akzente | Das Magazin der GIZ

More than 80 per cent of maternal mortality, stillbirths and infant mortality in the first month could be prevented by deploying well-trained midwives and birthing nurses. To mark the 200th birthday of the famous British nurse Florence Nightingale, International Nurses Day is being celebrated on 12 May 2020 with global campaigns under the heading ‘Nursing the World to Health’.

Around 70 per cent of all people working in health and social services are women. The majority of them are nurses and midwives. The shortage of skilled professionals in this sector is most pronounced in South-East Asia and Africa.

Eighteen million more health care professionals are needed worldwide to achieve and maintain comprehensive health care by 2030. Around half this number – nine million – currently work in nursing and midwifery. To highlight the huge importance of their work, the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared 2020 the International Year of the Nurse and the Midwife.

years remain before all insects may have become extinct. This is a scenario painted by the authors of the largest study on insects to date if insects continue to disappear at the current rate. The main causes identified by the authors are the loss of the insects’ original habitat, intensive agriculture and harmful fertilisers and pesticides.
www.sydney.edu.au

million babies were born in regions affected by conflict in 2018. Each of these children has already suffered stress in the first few months of its life due to chaotic and unsafe conditions. If children are faced with this stress repeatedly or over a longer period of time, it can have a severe impact on their mental and physical health. It also affects their ability to learn and their behaviour.
www.unicef.org

trillion US dollars have been invested in developing renewable energy over the past ten years. Capacity has quadrupled in this period: whereas only around 410 gigawatts of green energy were produced in 2010, this figure had risen to 1,650 gigawatts in 2019. This has saved around two billion tonnes of CO₂ emissions worldwide.
www.unenvironment.org

million instances of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) affect people around the world every year. The STIs in question are syphilis, chlamydia, trichomoniasis and gonorrhoea. The exact total has never been measured. Such infections can have far-reaching consequences: in 2016, syphilis caused more than 200,000 stillbirths and newborn deaths.
www.who.int

billion US dollars’ worth of productivity is lost in low-income and middle-income countries every year because people are having to eat food that is unsafe, according to estimates by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Every year, 600 million people fall ill after eating food that has been contaminated, e.g. by chemical substances.
www.fao.org

million people are migrant workers. That is nine per cent more than in 2013, when there were around 150 million. Around 60 per cent are concentrated in three world regions: northern, southern and western Europe, North America and Arab countries.