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Every country in the world is experiencing an economic shock as a result of the Coronavirus crisis, and all governments must act now to protect their people from destitution. Unless dramatic action is taken to shore up the economies of developing countries, the crisis could push as many as half a billion people into poverty.

The coronavirus pandemic has swept across a world unprepared to fight it. Only one in six countries assessed for the CRI Index 2020 were spending enough on health, and in more than 100 countries at least one in three workers had no labour protection such as sick pay.

The COVID-19 pandemic has worsened the extreme inequality in Southern African Development Community countries, and pushed millions into poverty. Recovering from the pandemic, however, offers SADC governments a once-in-a-generation opportunity to do reduce inequality drastically and eliminate extreme poverty by 2030. 

Global climate activists today gathered at Baku’s Olympic stadium —the venue for the United Nations climate talks— to urge world leaders to commit to a new, ambitious climate finance deal. The message “Pay Up!” unfolded across the stadium seats, in perfect sight from the COP29 presidency offices located on the opposite side of the arena. 

I felt a buzz of energy and calm when I was at the Stockholm Forum on Peace and Development — a feeling quite different from the heaviness of the tragedies unfolding in many parts of Africa.Tropical storm Filipo, just a year after the devastating Cyclone Freddy, has left hundreds of thousands of people in Mozambique in urgent need of humanitarian support. In Kenya, where I live, relentless waves of torrential rains and deadly floods have displaced thousands of people and caused severe damage to infrastructure. 

Sweeping measures to improve transparency and governance are urgently needed to end a scandal that has seen Africa lose an average of $1 billion every week for the past 30 years in illicit financial flows.

As the devastating impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on gender inequality became evident, governments and international financial institutions put a large public emphasis on “building back better” for a “resilient and inclusive recovery”. The year 2022 was big for gender at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, the world’s primary wardens of what is considered “sound” development and economic policy. The Bank celebrated the tenth anniversary of its first World Development Report dedicated to…

Responding to President Trump’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos today, Amitabh Behar, Oxfam's representative at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, said: “Don't be fooled by President Trump's glowing self-review.  This was a speech for the billionaires that the President's agenda has propped up at the expense of millions of ordinary Americans."

Even before the coronavirus crisis struck, people in the Middle East and North Africa were protesting against the injustice and inequality wrought by a decade of austerity. The pandemic and the lockdown measures taken by governments have paralysed economies and threaten to tip millions of people into poverty. This paper argues that if another decade of pain is to be averted, governments need to take immediate action to reduce inequality.

Hundreds of thousands of poor people will go without life-saving medicines and many more children will miss out on school because of the first cuts in aid since 1997, Oxfam warned today.