San-kranti Student Challenge
The San-kranti Student Challenge, a contest managed by the Indian Institute for Human Settlement, actively engages Indian youth with their cities and encourages emerging leaders to shape its course. The top three teams are awarded a grant to implement their proposed solutions.
2010 India NGO Awards Ceremony
Heather Grady and Ashvin Dayaland helped celebrate the Resource Alliance's India NGO Awards in recognition of innovation, professionalism, and ethical standards in India’s nonprofit sector.
Asia Office
Photo: Patrick de Noirmont
In many Asian countries, especially during the past three decades, we have seen unprecedented advances. Poverty has been reduced. Health care has improved. Education has been strengthened. With these advances has also come a tremendous shift in the region’s economic structure and population distribution, with 60% of global population growth during the next 30 years expected to occur in Asia’s cities.
These changes have been driven by a combination of forces: a rapid expansion of economic opportunity, political will, increased civic engagement, and greater innovation and dynamism across many fields. The private sector, academia, and the sciences, along with the Rockefeller Foundation and other philanthropic institutions, have all contributed to these transformations. But there is also another Asia. Hundreds of millions of people have been left out of the positive picture.
Asia accounts for nearly 50% of the world’s poorest people (those living on less than a dollar a day), according to the World Bank.
Along with unstable and uneven progress toward good governance, the fact that so many millions are falling through the cracks is increasingly because some of the world’s most acute climate hotspots are found in Asia. Water supplies are threatened. Despite major improvements in food production, unequal access and distribution leaves millions still hungry. Health and safety are precarious for too many, in both rural and urban areas. Even rapidly developing countries, such as Thailand and Vietnam, remain especially vulnerable to natural disasters, economic shocks, and global volatility.
