With an alphabet soup of measurements available to analyze global wealth, identifying the world’s richest country becomes a confusing task. Perhaps the most prevalent method used to assess the relative wealth of nations is Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita; in other words, a country’s GDP divided by the number of people living in that […]
The Dutch government has given entrepreneurs a way to do business in developing countries, without jumping through hoops to do so. The Dutch Good Growth Fund offers a source of financing for development-related businesses to improve the economies of developing countries, create jobs and increase production capacity locally. The Dutch Good Growth Fund (DGGF) is […]
A cholera outbreak in Tanzania that claimed the lives of 30 Burundian refugees and local Tanzanians has been curbed. The epidemic occurred in western Tanzania near Lake Tanganyika, in a remote village that is overcrowded with refugees. Authorities estimate refugees consumed contaminated lake water, which facilitated the spread of cholera. A total of 4,408 cases […]
Business deals between companies headquartered at opposite ends of the earth have become the rule, rather than the exception. These deals may make headlines for their magnitude, but not for their intercontinental nature. But recently, two such deals caught this writer’s attention. Though they received little coverage in the press, these deals exemplify the benefits […]
In order to fully comprehend poverty on a global scale, one first must understand how it affects his or her own backyard. The only way to do that is to go out into a community, talk to members of that community and volunteer. Local volunteer work serves as the stepping stone to understanding the root […]
Qatar has an estimated budget of 62 billion pounds for the hotels, infrastructure, stadiums and other buildings that it needs for the 2022 World Cup. Qatar has relied on migrant workers from countries such as India, Nepal and Sri Lanka to complete these building projects. However, the work for migrant workers is extremely difficult and […]
Belo Horizonte, the third most populous metropolitan city in Brazil, is one of the most progressive actors in poverty reduction. Home to nearly 2.5 million, Belo Horizonte practices the Right to Food that perceives food as a human right rather than a commodity. Poverty rates have dropped dramatically in Belo Horizonte since policy […]
The U.N. released its latest annual report on world hunger this week with some encouraging results: the number of chronically hungry people in the world has been reduced by 216 million since 1990. That still leaves 795 million hungry today. However, considering the world’s rapidly growing population, a decrease in hundreds of millions of hungry […]
Located in Central Africa, Chad is ranked near the bottom of the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Index, 184th out of the 187 countries studied. Heavily affected by internal conflict and economic strife, Chad’s fragile government has experienced incredible difficulty in increasing access to primary education. Due to severe economic disparities, there are […]
In 2004 in Iquique, Chile, the for-profit architectural company Elemental designed and built social housing units for 100 impoverished families. The company’s innovative and inexpensive design enabled this low-income community to remain in the city center, retaining access to jobs, healthcare, education and transportation, rather than being forcibly relocated to peripheral zones. Since the 1960s, […]
