Extreme poverty falls; Africa's Girl Effect; US Post on closure spree; Childless by choice; Lessons for Rahul Gandhi; Indian culture and leadership

1Extreme poverty falls (San Francisco Chronicle) A World Bank report shows a broad-based reduction in extreme poverty - and indicates that the global recession, contrary to economists' expectations, did not increase poverty in the developing world. The report shows that for the first time, the proportion of people living in extreme poverty - on less than $1.25 a day - fell in every developing region between 2005 and 2008. And the biggest recession since the Great Depression seems not to have thrown that trend off course, preliminary data from 2010 indicate.

The progress is so dramatic that the world met the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals to cut extreme poverty in half five years before its 2015 deadline. "This is very good news," said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the UN special adviser on the Millennium Development Goals. "There has been broad-based progress in fighting poverty." The report indicates that despite the world entering a recession in 2009, poverty did not increase in developing nations.

Preliminary surveys for 2010 show that the proportion of people in the developing world living in extreme poverty fell. That is because of strong growth in Brazil, India and especially China, growth that helped buoy economies in Africa and South America. High commodity prices also aided exporting nations. For the first time since the World Bank started keeping statistics in 1981, poverty fell in every region of the world on a three-year time frame.

Much of the story was about China, which moved almost 700 million people out of poverty between 1981 and 2008, with the proportion of its population living in extreme poverty falling to 13% from 84% during that period. But perhaps the most surprising success story is sub-Saharan Africa, where the proportion of people living in extreme poverty actually increased through the 1990s, before declining in the 2000s.

2 Africa’s girl power (The New York Times) Camfed (the Campaign for Female Education) was founded in 1993 by a Welsh social entrepreneur named Ann Cotton, who began by raising money at her kitchen table to send 32 girls from poor families in Zimbabwe to school. Today, the organization works with 3,667 schools in rural parts of Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania, Ghana and Malawi, and has provided direct support for more than half a million children to attend primary school.

In recent years, leaders in the field of international development have come to agree that the most powerful way to bring lasting social benefits to a country is to expand educational and economic opportunities for girls. What has become known as the Girl Effect is dramatic: A girl who doesn’t attend school or marries young, for example, is at far greater risk of dying in childbirth, contracting HIV, being beaten by her husband, bearing more children than she would like, and remaining in poverty, along with her family. By contrast, an educated girl is more likely to earn higher wages, delay childbirth, and have fewer, healthier children who are themselves more likely to attend school, prosper, and participate in democratic processes.

3 US post offices face closure (The Guardian) Blink and you'd miss Cottage Grove, the tiny town, population 85, set in the rolling hills of west Tennessee. This rural community was known as Todd Town after a local farming family until the late 1850s, when its first postmaster arrived and renamed the village. Now locals fear the service that created their identity 160-odd years ago is about to destroy it. Cottage Grove's story is being played out across America. The debt-riddled US Postal Service (USPS) is threatening to close 3,200 post offices, including this one. Closures are set for May, so letters of notice could start going out this month. Eventually, some fear, USPS has its eye on 15,000 closures, about half the network.

The USPS's army of critics blame declining mail volumes, the internet and soaring costs for the catastrophe. "The rise of email and online bill-paying, competition from private delivery companies like FedEx and UPS and the recession of 2007-09 have hit the USPS hard," the libertarian Cato Institute reported last year. Mail volume declined by 35bn pieces (about 17%) from fiscal year 2007 to fiscal year 2009. In 2000, 5% of Americans paid their bills online; now 60% do. According to the post office's defenders, however, the real culprit is not the internet but USPS's mismanagement and a combination of political hostility and incompetence.

Whatever the truth, it is hitting the service hard. Last month USPS announced the closure of 260 mail processing centres, with the loss of 35,000 jobs. In the last four years 140,000 positions have been lost from the postal service, the second-largest civil employer in the US behind Walmart with 571,000 employees.

