Resilience is a wonderful metaphor. It somehow conveys in a single word the qualities of bending without breaking, of healing after an injury, of tensile rather than brittle strength. Oak and palm trees are resilient to the power of strong winds, before which they bend and then straighten again. Resilient people pick themselves up after being knocked down, draw on their reserves of ideas and strength to deal with difficult challenges, or hunker down until the gale has blown itself away. Resilient economies bounce back, and resilient ecosystems restore themselves after the fire or the flood has passed.

The original version of this article, by Eugenie Maiga, appeared on the Wilson Center’s Africa Up Close blog.

With the 2011 and 2012 food crises in the Horn of Africa and the Sahel, calls for urgent action and sustainable solutions to food insecurity in Africa have intensified. While many factors, like rising commodity prices, have been contributing factors, land degradation stands out as a main catalyst. In the search for a solution, indigenous farming techniques may offer some quick wins.

Can climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts lead to tension or even conflict between countries? The latest issue of ECSP Report examines this often over-looked question in Backdraft, introduced by ECSP Senior Advisor Geoff Dabelko in last month’s most popular post. Other popular newcomers were guest contributor Alan M. Wright on FEMA’s new Strategic Foresight Initiative report; a major meeting of water-cooperation minds at the Wilson Center in April; a breakdown of two major reports about the Arab Spring and climate change; and how policymakers in Kenya and Malawi are combining population policy with climate change and development.

The 2011-12 West African food crisis led to riots in Senegal and Burkina Faso as well as food insecurity for millions of rural and urban poor across the region. The crisis emerged from a number of factors, including instability in northern Mali, increases in global food prices, and low rainfall in the 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 growing seasons. Many countries in the region are now reassessing and expanding domestic agricultural capabilities. At the top of the agenda for Senegal, a democratic republic on track to reach many Millennium Development Goals, is reducing youth unemployment and increasing domestic agricultural capacity.

The disempowerment of women and girls is the single biggest driver of inequality today, said Helen Clark, administrator of the UN Development Program, during a plenary on the final day here at the Women Deliver conference in Kuala Lumpur, where more than 4,500 people from 149 countries and 2,200 organizations gathered to discuss women’s health, equity, and international development.

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.

“Cooperative nurturing is the natural state of humans,” said Anthony Costello, director of the University College London’s Institute for Global Health, during a side event yesterday here at the Women Deliver conference in Kuala Lumpur. Children and mothers are healthier when they have a support network, so the Institute for Global Health has partnered with a number of NGOs over the last two decades to form thousands of community-based women’s groups in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Malawi.

A major theme on day one of the global Women Deliver conference here in Kuala Lumpur was that “women are not just reproducers, they’re producers.” That is, maternal health and other gender-related issues not only affect the lives of women, girls, and children, but help shape the economies and societies that they live in.