At the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, the theme was “Collaborative Innovation,” with leaders bringing new ideas to the table for solving the world’s problems.

Gordon Brown called for the IMF to become a “World Bank for the environmentas well as development.” “The IMF, the World Bank and the United Nations were built for the problems of the 1940s and can’t deal with the problems we have in 2008,” Brown said.

In a world where baldness gets more attention than Malaria, Microsoft chairman and co-founder Bill Gates has called for ‘’creative capitalism’’ as a new approach for businesses to help stamp out global poverty and diseases. Mayors and executives gathered in recognition of the role water plays in world crises, and began shaping a SlimCity Initiative to address urbanization.

Japan’s Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda announced a $10 billion “Cool Earth Partnership” program to combat global warming. He added that Japan will also be investing about US$ 30 billion in research and development in the environment and energy sectors over the next five years.

In recognition of the need to help impoverished countries become more self-reliant, especially in Africa, Fukuda said the international community will adopt the “self-reliance and mutual cooperation” principle, with development assistance going towards promoting self-help efforts.

The Forum has also adopted a set of ‘Guiding Principles’ for humanitarian relief; and announced a unique, pioneering example of collaboration between several companies and the humanitarian relief sector. The UN and three leading logistics and transport companies are joining forces to create “Logistics Emergency Teams” (LETs) to intervene for the first three to six weeks following natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods or storms.

“The future of humanitarian partnership is collaborative,” said Peter Bakker, TNT’s CEO and the initiator of the initiative. “This is the first time three industry leaders put competition aside to contribute their core competencies to the humanitarian community.”

With world leaders busily redefining problems as opportunities, tapping the power of innovative partnerships, and including a global set of stakeholders, 2008 could be the beginning of a whole wave of solutions which will have collateral benefits for all of us.

what happens everyday in our world .

While it is normal to expect high levels of hunger and poverty in a developing country, it may come as a surprise to observe a similar epidemic in one of the richest countries in the world. The Food Bank for New York City recently reported that nearly 20 percent of children in the city rely on free food to survive. According to statistics from Bread for the World, 13 million children went to bed hungry in the United States in 2004, the most recent year for which statistics are available. More than 1.4 billion people live in poverty so extreme that they can barely survive, and around 25,000 people die from hunger each day whilst a new billionaire is created every second day. The call for a global safety net has never been so urgent - and compels the international community to transform economic priorities and guarantee the universal securing of basic human needs. Children and Economic Growth While economic growth can be a powerful tool for lifting people out of poverty, increases in GDP often fail to trickle down to much of the population. Alternative measures of well-being are required to ensure issues such as inequality and redistribution are put on the development agenda, say Save the Children. 100 People Every Minute Pushed Into Poverty by the Economic Crisis Poor countries across the globe are struggling to respond to the global recession that continues to slash incomes, destroy jobs and has helped push the total number of hungry people in the world above 1 billion, writes Oxfam. Year of the Hungry: 1,000,000,000 Afflicted One billion people will go hungry around the globe next year for the first time in human history, as the international financial crisis deepens, according to the United Nations "This World Order Is Not Just Murderous, It Is Absurd" Fighting against the imbalance in the world, in his book the ‘Hatred of the West' Jean Ziegler calls for a new social contract based on global solidarity and dialogue between the South and the West.