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 October 22, 2024
By Chloe Pan, Global Communities
Photo: Global Communities
While many traditional approaches to improving food security outcomes focus on addressing farmers’ agricultural knowledge and access to productive resources, they may not always use a gender lens to understand the different needs, challenges and capabilities of women farmers. As climate change continues to threaten global food security, it’s crucial to use an inclusive approach to programming that will close the gender gap in agricultural productivity and address the barriers faced by those who are most vulnerable.
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Posted on October 21, 2024
By Karl Weyrauch, Founder, Pygmy Survival Alliance
Bwiza Hillside 2009. Photo: K. Weyrauch
To most people in Rwanda, Bwiza Village was a place unseen, and to the outside world, it was less than that. It was both unseen, unheard of, and mostly unimaginable. Yet, the name “Bwiza” in Kinyarwanda, the national language of Rwanda, translates as “something good” and a place named “Bwiza” would essentially mean “a good place”. Clinging to the eastern slope of an unnamed hillside in Gasabo District, in the eastern-most part of the city of Kigali, Bwiza in 2009, was home to about 30 Batwa families who lived in a couple dozen stick and thatch huts scattered like buckshot across two ravines splitting the ridge like cracks in a loaf of crusty peasant bread.
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Posted on October 16, 2024
By Joel Putnam, Global Partnerships
Photo: Nilus
Global Partnerships is a GlobalWA member and a nonprofit impact-first investment fund manager dedicated to expanding opportunity for people living in poverty. We’re sharing their most-recently published Impact Brief below:
The Challenge
The number of people facing hunger has been rising for nearly a decade. Close to 30 percent of the global population now faces moderate to severe food insecurity, with households living in poverty or conflict zones at especially high risk.[1]
There are two key factors constraining access to healthy food: availability and affordability.
- Availability challenges often appear in two forms, particularly in urban areas: food deserts, where there are few or no places to buy food; and food swamps, where stores only sell unhealthy junk food.
- Affordability encompasses the absolute cost of food and the cost of a healthy diet relative to household income. In Latin America and the Caribbean, approximately 23 percent of the population cannot afford a healthy diet, and in sub-Saharan Africa that rate rises to a staggering 84 percent.[2]
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