Links around Central America

Difficult driving environments

El Salvador is the worst country for drivers, according to Waze, followed by Guatemala, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Romania, Indonesia, Panama, Philippines and Costa Rica.

The list is heavy on Latin American countries due to the frequency and severity of traffic jams, lack of driver services, and poor road infrastructure, according to Waze.

Organized crime

The business costs of crime ranked Colombia at 132, Honduras at 133, Trinidad & Tobago at 136, El Salvador at 137, Guatemala at 138. Also El Salvador scored worst globally in terms of a separate category of the cost of organised crime on its competitiveness.

Rescue workers continue to look for survivors of this week's mudslide in Guatemala but hopes are dimming. The remains of eighty-six people have been recovered but another 350 remain missing.

Okay, some good news now.

Three badass girl activists highlights Jimena Asturias from Guatemala.

That is not a typo. Jimena Asturias is only 12 years old and a campaigner for girls in Guatemala. She began her work on educating youth about violence prevention and human rights when she was 8. Activism at an early age started with the lessons from her own parents.

“My parents were adolescent parents, and it took them a long time to succeed,” said Asturias. “I want to know how to help women and girls in my country succeed.”

Team IMPCT takes home the million dollar prize offered by the Clinton Global Initiative and the Hult Prize Foundation.

Each team had eight minutes to present its project to a panel of judges that included Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus and the former prime minister of Australia, Julia Gillard.

The ideas were impressive: a laundry center that doubles as a librarywhere parents and children in South Africa can learn together while their washing is done; or "talking stickers" to put on household items so a low-cost, hand-held electronic scanning device can make the objects talk, sing and read to children.

Team IMPCT's idea is to find investors who can help improve informal day care centers in urban slums, adding more educational efforts and increasing enrollment. The process will also turn local caregivers into small-business owners who operate a franchise of sorts.

Last Saturday night at a Midtown Manhattan hotel, it was time to find out who would take home the prize. Scobbie and his three teammates held hands. "I had used up all my nervousness days ago," says Scobbie, a 29-year-old from National Chengchi University in Taiwan. "My body had no more nervous chemicals to use."

Then Bill Clinton announced the winner: team IMPCT.