Innovative technology brand TECNO announced the strengthened partnership with UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, to support its Refugee Scholarships Programme DAFI (Albert Einstein German Academic Refugee Initiative) for the second year. The partnership aims to provide higher education and internship opportunities to refugee scholars in Africa, unlocking their full potential to thrive as adults, and ultimately contributing to equal access to education for all.
At the end of 2022, over 108.4 million people were forcibly displaced, up 19.1 million on a year earlier, marking the largest ever single-year increase. Higher education is vital in restoring hope and dignity to people driven from their homes. DAFI programme supports refugee students around the world through full scholarships for undergraduate studies. The aim of the programme is to help promote refugee self-reliance through increased access to opportunities to earn academic qualifications, develop knowledge and skills to improve preparedness for employment and entrepreneurship, and to empower students to contribute to host communities during displacement and upon return.

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) launched a new generation Productive Capacities Index (PCI) to help countries make more accurate diagnostics and measurements of their economic performance.
In turn, this can shape more effective policies and their implementation. The PCI measures countries’ abilities to produce goods and deliver services, which are critical for international trade and global production value chains.
The PCI is available through a dedicated online portal with publications, manuals, resources and tools. It maps the productive capacities of 194 economies and provides a better measure of development than other traditional benchmarks such as gross domestic product (GDP). It’s multidimensional and measures economic inputs and potential as opposed to outputs.
For governments, the PCI is a powerful and practical tool to track progress over time and forge informed policies to plug development gaps. It can help countries respond to a call by UN Secretary-General António Guterres to move beyond GDP and measure the things that really matter to people and their communities.

New global research on child mortality rates in Ethiopia shows while there has been a significant decline in these rates in past three decades, too many children under the age of five are still dying. The analysis found the mortality rate in the under-five demographic decreased by almost 4.5 per cent every year between 1990 and 2019.
However, despite the progress, it’s still one of the highest rates in the world with an estimated 190,000 under 5 deaths in 2019 at the rate of 52 deaths per 1000 livebirths. The country’s neonatal mortality rate is 26.6 deaths per 1000 livebirths.
Lead author Dr Gizachew Tessema from the Curtin School of Population Health said in 2019, almost three quarters (74 per cent) of these deaths occurred before a child’s first birthday and over half (52 per cent) in the first 28 days.
“While a baby born in Ethiopia today is three times less likely to die before age five than one born in 1990, this reduction is not enough,” Dr Tessema said. “We are still losing unacceptably too many young lives from

World leaders attending a summit in Paris tomorrow must ensure that wealthier nations commit to comprehensive debt relief for lower-income nations, including the cancellation of loans and to the scaling up of international assistance to vulnerable states, Amnesty International said today.
Amnesty International is calling on the Summit for a New Global Financing Pact (PACT) to ensure wealthier nations honour previous financial pledges they have failed to meet and adopt new ones which guarantee the rights of people in lower-income countries.
The rights to an adequate standard of living and to social security are enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which has been ratified by more than 170 countries. Article 2 of the ICESCR obliges states to take steps, including through international cooperation and assistance, to support other states to meet their economic and social rights obligations.