Several weeks ago, as GOP presidential hopefuls Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry wrangled over the ethics and implications of vaccinating preteen girls against the human papillomavirus (HPV)—the virus that causes cervical cancer--Rwanda began rolling out the world’s first comprehensive nationwide effort to eliminate ...
Looking at the statistics, the world has a long way to go on maternal health. One woman dies from pregnancy- or childbirth-related complications every minute--that's 529,000 women a year. That number seems even larger when you think about the fact that almost all ...
One of the oldest, most respected professions in the world is midwifery. And yet, midwives working in developing countries often lack simple resources like electric lights and towels. Meg Wirth founded the web-based startup Maternova, which provides vital obstetric tools and information to ...
One-year-old start up, Solar Sister is using cosmetics company AVON's model to distribute solar energy in Uganda, Sudan, and Rwanda. To learn more about the “business in a bag” model that's giving rural African women an income and a renewable light source, Dowser ...
Why are gender-based issues primarily considered “women’s” issues? Josie Lehrer founded the Men’s Story Project (MSP) to rethink this faulty truism. Intended for local replication, the MSP uses performance and dialogue to create public spaces for men to share their experience of male ...
Search for the hashtag #socent and you’ll find wide-ranging interest in social entrepreneurship on Twitter. Here’s a roundup of a few interesting tweets from the last week: Human-centered design work is at the center of companies like the well-known firm IDEO, which employs a ...
Eight years ago, the human rights activist and award-winning filmmaker Ronit Avni conducted over 475 interviews with Israeli and Palestinian activists to find out what kind of support they needed to advance peace. The overwhelming answer was to become more visible. The pockets ...
Talk about a single girl who's been trafficked from her home country, held captive, and forced into servitude -- and your audience will naturally listen and sympathize. But talk about the number of individuals around the world who face a situation like hers ...
Sometimes, the best way to progress isn’t to advance — to step up with more money, more technology, more modernity. It’s to retreat. Towards the end of the 1970s, the Mother and Child Institute in Bogota, Colombia, was in deep trouble. The institute ...
In our Risk-taking series, Tulane University and Ashoka U students Katie Smalley and Laura White shed light on the value of risk-taking. By interviewing social innovators about bold steps they’ve taken, they reveal that behavior that appears risky may be the most dependable ...