Suzanne Petroni directs the Gender, Population and Development program at the International Center for Research on Women. She serves on the board of directors of Advocates for Youth and sits on the International Steering Committee for the ICPD Global Youth Forum. Meredith Waters is a senior at George Washington University majoring in public health and was selected by the United Nations as a Respondent for the Global Youth Fourm in Bali. She is also a member of the International Youth Leadership Council at Advocates for Youth.

Half of the world’s population is under 30 years old, and these youth comprise the most well-informed and well-connected generation the world has ever known.

We have the fortune of joining nearly 1,000 of these youth in Bali, Indonesia this week - not sightseeing, but formulating the international development agenda for the future.

As the world heads toward the twentieth anniversaries of the major international development conferences of the 1990s and the conclusion of the Millennium Development Goals in 2015, the United Nations has brought together young leaders and experts on youth from around the world for the ICPD Global Youth Forum. 

The goal of an “AIDS-free generation” has become a little more realistic, according to the 2012 World AIDS Day report released on November 20 by UNAIDS.

The report, titled “Results," found that between 2001 and 2011, HIV incidence in 25 countries declined by more than 50 percent and decreased by 20 percent worldwide. Since 2005, the number of AIDS-related deaths has declined by almost one-third.

Much of this improvement is concentrated in Africa, which is more severely affected by the epidemic than any other continent. Since 2001, the report found, new HIV infections have decreased by 73 percent in Malawi, 50 percent in Zimbabwe, and 41 percent in South Africa and Swaziland.

“The pace of progress is quickening,” said Michel Sidibé, Executive Director of UNAIDS, in a press release. “What used to take a decade is now being achieved in 24 months.”

The 2012 International AIDS Conference in July marked some of the first real conversations about beginning to end the epidemic, and Chris Collins, vice president and director of public policy at amfAR, pointed to the beginning of the end of AIDS as one of the conference’s biggest takeaways. Now the question is, he said, how to accomplish this goal and assess our progress in a concrete way.

MONROVIA, Liberia — I never thought covering women's issues would become dangerous. That was until I reported on female genital mutilation (FGM) and the activities of my country's secret society for women, Sande, which operates "bush schools" where the cutting is done.

My story was published March 8, 2012, International Women's Day, on the front page of the paper where I work. The first threats came to my editor on the day the article appeared. I was outside Monrovia working in a rural area. She called me and said, "Mae, you have to leave right away because I have received numerous phone calls threatening to drag you to the Sande bush and have you cut."

I went home that day. When I walked in, a tenant who rents from me said, "So, you wrote this story exposing us. You shouldn't have done it. You had no business to write the story. If you go to any rural area you will never return to Monrovia alive."

As those who have been working on the ground will tell you, Haiti’s agricultural history has been as rocky as much of its once-arable soil now is. For a country that employs over 50 percent of its population in agriculture, it is almost unfathomable that between 50 and 80 percent of its total food supply is imported.