Ethiopia

In the spirit of accountability, leaders from the African Union (AU) and the Group of Eight (G8) agreed at the Hokkaido G8 2008 Summit in Japan to institute a follow-up mechanism to monitor the delivery of commitments for development made by both sides of their partnership. The AU and its New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) Programme produced their first accountability report in 2011, while the G8 has reviewed its collective commitments since the 2010 Muskoka Summit in Canada. This document, however, represents the first thematic accountability report summarizing progress towards commitments made in connection with the collective AU–G8 partnership relating to AIDS, Tuberculosis (TB) and Malaria.
The aims of this accountability report are fourfold:

Countdown launched its 2012 Report on June 14, 2012, at the Child Survival Call to Action, a two-day high-level meeting in Washington, D.C.  This conference, convened by the governments of the U.S., Ethiopia, and India in collaboration with UNICEF, charted a course toward the end of preventable child deaths around the world.

Meeting of the Committee of Experts of the 5th Joint Annual Meetings of the AU Conference of Ministers of Economy and Finance and ECA Conference of African Ministers of Finance, Planning and Economic Development
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
22–25 March 2012

This report, released at a conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, showed that while North African nations are making good progress on maternal, infant, and child mortality indicators, countries in sub-Saharan Africa still lag behind U.N. goals for reducing mortality.

Many of the world’s women are moving closer to gender equality, but substantial gaps remain between men and women in health, education and, particularly, political and economic participation in a number of countries, including some of the most developed, according to a new global report.

Measuring against 2010 rankings, for example, the Sixth Annual World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2011 found that New Zealand, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka and the United Kingdom showed slight declines in their overall gender equality rankings, while Brazil, Ethiopia, Qatar, Tanzania and Turkey posted gains.

How did we become so many? How large a number can our Earth sustain? These are important questions, but perhaps not the right ones for our times. When we look only at the big number, we risk being overwhelmed and losing sight of new opportunities to make life better for everyone in the future. So instead of asking questions like, “Are we too many?” we should instead be asking, “What can I do to make our world better?” or, “What can we do to transform our growing cities into forces for sustainability?” We should also ask ourselves what each of us can do to empower the elderly so they can play a more active role in their communities. What can we do to unleash the creativity and potential of the largest youth cohort humanity has ever seen?

A major new health workers index by Save the Children has ranked the best and worst countries for a child to fall sick in — with Chad and Somalia at the bottom and Switzerland and Finland at the top.

The index measures not only how many health workers there are, but also their reach and impact.

It shows that children living in the bottom 20 countries — which fall below the WHO minimum threshold of just over two health workers for every thousand people – are five times more likely to die than those further up the index.