Global Goalscast

In New York they are shooting off fireworks to celebrate reopening. But in other parts of the world the coronavirus is continuing to spread, with lethal results. Public health workers are angry and frustrated. A senior official of the World Health Organization, Maria Van Kerkhove, says the world needs to pull together to use all available tools to curb the virus. “Right now the narrative is vaccines, vaccines, vaccines,” she said, “and while vaccines, vaccinations are an incredibly powerful tool, we've completely forgotten about everything else that works. And I feel that frustration.”  In this episode, Public health experts in Botswana and Chile describe the continuing rampage of Covid-19 in their countries and Dr. David Nabarro, special Covid-19 Envoy of the WHO, criticizes leaders of the world’s most developed countries, the G7, for offering vaccines but not much else to the rest of the world at their just concluded summit. “It was a pretty bad outcome,” Dr.Nabarro said. “It was a lot of banging chests --

Covid-19 is moving from a pandemic to an endemic disease. The virus will be with us for a long time to come, maybe forever. Dr. David Nabarro, special envoy of the World Health Organization, says we need to prepare for this with strong leadership - both local and global. Global GoalsCast attends Dr. Nabarro’s latest briefing where he introduces us to health workers who have made a real difference controlling the virus and supporting those struck down by it in their local community. These include a nurse-run campaign to isolate and vaccinate in Nepal to a program in the United Kingdom to assist long-Covid sufferers.  “The sort of leadership that's needed is leadership that connects,” John Atkinson, a specialist in systems change, tells Dr. Nabarro. “Leadership that doesn't seek credit for itself. Leadership that knows there's no limit to what you can achieve if you don't give a damn who takes the credit.” Invisible leadership, Dr. Nabarro calls this. Globally, Nabarro calls for a new approach from rich countri

The world’s fight against Covid-19 is at a crossroads. Four out of five doses of vaccine have gone to a few rich countries.  “What are we all working for,’ asks Dr. David Nabarro, a special envoy of the World Health Organization. “Are we working for a small number of groups of people in well endowed countries to be able to be protected? People like me? Is this all about us being able to be okay?” Or, Dr. Nabarro adds, will the rich world take up the responsibility for manufacturing and distributing enough vaccine to protect everyone?  Inventing the vaccine was a triumph for science, says the Director General of the WHO, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.  But inequitable distribution is a “failure for humanity.” In this episode, Global GoalsCast attends a high level briefing lead by Dr. Nabarro, with updates on the spread of Covid-19 in India (Dr. NK Sethi), Nepal (Dr. Rojan Dahal), Chile (Rebecca Kanter) and Argentina. Co-host Edie Lush also speaks with her old boss, Ivan Weissman, a journalist in Argentina,

Global GoalsCast is invited to an exclusive briefing on Covid-19 for global health leaders. The Covid-19 situation is more sobering today than at any time in the pandemic, Dr. David Nabarro, special envoy of the World Health Organization, informs the group. India is the challenge now, he reports. But where will the problem be tomorrow? “I don’t know,” he warns.  Nabarro notes that some wealthy countries are trying to vaccinate their way out of the pandemic, even planning for the vaccination of children. But there is not yet enough vaccine to protect the world. So the right thing to do is use vaccine to protect the most vulnerable first, wherever they are and rely on non-pharmaceutical tools, like distancing, masks and washing, to curb the spread. Also featured in this episode is Dr. Jonathan Fitzsimon, a family physician in Ontario, Canada and the inspiring music of Nazeem, whose ballad, Respect, honors frontline workers and encourages everyone to abide by public health measures. You can support Nazeem’s musi

The fight to curb Covid-19 has created a new divide between those who have had the vaccine and those who have not. The United States, The United Kingdom and other well off countries are on their way to immunizing their entire adult population. Yet dozens of less wealthy countries have yet to receive their first dose. This inequity is both a moral challenge and a public health crisis. “You have coverage of a hundred percent in one rich country and then, in the following day, you have importation of new variants so all your efforts become useless,” warned Eduardo Samo Gudo, Scientific Director at Mozambique’s National Institute of Health. “From where we are in Africa,” said Emma Ingaiza who manages a clinic in the legendary Mathare slums of Nairobi, “we would want the world out there to understand that we are equally important. That our lives also matter. We're just on the front line as much as everyone else is.” Co-host Claudia Romo Edelman, who worked on the challenge of supply of treatment and vaccine for HI

