Walking with Maregret through Kwanokuthula, an impoverished South African township, it's easy to forget about the daily struggles of many of its 30,000 inhabitants. Maregret is an in-home caregiver and resident of Kwanokathula, where she is employed by an NGO called PlettAid. She spends her days walking to patients' houses to take their blood pressure or weigh them and to make sure they are taking any medication correctly. Somewhere in the comfortable atmosphere she creates as she cackles like a hyena or greets every person we pass with an enthusiastic, "Molo molo dada!" or "Mulweni mama!" I momentarily overlook the poverty that surrounds me. It seems as though everyone in the township knows and loves this cheery woman. One day, on our way to an AIDS patient's house, I inquired about what was wrong with that patient.   Read More

Genevieve and Marianna created this video to explore the experiences of women in rural India. Among other things, they found that their own assumptions about personal freedom and community culture may not apply to everyone.

The MV Sim (short for Millennium Village Simulation) was created as a teaching tool to help students appreciate the complexity of meeting the Millennium Development Goals in a rural African setting, and to experience the interdisciplinary nature of sustainable development. The MV Sim purposefully incorporates only a select set of issues to make it a manageable educational tool that models challenges cutting across the disciplines of agronomy, public health, environmental science, and economics.  Learn More and Play the Game