A woman sat crouched on the side of a busy road in Dakar, a baby in a sling on her back and a basket of peanuts in front. I know only a little French, and no Wolof, but I decided to try anyway. “Bonsoir,” I said, and smiled at the toddler beside her. “Combien?” I asked, pointing at the peanuts.

She smiled back at me, we negotiated a sale, and in exchange for the coins in my pocket I walked away with a few bags of the small, tasty nuts that are grown throughout the “peanut basin” of central Senegal.

Physical, sexual, or psychological harm by a spouse or partner is a major factor in maternal and reproductive health, said Jay Silverman at the Wilson Center last month.

Silverman, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, cited a 15-country study of both developed and developing countries that found 25 to 75 percent of women have suffered from intimate partner violence at least once. And the effects are very significant, both in terms of the health of mothers and their children. [Video Below]

Midwives play a critical but unheralded role in maternal health. Their skills are sometimes marginalized in otherwise well-meaning discussions about professionalizing care, or even worse, they are subject to abuse, as was discussed at the Wilson Center earlier this month. So when I found the room overflowing at a Women Deliver panel yesterday on the disempowerment of midwives and how much it undermines global efforts to increase access to care, I took that as a good sign that midwives will not be overlooked much longer.

A staggering amount of development dollars – one in three, in fact – are lost due to natural disasters and crises. Certain communities are less affected than others by such disasters; they are more resilient. Knowing where vulnerability and strength exist and how to bolster them could help avoid these losses. Yet, today, very little data exists to help development practitioners understand which adaptive capacities are lagging in a given community.

Pathfinder International’s Strengthening Communities Through Integrated Programming (SCIP) is part of a new push towards integrated development – looking at communities as a whole and addressing multiple, traditionally-siloed sectors at once. SCIP integrates both its activities and its funding to great effect in Mozambique.

Water is the foundation of human society and will become even more critical as population growth, development, and climate change put pressure on already-shrinking water resources in the years ahead. But will this scarcity fuel conflict between countries with shared waters, as some have predicted, or will it create more impetus for cooperation?

A world “free from the stain of poverty” is within our grasp, declared World Bank President Jim Yong Kim in a speech at Georgetown University last week. Kim then announced a plan to virtually eradicate extreme poverty by 2030.