The realtime challenge: some cutting edge data-gathering from the UN (yep, you heard that right)

January 26, 2012
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How can the UN get its act together on food and agriculture?

January 6, 2012
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So how many of the world's people are hungry? Dunno. Work in progress…….

November 17, 2011
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Responding to emergencies: is the centre of gravity shifting away from the UN towards national goverments?

October 12, 2011
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Will the 2012 Earth Summit be a flop? Guest post from Sarah Best

August 2, 2011
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The future of emergency response – the international system v national governments

July 8, 2011
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Will the new UN Panel on Global Sustainability have an impact?

August 11, 2010
The diplomatic circus is full of high level commissions and panels on this and that, most of which deliberate, publish and sink without trace. But the UN’s new High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability, launched this week by Ban Ki-moon, may just be an exception. It certainly has a hell of a job description: ‘finding ways to lift people out of
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The co-creator of the UN’s new Multidimensional Poverty Index defends her new baby

July 29, 2010
Sabina Alkire responds to the previous posts by Martin Ravallion and me on her new ‘Multidimensional Poverty Index’. She is director of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI). “As Martin Ravallion points out, we agree that poverty is multidimensional. The question is whether our efforts to incorporate multiple dimensions into the very definition of who is poor and
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Guest Blog: World Bank research director critiques the new UN poverty index

July 28, 2010
Martin Ravallion is Director of the World Bank’s research department, the Development Research Group. These are the views of the author, and need not reflect those of the World Bank. “Everyone agrees that poverty is not just about low consumption of market commodities by a household.  There are also important non-market goods, such as access to public services, and there
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How can we improve the way we measure poverty? The UN’s new poverty index (and groovy graphics)

July 27, 2010
Ask poor people what poverty is like, and they typically talk about fear, humiliation and ill health, at least as much as money. But can the non-income dimensions of poverty be measured in a way that allows policy makers to weigh priorities and allocate resources? If not, the danger (as often happens) is that decision makers and documents initially nod
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UN Women: the United Nations gets its act together on gender

July 9, 2010
One of the things undermining the effectiveness of the UN’s work on gender issues has been the lack of a single agency with responsibility for the subject. Now, after years of difficult negotiations, the U.N. General Assembly has voted to set up a body that will seek to improve the situation of women and girls around the world. The new body
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What happens when negotiations fail to prevent 2 million deaths? Not much, apparently

October 7, 2009
Suppose weapons of mass destruction had taken 2.1 million lives over the last three years. International diplomacy would surely be at fever pitch, the UN would be in constant session, leaders would be shuttling to and fro trying to bring a halt to the slaughter. Wrong. Conventional arms have, directly or indirectly, killed that number of people, and yet international
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