4 Childless by choice (Khaleej Times) While considerable media attention has focused on the world’s population reaching the milestone of seven billion, another demographic phenomenon receives little notice: the rise in number of people who choose not to have children. Until the early 1960s and the introduction of reliable family planning methods – namely, the oral contraceptive pill – childlessness within marriage was almost entirely involuntary. The modern era provided more education opportunities for women, leading to later marriage, careers, lower proportions marrying, greater use of contraception and abortion, and changes in women’s role and status. As a result, the proportions of childless women in developed countries and many developing countries are well above three per cent.

Childlessness rates are strongly connected to women’s educational levels. Women with university education, for example, are more likely to be childless than those with secondary education. In addition, young women who are highly educated are more likely to choose employment and postpone family building. Another contributing factor to higher rates of childlessness among highly educated women is their reluctance to marry a less educated man. By and large, women, especially those highly educated and seeking gender equality, have more to lose in terms of employment, careers and related opportunity costs than men when they become parents.

Childlessness is often not a clear lifestyle choice – that is, women deliberately pursuing individual satisfaction and rejecting childrearing responsibilities. Most remain childless after a series of childbearing postponements, including higher education, employment, absence of a suitable partner, separation or divorce. In the US, young single, childless women now earn more than male counterparts, attributable to the higher education attainment, and this may account for women’s difficulties in finding a suitable partner.

5 Lessons for Rahul Gandhi (Dawn) Rahul Gandhi said after this week’s electoral rout of the Congress party in India’s Uttar Pradesh statethat he has learnt a good lesson from the stinging defeat in India’s most populous state. Has he learnt something, really?

Rahul Gandhi was sighted one day near Moradabad in that campaign. Out of the blue, he confided to the audience that his grandmother had cut Pakistan into two. Had Rahul Gandhi managed to get a single extra vote for making the utterance that better suits his rivals in the Bharatiya Janata Party, he could be forgiven. In any case Rahul Gandhi was telling only half the story. He didn’t say, for example, that Indira Gandhi became a very unpopular leader within months of her pyrrhic victory and it eventually led to her imposing emergency rule in 1975. An unprecedented electoral rout came soon after.

The fact is that we haven’t heard anything worthwhile from Rahul Gandhi on any topic of importance to the masses. After Manmohan Singh became prime minister in 2005 Rahul Gandhi declared that the BJP was a joke. It had always harmed and insulted his family, including his grandmother, he told reporters. Insulting his family? A joke? Did he have any idea of the mayhem this “joke” had inflicted on India in 1992 in Ayodhya and in Gujarat in 2002? On Christian missionaries, Dalits and tribespeople perpetually?

Sleeping in Dalit homes and eating food cooked by them was a bad political a gimmick for Rahul Gandhi. Dalits want honour, justice and jobs. Mayawati gave them honour and according to the poll outcome she was routed in the number of seats but trailed behind the winner only by about a two per cent deficit. Someone gave Rahul Gandhi a piece of paper to tear up angrily at a public. Nehru and Indira Gandhi used to get away with such tantrums. Times have changed. Rahul Gandhi didn’t address the real elephant in the room — his party’s palpable political bankruptcy. Is that too difficult a lesson to learn?

7 Indian culture doesn’t breed leaders: Greg Chappell (The Times of India) In a vicious attack on Indian culture and Indian cricket team of which he was the coach, Greg Chappell has said that the side lacked leaders because parents, school teachers and coaches made all the decisions in the Indian system. "The (Indian) culture is very different, it's not a team culture. They lack leaders in the team because they are not trained to be leaders. From an early age, their parents make all the decisions, their schoolteachers make their decisions, their cricket coaches make the decisions," Chappell said.

"The culture of India is such that, if you put your head above the parapet someone will shoot it. Knock your head off. So they learn to keep their head down and not take responsibility. "The Poms (British) taught them really well to keep their head down. For if someone was deemed to be responsible, they'd get punished. So the Indians have learned to avoid responsibility. So before taking responsibility for any decisions, they prefer not to," Chappell was quoted as saying.