With its unique blend of gossip, jokes and songs mixed with serious global issues, Kadal Osai has built a devoted audience
Selvarani Mari is a fisher and seaweed collector who lives on Pamban Island of Tamil Nadu, on the southernmost tip of India.
Every day she helps her husband cast the fishing nets, maintains rafts for cultivating seaweed, and dives into the ocean to gather sargassum. But she always makes time to listen to the radio.
Continue reading...Despite accusations of war crimes in the central African country, the international community seems unmoved
On New Year’s Eve, a gang of militia left its jungle base and swept across Beni, a forested north-eastern corner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, looking for Nande people to kill.
Locals alerted the Congolese army but they were ignored. In small farms in Tingwe, a few kilometres from a DRC army base, the gang found 25 people – men, women and children – out harvesting food. One by one they hacked them to death with machetes and axes.
Continue reading...Judge said the ‘humiliating’ practice was used to cast suspicion on the victim, and deflected focus from the act of sexual violence
A Pakistani court has outlawed the practice of subjecting female rape survivors to a virginity test in an unprecedented ruling.
Lahore’s high court ruled on Monday that the virginity test has no legal basis and “offends the personal dignity of the female victim”.
Continue reading...Panic over infection rates mixed with fear of widespread hunger as 30-day shutdown is imposed after people defy ban on gatherings
Parties and new year celebrations that attracted thousands of revellers with little social distancing or mask wearing have triggered panic and a strict 30-day national lockdown in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare.
On New Year’s Eve thousands of people gathered at Matapi, Mbare, one of Zimbabwe’s oldest townships for a dancehall concert, while thousands of others held parties across the city despite a police ban.
Continue reading...Cheap, hygienic and sustainable, the mattresses made by Indian fashion designer Lakshmi Menon also generate income for rural women
At the height of the pandemic in the Indian state of Kerala, fashion designer Lakshmi Menon, 46, heard that every new Covid care centre had to have 50 beds. Mattresses were in short supply. Every time a patient was discharged, the mattress had to be incinerated. “I thought: that’s a lot of mattresses and a lot of burning,” says Menon.
Menon’s solution was to collect the mountains of plastic pieces from factories that make PPE – all the little bits left over after cutting. Women then braid the bits into rope-like plaits 6ft long. The braids are laid out in a zigzag and the ends tied together. The result is a light, soft, washable, hygienic mattress for just 300 rupees (£3) – half the price of a normal one.
Continue reading...Life was hard in this remote area of central Asia, until tourism offered new hope. Then Covid-19 struck and the visitors stopped coming
It has been over a decade since Umar Tashbekov saw his opportunity. His village, Sary-Mogol in Kyrgyzstan, at an altitude of 3,600 metres, is close to Lenin’s Peak, a popular mountain destination for tourists. If they were already hiking there, why not attract them to visit his village too?
Sary-Mogol is a three-hour drive from the nearest city of Osh, in the country’s south-east. Life here is not easy – short summers and unfavourable growing conditions make it hard to grow much more than potatoes and barley. The main source of work is the large livestock market in town. Others find employment as teachers or in the nearby coal mine. Out of its 5,200-strong population, about 500 people have left for Russia where companies welcome factory workers.
Continue reading...Criminal networks are depending on the chaos of Covid and Brexit. Now more than ever we need focus and international cooperation to prevent further tragedies
Trials in the UK of the drivers and haulage organisers involved in the Essex lorry tragedy in which 39 Vietnamese migrants perished ended in guilty pleas and convictions. Vietnam also convicted the agents who brokered the victims’ journeys to the UK and sentenced them to terms of imprisonment.
While these are positive developments in achieving some measure of justice for the victims, they won’t do anything to stem the smuggling and trafficking of Vietnamese migrants to the UK. No justice system has reached the actual masterminds and profiteers behind this horrific crime: the organised crime groups.
Continue reading...A popular actor was accused of harassment – now those who spoke against him are being charged under law meant to protect women
It takes a lot to rattle Leena Ghani. As an artist turned activist helping to raise the voices of Pakistan’s women, she has often fielded abuse, threats and harassment.
But when she learned, on a morning in late September, that police had charged her for criminal defamation, linked to Pakistan’s most high-profile #MeToo case, Ghani says she was shaken. “In terms of silencing and demonising people speaking out against sexual assault, it was a new low even for Pakistan,” she says.
Continue reading...Agitu Ideo Gudeta, who was killed on Wednesday, used abandoned land to start a goat farming project employing migrants and refugees
Tributes have been paid to a 42-year-old Ethiopian refugee and farmer who became a symbol of integration in Italy, her adopted home.
Agitu Ideo Gudeta was attacked and killed, allegedly by a former employee, on her farm in Trentino on Wednesday.
Continue reading...Bangladesh authorities under pressure from rights activists including Bianca Jagger over detention of Abul Karam
Bangladesh authorities are facing calls to release a Rohingya man arrested while photographing the transfer of refugees to a controversial island camp this week.
Abul Kalam, 35, has been held since Monday morning when he was reportedly beaten before being taken to police barracks near the Kutupalong refugee camp, where he has lived since leaving Myanmar as a child refugee in the early 1990s.
Continue reading...Coronavirus, conflict and cuts to UN funding are increasing the risks of food insecurity and acute malnutrition in 2021
The government has promised £47m in extra emergency aid for 2021 as it becomes clear that the coming year will see a dramatic rise in people struggling for food.
