The notion of well-being and happiness has increasingly taken centre stage in our societies over the recent years. As Nobel Prize Economist Daniel Kahneman puts it, "there is a huge wave of interest in happiness among researchers. There is a lot of happiness coaching. Everybody would like to make people happier."
In addition to physical health, it has become clear that emotional health is vital for our overall well-being. More...

Innovation and problem solving depend increasingly on the ability to synthesise disparate elements to create something different and unexpected. This involves curiosity, open-mindedness and making connections between ideas that previously seemed unrelated. It also requires knowledge across a broad range of fields. If we spend our entire lives in the silo of a single discipline, we will not gain the imaginative skills necessary to connect the dots and develop the next life-changing invention. More...

We are in 1961. JF Kennedy is president and has just designated Eleanor Roosevelt as chairwoman of the new US Commission on the Status of Women: "We want to be sure that women are used as effectively as they can to provide a better life for our people, in addition to meeting their primary responsibility, which is in the home." Fifty-seven years ago, women had to make a choice between pursuing a career or having children. More...

Mahatma Gandhi once said: "it is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver". And indeed, our physical well-being is key to how we live our lives. But while we don't always make the link between our minds and our bodies, physical health is important for learning, too. More...

Migration and displacement are complex phenomena which play an important role in – but can also pose challenges to – development. These phenomena also pose particularly important challenges for education and training systems. Firstly, they can rapidly increase the number of people that require education services, thus challenging both richer countries, which until now had been adjusting to shrinking student populations, and poorer countries, where provision is already stretched, especially in remote areas or slums where migrants and refugees often converge. More...

Teachers play a vital role in the lives of their students. They impart knowledge, provide pastoral care, act as role models and, above all, create an environment that’s conducive to learning. But teaching is fraught with numerous challenges that could lead to dissatisfaction and ultimately to drop-out from the profession. Science teachers are particularly vulnerable to quitting their jobs given the opportunities that exist outside the teaching profession. More...

Buiksloterham is an old industrial waterfront area north of central Amsterdam. Gas and oil producer Shell used to be located here, as was an airplane factory, shipbuilder and other assorted manufacturing. But the companies have moved out, leaving an empty site with polluted soil. Amsterdam city planners took a novel approach: they opened Buiksloterham to bidders for temporary use, with the site development criteria of building structures without foundations (due to soil issues) and fixing up the area. More...

In researching this piece, I went on the Aboriginal Women’s Business Entrepreneurship Network website and clicked on their videos on how to obtain financing. They advise women to use their own personal savings to start their businesses as well as to borrow from friends and family. Bank loans, overdrafts and credit lines are, not surprisingly, a distant third option, sometimes because women lack credit histories or are discriminated against in their credit scoring. In OECD countries, only 26% of women believe they would be given access to the necessary finance to start or grow a business, against 34% of men. More...

In 2016, the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) gave Google’s artificial intelligence company DeepMind access to healthcare data on 1.6 million hospital patients. The data was to be used for an app that identifies kidney problems. None of the patients had been contacted to give their explicit consent to such an arrangement, and the UK data guardian, the Information Commission, subsequently ruled that the NHS had not adequately protected the privacy of their data. More...