28 September 2007 – UNDP and IPS are please to announce the results of the first “Latin America and the Millennium Development Goals” Journalism Award. The winners were selected among 466 submissions by an international jury of five prominent personalities from the region’s cultural and communications fields.

The award seeks to encourage greater awareness by regional communications media of the significant challenges associated with the Millennium Development Goals and how they can be resolved. As Mario Lubetkin, IPS Director General and member of the jury says, “More than stories with bureaucratic data or percentages of improvement in one Goal or another, we are thinking about good reporting and articles that help the public to understand the gravity of the problems we have before us”.

The series “Working Children”, written by a team led by Marcela Turati, reporter of the Mexican newspaper Excelsior, won the first prize of the contest, worth $5,000. The series takes a close look at the life and death of hundreds of Mexican children forced to work as farm labourers in precarious and sometimes fatal conditions.

The second prize, worth US$2,500, was awarded to Bruna Cabral de Vasconcelos and her team for the series of articles about health and gender entitled “Faces of Maternity”, published by the newspaper Jornal do Commercio from Brasil. The third prize was shared by Z