"How long it will be until the process bears fruit remains to be seen."

Three Stats and a Map - Last year, the Social Progress Imperative released its first-ever full report on social progress around the world. The report detailed some 130 countries’ ability to “meet the basic human needs of its citizens.” This year, the group has released another report, this time covering 99 percent of the world’s population.

GSR Today - The story of copper has been intertwined with Zambia’s history since it was a British colony in the late 1800s and British mining companies set up operations. Recently, I traveled through northern Zambia with Presentation Sr. Lynette Rodrigues, a passionate environmental crusader, and learned more.

Nigeria enacted a law in 2003 prohibiting the trafficking in persons and established the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP). Yet, from its porous borders, women and children continue to be trafficked within, across and beyond the country for forced labor and sexual or physical exploitation. Even babies are sold for money. Why is human trafficking such a huge industry in Nigeria despite Nigerians’ collective value for abundant life? Why, regardless of the efforts to combat this nefarious industry, especially by the women’s religious communities in Nigeria, does this inhumanity to human persons continue unabated?

A year has passed since a global jolt awoke the world when over 200 girls were kidnapped in Nigeria on April 14, 2014. Across the world a chant resounded: “Bring Back our Girls.” It seems now the world has fallen to sleep, numb to the peril of girls; or maybe events just pass too rapidly to keep attention. If global Twitter campaigns and the voices of first ladies and prime ministers in globally dominant countries have no effect, what will wake us again?

GSR Today - In a lot of ways, Global Sisters Report, is all about confronting invisibility. The stories we write are often about people on the margins, but the stories of the sisters themselves could also be included in that categorization. Obviously, women religious aren’t looking for fame or recognition, but often, sisters don’t get credit for their ministries because no one knows about them.

Since his election in 2013, Pope Francis has been very generous with his words. There have been addresses, homilies, conversations, phone calls, interviews and writings, including an apostolic exhortation on “The Joy of the Gospel” (Evangelii Gaudium). Still, the pope has been silent, or very reticent on certain questions.

Maryknoll Sr. Joseph Lourdes Nubla was born in the Philippines, where she attended Holy Ghost College and Maryknoll College, entering the Maryknoll Sisters in New York in 1960. She has served in a variety of posts in Hong Kong since 1964. She is currently a volunteer with Mission for Migrant Workers in Hong Kong, where she is an official interpreter and translator of statements, helping people from Sri Lanka, India, Nepal and elsewhere avoid exploitation by people employing them as domestic servants.

Thousands of women from throughout the world – including women religious – attended the March meetings of the U.N.’s Commission on the Status of Women and a parallel event known as the NGO CSW Forum, marking the two decades since the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action at the U.N.’s Beijing World Conference on Women. “It’s important for women to ‘own things’ – own the issues that are important to women,” said Dominican Sr. Bernadine Karge of Chicago.

Pope Francis has warned against allowing the lower numbers of people entering Catholic religious life to influence decisions about who is healthy and able to take lifelong vows as a priest, brother or sister. On Saturday, the pope told a meeting of an estimated 1,200 formation directors for religious orders they must be "lovingly attentive" to those they are guiding so that "the eventual crisis of quantity does not result in a much graver crisis of quality."