Nurses give aid to a pregnant woman before delivering a baby at the maternity ward of the central hospital in Freetown on September 22, 2009. Photograph: Issouf Sanogo/AFP/Getty Images
MDG5: Improve maternal health
To reduce by three-quarters the maternal mortality ratio and achieve universal access to reproductive healthcare. Success is measured by maternal mortality ratio, the proportion of births attended by skilled health workers, contraceptive prevalence rates, unmet needs for family planning, adolescent birth rates and antenatal care coverage. Visit the UN webpage to read more about MDG5 and its progress.
MDG5 reports and data from the web
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More on MDG5
• Read the latest Guardian stories on maternal health, maternal mortality and gender
• Join the conversation about MDG5
Key MDG5 data searches
Search our global development data store, or take a look at searches on fertility, birth, contraception, family planning and maternal mortality
Multimedia related to MDG5
Explore our global development videos, galleries, audio and interactives related to MDG5, which include:
• Interactive: International Day of the Midwife: Voices from Africa
• Gallery: Midwives' challenges in northern Nigeria
• Gallery: Maternal health in Malawi
The Guardian: Women and the dangers of childbirth in Katine. Link to this video
Explore the other millennium development goals.
Independence celebrations in South Sudan earlier this month. Education provision is a priority for the new country. Photograph: Phil Moore/AFP/Getty Images
Being educated during the country's civil war was almost impossible. But Victoria Maja wanted to become a doctor, and in order to do so she had to leave South Sudan and live and study in the north. She was one of the lucky ones.
Despite the fact that Maja had to face discrimination because of her ethnicity, she was one of the few South Sudanese of her generation who graduated from university.
"I studied medicine and was shocked to find that I graduated at the bottom of my class because I was treated as a black African who could not pass examinations. I couldn't practice medicine then because I couldn't be registered," Maja says.
So she and her husband fled to Egypt in 2000 and later to Australia, where she was able to practice medicine after completing a bridging course.
Now Maja wants to return home and help build her newly independent country. And she understands that one of the ways to do this is to ensure that others get an education too. Because those who remained behind have not been as lucky as her. South Sudan has three generations of children who have never seen the inside of a classroom. According to Dr Michael Hussein, the minister for general education, the education sector suffered most during the civil war.
"Teachers were neglected, salaries were not regular, there was no training, and many fled the war-torn areas. As a result, three generations lost the opportunity to go to school," says the minister.
The issue of education in South Sudan is so critical that most leaders are calling on the youth to go back to school.
Lieutenant General Daniel Akot, the deputy speaker of the national assembly, is calling on his colleagues to pass relevant laws that will make it possible for all South Sudanese children to access education. "We have won the war with our enemy. Now the real war of fighting poverty, ignorance and hunger has started. We can't achieve this when our children don't go to school," he says.
Hussein is urging the government to dedicate at least 20% of its national budget to his ministry. He said his ministry wants to build 6,000 primary and 3,000 secondary schools.
"We have some areas that have 120 pupils per teacher, making learning impossible. One textbook is being shared among five pupils. We want to recruit many teachers, train more of them. We welcome those of our citizens who fled the country and (were educated) around the world to come back and bridge the big gap of a lack of personnel," says Hussein.
Hussein says that by the end of 2010, South Sudan had 169 pre-primary schools with 47,266 pupils and 1,249 teachers. There are 3,195 primary schools with 1.3 million pupils and 2,912 teachers. And there are 168 secondary schools with 34,487 students and three functional teacher-training colleges with 2,310 trainees.
But there remain about 2 million young South Sudanese who have not attended school, against an acute shortage of teachers. The government is working with its neighbours, such as Kenya, to provide it with teachers. Kenya has more than 70,000 unemployed trained teachers.
The minister says that since 2005 the government has developed its own system of education: an 8-4-4 system that requires learners to finish eight years at primary school, four at secondary school and four at university.
"We have developed a system that is inclusive and expansive to make sure that every child accesses basic education, which is a fundamental human right. We are also employing female teachers to act as role models to young girls so that many of them can go to school," says the minister.
The ministry is also providing special education and technical training for those older than school-going age.
