remittances using short messaging service (SMS) technology.

If you've been on the internet in the past year, you have likely come across Free Rice, the online vocabulary building game that donates 20 grains of rice to the World Food Program for each word correctly defined. The site went viral after its launch last year. To date, 36 billion grains of rice have been donated through the site by sponsors who advertise on the Free Rice homepage. It's a win-win: users build their vocab, the hungry get fed.

Today, the World Food Program announced that rice donated through Free Rice is going to the Burmese survivors of last month's cyclone; two of the site's sponsors, YUM! and Unilever are paying for the consignments of rice to Burma.

Not a bad way to find out that "sastruga" means "wind-formed snow ridge."

At 10 am, UN TV is live casting a press conference that will include the economist Hernando de Soto and Secretary Albright, the two co-chairs of the United Nations Development Program's Commission on the Legal Empowerment of the Poor. Tune in here to watch the release of a report the two co-authored called Making the Law Work for Everyone, which takes the novel approach that legal remedies must be harnessed in the fight against global poverty. Here is a teaser:

The majority of the world's poor live their lives outside the rule of law, without the basic legal protection that recognizes their homes, assets and hard work. Without property rights, they live in fear of forced eviction. Without access to a justice system, they are victims of corruption and violence. Without enforceable labor laws, they suffer unsafe and abusive work conditions. If they own an informal business, they cannot access the legal business protections that entrepreneurs in the developed world take for granted -- they are locked out of economic opportunity in their own countries and in the global marketplace. Many are unregistered from birth, and have no access to basic public services. Outside the law, the ability of the poor to create wealth is frustrated; without access to justice, their dignity is violated.

In its forthcoming report entitled "Making the Law Work for Everyone," the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor will call on national governments and international institutions to make legal empowerment a key pillar of the anti-poverty agenda. Specifically, the report makes concrete recommendations about how nations, multilateral institutions and civil society can come together to empower the poor in ways that allow them to lift themselves from the grips of poverty. Within the context of a scaled-up international effort to meet the MDGs, a real commitment to the Legal Empowerment agenda constitutes a powerful and dynamic tool in the assault on global poverty.

We're back! And with great news: Nothing But Nets was featured on the front page of the New York Times today. Reporter Donald G. McNeil, Jr. explains how it's becoming trendy and cool for today's youth to donate $10 to send an insecticide treated bed net to a malaria prone region in Africa.

Unusual allies, like the Methodist and Lutheran Churches, the National Basketball Association and the United Nations Foundation, are stoking the passion for nets that prevent malaria. The annual "American Idol Gives Back" fund-raising television special has donated about $6 million a year for two years. The music channel VH1 made a fund-raising video featuring a pesky man in a mosquito suit.

It is an appeal that clearly resonates with young people.

Addressing a conference of 6,000 Methodist youths in North Carolina last year, Bishop Thomas Bickerton held up his own $10 and told the crowd: "This represents your lunch today at McDonald’s or your pizza tonight from Domino’s. Or you could save a human life."

The lights were so bright that he could see only what was happening at his feet. "They just showered the stage with $10 bills," Bishop Bickerton said. "In 30 seconds, we had $16,000. I'm just lucky they didn’t throw coins."

Three years after the signing of a peace deal that ended the decades of civil war that ravaged much of Southern Sudan, UNICEF has achieved a major success in improving education in the region. The UN News Centre reports:

Some 1.3 million children in southern Sudan are expected to start classes this year, compared to just 340,000 in 2005, thanks to an initiative supported by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) to boost school enrollment and strengthen the education system.

[skip]

A major milestone has been the increase in the number of girls in school -- some 34 per cent of the 1.3 million children now in school. During the civil war less than 1 per cent of girls completed their primary education.

Along with promoting enrolment, UNICEF has also been supporting the Government of Southern Sudan in building over 200 new permanent classrooms, rehabilitating nearly 300 existing classrooms, and providing 400 emergency classroom tents while construction gets under way. A 2006 survey showed that only 16 per cent of the nearly 3,000 schools in the region had permanent buildings.

Read the full article here.

Once again, the World Food Program is warning that unless donors step up it will have to start rationing f