Sustainable finance key to health equity
The world faces an alarming shortfall of funding needed to transform global health. If the world is to end preventable child, adolescent and maternal deaths, we need new forms of development finance to close a $33.3 billion annual funding gap.
A new financing platform announced this week at the Conference on Financing for Development in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia aims to do just that. The Global Financing Facility (GFF) is a country-driven financing partnership to accelerate efforts to end preventable maternal, newborn, child and adolescent deaths by 2030.
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BD RMG industry can be a role model for Africa
Historically, the path to wealth for nations has run through manufacturing. Manufacturing gives you a way to quickly move a lot of people from low-productivity farming to higher-productivity jobs without requiring that they pick up lots of new skills first. And the garment industry fits the bill admirably; it does not not require lots of expensive infrastructure or a skilled population that can supply and maintain fancy machines, and it does use lots of low-skilled labor. Once you get people through the factory gates, their higher productivity and earnings will support improvements in infrastructure, education and services, that can fuel further growth. Eventually, one hopes that your country will get too rich to support much garment manufacturing, because workers will be able to comman...
