Some 800 million people globally – as many as a quarter of them in India – have no access to electricity. Far more suffer routine brownouts and power cuts. The result puts the rural poor, who are most impacted, at a severe disadvantage in every way: Health-care services are crippled, education is compromised, and entire communities are cut off from…

The Northern Triangle countries of Latin America are some of the most violent in the world. El Salvador and Honduras have ranked among the highest murder rates for years. It’s not only the gang violence we hear most about, but also domestic abuse and gender-based violence. And the trauma it leaves behind has a devastating effect on entire communiti…

Smallholder farming in Africa is a precarious existence. Low economies of scale, commodity price swings, out-of-date agronomic practices, and the effects of climate change conspire to trap farm families in a never-ending cycle of poverty. At the same time, Africa’s booming youth population is entering a saturated workforce without enough jobs to ab…

For decades, smallholder farmers who produce the world’s supply of quality coffee in developing countries have barely earned enough to stay in business. Many have gone under. Millions of those still producing live in poverty and go hungry. Now climate change is threatening their livelihoods as well. The main problem is a supply chain stuffed with s…

Nothing is more essential to life than clean drinking water. Where it’s in short supply—as in much of Africa and other developing regions—there’s opportunity for promoting good health, improving livelihoods, and making money. Jibu seeks to achieve all three through its franchises that treat, package, and distribute affordable water in the major cit…

From coal plants to large-scale agriculture, industrial activities contributing to the environmental crisis tend to concentrate in minority communities with little power, wealth, or legal knowledge to defend themselves. The consequences to health and livelihoods are frequently devastating. To help them protect themselves, the nonprofit Namati train…

This is the second episode of a two-part series about raising the quality of health care in the developing world. Even before the onslaught of COVID-19, public health services in many developing countries were chronically strained by a combination of burgeoning populations, severe shortages of trained clinicians, and growing burdens of disease. Noo…

This is the first episode of a two-part series about raising the quality of health care in the developing world. Deb Van Dyke, a nurse practitioner for Doctors Without Borders, grew increasingly troubled over 15 years by the low quality of care provided by local health workers around Asia and Africa. So she set up Global Health Media, an internatio…