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The United Nations is set to launch a major campaign to help tens of thousands of Ethiopian children facing an outbreak of lethal diseases, from diarrhoea to malaria, after rain showers hit the drought-stricken Oromia region, insufficient to undo the damage of two failed rainy seasons but enough to form shallow pools that breed disease-bearing insects.

Hundreds of thousands of children will go to school for the first time in Southern Sudan this year in a massive United Nations-backed campaign to rebuild a system that was ruined by two decades of civil war in a region where only about 22 per cent of an estimated 2.2 million youngsters are enrolled in primary school.

Over half the people in the poorest parts of Africa and Asia lack regular access to essential medicines because they cannot afford them, or because the health system in their country is too weak, according to a new report commissioned by the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO), which contains recommendations to remedy the situation.

Delegations from Kosovo and Serbia today ended a third round of direct talks on decentralization in the Albanian-majority Serbian province, which the United Nations has administered ever since the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO) drove out Yugoslav troops in 1999 amid grave rights abuses in ethnic fighting.

Aiming to protect 3.5 million children from malaria in Niger, where almost all the population are at risk from the disease, more than 2 million mosquito nets have now been delivered throughout the impoverished country to mothers of children under five, the United Nations-backed health fund that sponsored the campaign said today.

The United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) today protested against the Government’s refusal to let UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland’s plane land yesterday in the country, which is suffering serious humanitarian problems in its conflict-torn western Darfur region as well in the recently pacified South.

The governing body of the United Nations labour agency has ended its latest session by calling for global investment in the creation of decent jobs, while also expressing “profound concern” the lack of progress in ending forced labour in Myanmar.

Efforts to ameliorate slum conditions in Africa can mitigate other problems plaguing the continent, a senior United Nations official told ministers responsible for housing and urban development from more than 30 African countries at a conference that opened today in Nairobi.

Though 15,000 men, women and children around the world are still losing lives or limbs by coming upon explosive mines each year, the end of the scourge is now in sight if international action is sustained, a United Nations official said today as he previewed the first international day dedicated to the issue.

The United Nations has dispatched urgently-needed supplies to Iran and extended several emergency cash grants for relief efforts in the wake of the series of earthquakes that affected some 100,000 people in western Lorestan province last week, killing 70 and injuring at least 1,300 others.