Putting the world back on track after the pandemic will require a level of cooperation and partnership unlike anything we have seen. That is the conclusion of experts convened by Global GoalsCast to assess the crisis of the Sustainable Development Goals and the road forward.   The world before the pandemic proved dangerously vulnerable because of the very challenges the SDGs are designed to address.“And really this is our opportunity right now to focus in on who is being left behind, who is not getting the access and be able to find those supercharged solutions,” said Annemarie Hou, head of partnerships at the United Nations. “The SDGs are our way out of this, if we work together,” added Rajesh Mirchandani of the UN Foundation. Recorded live at the end of Global Goals week, this is part two of our special on the setbacks and solutions if the world is to build back better. Also featured in this episode are Alan Jope, CEO of Unilever; David Nabarro of the World Health Organization; Gillian Tett of the Financi

The pandemic has set the world back in so many ways. In this special, two-part episode, Edie Lush and Claudia Romo Edelman look at the damage inflicted on the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. The worldhad been making real progress toward the goals, which include eradicating poverty, educating everyone, providing health care for all and equity for women and girls. But in the space of a few months the progress hasbeen reversed on everything from vaccinations to literacy. In Part one, Henrietta Fore of UNICEF describes the crisis for children and for the SDGs overall. Melissa Fleming, Under Secretary General of the UN, describes the opportunity to embrace the lesson of the pandemic: inequity created this crisis. Building back a more equal worldwill help prevent the next one. Edie also visits with students in India and Uganda to hear how they have tried to keep their education going through the lockdowns. At the peak of the pandemic, 1.6 billion children were out of school. Unicef warns that a gener

Returning to work and curbing coronavirus are not competing ideas. That is a false choice. We can have jobs and health by building back in new ways that improve workplaces, education and medical care while deterring the infection.  Co-hosts Edie Lush and Claudia Romo Edelman seek out provocative ideas for immediate change. They are joined in this search by Gillian Tett of the Financial Times, inventor and editor of the FT’s Moral Money newsletter and coverage. “The key question is how do we go forward and build back better and not merely survive but thrive in the future.” Dr. Oxiris Barbot, New York City Health Commissioner, says that “an equity lens” is essential to recognize that risk of disease weighs heavier on communities of color and lower incomes. Repairing this requires not only improved access to health care, but also to better housing, jobs and education. “We are only as healthy as our most challenged resident,” she said. Jack Hidary, the Artificial Intelligence expert, serial entrepreneur and le

Not since World War II has so much of the world been so shattered by a single global event.  How do we recover?  We look at recovery from multiple perspectives. An Israeli peace-maker turned comic shares her frightening tale of Covid-19 diagnoses and survival. She was quarantined in a Jerusalem hotel with Arabs and Jews, an education in the true meaning of coexistence. Dr. Tom Frieden, one of the world's leading public health physicians, describes how to keep coronavirus in its box so we can carefully resume at least some parts of life and work. From two parts of Africa, Kenya and Cameroon, we hear about the fight to keep the pandemic from running rampant over Africa.   Facts and Actions are offered by Jonathan Rivers, the Head of WFP's Hunger Monitoring Unit of the World Food Program, which warns that the economic disruptions of Covid-19 are increasing serious hunger in several parts of the globe.   Amy Neale, Senior Vice President Start Path & Fintech at our sponsor, Mastercard, highlights two start-up co

Global Goal 5, gender equity, is both a purpose in itself and a vital accelerant to achieving all of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals. “We’re trying to move past the gravitational forces, the barriers that hold women back,” explains Melinda Gates, philanthropist, author and mother of three. “Because if you can remove those barriers and help lift women up, they will lift up the world.” In this special episode, Claudia Romo Edelman and Edie Lush share the How To Academy podcast in which journalist Hannah MacInnes interviews Melinda Gates in front of a live audience in London. For the last twenty years Gates has been on a mission to find solutions for people with the most urgent needs, wherever they live. One lesson she has learned is that to lift society up you have to stop keeping women down. The How to Academy hosts leading artists and thinkers in London for public talks, debates and conferences. Selected talks are featured in the How to Academy's podcast series, available wherever you get your pod

