Word: poorest
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...recent years, undergraduates have bemoaned a policy banning overnight guests without two-week notice, but many nationwide have praised Boston University’s successful 10-year partnership with the Chelsea, Mass., public school system—one of the state’s poorest-performing communities. During this stewardship, Chelsea High School nearly doubled the number of pupils taking the SAT, while increasing their average scores by over 200 points. Although Boston University has been in the forefront for many positive changes in education policy, its dismantling of the Academy’s Gay-Straight Alliance...
Johannesburg aims to put equal stress on the twin aspirations of sustainable development. Those who profess to care about the environment yet scorn the goal of development only undermine both causes. For the poorest members of the human family in particular, development means the chance to feed, school and care for themselves and their children. But development that takes little account of sustainability is ultimately self-defeating. Prosperity built on the despoliation of the natural environment is no prosperity at all, only a temporary reprieve from future disaster. The issue is not environment vs. development or ecology vs. economy...
Economic-development and family-planning programs have helped slow the tide of people, but in some places, population growth is moderating for all the wrong reasons. In the poorest parts of the world, most notably Africa, infectious diseases such as AIDS, malaria, cholera and tuberculosis are having a Malthusian effect. Rural-land degradation is pushing people into cities, where crowded, polluted living conditions create the perfect breeding grounds for sickness. Worldwide, at least 68 million are expected to die of AIDS by 2020, including 55 million in sub-Saharan Africa. While any factor that eases population pressures may help...
Efforts to provide greater access to family planning and health care have proved effective. Though women in the poorest countries still have the most children, their collective fertility rate is 50% lower than it was in 1969 and is expected to decline more by 2050. Other programs targeted at women include basic education and job training. Educated mothers not only have a stepladder out of poverty, but they also choose to have fewer babies...
...muddy courtyard. The women of the Zakari family lean out of their window, an Ottoman arch whose grey stone is pitted by the weather of 250 years. The place was built for one of the richest families in Nablus. Now it serves as rented accommodation for the city's poorest, hidden in the heart of the Casbah. "It's not a palace anymore," says Najah Zakari, the mother of one of six large families that squeeze into quarters once meant for a single household. "Do you think they'd let people like us live in a real palace?" She beckons...