Poverty, Inequality and Opportunity

On November 13, 2023, HKS Student Policy Review Senior Editor Jane Petersen spoke with former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos. The conversation covered a range of topics including what other countries can learn from Colombia’s peace agreement, poverty alleviation efforts, and the fight against climate change.

In 2019, Zach Moore was a new software engineer at a San Francisco-based tech company. He showed up to work early, walked around the neighborhood, and cleared his head. Incarcerated at age 15, Zach learned how to quiet his mind while spending 22 years in prison. For decades, he worked on himself and helped others […]

HPV has traditionally been framed as a disease that largely affects females, but should males get vaccinated as well? Ng Qi Siang argues that gender-neutral vaccination is more effective than female-only vaccination in terms of cost-efficiency and containing viral spread. He proposes that the government reframe HPV as a disease that affects all genders and move towards a gender-neutral HPV vaccination policy in the near future.

While the government has announced that it will repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code, it has also sought to protect the definition of marriage from constitutional challenge. Lawyer and activist Daryl Yang explains what the resulting constitutional amendment may look like, as well as what it means to the LGBTQ+ community in Singapore.

Over the past weeks and months, numerous think tanks and individuals have published reports and briefs on the looming humanitarian crisis in northwest Syria. [[1]] This déjà vu moment has not been lost on actors and agencies focused on aid in Syria. In mere weeks, the last remaining entry-point for humanitarian aid into northwest Syria […]

One of the accepted horrors of the pandemic is that Latinx populations sustain a disproportionately high burden of COVID-19. Take the city of San Antonio and surrounding Bexar county, for example, whose population is 60.7% Latinx.1 Of the COVID-19 cases and deaths where race/ethnicity was identified in the medical report, 75% of cases and 65% […]

Aloysius Foo responds to our previous article by Andrew Chia, Rethinking Scholarship Diversity: The Pre-U Education of PSC Scholars. In his letter, he highlights the need to go beyond diversity, and explore the deeper issues surrounding Singapore’s social class reproduction, which has created an “Aristocracy of Merit”.

How might we mainstream social justice ideas and language, beginning a national conversation that extends beyond more recognised civil society actors? Reflecting on the discourse surrounding migrant rights, Quah Say Jye draws upon philosopher Miranda Fricker’s concept of “epistemic injustice” to propose a shared vocabulary that might allow migrant workers into our linguistic community. He suggests that our semantic choices need to accurately represent the lived experiences of migrant workers, be accessible to them and the general public, and have the potential to pivot towards broader structural critiques.

Quad Research conducted a survey from 1-4 April 2020 on Singaporeans’ perceptions on a range of societal issues and how their views impact their political choices. This executive summary details some of their research findings.

In 2016, I was working at a UNHCR clinic in a refugee camp in South Beirut, Lebanon as a medical assistant. I remember throwing out suitcases full of donated medications, which were all outdated, or otherwise uselessbecause they were not addressing the health problems that we were seeing in the population. What good is a […]

Al Lim looks at how COVID-19 exacerbates existing vulnerabilities that small business owners already struggle with and considers how government support mechanisms can – and should – be deployed to help them cope with both the ongoing effects and aftermath of the pandemic.

What happens to citizenship when crisis disrupts the state’s ability to fulfil its obligations to its citizens, or when citizens find themselves unable to depend on their states for a meaningful guarantee of protection in times of need? Using the emergent COVID-19 pandemic as a lens, Theophilus Kwek considers how states, including Singapore, can do better in caring equally for their citizens – and how citizens can also support each other.