Inter Press Service (IPS) is sending a team of reporters from Africa and South Asia to report on the 4th High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea, and the Global Civil Society Forum that precedes it. The team will produce daily features and analysis for an IPS TerraViva online site in English and Spanish and in several Asian languages. Selected reports will feature in IPS’s global news service.

Follow the team’s coverage in real time on Twitter at @ipsnews and connect with IPS news on Facebook.

IPS reporting will reflect the agency’s focus on the South and the emergence of South-South co-operation as a powerful dimension of the aid effectiveness debate. Civil society, participating as full partners in the HLF4, and the gender perspective, will be prominent in the reporting.

The Busan TerraViva site has a useful archive that looks back to IPS coverage of previous HLFs and other international financing for development meetings. Finally, the coverage from South Korea is linked out to the concurrent negotiations in South Africa about climate change, where IPS has an African-led reporting team preparing a Durban TerraViva.

Mario Osava, IPS senior correspondent in Brazil,  has been reporting for many years about the country’s development projects, their effect in communities, on the environment and for the economy.

Mott Foundation describes Osava’s recent work in the story Brazil’s development: Is it sustainable for people and planet?

More stories by Osava are available at “Letter from Brazil“.

Follow Osava on twitter at @MarioOsava.

IPS will be reporting from the Global Microcredit Summit (Valladolid, Spain – 14-17 November, 2011), the world’s largest microfinance gathering which assembles a full range of stakeholders including practitioners, advocates, investors, UN agencies, donors, domestic government agencies, and many more.

IPS correspondents will provide special daily coverage from the Summit, in English and Spanish, beginning Monday, Nov. 14.

Articles can be found on the IPS mini-sites focused on micro-finance:

- Microfinance: Can Micro Loans Make a Macro Difference? (English)

- Microfinanzas: Microcréditos con macro resultados (Spanish)

IPS, the Secretariat of Information and Communication for Development of Paraguay (SICOM), the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) are organizing an international seminar on “Public Media and Society: the Global Experience and the Latin American Path”, on 26 October 2011, in Asuncion, Paraguay. Read more »

IPS director general Mario Lubetkin, Claudia Antunes, Editor, Folha de S. Paulo and GCIS deputy CEO Vusi Mona discuss how to prmomote the IBSA story. Photo: IPS/Zukiswa Zimela

IPS partnered with the South African National Editors Forum (SANEF) to bring together Indian, Brazilian and South African media leaders to discuss issues of mutual concern ahead of the IBSA Summit in Pretoria, South Africa in October.

About 40 editors, media stakeholders and observers attended the IBSA Editors Forum on Monday, October 17, 2011 in Johannesburg, South Africa, which was held with the support of the Government Communication and Information Services (GCIS) of South Africa and the World Bank. Read more »