Executive Summary

This year, World Water Day (March 22) highlights the importance of international efforts to preserve and protect the world’s shared water resources.

The United Nations has declared 2013 the International Year of Water Cooperation. According to UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon: ‘Water is central to the well-being of people and the planet, we must work together to protect and carefully manage this fragile, finite resource.’

International donors have pledged over US$450 million to support an African force to fight Islamist militants in northern Mali. The pledges came at a donors conference held Tuesday (January 30th) in Addis Ababa to raise funds and logistics support for the African-led International Support Mission to Mali (AFISMA). Prior to the donors' conference, the AU's new chairperson, Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, announced the AU Assembly's pledge to help stabilize Mali.

JOHANNESBURG, 10 January 2013 (IRIN) - In another four decades, urban residents will account for 66 percent of the population in developing countries, says the Population Division of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA).

This year, the message marking the commemoration of the World AIDS Day is unequivocal: Zero New Infections, Zero Discrimination and Zero AIDS-related deaths. Violence against women has been increasingly recognized as both a cause and a consequence of HIV. The twin pandemics are each rooted in gender discrimination, women’s subordination, disregard for women’s human rights and the power imbalances between women and men that exist in societies all over the world.

Most TB/HIV deaths can be averted if TB and HIV services work together more effectively and services are scaled up

GENEVA, 27 November 2012––Last week the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) reported that there has been a 13% reduction in tuberculosis (TB)-associated HIV deaths in the last two years. The reduction is due to a sharp increase in the numbers of people with HIV and TB co-infection accessing antiretroviral therapy (ART)––a 45% increase between 2009 and 2011.

JOHANNESBURG, 24 August 2012 (IRIN) - Quietly, a revolution to develop cheap ways to draw water for irrigation is unfolding in small villages and rural regions in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, a new three-year study has found. This movement has the ability to turn agriculture around in the developing world.

JOHANNESBURG, 6 August 2012 (IRIN) - As global grain prices begin to climb, the Sahel countries of West Africa, those in the Horn, and in central and southern Africa - many of which depend mainly on imported cereals to feed their people - are most exposed to the impact of more expensive food, said the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Around the world plenty of people are already living with high food prices, and more will be joining them.

FIRST-EVER STUDY OF HIV TREATMENT POLICIES IN 23 COUNTRIES

MSF releases report SPEED UP SCALE-UP presenting policy ‘dashboard’