Poverty rates have halved in recent decades: from 1.9 billion to 836 million people, mainly thanks to economic growth in countries like China and India. Nonetheless, more than 800 million people are still living on less than US$1.25 a day. In some regions, like Sub-Saharan Africa, the absolute number of poor individuals has even increased since 1990, according to World Bank data from 2016. ...
Social protection is not only a human right — in the long term it also boosts economies, says Prof. Franziska Gassmann, as she takes up her new Chair in ‘Social Protection and Development’ at Maastricht University. Below she explains why and how social protection works, and how much more needs to be done. Click here for the inaugural lecture event, and here to download the speech. … If the first Sustainable Development Goal (“End poverty in all its form everywhere”) is to be taken se...
Shyama V. Ramani, Professor of Development Economics at UNU-MERIT, has been working on the issue of sanitation since the tsunami of December 2004. It all started as a charity project to build toilets for women in a small coastal village in Tamil Nadu, her home state in the southernmost part of India. “The tsunami had destroyed the vegetal cover around the village and the women could no longer relieve themselves in the bushes as they used to. They needed toilets.” But the project failed, and so S...
A joint post by Prof. Wim Naudé and Dr. Paula Nagler. — Society has perhaps never been more unequal than at present, in terms of the distribution of income and wealth. Within-country income inequality (as measured by the Gini coefficient) is, according to the UN Development Programme, “more unequal today than at any point since World War II”. These inequalities, and the resulting societal divisions, were one cause of the 2008 global financial crisis — and were, in turn, amplified by it. Th...
Gender is often seen as an isolated one-dimensional issue, rather than for what it is – a multilayered concept touching all of society, including research and policy. Why are we highlighting this today? Because 25th November is the United Nations’ International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.This day has been used by activists worldwide for the last 35 years to commemorate the struggle to eliminate violence against women....
In 2013, India became the fourth country in the world (after Russia, the United States and the European Union) and the only emerging nation to launch a Mars probe into space. But it remains part of the group of 45 developing countries with less than 50% sanitation coverage, with many citizens practising open defecation, either due to lack of access to a toilet or because of personal preference. According to the Indian census of 2011, only 46.9% of the 246.6 million households in India had their ...
The world is an unfair, unequal, insecure and unhealthy place for about half its population. Around 30% of ‘us’ have no access to adequate healthcare when needed, and 40% face a complete or near-complete loss of income security when a personal or a national economic crisis strikes. At least a third of the global population live in abject poverty (under US$3.10 per day) – i.e., the cruellest form of insecurity. Every second child is poor and 5-10 million children die every year of preventable cau...
A country’s ability to close the fiscal gap is based on its tax revenue, and there are three clear reasons for this. First, since the UN General Assembly unanimously adopted the 2030 Agenda, implementation is mainly the responsibility of the countries themselves, not NGOs or the private sector....
On the education front, the MDGs were no paradigm-shifters -- but from a policy perspective their sheer scope did help drive the global development agenda for education. Some 15 years after the Millennium Declaration, how much progress has there been across the development indicators for education? The results are inconclusive....
Health is one of the core elements in human capital development and is explicitly presented under Goal 3, which aims to “Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages”. This goal is far more inclusive than its predecessor and seeks to put the issue high up on the 2030 Agenda....