U.N. Releases 1.5M For Sahrawi Refugees

The U.N. has released 1.5 million dollars in emergency aid to help the 90,000 Sahrawi refugees who have fled to Algeria, the U.N. development office in Algiers said Sunday, the AFP/Yahoo! Canada News (7/26). Malnutrition among the refugees stands at about 18 percent, according to a study done earlier this year, rfi.fr reports (7/27).

$133M Grant From Global Fund To Help Bolster Ethiopia’s Anti-Malaria Efforts

“The Global Fund and the Federal Ministry of Health (FMoH) on Thursday signed Ethiopia’s Round 8 Grant [from the Global Fund] worth over USD 133 million for scaling-up and sustaining anti-malaria intervention in the country over two years,” the Daily Monitor/allAfrica.com reports. The grant will bolster the country’s malaria control efforts and lay the foundation for the implementation of a national malaria strategy for 2010-2015, according to Tewodros Adhanom, Minister of Health (Tesfaye, 7/26).

Child Mortality Rate In Sri Lanka Drops Significantly

Sri Lanka’s child mortality rate has gone down from 40 percent in 1940 to 5 percent in 2005, according to findings presented by UNICEF at a South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) Senior Officials’ Conference on Children, the Sunday Observer reports. Malnutrition is one of the “key challenges” in the SAARC region, writes the newspaper (7/26).

Stronger Media Partnerships Encouraged To Achieve MDGs In Nigeria

Improving coordination with the media could help Nigeria and UNICEF reach child and maternal health-related Millennium Development Goal targets, said John Egbuta, executive director of the Humanitarian Development Centre for Africa’s Advancement Lagos at a UNICEF meeting. Participants discussed current collaborations that were working as well as ways the media could be utilized to inform “the public on the goals of MDGs as it relates to improvement on material health, reduction in child mortality and combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases among women and children,” ThisDay reports (Uneze, 7/25).