Missing People, Missing Rights

Universal Birth Registration in Pakistan

By Patricia Leidl | Published by World Vision

It is an overcast day and stagnant ponds of greasy water pockmark the fields that surround Matta, a nondescript village located in Kasur, Pakistan, a bleakly impoverished district huddled against the teeming Indian subcontinent to the south. In the compound where Safina Sarfaz, her husband and three daughters live, goats bleat angrily while scrawny chickens scratch amid piles of refuse.

More than a right: the pill hits 50

By Patricia Leidl | Featured on Conversations for a Better World

Women who want access to contraception but are denied that right suffer illness, loss of quality of life, and even death. Let’s ensure that all women have that right.

Betrayed

They said we were there to save Afghanistan’s women. So how come we haven’t?

By Valerie M. Hudson, Patricia Leidl | Published by Foreign Policy Magazine

Are we all losing focus on HIV/AIDS?

Financial crisis and growing poverty could reverse decades of HIV/AIDS progress

By Patricia Leidl, with Jean-Luc Martinage | Published in The Magazine of the Red Cross

Marjanne is so shrunken that from a distance she looks like a heap of black velvet that someone carelessly tossed onto the chaff-strewn ground. Six months ago, she and the dusty little boy she travels with—a nominal chaperone—would never have ventured down from her home in Lashkar Gah (Lash to the locals) to Nawa unaccompanied and in her case, uncovered. Today she squats balanced on two ancient ankles patiently waiting in the scorching heat: the only woman of among a group of one hundred men and two marines. What looks to be some kind of skin cancer is eating away at the tip of her nose, but her sunken black eyes are sharp and penetrating. Her purpose? To gather an allotment of cut-rate seed, a USAID-backed scheme designed to encourage local farmers to grow wheat instead of opium poppy.