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Contributor Guidelines
Submitting guest blogs is open to Global Washington’s members of the Atlas level and above. We value a diversity of opinions on a broad range of subjects of interest to the global health and development community.
Blog article submissions should be 500-1500 words. Photos, graphs, videos, and other art that supports the main themes are strongly encouraged.
You may not be the best writer, and that’s okay. We can help you shape and edit your contribution. The most important thing is that it furthers an important conversation in your field, and that it is relatively jargon-free. Anyone without a background in global development should still be able to engage with your ideas.
If you include statistics or reference current research, please hyperlink your sources in the text, wherever possible.
Have an idea of what you’d like to write about? Let’s continue the conversation! Email comms@globalWA.org and put “Blog Idea” in the subject line.
Posted on May 18, 2022
By David Albert, Olympia Friends Meeting and co-founder, Friendly Water for the World
(From Western Friend, April 2022, reposted with permission)
Climate change is here. Now. It is not a matter of an occasional snowstorm, hurricane, tornado, or short heat wave. In other parts of the globe, it is now part of the daily struggle for existence.
Friendly Water for the World, a Quaker-founded organization, partners with communities, schools, and families in parts of subSaharan Africa and India. We have seen what is happening at close hand. In central Tanzania, among the Maasai, women, who are used to walking for water every day, leaving at 3 a.m. and returning at noon, now walk as much as 13 hours each night, leaving at 11 p.m., with their daughters taken out of school for this purpose. Each and every night. In western Kenya, a Friends school reports that half of the children are leaving classes to walk for water. In some places, while rainfall hasn’t diminished, it has been concentrated into shorter, more intense periods leading to serious flooding. At the same time, dry periods are becoming longer and longer, leading to crop failures. In Chennai, in southern India, the entire city of more than seven million ran out of water for several months. People couldn’t take showers for weeks; clothes couldn’t be washed; factories shut down; restaurants closed because they couldn’t supply water to their patrons. People left for the countryside, where there was also little water to be found. Continue Reading
Posted on May 14, 2022
Pangea welcomes Green Community Volunteers (GCV) as one of our new partners in Southeast Asia. This organization was founded in 2009, and operates in the Xiangkhouang Province, northeast of Laos. GCV is the only local group in Laos that has been founded and run by indigenous women, and it seeks to empower communities on environmental issues such as biodiversity preservation through art and cultural exchanges. Earth Rights International first introduced Pangea to the work of GCV.
Continue Reading
Posted on April 29, 2022
Women and local communities will be first to face climate change and other emerging risks. Let’s engage and support them as the central actors they are.
From the Tostan team
Two Senegalese women dancing in celebration. Photo: Tostan.
As April comes to a close, many people are discussing Earth Day with a renewed sense of urgency given the bleak news on climate change and realization that rapid action is needed.
This offers an important moment to consider the challenges women, girls, and communities will face as climate change accelerates. These challenges join many others already confronting them. Yet this need not be only a negative story: Imagine the potential if women and girls could contribute their very best to develop and elevate solutions for positive change—in climate change and the other issues they face. Continue Reading