Category Archives: Global development

The mystery epidemic striking Nicaragua’s sugar cane workers – a photo essay

Posted on by

In Chichigalpa, kidney failure accounts for half of all male deaths over the last decade. Could industry changes be the key to saving lives?

  • Photographs by Ed Kashi

For decades, a mystery epidemic has plagued young male labourers toiling in Nicaragua’s sugar cane plantations. The men start their work fit and strong, but after repeated harvests chopping cane under the tropical sun, they begin to suffer from nausea, back pain and exhaustion, get such severe muscle weakness that they can no longer earn a living, then end up dying of kidney failure, despite many being only in their 20s and 30s.

In Chichigalpa, the centre of Nicaragua’s sugar cane industry, the mysterious illness accounts for half of all male deaths over the last decade. Just outside this “town of city and rum”, as it is known, one rural community has earned itself the moniker “La Isla de Viudas” – the Island of Widows.

Continue reading...

‘I want to give what I never had’: the trans mum taking in abandoned children in India

Posted on by

Manisha was shunned as a child by her family and ended up on the streets – now she dreams of opening an orphanage

When Manisha walks into her rented room, crestfallen at having earned little money at work, her children rush to the door and cluster around, welcoming her with hugs. “When I feel their arms around me, my worries just melt away,” she says.

Manisha, a transgender woman who goes by only one name, is not their biological mother. She has taken in eight abandoned children over the years and now, aged 35, looks after six, two having recently left to get married.

Continue reading...

Surge of Aids-related deaths feared as Covid pandemic puts gains at risk

Posted on by

UN calls for urgent focus on HIV/Aids as coronavirus blocks access to drugs and missed targets threaten to derail progress

Global progress on ending the Aids epidemic by 2030 could be blown off course by coronavirus, a senior UN director has warned.

Just a six-month disruption to medical supplies induced by Covid-19 could result in an extra 500,000 Aids-related deaths in sub-Saharan Africa by the end of 2021, according to data modelling in the annual report from UNAids. The agency’s executive director, Winnie Byanyima, said the world is already way off target on combating Aids, and the pandemic “has the potential to blow us even further off course”.

Continue reading...

Qatar firms’ failure to pay leaves migrant workers destitute – report

Posted on by

Despite government measures, thousands left struggling during Covid outbreak as companies withhold salaries and benefits, research shows

Companies in Qatar have failed to pay “hundreds of millions of dollars” in salaries and other benefits to low-wage workers since the coronavirus outbreak, according to new research by the human rights group Equidem.

In its report, Equidem describes how thousands of workers have been dismissed without notice, put on reduced wages or unpaid leave, denied outstanding salary and end of service payments, or forced to pay for their own flights home.

Continue reading...

‘Immense suffering’: older people worldwide being failed by aid agencies – report

Posted on by

‘It’s much easier to get funding for children’ says one charity, as 11-country survey finds systematic failings ‘tantamount to neglect’

Older people around the world are being “systematically failed” by aid agencies, leaving them unable find enough food or access medicine, research has found.

Interviews with almost 9,000 older people affected by natural disasters, conflict or socio-economic crises in 11 countries, including Yemen, South Sudan and Venezuela, found a “one size fits all” aid approach which leaves out older people, according to a joint report published on Thursday by HelpAge International and Age International.

Continue reading...

UK aid cuts ‘unprincipled, unjustified and harmful’, say experts and MPs

Posted on by

Cuts announced by Rishi Sunak will hit girls and women in poorest countries hardest, with charities predicting huge numbers of deaths

The UK aid cuts announced by chancellor Rishi Sunak could see a million girls lose out on schooling, nearly three million women and children go without life-saving nutrition and 5.6 million children left unvaccinated, causing up to 100,000 deaths, charities, aid experts and MPs have said.

They described the slash in funding to overseas aid, from 0.7% to 0.5% of Britain’s gross national income, as “unprincipled, unjustified and harmful” just as a global health crisis is throwing decades of progress on poverty, healthcare and education into reverse.

Continue reading...

‘Shadow pandemic’ of violence against women to be tackled with $25m UN fund

Posted on by

At least 30% will go to the women-led grassroots organisations that have been ‘critical’ through Covid pandemic

The UN is to spend $25m (£19m) from its emergency fund to address what has been called the “shadow pandemic” of gender-based violence against women displaced by wars and disasters.

