ADBI E-Newsline

"In Celebiler and other agriculture-based villages like it throughout Azerbaijan, women maintain the household and raise children. But they are also expected to perform as much physical labor -- and sometimes more -- than that of their husbands. Many of the village men have left seeking work in Russia. Women's chores even include the backbreaking task of toting water from a distant spring back to their homes.

Azerbaijan is one of the fastest-growing economies in the former Soviet Union, fueled by the country's massive oil and gas resources. The country reportedly holds more than $20 billion in currency reserves. President Ilham Aliyev has pledged to use that wealth to diversify the economy and improve infrastructure in places like Celebiler and the surrounding Barda district, which -- remarkably for an energy-rich country -- has no water or gas lines, and still burn wood for fuel."

"A major international study will be conducted in eight countries, including India, to examine whether shame is a key part of the experience of being poor. The study will look at whether being poor necessarily results in low self esteem or feelings of shame and whether welfare policies are counterproductive when claimants are stigmatized.

The researchers will carry out a statistical analysis of existing data on poverty in the World Values Survey. They will also explore the language and practices used by the agencies responsible for implementing social assistance and anti poverty programmes to see whether they are more or less likely to make people ashamed of asking for help."

"The water came in the morning, quietly sweeping across the rice paddies and into the village. Within hours, it was as high as a man's shoulder and Abdul Nabi had lost his harvest, his mud home and all 10 of his buffalo. After years of low rainfall that had left many farmers struggling at the edge of financial survival, they face the worst floods in generations. Most of the people living in the flood zone are villagers who have little they can afford lose.

Seen from the air, a huge swath of Pakistan has become an archipelago of misery, a vast lake of brown water dotted with islands of high land. Some of the islands are small stretches of road that now come from nowhere and go nowhere. Some are marked by the husks of ruined mud homes, or small concrete buildings with collapsed walls."

"Cambodia's population of young people, proportionately one of the largest in Southeast Asia, presents significant opportunities, but it also presents tremendous challenges. Despite recent rapid economic growth, there are simply not enough jobs for youths. Unemployment among youths is higher than for any other age group. At the current pace of job creation, Cambodia will not have the capacity to place the increasing numbers of young people who are entering the workforce each year. Currently estimated at 250,000-300,000 new entrants to the labour market each year, this number is expected to rise to 400,000 in the coming years.

The significant numbers of young people who find themselves unemployed or underemployed are all vulnerable to trafficking, entry into illegal sectors and use. Rural poor who migrate to cities for work are more likely than others to be homeless and unemployed, and are more likely to turn to criminal behaviour or to migrate in search of employment as unskilled laborers. Additionally, poverty and economic shocks force many young people to leave school without acquiring the basic skills they need for work and for life. Only half of young people complete primary school, and only a quarter proceed to lower secondary school."

"Rural-urban migration is allowing Dhaka to grow faster than any other mega-cities in the world. Although official figures put the current population of Dhaka at 12.5 million, demographers say it will be more than 15 million and the city adds another 400,000 each year. One-third of Dhaka's population already huddle in slums and new migrants also end up in squatter habitats.

It is estimated that at least 131 slums in Dhaka were bulldozed by the authorities between 1975 and 2004. Korail -- arguably the country's biggest slum -- fans out over 100 acres of public land and it is slated for the largest slum-clearing ever since the demolition of Agargaon slum in 2004, where 45,000 residents lost their dwellings. Bangladesh is a rapidly urbanizing society and the current rate of growth hovers at 5.0 to 6.0 percent a year but campaigners say the country is yet to craft a policy to better manage urban centers."

"There are 1.4 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Pakistan who live with host families, according to statistics. Life is hard for most of the disabled at the IDP camps in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, which house some 105,000 people. For those who are old or have problems with their mobility, it's difficult to get to the sanitation areas or to move beyond their tent blocks. Some attempts have been made to change this.

In 2009, the charity Sightsavers carried out an assessment at Jalozai Camp for IDPs at Nowshera near Peshawar and identified 188 persons with disabilities. The group was able to initiate a project to improve the social inclusion of the disabled by setting up sanitation facilities that offered them better access. Lack of awareness of what constitutes a disability and what can be done about it is a problem among IDPs in northern Pakistan who typically rarely see doctors."

