On Friday, Julia touched upon one of my favourite subjects: Community Health Workers. I am a strong advocate of her position for paying CHWs – and for reasons that ironically have to do with lowering costs. For the last couple weeks, I’ve been focusing on the financing of healthcare and advocating for new mechanisms to […]
It was 25 years ago today that the Number 4 reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic exploded. The first the world learned of it was the following day when radiation detectors in Sweden went berserk. The heroics of the “liquidators,” many of whom died from radiation sickness in […]
Approximately half of the world’s population is at risk from malaria, according to the World Health Organization, but the vast majority of malaria cases and malaria-related deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa. Among officially recorded cases from 2009, Uganda and Kenya had the highest numbers, but WHO estimates that more than 90% of the world’s malaria […]
Last month BBC New Magazine ran a curious story (here) about the US State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP), calling it “a little-known scheme run by the US State Department [that] has demonstrated an uncanny capacity to pinpoint these leaders-in-waiting.” Despite the BBC’s assertion, the IVLP is quite well-known and highly regarded. The State […]
There is an important series well underway at the Vancouver Observer: “The Big Grab.” It’s about how the tar sands industry is forcing choices on Canadians that they would not otherwise have to make in the absence of all the activity in Alberta. What’s particularly important about this series, it seems to me, is that […]
Southeast Asia is a hub for human trafficking. Too often, young girls are lured by traffickers through promises of well paying jobs in the cities. If you have read Half the Sky, by Nicholas Kristof and his wife Sheryl Wudunn, you will already be aware of the horrors endured by women and girls caught in the web of modern […]
As Easter weekend arrives, the World Food Programme (WFP) reminded the public of the effect of hunger on children. Citing how 20 million children worldwide could be fed for two years by the $2.3 billion spent on the annual Easter candy sales in the U.S. and UK, WFP urged people to donate the amount of […]
As I’ve written of Passover and Chanukah, Easter too is, ultimately, a story about the oppressed becoming the oppressors. One can interpret the Gospels to mean that Jesus advocated violence. After all, he did say “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34), though many disagree on the meaning of the […]
President Yoweri Museveni’s government in Uganda has cracked down on the latest “Walk to Work” day organized by his political rivals. This campaign is designed to protest rising fuel and food prices, putting food purchases out of reach of many of Uganda’s urban poor. Drought conditions in eastern Africa have driven up food prices and […]
The state-owned Myanmar Oil and Gas Company [MOGC] is going to sign deals with firms from China, Singapore and South Korea to explore three new areas for energy, according to the state-run media. Reuters reported that a deal is in the works with “North Petro-Chem Corporation Limited of China for exploration and production of oil […]
To ameliorate the coordination of food security during humanitarian crises, food security organizations and humanitarian aid NGOs have created the global Food Security Cluster (gFSC). Led by the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), World Food Program (WFP) and the International Committee for the Red Cross, gFSC is intended to be “‘…a powerful tool to […]
Greetings from Brodnica, Poland. A quick thanks to my partner in blog, Jackie Miller, who is helping keep the flame alive while I attempt to have a bit of a holiday. I managed to pick up a signal from the Polish countryside and reviewed the latest goings-on in the world. Here, with thanks to Jon […]
Popular from Press
