Do you send money home to your family overseas? If so, you鈥檙e contributing to the global flow of remittances, or as the World Bank鈥檚 Dilip Ratha calls them, 鈥渄ollars wrapped with care鈥.
World Bank
As this decade comes to an end, the world has seen progress on many fronts: the poorest countries have greater access to water, electricity, and sanitation; poverty and child mortality have fallen; technology has spread far and wide. But we鈥檝e also broken the wrong kinds of records: more people were forcibly displaced than any other time in history; carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hit an all-time high; biodiversity is declining at an accelerating rate. Here are highlighting some achievements and challenges.
Today, there are more refugees than directly after World War II. The directly. Also, by addressing the underlying drivers of conflict, it's aiming to reduce factors causing people to flee their homes.
Fishermen, families, hotel owners, and coastal farmers are all sounding an alarm: North Africa鈥檚 coast has reached its tipping point. Coastal hotspots in Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia, for a start, are 鈥渁bsolutely exhausted鈥 from overfishing and coastal erosion.
Out of 114 measured, 15 countries experienced the largest annual average percentage point declines in extreme poverty rate between 2000 and 2015. In each of these countries, an average of at least 1.6% of the population moved out of extreme poverty every year. Tanzania, Tajikistan and Chad top the list.
Explore the , which provide objective measures of business regulations for local firms in 190 economies. .
Innayatou Souradji watched her mother and grandmother work hard at home and in the fields without having the opportunity to go to school. She is determined not to follow that same path and dreams of becoming a doctor when she finishes her studies.
The world faces an invisible crisis of water quality. Its impacts are wider, deeper, and more uncertain than previously thought and require urgent attention.