When Halima Naiga was seven, she was told she had to leave school. Why? Because her parents did not want to waste money educating girls. When incomes are low, as they are in the rural area of Uganda where Halima is from, education for girls is one of the first things to be cut in…
Today, the United Nations Sustainable Development Summit opens in New York. More than 150 world leaders are expected to gather there to adopt the proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), an ambitious document meant to define the world’s development agenda for the next 15 years. With 17 goals and 169 individual targets, the SDGs are more…
The other day I saw a homeless man here in Washington, D.C. with a sign that read: “I bet you a dollar that you won’t stop to read this sign.” The message stuck with me because to me it encapsulated what I see as a serious development challenge across the world—our tendency to not address…
This blog was originally published by the SEEP Network, and is cross-posted with permission. There are approximately 500 million smallholder farms in the world providing up to 80 percent of food consumed in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Unfortunately, despite smallholder farmers’ substantial role in the world’s access to food resources, they consistently face constraints including…
Daily headlines highlight the urgent need for the international community to find a coherent shared approach to managing and mitigating conflict. In Syria alone — just one of the countries most affected by war in recent years — 74,000 people died in 2014 and nearly 250,000 have died in the last three years due to…
In the past few weeks, we’ve all seen the headlines as growing numbers of refugees flee the ongoing conflict in Syria. According to the armed conflicts database maintained by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, there are currently 42 active conflicts in the world, more than 12 million refugees, and approximately 180,000 people have been…
Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5, “achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls,” isn’t a new addition in the realm of development goals. It follows on the heels of Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 3, which sought to “promote gender equality and empower women.” However, while the MDG goal focused solely on equality in education,…
Jose Ignacio Noguera is the vice president of corporate affairs for the mining company Gran Colombia Gold. He is responsible for managing the company’s sustainability, public affairs, external and government affairs strategy. Chemonics partnered with Gran Colombia Gold through the USAID-funded BioREDD+ project to address the complex challenge of illegal mining operations in Antioquia, one of…
Over the past several years climate change has garnered increased attention around the globe, as everyone from farmers to politicians seek out ways to mitigate both the causes and effects of increased climate variability. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) reflect this increased attention in SDG 13, which calls for urgent action to combat climate change…
Success in the fashion industry, in any country, requires a delicate balance between artistic ability and keen business skills. As a designer, you need to not only understand what your market is and what customer you are targeting but what trends are emerging and how your personality will come out in your collections. The “toolkit”…
Insecurity of land tenure and property rights is cited as a precipitating, if not primary, cause of contemporary global poverty and inequality. Research from a range of sources including the World Bank, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, OECD, civil society organizations, and academic institutions show that strengthening land and property rights goes hand…
Ibrahim Osta is the chief of party for the Building Economic Sustainability Through Tourism (BEST) program in Jordan, which focuses on improving the country’s tourism sector and ensuring that Jordan has the skilled workforce needed to keep the sector competitive. The BEST program works at the intersection of tourism and economic development. Could you elaborate…