Africa is experiencing the highest urban growth rate in the world. Sub-Saharan African cities alone need to gear up to receive over 300 million more people over the next twenty years. To give an idea of the magnitude of what this represents in reality, it is equivalent to creating groups of urban buildings large enough to house the entire present population of the USA. However, neither the production capacities for local infrastructure and serviced land, nor the resources, nor appropriate financing mechanisms are currently in place to face a challenge on such a scale.

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In Tanzania in 2000, just over half of children did not go to school – a decade later, underpinned by aid, every child has a place. Every day the lives of almost 500 children – the equivalent of 16 primary school classes – are saved by mosquito nets and malaria medicines paid for by aid. Reducing aid dependence and developping the mobilisation of domestic ressources are essential, but pulling the plug on aid would almost certainly result in vast increases in poverty, the collapse of burgeoning health and education systems, and major reverses in the progress that has been made.

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Ger Bergkamp is Director General of the World Water Council, headquartered in Marseille, France. Read more...

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Ten years after the adoption of the Millennium Declaration by all the 189 member states of the UN General Assembly setting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the development community is gathering on September 20-22 in New York to look back and assess the progress that has been achieved so far and to take necessary measures in order to meet the MDGs by 2015. In view of this High-level Plenary Meeting of the General Assembly, ID4D members have written contributions on the topic of the MDGs and they have invited a series of renowned guest bloggers over the summer to share their ideas on these goals.

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This report has been commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the UN Millennium Campaign and is part of a larger project on progress in development. It presents an analysis of progress on the Millennium Development Goals.

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Jeremy Hobbs has been Executive Director of Oxfam International since October 2001. Read more...

What would the world look like if every child could go to school?

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Jon Lomøy has been appointed Director of the Development Co-operation Directorate of the OECD in April 2010. Read more...

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Michel D. Kazatchkine became Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in April 2007. Read more...

I am writing this blog a week after the XVIII International AIDS Conference in Vienna and only a few days after coming back from the African Union Summit in Kampala. I am writing this blog nearly 30 years after the first cases of AIDS were reported; 10 years after the International AIDS Conference in Durban brought the world’s attention to the moral outrage of the failure to provide antiretroviral treatment in much of the developing world; 10 years after member states of the United Nations agreed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015; and 8 years after the Global Fund was established to vastly scale up the response to AIDS, tuberculosis (TB) and malaria.

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Dr Chan is Director-General of the World Health Organization since 2006. Read more...

Two months from now, world leaders will meet at the UN in New York to review progress with the Millennium Development Goals. The many reports coming across my desk suggest that the MDGs have been good for development.

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Food Security: How programmes can better support smallholder farmers?

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