Given its impressive track record over the last 20 years, Rwanda has rightly been considered a model for reducing poverty and hunger in Africa. Between 1990 and 2015, hunger was reduced by almost half. Yet leaders and researchers are still confronted with a puzzling fact: despite higher crop yields and increasing incomes, nutrition is not improving. For …
In 2003 I travelled to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, for the first time. Like most of the continent, Tanzania was staggering under the burden of a burgeoning AIDS epidemic. AIDS was still a death sentence. I met women with HIV whose babies were born with HIV, even though drugs existed that could prevent this. Coffin …
I recently visited farmers in Limuru, a town outside of Nairobi, Kenya, where I met Angella, a 35-year-old single mother of three school-age children who lost her husband in a car accident seven years ago. For many seasons, Angella planted seed recycled from the previous year’s crop. Her harvest was never large enough to feed …
NAIROBI – The announcement of the winners of this year’s Goldman Environmental Prize is an opportunity to celebrate activist leaders. But it is also a moment to recognize just how much courage their efforts (and those of a great many others) can demand. When my dear friend Berta Cáceres and I won the prize in 2015, Berta …
In mid-March of 2016, I was a new field epidemiologist working in the West African country of Guinea. The Ebola epidemic seemed to be over: We were just 11 days away from being Ebola-free for 90 days, which would mark the official end of the country’s epidemic. Then field coordinator Dr. Angelo Loua walked into our small …