The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) is both a point of contention and an opportunity for collaboration among countries sharing the Nile river basin’s water resources. In our most read post this month, Matthew Gallagher covers a recent UNC event with Wilson Center Global Fellow Aaron Salzberg on the intricacies of the GERD and the importance of stakeholder diplomatic processes in shaping relationships around the dam.

Southeast Asian countries, like the Philippines and Indonesia, generate a large amount of plastic waste each year. One item alone—single-use plastic sachets—makes up the majority of this plastic waste, littering beaches, clogging waterways, and polluting surrounding oceans. In our top spot this month, Eli Patton shares potential solutions to turn off the tap on Southeast Asia’s plastic waste problem.

As Beijing prepares to host the 2022 Winter Olympics, China’s environmental activities are once again on center stage. The Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum took the top spot this month with Karen Mancl and Richard Liu’s coverage of the new program report, “Closing the Loop on China’s Water Pollution,” which details what China can learn from New York, Washington, D.C., and Singapore, to advance its wastewater and carbon reduction targets.

The U.S. Agency for International Development revamped its Water Office this spring, renaming it the Center for Water Security, Sanitation, and Hygiene, and adding it to the Bureau for Resilience and Food Security. In this month’s top post, Stephanie Cappa and Sarah Davidson highlight the importance of this shift for elevating water security as a central development issue, and call for increased attention and support to build more resilience and sustainability into food and water systems.

The same factors that make human trafficking victims vulnerable to trafficking can also exclude them from the very initiatives meant to protect them. In the case of the Dominican Republic, Haitian migrants—black, poor, and mostly men with an irregular immigration status—are more often viewed as criminals than victims of trafficking. In our top post this month, Jean-Pierre Murray explores the case of Haitian migrants, the risks they face, and why they’ve been overlooked.

Despite the fact that more than half of the professional health workforce are nurses and 90 percent of nurses and midwives are women, a strong gender bias still impacts women nurse’s decision-making power in the health sector. In this month’s most read article, Peter Johnson, a male nurse and midwife, challenges men both in and outside of the profession to do better in elevating the voices of women nurses and midwives and ensuring they have a seat at the table when decisions are made.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread and transform everyday lives, Rose Nzyoka and Vikas Dwivedi argue that using digital tools to improve systems to manage real-time data and decision-support systems could help the response to COVID-19. In our most read post this month, they propose five initiatives that ministries of health in low-and-middle-income countries need to focus on to limit the spread of COVID-19.

What is needed to close the billion dollar financing gap to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 6—ensuring the availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all—by 2030? In our most read post of the month, Wania Yad, Amanda King, Kelly Bridges, and Thomas Boynton explore a range of financing approaches that can accelerate global access to water and sanitation.