Economy

COVID-19 has constrained many of the ongoing SDG-readying support provided to the Government of Afghanistan and may have major implications for judicious and long-term development policymaking and programming that are needed to achieve the priority SDG targets in Afghanistan.

Pharmaceutical and tech companies and wealthy white Americans benefit from dramatic pandemic profits, further exacerbating inequality.

By Lykke Andersen A lousy little loan, which seemed like a good idea at the time, doomed Micky to a life in extreme poverty and heavy indebtedness, while Savvy, who couldn’t get a loan, did very well. So, if you thought micro credit will help solve the problem of poverty, you might want to do a bit of math to understand the astonishing power of compound interest.

According to the OECD’s latest Global Outlook on Financing for Sustainable Development, developing countries are facing a shortfall of USD 1.7 trillion in the financing they would need this year to keep them on track for the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as governments and investors grapple with the health, economic and social impacts of the COVID-19 crisis.

“That’s not to say that microfinance won’t help the very poor, rather that there needs to be a recognition that microfinance isn’t the only thing that can work", argues Oxford Microfinance Initiative’s President Vicente Solera Deuchar.

By Harris Zargar

Despite various efforts, child labour in India is still a common practice. Poverty forces children to seek jobs in undisclosed service sector and many are forced into prostitution, while many other become victims of human trafficking.

If the government takes serious actions to promote local and community entrepreneurship, this will not only diversify and uplift Nepal’s overall economy, but also provide enormous employment opportunities to Nepal’s jobless youths who have very few options for employment at the moment–apart from lying up in manpower agencies and heading for ill-paid foreign employment in the Gulf countries.

Sanja Ivandić After suffering some of the most degrading and cruel aspects of the war, twenty years ago, women of all nationalities in Bosnia and Herzegovina have managed to stay equally interested in the country's development, to invest in their education, to develop the most creative ways of self-employment through rural agriculture, crafts, arts, as well as to become change-makers through civil society initiatives.

Janakpur Handicraft Centre supports economically backward women in Nepal by giving them training, employment and other opportunities to get empowered.

Thirty-two of the world’s largest companies stand to see their profits jump by $109 billion more in 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic lays bare an economic model that delivers profits for the wealthiest on the back of the poorest, according to a new Oxfam report released this week.