Worthing Council wants Queen Victoria’s knickers

I recently moved to the South Coast, Shoreham-By-Sea in fact. I love it here. The cosmopolitan versus provincial mix feels a lot better executed than in my previous home town of Bath, and I have a sea view. I am happy.

There’s clearly a lot I don’t know about the area, though. For example, Dan of Empty Shops Network is currently blogging about an interesting tender from Worthing Council looking for an artist in residence to make works for the beachfront this summer. Why they want a replica of Queen Victoria’s knickers is beyond me, though.

Gates pledges $1.5bn to maternal health

Melinda Gates is on stage at the Women Deliver conference now pledging $500,000 a year to the cause of family planning, maternal health and women’s education on behalf of the Gates Foundation. “It is not that the world doesn’t know how to save the 350,000 mothers and 3 million newborns who die every year,” she’s saying, “It is that we haven’t tried hard enough.”

I’ve always been a little sceptical of the Gates Foundation – even though it blends my favourite themes of technology and international development. Anything of that size, even a charitable fund, scares me a little, but the part of her speech highlighting successes in Malawi and Sri Lanka were quite inspiring. Last week I was invited up to Marie Stopes‘ London HQ to talk about maternal health issues in the developing world and how to get media coverage of them. The latter part remains as difficult as ever, if my inability to get commissioned off the back of the conference is any indicator, but there’s been a lot of progress on the former. A Lancet study last month reckoned that the global maternal mortality rate had declined from 422 per 100,000 live births in 1980 to 251 per 100,000 live births in 2008.

As Prof Jimmy Whitworth of the Wellcome Trust told us, these statistics are probably innacurate, but they’re all we’ve got. While it’s generally good news amd there are lots of success stories like the ones Gates highlighted, only 23 nations are on track to achieve the MDG goal of reducing maternal mortality rate by 75% by 2015. In Afghanistan, for example, Marie Stopes’ country director Farhad Javid – a man who’s incredible story I hope to tell elsewhere soon – the MMR hasn’t changed since the fall of the Taliban, where it remains almost 1600 deaths per 100,000 births.

Gates’ contribution and speech are clearly to be welcomed, with some strong words about contraception and family planning, and an especially strong piece on feedback mechanisms and accountability.The issue of whether or not international aid should fund safe abortion (an area that Canada is now holding the G8 up with, not, as you might imagine, the US) was carefully avoided.

Zambia editor sentenced to hard labour

Fred looks surprisingly like my hero, George.

Fred looks surprisingly like my hero, George.

Shocking news from Zambia that the Editor of the Post newspaper – one of the only independent papers that frequently has run ins with the government – has been sentenced to four months’ hard labour for contempt of court. Fred M’membe’s crime? To publish this opinion piece about the farcical nature of the attempted prosecution of one of his journalists, Chansa Kabwela, for obscenity.

Kabwela was taken to court for sending pictures of a woman giving birth in the street to senior government officials in order to highlight problems with the hospital system. It’s worth pointing out that she didn’t actually publish the pictures. The baby in the photos died.

Kabwela was, quite rightly, acquitted – and her case brought international attention to both the problems with maternal health in Zambia and the inability of her government to face up to the issue in a mature manner. Obscenity charges? Really?

This is a government which doesn’t like criticism, and unable to convict Kabwela, has instead gone after her editor. The timing of the editorial was, in hindsight, problably foolhardy and the letter of the letter of the law says it should have been printed after the trial was finished, not during precedings.  M’membe’s defence was largely based on the fact he was away on a study break at the time.

Every word is true, though, and the failure of the authorities to acknowledge their shameful performance in bringing the original charges by dropping those against M’membe is an outrage.

The judge hoped the sentence should ‘reform the convict’. I sincerely hope it doesn’t.

–update

In brighter news about Zambia, LearnAsOne‘s ‘London Bridges’ sponsored walk took place today and raised loads of cash for Saviour’s school. Congratulations to all involved!