In high-income countries, as many as 10 to 15 percent of women experience depression, anxiety, or other non-psychotic mental health challenges during pregnancy or the year after giving birth. In developing countries, the chances rise to 16 percent of pregnant women and 20 percent of post-natal women, according to Jane Fisher, professor of women’s health at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. [Video Below]

In 2012, as part of the Every Women Every Child movement, 13 vital health commodities were identified by a UN panel that could save the lives of more than 6 million women and children over the course of five years. There are often significant cultural and behavioral barriers to these commodities reaching people in low- and middle-income countries, but physical logistics is also a major problem.

As climate change threatens more extreme weather, it is becoming more important to incorporate disaster risk reduction into poverty-reduction efforts, writes the Overseas Development Institute in a new report. The authors of The Geography of Poverty, Disasters, and Climate Extremes in 2030 argue that the hard-won gains of development are threatened by vulnerability among the poorest to climate change disasters, especially droughts. “Up to 325 million extremely poor people will be living in the 49 most hazard-prone countries in 2030, the majority in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa,” write Andrew Shepherd et al. Using an index measuring the risk of a nation’s exposure to natural disasters as compared with a nation’s vulnerability to extreme poverty (income less than $1 daily), the report singles out 11 nations at high risk in both categories.

“If there was a perfect slum, Kibera would be it.” The notoriously overcrowded and underserved settlement in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi captivates the public imagination, engendering visions of urban violence, poverty, and hopelessness, said Caroline Wanjiku Kihato of the University of the Witwatersrand at the Wilson Center on February 18. The area was ravaged by ethnic violence that erupted across the country following Kenya’s disputed 2007 elections, pitting neighbor against neighbor in tribal clashes that killed more than 1,000 people, displaced many thousands more, and provoked an alarming surge in sexual violence.