The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said on Wednesday it will provide more aid for food, water, hygiene and shelter in 11 countries, including £8m to Africa’s Sahel region, where the UN has warned of catastrophic hunger.
Continue reading...Despite court battles, female officers face limited career opportunities and inferior pension rights to male counterparts
Nidhi Rao* has 13 years’ experience serving in the communications wing of the Indian army. Now she is looking for work online and doesn’t know where to start. “I am jobless in the middle of a pandemic, with no financial security.”
When Rao joined the army, female officers were contracted for five years, after which time they might get an extension of five more years. Unlike men, they were not offered a permanent job. Later, the initial commission period was changed to 10 years, which could be extended a further four years.
Continue reading...As China’s leadership celebrates national triumph over virus, some residents want an investigation into the start of the pandemic
Jianghan Road in Wuhan throngs with shoppers and strollers bundled up against the late December freeze. Bells ring out on the hour from the landmark Hankou Customs House where the road terminates near the wide banks of the Yangtze River.
Restaurants along the city’s main pedestrian thoroughfare are packed, even on an icy weekday night, and resound with loud conversation.
Continue reading...‘Extremely dangerous’ if personal information needed to process mobile payments is lost or falls into wrong hands, say staff
The rapid upscaling of digital technology use by international groups in Somalia is causing concern about the risk to the people whose data is being collected.
The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the use of programming by humanitarian organisations to deliver aid, but local staff working with several different NGOs say the organisations are not thinking enough about data protection or obtaining informed consent.
Continue reading...A lack of trial data transparency from China has raised concerns, but the country is confidently pushing ahead
When Egypt’s health ministry sent out an invitation to doctors to be vaccinated against Covid-19, they neglected to make clear it was a clinical trial.
Instead, it assured them that two Covid-19 vaccines developed by China’s National Biotec Group, part of a state-owned conglomerate known as Sinopharm, had no side-effects and that “the minister of health was vaccinated today, and orders were issued to vaccinate all doctors and workers who wish to be vaccinated”.
Continue reading...Decades after the US took over the territory for a military base, families separated and forced to leave their homes are still waiting for compensation
When Laurenza Piron was forced from her home in the Chagos Islands in 1970, she was sent on a boat to the Seychelles. Her parents and siblings were sent to Mauritius. It was two decades before they located one another again, and even then none of them could afford a reunion. So Piron, now 76, never saw her family again.
“I wanted to go, but I didn’t have the money,” says Piron. “Compensation should have been paid. If it had, there wouldn’t be such hardship.”
Continue reading...Activists say the island of Bhasan Char is not safe and that the refugees are being moved against their will
Bangladesh has begun moving the second group of Rohingya refugees from crammed camps in Cox’s Bazar to a remote island in the Bay of Bengal, in defiance of safety and security concerns from international rights advocates.
Groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) have urged the Bangladeshi government to halt the relocation of Rohingya to Bhasan Char, which is hours by boat from the mainland, flood-prone, vulnerable to frequent cyclones and could be completely submerged during a high tide.
Continue reading...A survivor warns against the harmful practices many are forced to undergo to try to change their sexuality or gender identity
When I was nine, my parents took me to a traditional healer. He used a razor to make three incisions on the insteps of my feet, my wrists, my elbows, my forehead and on the back of my neck. As blood started to flow, the healer rubbed a concoction of herbs into the incisions and gave me a potion to drink. He took alligator pepper and rubbed it on various parts of my body. There was a rooster, into which he cast the “demon” inside me. The rooster was slaughtered and thrown into the river, supposedly taking my sexuality with it.
In boarding school, I met a boy who I would say was my first love. We talked about everything and liked to take long walks. But he struggled. I watched him struggle to accept his sexuality. He felt there was something wrong with him but I didn’t know how to help him. For me it was different. It wasn’t just about sexuality; it was also about gender. I was born male but I have never felt like a man.
When I was 22, in university, I met a transgender woman. She was a lot more open, more cosmopolitan, more upfront about what she wanted. I’d never met anyone like her. We had a sisterhood –– fun, graceful, pure. It was as if the scales fell from my eyes.
What part of me has been lost in the effort to make me fit a heteronormative, socially acceptable form?
Continue reading...Kerala villagers are reaping the benefits of a scheme that pays them to leave their trees rooted, reducing risk of deforestation
In the misty, hilly terrain of Wayanad, in the southern Indian state of Kerala, the people with any access to land in the quiet town of Meenangadi have been out counting their trees.
Sheeja CG, a 46-year-old farmer, has lived among coffee, coconut and pepper plantations all her life but last month she increased her income dramatically by mortgaging 53 of her trees at the local bank, in return for a sum of 2,650 rupees (£26.96), or 50 rupees each. She was one of the first beneficiaries of the state-sponsored scheme.
Continue reading...Now, mid-pandemic, would be the worst time to abandon our commitment to the world’s poorest countries
“The great strategic prize of the 21st century is the full economic, political and social empowerment of women,” said William Hague, when he was foreign secretary. “There are still large parts of the world who are undervaluing, under-utilising, under-developing half their population.” That was five years ago, and there is still a long way to go. I am speaking out now, because we are about to go into reverse.
Parliament’s women and equalities committee, which I chair, isn’t afraid to take the prime minister to task when his policies fall short in providing for the marginalised and under-represented. We’ve held the government’s feet to the fire on the domestic abuse bill, the role of women in the response to Covid-19 and the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on BAME communities. But the need to level up society doesn’t stop at our borders, and many of the world’s poorest countries are also the most unequal.
Continue reading...