By Katherine Schroeder

“I feel reassured about having this baby,” said Nepalese woman Lalita in her fourth month of pregnancy. Several years ago, you would be hard pressed to find an expectant mother who felt this way.

For years, Nepal has been plagued with poor economic and living conditions. This is reflected in its high rate of maternal and infant mortality. On average, Nepalese women give birth to six children over their reproductive years, and complications are extremely common. Over the past four years, however, Devex reports that Nepal has taken several steps to reduce these risks, motivated primarily by the Millennial Development Goals set by the World Bank. Continue Reading

By Katherine Schroeder

Habitat for Humanity, a Global Washington member, has recently received the FedEx Award for Innovations in Disaster Preparedness to honor the work they have done in the earthquake zones of Tajikistan. Using cost effective supplies such as locally sourced timber, the organization has worked to build houses that will withstand earthquakes. In addition, the project has led to the establishment of new building codes, and citizens in eight communities throughout Tajikistan are now trained to build these houses.  Kip Scheidler, Senior Director for Global Disaster Response at Habitat for Humanity, stated, “We appreciate this recognition of our work in Tajikistan, where Habitat for Humanity has proven seismic-resistant construction [that] need not be costly and can be made available to low-income families.” The FedEx Award for Innovations in Disaster Preparedness was launched in 2013, and aims to recognize efforts to reduce community vulnerability to natural disasters.

By Mark Olmstead

A much overlooked casualty in the government shutdown debacle was foreign aid. How was it affected, and what are the future ramifications?

For the most part, foreign aid was left untouched by the government shutdown. As the New York Times explains, USAID functions off of a multi-year funding program, therefore it is not tied to yearly appropriations. So, all future contracts and grants made prior to October 1, 2013 should still be running and will be paid for. This is because, under the Obama and the previous Bush administration, development is listed as a security issue. All travel scheduled before the shutdown will go ahead as planned yet, during the shutdown, only emergency travel was authorized. Continue Reading

By Jeff Guderian

You could say I’ve been involved in neglected tropical diseases and public health since grade school. I was 6 years old when we moved to Quito, Ecuador, where my dad, a medical pathologist, was put in charge of doing mobile medical care for a local hospital. Using a medically equipped van, he and his crew would go to the rural areas of Ecuador to do public health. During the day they would see patients, and at night they’d show reel-to-reel Disney health videos in Spanish, followed by a gospel message by the local pastor.

I would accompany dad on these trips whenever I could.

Dad always took his camera with him to document the way disease presented itself on patients, and one time I remember sneaking downstairs to watch him review the slides, only to receive a warning not to look at them. Continue Reading

By Kathleen Braden

When a confirmed infectious disease pandemic breaks out, Seattle Pacific University’s emergency team swings into action, even if the outbreak is 7,000 miles away in Hong Kong. I participated in this type of campus plan when SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) began to move worldwide in 2003. Why was such a cautious response necessary?

The answer is that we know in today’s world, an infected person can travel around the globe in 36 hours. As real-time distance has diminished, global health has become … well, global. Even when someone is not directly impacted by an illness, the cost of poor health in lost labor productivity, social injustice, and political instability around the world affects all of us in this global economy. Continue Reading

By Mark Olmstead

This past Friday the Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), though in the running for the prize was 16-year old Pakistani Malala Yousafzai.

Malala is the youngest nominee for the Peace Prize, and has been working hard to promote girl’s education around the world. She received international acclaim in 2012 when the Taliban in Pakistan targeted her for her activism. One day on her way to school armed men stopped her school bus and shot her. Fortunately she survived, and is now thriving and using this tragedy to work even harder for the right to an education. She has become an international emblem for the struggle against oppression and giving girls around the world a voice. Continue Reading

By Sam Daley-Harris

Brinksmanship over the federal budget, the debt ceiling and the Affordable Care Act has offered an especially harsh backdrop to my recent conversations on reclaiming democracy.  Whenever an interviewer asks about my work to create the political will to end poverty or ensure a stable climate, I am always sensitive to the audience’s despair about making a difference on these issues and their deep cynicism about the political process. As a result, I constantly begin by describing my own journey from hopelessness to action.

When I started that journey more than 35 years ago I was a musician and, like most people, I was pretty ignorant about environmental issues and problems like hunger and poverty.  But the death of a friend in 1964 and the death of Robert Kennedy four years later got me to asking questions of purpose.  Why am I here?  What am I here to do?  Mark Twain wrote, “The two most important days of your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” Those two deaths put me on the quest to answer that “why?”

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By Landesa

GlobalWA member, Landesa, fully refreshed a new resource on land and natural resource rights in Africa: Focus on Land in Africa (FOLA). FOLA is an educational resource for development practitioners and policy makers that explores how land and natural resource rights affect, and are effected by, development in Africa. Through raising awareness of these issues, FOLA aims to elevate land and natural resource rights as an urgent priority for development in Africa. The following highlights specific examples of what elevating these rights can mean for people living in rural Africa.

In Rivercress County, Liberia, women are planting life trees—rubber and plantain—that will bring needed income and add value to their farms (Ali Kaba, Talking Land). Just one year ago, such investments seemed impossible.  But in the interim, the Liberian government developed a land policy that promises to grant secure land rights to rural people, and, today, change is underway. Continue Reading

Tim Hanstad, Landesa’s President and CEO, recently had a blog post entitled, “What We Can Learn from the Last Case of Polio” published in the Huffington Post on women and girls, land, and the interconnectedness of the global development sector.

To hear more about this topic, register to attend the GlobalWA screening of the film Girl Rising at Intiman Theater on the 17^th of November.  A Landesa representative will be seated on the panel after the film to answer questions and explore how land rights can help to positively affect women and girls in the developing world.

By Mark Olmstead

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has been highlighting the national news recently when the government shutdown over whether or not to fund it with the continuing resolution stalled in Congress.  In honor of the upcoming International Day of the Girl this October 11^th; GlobalWA would like to highlight many benefits that the Affordable Care Act provides to women in the United States.

In the past, insurance companies reserved the ability to raise premiums on women based on gender or a pre-existing condition.  More than half of women report delaying care for treatable medical conditions because of balancing finances of paying for treatment and normal cost of living expenses.  Under the ACA women can no longer be denied coverage, and places a cap on what insurance companies can charge women out of pocket, thus taking the burden off women on affording medical treatment.  If an insurance company does increase premiums they are required to submit justification as to why premiums have raised allowing consumer’s access to changes in their coverage. Continue Reading