Latest tragedy follows string of disasters as Covid worsens poverty and sparks rush to work abandoned shafts in gold-rich country
Dozens are feared dead and others still trapped underground after an abandoned goldmine collapsed in Zimbabwe.
Six men have so far emerged alive from the mine at Bindura, about 70km north of the capital Harare after the disaster on Wednesday. According to officials, nearly 30 miners remain unaccounted for.
Continue reading...Readers respond after the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, cut international aid by a third in his spending review
Rishi Sunak has said he could not tell the country he was giving 0.7% of gross national income to foreign aid (Foreign Office minister resigns as Sunak cuts aid budget, 25 November). What kind of country does he think he lives in? Can he and the rest of the government not see that so many of the problems in the world come from the gross divide between countries like ours and ones where so many face starvation?
Has he not noticed that during the first lockdown, 10 million people volunteered to help people in their community? Did he not notice the thousands who volunteered to trial the vaccine? These are not people who would wish to ignore the rest of the world.
Continue reading...War, hunger and devastating aid cuts have made the plight of Yemenis almost unbearable
On a ward in Ataq general hospital in the dusty central province of Shabwa in Yemen, six-month-old Muna Bassam is lying on her back, eyes closed, her distended belly moving up and down with the labour of breathing.
In the corridor outside her room, a poster shows before-and-after photos of several children admitted to the ward who have managed to recover from acute malnutrition – still painfully thin, but smiling and alert. Muna’s family already took her to hospital once before. Worried about being able to pay for her treatment and fuel to return to the village, their prayers for her this time around are even more urgent.
Continue reading...The hunt for a coronavirus vaccine is showing promise but it is premature to say the end of the pandemic is nigh. Several rich countries have signed a 'frenzy of deals' that could prevent many poor nations from getting access to immunisation until at least 2024. Also, many drug firms are potentially refusing to waive patents and other intellectual property rights in order to secure exclusive rights to any cure.
Michael Safi, the Guardian's international correspondent, explains why 'vaccine nationalisation' could scupper global efforts to kill the virus and examines what is being done to tackle the issue
Continue reading...Police told to enforce law against cutting girls passed in July as country says it will adhere to African charter on child rights
Sudanese authorities have announced they will end child marriage and enforce the country’s ban on female genital mutilation (FGM), in a major step forward for the rights of women and girls.
Police officers were told on Wednesday they must inform local communities that FGM is illegal following new laws passed in July that make it punishable by up to three years in jail.
Continue reading...Reduction came before this week’s move to slash UK spending on poorer nations to 0.5% of national income, with girls worst affected
The overseas aid budget for education was slashed by more than a quarter by the government this year, even before this week’s further axing of a third of aid spending, according to analysis seen by the Guardian.
As anger met the government’s announcement this week, it was revealed that it has already reneged on the Tory manifesto pledge by cutting primary and secondary education funding as part of £2.9bn of cuts made by Dominic Raab in July. On Wednesday in parliament, while announcing he would seek to legally cut the aid budget from 0.7% to 0.5% of gross national income, Raab reiterated a promise to prioritise girls’ education, which was immediately dismissed as “empty rhetoric” by the shadow international secretary.
Continue reading...Tribunal rules that Ravi Karkara, an adviser to UN Women, was rightfully dismissed for harassing younger men
A former senior UN adviser who contested his sacking over sexual misconduct has lost his appeal at a tribunal.
Ravi Karkara, who was tasked with promoting gender equality and youth partnerships at UN Women, was dismissed in 2018 following allegations of harassment against younger men, including an intern.
Continue reading...In Chichigalpa, kidney failure accounts for half of all male deaths over the last decade. Could industry changes be the key to saving lives?
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...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...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...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...‘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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...