Many argue that strong preschool education is key to molding successful students and adults. Photo: woodleywonderworks (flickr)

Despite being one of the most developed countries in the world, it looks like the United States may be falling behind other highly-industrialized countries in regards to preschool education. A study released this week by the University of London says that universal preschool is a way to create better students and workers, a topic that has been highly debated in the past two decades.

The study showed that children at age 10 who had attended preschool scored 27 percent higher in math and performed better in other subjects as well compared to boys and girls who did not start their education as early.

Critics of universal preschool have insisted that much of the initial gain in IQ and cognitive abilities resulting from early preschool education dissipates in later years — largely because of a dysfunctional K-12 system. Thus, critics argue, tax dollars spent on such programs are largely wasted and should be spent on K-12 education reform instead. However, the researchers for this study believe that the educational benefits of preschool are long-term and last through primary school.

The new study supports early preschool advocates who have argued that kids that attend preschool are more likely to graduate from college, are more productive workers and are less likely to participate in criminal activities. Some estimates even indicate that governments can expect to save $13,000 to $19,000 per child just by investing in early education. Recognizing the benefits of early preschool, China has invested in preschool education with the goal of building a more competitive work force.

With all the benefits associated with early schooling, it seems like compulsory preschool is an obvious way to improve a nation's economy. If the results of the study prove reliable, it may be time for the United States to stop arguing over the issue and embrace universal preschool education. Our reluctance certainly won't discourage other countries (and competing economies) from doing so.

So happy. Photo: Joy Portella/Mercy Corps

On average, people are happier now than they were 25 years ago, according to the most recent World Values Survey. The study attributes the increase in happiness to economic prosperity, democracy and social liberalization.

Money can't buy happiness? Or can it ... just a little?

Women in line at a hospital window. Photo: World Bank Photo Collection (flickr)

India's public health care system is in a state of crisis.

Time Magazine recently ran photos of hospitals swamped with patients and their families in a report that says India's "massive population" has led to "overloading systems where they do exist and aiding the spread of disease in the many places they don't." A Brookings Institution report says the rural medical practitioners who perform 80 percent of India's outpatient care "have no formal qualifications for it. They sometimes lack even a high school diploma."

But the Wall Street Journal reports that India's central government is stepping up with a new National Health Insurance Program. For just $1, India's poor can receive a card that entitles them to $700 of care at most public or private hospitals.

To enroll, families must make less than $100 per year and pay the $1 fee. To support the program the government will pay out $1 billion to insurance companies, who say their involvement will help them market to participants whose future income may turn them into paying customers. Already, about 1.5 million people have signed up, and plans for expansion are in the works.

While the use of the card is limited to care at hospitals, it still goes a long way to reduce the chance that medical debt will financially crush already-impoverished families. And with one-third of the world's poor living within its borders, India is right to address its health care challenge.

Photo: 3arabawy(flickr)

Most people have heard of the concept of a “carbon footprint," which is a measure of how much our personal, daily activities affect the environment in terms of greenhouse gases. For example, a person who bikes to work, uses energy-saving lightbulbs and recycles religiously would have a smaller carbon footprint that a person who drives a Hummer, makes overseas trips once a month and is forgetful about turning off electrical appliances.

It turns out that a carbon footprint is only one way of looking at your environmental impact. As many countries struggle with freshwater shortages, there has been a push to account for just how much water people actually consume in their day-to-day lives – in other words, a “water footprint.” Like a carbon footprint, a water footprint takes into consideration hidden environmental tolls, such as the water needed to grow grain or maintain animals in order to produce just one hamburger. Water footprints can be calculated on the individual, national and global levels.

In March 2008, a University of London scientist was honored with the Stockholm Water Prize for his work on the concept of “virtual water," which is a way of calculating how much water is used to produce a range of different commodities. For example, it takes 140 liters (about 37 gallons) of freshwater to produce one cup of coffee, which takes into account not only the water content of the drink itself, but the freshwater needed to grow, process, package and ship the coffee.

