Development Policy Archives

The Syrian crisis has caused the exile of millions of citizens. But only 60,000 of them took refuge in the European Union.

The aid index released annually by the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) has become a reference for trends of official development finance, and ways to make it work to its fullest.

According to the World Health Organization, some 6.6 million children, under the age of 5, died in 2012, half of them from conditions that were preventable, or treated with access to simple, affordable interventions.

In 2000, the world set six education targets to be met by the end of next year. But despite advances over the past decade, "not a single goal will be achieved globally by 2015," according to a Unesco Global Monitoring Report.

The Netherlands, France and Switzerland are the three countries enjoying the planet’s cheapest, healthiest and most plentiful diets according to a new Oxfam ‘Good Enough to Eat’ index, while three African countries have the worst.

After the Lampedusa tragedy, several EU leaders called for development aid to be targeted toward countries, mostly in Africa, which are a major source of illegal immigration.

Only a few aid organisations published large amounts of useful information about their activities, according to the 2013 Aid Transparency Index.

Global warming will affect the whole of the world's water supplies over the coming century, but it will not affect them equally. Hundreds of millions of people will experience new or aggravated forms of water scarcity by 2100.

To prepare the process of defining post-2015 Millennium Development Goals, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed a high level panel to produce a report on how the post-MDGs could look like. The philosophy behind the 12 goals formulated is that they should apply to all countries, not just developing ones.

The European Union is the largest of contributor of development assistance to Egypt, where a military-backed interim government ousted the country’s first democratically elected leader, Mohammed Morsi, on 3 July. After days of bloody unrest, there was no sign that the country's benefactors were prepared to reduce aid.

Leaders of the Group of Eight (G8) countries are meeting in Lough Erne, Northern Ireland, on 17-18 June, under the group’s UK presidency.