Foreign Policy Blogs

A global movement for age-friendly cities

The WHO has launched the Global Network of Age-Friendly Cities, an effort to link cities who “address the environmental and social factors that contribute to active and health ageing in societies.”  This is in response to statistics cited on the WHO site, including: (1) In 2000, more than 600 million people in the world were aged 60 – this number will grow to almost 2 billion by 2050; (2) the global aged as a percentage of the total population will double by 2050 – to 22% of the entire population.  Download the guide and checklist here.

 

Author

Cynthia Schweer Rayner

Cynthia Schweer Rayner is an independent consultant and philanthropy advisor specializing in public health, social entrepreneurship and scalable business models for positive social change. As a recovering management consultant, she spent several months living in South Africa, and later co-founded the US branch of an organization providing support to orphaned and vulnerable children. In 2009, she was an LGT Venture Philanthropy Fellow, working with mothers2mothers (m2m), a multinational non-profit organization employing mothers living with HIV as peer educators to positive pregnant women. She currently works with individuals, companies and nonprofits to finance and develop models for positive change. Cynthia has an MBA from INSEAD and a BA in English Literature from Georgetown University. She currently lives in Cape Town and visits New York frequently, where she co-owns a Manhattan-based yoga studio, mang'Oh yoga (www.mangohstudio.com).