Heavy rains hit earthquake survivors in tent camps in Port-au-Prince on Thursday, “bringing a warning of fresh misery to come for the 1 million people living on the streets,” Reuters reports. “While the rain could wash away some of the dust from the hundreds of collapsed structures in the stricken city, it could also worsen a fierce blight of mosquitoes,” according to Reuters, which reports that Haiti is struggling to get all the earthquake survivors out of make-shift tents and into more substantial shelters (Loney, 2/11).

U.N. Launches $538M Aid Appeal For Displaced Persons In Pakistan The U.N. launched an international appeal Tuesday, calling for $538 million to provide aid in Pakistan for “hundreds of thousands of people displace[d] by army clashes against the Taliban,” the Associated Press/Washington Post reports (Toosi, 2/9). Agence France-Presse writes: “The…

UNICEF on Thursday launched a $1.2 billion appeal aimed at providing “life saving emergency assistance to millions of children and women in dire need,” VOA News reports (Schlein, 2/4). “The appeal is part of UNICEF’s Humanitarian Action Report 2010, released in Geneva … which spotlights the desperate situation of children and women in 28 countries and territories facing deep humanitarian crises,” the U.N. News Centre writes (2/4).

Clean Water Needs To Be Priority For Haiti “Long before the earthquake, Haiti was mired in a crisis that only a few experts noticed – a severe lack of clean drinking water,” writes Joseph Treaster, editor of the University of Miami’s Internet magazine on global water issues and the environment, in…

Over the next decade, efforts to vaccinate “infants against rotavirus could save the lives of millions of children in developing nations who would otherwise die from the diarrhea-causing disease, two new studies show,” HealthDay/BusinsessWeek reports. The studies track diarrhea deaths among children vaccinated against rotavirus in Africa and Mexico and appear in the Jan. 28 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (Thomas, 1/27).

Report Measures Bangladesh’s MDG Progress A report by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics and UNICEF shows the country “has made a good progress in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) even though there are big disparities in education, child and maternal health among its 64 districts,” the New Nation reports.  In…

Nine days after a major earthquake struck, “deeply needed aid streamed into Haiti’s ravaged capital in quantities that relief agencies said is a clear sign of progress,” the Miami Herald reports. Roads have been cleared, additional food and water distribution points are available and some new medical clinics are open.

The New York Times explores efforts across the U.S. to craft and implement affordable solutions to infrastructure problems around the world, and programs geared toward supporting the work of local entrepreneurs to build solutions to the problems on the ground.

Rescue efforts continue in Haiti after a major earthquake hit the country last week, CNN reports (1/18). While teams still search for survivors under the rubble, the priority is shifting to relief for those who survived the quake, Nicholas Reader, spokesperson for the U.N.Offices for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, TIME reports (Newton-Small,1/18).

Rescue teams and aid groups headed to Haiti on Wednesday to offer help and “assess damage from a powerful 7.0-magnitude earthquake that crippled the island nation, severing communications with the outside world and crumbling countless buildings,” the Miami Herald reports (Charles et al., 1/13). Tuesday’s “earthquake was the worst in the region in more than 200 years and left the country in a shambles,” according to the New York Times (Romero/Lacy, 1/13).