UK-led action to address spiralling national debt in some of the world's poorest countries could more than offset the impact of UK aid cuts, producing net funding gains across water, sanitation, education and health, new research has found.
A quarter of countries in the developing world are poorer than they were in 2019 before the Covid pandemic, the World Bank has found. The Washington-based organisation said a large group of low-income countries, many in sub-Saharan Africa, had suffered a negative shock in the six years to the end of last year. The bank said global growth had downshifted since the pandemic, and the pace was now insufficient to reduce extreme poverty and create jobs where they're needed most.
We want this to be a Cop of truth, as the Cop presidency has said it should be, said Lidy Nacpil, the Filipino social justice activist who is coordinator of the Asian Peoples' Movement on Debt and Development, late on Friday. And the narrative that is the developing countries that are not ambitious is not the truth. It is part of many duplicitous narratives that are coming out of this Cop and have come out of previous Cops.
Last week, a coalition of groups, UN bodies and the Brazilian government unveiled the AI Climate Institute, a new global initiative aimed at fostering AI as a tool of empowerment in developing countries to help them tackle environmental problems. Proponents say the program, in time, will help educate countries on how to use AI in an array of ways to bring down emissions, such as better optimizing public transit, organizing agricultural systems and recalibrating the energy grid so that renewables are deployed at the right times.
