1. Read (1) The Millennium Development Goals: Global targets, local ingenuity, (2) Child malnutrition in India: Putting the smallest first, and (3) Household access to energy (The Economist, 25 September).
2. Watch The necessity of educating women (The Economist online, 23 September) – “the former president of Ireland on why the Millenium Development Goals are not being met, and why they are still worth pursuing”.
3. Read Soul searching at the UN (The Lancet, 25 September) – “the UN seems to be an institution suffering a crisis of confidence, looking inwards (with the exception of UNICEF), while the major players in everything from climate change to the financial crisis look elsewhere for strategic leadership”.
About Me
- Duncan Mara
- University of Leeds, United Kingdom
- I'm an emeritus professor of civil engineering at the University of Leeds in England. I've been working on low-cost sanitation in developing countries since the mid-1970s, and also on low-cost wastewater treatment and reuse. I was a lecturer at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, 1970-73 and then a senior lecturer at the University of Dundee, Scotland, 1974-79 before moving to Leeds in late 1979. I was a visiting professor of sanitary engineering at the Universidade Federal da Paraiba in Campina Grande, northeast Brazil, during 1976-95, and since 1996 I have been a visiting professor of environmental engineering at the Instituto Cinara, Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia.