A new group of innovative non-governmental organisations are springing up in the wake of disasters around the world, driven by complex data analysis and backed by telecom brands

Signing up refugees via mobile phone, Kakuma refugee camp, Kenya

When a massive earthquake hit Haiti in January 2010, the United Nations found that data collected through mobile telephones was crucial to delivering its relief programmes in the region.

It's the hard-working demographers of the U.N. who have counted the global population and have selected Oct. 31 as the date of the 7 billionth person. That makes sense because population is a major part of international development — and that's the business of the U.N. Bryan Walsh of TIME spoke with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in his office in New York City about global population, the challenges of development and the lingering threat of climate change.

Several Pakistani news outlets today are dissecting a troubling finding from the U.N. Children's Fund: the 63 cases of polio diagnosed in the country so far this year are nearly double the 36 detected during the same period last year. The highly contagious viral disease, which attacks the nervous system and can cause paralysis or even death, is most evident in the province of Balochistan and has now spread to other areas that haven't been infected for the past five years.

(Reuters) - Millions of children's lives and billions of dollars could be saved if vaccines were more widely available in 72 of the world's poorest countries, according to a series of studies published on Thursday.

In studies in the Health Affairs and The Lancet journals, public health experts and scientists projected that if 90 percent of children in those countries were immunized, more than $151 billion in treatment costs and lost productivity could be saved in 10 years, giving economic benefits of $231 billion.

CHICAGO, April 13 (Reuters) - More than 2.6 million pregnancies a year end in stillbirth, a tragedy which mostly hits women in poor countries and accounts for more deaths than AIDS and malaria combined, researchers said on Wednesday.

A series of studies published in the journal Lancet by researchers from the World Health Organization and some 50 organizations in 18 countries offered the first comprehensive look at the impact of the problem around the world.