Blog

September 28, 2016 | Post

What does poverty mean for young people in the developing world? For far too many girls it means adolescent sexual activity—often transactional—followed by pregnancy and early marriage. An estimated 15 million girls are married before their 18th birthdays each year—that’s 28 girls every minute. A recent study conducted by the…...

July 21, 2016 | Post

More than 225 million women in the developing world live with an unmet need for contraceptives. A new report by the Guttmacher Institute has some answers as to why, and they might surprise you. The Demographic and Health Survey asked women in 52 countries to specify all of the reasons…...

February 20, 2015 | Post

What do poverty elimination, gender equality, and educational and health equity have in common? None of them can be fully realized until everyone around the world has the ability to plan their pregnancies. In other words, social justice requires universal access to family planning. And what better time to reflect…...

January 28, 2015 | Post

As world population continues to grow, an increasing number of people are moving to cities in hope of securing better living conditions, higher quality educations and greater economic opportunities. For the first time in human history, half of the world’s population lived in towns and cities in 2008. Africa is…...

January 28, 2015 | Post

In 2011, drought struck the Horn of Africa, sparking widespread food shortages. An estimated 13 million people in Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya faced persistent hunger, which killed between 50,000 and 100,000 people—half of whom were children under five. According to UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, Valerie Amos, it was East Africa’s…...

January 27, 2015 | Post

Suburban sprawl, generally speaking, is the low-density expansion of cities over a wide geographical area, usually into undeveloped land. Single-use zoning, whereby residential and commercial areas are developed separately and without effort to make them accessible to each other is another characteristic of sprawling regions. Wild habitats are destroyed as…...

January 27, 2015 | Post

“The [Millennium Ecosystem] assessment concluded that human activity has disrupted natural ecosystems more extensively in the past 50 years than in the entire course of human history, as large areas on all continents have been converted to farmland, forests have been felled for timber and to make way for pasture…...

November 1, 2011 | Post

On October 31, 2011, according to demographers at the UN Population Division, the earth’s human population crossed the 7 billion mark. It took only 12 years for the global population to increase from 6 billion in 1999—and only 12 years before that to increase from 5 billion. The UN Population…...