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	World's most marginalized still left behind by global development priorities by UN Development Programme   Millions of people are not benefiting from economic progress, with the gap set to widen unless deep-rooted development barriers, including discrimination and unequal political participation, are tackled.   A quarter-century of human development progress continues to leave many people behind, with systemic, often unmeasured, barriers to catching up.   A stronger focus on those excluded and on actions to dismantle these barriers is urgently needed to ensure sustainable human development for all.   These are the findings of the Human Development Report 2016, entitled 'Human Development for Everyone', released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).   The report finds that although average human development improved significantly across all regions from 1990 to 2015, one in three people worldwide continue to live in low levels of human development, as measured by the Human Development Index.   'Leaving no one behind needs to become the way we operate as a global community. In order to overcome the barriers that hamper both human development and progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals, inclusiveness must guide policy choices'.   'The world has made some real progress in rolling back extreme poverty, in improving access to education, health and sanitation, and in expanding possibilities for women and girls', said Helen Clark. 'But those gains are a prelude to the next challenge, to ensure the benefits of global progress reach everyone'.   This is a concern in developed countries too, where poverty and exclusion are also a challenge, with over 300 million people, including more than one-third of all children living in relative poverty.   The report notes that not only are deprivations high, but disadvantages disproportionately affect some groups.   'We place too much attention on national averages, which often mask enormous variations in people's lives', stated Selim Jahan. 'In order to advance, we need to examine more closely not just what has been achieved, but also who has been excluded and why'.   The report shows that in almost every country, several groups face disadvantages that often overlap and reinforce each other, increasing vulnerability, widening the progress gap across generations, and making it harder to catch up as the world moves on.   Women and girls, rural dwellers, indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, migrants and refugees, and the LGBT community are among those systematically excluded by barriers that are not purely economic, but political, social and cultural as well.   In the case of women, the largest of these groups, the report notes that while global gender disparities are narrowing slowly, longstanding patters of exclusion and lack of empowerment for women and girls remain pressing challenges.   Women tend to be poorer, earn less, and have fewer opportunities in most aspects of life than men. In 100 countries, women are legally excluded from some jobs because of their gender, and in 18 countries, women need their husband's approval to work. Dangerous practices like female genital mutilation and forced marriage continue.   Populations living in rural areas also face multiple barriers. For instance, children from poor rural households attending school are less likely to be learning reading, writing and mathematics.   Moreover, migrants and refugees often face barriers to work, education and political participation and more than 250 million people in the world face discrimination on the basis of their ethnicity, the report notes among other examples.   "By eliminating deep, persistent, discriminatory social norms and laws, and addressing the unequal access to political participation, which have hindered progress for so many, poverty can be greatly reduced and a more peaceful, just, and sustainable development can be realised for all," Helen Clark said.   Marginalized groups often have limited opportunities to influence the institutions and policies that determine their lives. Changing this is central to breaking the vicious circle of exclusion and deprivation.   For example, indigenous peoples account for five percent of the world's population, but 15 percent of people living in poverty.   The report calls for far greater attention to empowering the most marginalized in society, and recognizes the importance of giving them greater voice in decision-making processes.   The report also calls for a more refined analysis to inform actions, including making a shift toward assessing progress in such areas as participation and autonomy. Key data, disaggregated for characteristics such as place, gender, socioeconomic status and ethnicity, is vital to know who is being left behind.   The report warns key development metrics can overstate progress when they focus on the quantity, rather than the quality, of development.   For instance, girls enrolment in primary education has increased, but in half of 53 developing countries with data, the majority of adult women who completed four to six years of primary school are illiterate.   'Despite progress gaps, universal human development is attainable', said Selim Jahan. 'Over the last decades, we have witnessed achievements in human development that were once thought highly unlikely'.   Since 1990 women's empowerment has become a mainstream issue: while as recently as the 1990s, very few countries legally protected women from domestic violence, today, 127 countries do.   The report stresses the importance of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development to build on these gains, noting that the agenda and human development approach are mutually reinforcing.   The report includes recommendations to reorient policies to ensure progress reaches those furthest behind, and urges reforms of global markets and global institutions to make them more equitable and representative.   http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/human-development-report-2016 Visit the related web page
