“The Zika outbreak is a result of something; it is the result of the lost attention to sexual and reproductive health issues as a human right and women as subjects of rights,” said Jaime Nadal Roig, the United Nations Population Fund representative to Brazil, at the Wilson Center on April 12. [Video Below]

Ashraf and Shazia use the word “guilt” often.* Their voices tremble as they rewind to the day when they read an article in an Indian magazine, Manorama, that opened their eyes to the reality of khatna – the practice of female genital mutilation among their community. “We felt guilt – immense, powerful guilt – when we realized that this was not needed, that we didn’t need to put our elder daughter through this,” the parents say. “We had no idea this was just going on, prevalent, generation after generation.”

This Earth Day, the United States, China, and Canada are among more than 170 countries expected to take part in the largest one-day signing of an international agreement in history. The ratification of the climate agreement hammered out at the Paris Conference of Parties (COP-21) last December could be the most significant elevation of environmental issues on the global stage yet.

Today, Africa has the world’s highest fertility rates. On average, women in sub-Saharan Africa have about five children over their reproductive lifetime, compared to a global average of 2.5 children. Research shows that the “demographic transition,” the name for the change from high death and fertility rates to lower death and eventually lower fertility rates, has proceeded differently here from other regions in the developing world.

The saying goes, what hasn’t been counted doesn’t count. Our latest datasets for the Environment and Gender Information (EGI) platform are proving this true.