The money will be divided between the UN population fund (UNFPA) and UN Women, and at least 30% of it must be given to women-led local organisations that prevent violence and help survivors access medical and legal help, family planning, mental health services and counselling.

Continue reading...

UK’s foreign aid budget to be reduced to 0.5% of gross national income

Posted on by

Chancellor announces £4bn cut in spending, breaking Tory pledge to keep to 0.7% target

Britain’s overseas aid budget is to be cut from 0.7% of gross national income to 0.5%, slicing more than £4bn from the annual package and breaking a Tory manifesto commitment made only a year ago.

The cut was announced in the spending review by Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, which also saw a large three-year increase for the defence budget. Sunak clearly decided to brush aside warnings from across the political spectrum that Britain’s commitment to foreign aid symbolised an outward looking and generous UK.

Continue reading...

Report clears WWF of complicity in violent abuses by conservation rangers

Posted on by

But independent review criticises wildlife fund’s inconsistent approach to human rights

A long-awaited report into allegations that conservation rangers supported by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) committed violent abuses in several countries, including murder, has cleared the organisation’s staff of complicity but criticised it for serious shortcomings in oversight.

But even as the report was released, campaigners for tribal rights – including Survival International, which has long been a critic of WWF – suggested the report had failed to investigate some of the most serious issues and that it had been released two days before the US Thanksgiving holiday in an attempt to bury the news.

Continue reading...

Zambia’s default fuels fears of African ‘debt tsunami’ as Covid impact bites

Posted on by

Aid agencies say debts should be restructured or cancelled due to the pandemic and warn other countries could follow

Zambia has become the first African country to default on its debts since the pandemic, leading to fears that a “debt tsunami” could engulf the continent’s most heavily indebted nations as the financial impact of coronavirus hits.

A hastily-arranged G20 finance minister meeting in Saudi Arabia failed to sort out Zambia’s debt, after the southern African country missed a $42.5m (£32m) coupon payment on its bonds in October. Missing another payment on 14 November meant a technical default.

Continue reading...

The Indian school where students pay for lessons with plastic waste

Posted on by

Villagers once burned the toxic waste as fuel, but a pioneering couple’s radical education model uses it much more creatively

Every morning, students in Assam’s Pamohi village go to school clutching a bag of plastic waste, in exchange for which they will get their day’s lessons.

Akshar School, founded by Mazin Mukhtar, 32, and his wife Parmita Sarma, 30, has turned its pupils into ecowarriors by waiving school fees and helping to stop local people burning used plastic.

Continue reading...

Africa’s largest Covid treatment clinical trial launched by 13-country network

Posted on by

Anticov study with international research institutions aims to stop disease progression and protect fragile health systems

A network of 13 African countries has joined forces with global researchers to launch the largest clinical trial of potential Covid-19 treatments on the continent.

The Anticov study, involving Antwerp’s Institute of Tropical Medicine and international research institutions, aims to identify treatments that can be used to treat mild and moderate cases of Covid-19 early and prevent spikes in hospitalisation that could overwhelm fragile and already overburdened health systems in Africa.

Continue reading...

As Ethiopia’s army declares daily victories, its people are being plunged into violence

Posted on by

Abiy Ahmed’s war against Tigrayan rebels endangers a fragile union whose collapse would destabilise the Horn of Africa

Ethiopia’s prime minister Abiy Ahmed has promised military victory in Tigray. He says he will capture the capital, Mekelle, and the leadership of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which he calls a criminal junta. If he succeeds, it will be a pyrrhic victory – prospects for peace, democracy and protection from famine in Ethiopia will be set back a generation.

There are artillery barrages, airstrikes, armoured assaults. The Ethiopian army announces a Tigrayan town captured every other day and this week it plans to surround Mekelle. But there’s something missing. We’re not seeing pictures of prisoners of war, recovered military equipment, or newly-captured towns with local people welcoming their liberators. Perhaps the TPLF evacuated the towns and retreated to the mountains. Or maybe there are things that Ethiopian TV doesn’t want the world to see.

Continue reading...

Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine to be sold to developing countries at cost price

Posted on by

Jab that is part of global initiative to distribute doses will remain at low price ‘in perpetuity’

The coronavirus vaccine produced by Oxford University and AstraZeneca will be available on a non-profit basis “in perpetuity” to low- and middle-income countries in the developing world.

