New Security Broadcast

“You cannot separate water and health,” says Doris Kaberia in this week’s Water Stories podcast. “People need safe drinking water for them to be healthy.” Kaberia works with Millennium Water Alliance, a coalition of international NGOs working on water sanitation and hygiene around the world, where she manages a Kenyan water program. RAPID (Resilient Arid Lands Partnership for Integrated Developmen...

We realized “there was a need for a toolkit on water,” says Sandra Ruckstuhl in this week’s Water Stories podcast, “with a focus of conflict and conflict mitigation, but also peacebuilding.” Ruckstuhl, a consultant for the World Bank who has researched water programs in Yemen and the Middle East, helped the Wilson Center produce USAID’s Water and Conflict toolkit, which documents examples of succe...

“Countries—even countries that don’t like each other much—have, and continue to have, conversations over water resources, even when they won’t about other issues,” says Aaron Wolf, Director of Water Conflict Management and Transformation at Oregon State University, in this week’s Water Stories podcast. Wolf’s research shows that water stress—instead of spurring wars between countries—can actually...

“We need to mainstream young people into the decision-making process,” said Senator Nikoli Edwards, age 25, of Trinidad and Tobago at a recent Wilson Center event on engaging youth to protect their sexual and reproductive health and rights. “Where it’s not a matter of, ‘let’s bring a young person into the room as an afterthought,’ but it should be written that a young person has to be a part of th...

“Even in a weak system without a quality improvement structure, it is possible to support district managers and facility providers to measure and improve quality care,” said Eliane Razafimandimby, Chief of Party of USAID’s flagship Maternal and Child Survival Program (MCSP) in Madagascar, at a recent Wilson Center event on improving the quality of reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child healthc...

“A lot of the advocacy of family planning has been built around establishing a long list of the many ways in which family planning can be relevant” to other development goals, says Parfait Eloundou-Enyegue of Cornell University in our latest Friday Podcast. While comprehensive accounts of the ways family planning access benefits communities, these “laundry lists” are not “clear, synthetic, or inte...

Healthy Women, Healthy Economies is a global initiative that aims to unleash the “economic power of women by bringing governments, private sector, and other civil sector actors together to improve women’s health,” says Jocelyn Ulrich of EMD Serono, the U.S. branch of Merck KGaA, Darmstad, Germany, in our Friday Podcast. Providing for women’s health needs enables them to “join, thrive, and rise” in...

Africare’s work has been built on a “strong belief that community mobilization and local capacity building and innovation are the cornerstones of successful development, and that, for us, includes resilience,” says Franklin Moore, Chief of Programs for Africare, in a podcast from a recent Wilson Center event. “Community engagement, capacity building, and looking at locally driven behavior and soci...

“This is a woman who did exactly what she was supposed to do; she did exactly what we encourage pregnant women to do,” said Amy Dempsey of the Population Council at a recent Wilson Center event on World Preeclampsia Day. The Ethiopian woman was suffering from preeclampsia—a preventable condition—but like many pregnant women in low- and middle-income countries, she did not receive the treatment nee...

“How do our interventions provide an opportunity to really work at some of the core drivers of instability or lack of resilience?” said Larry Cooley from Management Systems International at a recent Wilson Center event on scaling up reproductive, maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health interventions. In fragile settings—countries in conflict or crisis—scaling up healthcare is increasingly...

“Climate is unquestionably linked to armed conflict,” says Halvard Buhaug, Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, in the latest Wilson Center podcast. “If we produce a map of the world with locations of ongoing and recently entered armed conflicts, and we superimpose on that map different climate zones or climatic regions, we would very easily see a distinct clustering pattern of...

“As many as 865 million of our mothers, daughters, [and] sisters across the globe are not reaching their full potential to contribute to their national economies,” said Dr. Belén Garijo, CEO for healthcare and executive board member of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, at a recent Wilson Center event. The act of caregiving, and the physical and mental health impacts that accompany it, often dispropo...

“We need to think differently about how we invest in our country programs, and what outcomes we are interested in,” said Dr. Koki Agarwal, director of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)’s flagship Maternal and Child Survival Program (MCSP) and a Vice President with Jhpeigo, at a recent Wilson Center event. USAID’s “Acting on the Call” report recommended 29 evidence-based materna...

Every day, 7,100 babies are stillborn. A tragic, complicated problem, stillbirth—which the WHO defines as a baby born with no signs of life at or after 28 weeks' gestation—remains difficult to control and to assess. Some hospitals hide data on stillbirth, due to the shame and stigma associated with it. However, as White Ribbon Alliance CEO Betsy McCallon said at a recent Wilson Center event markin...

“Women still die…and they die preventable deaths,” said Address Malata, vice chancellor of the Malawi University of Science and Technology, at a recent Wilson Center event honoring the 30th anniversary of the Safe Motherhood Initiative. Malata—a midwife and the former vice president of the International Confederation of Midwives—told the heart-wrenching story of a pregnant woman who, like so many...

Peter Yeboah, Executive Director, Christian Health Association of Ghana, offers his perspective on faith-based approaches to global health

Dr. Tonny Tumwesigye, Executive Director, Uganda Protestant Medical Bureau, gives his remarks on faith-based approaches to global health.

As a child growing up in Nepal’s mountainous Upper Mustang region, Ghana Gurung understood that his survival depended on the mountains and his community. Today, as senior conservation program director at World Wildlife Fund-Nepal, he works to protect the endangered and elusive snow leopard by improving local communities’ livelihoods and the mountains’ ecosystem. “Survival of the snow leopard is…im...

Climate change poses an undeniable threat to small island states, but many islanders do not even know what climate change is, says Camari Koto, an indigenous Fijian academic and educator at the University of the South Pacific and member of the Resilience Academy, in our latest podcast. “They know it’s happening, they are unconsciously [taking] adaptive responses,” and certainly feel the brunt of i...

“Innovation happens when there are pioneers that stick with it,” says Monica Kerrigan, vice president of innovations at Jhpiego in a podcast from the Wilson Center’s Maternal Health Initiative. At a recent panel discussion on “Reaching the Farthest Behind: Facility-Level Innovations in Maternal Health,” Kerrigan shone a light on some of the challenges facing innovators trying to change the way we...

Maps help us to grasp complex ideas, such as patterns of risk and vulnerability, but the stories they tell can have significant implications. “It’s very difficult to validate that what you’re capturing in the maps is representative of real-world phenomenon,” says Joshua Busby in this week’s “Backdraft” episode, describing his efforts to map climate and security hotspots in Africa and Asia. “You ha...

“How do we present things in a responsible way?” asks Dr. Doris Chou of the World Health Organization (WHO) during a Wilson Center panel discussion on “Maternal and Women’s Health, Two Years In: Measuring Progress Towards Meeting the SDGs.” “My job is to make sure things don’t get misinterpreted,” says Chou. WHO’s Ending Preventable Maternal Mortality (EPMM) strategy, which was published in 2015,...

In this podcast postscript, Simon Nicholson goes into detail about the array of climate engineering technologies being researched.

When the Paris Agreement set an ambitious goal of limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the negotiators put climate engineering on the table, says Simon Nicholson, professor at American University in this week’s episode of Backdraft. Once the purview of science fiction, a majority of the models run by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change...

“Water scarcity is a nightmare scenario that is all too real and all but inevitable in Pakistan,” says Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Wilson Center’s Asia Program, in this week’s podcast. Pakistan faces the intersecting challenges of population growth, inefficient infrastructure and policies, deep societal inequality, and climate change, leading to a situation where the country is “vorac...