Photo: UN Women/Ryan Brown The world is entering a period not merely of shrinking civic space, but of contracting moral ambition. Thirty years after the Beijing Platform for Action , the global crisis of violence against women and girls is deepening rather than receding. Armed conflict, political instability, economic stress, and an organized backlash against gender equality have converged to produce a hostile environment in which women’s rights organizations are compelled to

Lizulu Market in Lilongwe City. Pic by Malawi Travel If you want to understand Malawi’s economy, don’t start with a spreadsheet. Start at Lizulu at dawn, when traders with the common sense of seasoned macroeconomists lay out tomatoes, dried fish, cassava, and second‑hand shirts, hedging against price volatility by stocking what people actually eat and wear. Here, in the hum and barter of everyday life, are Malawi’s territorial markets —localized systems that connect producers

Pic by Chikondi/UNICEF Malawi’s education system is not merely lagging. It is structurally unprepared for an era in which artificial intelligence and digital tools are redefining productivity, skills formation, and national competitiveness. The consequences are visible in chronic overcrowding, low completion and transition rates, fragile infrastructure, and uneven teacher capacity—conditions that make adaptive learning at scale elusive and undermine the country’s long-term de

Pic by UNOPS Global development finance is entering a harsher season. Aid volumes dipped in 2024 for the first time in five years, while indebted low‑income countries faced escalating debt service and shrinking fiscal space. Against this backdrop, one question reigns supreme: is Global North private sector activity, both via profit‑shifting practices and the growing use of “private sector instruments” in aid, crowding out government revenue and, in turn, squeezing public assi