U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon on Tuesday selected President Barack Obama's nominee to head UNICEF -- Anthony Lake, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports. UNICEF's board must approve Ban's selection and is expected to do so, the newspaper writes (3/17).

What the World Bank has dubbed "quiet corruption" in it's Africa Development Indicators 2010 report (.pdf) could be as significant a threat to the continent's development "as the graft scandals that frequently dominate newspaper headlines," Bloomberg/BusinessWeek reports (McGregor/Seria, 3/15).

The GAVI Alliance has "asked existing and potential donors to a meeting in The Hague on March 25 and 26 to challenge them to 'make a strong impact' on childhood death rates," Reuters reports. "GAVI, which is supported by the World Health Organization, the World Bank, UNICEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and vaccine makers, says it has 40 percent of the $7 billion it needs between now and 2015 to help" immunize of millions of children in developing countries by 2015, according to the news service. With full funding GAVI "will be able to fully roll out pentavalent vaccine" – which protects against hepatitis B, diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough and Hib – "and introduce new vaccines against pneumococcal disease and rotavirus diarrhea in over 40 countries,' [GAVI] said in a statement. 'These last two vaccines alone can save one million children by 2015,'" reports Reuters. "Britain last week pledged 150 million pounds over the next 10 years for GAVI's core funding, a move the group's deputy chief executive Helen Evans said she hoped others would follow," Reuters writes. "This is the first sovereign donor to have made a 10-year commitment to GAVI, and that really helps because it builds predictability into funding ... and actually helps to shape the market for vaccines," Evans said (Kelland, 3/15).

"Calling the subjugation of women a threat to American security, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary [Rodham] Clinton made a vibrant plea to give equal rights to women around the world," during a speech a the U.N. on Friday, Agence France-Presse reports. Clinton's remarks came on the final day of a two-week international women's conference that examined the progress made in women's rights since the adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.

During a conference in London Thursday, development officials urged world leaders to "accelerate efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015 and [said] rich countries must make good on promises to boost aid to poorer nations," Reuters AlertNet reports.

Former President Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said Wednesday at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing "that U.S. investments in fighting [HIV/]AIDS, malaria and other diseases in underdeveloped nations save lives and play a vital role in improving America's image abroad," the Associated Press reports.

The New York Times examines development and health improvements in Sauri, Kenya, which was the first Millennium Village in Africa, a project conceived by economist Jeffrey Sachs, which aims "to show that tightly focused, technology-based and relatively straightforward programs on a number of fronts simultaneously – health care, education, job training – could rapidly lift people out of poverty."