Each year, hundreds of thousands of graduates join a growing pool of unemployed and often unemployable young men and women in Nigeria. It is the greatest challenge of our era: creating jobs for the largest segment of our population. We know that the youth make up 65 percent of Africa’s population. What we, as a society, often …
After years of diplomatic wrangling, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have become gospel for next 15 years. There’s no doubting their high ambition, with 17 main goals and no fewer than 169 subsidiary targets. But these lofty aims seem little more than a dream unless we answer one fundamental question: Where’s the money coming from? Financing the …
Mana Maya* went into labor just before dawn in a small Nepali mountain village in the Himalayas. Alone at home with her mother-in-law and three small children, Mana Maya gave birth to a baby girl before complications set in. Her husband, a migrant worker, was not there when she began to bleed heavily. It was …
When my sister-in-law Angelina was six months pregnant, she went to a health facility for a routine antenatal care visit. This was not an easy thing to do, however. She lives in rural Kenya and in order to reach the facility situated 15 kilometres away, she sold her pig. With this money she was able …
FREETOWN, SIERRA LEONE – I was a young medical officer working at the Emergency Unit of the Ola During Children’s Hospital in Sierra Leone when I advised the mother of a child with severe malaria to tell a blatant lie. Her daughter Mariama needed a life-saving blood transfusion. But her mother had no money to …