It may seem complicated to have multiple ways to measure just how much our individual actions weigh on the environment. However, in a world where one person in five has no access to freshwater, it’s a step in the right direction any time hyperconsumers in developed countries can to think about exactly how their choices affect other members of the planet.

To find out how your consumption choices add up, use Waterfootprint.org's individual water footprint calculator.

Training midwives in Afghanistan. Fighting for women's equality. Lending money to poor people in Madagascar. These are among a number of honorable undertakings led by Muslim charities every day.

But following the September 11th attacks, many Muslim charities were accused of supporting terrorist groups and investigated by the U.S. government in what one critic called "a witch hunt."

"Government actions have resulted in program cutbacks and increased fear of speaking out on important public issues," said Kay Guinane with the watchdog group Office of Management and Budget Watch.

Nearly seven years later, many of these organizations have still not seen donations recover to pre-9/11 levels, and are turning to a private-sector charity validator to win back donors and restore a positive image.

The Wall Street Journal reports that seven major U.S.-based Muslim charities are voluntarily opening up their financial records to the Wise Giving Alliance, a charity-vetting service run by the Better Business Bureau. The organizations hope the BBB accreditation will "build trust among the public, donors and the U.S. government," said Muslim Advocates' Farhana Khera.

They'll need to do so in what is undoubtedly a tough giving climate. In 2006 and 2007 charitable giving rose only about 1 percent after inflation, reported the Chronicle of Philanthropy, and this year is predicted to be worse due to a sluggish economy. At the same time, many charities are seeing the demand for their services increase, forcing all service-oriented nonprofits — Muslim or otherwise — to do more with less.

A new UN Food and Agriculture Organization report predicts that rising food prices will soon begin to slow. However the BBC decidedly reports that cheap food is a thing of the past:

[Food] prices will level off at a far higher average level than seen before the crisis erupted. The long era of cheap food is over.

The sharp rise in food prices over the past year have been felt all over the world but are particularly painful for the poor in developing countries. The World Bank recently estimated that higher food prices and food scarcity could force 100 million people to become impoverished. In response, The World Bank is allocating $1.2 billion for increased food aid. At least $200 million is designated for grants targeting "high risk" countries including Liberia, Haiti and Djibouti.

Anyone who's purchased a meal from a streetside cart knows that its food can often be tastier than what's offered in a restaurant. What you might not have considered is how street food is one of the best ways to learn about the local culture.

The new eight-part Al Jazeera series "Street Food" explores what street food can teach us about culture by taking us to the carts of Penang, San Sebastian, New York City, London, Nairobi, Beijing, Cairo and Jerusalem.

While food is the focus of the show, it is difficult to separate its influence on culture, politics and health. Topics such as the global food crisis, food shortages and the rise of Western diets and obesity are covered of the program. “The so called rich man’s diseases, like diabetes and high blood pressure, are starting to appear," warns a popular TV chef in Nairobi. Episodes also highlight the everyday struggles of both food-cart vendors and their customers.

Although the shows certainly showcase the distinctiveness of local foods, one also demonstrates how food can bridge differences: The Jerusalem episode features Chefs for Peace, an alliance of chefs from Israel and Palestine who bring together people of different faiths to share in the delight of great food.


Watch the first episode of "Street Food" in Nairobi, Kenya.

If you think that the global food crisis is taking a toll on countries like Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Mexico, imagine what its like for those living in Ethiopia. Alex Perry’s report from Kersa, Ethiopia for Time Magazine paints a grim picture:

The day photographer Thomas Dworzak and I arrived at Kuyera, four children died. There were four more the next day…. On that first day, I glimpsed Ayano in the intensive care room, wrapped in a red and blue blanker, struggling to breathe, his eyes tipped back into his skull. When I next saw him, he was trussed up the blanket that had become his death shroud, lying on a slab next to two other small bundles in the morgue…. For five days, we turned our hired SUV into an ambulance, ferrying bodies of dead children back to their villages, picking up the starving and taking them to Kuyera.

