Category Archives: Global development

‘Love and desire’: how erotic poetry is helping Afghans through lockdown

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A new generation of poets in Afghanistan is exploring the physical side of love – and isolation is their inspiration

It has been weeks in lockdown for Hoda Khamosh, but the 23-year-old has managed to stick to a routine. This includes sitting down in the afternoons to write poetry, mostly with an erotic spin to it.

In the absence of touch and seeing friends and loved ones, she – along with many others – has turned to erotic poetry, convinced that, “it will help to get through these difficult days”.

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Family reunion rescue flight to bring vulnerable migrants from Athens to UK

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Exclusive: Greek PM intervenes to help 50 asylum seekers reach UK despite ban on direct flights

An unprecedented family reunion rescue flight is due to leave Athens, bringing 52 vulnerable migrants, including several minors, to join family in the UK.

The flight on Monday is the result of intense efforts by refugee families in the UK with the support of campaign group Safe Passage and the peer Alf Dubs. It was organised with collaboration from the UK and Greek governments after direct flights between Greece and the UK were suspended in March.

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‘You are still a soldier to me’: The forgotten African hero of Britain’s colonial army

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Jaston Khosa was one of 600,000 men from African countries who fought for Britain. He was quietly buried on VE Day after a life of abject poverty

In a crowded, Zambian slum on VE Day, a family gathered to bury one of the last veterans of Britain’s colonial army. Jaston Khosa of the Northern Rhodesia Regiment was laid to rest on the day the world commemorated the end of the war in which he fought.

The 95-year-old great-grandfather was among 600,000 Africans who fought for the British during World War Two, on battlefields across their own continent as well as Asia and the Middle East. Although their service has largely been forgotten, the mobilisation of this huge army from Britain’s colonies triggered the largest single movement of African men overseas since the slave trade.

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Bangladeshi journalist is jailed after mysterious 53-day disappearance

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Campaigners warn Shafiqul Islam Kajol faces a lengthy sentence as his family worries about his exposure to Covid-19 in prison

Fifty-three days after he disappeared, Bangladeshi journalist Shafiqul Islam Kajol turned up on Sunday in police custody at a border town 150 miles from where he had last been seen.

“I am alive,” he told his son by phone, the first time the family had heard his voice since his disappearance in early March, a day after a case was filed against him and 31 others under the country’s controversial new Digital Security Act.

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‘Separation by sex’: gendered lockdown fuelling hate crime on streets of Bogotá

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While men and women can go out on alternate days, trans people in the Colombian capital face increasing risk of violent attacks

A policy of making men and women leave their homes on alternate days during lockdown in Bogotá is fuelling violence towards the transgender community by the police and the public, activists say.

The mayor of the Colombian capital, Claudia López, announced last month that women were permitted to go outdoors for essential tasks on even-numbered days and men on odd-numbered days, in an effort to limit numbers on the streets.

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‘There is no future’: the refugees who became pawns in Erdoğan’s game

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First the asylum seekers were used to further Turkey’s regional ambitions, now they are made to suffer in quarantine camps

At the beginning of March, thousands of refugees gathered in the shadow of the Pazarkule border gate in Turkey after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said he would “open the gate” to Europe.

The move was a reaction to the killing of 33 Turkish soldiers in Idlib province on 28 February and designed to exert pressure on the EU and Nato to support its military operation in northern Syria.

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Trouble brewing for tea producers as coronavirus lockdown hits harvests

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India’s ‘champagne of teas’ among those affected as country’s tea board estimates output could drop 9%, amid strain in China and Sri Lanka

Trouble is brewing for the world’s tea producers as the coronavirus lockdown shut down the harvest in several important regions, including the picking of India’s “champagne of teas”.

Despite forecasts of increased demand from drinkers stuck at home across the world, producers have become frustrated by the enforced quarantining of their workforce, with India’s output expected to drop by 9% in 2020.

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‘We are living in a catastrophe’: Peru’s jungle capital choking for breath as Covid-19 hits

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Iquitos, still reeling from a dengue fever outbreak and plagued by poverty, relies on air deliveries for medicine, equipment and oxygen

In the final hours before Covid-19 claimed her life, Cecilio Sangama watched helplessly as his eldest sister Edith gasped for breath.

Hospitals across Peru’s largest Amazon city had run out of oxygen, and the shortage had pushed the black market price of a cylinder well above $1,000 (£810).

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‘They’re fearless’: the women battling to free Myanmar from meth

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From jungle stakeouts to burning drug dealers’ property, a group of mothers is willing to do whatever it takes to free their community from addiction

Sister Ester keeps several small plastic bags of colourful methamphetamine – or meth – tablets beside her bed, along with a pistol and a plastic box of bullets.

“All of these items were seized by our group in raids on houses selling drugs over the past few weeks,” she says.

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Covid-19 could trigger ‘media extinction event’ in developing countries

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Critical reporting under threat as revenue losses leave independent news outlets hostage to government subsidies or whims of billionaires

Fake news laws and political interference along with growing financial pressures has left many independent media groups in developing countries fighting to survive during the pandemic.

News outlets around the world have faced measures to muzzle critical reporting in an environment that has already seen dozens of journalists harassed, arrested and censored by governments, according to editors and press freedom groups.

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‘I had no choice’: the desperate Nigerian women who sell their babies

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With limited access to abortion and antenatal care, many young mothers are falling prey to the country’s human traffickers

Two months after 17-year-old Ebere fell pregnant last year, she considered having an abortion. But she was told by a doctor that such a process – eight weeks into her pregnancy – could lead to complications.

