Girls in Zimbabwe grow up in a country racked by HIV/AIDS and extreme poverty, and one of the lowest life expectancy rates in the world. A ten-year economic recession with inflation at 1000 percent robbed an entire generation of education and health care. The pervasive belief that sleeping with a virgin or his daughter will cure a man of HIV/AIDS has made sexual violence an everyday reality.

Since the early 1980s, Chinese farm workers have relied heavily on pesticides in order to increase food production. Excessive and negligent pesticide use contaminates water supplies, destroys natural habitats and causes health problems for farmers and their families. In 1993 alone, rampant use of pesticides caused the deaths of over 10,000 Chinese farm workers.

In Azerbaijan there are 700,000 displaced people who are the survivors of a conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the mountainous region known as Nagorno-Karabakh. From 1988 to 1994, 35,000 people were killed, and one million uprooted.