	The impossible choices facing hungry families by Thabani Maphosa World Vision International, agencies   Imagine you have three children but only enough food for one. Or having to make the choice between providing a meal for your family or paying for medicine to treat your son or daughter.   These are real choices that the very poorest parents around the globe face each day because the international food assistance system is stretched to breaking point due to increasing numbers of people in need and inadequate funding.   Many more parents are about to face the same kinds of impossible choices because one of the worst El Nino's ever recorded is predicted to push millions more men, women and children into extreme hunger and malnutrition.   The role of international food assistance is to serve as an international safety net for the very poorest. It ensures vulnerable children and families have enough to eat during a tough time in their lives.   Food assistance is provided as food - things like flour, beans, oil, sugar, pulses and fortified biscuits or specialised nutrition products for mothers and young children - or as cash and vouchers which allow people to buy what they need.   In a report my agency World Vision has released ahead of the UN's international Climate Change conference we found millions of the world's most vulnerable people are now failing to receive this promised food assistance.   Parents and guardians told us of trekking to distribution points only to find no food, or of children too hungry to play or study because school meals programmes had run dry.   The findings of When there is no Food Assistance report are deeply worrying because it reveals a food assistance system collapsing under the weight of need at a time when El Nino is going to leave millions more people hungry.   Scientists are warning that climate change is interacting with El Nino as well as creating new and more severe weather patterns. The full humanitarian implications of this scenario are now looming.   In Ethiopia, 15 million people will shortly be in need of food assistance. Across Southern and Eastern Africa a mix of extensive drought and localised flooding is going to decimate crops and livestock, worsening pre-existing high levels of stunting and wasting in children, and pushing millions into hunger.   UN and aid agencies are also reporting drought in Central America and the Pacific Islands.   Evidence of the failure of the international community to meet its promises of food assistance for those most in need is symptomatic of a humanitarian system at breaking point. The gap between need and funding is at its greatest in a decade.   With El Nino putting the lives, food security, and livelihoods of millions at risk, the challenge is how to respond. Without new funds hard-pressed aid agency staff will increasingly be forced to ask themselves, Who eats and who goes hungry?   Do we concentrate on helping only those at the very edge of extreme hunger, leaving those who are just a little less vulnerable with nothing?   The stark truth is that more and new money must be found to help those in crisis. Even if we take the tough decision to sharpen our targeting and focus on the toughest cases -- which really means deciding to feed a few well rather than feed many poorly - we are just kicking the problem down the road. Those less vulnerable today will likely become the most vulnerable before long.   A hunger-free world depends on building the resilience of communities to El Nino and other climate related events to overcome the root causes of hunger and poor nutrition.   Food assistance interventions must be designed to empower poor people to build productive assets such as water harvesting tanks, dams and irrigation projects or to plant trees that help them become self-sufficient in the long term. In this way, food assistance funding can leave a lasting impact.   The lessons of the 2011-12 Horn of Africa famine in which some 250,000 people died, half of whom were children under 5 years of age, are a grim reminder of what happens when early action doesn't follow early warning. The costs are just too large both in financial terms but most importantly in lives lost.   There are solutions available to end this tragedy: break down the funding silos that exist; strengthen small-holder farming and climate smart agriculture; help governments in vulnerable countries build social safety nets and become disaster ready; and commit new funding for reliable food assistance to meet immediate needs and help poor families recover their livelihoods.   No parent should ever have to face the kinds of questions that so many are forced to ask today, and that so many more will have to ask tomorrow if nothing changes.   http://www.wvi.org/newsroom http://actalliance.org/act-news/ http://www.caritas.org/stories/press-releases/ Visit the related web page
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