Ethiopian paper bag firm employs 18 deaf workers who use sign language to persuade clients to choose greener alternative
What do you say to a business owner who has heard it all before? Answer: Don’t speak, use sign language.
At least that’s the novel approach taken by Teki Paper bags, an Ethiopian enterprise developed by deaf women.
Continue reading...With Covid-19 yet to spread widely, business closures are already causing hardship for people dependent on casual work
From 6pm to 6am, the security services enforce the curfew. Like most other countries in the world, Tunisia remains in lockdown.
At all other times, tight restrictions on public movement are in place to limit the spread of coronavirus. Across the country, many businesses are shuttered up, with employees preparing themselves for the long and potentially economically devastating wait until something like normal life returns to the country.
Continue reading...As owner of brands including Topshop and Dorothy Perkins cancels unshipped orders, thousands will be left without income, warn rights groups
The Arcadia Group, which owns brands including Topshop, Dorothy Perkins and Miss Selfridge, is estimated to have cancelled in excess of £100m of existing clothing orders worldwide from suppliers in some of the world’s poorest countries as the global garment sector faces ruin.
According to data from the Bangladesh Garments and Manufacturing Association (BGMEA), the Arcadia Group has cancelled £9m of orders in Bangladesh alone.
Continue reading...Violent unrest at Ethiopia’s universities has been quelled by police, but the root causes will prove harder to tackle
On a December morning last year, students at Ambo University in Ethiopia’s Oromia region awoke to find threatening notices pinned to the walls of their dormitories. The message was simple: boycott classes. Anyone failing to do so would face punishment.
Written by Oromo student activists calling themselves the Qeerroo, the notices demanded solidarity with fellow Oromos at universities in the neighbouring region of Amhara, after a spate of deadly ethnic clashes there. Similar boycotts had been called in universities across Oromia, the country’s largest region.
Continue reading...For millions of young people, coronavirus restrictions have made access to food, water and shelter even more precarious
Timothy, a teenager on the streets of Mombasa, wonders how he will eat. “Rich people can stay home … because they have a store well stocked with food,” he says. “For a survivor on the street your store is your stomach.”
However, says another, if the rumours are true and street children are arrested in the city during the Covid-19 crisis, he’d be happy to go to Shimo women’s prison, because there “you are sure to get free food, shelter and medical services”.
Continue reading...In densely populated townships and cities, the army and police have been patrolling the streets to enforce strict measures to curb the spread of coronavirus
All photographs by Jérôme Delay for AP
Continue reading...World Food Programme announce 30% relief reduction, as farms and businesses shut in Covid-19 lockdown, fuelling hunger fears
Food rations have been cut to more than 1.4 million vulnerable refugees in Uganda by the World Food Programme (WFP) because of insufficient funds.
Announcing a 30% reduction to the relief food it distributes to refugees and asylum seekers, mainly from neighbouring South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi, the WFP in Uganda warned that further cuts could follow.
Continue reading...Residents fearful how their families will cope as food runs out and Jair Bolsonaro undermines lockdown message
Renato Rosas knows what poverty feels like. The musician and biomedical salesman grew up in one of Brazil’s biggest favelas, in the Amazon city of Belém. Relatives still live in the wooden stilt houses that line the black, polluted rivers running into Guajará Bay.
“It is the most extreme poverty,” he said of the Baixadas da Estrada Nova Jurunas neighbourhood where floods, deadly sucuri snakes lurking in floating rubbish and armed drug gangs are among the challenges.
Continue reading...UN warns of ‘alarming and unprecedented threat’ to food security and livelihoods in the region
A second wave of desert locusts is threatening east Africa with estimates that it will be 20 times worse then the plague that descended two months ago.
The locusts present “an extremely alarming and unprecedented threat” to food security and livelihoods, according to the UN. A swarm of just more than a third of a square mile can eat the same amount of food in one day as 35,000 people.
Continue reading...Homegrown efforts are boosting preparedness, but they need to be strengthened before the pandemic gathers force
When Covid-19 hits Africa, will we be ready? This was a distant thought just one month ago. Now, as cases climb, we are braced for impact.
As the crisis deepens in the world’s largest economies, taking up most of the media bandwidth, Africa hardly makes the headlines. In international news outlets, the idea of crisis in Africa is met with resignation, not outrage. It is almost as if the media perceives crisis as the status quo in Africa, something expected. Unavoidable.
Continue reading...In the first of a series focusing on the work of photographers during the coronavirus crisis, Jerome Delay trains his lens on South Africa
We’ve become used to the images of western cities around quarantine. In the empty streets of industrial and post-industrial societies tightly connected by globalisation, absence has become one of the most powerful metaphors of the coronavirus.
