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Rachel Brul\u00e9<\/a>, Assistant Professor of Global Development Policy at the\u00a0<\/span>Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, and Mahesh Karra<\/a>, Assistant Professor of Global Development Policy at the Pardee School and Associate Director of the Human Capital Initiative at the\u00a0Global Development Policy Center<\/a>, provided their thoughts on the top policy priorities for human development and an inclusive recovery in the year ahead as part of a Global Development Policy (GDP) Center blog<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Global inequality widened in 2020, and experts form the GDP Center’s Human Capital Initiative (HCI) laid out their priorities for public health, gender, education, and human development. Brul\u00e9 argued for building gender-inclusive institutions, and Karra called for the prioritization of maternal and child care.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n An excerpt from Brul\u00e9’s priority:<\/p>\n The impacts of COVID-19 are blindingly clear for gender inequality. Globally, women comprise over 70 percent of healthcare workers \u2013 and even more in COVID-19 epicenters (90 percent in China\u2019s Hubei Province and 78 percent in the US), according to UN estimates. In the world\u2019s largest democracy, India, the face of frontline health workers is almost exclusively female, and plans for mass vaccination rely on women. Yet, women are less likely than men to have access to formal wages, wealth, healthcare, and, as health workers have less effective personal protective equipment (PPE).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n An excerpt from Karra’s submission:<\/p>\n An accompanying feature of the pandemic has been the reduction and suspension of health programs, particularly in maternal and child health, the consequences of which will be observed for years to come. Recent evidence from the Ebola outbreak in West Africa has shown how health emergences can be a significant threat to the lives of mothers and children not only through the direct effects of the outbreak (higher mortality, infection, etc.), but also through the diversion of scarce resources from essential health services, such as emergency obstetric care, antenatal coverage, facility delivery coverage, and child immunization programs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The full blog, which contains additional insights from HCI core faculty, can be read on the GDP Center’s website<\/a>.<\/p>\n Rachel Brul\u00e9<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>is an Assistant Professor of Global Development Policy at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and core faculty of the Global Development Policy Center\u2019s Human Capital Initiative. Her research interests are broadly in comparative politics, international development, political economy, and gender, with a geographical focus on South Asia. Read more about Brul\u00e9\u00a0on her\u00a0<\/span>faculty profile<\/a>.<\/p>\n Mahesh Karra<\/a>\u2019s academic and research interests are broadly in development economics, health economics, quantitative methods, and applied demography. His research utilizes experimental and non-experimental methods to investigate the relationships between population, health, and economic development in low- and middle-income countries. Read more about Karra on his faculty profile<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What should the top policy priorities be for supporting human development in the year ahead?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17823,"featured_media":48200,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8431],"tags":[11784,11694,11583,2093,10359,10880,10346,11435],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48176"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17823"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48176"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48201,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48176\/revisions\/48201"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}