Hasina among top female leaders

Prime minister Sheikh Hasina seventh in a list of top 12 female leaders in the world in 2011. Newly elected prime minister of Thailand Yingluck Shinawatra topped the list published on the popular magazine's website on Aug 5. The leaders are Yingluck, chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel, president of Argentina Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, president of Brazil Dilma Rousseff, prime minister of Australia Julia Gillard, president of Liberia Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Hasina, prime minister of Iceland Johanna Sigurdardottir, president of Costa Rica Laura Chinchilla, president of Finland Tarja Halonen, president of Lithuania Dalia Grybauskaite and prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago Kamla Persad-Bissessar. About 63-year-old Hasina, the US-based magazine says she has a history of surviving brutal attacks including one in 1975 when her father independence leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was assassinated along with most of her family members. She lost 17 family members on Aug 15, 1975 during an army coup it says. , Hasina, then 28, survived as she was abroad, it adds. She later survived a grenade attack that killed more than 20 people, dodging the bullets that sprayed her fleeing car, it says. Hasina, also the president of Awami League party, was first elected prime minister in 1996. In a late 2008 election, her party won 230 in the 300-seat parliament, and the consummate survivor found herself prime minister — again, it says.

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African leaders launch talks on biggest free-trade bloc

South African president Jacob Zuma, centre, King Mswati lll of the Kingdom of Swaziland, left, and Namibia’s president Hifikepunye Pohamba sit together at the opening of the tripartite SADC summit in Johannesburg. 

African leaders Sunday agreed to a framework to guide the next phase of negotiations on creating the continent’s biggest free-trade bloc, in a communiqué issued after a day of talks.

The new bloc would integrate the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, the East African Community and the Southern African Development Community, an idea first backed in 2008.
It would combine 26 countries home to 700 million people with a combined economy estimated at $875 billion.

The bloc aims to enhance connectivity among the nations and reduce costs of doing business, while increasing investment flows to address capacity constraints.

‘It is now well documented that regional integration is one of the four factors that have sustained Africa’s growth in the last decade, as well as the quick and robust recovery from the recent financial crisis,’ said Eratus Mwencha, the deputy chairman of the AU Commission.

‘We all know that trade can act as an engine of growth,’ said Mwencha. ‘For the people of Africa, this will mean a paycheque in their pocket.’

The International Monetary Fund expects Africa to grow faster than the global average in the coming years. Six of the world’s 10 fastest-growing economies were on the continent last year.

Mwencha added that it was projected that Africa would double its GDP in the next ten years, a growth expected to be propelled by the growing middle class.

The mega-bloc would bring together the continent’s most developed economies of South Africa and Egypt and some of its most energetic, such as Angola and Ethiopia.

It is expected to end the challenges presented by the current trade blocs which have different rules, with some countries belonging to more than one grouping, complicating efforts to streamline trade.

‘This Tripartite is blazing a path to be followed by other regions in Africa in realising the dream of a united Africa,’ said Sindiso Ngwenya, general secretary of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa.
‘There are a number of areas where, by building on the work already done by member and partner states, working regionally, we can expect quick wins,’ he said.


But the pact faces immense hurdles: tariff barriers, poor infrastructure, weak supply chains, and economies often largely reliant on natural resources rather than manufactured products.


The three existing free trade areas — of which the five-member East African Community is the most advanced — have failed to meet intra-trade targets despite removing the bulk of trade tariffs.
And the bloc includes countries hit by conflicts, coups and political turmoil, such as Libya, Madagascar, Sudan and Zimbabwe.


New World Bank research says trade within southern African accounts for just 10 per cent of the total in the region — compared to 60 per cent in Europe and 40 per cent in North America.


Southern African Development Community exports increased from 20 to more than 30 per cent of combined GDP over the past decade, but regional trade made up a mere three per cent of the increase.

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UN summit sets plan to stop HIV child infections

World leaders at a U.N. AIDS summit launched a plan on Thursday to try to eliminate by 2015 most new HIV infections among children, who inherit the condition from already infected mothers.
The campaign was launched as the leaders also agreed on a target of reaching 15 million people with HIV treatment, more than double the number who currently get it, also by 2015.
Both goals were announced just weeks after groundbreaking new data showed that early treatment of the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, which causes AIDS, can cut its transmission to a sexual partner by 96 percent.
In 2009, some 370,000 children were born with HIV, or one nearly every minute -- the vast majority of them in 22 countries, almost all in Africa. But providing HIV-positive pregnant women with treatment can reduce the risk of a child being born with the virus to less than 5 percent.
The UNAIDS organization and the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which are jointly managing the campaign launched on Thursday, said it would aim to reduce the number of child infections by 90 percent by 2015.
"We believe that by 2015 children everywhere can be born free of HIV and that their mothers can remain healthy," UNAIDS Executive Director Michel Sidibe told the launch event, describing the plan as realistic and achievable.
UNAIDS Deputy Executive Director Paul De Lay told Reuters the plan was based on providing pregnant women with more information and on more effective use of anti-AIDS drugs.
"BEGINNING OF THE END"
UNAIDS officials said funding from all sources for prevention of mother-child transmission of HIV was currently running at some $500 million a year. They said a total of $2.5 billion more would be needed by 2015 to achieve the campaign's target of eliminating mother-to-child HIV infections.
"Developed countries already do this," U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the meeting. "But we cannot rest until this is true for our whole world."
U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Eric Goosby said the United States was contributing an extra $75 million to the campaign. Several private companies and foundations also announced contributions.
Achieving the goal could be "the beginning of the end of the story, because that opens the prospect for an AIDS-free generation," Michel Kazatchkine, head of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, told Reuters.
Meanwhile, a declaration agreed by the 140-nation U.N. summit commits governments to "the target of working toward 15 million people living with HIV on antiretroviral treatment by 2015."
The declaration is expected to be adopted on Friday at the end of the three-day summit, which was held close to the 30th anniversary of the discovery of AIDS.
Some 6.6 million were receiving antiretroviral treatment in low- and middle-income countries at the end of 2010, according to U.N. figures.
Aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) called the pledge a "critical step," but said governments needed to take "immediate concrete action" to make the target a reality.
"There are 9 million people waiting for HIV treatment today," Tido von Schoen-Angerer of MSF said in a statement. "This whole AIDS summit will have been a farce if we don't see real plans to ramp up treatment so we can get ahead of the wave of new infections."

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