It’s a very different story in countries where inequality and poverty are much more acute; where access to a safe and distanced space in which to isolate is limited by poverty, social status and economics, and intimate social connections have a different importance.
Continue reading...Early, aggressive measures seem to be controlling the disease but the pandemic has laid bare the country’s social inequalities
When Covid-19 arrived in South America, Paraguay was one of the first countries to take measures to contain the virus, closing schools and banning public gatherings after just the second confirmed case on 11 March.
The nationwide lockdown seems to be controlling the spread of the disease, but it has created another problem: large numbers of Paraguayans are going hungry in their own homes.
Continue reading...As the anniversary of the bombs that shook the country looms, survivors working to build harmony face multiple challenges
A year on from the Easter bombs that killed more than 250 people, Sri Lanka is now under pandemic lockdown and facing rising pressure.
President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, whose decision to include individuals accused of atrocities during the country’s 25-year civil war among his political appointments has been a source of international opprobrium, is now under fire over the country’s repressive, militarised response to Covid-19.
Continue reading...Peacekeeping and aid operations face disruption as outsiders are scapegoated in one of Africa’s most vulnerable countries
A backlash against foreigners in Central African Republic threatens to disrupt peacekeeping and aid supplies in one of Africa’s most fragile countries.
Since an Italian missionary was identified as CAR’s first coronavirus case last month, xenophobia has been on the rise. Unfounded stories widely published in the country’s newspapers and on social media have portrayed foreigners as unwelcome importers of a disease that could further impoverish the country.
Continue reading...Charities press World Health Organization to ensure women can get contraception and safe abortions during crisis
The World Health Organization is being urged to declare abortion an essential health service during the coronavirus pandemic.
In guidance notes issued last week, the WHO advised all governments to identify and prioritise the health services each believed essential, listing reproductive health services as an example.
Continue reading...Official announcement greeted with cautious optimism but World Bank comes under fire over $500m education loan
Tanzania has pledged to improve access to education for pregnant girls after receiving a controversial $500m (£402m) World Bank loan, but has stopped short of readmitting them to mainstream classrooms.
The World Bank has been accused of undermining human rights and has faced criticism from local and international civil society groups over the Tanzania secondary education quality improvement programme loan. Campaigners say approval should not have been given without first securing a commitment from the government to reverse its discrimination towards pregnant girls and end compulsory pregnancy tests.
Continue reading...Court application warns ‘many lives will be lost’ without urgent action to provide face masks
The Zimbabwean government has been taken to court over its failure to provide doctors working on the frontline of the Covid-19 pandemic with masks.
The Zimbabwe Association for Doctors for Human Rights (ZADHR) is seeking to compel the authorities urgently to provide personal protective equipment (PPE) for medical practitioners, warning that medics in the country’s troubled health sector will otherwise die.
Continue reading...Ibado Mohammed Abdulle is a counsellor, friend and campaigner for women who have been made refugees in their own country by the impact of the climate crisis
The long, black hem of Ibado Mohammed Abdulle’s diya drags in the sand, creating mini tornadoes of dust under her sandals. At a circular fence of waist-high thorny bushes, she knocks on the metal sheet serving as a makeshift door. A woman’s face, partially hidden by a bright green hijab, appears. “Salaam Alaikum,” Abdulle says, “peace be upon you.”
Holding up a hand to the armed guards tasked with accompanying the visiting charity staff following her around the displacement camp, she instructs them to stay outside.
Continue reading...With over 1,000 refugees and migrants left without proper sanitation, water supplies or food there is no way to contain virus, say volunteers
The last remaining volunteers working with refugees and migrants in northern France have warned that Covid-19 is spreading quickly through the makeshift camps where over 1,000 people are sheltering without proper sanitation, water supplies or food.
Care4Calais, one of the only organisations still providing emergency services to migrants and refugees in Calais, said the number of people exhibiting symptoms of Covid-19 rose from two to nine in just three days last week.
Continue reading...Exclusive: multinationals write to G7 and G20 urging leaders to keep borders open to trade and avert global food crisis
Food supplies across the world will be “massively disrupted” by the coronavirus, and unless governments act the number of people suffering chronic hunger could double, some of the world’s biggest food companies have warned.
Unilever, Nestlé and PepsiCo, along with farmers’ organisations, the UN Foundation, academics, and civil society groups, have written to world leaders, calling on them to keep borders open to trade in order to help society’s most vulnerable, and to invest in environmentally sustainable food production.
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