These are some of the views and reports relevant to our readers that caught our attention this week.
Want a Better, Safer World? Build a Finance Facility for Education
Stanford Social Innovation Review
The global education crisis can seem overwhelming. Today, there are 263 million children and young people throughout the world who are not in school, and 60 million of them live in dangerous emergencies. Fast forward to 2030, and our world could be one where more than half of all children—800 million out of 1.6 billion—will lack basic secondary-level skills. Almost all of them will live in low- and middle-income countries. What’s more, many of those children will never have the chance for an education at all; others who do attend school will drop out after only a few years. Their job prospects will be poor—their likelihood of becoming the entrepreneurs who will drive the next stage of global growth even more uncertain. This is a prediction of course—not a done deal by any means—and yet many low- and middle-income country leaders fear that this grim possibility will become their reality. They understand that lack of quality education will leave their countries unable to gain economic ground or improve the well-being of their citizens. And they realize that large numbers of young people—who should be a huge asset to their countries—can easily shift to the liability column and become sources of instability if they are deprived of their fundamental right to an education.
Business, Human Rights, and the Sustainable Development Goals
Business and Sustainable Development Commission.
Companies’ single greatest opportunity to contribute to human development lies in advancing respect for the human rights of workers and communities touched by their value chains, according to the new paper, Business, Human Rights, and the Sustainable Development Goals, authored by Shift and commissioned by the Business and Sustainable Development Commission. People around the world are affected by business activities every day, many very positively. Roughly 2 billion people are touched by the value chains of multinational companies. Yet these same people are exposed to the harms that can also result when their human rights are not respected by business, cutting them off from the benefits of development.
Will the world reach 10 billion people?
If the recent United Nations projections turn out to be correct, the world’s population will continue to grow at a relatively high pace throughout this century, and many of you will still be alive when we reach the 10 billion mark in 2060. If you want to know the precise odds that you may still be around to see this, you can check them at www.population.io. Why is population growth happening now and why so rapidly? Contrary to common wisdom, rapid population growth is the result of development, not of misery. It is driven largely by the fact that people live longer, and longer lives mean more people, even with fewer children per family. In fact, the number of children (age 0-14) has hardly increased since 2000 and is expected to remain at around two billion throughout most of this century. In other words, all of today’s global population growth comes from higher numbers of adults.
The higher the inequality, the more likely we are to move away from democracy
In every political system, the rich tend to hold more power – but the relationship between politics, economics and inequality is complex. To better understand these critical issues, we must look to Big Data. I am asked this question very often: why should we care about inequality? There are three reasons.
They Outnumber Refugees But Don't Often Make Headlines
US National Public Radio
Refugees make headlines. Internally displaced people don't. Maybe their plight eludes the limelight because, unlike refugees, they don't cross international borders ... or seek to enter the United States or Western Europe, where people debate how many of them to let in ... or undertake harrowing voyages across the Mediterranean. And maybe it's because of their official label. "Internally displaced persons" (also known as IDPs) sounds vague and a bit confusing, as if they were lost inside themselves.
Photo credit: Flickr user fdecomit
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