U.N., NGO and general news round-up

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, currently the U.N. special envoy to Haiti, will be named international coordinator for relief efforts in the earthquake-devastated country, U.N. officials said. Speaking on condition of anonymity because the decision has not been formally announced, U.N. diplomats and officials said Clinton was the most obvious choice to coordinate aid and reconstruction in the impoverished Caribbean nation. "The official announcement should come sometime this week," a U.N. official told Reuters. Another official said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon would formally appoint Clinton, who would "represent the U.N. at the strategic level" and coordinate aid, financial assistance and reconstruction. Several Security Council diplomats said Clinton had strong backing from U.N. member states.

Beyond food, hundreds of thousands of Haitian earthquake victims displaced from their homes in Port-au-Prince, Leogane and Jacmel urgently need shelter, with plastic sheeting taking priority over tents, the United Nations reported Feb. 2 in its latest update on the situation there. Haiti’s Ministry of Health, with support from the U.N. World Health Organization (WHO) and the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF), is planning a targeted immunization campaign beginning today for people in temporary settlements, including rubella and diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccines for children under seven and diphtheria and tetanus for older children and adults, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said. Sanitation will remain an important public health issue in the coming weeks, according to U.N. health officials.

In an interview with Xinhua, UNDP Haiti Country Director Eric Overvest said the U.N. development agency plans to hire up to 200,000 local people in the post-quake reconstruction in Haiti. “The first stage is to hire in the most affected cities and neighborhoods,” Overvest said. “The first stage is rubble removal to clear the streets and create access.” UNDP hired 385 Haitians immediately after the earthquake to turn solid waste into burnable “bricks” that can be used to fire stoves for cooking. Now the UNDP payroll has extended to cover the labor of 30,000 Haitians. The UNDP has prepared to hire up to 100,000 in two weeks and over 200,000 Haitians as early as March. Overvest said that each is paid 200 gourds (USD5) a day with meals, more than the Haitian minimum wage of 180 gourds which is paid in part in kind of food. “In the second stage we will be working with the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF) on training teachers and creating infrastructure,” Overvest said.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will donate USD10 billion over the next decade to research vaccines and make them available to the world's poorest countries, the Microsoft co-founder and his wife said last week. Calling on governments and businesses to contribute, the Gateses said the initiative will produce higher immunization rates and is intended to protect 90 percent of children in poorer countries against such dangerous conditions as diarrhea and pneumonia. Gates said the commitment more than doubles the USD4.5 billion the foundation has given to vaccine research over the years. The foundation said up to 7.6 million children under 5 could be saved through 2019 as a result of the donation. It also estimates that an additional 1.1 million kids would be saved if a malaria vaccine can be introduced by 2014. A tuberculosis vaccine would prevent even more deaths.

Some of the world’s biggest emitters of carbon dioxide have formally submitted to the U.N. their national targets to cut and limit greenhouse gases by 2020 – abiding by the 31 January deadline specified in the Copenhagen Accord produced at December’s U.N. summit in Denmark. The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) said that by the deadline it had received specific pledges from 55 countries that together account for 78 percent of global emissions from energy use. “This represents an important invigoration of the U.N. climate change talks under the two tracks of Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention and the Kyoto Protocol. The commitment to confront climate change at the highest level is beyond doubt,” Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC stated. The countries that signed on to the Copenhagen Accord include the United States and China, the two largest emitters, along with the European Union, (EU) Australia, India and Japan.

Dozens of African leaders met Feb. 1 in Ethiopia to tackle the challenges facing the continent in the effort to meet the United Nations target of ensuring universal access to malaria control measures by the end of this year. Some 26 heads of State convened the first working session of the African Leaders Malaria Alliance (ALMA) during the annual African Union (AU) summit, which got under way yesterday in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa. ALMA aims to defeat the disease, which accounts for over 25 per cent of all deaths of children under the age of five across Africa, affects over 50 million pregnant women and is responsible for 10 percent of all maternal mortalities every year. “The world is closer than ever before to ending malaria deaths,” said the Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Special Envoy for Malaria Ray Chambers, with the World Health Organization (WHO) 2009 World Malaria Report indicating that more than one-third of malaria-affected countries have documented reductions in cases of more than 50 percent.

The World Food Program (WFP) is ramping up efforts to assist nearly 4.3 million people in southern Sudan where the number of hungry has quadrupled over the past year due to conflict and drought. “This spike in the number of hungry people in southern Sudan comes just ahead of the rainy season, when roads become blocked and communities are cut off from food assistance,” said Leo van der Velden, WFP’s coordinator for southern Sudan. The agency plans to assist the hungry for two to eight months in 2010, depending on how heavy the rainy season is and the extent of food available in local markets. It is pre-positioning 50,000 metric tons of sorghum, pulses and vegetable oil to feed the millions who may be cut off when the rains start. It will also support school meal programs for more than 400,000 schoolchildren and provide food for tens of thousands of people.