Author: Mallika Khanna

ALEPPO, Syria — Even as the Syrian army, with help from Russian forces, took over the country’s largest city Aleppo from the rebels who had been holding it since 2012, the attention of the world was on the monumental health crisis in Syria. In Aleppo alone, of the 5,000 physicians working before the war began, only 36 remain. According to the World Health Organization, approximately two-thirds of the hospitals and clinics in Syria have been destroyed in the ongoing war. This wanton destruction and the subsequent movement of millions of Syrians has led to the return of previously eradicated diseases…

KATHMANDU, Nepal — Nearly 20 months after the devastating earthquake in Nepal, the global effort to reconstruct the Himalayan nation and rehabilitate the two million people impacted by it has achieved few of its promised goals. There was great resolve to provide aid immediately after the massive earthquake hit the country, killing 10,000 people and leaving an estimated two million affected. A month after the earthquake in Nepal, global donors met in Kathmandu to plan reconstruction. The objective was to “build back better”, and donors committed $4.4 billion to the restoration, led by Europe, the U.S., India and China. But as the…

NEW DELHI, India — A shocking 2011 report put the estimated use of female hygiene products in India at about 12 percent of all 355 million menstruating women. This figure is the result of twin barriers to access and affordability that force the other 88 percent to rely on unsanitary alternatives such as cloth, ashes and husk sand. The lack of access to hygiene products, particularly in rural India, can be attributed to the taboo associated with menstruation in India. Certain interpretations of Hindu myth imply that menstruating women are impure and must be clean before returning to daily life. This tradition is…

HARTFORD, Connecticut — Across the world, refrigerators are being used to improve vaccine access and save lives, by keeping temperature-sensitive vaccines effective for children in Africa. Rotavirus and Pneumococcal, vaccines for preventing diarrhea and pneumonia (the leading causes of child deaths), must be kept between two and eight degrees centigrade. These vaccines are particularly crucial in parts of Africa where immediate medical attention is hard to access, and it is only through new innovations in refrigeration that children in the region are gaining access to them. For a long time, one of the biggest healthcare challenges to improve vaccine access in Africa was…

Almost a quarter of the population of Rio de Janeiro lives in favelas, slums within urban communities. Unsurprisingly, people living in favelas tend to have low education, including lower rates of literacy, age-grade disparities and higher dropout rates than the rest of the country. The barriers to education in favelas include poverty, conflict and high population density. Urban poverty is a key feature of the landscape of many developing countries today. In Brazil, a debt crisis, high inflation, rising wage inequality and government policy have deepened the vast inequality between the rich and the poor. The urban poor settle in favelas in search of…

Zaatari refugee camp, home to more than 81,000 Syrian refugees, has become the largest refugee camp in the Middle East since its establishment in 2012. Located in Jordan, the camp has developed its own economy, recreational facilities and education system, a testament to the resilience of the refugees living there. Zaatari has 30,000 shelters and administration buildings, three hospitals, three schools, and around 3,000 shops in a market dubbed the ‘Champs Elysees’, where food, household goods, and clothes are for sale. In 2016, 1001 Media and Living on One released Salaam Neighbor, a movie attempting to capture the intricacies of this…

SEATTLE — In India, one in four children of school-going age is out of school. In sheer numbers, this means that as of 2011, 99 million children in total had dropped out of school. As shown from the figure above, the right to education so determinedly enshrined in the Indian Constitution has not borne its fruits. Access to education is lacking for a large part of the youth. It is in this environment that Children’s Rights and You (CRY) launched its School the Spark campaign this July. A well-established NGO founded in 1979, CRY has implemented various projects over the…