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Chad Comes in Last in New Global Food Index
Yesterday Oxfam released its new Global Food Index that shows the best and worst places to eat. Across all indicators Chad came in dead last in the index. The indicators to rank the countries include having enough food to eat, food affordability, diabetes and overweight citizens, and food quality. In fact, along with Chad, eighteen…
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Our Favorite Sound Capture of 2013
Using Soundcloud was one of the best ways to report from the field in Africa last year. One of our favorite sound captures of last year was in Tanzania after spending time with the Maasai in the arid northern part of the country. Hosted by Oikos, an Italian NGO that works with the Maasai to…
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Saving Mothers Giving Life Releases Annual Report
Today maternal health experts gathered in Washington, DC to discuss the new results from the preliminary work of Saving Mothers Giving Life, a public private partnership aimed at reducing maternal mortality in Zambia and Uganda. Utilizing the strengths of each partner program results showed that maternal mortality decreased by 30% in the districts where Saving…
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New Needle-Free Malaria Test Could Be a Game Changer
One of the most effective advancements in malaria testing has been the rapid diagnostic test. Easy to use and inexpensive it cut the wait time for diagnostics drastically and has made testing and treatment easier for frontline health workers around the world particularly in sub-Saharan Africa where the prevalence of malaria is the highest. In…
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The Importance of Clean Cookstoves – A Personal Experience
When I was in Tanzania in October I went into a traditional Massai hut where a mother was inside making beans in a kettle over a red hot fire. The fire was ridiculously hot and I couldn’t believe how the woman and her family could endure the heat and smoke from cooking. While I was…
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An Update on Central African Republic’s Growing Violence, Humanitarian Response
Since I last wrote about the growing violence in the Central African Republic, things have made a marked turn for the worse. Even with a reported 7600 French (1600) and African Union (6000) troops on the ground and with United States’ air support inter-religious violence between Muslims and Christians has escalated into all-out militia and…
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New Crop of Grants Go to Improving Libraries in Developing Countries
In the 1980s and 1990s libraries in the developing world suffered greatly from a lack of funding. Additional funding did not pick up until the latter part of the 1990s and now there is a renewed effort to bolster access to information in developing countries through even more funding. Why? In 2013, for example, the…
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Central African Republic Descends into Religious Violence, Nears Genocide
Reports are flashing across the wires that Central African Republic is embroiled in massive inter-religious violence that is mere stages away from full-on genocide. A coup in March saw Muslim rebels overthrow then president François Bozizé. Now, Central African Republic is being led by an interim president, Michel Djotodia. Djtodia is the country’s first Muslim president.…
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Gender-Based Violence is Grossly Under-reported According to New Report
A new report, funded in part by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health, found that gender-based violence in the developing world is being under-reported by 11 – to 128 fold. The data that was used to make these findings were from health systems and…
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Increased International Travel Spurs U.S. Malaria Cases
I travel to many malaria endemic countries and to be completely honest I do not take my malaria medicine as I should. They tend to make me ill, so I just roll the dice and hope for the best. That might not be the smartest thing to do, especially knowing that there has been a…
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How Postagram is Changing Letter Writing Campaigns to Congress
Being passionate about issues – both domestic and global – means taking your activism from the Net to Washington, DC in many cases. Taking your activism to the halls of Congress or even to the halls of your state’s legislature is harder to do for some. Even writing a letter to your representative can be…
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Becoming a Part of 2014’s One Billion Rising
One in three women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime. Let’s take that in for a moment. It’s such a silent epidemic. I know. I have seen women’s eyes in the countries I visit and even here at home. They can’t hide it. According to OneBillionRising.org, that number comes to one billion women worldwide.…
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Momina’s Story: International HIV/AIDS Alliance #WAD2013
Meet Momina Momina is a 22 year old single mother of two who lives in the city of Adama in central Ethiopia and was diagnosed as living with HIV three years ago. Although she wears a smile, sadness is etched across her face when she talks about her younger son, Yerosa. Born HIV positive, he…
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[Photos] Communal Toilets + New Study About Women, Girls and Sanitation
Yesterday World Toilet Day was recognized to bring global awareness about the millions of people worldwide who do not have access to a toilet. In fact, 40% of the world’s population has to use the bathroom in the open and spends billions of hours searching for a place to relieve themselves. WaterAid, along with the…
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![[Photos] Inside a Malaria Treatment Center](https://socialgoodmoms.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/dsc5815.jpg)
[Photos] Inside a Malaria Treatment Center
I have been told enough harrowing personal stories and have read enough reports to understand contracting malaria isn’t a cakewalk. And for children (especially those under the age of five) and expectant mothers malaria can be deadly. Fortunately with rapid diagnosis and malaria treatments children as well as adults can experience speedy recoveries from a…
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Why We Need World Prematurity Day
One of the world’s greatest tragedies is when babies are born too soon. Every day a mother around the world experiences the heartache of delivering her baby before 37 weeks gestation whether she is walking on foot to a rural health facility in Bangladesh, delivering her baby in a hut in the lush countryside of…
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10 Top Tweets from the Family Planning Conference: Day 2
Choosing ten top tweets from day two of the International Conference on Family Planning wasn’t easy. Thousands of experts, researchers, those representing NGOs, and stakeholders are in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia this week at the largest conference on family planning and reproductive health. Below are ten tweets we feel are informative and provide fantastic discussion points…
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![[Photos] Family Planning Kits from Ethiopia, Zambia, South Africa](https://socialgoodmoms.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/dsc5971.jpg)
[Photos] Family Planning Kits from Ethiopia, Zambia, South Africa
I have been fortunate to visit health posts and family planning clinics in a handful of countries. One of the things I always ask to see while visiting are family planning kits used for educational purposes for clients. Some of the kits have been fancy, others have been fairly rudimentary, but they all serve the…
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10 Top Tweets from the #FamilyPlanning Conference: Day 1
Today was the first day of the International Conference on Family Planning in Addis Ababa. With thousands of participants at the conference there was a flurry of tweets throughout the day. Here are ten tweets we identified as extremely informative. You can also follow the conversation at a host of hashtags: #FP2020, #FullAccess, #FamilyPlanning, and #ICFP2013. Related articles…