Wars keep children out of school. So does sickness. But in Niger, a sun-baked land where drought occurs with alarming frequency, a major impediment to education is thirst and the long trek required to quench it.

The school day had already begun on a recent morning as a procession of small children on donkeys, school-age all, made their way over a sandy field, joining other youths gathered with their animals around deep holes in the ground.

French oil major Total has plugged a gas leak in southern Nigeria's Niger Delta region and no longer needs to drill an additional relief well to curb its flow, a spokesman said on Friday.

The leak occurred in March on a block that also contains crude oil in Rivers state, one of the three main states that make up the Niger Delta, a vast wetlands region in the southeast where Africa's biggest energy industry is based.

Block OML 58 also produced around 76,000 barrels per day of oil in 2004 and this increased in 2008, the company says. No oil was spilling from the leak.

A report on the quality of life for mothers around the world put Maldives in 45th place out of 80 developing countries.

The 13th Save the Children annual report, released on Tuesday, lists countries based on a range of UN and World Health Organization parameters such as life expectancy, maternity deaths, education, earnings, and maternity leave benefits.

The best country in the world overall to give birth and raise children in is Norway, followed by Iceland and Switzerland. The United States ranked 25th and the United Kingdom came in 10th.

The African nation of Niger has ousted Afghanistan as the worst place in the world to be a mother, largely due to hunger, according to an annual report out Tuesday by Save the Children.
In contrast, Norway is the best according to the group’s ‘Best and Worst Places to Be a Mom’ ranking which compares 165 countries in terms of maternal health, education, economic status and children’s health and nutrition.

The number of young children who die each day has plunged over the past two decades, new United Nations figures show, but the world is still lagging far behind in efforts to achieve its target for reducing child mortality.

Child mortality rates are dropping in every region of the world, including the area with the highest number of under-five fatalities, sub-Saharan Africa, where the rate of the decline has even accelerated in recent years.

Leading aid and development charity Oxfam said 36 per cent of Pakistanis were undernourished, listing Pakistan among the 21 nations of the world which were found to be undernourished according to an interactive map published on Wednesday.

Pakistan was adjudged to be more undernourished than Tanzania (35 per cent), Niger (28 per cent) and Yemen (32 per cent) where nearly every third person was feared to be malnourished. The map showed how poor communities across the world were being adversely affected by high and volatile food prices.

In ten years, the living conditions of the poor have been improving