NEWSBYYEMISRACH KIFLE

The verdict is in. “Hope dims for universal education by 2015, even as many poor countries make tremendous strides,” announces the 2010 United Nations report (PDF) on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).  Indeed, one look at the primary education enrollment stats in the poorest parts of the globe and it becomes clear why only five more years probably won’t do.

Just how badly is the world doing in providing universal primary education for its children? It depends. Enrollment in elementary schools around the developing world has reached 89 percent.  The overall number of children out of school has decreased from 106 million in 1999 to 69 million in 2008, but there are significant regional differences. Among the un-enrolled children, 31 million are in Sub-Saharan Africa while 18 million live in Southern Asia.

Enrollment in Sub-Saharan Africa stands at just 76 percent, much less than the second and third lowest numbers – Western Asia at 88 percent and South Asia at 90 percent. Still, deeming Africa an MDG failure would be a mistake. The gains made by the continent are huge, going from a 58 percent enrollment rate in 1998 to 76 percent in 2008 – an 18 percent jump. No other region in the world has made that big of a stride. We should all feel encouraged by that.

With one billion people around the world hungry, can we really afford to let perfectly fertile land lie fallow? Over at the Guardian, Kate Allen asks some hard questions about the growing land grab trend in Africa.

Financiers are coming from wide and far to invest their money in dirt cheap farmland. In addition to the usual suspects -- China, Gulf states, bio-fuel producers -- pension funds burned by Wall Street are glancing toward these same deals. After all, who could really beat the $1 per hectare, 99 year lease offers some of the continent’s desperate countries are putting up?

Allen argues that, all this doesn’t have to be a bad thing. If done right, the African nations can benefit from introduction of new farming technologies which can then result in higher yields and therefore more food. Small scale subsistence farming, which employs a majority of Africans, has shown itself to be woefully inadequate in stemming widespread food scarcity. These investments have the potential to bring badly needed jobs. Recipient country governments should know better and fight to broker a deal that is mutually beneficial for both the investors and their people. Yes, all true.

Wasteful and inefficient. That's how a new report by Cornell University researchers describes U.S. food aid. According to their research, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) wastes roughly $140 million a year because it ships U.S.-grown food aid to overseas recipients on American vessels. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. U.S. food aid was designed with the profit of American businesses in mind.

The source of this controversy boils down to USAID's policy of requiring at least 75% of food aid to be sent via U.S.-registered ships, regardless of how much more expensive that option might be. As it stands, though, the policy is not only expensive, it's not even a particularly effective way to subsidizethe shipping industry. Most of the vessels used, the report asserts, may be U.S.-registered, but they're actually foreign-owned. Go figure.

As Te-Ping's written here before, it's very difficult to defend this policy, which requires taxpayers to spend twice as much as they would if aid was delivered as in-kind, according to authors Christopher Barett and Daniel Maxwell.

Last week, members of the East African Community (EAC) — Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda — announced the launch of an idea that looks good on paper: the creation of a common market. The goal of the new agreement is to allow unrestricted, untaxed movement of people, goods and capital among the five countries.

Sounds good, right? The agreement will create an integrated market spanning a population of 127 million people and a total GDP of $73 billion. Removing constraints will mean increased intra-regional trade. When done correctly, such a move can translate into an efficient market in which more cash circulates within the five-country zone, instead of simply bouncing against barriers and flowing out. It will mean growth in overall economic activity, too — all good stuff.

But if the history of the European Union has taught us anything at all, it is that properly implementing such policies takes a long time and a lot of hard work. While the EAC legislation has already been written and signed, actually implementing it may take as many as five years, according to Kenya’s Trade Minister Amos Kimunya. The declaration of the market on the 1st of July was just a “recognition,” as he explained in a speech aired on a Kenyan TV channel.

In the same vein, the Ugandan Revenue Authority has had to clarify to excited entrepreneurs that cross-border goods and services will still be taxed for the time being. Indeed, basic details such as whether or not goods that have been taxed upon entry into the common market should move freely within the zone have yet to be worked out among the participant countries.

Guess who's gone and hired an image consultant? None other than Equatorial Guinea’s resident dictator, Teodoro Obiang Nguema.  Apparently, his reputation as one of the worst dictators in Africa hurts his feelings. It's not enough that he's gotten away with pocketing his country’s oil wealth while ordinary citizens struggle under poverty. Nope. He wants us to like him, too.

As we've written before, Obiang previously tried to cozy up with UNESCO by funding a life sciences award — named, naturally, in his honor. (After human rights activists responded with outrage, the prize was suspended.) Now, it turns out Obiang is paying Lanny J. Davis — a Clinton-era, former White House special counsel — a whopping million dollars a year to help remake him into a respectable leader on the global stage.

With his image consultant beside him at the Fortune-Time-CNN Global Forum, Obiang announced reforms that purportedly will ensure that the Equatorial Guinea's oil wealth reaches its impoverished population. He also told journalists that his country is democratic, while denying that Equatorial Guinea's oil wealth ended up in foreign bank accounts.