"We realise that those who missed out on education [should] get a second chance. We are offering alternative education to them. Those who are 18 years and above [attend] school for four years and sit [for] primary examinations. Those who pass join secondary schools and those who don't join technical colleges. So far, we have 5,753 pupils in this programme," Hussein says.
Kathy Kamphoefner, the South Sudanese secretariat co-ordinator for the non-governmental Human Rights Forum, says 90% of the people who live in rural areas are illiterate and has called on the government to prioritise education so that the country can realise meaningful development.
"Most of the communities lack basic needs and it will require a lot of time to change their way of thinking so that they can go to school. The government should also improve the infrastructure to open up the rural areas that cannot be reached during the rainy season so that sponsors can build schools in those areas," Kamphoefner says.
Professor Matthew Udo, the undersecretary in the ministry of co-operative and rural development, is urging the youth to go to school and form unions in rural areas. He wants them to embrace agriculture as a form of employment and food provision.
His sentiments are echoed by Rebecca Garang, the widow of the late vice-president of South Sudan, Dr John Garang. She has started her own school.
"I have lived through many years of war and I know that it is only through education that our society can grow. The government should make sure that all its resources are geared towards fighting ignorance," she says.
Two Somali girls watch water fill their jerry cans at a water distribution point in the Dadaab refugee complex, in Kenya, which is struggling to cope with an influx of refugees from Somalia. Photograph: Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images
The drought in east Africa, the creation of a new African state and the launch of UN Women's flagship report have dominated the Global development site over the past two weeks.
A combination of failed harvests, changes to weather patterns, political instability and rising food prices has resulted in severe food shortages in Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan and parts of Uganda. More than 10 million people are predicted to now be in need of humanitarian assistance.
We speak to the head of UN humanitarian affairs, Baroness Amos, about the crisis. She urges donors to "dig deep" to provide emergency relief. Meanwhile, NGOs say long-term solutions need to be found to enable people in areas prone to drought to cope with severe shocks. Alison Rusinow, from HelpAge, questions why the response from the international community has taken so long, while Mark Tran offers an overview of the crisis and explains at what point severe food shortages become a famine.
On 9 July, the Republic of South Sudan was born. To mark the occasion, we look at the key development indicators of both north and south Sudan. Sara Pantuliano writes about the sense of jubilation at the creation of an independent state and the challenges it faces, and takes part in our monthly podcast examining what the future holds for South Sudan. Ross Mountain cautions against forgetting the humanitarian needs of people in Darfur and South Kordofan as the world's attention shifts to the south, and Richard Dowden charts the roadmap to independence.
UN Women published its flagship 2011 report last week. Included in our coverage, which can be found on our dedicated subject page, are data comparing women's access to justice in every country around the world, an interactive timeline of when women got the right to vote and an interview with Botswana's preeminent lawyer Unity Dow.
Elsewhere on the site
As the US announces it is to withhold military aid to Pakistan, Claire Provost finds the data on how much money America has given to the country over the past 60 years.
Mark Tran reports that rich nations have not kept their pledge to help farmers in developing countries.
We visit Bahn refugee camp in Liberia to look at the work being done to support children who have fled violence in the Ivory Coast.
Coming up on the site
This month's Global development Focus podcast will look at population issues. The podcast will be launched on the site next week, but look out for our talk point later this week inviting you to put your questions to our panellists.
On Wednesday afternoon, development workers from the NGOs Save the Children and Plan International will be live online from Kenya and Ethiopia to answer your questions on the drought and food crisis in east Africa.
Claire Provost will be travelling to Egypt to look at partnerships being formed between the private and public sectors to address youth unemployment.
We will be reporting on the AfricaSan 3 conference on sanitation and hygiene being held in Rwanda next week.
Multimedia
Interactive: A political history of Africa since 1900
On Saturday 9 July 2011 South Sudan celebrated its independence day. How did the current nation states emerge from colonisation?
Video: Martin Bell visits South Sudan
Former BBC reporter and MP Martin Bell visits the provinces of southern Sudan with Unicef as the country prepares to become a fully independent nation on 9 July.
