Early last week, the government of Bhutan hosted a high-level UN summit on a topic that isn’t often discussed in the usually serious halls of Turtle Bay: well-being and happiness. The South Asian country, nestled between India, China, and Bangladesh, has never been keen on measuring itself the way most countries do: the size of their economies. They prefer a different measure: Gross National Happiness.

Anowara Upazilla, Bangladesh - This Saturday is International Health Day, a good time to focus on tuberculosis (TB), the world's second largest global killer after HIV/AIDS. In 2010, 8.8 million people fell ill with TB, and 1.4 million died from the disease. Tuberculosis is a global disease, but rates of infection and death are much higher in poor, crowded countries. South Asian nations report some of the highest rates of TB in the world. Last year, I had the opportunity to see how the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria—which works closely with the United Nations and other international donors—was supporting TB programs in Bangladesh.

BEIJING -- Fifty-eight year-old Zhang Hui has never had a problem finding safe drinking water—not in his first village in central Zhejiang province, which the local government demolished to build a wastewater treatment plant, and not in his second village, a cluster of concrete mid-rises next to a textile plant that belches orange-red smoke from three large smokestacks, blanketing the area in a noxious haze.

When the tiny blue-tailed skink was officially reported extinct on the Hawaiian Islands this month, scientists knew only pieces of the story. How and when it happened remained unclear; the impact on the local ecosystem was equally uncertain.

In honor of International Women's Day, The InterDependent takes a look at the progress made in gender equality. View Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of our Women's Series.