So, yeah. The lies continue, but this time he really want us to believe them.

The United Kingdom is getting ready to return child asylum seekers back to Afghanistan. Yes, you read that right. The country’s Border Agency is planning to set up a “reintegration center” in Kabul to which it plans to send unaccompanied minors that are now living in the U.K. The office plans to deport 12 underage boys a month.

Currently there are about 4,200 child asylum seekers in the United Kingdom, among which Afghan youth form the largest group. Until recently, these children were protected from being forcibly returned to their home countries without families.

But at this point, the U.K. government has not only adopted a harsher policy in regards to underage asylum seekers, it also appears to be ignoring the fact that Afghanistan is currently home to an ongoing war and escalating violence. The United Kingdom is setting a bad precedent, and other countries are following suit. Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands are all planning to return underage asylum seekers to Afghanistan as well.

The order to leave came unexpectedly, with residents given only 20 minutes to abandon their homes and much of their belongings.

“They came with trucks and police cars,” one of the victims from the informal Gazela Bridge settlement in Belgrade, Serbia told Amnesty International. Sadly, when the Roma families — also commonly known as Gypsies — were forcibly, hastily evicted that day in August 2009, their case was hardly unusual.

There are roughly 147 informal settlements in Belgrade alone. While the Gypsy population in Serbia faces severe discrimination, those who live in settlements like Gazela suffer the most. Their lack of legal addresses means they don’t have residence permits. Without such permits, they can’t access health care and education. Many children don’t go to school, and can’t seek employment as adults.

The Roma people are among  the most persecuted minorities in the world. So much so that there is even a term — Antiziganism — to describe the kind of racism they face. Yet we don’t hear much about their plight, despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of the estimated 12 million Roma live in abject poverty, spread across the not-so-poor European Union. And it isn’t like they arrived yesterday, either. The Roma people have been on the continent for at least 500 years.

Good news this month in the Lancet, which reports that more of the world's children are surviving the first five years of their lives. After looking at data from the last four decades (1970-2010) in 187 countries, their latest report concludes that global child mortality rates are dropping faster than previously projected. Awesome, right?

But wait. The report also projects that in 2010, 7.7 million children will die before their 5th birthday — that's two million more than the entire population of Denmark. It's hard to celebrate the good news when confronted with such an awfully large number — even if the figure has shrunk by 4 million since 1990.

So, exactly where where do these unlucky 7.7 million children live? Almost half are born in Africa, while a third find themselves in Southeast Asia. The World Health Organization says child mortality is one of the leading indicators of "overall development in countries," and this is certainly reflected in the Lancet numbers — out of children under age 5 who will die this year, only 1% come from high income countries.

Even if the overall picture is still bleak, progress is progress. So what brought down the numbers?

Want to know which countries are the worst places to get pregnant in? Take a look at State of the World's Mothers, an annual report compiled by Save the Children that ranks 160 countries. Out of the bottom 10, eight of them are African nations — Niger, Chad, Guinea-Bissau, Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali, Sudan, Eritrea and Equatorial Guinea. Afghanistan and Yemen round out the list.

Just how dangerous is it to give birth in these places? In Niger, fully one woman in 7 perishes during childbirth — that's 14% of pregnant or birthing women. In Afghanistan and Sierra Leone, the number is one in 8. These are some really scary statistics. By contrast, in Ireland, that figure is just one in 47,600.

As part of tackling maternal mortality in these countries, Save the Children recommends greater support for front-line health workers. Not surprisingly, in countries where access to birth control is most limited, the shortage of "skilled birth attendants" is also the deadliest. Women in such regions "face the most pregnancies and the most risky birth situations," says Save the Children's Mary Beth Powers.

The report also reflects just how correspondingly low the status of women is in the previously listed countries. For example, in Afghanistan and Yemen, women earn just 1/4 of what men make — or $0.25 for every dollar their male counterparts take in. In Niger, women spend an average of just four years in school. You get the picture: too often for women in poor countries, biology is destiny, and many end up dead because of it.

Want to know the latest good news about child labor? According to the International Labor Organization, child labor actually declined by 10% among kids aged 5-14 between 2005 to 2008. And wait, it gets better. Even among child laborers, the number engaged in hazardous work fell by 31%, while girls in particular saw their workloads drop by 15%.

Indeed, all this is encouraging.

Okay, but not that encouraging. We're still talking about some 215 million kiddos (PDF) toiling their lives away, and most of them continue to work under dangerous conditions. What's more, the number of working teenagers between the ages of 15 to 17 actually rose by 20%. And though most parts of the world showed a drop in child labor, sub-Saharan Africa actually saw an increase.

In fact, when we look at overall participation of children in the global labor force, though it's shrinking, the pace of that decline has fallen when compared to the previously measured period (from 2000 to 2004). So what explains the slow-down?