Over the past decade, nearly 58 million girls were married before the age of 18. Child marriage is a truly global problem: In Africa, 42 percent of girls are married before turning 18, but it is also prevalent in parts of Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean (in South Asia, for instance, 46 percent of girls are married). Child brides often start childbearing early, leading to complications and producing high rates of maternal morbidity and mortality among girls in developing countries. Married girls are often forced to leave school, negatively affecting their ability to work and provide for their families. The panelists will describe current policies and programs working to support young women and delay marriage whenever possible.

Increasingly, family planning and HIV programs are seeking to expand their services to include maternal health care. The movement to integrate health services provides an important opportunity to share lessons learned across the different communities on their experiences with rights-based care. Join us for a discussion with experts in rights-based maternity care and its intersection with family planning and HIV.

In remote Kalimantan, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea, rare species, virgin rain forests, and rich bio-diversity abound, as do abject poverty and steady destruction of natural habitat. But two women, initially interested in researching threatened species, saw the complex and interconnected relationships between the health of the forest and its inhabitants and developed programs that are successfully and sustainably tackling both health and environment issues.

Amid the growing number of reports warning that climate change threatens security, one potentially dangerous – but counterintuitive – dimension has been largely ignored. Could efforts to reduce our carbon footprint and lower our vulnerability to climate change inadvertently exacerbate existing conflicts?