Sexual assault remains distressingly common throughout the world and too often it’s the victim who gets the blame, says Nancy Schwartzman, filmmaker and executive director of Tech 4 Good, in this week’s podcast.

HIV-positive persons in all segments of society face intense marginalization, but the effect is immensely compounded for women and expecting mothers. In Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, where at least 57,000 women are living with HIV, the stigmatization is so great that many are denied basic reproductive rights, says Harvard University’s Tamil Kendall in this week’s podcast, from the Maternal Health Initiative.

Trade is “the lifeblood of Darfur’s economy,” says Margie Buchanan-Smith in this week’s podcast.

Buchanan-Smith, a visiting fellow at Tuft University’s Feinstein International Center and the lead author of a recent study on livestock trade in Sudan, presented at the Wilson Center in November about the Feinstein Center’s collaboration with the UN Environment Program studying pastoralism in Sudan during the last decade of conflict.

“If girls and young women are often thought of as the forgotten drivers of development, their sexual and reproductive health is almost entirely absent,” says the Guttmacher Institute’s Heather Boonstra in this week’s podcast.

What does Himalayan ice melt have to do with food security in Cambodia? A lot, when they both significantly affect the flow of the Mekong River. But when it comes to long-term planning across topical and regional lines, development agencies aren’t always as collaborative as they could be – both externally and internally.

Twenty thousand girls under the age of 18 give birth each day, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Two million girls age 14 or younger give birth each year. Societal norms often frame adolescent pregnancy as the result of promiscuous behavior, but this year’s State of the World Population Report encourages “a shift away from interventions targeted at the girl toward broad-based approaches that build girls’ human capital, protect girls’ rights, and empower them to make decisions,” says Dianne Stewart, director of the information and external relations division of UNFPA, in this week’s podcast.

Compared to East Asia and Latin America, the “demographic transition” in Africa has been slower to date, prolonging periods of rapid growth and creating very youthful populations. But, explains David Canning in this week’s podcast, “the high level of fertility in Africa doesn’t seem to be something that is set in stone.”

Developing countries with youthful populations may have the opportunity to take advantage of a phenomenon called the “demographic dividend,” when a decline from high to low fertility rates leads to slower population growth and a large working age population. But “age structure alone isn’t going to make it happen,” says Jay Gribble of Abt Associates in this week’s podcast.