• Health and Population

     

    A Traditional Chief Slashes Maternal Deaths in Malawi

    by  • April 18, 2013 • Africa, Health and Population, Women's Issues • 1 Comment

    Joyce Banda and Chief Kwataine of Malawi

    The heroes of safe motherhood campaigns around the world are not always women or large global aid organizations working for their interests. In a district of central Malawi, a small, very poor southern African country, Kwataine, a hereditary chief in a rural area who goes by one name, has almost single-handedly made deaths in pregnancy [...]

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    Signals of Greater Times Buoy Developing Nations

    by  • March 13, 2013 • Africa, Asia, Development, Health and Population, Millennium Goals, Special Report • 6 Comments

    A displaced person in Mali.

    For the developing world, the news in the 2013 United Nations Human Development Report is almost all good. (More on that “almost” later.) The title of the report, The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World, sets the tone. New players with global clout, increased South-South trade and investment, strengthening regional institutions [...]

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    Population Trends Disrupt Old Ideas in the Global North and South

    by  • February 5, 2013 • Development, Health and Population, Women's Issues • 1 Comment

    Refugees in Burkina Faso

    RIO GRANDE, Puerto Rico — The line used to be clearer between rich and poorer nations when discussions turned to a country’s ideal population size. In the industrial global north and the tiger economies of East Asia, family sizes shrank steadily over decades and economies grew. Small was good. In poorer countries, fertility often remained [...]

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    WORLDVIEWS  

    Dodging International Migration at the United Nations

    by  • January 29, 2013 • Health and Population, WORLDVIEWS • 1 Comment

    Filipino laborers

    Although the United Nations has not shied away from convening global conferences on aging, children, environment, population, trade, human settlements and women in the last decades, it has never held a conference on international migration. This lapse contrasts sharply with the fact that international migration has risen to the top of political agendas at all [...]

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    Philippines Defies Church, Giving Contraception to the Poor

    by  • January 2, 2013 • Asia, Health and Population, Women's Issues • 3 Comments

    Filipino in jeepney in Manila

    It took a committed president of the Philippines, Benigno Aquino III, and a Filipino Congress concerned about rising maternal mortality and continuing population growth amid widespread poverty, to overcome strong opposition from the Roman Catholic church and make contraception freely accessible to millions of poor women beginning in 2013. The adoption in mid-December of a [...]

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    UN and US Congress Act to Curtail Female Cutting Globally

    by  • December 23, 2012 • Africa, General Assembly, Health and Population, Human Rights, Middle East, Women's Issues • 2 Comments

    Young girls in Sierra Leone about to be circumcised

    Only four days before Christmas, when many minds were fixated on the year-end holidays, two important steps were taken almost unnoticed to combat female genital mutilation globally, raising hopes that millions of girls might be spared the excruciatingly painful and harmful yet persistent practice. In what Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called “historic” UN action, the General [...]

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