Examining the Keys to Power
Along with all good Plan employees, the belief that education can lift children from a future of poverty to one of opportunity is one which I firmly hold. We should all know the facts; that a girl who makes it through both a relevant and quality primary and secondary education is: less likely to experience […]
Girl Power in the Pipeline
Meet Laxmi: an ambitious young woman from India, netball player, confident leader and now, aspiring lawyer. Just three years ago, the introduction to Laxmi would have been a bit different. Coming from an underserved community in Delhi, her chances to go beyond basic public primary school were slim. So, what changed? She enrolled in Goal […]
Sport as Strategy to Empower Adolescent Girls
Head, Education and Girls Programmes, Standard Chartered No single entity can address an international development challenge in isolation. Effective interventions require a suite of resources, networks, expertise, and experience, and no one institution has the human and financial capital required. The challenges girls and women face are no exception. Any sustainable, truly impactful effort to […]
Cambodia: Growing Momentum for Sanitation
By KC Koch, iDE WASH Communications Manager On a Sunday morning, rural villagers gather in the village meetinghouse. A respected member of the local commune committee calls for the group’s attention. She leads them in games and stimulates lively conversations about proper sanitation. People wave fans in the air decorated with colorful photographs and consult […]
Contribute to the Fight Against Ebola with Bitcoin
In times of global crisis, we often find that humanity demonstrates compassion, offering support in cash, time and expertise. Those on the frontlines fighting the Ebola outbreak in West Africa are our modern-day heroes, selflessly exposing themselves to potential danger in the throes of the fight. These heroes need financial support, and more importantly, they […]
Vegetable Seeds – Growth in Nutrition and the Economy
At the wholesale market in Arusha, Tanzania, it’s all about tomatoes. Everywhere you look, there are stacks of wooden crates piled high with the crimson orbs, ready to be packed onto trucks and driven off to the capital, Dar es Salaam, for distribution throughout the region. The thriving tomato trade is among the most visible […]
Ebola Perception Risks May Hurt Africa’s Economies
Nearly six months after the first reported case of Ebola was diagnosed in West Africa, the outbreak continues to dominate daily news headlines globally. The economic impacts of the virus, which continues to spread rapidly in the three worst affected countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, have already lopped several percentage points off of […]
Diamond Development Initiative on the Ebola Crisis
It is with grave concern that I share our perspective on the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Thankfully, none of our partners on the ground have been infected. However, their communities and their livelihoods are under siege. The Diamond Development Initiative (DDI) is currently engaged in projects in Sierra Leone, which are helping to reform […]
We Need to Talk About Toilets
You visit the toilet about six to eight times a day on average 2,500 times a year. This amounts to three years of your life spent sitting on a toilet. If you are lucky. If you are not one of the two and a half billion people in the world unable to access adequate sanitation. […]
Harnessing Markets to Enhance Access to Nutritious Food
Herbert Smorenburg, Senior Manager Netherlands Office, Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition The IFC estimates that the 4.5 billion people at the “base of the pyramid” (BoP) spend $2.3 trillion a year on food and beverages. Even farmers are net purchasers of foods, particularly during the lean season before the next crop is harvested. Yet, this […]
The Nutritional Value of Toilets
“Don’t ever, ever eat in the toilet!” When I grew up I imagined every mother in the world admonished her children with this warning. If you’ve grown up hearing this message, as so many children in middle and high income countries have, you simply cannot think of food and toilets in the same sentence without […]
Innovative Finance Partnerships
Meds and Food for Kids (MFK), a non-profit dedicated to saving children’s lives by fighting malnutrition in Haiti, had a problem. It saw an opportunity to produce high quality therapeutic foods locally and at a scale significant enough to reach thousands of children with this life-restoring product, but to do so it needed financial support […]
Partnerships for Good Growth: Improving Crop Efficiency
Vegetables and Specialty Crops, Syngenta We all know that, globally, our population is growing. To put it into perspective, we are adding over 200,000 people to our planet every day. The good news is that infant mortality is down to the lowest rate in history in many countries, and many people are living longer, fuller […]
Improving Access to Nutritious Food
Cargill The poor eat poorly. In the developing world and developed nations, in rural communities and urban centers, the world’s poor are disproportionately undernourished or unhealthily overweight. The global prevalence of malnutrition is a serious threat to human health and wellbeing. Its consequences are lasting and costly, whether in the form of stunting and other […]
How Do We Achieve Scale in Markets for Nutritious Food?
There is unprecedented interest in building value chains and market-based solutions to make nutritious foods more accessible to the people who need the most, and drive better nutrition. Efforts are spanning conventional sectorial divisions: agricultural development programs are introducing nutrition targets, national-level fortification programs are being scaled up and enterprises are developing specially-formulated supplementary foods […]
Agriculture and Nutrition: Feeding a Growing Population
It’s estimated that by 2050 the world’s population will reach nine billion people; all will need nutritious diets in order to live healthy and productive lives. Yet, despite the intrinsic relationship between the food we eat and the food we grow, the nutrition and agriculture sectors are still not working together closely enough. Indeed, since […]
Partnerships for Nutrition and Agricultural Development
Every night, 842 million women, children and men go to bed hungry. Every day 8,000 children die needlessly from conditions linked to under-nutrition. Globally, 2 billion people suffer from micronutrient malnutrition. These statistics are well known, but they bear repeating. The burden of under-nutrition is incalculable, and the ramifications for children are particularly severe. When […]
Building Healthier Supply Chains
Undernutrition is one of the greatest challenges facing the world today. More than two billion people around the world are deficient in key vitamins and minerals and it is responsible for 11 per cent of the total global disease burden. Because of its direct and indirect impacts, undernutrition is often considered the number one threat […]
Going Beyond Multinationals to Scale up Nutrition
When you think of companies getting involved in the worldwide struggle against undernutrition, which ones come to mind? Probably big. Probably multinational. Probably based in Europe or the United States. But there are companies breaking this mold, showing leadership in the fight against malnutrition. Indofood is a $5 billion-a-year Indonesian food manufacturing and distribution firm […]
Women’s and Children’s Health and the SDGs
By Next year, the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) will be replaced by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) — a set of even more ambitious targets for global development. In a bold attempt to create the healthiest generation of young women and children in the world, the new SDGs will require the near elimination of preventable […]