The pandemic can be stopped. We already know how, explain two of the world’s top public health doctors in this episode on lessons from the pandemic. The solution involves truly understanding how the disease was stopped in the early countries that confronted it. “We’re going back and relearning a lot of the lessons from China,” said Dr. Bruce Aylward, who led the World Health Organization’s mission to China and is working to share those findings in Italy and other countries. Dr. Aywalrd says leader’s in the West were slow to listen to the lessons. “We are all human at a certain level and we tend to cherry pick that part of the information, which we find most reassuring,” he observed. Dr.David Nabarro, TITLE, said that quick action will contain the virus. “If when a case arrives, you prevaricate, you're half-hearted, you pretend it's not real and you wait perhaps two, three, four weeks before you start to implement measures of any kind,” he warned, “what happens is that it basically doubles in scale every two t

Measured against history the change has come swiftly. After living in the countryside for thousands of years, humanity is in the midst of an epic move to the city. Co-host Edie Lush points out in this episode that as recently as 200 years ago little more than one person in ten lived in a city. Today, the UN estimates just over half of us live in cities. By 2050 that will be two thirds. Population is growing and urbanizing at the same time, says Renata Rubian, Adviser on Inclusive Sustainable Growth at the United Nations Development Program. Which is why the Global Goals include a goal explicitly focused on creating Sustainable Cities, SDG # 11.  Co-host Claudia Romo Edelman notes that other goals, like eradicating poverty or hunger, are easier to understand even if they are challenging to achieve. But given how much of the world will be living in cities we can not hope to achieve the global goals – from climate to equity, from good health to decent jobs and living standards – without creating sustainable ci

We must end our dependence on Fossil Fuels. “There is no choice,” Claudia Romo Edelman says. But it is not as simple as just stopping, experts explain in this episode, produced in cooperation with the Alphaville blog of the Financial Times. Eighty percent of our energy today comes from Fossil Fuels, explains Izabella Kaminska, editor of Alphaville. If we just go cold turkey, or even transitioned too suddenly, the global economy would shudder. That, in turn, would push other important goals out of reach and cause worldwide disruption and potential political upheaval.  Claudia and co-host Edie Lush frame this challenge in terms of the Sustainable Development Goals: How do we achieve Goal 13, Climate Action, while also moving toward Goal 1, eradicating extreme poverty or Goal 8, decent work and economic growth? To find answers, they speak with experts who are working on the transition from fossil fuels.  Adam Matthews, Director of Ethics and Engagement for the Church of England Pensions Board, describes the Tr

Wildfire season in Australia has brought human and environmental tragedy. It also has sent a warning to us all. “There's a huge, really very important message for everybody in the world looking at these fires,” Matthew England, a professor of oceanography and climate at the University of New South Wales, explains in the final episode of Global GoalsCast’s Season Three. “This is a glimpse into our future. we only have to take warming levels of the planet to about three degrees Celsius, which we're not far off… We're a third of the way to that warming…(and) the summer we've just had will be basically a normal summer event.”   In fact, 2019 was the warmest driest year ever recorded in Australia, with temperatures 1.5 degrees Celsius above the average in the late twentieth century. Edie Lush and Claudia Romo Edelman speak with Australians to understand the impact of these fires. Catriona Wallace, the founder and director of Flamingo Ai, a machine learning company, describes the flaming hell that consumed both her

It is that end-of-the-year time to take stock. Global GoalsCast doesn’t judge whether you’ve been naughty or nice. But co-hosts Edie Lush and Claudia Romo Edelman do take a look at the world in 2019 and ask whether it is still getting better, or going to hell in a handbasket, as Edie so delicately framed it. She cites the failure of the climate talks and the rise of nationalism everywhere from the UK to Brazil. Things are not as bad as they seem, Claudia replies. In fact, the replenishment of the Global Fund to fight Malaria, Tuberculosis, and Aids shows that collective multilateral action is still possible. The world seems to be going in two directions at once, Edie and Claudia agree.   To help sort things out Gillian Tett, founder of Moral Money at the Financial Times, joins the conversation. Some governments are dragging their feet, including the United States, Tett says. But Tett adds, “this was the year that business really stepped up.” The SDGs are a valuable checklist for business, she explains, and vi