"This 12-year-old girl isn't doing her schoolwork. In fact, she says she has missed months of classes. That's because nearly every hour of her day is spent working in the tobacco fields of Kazakhstan alongside her parents, who are migrant laborers from neighboring Kyrgyz Republic. The report documents wage violations, forced labor, debt bondage, excessively long working hours, the absence of written contracts, exposure of workers to pesticides, lack of clean drinking water, and illegal labor by children as young as 10 on the tobacco farms.

The payment structure is such that migrant workers get paid once at the end of the season by the volume of tobacco that they produce. That incentivizes child labor because these migrant workers travel with families and they need to get as many hands on the tobacco as possible."

"The community of Ilam in the east of Nepal is struggling with high rates of suicide which have left the act seemingly a part of normal life for many. Statistics reveal that over the past eight years, nearly 500 people in Ilam have committed suicide. This year so far, 60 people have taken their own lives and 'has almost become normal' in the town.

Efforts from local police to lower the rates, including large billboards dotted around and the introduction of the Awareness against Suicide program, seem to have had little impact. Triggers to the high rate of suicide could include unemployment and poverty. Nepal is one of the poorest nations in Asia with over 30 percent of its population living below the poverty line."

"Young rag-pickers sifting through rubbish are a common image of India's chronic poverty, but destitute children face new hazards picking apart old computers as part of the growing 'e-waste' industry. Asif, aged seven, spends his days dismantling electronic equipment in a tiny, dimly-lit unit in east Delhi along with six other boys. His older brother Salim, 12, is also hard at work instead of being at school. He is extracting tiny transistors and capacitors from wire boards. The brothers say they are kept frantically busy as increasing numbers of computers, printers and other electronic goods are discarded by offices and homes.

Few statistics are known about the informal 'e-waste' industry, but a United Nations report launched in February described how mountains of hazardous waste from electronic products are growing exponentially in developing countries. It said India would have 500 percent more e-waste from old computers in 2020 than in 2007, and 18 times more old mobile phones. Toxic metals and poisons enter workers' bloodstreams during the laborious manual extraction process and when equipment is crudely treated to collect tiny quantities of precious metals."

"In a dimly lit, windowless room in one of Manila's sprawling slums, Susan Cumal, 46, spends her day hunched over a sewing machine, working to earn enough money to send her children to school. In a good week, the mother of three can earn around 1,500 pesos ($32).

Like many Filipinos, Mrs Cumal moved to Manila in the hope of finding a better life. Instead she found herself in a slum housing more than 3,000 families. Mrs Cumal considers herself fortunate. She has managed to build up a reasonable sewing business and has to put one son, who is now a teacher, through college. 'Education is the only way out of this,' she says. Last week 23 million Filipino children went back to school but by the end of the year over two million will have dropped out."

"At least 245 million women around the world have been widowed and more than 115 million of them live in devastating poverty, according to a new study. Some of the most dire consequences are faced by 2 million Afghan widows who lost their husbands as a result of the ongoing conflicts.

The countries with the highest number of widows in 2010 were China with 43 million and India with 42.4 million. According to the report, over 500 million dependent and adult children of widows worldwide are caught in a vicious underworld in which disease, forced servitude, homelessness and violence are rampant and youngsters are denied schooling, enslaved or preyed upon by human traffickers."

"Cash-strapped coconut farmers are forced to sell their babies in Karnataka, the heart of India's powerful IT sector, to make ends meet, according to a media report. With the help of unscrupulous middlemen, babies are being sold at between 6,000 and 8,000 Indian rupees. At least, six new babies of farmers who are unable to cope with grinding poverty, were sold to wealthy families in the past one week.

Coconut production has dipped badly last season, pushing farmers into unemployment and deep financial crisis. Many families, due to poverty or with too many children, are compelled to hand over their children for a price. Local police said that over the last six months, 20 cases were reported in the state, many involving new-born baby boys, while others were below four years of age."

