Poverty & SDGs

Protecting and Managing the High Seas

By Daud Khan and Stephen Akester
On March 4 2023, the 193 members of the United Nations reached a major milestone. They agreed on a treaty to manage and protect the high seas– the marine areas that lie outside the 200 mile Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) of coastal states. The high seas are an essential part of the global ecosystem. They cover 50 percent of the Earth’s surface, produce half the oxygen we breathe, provide a home to 95 percent of the planet’s biosphere, are a critical sink for carbon dioxide, and help regulate the Earth’s temperature.

Championing Sustainability Despite Adversities in Asia & the Pacific

By Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana
As we reach the midpoint of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, it is an opportune moment to reflect on the Asia-Pacific region’s progress and accelerate efforts to achieve our goals.

Bottled Water Masks World’s Failure to Supply Safe Water for All, Can Slow Sustainable Development: UN

The rapidly-growing bottled water industry can undermine progress towards a key sustainable development goal: safe water for all, says a new United Nations report.

Health – It’s Time for Women to Lead the Sector

By Roopa Dhatt and Ebere Okereke
Women health workers are more than two thirds of the health workforce and represent 90% of the world’s frontline health workers, yet hold less than a quarter of senior leadership roles - a situation which is unfair and a significant risk for global health security.

Terrorism & its Impacts on Water Access in the Sahel

By Armand Houanye
Burkina Faso’s interim President Captain Ibrahim Traoré spoke late last year of the conflicts that are now blighting his country and much of his region. He described the situation in Burkina Faso as predictable given the endemic weaknesses in governance that he believes have led to the economic abandonment of many young people, particularly outside of urban areas.

Parliamentarians Pledge to Act on Grim Realities of Child Marriage, Gender-Based Violence

By Cecilia Russell
Child marriage, gender-based violence (GBV), sexuality education, religion, and tradition came under the spotlight during a conference, Arab and Asian Parliamentarians’ Meeting to Follow-Up on ICPD25 Commitments: Addressing Youth Empowerment and Gender-Based Violence, held in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Pandemic Accord Text Falls Short of Expectations

By Ashka Naik and Nicoletta Dentico
As countries recently gathered in Geneva for the fourth round of negotiations on the WHO proposed pandemic treaty or accord, close examination of the current text by civil society experts has revealed significant gaps.

Vanuatu Twin Cyclones Underscore the Pacific’s Vulnerability to Compounding Climate-Disaster Risks

By Sanjay Srivastava and Sudip Ranjan Basu
Two destructive Category 4 tropical cyclones, Judy and Kevin, and an earthquake of 6.5 magnitude impacted over 80 per cent of the Vanuatu population from 1 to 3 March 2023. To address this emergency situation, the UN, along with Pacific member States have deployed personnel on the ground to coordinate humanitarian assistance and prepare post-disaster damage assessment.

Breaking Barriers: Why Free & Public Education Should be Every Woman’s Right

By Dana Abed
This month, government and civil society organization representatives gathered in New York for the United Nations’ 67th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) to discuss technology as a tool to facilitate access to education for women and girls.

Breaking the Link between ‘Polycrisis’ and Poverty

By Vidya Diwakar
This year marks the halfway point— eight years in and eight years out— of the UN Sustainable Development Goals to end poverty and reduce inequalities.

The Caribbean’s Role in the Transformation of Agri-Food Systems

By Mario Lubetkin
The global food security crisis reveals an increase in the undernourishment prevalence, reaching higher than in 2015, when countries first agreed to eradicate hunger by 2030 as one of the SDG targets. In the Caribbean, between 2014 and 2021, hunger increased by 2.3 percentage points, affecting 16.4 percent of its population by 2021. Moreover, the Caribbean is a net importer of almost all the main food groups such as cereals, dairy products, fruits and vegetables (except the Dominican Republic), meat and vegetable oils.

International Women’s Day, 2023
Women and Girls: Innovation and Higher Education

By Giulia Ribeiro Barao and Bosen Lily Liu
In September 2020, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action for women’s rights celebrated its 25th anniversary. It was, however, a bittersweet commemoration, mixing joy for the progress in gender equality achieved since 1995, and the stark realization about the multidimensional gaps awaiting tackling and the new divides brought by the social consequences of COVID-19.

International Women’s Day, 2023
Digital Inclusion is Vital for Strengthening Women’s Rights in Africa

By S. Mona Sinha
The internet has a pivotal role to play in empowering women and girls across Africa, but preexisting forms of gender discrimination and marginalization are underpinning a widening digital gender divide.

International Women’s Day, 2023
The Power of Technology—& the Increased Exclusion, Inequalities & Gender Discrimination

By Achim Steiner
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the tremendous power of technology and innovation has become clear to the world. However, it has also increased exclusion, discrimination, and inequalities -- especially for women and girls.

International Women’s Day, 2023
Empower Her

By Yasmine Sherif
On International Women’s Day, let us remind ourselves of the power of education. We have all benefited from an education that less than a century ago was not a given for a girl and which still remains a distant utopia for millions of young girls.

Why Do 800 Mothers a Day – 1 Every 2 Minutes– Die from Preventable Causes?

By Baher Kamal
The answer is that there are alarming setbacks for maternal health care and, in many cases, even a total lack of maternity services, which threaten to further raise the number of these tragic preventable deaths one million or more a year by 2030.

Our AIDS Response Must Acknowledge and Bridge Gendered Digital Inequalities

By Anne Githuku-Shongwe and Eva Kiwango
Recent crises have pushed the gender inequality gap even wider and new technology has brought new threats to women’s autonomy and safety. This year’s International Women's Day celebrated under the theme “DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality” is an opportunity to strengthen efforts to uplift and empower women and girls’ digital participation to ultimately improve their lives.

International Women’s Day, 2023
Promoting Gender Equality and Closing the Digital Divide

By Mercy Erhi Makpor
The accelerating pace of digitalization has ushered humanity into a whole different era of information and communication. Today, digitalization permeates every aspect of our lives, socio-economically and politically.

International Women’s Day, 2023
Her Land, Her Rights: Advancing Gender Equality & Land Restoration Goals

By Andrea Meza
When it comes to land, gender inequalities are pervasive. Today, nearly half of the global agricultural workforce is female – yet less than one in five landholders worldwide are women 1.  

International Women’s Day, 2023
To Strengthen Women’s Resilience to Disasters, Make Wealthiest Pay Their Fair Share

By Magdalena Sepúlveda
She will be called Aya. This is the name that nurses gave to the infant baby pulled from the rubble of a five-story building in Jinderis, northern Syria. A miracle. Beside her, the rescuers found her mother, dead.

International Women’s Day, 2023
A New Global Architecture to Defend & Promote Rights of Women & Girls

By Simone Galimberti
If you want to have a good reading on women and young girls’ activism, there is a high chance that you have missed an incredibly interesting report.
Next Page »