Category Archives: Global development

Amazon people turn to water tanks after environmental disaster

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Scheme provides clean water and helps foster trust between indigenous groups

Romelia Mendúa was handing out plantain drinks served in aluminium bowls. Guests were seated in a hammock and on the bare wooden floor. Beyond the window was the lush vegetation of Ecuador’s north-eastern Amazon.

Chocula, as the drink is called, is made by mashing plantains into water, and is a common refreshment in the Amazon. But the water in Mendúa’s chocula was no ordinary water. It came through a tap in her kitchen connected to two tanks outside collecting and filtering rainfall.

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‘He just wanted dignity’: the tragedy that captured the mood of a nation

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The death of a struggling street vendor whose stock was confiscated by officials has sent shock waves through Jordan and sparked comparisons with the origins of the Arab spring

Anas al-Jamra carried more burdens than he could bear. As the eldest of 16 children, the fruit and vegetable vendor was the main provider for his parents, brothers and sisters, in addition to his own four young children.

But continuously harassed by police and city officials, who confiscated his stock, the 28-year-old began accumulating debt.

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George Clooney ‘saddened’ by alleged child labour on Nespresso coffee farms

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Brand ambassador pledges ‘work will be done’ after children are filmed toiling on Guatemalan farms believed to supply company

George Clooney has said he is “surprised and saddened” by the alleged discovery of child labour on farms used by coffee giant Nespresso, the brand for which he has long served as ambassador.

The Oscar-winning actor and director, who during school holidays worked on his own family’s tobacco farm in Kentucky, vowed that “work will be done” to improve conditions after a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary, due to air next week, filmed children picking coffee beans and hauling sacks on six Guatemalan farms believed to supply Nespresso.

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Set them free! The judge who liberates Nigerians forgotten in jail

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Ishaq Usman Bello is shaking the conscience of the courts – and nearly 4,000 wrongly detained prisoners are grateful for it

In a crowded prison courtyard in Suleja, Nigeria, a judge flipped through a battered folder detailing the case against a young woman who stood quietly before him in a faded pink dress.

She was charged with “issuing a dud cheque”, a crime that carries a maximum sentence of two years in prison. But she’d already spent three years in prison awaiting the outcome of her trial.

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Uganda’s ‘locust commander’ leads the battle against a new enemy

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The army has been called in to eliminate the insects swarming across Africa, but their mission is dangerous and unending

  • Photographs by Edward Echwalu for the Guardian

Sitting at a plastic table in the garden of Timisha hotel in Soroti, eastern Uganda, Major General Samuel Kavuma takes a drag of his cigarette and looks down at his phone, which has barely stopped ringing for the past hour.

A military figure for nearly 40 years, Kavuma fought the Lord’s Resistance Army insurgent group. Now, he’s become the “locust commander”, the man leading the fight against the country’s worst locust outbreak in decades.

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Coronavirus in a war zone: Afghanistan braces for outbreak after first case

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Lone Kabul laboratory preparing to treat patients in the midst of political turmoil and tentative peace talks, as border with Iran closed

Preparations for an outbreak of coronavirus were underway in Afghanistan as the country confirmed its first case in the western province of Herat, which borders Iran.

Seven more suspected cases have been identified in Herat, and three cases in the nearby provinces of Farah and Ghor.

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‘No justice’ for Tanzanian journalist freed after seven months in jail

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Erick Kabendera, a known critic of the government, faces steep fine after pleading guilty to tax evasion charges in case widely seen as part of President Magufuli’s media crackdown

An investigative journalist known for holding the Tanzanian government to account has been released from prison after pleading guilty to charges widely discredited as politically motivated.

Erick Kabendera, who has written for the Guardian and various other publications, was arrested by plainclothes police officers in July last year. This week he has been ordered to pay 275m Tanzanian shillings (£92,180) on charges of tax evasion and money laundering.

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The contraceptive helping refugee women plan their families

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Instead of becoming ‘factories for babies’, women who’ve fled South Sudan to Uganda are trying new options for managing their reproductive health

Christine Lamwaka and her husband gathered their six children and fled. It was April 2017 and their town in South Sudan had just been attacked. They walked for two days from Eastern Equatoria before crossing the border into Uganda.

“It was hard to flee with the young children. We struggled to run. I thought we couldn’t make it alive,” says Lamwaka, who was 22 at the time of the attack.

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Against the grain: why millet is making a comeback in rural India

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Nagaland farmers are bringing back the ancient crop – said to have near-miraculous powers – as a less water-intensive alternative to rice

  • Photographs courtesy of NEN Nagaland

Whülü Thurr is a staunch believer in ancient farming traditions. “There is an old adage,” she says, “which goes ‘even a single stalk of millet can revive a dying man’.”

The 65-year-old farmer, from New Phor village in Nagaland state, north-east India, is a devotee of the ancient grain millet, and is well versed in its nutritional benefit. She is one of the few farmers here who has stayed with the traditional crop over the decades. Many other farmers in Nagaland, the majority of whom are women, have stopped growing it due to a lack of demand.

