Blog Posts: poverty

While the number of people without electricity has dropped, experts predict that more than 600 million will still lack power in 2030. Nine out of 10 of them will live in sub-Saharan Africa.

Some schools in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania see more than a dozen of their students injured or killed in road crashes every year. Traffic engineer Ayikai Charlotte Poswayo wants to change that.

More than a dozen students are killed or injured in road crashes every year at some schools in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. One project is helping kids get to school safely simply by making small changes to city street designs.

Pune's waste pickers used to be treated much like the garbage they collected. India's first worker-owned waste-pickers' cooperative elevated their status while cleaning up Pune's mountains of trash.

New WRI research shows that cities in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia are expanding outward rather than vertically. As these places grow in population, continuing their unwieldy expansion outward could push them into economic, environmental and social crises.

When Kenya's Najile health clinic lacked electricity, clinicians couldn't vaccinate children or deliver babies at night. Rooftop solar panels changed everything.

Short-lived climate pollutants like hydrofluorocarbons, black carbon and methane aren't as well-known as carbon dioxide. But they have a powerful impact on the climate and on human health, and more countries need to develop plans to cut their emissions.

There is now widespread recognition that the poorest are at the frontline of climate change impacts. Low-income households have less capacity to adapt than those who are wealthier, and 75 percent of the extreme poor depend on activities such as agriculture that are highly sensitive to climate impacts. Unless we drastically change course, an additional 100 million people could live in extreme poverty by 2030 because of climate change,...

As Cape Town hosts the Adaptation Futures conference, WRI experts highlight actions that nations can take now to prevent devastating losses from climate events.

A new sugarcane plantation forced 600 Cambodian families off their land. Many lost all their belongings, and parents, unable to farm and afford school fees, sent their children to work in Thailand. It's a shocking story, but one that's all too familiar for the 2.5 billion people living on indigenous and community lands.