Ethiopia faces a major crisis — chronic drought coupled with food prices that have risen 330 percent in the past year and a population that has doubled in size since the mid-1980s.

Yet nature alone is not to blame for Ethiopia's food crisis. Some argue that the government's tight control of the agricultural sector that puts all land under state ownership exacerbates Ethiopia's food insecurity. The distribution of fertilizer and seeds are government-controlled, and while farmers can choose what they want to grow, the Los Angeles Times reports that some 20,000 agricultural advisors, also functioning as tax collectors, keep close tabs of what is being grown.

This week, the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said that "despite the best efforts of the government and humanitarian community to respond to the crisis the needs of people continue to far outstrip the resources available to hand."

Yet surrounding the famine are lush fields of green — feeding goats and cattle — while children continue to die of hunger. It is the harsh reality of what is being called "green hunger" or "green drought" — starvation amidst plenty. A recent BBC article describes it as "the time when the land is full of new shoots but there is no food. It happens because the last rains failed and few crops were planted."

Images posted by Reuters photographer Radu Sigheti puts a face to the crisis in an intimate visit with the Mohamed family during the loss of their young daughter, Michu, who died of malnutrition.

Other children will likely suffer the same fate. Recent government figures estimate some 75,000 children under the age of five in the country are severely malnourished. Among all Ethiopians, more than 4.5 million are in need of emergency food aid.

Now is the time for us to help fill Ethiopia's need. As Mark Lang from the Christian relief agency Tearfund writes in the Times Online, "This is no time to give Ethiopians a compassion fatigued brush-off."

Photo: guuleed (Flickr)

The new National Stadium, also called the "Birds Nest" was built especially for the games at an estimated cost of US $423 million. Photo: Noel in the Bahamas (flickr)

What does hosting the Olympics mean for China’s economy?

Spending $43 billion on large-scale infrastructure projects like hotels, public transportation and sports arenas certainly creates jobs and economic activity. It also will help draw tourists. But hosting the Olympics doesn't always result in long-term financial gain.

Before China, Greece held the title for the biggest Olympic spender at roughly $12 billion U.S. After the 2004 Athens Games, Greece’s budget deficit hit 5.3 percent, or 50,000 Euros per household. Citizens unable to afford tickets to the ceremonies essentially ended up financing the games through higher taxes.

While Australia’s government claimed that the 2000 Sydney Olympics would not be a drain on taxpayers, four years later the state was still paying to maintain underutilized stadiums and facilities built especially for the 2000 Games to the tune of about $40 million U.S. a year. The government does not expect to break even on the Games until 2010.

Of course, hosting the Summer Games hasn't always been an economic drain. In 1988, South Korea’s economy grew by 10 percent and the 1996 Atlanta Games added a 2.5 percent boost to the U.S. economy. The 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona coined the phrase the Barcelona effect, which referred to the ability of Spain to reap increased tourism and tourist dollars after hosting the Summer Games.

So how will China fare? Wang Yiming, an expert with the think tank under the National Development and Reform Commission, says the Games "will not become a watershed of China's economic development, as the fundamental factors that have supported China's economic progress in the past 30 years are not to change markedly."

Another website pointed out that "heavy-handed security and restrictions on business visas led many buyers and inspectors to cancel visits and orders," and that empty hotel rooms and a decline in airline reservations don't bode well. Then again, Beijing's entire economy accounts for less than 5 percent of China's GDP.

It's too early to gauge the ultimate financial impact of these Games. But considering the economic juggernaut that China is today, maybe the more relevant question for China is, Does it really matter?

Photo: uncultured(flickr)

Human subjects research has always been rife with ethical concerns, especially when research is being conducted in the developing world. At first glance, demographic and health surveillance (DHS) research can appear to have less potential for harm than direct-intervention drug trials. Not so, says a recent bulletin from the World Health Organization.

