About 40 per cent of ethnic minority women are living in poverty, twice the proportion of white women.
According to a new report by the Fawcett Society and Oxfam, Poverty pathways – ethnic minority women’s livelihoods, poverty extends to more than a third of black women and almost two thirds of Pakistani and Bangladeshi women.
Ethnic minority women are amongst the poorest and most socially excluded people in the UK. Yet very little is known about their lives, or how to lift them out of poverty.
Mainstream approaches simply do not see these women or their needs says the report.
This report, published as part of Seeing Double, Fawcett’s flagship campaign on ethnic minority women, shows how the recession is on course to present two major risks if current policy approaches do not adapt:

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Clearly, Big Brother CPM and its tailist loyalists, can't find the ground beneath their feet. Indeed, the ground is so rapidly shifting, that they are fast losing the ABC of Dialectical Materialism - their body language, tactics, doublespeak, lies, faltering rhetoric, shallow bravery prove it.

The Communist Party of China was formed in 1921. Officially, the undivided Communist Party of India, too, was formed in 1925. The Chinese fought a protracted guerrilla war, went on a long march, made huge sacrifices and captured power with a peasant revolution, defying established 'working class as vanguard' Marxist-Leninist theory. They committed mistakes, rectified them, went for the great leap forward, a botched up, anarchic cultural revolution with its multitude of injustices with hundred flowers and hundred schools of thought, finally, the end of ideology. Now, having dumped Mao and the revolution, with the Deng bottles as their cracked mirrors, and bottled memories of Tiananmen Square, they are a highly efficient totalitarian capitalist regime, where dissent is crushed ruthlessly, competing with advanced capitalism's profit machines, consolidating military/nuclear/economic might, backing every rogue regime and brutish junta in the world, with huge rich and poor divide. More than 25 million people have lost jobs in China: can you hear one sound of protest?

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Jeanne d'Arc Mukamurigo and her daughter sit on a bench in the shade of a tree, twisting stiff, skinny threads of red bamboo into place mats. Weaving isn't something she grew up doing, and place mats aren't particularly Rwandan, but she spends a few days a week turning finicky threads into things white people will buy when they visit this village, about an hour's drive south of Rwanda's capital, Kigali.

Ms. Mukamurigo is a member of Imirasire, a collective of women taught to weave baskets, place mats, and coasters and sell them to tourists. Tourists are new to Mayange, where 25,000 people live in an arid part of Rwanda.

As Mukamurigo and her daughter finish off their latest creation, an SUV pulls up near their bench. Four mzungu, the local term for white people, shuffle out and watch silently as she curls the bamboo into a cable.

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Approximately 1.2 billion people in the world live in extreme poverty (less than one dollar per day). Poverty creates ill-health because it forces people to live in environments that make them sick, without decent shelter, clean water or adequate sanitation.

WHO supports countries to design and implement 'pro-poor' health policies, that is, health policies which prioritize and respond to the needs of poor people. This work includes global advocacy, regional initiatives and direct support to ministries of health in developing countries.

At global level, this experience is synthesized to form recommendations on best practice. Health and poverty issues differ markedly from country to country contexts, with countries emerging from and affected by conflicts presenting a particular challenge.

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six men broke into the home of Justine Masika Bihamba in Goma in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Bihamba wasn’t home, but six of her children, ages 5 to 24, were. The men, reportedly government soldiers, tied up the children at gunpoint and abused two daughters in their 20s, sexually assaulting one with a knife. Bihamba and her children identified the attackers to military police but authorities refused to arrest the suspects, saying there was no evidence against them. They remain free today.The men targeted Bihamba’s children because of her work coordinating medical and psychological care for women and girls who have been sexually assaulted. In the violent conflict that has raged in Congo for a decade, rape is a weapon of war.

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Deputy president Kgalema Motlanthe will, among other responsibilities, take the lead in championing the fight against poverty, President Jacob Zuma said on Wednesday.

This would include integrating government plans and mobilising social partners."Government cannot wage this war alone," Zuma told the National Assembly during debate on his budget vote.

Reviewing forums "As part of building a responsive, interactive and effective government, we must strengthen our partnerships with society.

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From the homeless, to low-income elders, to at-risk children, two Fox Valley charities are partnering to put more than $800,000 into the fight against poverty.

For Ron, who is chronically homeless, being on the street was a way of life.

"I was down in Chicago and this old man, 60 years old, was just drunk," he said. "The shelter basically said, 'get the hell out of here', and he died right there on the corner in the cold. That made me think."

Ron sought help through the "Housing First Initiative", which offers housing and other services for the chronically homeless.

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When street urchins used the age old trick where one distracts you from the right while the other helps himself to stuff in the car from the left to peacefully relieve me of my mobile phone as I drove in Nairobi recently, I took it in stride.

Perhaps believing in Murphy's Law that anything that can go wrong will, but also thanking God for being able to have afforded it and taken so long with it in the first place. Millions of Kenyans can't afford and I had never lost a mobile phone set before.When I challenged the watchmen and taxi operators nearby, some of whom I know well, as to why my phone could be picked while they watched, they threw their hands up in submission, saying no one dares challenge those boys, unless they wish to invite their wrath.

When a friend later asked me what came of my phone, I lightly told him, "wakenya wenzetu walijisaidia nayo."

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A third of grandparents in the UK aged under-55 are struggling financially, according to Grandparents Plus.
Its report includes research showing an increase in such "gran-carers" living alone and on low incomes.
The report "challenges the cosy image we have of the retired grandparent," said the charity's head, Sam Smethers.
The report, the Poor Relation?, describes an "invisible generation" caught between the demands of their children, their children's children and their own parents.
'Gran-carers'
In these four and five-generation families, single, working-class grandmothers in particular can find themselves in a cycle of living on a low income while acting as unpaid carers.

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As the saying goes, you can’t squeeze blood from a stone. That is how many policymakers are beginning to look at state budgets. As talk in the country’s state capitals focus on what to cut - and by how much - the so-called social safety net, meant to catch the people at the bottom before they fall through the floor, is looking particularly frayed.

Last month, Washington Governor Christine Gregoire announced her budget for the next two years. If you’ve been following the crashing economic scene, here and around the world, it should be no surprise to learn the budget proposal calls for considerable cuts in state spending. Faced with a projected budget deficit of nearly $6 billion in the 2009-10 budget year - the largest in Washington state history - Gregoire proposed a spending plan on December 18 that will deeply slice funding for health and human services, education and natural resources, while not raising taxes.Human services were among the hardest hit, with the budget being reduced by 12.2 percent. Health care programs for children, disabled people and the poor will lose $500 million, while the General Assistance Unemployable (GAU) program - temporary help for those who can’t work due to disabilities - will be eliminated entirely.

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