A family cooking with firewood in Qunu, the rural village where former South African President Nelson Mandela grew up.
Carl De Souza/AFP via Getty Images
The essential ingredients in achieving the development goals are partnerships combined with smart thinking about how to deploy 21st century technologies.
Riverbanks are reinforced to reduce flood risks, but these techniques reduce biodiversity and limit public accessibility.
(Shutterstock)
The sustainable and inclusive development of the St. Lawrence River is essential. A prolonged laissez-faire attitude will have harmful consequences on people and the environment.
Regions with higher than average university attainment in the 1960s continue to have higher university attainment rates today.
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If rural communities plan carefully – and some already are – they can reinvent themselves as the perfect homes for people fleeing wildfire and hurricane zones.
Women continue to fetch wood and cook over smoky fires even where there are solar home systems.
GettyImages
Developments in the energy sector shouldn’t be reduced to technological sophistication. They should be guided by how they improve the livelihoods of the intended beneficiaries.
Charcoal is an essential fuel for most parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
AnandievanZyl/Wikimedia Commons
Step aside, Pablo Escobar. New research shows it was poor farmers who helped turn Colombia into the world’s largest drug producer when they started growing and exporting pot in the 1970s.
A market in the Old City of Kabul, Afghanistan, Sept. 8, 2019.
AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi
Building a lasting peace in Afghanistan will take much more than an accord with the Taliban. In post-conflict nations, economic development and job creation are critical to national security.
Nigerians rescued from a Boko Haram camp in the north. The terrorist group is just one element of insecurity in the region.
EPA
Policymakers in Africa approach rural and urban development separately. This needs to change.
The latest World Bank report on South Africa identifies land reform as critical factor of addressing the country’s economic challenges.
EPA/Kim Ludbrook
South Africa’s land policy is flailing around in the dark, with the haziest of understandings of how well or how badly land reform is doing.
Men transporting a large bag in the Muvumba river valley in Kigali. A massive Rwandan electrification programme sets out to benefit rural communities.
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A massive rural on-grid electrification programme in Rwanda has delivered considerable benefits. But is it the most sensible way to deliver power to remote areas?
In Nagoro, in Tokushima Prefecture, one resident has made around 300 dolls to replace villagers who are no longer around.
Roberto Maxwell/flickr
Across Japan, towns and villages are vanishing as the population ages and young people move to the cities. How the country manages this holds lessons for other developed nations facing a similar fate.
Rural poverty affects a growing number of people in South Africa.
REUTERS/Mike Hutchings
South Africa should review its rural development strategy and land reform policy to win the fight against rising poverty.
A woman takes an oral cholera vaccine in a hospital. But cholera vaccines are not always effective and never long lasting.
REUTERS/Andres Martinez Casares
Many states in Nigeria are reeling from cholera outbreaks. They need better health and sanitation infrastructure to disrupt transmission of the bacteria which cause the disease.
Paraguayan farmers are demanding agrarian reforms that would restore lost jobs to the countryside.
Jorge Adorno/Reuters
Outside the capital cities and the coastal fringes, the towns and people of rural and regional Australia have had to be inventive to get through the tough times.