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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 February 8, 2021
By Alberto Solano, Guillermo Jiménez, and Sierra Golden
Hipólito ‘Polo’ Chavarria of San José, Nicaragua, shows off coffee beans he grew using more environmentally friendly farming practices. Photo courtesy of Agros International
Travel writer and documentarian Rick Steves calls climate change, conflict, and corruption “the three Cs of extreme poverty.” Agros has long tackled conflict and corruption as causes of poverty by giving marginalized families in rural Latin America the opportunity to own land and transform themselves from day laborers into successful agribusiness owners. In 2020 we added a climate smart agriculture program to our work as a top new initiative. Continue Reading
Posted on November 30, 2020
By Irit Tamir, Director of Oxfam America’s Private Sector Department
An apparel worker in Dhaka wears a face covering and maintains social distance from other workers as garment factories reopened amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Photo: UN Women/Fahad Abdullah Kaizer via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
COVID-19 has laid bare the deep inequalities our economic model has fostered and thus is a major threat in achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG 10 (reducing inequalities). Business has a role to play in achieving SDG 10—but a recent Oxfam report highlights how big corporations are exacerbating rather than reducing inequality.
While the global pandemic saw devastating jobs losses of 400 million, nearly have a billion people are expected to be further pushed into poverty. But not everyone is losing out – billionaires have seen their incomes rise as shares in big corporations saw their profits jump. Power, Profits and the Pandemic: From corporate extraction for the few to an economy that works for all found five ways in which corporations are exacerbating inequality.
Continue reading this article on our Goalmakers Blog.
Posted on September 4, 2020
By Zama Neff
Children in a favela in Rio de Janeiro watch as a volunteer disinfects public areas during the Covid-19 pandemic, Brazil, April 20, 2020. © 2020 by Mauro Pimental/AFP via Getty Images
“It does not make me happy that my children are no longer going to school,” the mother of two preschool-age children in North Kivu, a conflict-affected region in the Democratic Republic of Congo, told us. “Years don’t wait for them. They have already lost a lot. . . . What will become of our uneducated children?”
Children around the world face an unprecedented threat to their human rights. Pandemic-related school closures have affected 1.5 billion students, placing children at immediate risk of labor exploitation, hunger, recruitment into armed groups, and, especially for girls, child marriage, and sexual violence. Two decades of gains in reducing child labor and increasing school enrollment are under threat. Continue Reading