The details of arrangements to supply poorer countries came as AstraZeneca revealed the interim results of a phase 3 trial of the vaccine, which is being heralded as the first to meet the more challenging requirements of the developing world.

Continue reading...

‘Nowhere to go’: the young LGBT+ Ugandans ‘outed’ during lockdown

Posted on by

Student tells how he and others were arrested on Covid-related charges, publicly humiliated and left without a place to stay

When you ask Ronald Ssenyonga, a 21-year-old Ugandan, to tell you about his arrest, he asks: “Which one?” Like many gay people struggling to survive in a country that has used Covid-19 as an excuse to clamp down on human rights, Ssenyonga is used to arrests and raids.

Even before the pandemic Uganda was labelled the worst place to be gay after its parliament proposed the death penalty for some homosexual acts. The constitutional court annulled the law in 2014, but security agencies continue to hound gay people – relying on information from community vigilantes to attack and smoke them out of places they thought were safe.

Continue reading...

‘He was nine’: The Saudi minors still on death row despite royal decree

Posted on by

Saudi Arabia announced it would end capital punishment for juvenile crimes, but campaigners fear at least 10 prisoners could be executed at any time

Saudi security forces arrested Mohammed Al Faraj outside a bowling alley when he was 15 years old. The teenager from Qatif, aShia-majority province in the east of the country, was separated from his companions and transferred to a prison for adults in the city of Dammam where he was detained and denied outside contact.

When his family was finally able to visit him in October 2017, Al Faraj claimed he’d been beaten and kicked, forced into stress positions for hours and left for days in solitary confinement. Observers say Al Faraj was tortured into confessing to three crimes related to protests in the restive Qatif province, including harbouring a fugitive, attending the funeral of a relative in 2012 and sending WhatsApp messages that could affect public security. The charges carry the death penalty.

Continue reading...

Egypt cracking down harder on human rights groups, experts say

Posted on by

Three members of Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights detained over ‘fake news’

Emboldened Egyptian security forces have stepped up their crackdown on human rights groups with a series of unprecedented recent moves triggering widespread alarm, experts are warning.

Last week the head of a leading human rights organisation and two of its staff members were detained after the group met with foreign diplomats in Cairo.

Continue reading...

MPs from seven parties urge government not to cut overseas aid

Posted on by

Letter to PM says move would send a terrible signal as UK prepares to host G7 and COP26

MPs from seven parties have urged the government not to cut the overseas aid budget, saying it had made the difference between life and death for countless people.

The intervention by MPs, including the Tory “father of the house”, Peter Bottomley, comes after it emerged that the Treasury was considering cutting more than £4bn from the aid budget and breaching a commitment to spend 0.7% of GDP on overseas assistance each year.

Continue reading...

A terrible time for the UK to cut foreign aid | Letter

Posted on by

There are no grounds for breaking legal commitments or for turning our backs on countries and people at a time of great need, write Sam Hickey, Uma Kambhampati and others

News that the UK government is set to renege on its commitment to spending 0.7% of gross national income on foreign aid could not come at a worse time for the world’s poorest countries and people and for international cooperation more broadly (UK aid budget facing billions in cuts, 17 November). The World Bank estimates that the Covid-19 pandemic will push an extra 88-115 million people into extreme poverty this year alone, rolling back years of progress that UK aid has helped contribute to. While there is room for debate about the best way to set aid budgets, there are no grounds for breaking legal commitments or for turning our backs on countries and people at a time of great need.

Taken together with the parallel proposals to boost spending on national defence and to restrict employment within the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office to British nationals – which will greatly limit the talent pool from which to recruit and undermine FCDO’s ability to operate effectively in different contexts – this latest move suggests Britain is rapidly becoming a parochial rather than progressive presence in the world. The UK, with its reputation as a global leader on foreign aid and for scientific excellence in vaccine development and beyond, remains well placed to play a leading role in both responding to the pandemic and helping to build a more equal, safer and sustainable global order.

Continue reading...

David Cameron and Tony Blair warn against cutting foreign aid

Posted on by

Former prime ministers say widely expected move to cut budget is ‘strategic mistake’

Former prime ministers David Cameron and Tony Blair have warned against plans to cut the overseas aid budget, calling the idea a “strategic mistake”.

The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, is widely expected to pare back the UK’s commitment to spend 0.7% of national income on overseas aid to 0.5% in next week’s spending review.

Continue reading...