Karen Leigh

Karen Leigh is a contributor to TIME, The Atlantic and others, currently in Berlin and previously based in West Africa. She also reported for TIME during the Arab Spring from Bahrain, Jordan, Egypt and Libya; worked as an anchor and reporter for Mint/WSJ in New Delhi; edited at an English-language daily in Cambodia; and traveled with the 2008 U.S. presidential campaigns for Bloomberg News. She has written for Monocle, The Newsweek Daily Beast and Foreign Policy and guested on Bloomberg TV and Deutsche Welle.

Budgeting Relief: Syria’s Ever-worsening Humanitarian Crisis

By Karen Leigh | January 24, 2013

Many of the children who populate Atma refugee camp—a tent village on low slopes just inside the northern Syrian border near Turkey—slosh through mud barefooted, running between shared bathroom facilities and the cramped, freezing tents their families now call home.

A Seemingly Endless Cycle: Pakistan’s Dearth of Women’s Rights

By Karen Leigh | January 14, 2013

On January 4, Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year-old rights activist shot by Taliban militants in Pakistan last October, was released from London’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital.

The Dramatic Drop of Child Mortality Rates

By Karen Leigh | October 15, 2012

It’s one of UNICEF’s less recognized success stories: the global child mortality rate has fallen by nearly 50 percent in the last two decades. Last month, the agency announced that 6.9 million children died before age five in 2011 - a number that, while still high, has been drastically reduced from 12 million in 1990.

Stemming the Tide of West Africa’s Cholera Outbreak

By Karen Leigh | September 18, 2012

Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, is marked by slums that sprawl for miles along the shore of the Atlantic Ocean. For centuries, its seaside location has made it a coastal trade hub. Now, in an unusually heavy rainy season that has seen increased flooding, that same proximity to the water has transformed these ramshackle communities into ground zero for the deadliest strain of cholera West Africa has seen in decades.

The Fight Against Human Trafficking in Bulgaria

By Karen Leigh | September 7, 2012

It is an enduring scourge plaguing Bulgaria and its neighbors—sex trafficking, particularly that of young women from Eastern Europe and the Balkans into neighboring countries. In August, Antoaneta Vasileva, the head of Bulgaria’s National Committee for the Fight Against Human Trafficking, told a national radio program that 541 trafficking victims were recorded in Bulgaria last year .

Saving Progress on Women’s Issues in Afghanistan

By Karen Leigh | July 16, 2012

KABUL – As the U.S. prepares to withdraw its armed forces from Afghanistan beginning next year—with a full exit by 2014—aid workers in Kabul are concerned that financial resources for women's causes, not to mention personnel, will depart with them.

WHO Annual Report Takes Aim at Heart Disease

By Karen Leigh | May 18, 2012

One-third of adults worldwide have a single, noncommunicable disease - high blood pressure - and the number will continue to rise, the UN’s World Health Organization said in its annual World Statistics report, released Wednesday. Chronic conditions, including blood pressure, cancer and cardiovascular diseases, now account for two-thirds of all global deaths.

West Africa's New Trillion Dollar Industry: Drugs

By Karen Leigh | March 23, 2012

In coastal Accra—the seat of one of the world’s fastest-growing economies—industry has been expanding in more ways than one. Ghana, known as one of the most stable countries in West Africa, has become a major global hub for cocaine trafficking. Smugglers have been escalating their activity across the region in recent years, using Ghana, Guinea Bissau and other countries in the Sahel region as way stations between Latin America and Europe, where cocaine sales total more than $2 billion per year.

UN Warns of Hidden Health Crisis in Eastern Europe

By Karen Leigh | March 2, 2012

BERLIN - On a recent wintermorning on a train leaving Berlin's underground Alexanderplatz station, a car filled withyoung Germans skidded by, the passengers toasting with open bottles ofchampagne and wine. In the station's corner, an older man sat hunched, hishands wrapped tightly around a bottle of vodka. Alcohol was pieced into themoment seamlessly-a part of life, a way to celebrate, a means to stay warm.