"A thick, acrid smoke stings his eyes, but Bambang presses on down the side of Kawah Ijen volcano, bending under the weight of the sulfur that he balances on his shoulders. To avoid the toxic gas, he bites on a wet cloth. Bambang is one of 350 sulfur miners who eke out a dangerous and exhausting living on the active volcano, in the extreme east of Java island.

Most of the miners have hacking coughs and teeth stained yellow from inhaling sulfur dioxide, but health is clearly not their priority. The porters get about Rp 600 a kilogram and make up to Rp 80,000 ($8) a day for two trips into the fuming crater, a relatively good income compared to many of their neighbors. Bambang said it was a good reward for the workers, three times higher than growing rice."

"Due to limited job opportunities and low incomes, tens of thousands of Myanmarese seek work abroad, hoping to earn a better living, but many fall prey to human traffickers. Although there is no reliable data on human trafficking in Myanmar, experts believe several thousands are trafficked annually. Women, children, and men are trafficked to Thailand, China, Malaysia, Korea, and Macau for sexual exploitation, domestic servitude, and forced labor.

The government and international agencies have been working on a national plan of action to combat human trafficking, raising awareness through the media and community meetings. In addition, the government has 23 anti-trafficking task forces to rescue survivors and stringent laws to punish the traffickers. Experts say ongoing efforts are needed to protect victims once they have returned home and to scale up prevention efforts in vulnerable communities."

"Is industrialization the answer to reducing poverty in the developing world? Or should the priority be conservation of tribal communities and the environment? If India is to achieve its goal of 8.5% GDP growth in the current financial year, and continue to lift more people out of abject penury, it needs large industrial projects. The question of how to reconcile the need for industrial development with the consequences of environmental damage and community disruption goes to the heart of the challenge facing the world in the 21st century.

It is argued that preservation of traditional communities and simple agriculture offers little hope for the millions scrabbling along the verge of starvation. Government structures need to be fundamentally strengthened so that the profits from mining and industrialization actually benefit not just the country as a whole, but also future generations."

"Elisa Kefi and her 63-year-old sister brave the heat and sit on the side of the street selling nuts and small vegetables in Timor-Leste's Oecusse enclave. If they sell everything, they can make up to $5, but usually they only pocket $2 a day. Life is hard in Oecusse, sandwiched between Indonesian West Timor and the Savu Sea.

With no Indonesian consulate and only two, 12-hour ferry rides to the capital Dili each week, the 80,000 or so inhabitants, most of whom live in the mountains, struggle on. Kefi and her sister are also part of a 10-strong group of traditional tais weavers, who can make up to $300 a month by selling their products in Dili. Boosting agriculture is a challenge because of Oecusse's long dry season, poor soil and mountainous territory, which is compounded by a lack of permanent water sources, according to a 2008 Oxfam report."

"Asma is one of about 10 workers in a dingy factory in Dhaka who are under 14. The 10-year-old operates a powerful cutting device in the poorly-lit premises for up to 12 hours a day. There is no first aid in the factory and no lunch break. She often works six days a week and is paid about $2 a day. 'I used to study in school then all of a sudden my mom took me out and put me into work. I want to go to school but my mom said I would go again after the Muslim religious festival. So far that has not happened.'

Asma is one of thousands of Bangladeshi children who work in the informal sector, which includes factories, workshops, home-based businesses and domestic employment. She and others like her are mostly outside the reach of labor controls, being isolated in the factories and households where they work. To make matters even more complicated, many children in this sector do not have birth certificates, making it harder to validate their ages."

"Nineteen-month-old Nanchu died barely 15 months after his elder brother Chhangu's death in December 2008. Records say both the deaths were due to malnutrition. The family belongs to the Mawasi tribe, which subsists on agriculture and hunting. Kamlesh and Savitri, both landless laborers, have a ration card for those below the poverty line, fetching them only 20 kg of wheat and/or rice a month at Rs 5 per kg. When that is exhausted, they eat mahua dhubari (boiled mahua fruit) or some leafy forest vegetables with chapattis.

