Peace After Paris: Addressing Climate, Conflict, and Development
2015 was a historic year for international commitments to sustainable development, climate change action, and new kinds of peacebuilding. For governments and policymakers, now comes the difficult task of living up to those commitments. Security concerns, like ISIS and a revanchist Russia, tend to do…
Climate change and ‘smart seeds’ in Africa
Southern Africa is undergoing the worst drought in more than three decades. More than 30 million people in South Africa, Malawi, and my home country Zimbabwe are facing hunger. While this year’s drought is largely attributed to the El Nino effect, rains have been increasingly erratic over the past t…
A Better Way to Fight Modern Slavery
Human trafficking is big business. It generates profits of nearly $150 billion annually. Yet because it is a black market activity, it is extremely difficult to track. The 2016 Global Slavery Index, recently issued by The Walk Free Foundation, estimates there are 45.8 million victims of human traffi…
Mobile Broadband: A Game-Changer For Sustainable Development Goals
“Business recognizes we can make the world sustainable… and business can’t sit back and wait for government to set the rules. Business must lead.” There were the words of Peter Bakker, President of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, who spoke at the United Nations Digital Medi…
European e-commerce needs better visibility into cross-border delivery prices
The European Commission released a multi-faceted plan to boost e-commerce in Europe on 25 May. The plan includes provisions to increase the transparency of prices for cross-border parcel delivery, with an eye to lowering prices as a means of increasing European e-commerce. What exactly is meant by t…
NDA at 2: Modi’s Unexpected Successes in Foreign Policy
Exactly two years ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi surprised both Indian and foreign observers by inviting the South Asian heads of government to his swearing-in. For a leader who had barely uttered a word about foreign policy during his election campaign, this dramatic and welcome gesture presaged…
Striking Back at The Islamic State’s Foreign Fighter Pipeline
In March, the terrorist group known as the Islamic State struck in the heart of Europe for the second time in six months. The attack in Brussels caught European security forces flat footed; even though there were indications that attackers—who were trained in Syria—were poised to strike. The I…
Four reasons disease outbreaks are erupting around the world
MERS, H1N1, swine flu, chikungunya, Zika: Another virus with a peculiar name always seems to be right around the corner, threatening to become a pandemic. Over the past decade, the World Health Organization has declared four global health emergencies. Two of them were in the past two years: the Ebol…
The Zika Virus
The Zika virus, a mosquito-borne illness, has been linked to a dramatic rise in birth defects in Brazil and neighboring countries. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared it a Public Health Emergency of International Concern in February 2016, and by mid-2016, sixty countries were reporting acti…
The incredible miracle in poor country development
The amazing improvement in the quality of life of the world’s poor people should be common knowledge by now. For example, you have the now-famous “elephant graph”, by Branko Milanovic, showing recent income growth at various levels of the global income distribution: This graph shows that over the la…