Institutional Round-Up

U.N. Round-Up

UN envoy to the Middle East Alvaro de Soto plans to leave the post in May and diplomats said April 3 the world body was considering options that include naming a new special envoy jointly with its Quartet partners. Members of the Quartet of Middle East mediators -- the US, the EU, Russia and the UN -- are drafting proposals to try to spur negotiations between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and to promote an Arab land-for-peace initiative. Reuters reported that Western diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there was some uncertainty about the future of the UN special envoy's post, which de Soto has held since May 2005.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said that he wants more time to convince Sudan to accept a large "hybrid" peacekeeping force in Darfur before Britain and the US push for Security Council sanctions. "Before we talk about the sanctions, let me have some more political space to deal with this dialogue with them," Ban told reporters after returning from an 11-day Middle East trip. The US is working closely with Britain, which takes over the presidency of the Security Council for April, and is planning a new resolution on Darfur that could include sanctions. Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has hesitated on allowing UN peacekeepers into Darfur, where experts say at least 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million displaced since 2003, when rebel groups took up arms against Khartoum.

African Union forces can no longer cope with the dangers in Darfur and need the help of UN troops to prevent further "slaughter," a top AU official in Sudan said April 3. Sam Ibok, head of the AU team charged with implementing a peace agreement in western Sudan, expressed his concerns after gunmen killed five AU troops in the deadliest single attack against the African force since it deployed in 2004. The five Senegalese soldiers were guarding a water point near the Sudanese border with Chad when they came under fire on Sunday. "The African Union force cannot cope with the circumstances that it finds itself in, and we have to be honest about it," Ibok told Reuters Television in an interview. "Anybody who wants us to succeed would need to work to give us the ability to be more effective and that can only be done ... between the United Nations and the African Union."

Egyptian health authorities excluded the possibility of human to human transmission in the case of a brother and sister with bird flu, the WHO said April 3. A four-year-old boy, from Qena province around 670 km (400 miles) south of Cairo, was among three human cases announced by the health ministry at the weekend. His six-year-old sister was one of two children diagnosed with the virus late last week. "We have heard from the Ministry of Health that human to human transmission has been ruled out," WHO spokesman Greg Hartl told Reuters. Both of the children had been exposed to poultry infected with the H5N1 virus, the most common way in which bird flu has been spreading.

IMF, World Bank & IFI Round-Up

Official development aid supplied by the world's wealthiest donor countries slid 5.1 percent last year from a record in 2005, the peak year for write-offs of debt owed by Iraq and Nigeria, the OECD said April 2. Aid from the 22 countries in OECD slid to USD 103.9 billion from USD 106.8 billion, it said, adding that a pledge to double the fund flow to Africa by the end of the decade thus remained a challenge. That pledge was made in Gleneagles, Scotland, in 2005 when British Prime Minister Tony Blair hosted a meeting with other leaders of the G8 -- the US, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Canada and Russia. "Aid to sub-Saharan Africa, excluding debt relief, was static in 2006, leaving a challenge to meet the Gleneagles G8 summit commitment to double aid to Africa by 2010," the OECD said in a statement. Excluding debt relief for Nigeria, aid to sub-Saharan Africa rose just two percent in 2006, it said.

The World Bank April 3 asked South Asian leaders to adopt bold reforms in a bid to increase trade and investment, relieve energy shortages and foster peace in the largely poverty-stricken subcontinent. The Bank said India should set the pace for regional integration by pushing for a dialogue mechanism to resolve political disputes and launching programs to remove infrastructure bottlenecks and trade barriers. India is the chair of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit in New Delhi, which was attended by leaders from across the region. "This meeting taking place in New Delhi is quite unique and in many ways presents opportunities that previous summits have not - one is the fact that India is chairing," said Praful Patel, the Washington-based World Bank Vice President for the South Asia region. Patel said South Asia, unlike Europe, did not have the luxury of time for regional integration as it was "the least integrated region in the world."

The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation's (SAARC) 14th summit is being participated in for the first time by Afghanistan as its eighth member. The grouping also includes Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Also for the first time, the summit is being attended by observers from China, Japan, South Korea, United States and the European Union. Implementation of the South Asian Free Trade Area, which went into force in January 2006, is another key issue being addressed at the summit.

Interest in sustainable business models is moving into the mainstream among banks, according to the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of the World Bank. More than 100 banks from 51 countries have entered the 2007 FT Sustainable Banking Awards, created by the IFC and The Financial Times - more than double last year's total. The interest in banking sustainability outside the developed economies is shown by the involvement of financial institutions from China, Russia, Pakistan and Uganda among almost 50 entries from emerging markets. The 28 shortlisted entries published today include many of the world's largest banks including Citigroup, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. Barclays and ABN Amro, currently negotiating an Anglo-Dutch merger, are shortlisted separately - as are two emerging markets subsidiaries of the Netherlands-based group.