Achievement awards
The Guardian has launched its annual international development achievement awards, which celebrate outstanding contributions to global poverty alleviation. Find out more about the competition and nominate someone whose achievements deserve attention.
What you said: Some of the best comments from our readers
On our talk point on the future of South Sudan, Calestous writes:
South Sudan is being born at a time when the world is transitioning to digital books and broadband has become a cost-effective reality. This is a great opportunity to get the countries onto the path for mobile education from the outset. Not the whole country can do this but the absence of incumbent educational infrastructure such as book publishers can allow South Sudan to partner with regions of the world that are migrating to digital books. The price of access devices in dropping remarkably fast and the emergence of industries such as cloud computing can help South Sudan to deliver quality education to more people at lower costs and at faster adoption rates.
On Jonathan Glennie's blogpost on the need to support civil society groups, degutsdeybust writes:
Generally speaking, the empowered civil society model has varying degrees of importance and effect, in my experience. The issue I've come across several times is that you end up with a very empowered community hammering on the door of the local authority, but they can't do very much, as they don't have any money eg we do some work on implementing health services. Everyone now knows they are supposed to get free services, and when people challenge the local authority, they say that the drugs don't get delivered. This is when you enter that grey area of NGOs providing quasi-governmental services. Again, no easy answer here.
Highlights from the blogosphere
Panos highlights the human cost of drug addication and trafficking in Burma.
Owen Barder writes about a report on the quality of schools in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, published by Uwezo, an east African initiative hosted by a coalition of three NGO networks. The report "makes dismal reading", he says.
And Oxfam's Duncan Green asks how can NGOs work with the private sector?
Hussain, 80, breaks bricks for the construction of a new bridge in a village in Bangladesh. About 2 million people in the country now receive an old-age allowance. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/HelpAge International
In the last few years, social protection has been shooting up the agenda as the new kid on the development block. As we speak, the UN is pushing forward its Social Protection Floor Initiative, the EU and DfID have just completed significant evidence papers, and the World Bank is developing a new global strategy on social protection. (See Madeleine Bunting's recent blog for more on social protection.)
As the debate moves on, conditional cash transfers (CCTs) are often highlighted as the new, innovative, bright idea. Few mentions of social protection in the media, or in development debates, come without a reference to Brazil's Bolsa Familia or Mexico's Oportunidades programmes.
These programmes clearly have a big impact, but it is surprising how little attention is paid to another kind of cash transfer that is even more pervasive than conditional cash transfers. More than 80 countries in the world have put in place social pensions – non-contributory, regular cash transfers to older people – and these reach huge numbers of people. About 2 million people in Bangladesh receive the old-age allowance, and close to 6 million receive the universal pension in Thailand. China is currently rolling out a quasi-social pension that would reach 100 million older people.
The variety of countries that have chosen to put in place social pensions is astonishing. In Brazil and South Africa they are backed by constitutions and form the backbone of redistributive policy. In Bolivia, the universal social pension was thought up in a period of neoliberal government then repackaged and extended as part of President Evo Morales's social programme. In post-conflict contexts such as Nepal, Kosovo and Timor-Leste, they are mixed up in dynamics of reconciliation.
And let's not forget the role of social pensions in richer countries. Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand and most Scandinavian countries all have large-scale social pensions. The UK's Pension Credit is a social pension, while the broader state pension – while is loosely contributory through national insurance – performs a similar role in keeping vast numbers of people out of poverty.
Design varies significantly. Some social pensions are universal to all citizens over a certain age, and others are more narrowly targeted, through means-testing or limiting to a certain region. The benefit levels also vary from lows of around $4 per month in India and Bangladesh to hundreds of dollars in Chile, South Africa and Brazil.
While the benefits are small in many cases, it is clear that even this minimum has made a huge difference to poor households across the developing world. Without social pensions, older people normally have no other option but to work in any way possible to earn a living. When they no longer can, supporting them is an extra strain on already poor households.
Small regular pensions can slash the poverty rates of older people, but they can also make a huge impact on the households in which older people live. Girls in households receiving South Africa's Old Age Grant were found to be significantly taller than those in other households. Bolivian households receiving the social pension invested the money in agriculture, meaning they were able to increase the value of the pension by 50%.
