Posts Tagged ‘poverty’

This blog post is a response to the post “Invest in women — it pays!”

A response to the blog-post “HIV thrives on poverty.” Overwhelmingly, it is women who are victimized by HIV/AIDS.

When a woman dies during pregnancy, childbirth or due to complications after delivery, it affects not only the family, but also the whole community. These videos, by different human rights organizations, go beyond statistics to tell us the stories of women and their families as they struggle to understand why it is that so many women are dying during childbirth and what needs to be done to stop this.

We must understand the barriers that plague even the most well-intentioned campaigns to promote health. The actual cost of a Tuberculosis test is free, but there are indirect costs: one week of lost wages; and emotional and physical stress.

For the 51 million of girls around the world who were married off as children, marriage is risky sexual behavior.

HIV thrives on poverty, is spread by poverty and produces poverty in its turn. The relationship isn’t simple.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not even implying that the Internet can replace a relief package, neither am I suggesting that the Internet can compensate for the social and personal losses that follow poverty. I am rather suggesting, similar to Mr. Gordon Brown, that the Internet can provide a platform where we can be ourselves and have a global conversation with each other on important topics, such as poverty and AIDS.

I just stumbled upon a very interesting debate on The Economix Blog, a blog by The New York Times. In a time where global experts and scholars seem to disagree about the victims and the spoilers of the financial crisis, I find this piece very thought-provoking.

Around 35 million people are employed through India’s textile industry, the majority of the lower tiers being women. Millions of workers are now facing a dramatic drop in wages forcing them below the poverty line.

In these turbulent times of financial crisis, rising food prices, climate change and political instability, it is women and girls who will be disproportionately affected, particularly poor women in poor countries. It is girls who will be removed from school because families can no longer afford to pay for them; it is women who [...]

At the moment the world loses 15 billion dollars every year in productivity that doesn’t happen because mothers and their newborns are dying – one mother a minute, four million newborns every year. A mother’s death always means deeper poverty and hardship for her family and community. It often means an early death for her [...]

Women and children do bear the brunt of economic hardship during any economic downturn. I witnessed this during the course of  2007 and 2008 when I made several trips to Ghana to photographically document a microfinance operation in Pokuase, a small town approximately one hour outside the capital of Accra. Because poverty in the third [...]

Investing in Women is a Smart Choice
We echo the words of the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon on the Observance of World Population Day: In the midst of the worst global economic crisis in generations, we must find the most effective ways to continue progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals. There is no [...]

Who’s responsible for globalization? Probably a woman called Ug. Ug recognised that the woman in the next cave made better mammoth-skin shoes than she did. She also knew that Mr. Ug threw a pretty hot spear, which meant she had more mammoth skin to work with. So the first trade was made…