“Imagine all the people, living life in peace…. no need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man.” Those lyrics are surely familiar to you. They are from one of the most successful songs of all time, Imagine, by John Winston Lennon. Lennon, singing of his better world, voiced certainty that he “was not the only one” with this dream. Now, prominent corporate leaders have begun a new firm with the express purpose of making business and industry better global citizens. They have named the firm, Imagine, after the song.  In this episode, Edie Lush and Claudia Romo Edelman discuss Imagine and talk with two of the founders, Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever, and Valerie Keller, a well-known CEO whisperer, coach and expert in transformational business leadership. With governments acting too slowly or in many crucial places gridlocked, more focus has fallen on the role of business in curbing climate change and achieving the other Sustainable Development Goals.  Keller and Polman argue that much can be accomplish

More than 30,000 African migrants have died crossing the Mediterranean. Ibrahim Kondeh narrowly escapes becoming one of them. But through luck and courage he makes it across to Italy, although he pays a terrible price on the way. Claudia Romo Edelman and Edie Lush complete the story of this one migrant. “The story of migrants should be told more,” Ibrahim says in this episode.  “People tend to follow what the media tells about migrants and refugees -- seen as people who come in to steal jobs, criminals.  So as a result no one knows what our actual stories are. Positive stories can change the mindset of people.”  Ibrahim encounters frustration and racism in Italy. But he also is helped along the way, particularly by an innovative use of text messaging called U-report. Tanya Accone of Unicef explains that U-report connects Ibrahim and other migrants and refugees with experts who can advise them when they are at their most vulnerable, alone in a new land without language our resources. With the help of U-report

His name is Ibrahim Adnan Kondeh. He is one of thousands of young African’s who have crossed the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea in search of opportunity. Thousands more have died trying. We usually hear the tragedy and the controversy about migration, as cohost Edie Lush notes. So in this episode, Global GoalsCast wants you to meet one migrant and to hear his story, from him. Ibrahim is a remarkable young man. Courageous, resourceful and, it turns out, poetic.       "In plastic boats, we are choked up as much as they can    just like fishes in a sardine can.    Irrespective of our religions, we pray for God's mercy.   For it was only by his grace that we made it through that great sea.  A true hero is what we are..." Ibrahim retraces his journey from his village in Sierra Leone to the Libyan seashore. A trip that took him a harrowing nine months. He started as a teenager running away from tribal initiation. But by the time he was done he had joined an extraordinary stream of humanity flowing north. 

Is it possible to eradicate extreme poverty? Here is the remarkable thing. For the first time in history, the answer is yes. Co-hosts Edie Lush and Claudia Romo Edelman talk about the new thinking about how to end the worst poverty. Macro solutions like growth, trade and migration still matter, a lot, they agree. But so do local solutions. Tanya Accone of Unicef explains how a failed effort to involve Silicon Valley in anti-poverty efforts produced a different approach in which solutions are developed with local communities not just for them. A good example from Uganda is Spouts of Water, which has invented clay pot filters that cost no more to use than the previous system of burning wood or coal to boil the water. Plus, Ugandans like the flavor! One of the basic lessons is that to help very poor people, often at the end of long dirt paths or isolated in slums, solutions must be designed for their situations, Accone explains. Context is crucial. Edie and Claudia also discuss the meaning of two Nobel prizes th

Is the zeitgeist shifting toward action to curb global warming and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals? Veteran Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett joins Edie Lush and Claudia Romo Edelman to consider that question in the aftermath of the United Nation’s climate summit and General Assembly. While the actions of governments were disappointing, they see a new attitude among many businesses, who were far more engaged in UN activity this year. “The balance of risks in the eyes of many business executives have shifted,” says Tett. Many executives now think it is “riskier to stand on the sidelines and do nothing than to actually be involved in some of these social and climate change movements,” Tett reports. The challenge now is not whether to act but how. Edie completes her visit with Professor John Sterman at MIT, whose En-Roads computer model of the climate lets Edie identify policy actions that will hold contain heating of the atmosphere. “The conclusion here is it is, technically, still possible to l