The government is aiming to work more closely with the private sector to convince companies to donate money to government-funded overseas assistance programs in the wake of a continuous reduction of the budget, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) said yesterday.
The government is spending less on official development assistance (ODA), which is defined as government aid designed to promote the economic development and welfare of developing nations, Department of International Cooperation and Economic Affairs Director-General Phoebe Yeh (葉非比) said.
A long-standing UN target is that developed nations should devote 0.7 percent of their gross national income to ODA, but Taiwan only spent US$300 million on ODA last year, about 0.051 percent of gross national income compared with 0.28 percent for Japan and 0.15 percent for South Korea, Yeh said.
Taiwan only spent 0.056 percent on ODA in 2017, she added.
She attributed to the significant drop in ODA to a US$6.24 million decrease in the budget allocated to foreign aid.
Therefore, TaiwanICDF, a ministry-funded agency that runs the nation’s foreign aid programs, has visited a number of local enterprises to persuade them to join ICDF-initiated foreign aid projects, she said.
Through technical cooperation, the government is hoping that the private sector can see the business potential in the foreign aid projects, mostly in the nation’s diplomatic allies in Latin America and Africa, she added.
TaiwanICDF deputy secretary-genberal Shyy Lih-jiun (史力軍) said the agency is also working hand-in-hand with international non-governmental organizations to launch joint projects to save government funds.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching