Lausanne World Pulse – World Pulse Archives – World Pulse Archives

GLOBAL: Serious investment in the world’s children is essential to overcoming poverty, according to the UN’s most comprehensive children’s study of 150 countries. More than 10.5 million young people die annually, often from preventable causes; an estimated 150 million are malnourished; more than 120 million never go to school, the majority girls. Failure to adequately invest in children limits economic development and social cohesion. Programs in immunization, nutrition, sanitation and quality education reap direct economic benefits. For every $1 invested in infant and child development, a $7 return results in future savings on health care, unemployment and crime, a 1998 study indicated.

AFRICA: Christian leaders from 30 countries met in Côte d’Ivoire for the Regional Consultation for Francophone Africa in May. Increasing ministry partnerships have resulted from consultations over the last three years.

EAST TIMOR: Citizens danced in the streets on May 20, the island’s first day of independence from Indonesia. Despite the happy end to centuries of brutal occupation, East Timor is one of the world’s poorest nations. The country will depend on foreign aid until 2005 when revenues from a profitable oil treaty with Australia kick in. Forty percent of its people are illiterate and 70 percent are unemployed.

June 21, 2002

ERITREA: The government shut down all churches in the country except the Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Mekane Yesus (Lutheran) denominations. The action may be related to the many Eritrean soldiers who turned to Christ during the long war with Ethiopia. Church leaders are organizing themselves into house churches. SIM missionaries in Eritrea are awaiting clarification of government action.

EUROPEAN UNION: Christian broadcasters are anticipating new European Union communications regulations to significantly impact them this year. EU officials in Brussels are being asked to assure fair rights for Christian Broadcasters.

INDONESIA: Sixty Indonesian evangelists have planted more than 200 cell churches in unreached towns and villages….Campus ministries are targeting students at six major universities. Thirty classes heard the gospel and 3,000 new students participated in new student programs.

KENYA: Believers are gearing up to monitor upcoming presidential elections in December. They are concerned about peaceful and fair elections. President Moi has ruled for nearly 24 years, but allegations of vote-rigging surrounded his election in the country’s first multi-party elections in 1992, and his re-election in 1997.

LATIN AMERICA: Castro’s dedication to education is paying off. Cuban primary students’ test scores ranked top of the class among 13 Latin countries. Other Latin leaders concur that improved education is key to stable democracies. Regardless, Latin students still lag behind their international counterparts in science, reading and math. Still, progress is evident. Two-thirds of school kids now get some secondary education, compared to only half in the mid-1980s. School enrolment is up in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Honduras and Nicaragua. Poor families in those countries get welfare payments if their children attend school regularly. Chile and Venezuela offer school-vouchers for sending children to independent, church-run institutions.

MADAGASCAR: Politics and race threaten to split this island nation in the wake of last December’s disputed presidential election results. Two rival presidents are polarizing the country’s coastal inhabitants with African ties and light-skinned highlanders of Asian descent. Neither rival offers to compromise. A blockade dividing the regions has reversed impressive economic growth. As many as 150,000 people may have lost their jobs and malnutrition is getting worse, especially among children. Some say the country is close to civil war.

NIGERIA: A plane crash in Nigeria killed 160, including five prominent Christian leaders and other believers.

RUSSIA: A Moscow-based ministry is tackling Russia’s high rate of alcoholism. One Moscow group hosts three AA groups and an Al-Anon group each week. Seminars in Moscow and nine other cities are training teams to start Christian treatment centers in cities where few recovery resources are available. More than 30,000 Russians die of acute alcohol poisoning each year compared to 300 to 400 such deaths in the US….Believers in the Russian Far East published the first Sakha-language hymnal in March. Since Russians first began evangelizing the Sakha people 10 years ago, Sakha Christians have translated Russian songs and are now composing original works and putting Sakkha Christian poetry to music. Sakha believers are hopeful that original songs with Sakha melodies will facilitate evangelism to nonbelievers.

SOUTH AFRICA: University turn-out remains low in post-apartheid years. Only 15 percent of South African youth attend university, half the rate of Britain, and only one in six graduate. The figures are worse for black South Africans. The government may eliminate many rundown black universities. Top black students have already fled the decrepit black institutes of the apartheid era.

TOGO: More than 1,000 pastors from Togo, Ghana and Benin gathered for the nation’s first-ever interdenominational missions conference April 8 to 13. Pastors received evangelism training for reaching Togo’s 20 unreached people groups who are primarily Muslim or animist. Togo, a West African nation, is home to 4.6 million people from 78 ethnic groups.

URBANIZATION: The world’s surging urbanization is moving up on the international agenda. UN-HABITAT hosted the first-ever World Urban Forum in Nairobi. Sixty percent of Nairobi’s population lives in Africa’s second-largest slum. The answer to deplorable living conditions may be local. Grassroots advocacy groups of slum-dwellers are gaining land tenure in Nairobi and around the world.

June 21, 2002