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Coronavirus: South Korea to test 200,000 sect members as pandemic fears hit markets

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Nation brings in ‘maximum measures’ to contain outbreak at secretive church

South Korea has stepped up its “maximum measures” to contain the coronavirus with plans to test around 200,000 members of a secretive church believed to be at the centre of the country’s outbreak.

Along with an emergency budget and a crackdown on the hoarding of face masks, the government in Seoul will test members of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus after its founder agreed to provide authorities with the names of all its members in the country.

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‘They wanted a better life’: the young Venezuelans escaping into Brazil alone

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After six years of economic crisis in their neighboring country, Brazilian officials say more and more unaccompanied minors are arriving

Jesús Pérez was 16 when he crossed into Brazil in June, fleeing a life of hunger on the streets of his disintegrating homeland.

In Pacaraima, the Brazilian border town that is the main entry point for fleeing Venezuelans, he told social workers he hoped for a fresh start.

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Women can be protected from cervical cancer – so why aren’t we doing it?

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Amid a global shortage of HPV vaccine, more must be done to steer supplies towards those most at risk: girls in poor countries

For too many women, cervical cancer is a death sentence. But it doesn’t have to be. A life-saving preventative vaccine can dramatically cut cases and put the world on track to eliminate this deadly disease.

The UK first began offering a vaccine against HPV – the primary cause of cervical cancer – in 2008. According to a 2018 study by Public Health England, infections of certain cancer-causing types of HPV have since fallen by 86% among 16- to 21-year-old women. A study conducted in Scotland last year found that the vaccine reduced pre-cancerous cervical lesions by up to 90%.

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Somalia edges closer to first democratic election in half a century

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Landmark law expected to replace clan system and lay groundwork for long-awaited ‘one person, one vote’ poll

The president of Somalia has signed a landmark federal law, paving the way for the country to hold its first popular election in half a century.

A long awaited “one person, one vote” election could be held by the end of the year.

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Togo has long been mired in political crisis – and elections won’t change that

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As the country goes to the polls, the ruling Gnassingbé dynasty has a stranglehold on power that looks unshakeable

A familiar quote in Togo comes from the president, Faure Gnassingbé, who once said: “My father told me to never leave power.”

He has heeded that advice. The first African country where a coup d’etat occurred after independence and where the elected head of state was assassinated, Togo stands to be the last country in Africa to see the lights of a democratic alternation.

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‘A step away from hell’: the young male refugees selling sex to survive

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Photographer Heba Khamis spent a year and a half documenting the lives of ‘black birds’: the male Afghan and Iranian sex workers in Berlin’s Tiergarten

  • All photographs by Heba Khamis

The allure of romance is never far away in Berlin’s Tiergarten park, a vast 520-acre expanse home to manicured lawns, dense forest, a picturesque boating lake and the city zoo. As families lay out picnics and millennials fire up barbecues, those seeking something more illicit head to the park’s wooded north, where young male Afghan and Iranian refugees can be found selling sex to the hundreds of buyers who pass through Tiergarten each day.

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Stella Nyanzi marks release from jail in Uganda with Yoweri Museveni warning

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Writer and activist who was imprisoned for insulting Ugandan president calls on him to go as 18-month sentence is revoked

The feminist academic and writer Stella Nyanzi has been released from prison after her 18-month sentence for insulting Uganda’s president was quashed.

Nyanzi collapsed as she left court in Kampala on Thursday, and scuffles broke out between her supporters and prison wardens, who fired live rounds into the air to disperse the crowd.

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How the American dream died on the world’s busiest border

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It is a place where worlds converge, a vast melting pot of different peoples, all in search of a better life. Yet the US-Mexico border is also, increasingly, a focal point for human suffering

Milson, from Honduras, sits with his 14-year-old daughter, Loany, on the reedy riverbank beside the bridge connecting Matamoros, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, with downtown Brownsville, Texas, across the Rio Grande.

On the far reach – a few yards but another world away – is a vast tent (officially a “soft-sided facility”) erected to cope with the sheer numbers seeking asylum in the US. In a few weeks’ time, on the date stipulated on their “notice to appear” document, the people staying here will have their “credible fear interview” by video link.

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The mystery sickness bringing death and dismay to eastern Ethiopia

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As villagers in Somali region fall ill in unexplained circumstances, some locals fear gas exploration has tainted the local water supply

At first, 23-year-old Khadar Abdi Abdullahi’s eyes began turning yellow. Then the palms of his hands did the same. Soon he was bleeding from his nose, and from his mouth, and his body was swelling all over. Eventually he collapsed with fever. He later died.

A deadly sickness is spreading through villages near a Chinese natural gas project in Ethiopia’s Somali region, according to locals and officials who spoke to the Guardian. Many of Khadar’s neighbours have suffered the same symptoms. Like him, some died.

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A million children left behind as Venezuela crisis tears families apart

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As the country battles economic collapse, parents have been forced to migrate, leaving their offspring in the care of family, neighbours or sometimes alone

It has been four months since Isabel Carrasco skipped her crumbling country, entrusting her daughters to a neighbour to join modern South America’s largest ever exodus.

Carrasco’s destination was Guyana, although the woman now raising her children isn’t sure which part.

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