DHS research is defined as “long-term monitoring of specifically defined populations, typically residing in a small geographic region.” The authors of the August 2008 bulletin article say that while DHS research has led to many life-saving findings, including vaccine development, the invention of oral rehydration solution, and the link between early cessation of breastfeeding and malnutrition, it comes with a special set of ethical complications.

For example, when a disease surveillance team with the resources to provide comprehensive health care to a community is stationed in a poverty-stricken area, what is their obligation to the community? Do they treat people for only those diseases that they study? Do they only treat study participants? How does project staff go about obtaining informed consent from the community members? If there are monetary gains to be made by study subjects, what consequences might that have? If the DHS group provides health care or other services in a community for a long period of time, what happens to the community when they leave?

Ethical quandaries are certainly not limited to DHS research. As global health and development topics increasingly capture the attention of resource-rich universities and researchers, it is important to remember that the potential for harm rises along with the potential for good.

In the foreground stands the television news correspondent. He is describing the bombings and devastation being wreaked by Russian troops in a defiant Georgia. Crossing behind him unnoticed is a small group of people clearly fleeing the devastation with possibly everything they own on their backs or in the makeshift bags they are carrying. Where they are going is a mystery.

A known but little-noted result of the conflict in Georgia — and others around the world — is the displacement of people who have absolutely no control of the events going on around them. In Georgia alone, tens of thousands of refugees from the secessionist territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia have been waiting for more than ten years for a chance to return home. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, as many as 247,000 people are displaced in Georgia as of February 2007. The current situation promises only to worsen an already terrible circumstance.

Indeed, according to a 2007 study published by the IDMC, the number of refugees created as a result of armed conflicts and violence in more than 50 countries is well over 26 million. In nearby Iraq, for example, nearly 3 million people were displaced by rising inter-community violence between February 2006 and March 2008, according to the UN. “If a similar percentage of the U.S. population were displaced," writes the Brookings Institute's Elizabeth Ferris in The Looming Crisis: Displacement and Security in Iraq,
"this would represent over 50 million Americans — the equivalent in displacement of those uprooted by 50 Hurricane Katrinas.”

Add these folks to the already staggering number of poor and poverty stricken people throughout the world — a World Bank report states that 2.8 billion of the world’s more than 6 billion people live on less than $2 a day and 1.2 billion on less than $1 a day — and one begins to get a sense of the enormous challenges facing the world’s decision makers.

(Editor's note: Mercy Corps is one of several organizations helping displaced people in Georgia.)

Photo: Meanest Indian (Flickr)

Despite the many signs of progress, India’s quality of economic growth has been questioned by Unicef in its 2008 State of Asia-Pacific's Children report. According to the report, India’s poorest children are not being provided basic health care, despite the country’s impressive economic performance.

In 2006 alone, 2.1 million children under five years old died in India, giving the country an infant mortality rate of 57 per 1,000 births, one of the worst rates of child survival in the world. In fact, together China and India account for nearly a third of the child deaths in the world today.

Despite being a popular destination for medical tourism, unequal access to medical care continues to be a consequence of India's growing disparity between the rich and poor. Unicef's report found that “a child born to a family in the wealthiest fifth of the population is about three times more likely to receive all the basic vaccinations than a child born in the poorest fifth.” And it appears that the issue extends beyond economics — many women and children are also unable to access proper health care.

According to the report, "one out of every three women is underweight," putting them at risk of having low birthweight babies that "are 20 times more likely to die in infancy than healthy babies." Bloomberg.com's analysis of the report also points out that, "South Asia is the only region in the world where female life expectancy is lower than male life expectancy and where girls are more likely to be underweight than boys." Paradoxically, India also has "the world's largest number of professionally qualified women" and "more women as doctors, surgeons, scientists and professors than the United States has," according to Smile Foundation, a organization in India that targets at providing education and health to underprivileged children.

