UN working group devising the sustainable development goals (SDGs) has pared down its list of proposed target areas from 19 to 16, raising hopes of a more concise framework for challenges such as eradicating poverty, ensuring equality and tackling climate change.

The United Nations estimates that people in sub-Saharan Africa spend roughly 40 billion hours per year collecting water, and what they do find is often unsafe to drink. In some parts of Africa, finding potable water can be a six-hour endeavor. Roughly 3.4 million people die every year from water-related disease. The water shortage is a major life-threatening problem that affects as many as 1 billion people on the continent alone, but it's not as though you can just snap your fingers and make water magically appear out of thin air. Or can you? 

The techniques used in commercial social media campaigns don't always translate to the field of international development. Global development is a niche sector, so its communicators don't need tens of thousands of followers to be successful. Even for commercial outfits, a followership of 30,000 is not in itself an indication that the campaign is being effective: what if only 15% of those followers are from the target audience? 

President Barack Obama is set to take his boldest step to halt the rise of the oceans and stop the warming of the planet. It won’t be enough unless the rest of the world follows. Trimming carbon emissions from U.S. power plants by 25 percent in coming decades, as Obama is said to be proposing, would be more than overwhelmed by increases in China andIndia where coal-fired power plants are springing up and new cars are rolling out of showrooms.

African governments and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have agreed on the urgent need to harness the continent's rapid economic growth, as unrest and other political challenges temper exuberance about the future. At a meeting in Maputo, the IMF, finance ministers and central bank governors declared that a deeper structural transformation is needed so that ordinary citizens can benefit from the boom.

Like an increasing number of tourists visiting Nepal's mountain peaks, colourful markets and lush national parks, Marina Argeisa wanted to experience the latest must-do activity on the tourist trail: a volunteering stint at an orphanage. What the 26-year-old Spaniard did not know was that her good intentions were unwittingly feeding an industry that dupes poor parents into sending their children to bogus orphanages in order to extract money from well-meaning foreigners.

Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) has decided to pay the wages of imams in flood-hit Bosnia-Herzegovina, in addition to restoring mosques and other religious service buildings that have been damaged in the flood.“At the moment, the number of damaged mosques is over 10. Among them, there is the Recep Yazıcıoğlu Mosque in Maglaj, which was built by Turkey. These mosques need to be rebuilt,” Deputy Director-General of the Diyanet Foundation (TDV) Mustafa Tutkun told state-run Anadolu Agency on May 25.

At a time when many in the West question Russia’s geopolitical actions, especially regarding Ukraine, one might ask why it is a priority for American scientists to work on the ground with Russians to research and save arctic animals. The answer is simple: Conservation is the provenance of all. Irrespective of geography, animals have no voice.Climate change in the Arctic is more rapid than in other areas.