Going home to her parents after visiting the doctor wasn’t an option for Ebere, who feared her strict father would beat her and shame her in their neighbourhood. The father of the baby had denied all responsibility and threatened to kill her if she ever tried to contact him again.

A nurse, who saw the troubled young girl sitting in the hospital, approached her to find out what was wrong. Ebere explained her situation and the nurse showed her a Facebook page of a man she said was a social worker who helped pregnant women in her position. She told her to call the phone number.

“When I called and explained my situation, he asked me to meet him at a popular restaurant in town,” says Ebere, speaking to the Guardian in her home city of Enugu, in south-eastern Nigeria. “When we met, he offered to take me to his home and care for me until I gave birth, but only if I was willing to sell the baby to him.”

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Pollution causing birth defects in children of DRC cobalt miners – study

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Researchers link exposure to mining pollutants to greatly increased risk of conditions such as spina bifida and limb abnormalities

Thousands of people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are being exposed to dangerous levels of toxic pollution that is causing birth defects in their children as they mine for cobalt used to make rechargeable batteries for smartphones, laptops and electric cars, a new medical study has found.

Research published in the Lancet last week found that local people working in mines in the African “copperbelt”, a mining region stretching across Zambia and the DRC, are at significantly higher risk of having children born with serious birth defects.

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Millions predicted to develop tuberculosis as result of Covid-19 lockdown

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With attention focused on coronavirus, undiagnosed and untreated TB cases will cause 1.4 million to die, research suggests

The head of a global partnership to end tuberculosis (TB) said she is “sickened” by research that revealed millions more people are expected to contract the disease as a result of Covid-19 restrictions.

Up to 6.3 million more people are predicted to develop TB between now and 2025 and 1.4 million more people are expected to die as cases go undiagnosed and untreated during lockdown. This will set back global efforts to end TB by five to eight years.

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Vietnam crushed the coronavirus outbreak, but now faces severe economic test

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Strict quarantining and widespread testing have helped the country avoid disaster, but with tourism on hold the nation’s future is uncertain

Vietnam didn’t just flatten its coronavirus curve, it crushed it. No deaths have been reported, official case numbers have plateaued at just 271, and no community transmissions of the virus have been reported in the last two weeks. On 23 April, the nation eased lockdowns in its major cities and life is gradually returning to normal. It is a stark contrast to many other nations including the US, where more Americans have died from Covid-19 than during the entire Vietnam war.

Kidong Park, the World Health Organisation’s representative to Vietnam, has praised the country’s response to the crisis.

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Chile: pandemic highlights health crisis as lockdown halts inequality protests

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Coronavirus arrives against backdrop of unresolved social tensions that fueled last year’s explosion of protests

For six months, Chile was shaken by a wave of protests in which millions took to the streets to protest against inequality. Residents of the capital, Santiago, grew accustomed to the raucous crowds thronging the main square to sing and chant against the government.

Now, with parts of the capital on coronavirus lockdown, wind rasps through an empty Plaza Italia as a handful of shoppers hurry past security forces enforcing the stay-at-home order.

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‘For the lives of our mothers’: Covid-19 sparks fight for maids’ rights in Brazil

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Millions of domestic workers have been told to keep working or been laid off without pay. Now their families are fighting back against a ‘structurally racist’ system

For as long as Juliana França can remember, on weekdays her mother, Caterina, has made the four-hour round bus trip from the working-class area of Baixada Fluminense, outside Rio de Janeiro, to the city’s affluent South Zone to work as a maid.

But when Covid-19 arrived in Brazil, França begged her to stay at home.

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Where India’s government has failed in the pandemic, its people have stepped in

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Civil society has outperformed the state in helping to feed India’s poorest. It should be seen as ally not enemy

The highways connecting India’s overcrowded cities to the villages had not seen anything like it since the time of partition 73 years ago. Hundreds of thousands of workers were on the move, walking back to their villages with their possessions bundled on their heads.

On 24 March, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered a nationwide 21-day lockdown to contain the coronavirus pandemic. States sealed their borders, and transport came to a halt. With no trains or buses to take them home, India’s rural-to-urban migrant population, estimated at a staggering 120 million, took to the roads. On 5 April a statement from the home ministry said 1.25 million people moving between states had been put up in camps and shelters.

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Uganda megachurch criticised for choir tour as children stranded by Covid-19

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Watoto church investigated over decision not to pull out as 48 children are among those stuck abroad due to border closures

The Ugandan government has launched an investigation into the activities of a megachurch in Kampala after seven members of its internationally renowned children’s choir were diagnosed with Covid-19 following an overseas tour.

The country’s child affairs minister, Florence Nakiwala Kiyingi, told the Guardian the Internal Security Organisation was investigating Watoto church for allegedly breaching child labour laws, taking the children out of the country without permission and putting them at risk by not cancelling the tour as coronavirus cases escalated and countries closed their borders.

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‘It’s being built on our blood’: the true cost of Saudi Arabia’s $500bn megacity

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With an artificial moon and flying taxis, Neom has been billed as humanity’s next chapter. But beneath the glitzy veneer lies a story of threats, forced eviction and bloodshed

“The future has a new home,” proclaims the website.

“It’s a virgin area that has a lot of beauty,” says the voice over a string section soundtrack as the promotional video tracks colour-tinted panoramic shots of picturesque desert expanses, and deep azure lagoons.

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