Yet no matter how robust its economy may be, unless the Indian government directly intervenes in issues of poverty and inequality plaguing the country, advancement in development may suffer. For progress to be sustainable, those who benefit from economic opportunities must not forget those left behind.

For decades, newly minted business-school graduates have flocked to Wall Street in New York, eager to make their mark in one of the biggest financial hubs in the world. Today, these “high-level” jobs are increasingly moving abroad, fueled by Wall Street companies’ efforts to reduce operating costs in a bad economy.

Over the past year, domestic financial markets have been hit hard. From 2004 to 2007, the top U.S. financial companies earned approximately $254 billion in profits. Over the past year, however, these companies’ combined assets value has decreased by $107.2 billion. Companies in the financial sector have been outsourcing for years, but the recent economic downturn has changed the types of jobs going overseas. Instead of the so-called “back-office operations” such as IT and accounting, companies are increasingly relocating research and data analysis jobs to places like India and Eastern Europe.

According to the International Herald Tribune,

[This] could signal the beginning of a profound change in the way investment banks are structured, with everyone but the top deal-makers, client representatives and the bank management permanently relocated to cheaper areas like India, the Philippines and Eastern Europe.

Some U.S. workers are adapting by moving where the jobs take them, whether that’s Latin American or Asia.

Although this trend might suggest that emerging and developing economies are booming, the International Monetary Fund’s July 2008 World Economic Outlook Update suggests otherwise. Economic growth in developing economies is expected to slow from 8 percent in 2007 to 7 percent in 2008-2009 — still better than U.S. forecasts, but an indication that clear-cut winners are hard to find in today's harsh economic climate.

Photo: Henry McInnis for Mercy Corps

Along the banks of the Nile River in Sudan is some of the most fertile land in Africa. In fact, “Sudan could be self-sufficient, it does have the potential to be the breadbasket of Africa,” notes Kenro Oshidari, director of the UN World Food Program in Sudan.

Despite a harsh humanitarian situation in Darfur, and being the recipient of the most food aid, Sudan is actually a major exporter of sorghum, wheat, beans, peanuts, and tomatoes, among other crops. Just last year the U.S. shipped 283,000 tons of sorghum to Darfur — almost the exact same amount of sorghum exported by Sudan, UN officials told the New York Times.

Jeffrey Gettleman of The New York Times explores the complexity of food aid in Sudan in his revealing article; "The Food Chain: Darfur Withers as Sudan Sells Food."

We hear a lot about people who live on “less than a dollar a day.” But a dollar buys a lot more in some countries than it does in others. That’s why some economists believe a better way of understanding the relative income of people around the world is through something called Purchasing Power Parity.

A simple way of understanding this concept is through the words of BBC Reporter Mukul Devichand, who explains how the “Big Mac Index” — first coined by The Economist — is a good way of understanding price differences between countries.

The idea, says former World Bank economist Michael Ward, is that the Big Mac is an almost identical product no matter where in the world you buy it — bread, cheese, meat, lettuce and labour costs. But in fact, Big Macs end up costing much less in places like Beijing or Mumbai than London or New York.

So economists use the different prices of Big Macs across the world to judge the relative buying power of people in different countries. For example, if a Big Mac costs a dollar in America, but only 25 cents in Mumbai, then a PPP "dollar" in Mumbai is actually worth only 25 cents.

It’s a good idea to keep the dollar’s relative worth in mind when checking out the portfolio of pictures on onedollaroneday.org, sponsored by our sister site Global Citizen Corps. The site is challenging its visitors to submit photos that answer the question, “What can you eat on a dollar a day?”

With Global Citizen Corps’ global audience, it’ll be interesting to see how submissions from the U.S. differ from those from, say, Spain or Syria or Sudan.

Students aged 14-25 can register with Global Citizen Corps and submit their photo on flickr.com. The grand prize is a digital camera, with Amazon.com gift cards for second and third place. The deadline is August 20.