Apathy toward global issues critically affects college campuses across the nation. Since catalyzing civil rights and anti-war movements in the 1960's, many college campuses have evolved into passive atmospheres where students are often unaware of important issues, such as global poverty, climate change and globalization. Due to the complexity and scale of these problems, many students feel powerless to make a difference.

Students attempt to expand their understanding of global issues by studying abroad in developed countries while spending social time among fellow Americans. This all-too-common experience fails to deliver an understanding of the factors that result in poverty for almost half of the world's population.

According to the Institute of International Education (IIE), the top five study abroad destinations last year were the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, France and Australia. While learning in these angelic destinations is very appealing, it fails to actively engage students where their passion and energy is needed most. This perpetuation of Western nations sharing knowledge, resources, and privilege does little for the one billion people who cannot read or write. Without students seeing the reality of the developing world, is there truly any wonder why they suffer from apathy?

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The Institute of International Health and Development (IIHD), based at Queen Margaret University College, has been granted £171,000 to support health management and contribute to improved health services in Malawi. 
 
Funding has been made available from the Scottish Executive International Development Fund over three years.  IIHD staff will contribute to the development of a School of Community and Public Health in the College of Medicine in Blantyre, Malawi and support the delivery of a postgraduate diploma course in health management. The IIHD team will provide mentorship throughout the process of course design and implementation, as well as teaching on the programme.

Canada's tolerant, multicultural values need to be adopted worldwide, the Aga Khan said yesterday as he and Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced the creation of a new Global Centre for Pluralism in Ottawa.

Housed in the former war museum not far from the Prime Minister's residence, it will act as an international centre for promoting the concept that diverse ethnic, cultural, racial and religious groups can co-exist in harmony without compromising their identities.

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In June, Mark Malloch Brown, deputy secretary-general of the United Nations, told the 19th graduating class of the International Diploma in Humanitarian Assistance (IDHA) program that humanitarian aid work had become much more lethal since his days in the field.

“When I started all I had to do on a very dangerous place on the Thai-Cambodian border was to make sure that the car I was traveling in had a big U.N. painted on the roof and a blue U.N. flag on its front,” he said. “That was enough, people didn’t target me.”

Brown wondered how many IDHA graduates had been killed in the course of humanitarian missions. “I certainly know that in the U.N. it is our development and humanitarian workers, not our peacekeepers in general who bear the brunt of loss of life in many years,” Brown said. “But in many years it is just the one or two at a time of humanitarian workers picked off in different conflicts who in the end of the year provide the bulk of tragic deaths in the United Nations. It’s getting to be a dangerous job and of course one reason why it is getting to be so dangerous, is this reckless character of modern intrastate war.”

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