Archive
Reuters blog archive
from Chrystia Freeland:
Give the children the vote?
Here's a novel way to address the problems caused by rising income inequality: give children the vote.
One virtue of this iconoclastic idea, recently advanced by the Canadian economist Miles Corak, is that it sidesteps the usual partisan debates. After all, the right and left have profound moral disagreements about economic inequality. But whatever your political stripe, you almost certainly believe in equality of opportunity.
Unfortunately, some of Corak's most celebrated work has been to show that rising income inequality and declining social mobility go together. This relationship, which Alan B. Krueger, the head of President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, has dubbed the Great Gatsby Curve, is one of the most powerful reasons to care about rising income inequality.
That's where the kids come in. In a policy paper published last month by Canada 2020, a Canadian progressive research group, Corak points out that the group that suffers most from declining social mobility is the young. As it happens, this is also one of the last human constituencies that doesn't have the right to vote. That relationship may not be coincidental.
from The Human Impact:
Strong Arms Trade Treaty could help prevent use of child soldiers-Amnesty
Although it is a war crime to conscript or use child soldiers under age 15 in active hostilities, the practice continues in at least 19 countries, Amnesty International said on Tuesday, citing the charity Child Soldiers International.
Amnesty has documented the recent use or allegations of use of child soldiers in Mali, Central African Republic, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sri Lanka, Somalia, and Yemen. As well as perpetrating human rights abuses themselves, many child soldiers are killed, maimed or become victims of rape and other sexual violence.
from The Human Impact:
Q+A – Child-friendly toilets key in fight to improve global sanitation
If toilets meet children’s needs, this will keep them in school longer, reduce the spread of life-threatening diarrhoeal diseases and help meet development goals, according to the charity Water For People.
At least 2.5 billion people worldwide do not have proper sanitation facilities. The combined effects of improper sanitation, unsafe water supply and poor hygiene are estimated to cause almost 2,000 child deaths per day, the U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF, reports.
from The Human Impact:
IF campaign to end hunger seems a bit iffy
By Maria Caspani
Techno music and revolving images of hungry babies were among the most disheartening, not to say disturbing aspects of the event that kicked off the 'Enough Food for Everyone IF' campaign at London's Somerset House this week.
The catchphrase – ‘There is enough food in the world to feed everyone, yet 2 million children die from malnutrition every year' – was repeated so many times during the hour-long event on Wednesday evening that, by the end of it, I felt like the words had lost their meaning.
from Full Focus:
Raised behind bars
In 2007, photographer Carolina Camps documented women living with their children inside Argentina's Los Hornos women's prison. Five years later, Carolina tracked down four of the women featured in her original images.
Read Carolina's personal account here and view a multimedia piece here.
from The Human Impact:
Dial-a-maid, get-a-slave in middle class India
When I arrived in India some years back as a single mother and full-time journalist, there was one thing I knew I wouldn’t have to worry about – finding domestic help.
Maids, nannies, drivers, cooks and cleaners are ten-a-penny amongst the urban middle classes here.
from The Human Impact:
Poor Kenyan women robbed of choice to give birth
The saddest part of the stories told by 40 HIV-positive Kenyan women who are suing the government for forced or coercive sterilisation is not that they can no longer give birth.
Most already have children, often more than they can comfortably provide for.
“Getting food is a problem,” said Pamela Adeka, who was sterilised after giving birth to twins in 2004.
from The Human Impact:
How can contraception cut child deaths?
LONDON (TrustLaw) - It’s well known that good family planning vastly reduces the risk of women dying from pregnancy complications and helps prevent miscarriages and still births.
What is far less recognised is the effect that spacing out pregnancies has on the survival of children way beyond birth.
from Photographers Blog:
The boy in blue
By Lucas Jackson
One of the ubiquitous presences when traveling through Afghanistan on an embed with U.S. soldiers is that of scores of children either watching the soldiers passing in convoys or patrolling their villages. It is not uncommon for dozens of faces to be staring at you, often while standing mere feet away from the obvious out-of-towners.
The soldiers do their best to either ignore these multitudes of staring eyes or to interact with them but most often the children react shyly when confronted or when someone tries to talk to them. As a photographer traveling with these soldiers I also stand out, even more so than the soldiers which they are at least used to seeing. I am dressed differently and instead of a rifle I carry something they see far less often - cameras. For me these trips are as frustrating as they are interesting. I try to catch moments when these children are interacting to the presence of the military in their town or with each other. But I often find that as soon as I point the camera, I either become the center of attention or my young subjects turn and run away.
from The Human Impact:
Uganda school children put chill on teacher truancy
A new hard-hitting advocacy video highlights the success of a project at a Uganda primary school where students monitored the attendance rates of their instructors to try and reduce teacher absenteeism.
Uganda has the worst teacher absenteeism rate in the world, according to Anslem Wandega, a program manager at African Network for the Prevention and Protection against Child Abuse and Neglect (ANPPCAN), which oversaw the project with funding from the Results for Development Institute (R4D) in Washington, D.C.
