Thailand adopted a universal healthcare scheme to help ensure equal provision of health services to all citizens. Although they have come far in terms of improving access to their healthcare system, newer hurdles arise. Currently the main challenge may be categorized as transportation inequalities.

Speculation about the disciplining power of financial globalization has been taking place for quite some time now. During election violence in Ivory Coast earlier in 2011 we may have seen this happening. West Africa is according to some people perhaps the most financially integrated region in the world other than the Eurozone. This integration proved to provide some level of discipline during the Ivory Coast election violence.

“The plethora of checkpoints dotted along the major transit points across the sub-region adds excessive costs to merchants especially since these checkpoints have become hubs of corruption. The ECA has reported that there was a total of 69 checkpoints on the route between Lagos (Nigeria) and Abidjan (Ivory Coast), a distance of only 992km; 34 checkpoints between Lome (Togo) and Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), a 989km route; 20 between Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) and Abidjan (Ivory Coast), a distance of 529km.

“Appalled by the state of infrastructure in public schools and the rote learning that was unlikely to really develop critical thinking skills in children, Shehzad Roy, a popular singer in Pakistan, established the Zindagi Trust in 2002. Through the trust’s initiatives, he aims to provide quality education to Pakistan’s underprivileged children. One of the trust’s early initiatives – ‘I am paid to learn’ – seeks to bring working children back to school. Working children gain basic and functional literacy skills over 26 months and earn a monetary reward on graduation.

The inability of women living in poverty to purchase feminine hygiene products while menstruating is a major challenge for poor communities. Not only does it provide a source of humiliation for many women, but it drastically cuts down on their productiveness. Inventor Arunachalam Muruganantham of India has invented a machine the produces low cost sanitary napkins to women and provides a business opportunity.

The informal shipwrecking industry in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan truly epitomizes modern day labor exploitation as mentioned in this signal. In India we are seeing the formal dock workers teaming up with their neighboring shipbreakers in order to help them better their labor conditions.

“As tattered laborers wait beachside in a secluded Mumbai port, an aging ship making its twilight voyage runs aground, settling its hull into the sand before flopping, listlessly, on its thick steel side . The shipbreakers rush to the death scene of the expired vessel and, without hesitation, begin the long, laborious process of dismantling the scrapped ship by hand. Wading through toxins, pulling apart asbestos-laden pieces and inhaling oil, gas and other hazardous fumes earns them a meager wage for the day.

“Urbanization is not a new phenomenon, but today it is taking a different form from in the past. From the 1940s to the 1970s, the move to the city was in search of jobs in the new industrial economies. From the start of decline in the 1980s and 1990s, the new migrants to cities were ore like economic refugees, fleeing the rural economic collapse triggered by structural adjustment and the strictures of prolonged drought in the Sahel. In the new century, economies have kickstarted again, and urbanization is taking a new pattern.

The issue of private property and land ownership is a big area in need of intervention for the purposes of national development.

Land grabs are a continuing issue for West Africa, with increasing concern growing over the long-term effects.

“(Modern day land grabs are) in a sense similar to colonisation of lands in the region by European powers in earlier centuries where lands were taken over through illicit deals with illiterate traditional rulers and shady government officials.