If you work for an NGO, you likely face the challenge of “demonstrating impact and effectiveness” to your funders. Yet donor states and international organizations no longer blindly accept that NGOs are doing what they claim to do. So the task is not only to meet expectations, but also to communicate the organization’s most significant impacts to donors, other partners, and professional colleagues. Measuring organizational effectiveness for improved health and development impact is a key element to do so in a changing landscape.

A window into what we are reading at the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program

Mpox Outbreak a Global Health Emergency, Again (The Washington Post) 

Various rapidly spreading mpox strains in Central and East African countries have led the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare the viral infection as a global health emergency. More than 15,000 people have been infected this year alone, with over 500 deaths reported. Mpox is transmitted largely through exposure to infected animals, as well as via skin-to-skin or sexual contact, and it disproportionately affects heterosexuals and sex workers.

July 11 is World Population Day—designated annually by the United Nations as a focused opportunity to examine population trends and their implications for society. This year, World Population Day offers a chance to reflect on the 30^th anniversary of one of the largest and arguably most influential world population conferences in history—the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD).

During a visit to Vietnam in November 2023, I cringed as my aunt tossed our now empty bánh mì plastic bag onto the sidewalk. “It doesn’t really matter,” she shrugged, “there aren’t any nearby trash cans anyway.” Finding a trash can wouldn’t have helped much, as two-thirds of Vietnam’s plastic waste ends up burnt, landfilled, or leaked.

Today, March 8, is International Women’s Day (IWD). It is an annual occasion to celebrate the incredible achievements of women and girls globally, while acknowledging the work still needed to push forward to make the critical human rights issue of gender equality a reality.

On November 15, the world population is projected to reach 8 billion people. As we approach that milestone, there’s no denying that our rapidly growing human population also places extraordinary pressure on the environment. The human population has doubled in the last 50 years, while wildlife populations have been cut in half.

We should be outraged by sexuality education’s colonialist connections. As a researcher and trainer based in the UK, I see how deeply blatant colonialist influences run in the field of sex education. The British empire was obsessed with the sexualities of their subjects and imagined their societies to be exotic licentious places where upper class British men could live out illicit fantasies. Yet, at the same time, these societies were deemed to be wells of immorality that needed Victorian moral education. These dual imaginaries were used to justify colonialism itself as a force to civilize non-western bodies and sexualities, and remain as ideas which echo in more contemporary discourses around controlling population and HIV.