Today is the first “International Day of the Girl Child” – a day established last year by the United Nations to acknowledge the rights and unique challenges faced by young girls around the world.

The latest UN projections put the number of women under the age of 19 at about 1.18 billion today. Especially in developing countries (though not only) these young girls often face outsized barriers to happy, healthy, and productive lives.

The original version of this article, by Russell Sticklor, appeared at the Stimson Center.

Spend a day in Kathmandu, Nepal’s sprawling capital of four million people, and you’ll quickly notice what has long been a fact of life in this landlocked Himalayan country, and many other South Asian nations – no reliable electricity supply exists. Up to eight times a day, neighborhoods throughout the city suffer rolling power cuts due to load shedding, causing residents and businesses alike to either carry on in the darkness or rely on expensive, diesel-consuming generators to keep the lights on. Although the country’s civil war ended in 2006, carrying the promise of restored domestic stability and accelerated economic development, Nepal’s economy has remained hamstrung by an inconsistent energy supply, with only 40 percent of the population having access to electricity. This situation persists despite the fact that the country sits on top of a virtual goldmine – an estimated 80,000 megawatts (MW) of untapped hydroelectricity, of which it has harnessed a scant 700 MW.

This is part of a seven-part “environmental challenges and opportunities” series featured in the University of Minnesota’s fall issue of Momentum magazine.

As world population careens toward nine billion, all the planet’s systems will be strained. Lowering fertility rates is a complex endeavor, and no one path leads directly there. Poverty, access to contraception, education, job prospects, cultural mores – all of these influence family size. So addressing any of them, or a combination, can help. Solutions abound, at least on a relatively small scale, such as conservation programs that include family planning components.

The original version of this article, by Manipadma Jena, appeared on Inter Press Service.

Parvez Ahmad Dar climbs three hours to reach the hilltop, generator-equipped tourist center in Ajaf village, 35 kilometers from Srinagar, to recharge his mobile phone.

The 46-year-old president of the Wular Valley People’s Welfare Forum is in high demand as an activist and organizer – he cannot allow the long power outages in northern India’s Kashmir Valley to cut off communication with his constituency.

Eight years from now, the Gaza Strip will have “virtually no reliable access to sources of safe drinking water, standards of healthcare and education will have continued to decline, and the vision of affordable and reliable electricity for all will have become a distant memory for most,” according to a United Nations report released last month. The bleak assessment concludes that without immediate action to address immense and interconnected economic, demographic, environmental, infrastructure, and social challenges facing Gazans, “the already high number of poor, marginalized and food-insecure people depending on assistance will not have changed, and in all likelihood will have increased.”

This summer, 26 countries and private donors met at the London Summit on Family Planning to pledge $2.6 billion to expand family planning services to 120 million more women in the poorest countries around the world. But while the summit renewed focus on reproductive health with its ambitious target, “we’re now at that point where we have to really sit down and work through” how to achieve that goal, said Julia Bunting of the UK’s Department for International Development at the Wilson Center on September 17. [Video Below]

Earlier this month, there was a flurry of stories about brutal mass killings in clashes between the Pokomo and Orma communities over water and land in southeast Kenya’s Tana River County. The Kenyan media reported that about 30 people, including eight security personnel, had been killed and scores wounded, and reports on the death toll since last month are more than 100.

The original version of this article, by Kate Gilles and Marissa Pine Yeakey, appeared on the Population Reference Bureau’s Behind the Numbers blog.

World Contraception Day “centers around a vision for a world where every pregnancy is wanted,” with a goal of enabling “young people to make informed choices on their sexual and reproductive health.”