You could say the people living along the banks of the Thondwe River in southern Malawi were lucky. At least they’d been warned of the flash flood in early January that would burst through an earthen dike, wash away their homes and crops, and leave more than 4,000 of them homeless.

A roadside billboard in Malawi reads: “No woman should die while giving life.” But in many countries, death or grave injury during childbirth is an all too frequent occurrence. [Video Below]

Over the last two decades, social accountability has emerged as a strategy to make health services more responsive to community needs. It’s an approach that creates a space for “interaction between citizen engagement and government responsiveness,” said Jonathan Fox, professor of international development at American University at the Wilson Center May 5. [Video Below]

Of all the Millennium Development Goals, the maternal health and sanitation targets are among the farthest off track, said Rebecca Fishman, operations and special projects director of WASH Advocates. [Video Below]

Democracy is fickle. Many of the competing theories on the best ways to foment and consolidate plural, inclusive governance or predict its rise and fall focus on political and economic forces. Yet a small group of demographers have explored population age structure as a catalyst for and reflection of a host of changes in societies that can affect governance.

Climate change vulnerability is closely tied to population dynamics, says Kathleen Mogelgaard in this week’s podcast. “We know that population size, composition and spatial distribution around the world is constantly changing, and that these changes do have implications for climate change exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity – the three elements of vulnerability.”

Effective development interventions often require thinking outside the box. In southern Malawi’s Lake Chilwa basin, where environmental degradation, public health, and population dynamics intersect in unpredictable ways, people like Deepa Pullanikkatil of Leadership for Environment and Development (LEAD) are challenging conventional thinking with promising results.

In Lake Victoria and Lake Chilwa basins, interconnected development challenges defy sectoral boundaries, said experts at the Wilson Center on February 10. According to Deepa Pullanikkatil of Leadership for Environment and Development and Doreen Othero of the Lake Victoria Basin Commission, growing populations, shrinking resource bases, and persistent human health concerns demonstrate the need for integrated development approaches that combine population, health, and environmental (PHE) interventions. “We need different sectors working together to achieve the greater goal,” said Pullanikkatil. [Video Below]