Blog
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 August 26, 2019
by Olga Vnodchenko
SIF brings the harsh reality of Central America to the city of Seattle through a photo exhibit and a conversation with independent journalists in Central America to reflect on the migration crisis in the region.
Fred Ramos, El Faro
You are Salvadoran. Your name is Dani, you are 13 years old and your life is in danger. The MS-13 gang accuses you of being an informant for Barrio 18, its rival gang. Both criminal groups were born in the United States 30 years before your time. Now they control your country. You are innocent but you leave. Maybe there are two things that are worth more in the North: the dollar and your life.
You are Nicaraguan. Your name is Leslie, but your nickname is Managua, like the capital of the country where you no longer live. You are with your wife and your daughter in a migrant center in Costa Rica. You had to flee for protesting in the barricades against the repression of Daniel Ortega, a president who no longer represents you. You were targeted by a brutal paramilitary operation. You do not live in your country because political dissidence kills. Perhaps it’s best to never return. Continue Reading
Posted on August 16, 2019
Dr. Sue Desmond-Hellmann of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Visits Hutch Researchers in Kampala
By Dr. Gary Gilliland
Long before I became president and director of Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, I learned all-too-well the link between infectious disease and cancer.
As a medical student at the University of California, San Francisco during the 1980s, I witnessed the early days of the AIDS epidemic. Young men with HIV were dying in that city by the thousands of unusual opportunistic infections such as pneumocystis pneumonia and rare cancers such as Kaposi sarcoma.
Read more: https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2019/08/in-uganda-treating-twin-threats-hiv-cancer.html
Posted on August 5, 2019
By Anna Pickett and Josué Torres
Introduction
In the context of global development, disability is too often ignored or rendered invisible. Organizations that work to promote equity often times don’t support disabled populations because disability is not one of their focus areas, or because they have other priorities. But the truth of the matter is, if an organization works on human rights without including people with disabilities, they are only really promoting the rights of some humans.
With this work, applying an intersectional approach allows for a deeper and more nuanced understanding of how social identities and conditions interact within a society. As a result, we gain a broader picture of human diversity. In discussing inclusion in global development and improving the standards for living a life of dignity, we must understand the concept of intersectionality and have the awareness that disability is a human condition that is present in a significant percentage of the global population. According to the World Bank, one billion people, or 15% of the world’s population, experience some form of disability. Continue Reading