Though eligible, they do not have an antyodaya card, for the poorest, most vulnerable people, who can get 35 kg of grain, rice at Rs 3 per kg or wheat at Rs 2 per kg. At 60 percent, Madhya Pradesh has India's highest proportion of malnourished children. India has the highest number of malnourished children in the world."

"Today malaria kills almost 1 million people each year. Sixty-two percent of malaria deaths outside of Africa are believed to occur in the Asia Pacific region, with the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu topping this list.

Malaria infects up to 500 million people worldwide each year. While adults are less likely to die from malaria, it is a debilitating illness that leaves victims unable to work or complete everyday tasks. In countries where millions of people subsist on less than $2 a day, not working can quickly lead to malnutrition."

"In Jakarta's northern Muara Angke coastal area, a lack of access to piped water has forced people to bathe and wash clothes using murky grey water from fish ponds. Residents, many of whom live on less than $2 a day, had to fork out the equivalent of up to $1 daily to buy clean water for drinking and cooking from vendors transporting water in jugs. Jakarta is dotted with slums like the one in Muara Angke.

Many people live without running water in shanty towns built in the shadow of gleaming skyscrapers, and gutters are clogged with rubbish, causing foul smells. Less than 50 percent of Jakarta's residents have access to piped water, according to a NGO, which runs water, sanitation and health programs in the city. More than 75 percent of the city's residents rely on shallow groundwater, but an official study found that 90 percent of shallow wells are contaminated with coliform bacteria or heavy metals."

"Balochistan is Pakistan's least developed and educated province with a literacy rate of 36 percent against the national literacy rate of 53 percent. Some districts in Balochistan have among the lowest enrollment and literacy rates in the world, with one district recording only two percent enrollment at the primary school level. The governments resolve to develop Balochistan as hub of business activity can only be fulfilled provided the potential of locals Balochs are fully developed in respect to skill management.

Skill Development, Productivity, and Growth, are inter-related. When we talk of strengthening the education and skills of our people, we mean to strengthen our economic advantage. Pakistan has over 100 million of population that is below the age of 25. All they need is skills and opportunities to harness their full potential."

"Under-nutrition haunts the lives of millions of Indian children. Several facts reveal the magnitude and severity of the nutritional crisis facing the country. Close to two million children below the age of five die in India every year. Of these, over a million deaths can be attributed to under-nutrition and hunger. Available reports place the number of annual child deaths because of under-nutrition in Maharashtra alone at 45,000. Sadly, only a handful of starvation and nutrition-related deaths get reported by the media.

Clearly, India has the resources to deal with the problem. It also has the knowledge and the expertise. Most of the solutions are well known. What then explains the slow progress? Clearly, it is insufficient state action. Not daring to take bold decisions is resulting in the violation of the rights of millions of children. Nothing could be more detrimental to the future growth and development of the country."

"In 2006, the transport minister of West Bengal state, of which Kolkata is the capital, banned hand-pulled rickshaws in a bid to reduce congestion and project a more modern city image. Even then, Kolkata was the last Indian city to use them regularly. Other Indian cities have cycle rickshaws that the drivers pedal. Thousands of the vehicles were seized after the ban, and slated for destruction, until a public outcry forced the West Bengal government to back down, leading to a compromise: The rickshaws could ply the back streets but not main thoroughfares.

Although few pullers enjoy the work, they are protective of their livelihood. Most are older than 40, come from the impoverished neighboring state of Bihar and know little else. 'If we didn't have this job, we'd have no way to make money,' said Mohammed Samsul, 50, who supports five children and a wife back in the village with his $2.50-a-day earnings. Cleaning toilets is also inhumane work, but the government doesn't ban that, said rickshaw puller Nur Mohammed, 35. 'The government just doesn't like looking at poor people,' he said."

"Two young men were recently handing out leaflets at the gate of the Army Hospital 108 in Hanoi, each offering one of his kidneys for 50 million dong ($4500). This news has attracted attention to the underground trade in internal organs, particularly kidneys. The two men who advertised to sell their kidneys first they tried to sell their kidneys to hospitals to raise money to pay their parents' debts. The hospitals turned them away because what they proposed is illegal. Resolved to find a buyer, the men turned to handing out leaflets.