Social pensions can also form a building block to reducing poverty at a national level. Brazil has been able to significantly reduce poverty and inequality in recent years, and cash transfers, including pensions, have played a central role. In fact, the impact of pensions tagged to the minimum wage on inequality was 50% higher than the impact of the Bolsa Familia.
If the impacts can make such a difference, why haven't they gained the same attention as CCTs? One reason seems to be that "pensions" in developing countries are usually put in a different box to "development". This reflects an inability to understand that money entering a household through an older person also reaches the children and other family members they live with. Equally worryingly, it also ignores the fact that bad pension reforms can leave countries with huge financial burdens, which have an impact on development.
Another reason may be because it is usually governments themselves, rather than donors, who decide to implement social pensions. And funding almost always comes out of the general government budget. This is in contrast to CCTs, which are usually designed and financed by loans from development banks, especially the World Bank.
This high level of government ownership tells us two things. First, social pensions appear to be affordable, even for some of the world's poorest countries such as Nepal and Swaziland. Simulations by HelpAge International have shown that most sub-Saharan African countries could put in place a universal pension for around 1% of GDP or less.
Second, it suggests that social pensions are a politically popular option within developing countries, which means they are likely to be sustainable in the long term. This fact in itself may well make them a good starting point for building a broader system of social protection.
In spite of the widespread success of social pensions, there is still significant work to do. Many countries struggle with delivery and targeting processes, while few have the resources to properly monitor the impact of programmes. Meanwhile, many of the countries without social pensions are showing interest in building evidence on how they could be put in place.
This means there is significant space for the international community to support their implementation. While some international organisations have already started to support government, there is clearly room for more. Increasing this support would be a way of cementing the success of government-owned and sustainable social protection.
• Charles Knox-Vydmanov is social protection adviser for HelpAge International, which has launched Pension watch, an online resource for policy makers and development practitioners
For the first time since Mr Mubarak's fall from power in February, tanks were
deployed in Cairo's Tahrir Square, the epicentre of the revolution, as
Egypt's generals made a desperate attempt to shore up their waning authority.
Earlier, hundreds of troops tore down tents and arrested dozens of protesters
who had staged a three-week sit in inside the square to demonstrate their
anger against what they say is the slow pace of reform since the army took
charge.
With the atmosphere in Cairo growing increasingly febrile, there are growing
fears that a failure by Mr Mubarak to appear in court could trigger renewed
violence in a country that has seemed increasingly unstable since his
overthrow.
For the hundreds of thousands of protesters who thronged Tahrir Square at the
beginning of the year, the trial of the man who led them for 30 years was
meant to represent the culmination of their struggle for genuine freedom in
the Middle East's most populous state.
Instead, many fear a shabby compromise brokered by the military leadership
will rob them of justice at the last moment.
Mr Mubarak's trial opens on Wednesday in a court at Cairo's police academy.
Charged with corruption and ordering the deaths of more than 800 people
killed by his security forces during the uprising, he ostensibly faces the
gallows if he is convicted.
But many observers expect that the fallen dictator will not appear and that a
postponement of the trial will be sought and granted.
For the moment, judicial officials are insisting that he will appear. But
state doctors at the hospital in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheikh where
Mr Mubarak is being treated for a heart condition have hinted that he may be
too ill to take to the dock.
Pro-democracy activists see any outcome in which a trial takes place in Mr
Mubarak's absence as a shabby compromise meant to protect the military
leadership, which is governing Egypt until elections later this year.
The generals were close to Mr Mubarak, himself a military man, when he was in
power and are said to be afraid of what he might reveal about them during a
trial.
Mr Mubarak's widely detested sons, Gamal and Alaa, are expected to be in court.
Unlike their father, they are already being held in prison and state media
reported that they will be brought to the hearing in an armoured personnel
carrier for their own protection.
The government has promised to broadcast their ordeal live on state television
but although the prospect of seeing the two men on trial is likely to prove
immensely satisfying for many, their father's probable absence will give any
sense of triumphalism a hollow feel.
