Social Policy

Amidst the vast societal machinery that sustains India, sanitation workers operate as the unrecognized cogs essential to the public health system, yet they remain largely invisible within policy frameworks and legislative agendas.

On February 6, 2024, HKS Student Policy Review Senior Editor Ala’a Kolkaila spoke with David Beasley, the former Executive Director of the World Food Programme (WFP). The conversation focused mainly on food security and Beasley’s time at the WFP.

As a child, there was one golden rule: Don’t waste food. Aid organizations that address hunger and food security would do better to focus on creating access to food than pandering to people’s emotions about throwing it away.

Ghana’s Vice President, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, addressed the African Development Conference organized by Harvard Kennedy School’s Africa Caucus and Harvard Law Students Association in Cambridge,Massachusetts, emphasizing the importance of Africa charting its own course towards a more prosperous and inclusive future. The conference’s theme, “Reimagining Africa’s growth on our terms,” was described as timely and […]

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 […]

Lawyer and activist Daryl Yang discusses how a consumer protection approach to conversion therapy might offer a balanced alternative to legislative change that permits individual choice whilst protecting against misleading claims.

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.

In 2005, Pope John Paul II died, Liverpool won the UEFA Champions League, and the Dow Jones had not yet broken 11,000. It was also the year in which then Prime Minister Gordon Brown started a radical experiment to provide every child born in the U.K. with a long-term tax-free savings account or “baby bonds.” […]

In September 2018, the Indian Supreme Court made history by unanimously voting to repeal Section 377, which explicitly forbade “unnatural offences of carnal intercourse” and was often used against the country’s LGBT+ community. As the ruling was being celebrated in India, three separate challenges were made in Singapore’s courts against the country’s similar Section 377A. […]

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”.

As a record number of Americans file for unemployment and families struggle to make ends meet, the COVID-19 Pandemic has not only accentuated deep flaws and inefficiencies in the U.S. healthcare system; it has also exposed gaping holes in America’s social safety net. In response, U.S. policymakers must act boldly to construct a new social […]

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.