Tag Archives: Oxfam

The richest 1% now own more wealth than the rest of the world combined while the wealth owned by the bottom half of humanity has fallen by a trillion dollars in the past five years.

The world’s 85 richest billionaires now hold as much wealth as the 3.5 billion people in humanity’s poorer half. The combined wealth of these 85 billionaires is increasing at the rate of a half million dollars a minute. But one respected anti-poverty charity’s new global campaign may help minimize economic inequality.

Poor roads and railways, high transaction costs, lack of sufficient market information, incoherent trade policies by governments and bureaucratic hurdles are among limitations to free trade in West Africa. Import and export procedures are more costly and more time consuming in West Africa than any region of the world, experts say.   For instance, according to a 2010 study by the UN …

By 2015, three billion people will be living in urban slums according to UN Habitat. As the number of vulnerable people living in urban slums rises, aid agencies are struggling to identify the tipping point at which chronic urban vulnerability turns into a humanitarian crisis. IRIN spoke to aid staff to find out what they are doing about it. Accurately tracking vulnerability …