Townspeople came out to celebrate when last year water came to another 10 000 people in El Alto, the sprawling city of one million on the high plain above La Paz, Bolivia.
When the crude, animal-polluted ponds in the central Ethiopian village of Deyata Dodota used to run dry — as they always did for six months of the year — the women would set out at 4am on a long, back-breaking journey. They’d trek 20km to the nearest water source.
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/ 4 November 2002
Mountain people around the world are in danger of losing their cultures and being caught by conflict and environmental degradation, according to a United Nations report. Environmental and social pressures on the remotest regions are escalating.
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/ 9 September 2002
Mark Malloch-Brown, head of the UN development programme, gave his first speech to the main UN conference at the Summit. It was monumentally boring, he freely admitted, and the former man from Economist magazine expected few to have paid much attention.
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/ 6 September 2002
The East Timorese Foreign Minister, Jose Luis Guterres, became the last of 109 heads of state and 80 senior politicians to stand before the world on Wednesday and mourn for five minutes that humanity was in bad shape and that Something Had to Be Done.
United States Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and rock singer Bono this week arrived in Addis Ababa on the last leg of their 11-day tour of four sub-Saharan African countries. They had already seen some of the best and worst of the continent.
THE village of Gumbi is semi-deserted, its people in rags and its larders bare. In the past few months there have been 17 deaths from hunger here. This should be harvest time, with the maize full in the fields, but the crops have either failed or been eaten unripe.