Financial Transparency Coalition

In January of next year Nigerians will head to the polls to elect their next president. Nigeria’s exercise in democracy has so far lasted slightly over a decade, beginning with the country’s transition to civilian government in 1999 after a long period of military rule punctured with failed stabs at democracy. To alleviate ethnic and religious divisions, the current system includes a power-sharing agreement between the Muslim North and Christian South. By law, each term should alternate between a Northerner and Southerner, though the last three presidents have muddled the intended fluctuations. There are those who claim this election will...

No one is perfect. That’s why it shouldn’t come as a surprise to you that early this morning Italian authorities seized $30.18 million from a Vatican bank account for possible ties to money laundering. It should also not come as a surprise to you that the Vatican bank’s chairman and director general are now under investigation for failure to meet Italy’s anti-money laundering laws. Surprised anyway? You shouldn’t be. Here’s why. In the morning of June 21st, 1982 in London, a postal clerk on his way to work was crossing the Blackfriars Bridge when he noticed a...

On Wednesday I wrote a blog post about the number of people worldwide who suffer from hunger; a figure that has dropped in the last year, but is still much higher than it was a decade ago. I wrote that in 2000 the United Nations (UN) set about the lofty goal of halving global poverty and hunger as part of its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The MDGs represent perhaps the most ambitious set of development objectives ever. And next week, in New York City, world leaders will convene for a UN Summit to evaluate the progress...

Today the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations reported that 925 million people are undernourished in 2010. This is actually a decline from the all-time high of 1.02 billion in 2009. It’s easy to forget, when faced with our own brand of pain in the developed world, that a global recession is the difference between life and death for millions worldwide. It is startling to realize that an economic downturn that originates in the skyscrapers of New York can hit hardest in the rural towns of Bangladesh and Ethiopia, where most haven’t heard of...