However, there are many online offers to buy and sell kidneys on the Internet and there is also a 'real market' for kidneys. Around 10 percent of Vietnamese people suffer from some impairment of kidney function. Only 10 percent of these receive treatment because the hospital fees are very high."

"Widespread poverty is a largely untold story of Hong Kong. In a city of 7 million people with an average per capita income of nearly $30,000, 1.23 million live below the poverty line, earning less than half of a desperately low median wage. The city's Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, is the worst in Asia (worse even than India and mainland China) before the limited effects of the city's half-hearted income redistribution are counted.

Were it not for subsidized public housing, where 40 percent of Hong Kong residents live, conditions would be much worse. As it is, thousands of pensioners pick through garbage to make ends meet. Hong Kong has been as badly hit as anywhere by low-cost competition from mainland China. Land prices are kept artificially high. Hong Kong also has a tradition of small government and a credo of positive non-interventionism."

"For Riya, life in the refugee camps in Bangladesh isn't much better than Myanmar. Her shelter rests on the side of a hill pieced together with scraps of tarp and chunks of mud, and she only has access to water for one hour a day. Riya scrounges for food from relatives, collects and sells firewood from the local forest, and begs for money outside the camp just to avoid hunger. Under these conditions, she cannot seek medical care for her son because of the constant need to find food to avoid starvation.

As a stateless group, the Rohingya are stuck in between a country that denies them citizenship and a country that denies them refugee status. Riya's experience is just one example that illustrates the need for durable solutions for refugees in the midst of protracted conflict. Unfortunately, Riya's story is not uncommon. There are 39,000 other Rohingya refugees living in refugee camps and an estimated 200,000 undocumented Rohingya living in Bangladesh."

"Just five months ago, villages in the city of Muntinlupa had too much water. Too much in fact it spilled onto the streets in the form of five feet deep floodwater. But then that abundance wasn't with potable water, but from tropical storm 'Ondoy.' Residents in these same villages are now experiencing a different, probably more dreadful water problem nowadays, with the effects of El Nino drying up water reserves in Metro Manila.

Muntinlupa will be one of the five cities in Metro Manila to encounter an interrupted water supply come May as the region copes with the nose-diving water level of Angat Dam. Homemaker Virginia Allegre relies only on a deep well for her water needs. And like the rest of her neighbors, collecting water is becoming a much tougher chore, as she has to get up as early as 3 a.m. to fetch water. Piles of unwashed dishes and mountains of dirty laundry have also become familiar fixtures within homes across Muntinlupa as a result of the water distribution problem."

"The government of India announced plans earlier this week to do comprehensive mapping of slums in the entire country. In many of India's big cities such as Mumbai, well over half the population reside in slums. Using Geographical Information System mapping, the project aims to produce reliable numbers about slum populations -- to further the government's ambitious goal of making India slum-free within five years.

Officials say that the detailed geographic information will also make it easier for municipalities to provide basic services to slum dwellers, including water and electricity. Yet some advocacy groups argue that the effort would merely facilitate redevelopment plans and the relocation of slum dwellers."

"Small towns in Laos are experiencing an influx of migrants in search of better living conditions, increasing the strain on infrastructure and services such as water and sanitation. There are an estimated 139 small towns in Laos, and many of those along economic corridors -- bordering Cambodia, China, Thailand and Vietnam -- are seeing influxes from rural areas.

In Laos, insufficient data on small-town population growth means development programs are planned according to the national population growth rate of 2.8 percent, rather than the local rate, which is unknown. Small-town populations face the problem of the high cost of water, especially where local authorities lack the ability to supply it. In the mountainous small town of Houn in Oudom Xai Province in northern Laos, one cubic meter of water is sold by private vendors for the equivalent of $3 -- 26 times more than the usual cost."

"Like 99 percent of the other 3,000 people from a remote village in Bali's North East, Alit was illiterate. Alit never imagined life outside his rugged mountain home; a home where disease was the common lot, grinding poverty the only way of life known and iodine deficiency induced retardation endemic. That's if you lived; infant mortality stood at between 30 to 50 percent of children under one year, mothers had never heard of maternal health clinics, nurses never visited, and the national census ignored the existence of these people.

