With a population of seven million, Honduras is the second most populous country in Central America. It is also the second poorest country in the region with an annual per capita income of less than US$ 1,000. Two out of every three people in Honduras are poor (per capita income less than US$...

Public health observatories proactively investigate health issues to provide robust analytical evidence to policy makers. This type of organization has different characteristics from other public health institutions, such as information-gathering bodies, academic public health departments, or...

The United Nations decade of action for road safety 2011-2020 sets an ambitious goal to stabilize and then reduce by half the predicted level of traffic fatalities in low and middle-income countries by 2020. This goal should save around 5 million lives, avoid 50 million serious injuries, and...

The Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region has been experiencing a rapid demographic and epidemiological transition which has important health and economic consequences. Not only is the population aging rapidly, but it is also experiencing major changes in lifestyle. This has altered the...

A rapid agricultural supply chain risk assessment, recently developed by the World Bank, constitutes a useful tool for a system-wide approach to identify risks, risk exposure, the severity of potential loses, and options for risk management either by supply chain participants (individually or...

Agricultural insurance is a tool to manage agricultural production risks and help producers reduce the effects of negative shocks and improve the allocation of resources. It provides a mechanism to transfer a variety of risks faced by crop, livestock, forestry, or aquaculture production. The...

Non-communicable diseases (NCDs), such as cardiovascular diseases, cancer, diabetes mellitus and chronic respiratory diseases generate a heavy burden in the Latin America and the Caribbean region. Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) cause nearly a third of all deaths, while malignant and other...

The Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region fares well on achievement of the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets when compared with other regions, but the region has great disparities between and within countries on these goals. The region is also performing better than the rest of the...

In recent years, several middle-income Latin American countries have seen a steep increase in the number of cases litigating access to curative services and inputs. A renewed judicial approach to the enforcement of the right to health, the expansion of health coverage, a more demanding public...

Agriculture plays an important role in the state of Santa Catarina, Brazil. Most of its production depends on small family-owned farms, which are greatly exposed to climatic and price shocks. In order to help small farmers to manage risks, the federal and state governments have been carrying out...