IDEALS

BOGOTA, (Aug. 12, 2009) IPS/GIN – While street sweepers clean up
huge piles of rubbish in the Tercer Milenio park in the centre of
the Colombian capital, young police officers have been posted there
to prevent any more people displaced from their rural homes by the
armed conflict from trying to camp there.

For four months, more than 5,000 people took refuge in makeshift
tents and shelters in the park – an area of 16.5 square kilometres
that had been taken over by the Bogota  city government and
transformed into a beautiful public park.

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HARARE, (Aug. 12, 2009) IPS/GIN – City council turns off the water.
National minister in charge says turn it back on. Domestic and
commercial users alike dispute their unpaid bills. The shadow of
a cholera epidemic looms over it all. Must be Harare.

“We are not going to pay. We will boycott paying.” Netsai Mutongi
has a letter from the council demanding 230 dollars for unpaid
water bills, just part of the 22 million dollars Harare City
Council says it is owed in outstanding water bills.

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UNITED NATIONS, (Aug. 17, 2009) IPS/GIN – The U.N.’s Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs), already undermined by the global
financial crisis, are expected to take another hit – this time from
rising population growth.

The goal of halving the number of people living in extreme poverty
and hunger by 2015 could be jeopardised by soaring population
growth, mostly in the developing world. Read the rest of this entry →

BRATISLAVA, (May 3, 2010) IPS/GIN – A generation of children
growing up in Eastern Europe face poverty when they reach working
age because of the effect their own parents’ long-term unemployment
will have on them, sociologists and economists have warned.

They say that tens of thousands of children with parents who have
not worked for as long as ten years in some cases have no concept
of what working for a wage means, and have come to accept a life
of poverty forced to live off scant social benefits payments as
“normal”. Read the rest of this entry →

KARACHI, (May 5, 2010) IPS/GIN – Imran Ali, 23, has no reason to
complain. His monthly take home pay of 8,600 Pakistan rupees (about
102 U.S. dollars) as a government employee allows him to augment
his family’s meager income.

Many of Ali’s neighbors are not as fortunate, though, earning only
4,500 to 6,000 rupees (53 to 71 dollars) a month.

His father – a public transport coach earning between 400 and 500
rupees (about 4 to 6 dollars) a day – can hardly support a family
of seven. Read the rest of this entry →

CAIRO, (Apr. 29, 2009) IPS/GIN – Egyptians facing economic hardship
know how hard it can be to put food on their table. Now they have
also learned the cold reality of the capital market.

“We’ve lost everything,” says Hamdy Abdel Aziz, a factory worker
and father of two living on less than 100 dollars per month. He and
five of his neighbors each put 400 dollars into a gamaiya, an
informal arrangement common among poor Egyptians where money is
pooled to purchase stocks and then share the earnings.

Their portfolio has lost 80 percent of its value. “It took me four
years to save up that money. We weren’t being greedy, we were just
desperate and the stock market seemed to offer the only way out of
poverty.” Read the rest of this entry →

GAZA CITY, (May 13, 2009) IPS/GIN – Um Abdullah cannot remember
the last time she was able to feed meat to her eight children. She
does know that for the past week the single meal she cooked for
them each day consisted only of lentils. And that on one day, she
had received aid coupons from the United Nations, which she
subsequently sold to buy tomatoes and eggplant at the local market.

Um Abdullah is a 42-year-old dressmaker and hails from Jabaliya,
a cramped refugee camp on the outskirts of Gaza City. Stories like
hers are commonplace across the Gaza Strip, where years of
sanctions, siege and now war have battered the territory’s economy
and put many essentials out of reach for the majority of the
population. Read the rest of this entry →

MAPUTO, (May 12, 2009) IPS/GIN – Unemployment and poverty are rife
in the flood zone of central Mozambique.

Deep poverty is relentless despite the country’s much-touted
success in attracting foreign investment and keeping the peace
after a violent civil war that ended 17 years ago.

But a study by Leonor Teressa Matine and Ambrosio de Fonseca found
chronic poverty affecting mostly elderly and mothers who receive
the state poverty subsidy of $4 a month per adult and $2 per child,
according to “Vulnerability and Survival Strategies among Families
in the Periphery of the City of Tete: Studies of the bairros
Matundo and Matheus Sansao Muthemba”. Read the rest of this entry →

MAPUTO, (May 12, 2009) IPS/GIN – Unemployment and poverty are rife
in the flood zone of central Mozambique.

Deep poverty is relentless despite the country’s much-touted
success in attracting foreign investment and keeping the peace
after a violent civil war that ended 17 years ago.

But a study by Leonor Teressa Matine and Ambrosio de Fonseca found
chronic poverty affecting mostly elderly and mothers who receive
the state poverty subsidy of $4 a month per adult and $2 per child,
according to “Vulnerability and Survival Strategies among Families
in the Periphery of the City of Tete: Studies of the bairros
Matundo and Matheus Sansao Muthemba”. Read the rest of this entry →

CAPE TOWN, (Jun. 15, 2009) IPS/GIN – Attempts to ”alleviate”
poverty and hunger and boost African economies are futile, if the
needs and potential of small-scale farmers in the region are
ignored and the issue of trade barriers remains unaddressed.

This is the position that emerged from the World Economic Forum on
Africa, which concluded on Jun. 12.

”We have approximately 80 million small-scale farmers in Africa
who produce very little – not because they do not want to be more
productive, but because they are not able to,” argued Florence
Wambugu, founder of Africa Harvest Biotech Foundation. Read the rest of this entry →