Alit was one of the first children from the Ban's sub-village of Bunga to start school. Today, at 19 years of age, Alit is not only literate, he is also a teacher in the remote Darmaji school, still inaccessible after rains. Literacy has changed Alit's family income potential. Understanding prices in the market means his family receives true value for their produce. A new road has also acted as a financial boon to Ban's farmers who husband cattle as a cash crop."

"Bits of gray land sprout shyly from the Brahmaputa-Jamuna River. The cracked mud seems to understand that when the monsoon season hits, it will become completely submerged. Home to at least 3.5 million people, these few hundred chars, or tiny islands, are located seven hours north of the country's capital Dhaka. They constitute one of the most remote and vulnerable regions in Bangladesh, considered the nation most susceptible to climate change's impacts. People in these communities lack electricity, media and access to any commercial market.

Char-dwellers survive the best they can. They migrate from char to char up to 40 to 50 times in a given life (the average life expectancy here is late-40s), taking their collapsible, tin houses along with them. But most people just wait for relief. Despite the challenges of living on chars, no governmental program exists to relocate the few million char-dwellers."

"One of the Millennium Development Goals of the UN is to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger by 2015, which would mean halving the proportion of children, who are underweight for their age. According to a UNICEF report, half of the world's undernourished children live in South Asia. Every year, 2 million children die in India, accounting for one in five child deaths in the world. Prevention of many such deaths is possible if efforts towards better nourishment of our children are taken seriously.

Under-nutrition level is serious in rural areas, especially in lower wealth areas and among families with no educated adult. The percentage of undernourished children is far higher than the income poverty rate. Only 33 percent of age-eligible children have received any service from the Integrated Child Development Services program. This shows that only about 650,000 children received some minimal attention of the government, leaving the rest of them to their fate."

"War refugees have found little left of their old lives as they trickle back to their villages in the former Tamil Tiger stronghold eight months after Sri Lankan forces crushed the rebel group. The government says the returnees are getting food rations and money to help them out, but conceded it was not enough. Kilinochchi today looks like a garrison town with dozens of military camps, large and small, every few hundred meters and soldiers patrolling the streets.

No building is without damage and the streets are nearly empty, because only 8,000 of the district's estimated 120,000 pre-war residents have returned. The returnees receive a resettlement package of $250 from the United Nations refugee agency, six months of food rations, 12 tin roof sheets and a tent. Returnees say the resettlement package is not enough for them to make the needed investments in cleaning up and replanting their farms or restarting businesses."

"An Internet search reveals an increasing number of websites containing 'Kidney for sale' advertisements in the Indonesian language. Officials said the scale of illegal organ trafficking in Indonesia was not known, but the Internet phenomenon had raised concerns about the scourge. Indonesia's new Health Law, passed in October 2009, bans organ trading, with offenders facing up to 10 years in prison or a fine of one billion rupiah if found guilty.

According to the World Health Organization, the shortage of organs is a global problem, with potential recipients traveling outside their home country to obtain organs through sometimes illegal commercial transactions. Only 10 percent of the estimated need was met in 2005. As a result, the illegal kidney trade has increased tremendously over the past few years, although the extent of illegal kidney transplants is unknown."

"Shonal Chand, 16, has ditched school to work full time to assist his financially struggling family. He sells pineapples, watermelons and other local seasonal fruit by the roadside six days a week. Chand's family is only too happy he is able to bring home as much as $78 a week. The dropout rate from Fiji schools before the onset of the global financial crisis was as high as 66 percent, mainly because of poverty. There are concerns that the dropout rate may have worsened since the financial crisis struck.

Fiji's compulsory education age is 15, which is also the minimum legal age for work. The law also prohibits Fiji children below 18 from working during school hours. Just as in many developing countries with high levels of poverty and low levels of social welfare, child labor laws are either poorly enforced or ignored as strict implementation could lead to the affected family going without food. An estimated 43 percent of Fiji's population of 850,000 lives in poverty of varying degrees."