Aissata M.B. Camara grew up in an educated, upper income household in Guinea, West Africa. One morning, she woke up to singing outside her window and knew they were coming. Many in her community thought that she was unclean and would grow up to be promiscuous if she wasn’t cut. She would be unmarriageable. While her family and community members held her down, she realized, “my body no longer belonged to me.” [Video Below]

The sexual and reproductive health and rights of women and girls must be protected, even – especially – during “the toughest of times, in the hardest of places,” said Kate Gilmore, deputy executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), at the Wilson Center on December 3. [Video Below]

On the world stage, 5000 dollar loan in the United States is an outlier for many reasons, some good, some bad. Few are more alarming, however, than maternal health. Despite spending two and half times more per person on health than the OECD average, the maternal mortality rate in the U.S. – the number of women who die during or as a result of childbirth and pregnancy – increased from 12 to 14 deaths per 100,000 live births from 1990 to 2015, putting the United States at 46^th in the world. [Video Below]

Inspired by the success of East Asian economies, the demographic dividend framework is taking off in sub-Saharan Africa, where many are yearning for workable solutions to the region’s ongoing development challenges.

The deadly West African Ebola epidemic has largely faded from headlines, replaced by mounting concern over conflict in the Middle East, terrorism, and refugees streaming into Europe. But while Guinea and Sierra Leone were declared free of the disease in November, Monrovia saw three new cases two weeks later. At least 149 individuals who came into contact with the infected have been identified thus far, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

SHENZHEN, China – In 1980, the year Deng Xiaoping established Shenzhen as China’s first special economic zone, opening its mercantile sectors to market capitalism and free trade principles, an attractive, tree-shaded commercial district known as Dongmen was home to 30,000 residents near the center of a metropolitan region of 300,000.

Thirty-five years later, Dongmen is a crowded commercial neighborhood of 300,000 residents at the edge of a metropolitan region of 18 million, China’s fourth largest.

The most important and anticipated climate change conference in years is finally underway. In some ways, as Bill McKibben and Andrew Revkin have pointed out, its success is relatively assured thanks to the number of major commitments countries have already made. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to see here. “The conference isn’t the game – it’s the scoreboard,” writes McKibben. To extend the metaphor even more, you might call it the league scoreboard, giving us a glimpse of many different storylines playing out.

As the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP) gets underway in Paris, #resilience appears with increasing frequency on my Twitter feed, and I frequently hear talk about “socio-ecological resilience,” “climate-resilient development,” and “resilience programming.”