Throughout the world, access to safe drinking water is the most critical element of sustained good health. Clean Water focuses on the highly successful efforts of one humanitarian organization, East Meets West, to bring safe drinking water to rural communities in Vietnam -- led by staff member Richard Brogdon, a Vietnam war veteran who has special reason to help the local Vietnamese community.
The Advance Market Commitment scheme, formulated by the GAVI Alliance, aims to provide more vaccines to the developing world by fixing their price over a 10-year period. Is it going to deliver, what will be the result, and how did global health institutions and the big pharmaceutical companies manage to agree on such a deal?
Deacon Patrick Moynihan is a missionary in Haiti who runs the Louverture Cleary School, offering a free secondary education to youth in this Port-au-Prince suburb. He believes that the way to rebuild Haiti is through providing education everywhere, no matter how bad the conditions may be.
Chris Mburu grew up poor in Kenya, at the top of his class but unable to pay his school fees. He was on the verge of dropping out when a Swedish woman sponsored him, allowing Mburu to continue his studies and fulfill his potential. Now a human rights lawyer for the United Nations and a Harvard grad, Mburu has started a scholarship program of his own to give the next generation the opportunity he received.
What impact are the Millennium Development Goals having on inhabitants of Kibera, a massive shantytown in Kenya? This film about local midwife Silva Adhiambo examines some of the tensions that exist between aid organizations and the people they are trying help.
Alleviating poverty is more guesswork than science, and lack of data on aid's impact raises questions about how to provide it. But Clark Medal-winner Esther Duflo says it's possible to know which development efforts help and which hurt—by testing solutions with randomized trials.
Kids in developing countries need vaccines, but will the world's wealthy financial markets really help to deliver them? A deal brokered by former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has so far raised nearly $2 billion for just that purpose. It's called the International Finance Facility for Immunisation (IFFIm), and author Aminatta Forna wants to know how it works.
After decades of conflict, the people of southern Sudan are rediscovering what it means to live in a time of peace. One of the most immediate benefits is wider access to education, but with limited resources and high demand, young people aren't always finding it easy to catch up on the years of school they missed.
The debate over foreign aid often pits those who mistrust "charity" against those who mistrust reliance on the markets. Jacqueline Novogratz proposes a middle way she calls patient capital, with promising examples of entrepreneurial innovation driving social change.
What is social innovation? Solving some of the world's most pressing problems -- including global poverty and development -- requires innovative thinking, unusual partnerships, and entrepreneurialism. And it's already working. Find out how in Unleashing Innovation.
One billion people in the world face hunger and malnourishment on a daily basis. The international community has long sought to tackle this problem. But what if everything we thought we knew about how to erase hunger was wrong? Concern Worldwide and Valid International brought their innovative ideas and faced off against entrenched interests to change people's perceptions of this problem. The result was a sea change in how the world looks at hunger.
Cervical cancer kills more than half a million women worldwide every year, and is the leading cause of female cancer deaths in the developing world. New low-tech screening programs have begun to reduce cancer deaths but campaigners like Sarah Nyombi, a politician in Uganda, want to see more.
In 2004, an invasion by paramilitary groups caused thousands of Colombians to be internally displaced. Many lost their identity papers during the upheaval and remain undocumented. The United Nations Refugee Agency, UNHCR, has funded a project that will process documents quickly by sending a mobile truck equipped with self-contained technology to residents in remote areas.
Can risk management techniques from global financial markets help people in the developing world avoid the worst effects of famine? The World Food Programme's new director of business planning thinks this approach could revolutionize the aid industry.
Can anyone make the world a better place? Californian schoolgirl Avery Hale certainly thinks so. She started the Step by Step organization when she was just 13 years old, to distribute unwanted shoes to people who need them in developing countries.
Halting the destruction of Amazonian rainforest isn't Brazil's only battle in the fight against climate change. The country is also working hard to eliminate CFC gases that not only harm the ozone layer, but are also much more harmful to the atmosphere then CO2. UNDP is helping the Brazilian government to safely extract and dispose of this harmful chemical.
