Anand Gopal

Some people will talk about how Afghanistan has improved, but they're really just talking about the cities. In the countryside where the war has been fought, it's really not that much better than it was in 2001.

Al Qaeda's vision of global jihad doesn't resonate in the rugged highlands and windswept deserts of southern Afghanistan. Instead, the major concern throughout much of the country is intensely local: personal safety.

The majority of small-holder farmers in Africa are women and, in urban areas, you're primarily looking at women-led households. So we can't solve hunger if we don't have gender-sensitive programming that addresses access to opportunities for women, whether it's through education or tools for cooking, like solar-powered stoves.

We still live in a world in which a significant fraction of people, including women, believe that a woman belongs and wants to belong exclusively in the home; that a woman should not aspire to achieve more than her male counterparts and, particularly, not more than her husband.