In July 2010, Ethiopia’s Environment Protection Authority declared it would have a carbon-neutral economy by 2025. What? An entire country? Carbon neutral? While I know that developing countries emit considerably less carbon than countries like the United States do, this is a hard claim to swallow, especially in such a short timeframe. Indeed, it […]
Author: Kellee Usher
Developed countries’ aid programs in Africa often center on responding to the challenges created by climate change, such as desertification, coastal erosion, flooding, and myriad other problems affecting food supply, availability of water, and livelihoods of the impoverished. Through the use of National Adaptation Programs of Action, developed according to guidelines agreed upon internationally, […]
Recently, the Republic of Congo reported more than 150 deaths from polio, as well as more than 200 cases of paralysis due to polio. This comes as a shock to members of developed countries in which polio remains just a story of older generations. To the progressively more vaccine-averse generations of the United States, polio […]
The world is full of endemic, intractable problems that we as a rich developed nation are asked to help solve: poverty, hunger, health problems, inequality, and more. Our efforts to address these problems through aid have had mixed results. Sometimes progress emerges, sometimes the same progress is reversed, and often it seems all our aid […]
The United States of America: The nation that produced Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Southern fried chicken … and an extraordinarily high prevalence of obesity. According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2009 the state with the lowest percentage of obese adults was Colorado – and Colorado still had 18.6 percent prevalence of obesity, defined as […]
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Health’s Deadline: 2015
At the turn of the millennium, world leaders decided the new era should see the end of extreme poverty and other basic development problems. In order to facilitate a worldwide focus on this broad aim, they crafted the Millennium Development Goals to set up detailed goals to be achieved by 2015. Out of the eight […]
The international sound and fury over the Pakistani floods has died down – and yet, flood victims still face a serious crisis. Most notably, the health crisis associated with the flooding has only recently begun to unfold, and yet the international aid and attention just is not there the way it was in the very […]
Brazilian poverty is a familiar subject to many of us. Images of the favelas or massive slums surrounding Brazil’s major cities have reached us one way or the other, whether through movies, newspapers or some other route. According to the World Development Indicators, the top 10% of Brazilians hold 43% of the income, while the […]