In Nairobi this month, the world’s governments will discuss the path towards the first global treaty to tackle plastic pollution. But with multiple proposals on the table, the scope and ambition of a potential treaty hangs in the balance.

Evidence shows that in low- and middle-income countries, the expansion of health coverage or access to care has not always reduced overall mortality, said Dr. Patricia Jodrey, Child Health Team Lead in the Office of Maternal and Child Health and Nutrition at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). “However, the analysis also showed that when countries have progressed in improving the quality of their health systems, the survival rate tends to improve,” she said.

Growing up in Austria in the 1990s, one of the underlying lessons I learned in middle school was that nuclear power is humanity’s downfall. Though never explicitly described that way in the curriculum, from a young age my peers and I knew to associate the black-and-yellow trefoil symbol with apocalyptic environmental destruction. Reflecting on my upbringing helps me understand why so many in Germany, Austria, Denmark, Greece, and Italy argue that nuclear power should be our last resort as an energy resource. How could we allow the development and use of such dangerous technologies in our own lives? How could we just move on and accept that a nuclear accident could kill all of us at any moment?  

As the novel COVID-19 coronavirus swept the planet in early 2020, researchers scrambled to find effective treatments and vaccines. Within a year, there was a clarion call from heads of state, the World Health Organization (WHO) and other agencies to create an international “pandemic preparedness and response” treaty. WHO noted that COVID-19 offered “a stark and painful reminder that nobody is safe until everyone is safe” from zoonotic disease outbreaks.

“The pandemic and related global economic recession are severe setbacks to already insufficient progress towards meeting the global nutrition targets set for 2025 for stunting, wasting, maternal anemia and breastfeeding,” write the authors of a 2021 study examining the effects of COVID-19 on child and maternal health and nutrition. Adequate nutrition in the perinatal period is essential for healthy mothers and babies, and COVID-19-induced poverty and disruptions to global supply chains have compromised the food security of people around the world, mostly in low-to-middle-income countries (LMICs).

The countries of the Western Sahel find themselves in the tightening grip of a set of mutually reinforcing crises. These include deepening seasonal food insecurity and surges of food-aid dependency, widening income inequalities, widespread childhood stunting, low levels of education attainment and pervasive unemployment, as well as acute political instability and a rapidly growing Islamist-led insurgency that has already displaced some 2.5 million people across the region. In our recent report, What Future for the Western Sahel? The Region’s Demography and Its Implications by 2045, (published by the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security), we argue that, unless the Sahelian states focus on reversing the underlying conditions that sustain high fertility—the cause of a persistently youthful and rapidly growing population—they will likely not be able to resolve these crises in the foreseeable future.  

With a high burden of cervical cancer in Tanzania, we are advocating for the government’s parliament to prioritize cervical cancer prevention in its annual budget, said Dr. Safina Yuma, a Reproductive Cancer Coordinator at the Ministry of Health, Tanzania, at a recent event hosted by TogetHER for Health on cervical cancer leadership in recognition of cervical cancer awareness month. At least 270,000 women die globally from cervical cancer each year and in Tanzania, it is a leading cause of death, taking the lives of approximately 4,200 women annually. However, cervical cancer is 90 percent preventable with appropriate prevention strategies such as human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccinations and screenings. Expert leaders from NJIA, a leadership development program for practitioners working in cervical cancer research and prevention, discussed strategies for improving collaboration and leadership within the medical profession to reduce avoidable deaths.

“Most of the people living here are helpless,” said a woman in Jaffna, a district of northern Sri Lanka, nearly ten years after the country’s civil war ended. It was 2017, and I was conducting research with women in two villages in Jaffna. This woman’s sentiment reflected the challenges many in her community are still facing, including the ability to access health services. Through this research, my colleagues and I found that women’s access to healthcare was influenced by both their gender—particularly gender norms and gender roles—and household income. Better understanding of how gender and gender dynamics impact healthcare access will be essential to improving their lives.