Japan on July 17 pledged US$1 billion (S$1.37 billion) over the next two years to back the United Nations' development agenda, raising its profile as one of the world's largest foreign aid donors. Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida told a meeting at the UN that the funding will go to help children and youth worldwide, in particular to promote education, health, disaster response and gender equality.

Young amputees in some of the poorest parts of the world will be able to navigate rough terrain to access jobs and opportunities with the help of new, specially developed prosthetic knees, after a non-profit company received a grant from the UK government to develop its design. [...] D-Rev, a development company based in San Francisco, California, has been awarded around $100,000 (£76,280) in UK aid money to develop a polycentric, four-bar knee, which wearers will be able to use over uneven ground.

The Israeli Embassy in Hanoi, Vietnam, decided to take the budget allocated for a party celebrating Israel’s 69th Independence Day in May and use it to purchase 100 innovative lightweight wheelchairs from Israeli company Wheelchairs of Hope to donate to needy local children.

Through a new smallholder farmer loan initiative with the Inter-American Developmental Bank (IDB) directed toward a women-led coffee cooperative, and an expanded partnership with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) aimed at helping young coffee farmers in post-conflict zones build greater resiliency and expertise, Starbucks will help create opportunities in some of Colombia’s most vulnerable coffee growing communities.

Capacity at Tanzania's Port of Dar es Salaam looks set to increase to 25 million tonnes over the next seven years thanks to a World Bank grant of US$12 million. The grant comes in addition to the approval of a $345 million credit for the new Dar es Salaam Maritime Gateway Project (DSMGP), which will also allow the port to improve waiting times at berth.

Technology will transform how we meet our needs for peace, dignity and community. This will shatter the global political equilibrium, and shift power away from governments towards individuals. States, ideas and industries will go out of business. Inequality could grow. [...] For the first time, technology gives the prospect of the world’s population having an instant, global and unfiltered means of communicating, of consuming information, of forming opinions, preferences and communities.

Drought in a developing country can mean many things: a lack of water, a lack of food and nutrition, and a lack of economic growth that puts even more pressure on impoverished communities relying on farming for their livelihoods. For women and girls, it also means a lack of protection. [...] But a new initiative in rural northern Kenya turns to technology and members of the community to make the region safer, and put an end to gender-based violence.

On a dirt path that passes for a street in a Kenyan refugee camp, a merchant sells grains he bought from a local farmer outside the settlement. To call it an “economy” would be euphemistic, but it’s a living, and it’s enough to support his wife and two children — a family he’s built since arriving at the camp over a decade ago. [...] Mastercard and Western Union have spent the past year studying the needs of these international camps-turned-cities.