Health and Education in the Modern World

Our challenge is to ensure for people everywhere, of all ages, healthy lives and a quality education that promotes lifelong learning.


Even within wealthy countries, access to the determinants of health varies widely. How can we make a healthy life available to all?

Travel the Journey

Healthy Pleasures

Robert Ornstein and David Sobel

Imagine a medical treatment that can help lower your blood pressure, decrease your risk for heart disease and cancer, boost your immune function and block pain. It’s safe, inexpensive and readily available. The main side effects include feeling good, an increased sense of well-being and greater self-confidence. Would you take it?

Beyond the Hole in the Wall

Discover the Power of Self-Organized Learning

Sugata Mitra

Sugata Mitra’s now famous experiments have shone light on the immense capacities that children have for learning in self-composed and self-regulated groups.

Improbable Scholars

The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America’s Schools

David L. Kirp

How do we determine if our schools are preparing students for a meaningful future in our society and improve the schools that are not living up to those standards? Explores the current crisis in American education and four districts that have made positive changes.

One World Schoolhouse

Education Reimagined

Salman Kahn

There may be a young girl in an African village with the potential to find a cancer cure. A fisherman’s son in New Guinea might have incredible insight into the health of the oceans. By combining the enlightened use of technology with the best teaching practices, we can foster students who are capable of self-directed learning, deep understanding of fundamentals, and creative approaches to real-world problems.

Further Reading

External Stories and Videos

Time to Care

Oxfam Report to the 2020 World Economic Forum

The heavy and unequal responsibility of care work perpetuates gender and economic inequalities. This has to change.

Public Good or Private Wealth

Oxfam Report to the 2019 World Economic Forum

“The gap between rich and poor is pulling us apart. It stops us from beating poverty and achieving equality between women and men. Yet most of our political leaders are failing to reduce this dangerous divide. It does not have to be this way. Inequality is not inevitable – it is a political choice. Concrete steps can be taken to reduce it.”

Lost Mothers: Maternal Mortality in the U.S.

NPR and Propublica Special Series

The U.S. has the highest rate of maternal mortality in the industrialized world, with the rate of life-threatening complications for new mothers more than doubled in two decades What is behind this alarming trend?

Watch: Why Bill and Melinda Gates put 20,000 Students Through College

Scott Pelley, CBS 60 Minutes

The surest way to narrow the wealth gap is to earn a college degree. Now major universities like Princeton are working to lower the price of admission through a new kind of affirmative action, not based on race, but on low-income status.

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)

The OCED is a major source in our Human Journey assessment of key challenges we face on the road to the future. Founded in 1961 and headquartered in Paris, France, the OCED provides a forum for 35 member countries to share experiences, seek solutions to common problems, and promote policies to improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world.

OECD Watch “aims to ensure that business activity contributes to sustainable development and poverty eradication and that corporations are held accountable for their impacts around the globe.”