Category Archives: Global development

Tony Blair is wrong. Africa won’t be the answer to Britain’s post-Brexit problems

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Far from promising an economic miracle, the UK has missed the boat on a continent on the brink of a painful debt crisis

Tony Blair’s cheerleading for the UK-Africa investment summit is of a piece with much of the former prime minister’s recent career. Trading in grand-sounding ideas, often very short on detail, he brings the pitch of an evangelist crossed with a lobbyist to the world’s biggest problems.

Blair’s latest piece of rhetorical woo-woo unites (and promises to address) a series of disparate preoccupations: eradicating poverty and encouraging good governance in Africa while solving the issue of Britain’s trading relationships post-Brexit. All seasoned with just a hint of post-colonial hubris.

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UN report: half a billion people struggle to find adequate paid work

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Study also shows global unemployment due to rise for the first time in a decade

Nearly half a billion people around the world are struggling to find adequate paid work, trapping individuals in poverty and fuelling heightened levels of inequality, according to a UN report.

In a study published as world leaders fly into the Swiss ski resort of Davos to voice concerns over inequality and the climate crisis, the UN’s International Labour Organization (ILO) said more than 473 million people around the world lacked the employment opportunities to meet their needs.

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Should the world be worried about the coronavirus in China?

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Experts fear latest strain of virus may spread across planet from person to person

It is a novel coronavirus – that is to say, a member of the coronavirus family that has never been encountered before. Like other coronaviruses, it has come from animals, or possibly seafood. Many of those infected either worked or frequently shopped in the Huanan seafood wholesale market in the centre of the Chinese city. New and troubling viruses usually originate in animal hosts. Ebola and flu are examples.

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‘The river is our home’: Bangladeshi boatmen mourn their receding waters

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Decreased flows caused by water-hungry neighbours, especially India, are damaging river communities

• All photographs by Kaamil Ahmed

Holding his downturned palm level with his waist, Musana Robi Das indicates how tall he was when he started working on Bangladesh’s rivers.

As a child he helped his father ferry villagers across local waterways. Now a tall and spindly 50-year-old, he has had to abandon that life as a boatman. The waters now sit so low that his services are unnecessary. So the past decade has instead been spent repairing shoes inside a dimly lit wooden booth in the village market.

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World’s 22 richest men wealthier than all the women in Africa, study finds

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Startling scale of inequality laid bare as Oxfam report highlights chronically undervalued nature of care work

The world’s 22 richest men have more combined wealth than all 325 million women in Africa, according to a study.

Women and girls across the globe contribute an estimated £8.28tn ($10.8tn) to the global economy with a total of 12.5bn hours a day of unpaid care work, a figure more than three times the worth of the global tech industry, claims an Oxfam report published on Monday ahead of the World Economic Forum in Davos.

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Britain must open a new chapter in its relationship with Africa

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Economic growth in African countries has triggered a global race for influence. Britain cannot afford to be left behind

Africa is the coming continent. Its population is predicted to double to 2 billion people over the next three decades. That growth will mean enormous opportunities for business and investment, but will also create huge challenges around sustainability and the environment.

An Africa focus is therefore essential, particularly for a post-Brexit Britain.

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‘You can’t handcuff my spirit’: jailed writer wins freedom of expression prize

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Stella Nyanzi, imprisoned in Uganda after writing poem about president’s mother’s vagina, lambasts regime’s ‘fear of writers’

The Ugandan academic, writer and feminist activist Dr Stella Nyanzi, imprisoned for criticising the country’s president, has been awarded the Oxfam Novib/PEN International award for freedom of expression.

Nyanzi has been in Luzira women’s prison in Kampala, the capital, for nearly 15 months after writing a poem about President Yoweri Museveni’s mother’s vagina. The poem uses the metaphor of her vagina and Museveni’s birth to criticise his near 35-year rule.

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Locusts swarm into Kenya as UN warns of ‘extreme danger’ to food supply

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Government races against time to contain threat to key food-producing regions in country still reeling from droughts and floods

The UN has warned of a “significant and extremely dangerous” escalation in the number of desert locusts descending on Kenya, as the government strives to contain the threat before it reaches the country’s food-producing regions.

The tropical grasshoppers have been wreaking havoc on Kenya’s neighbours to the north and east, devouring tens of thousands of hectares of crops in Ethiopia and Somalia since last June.

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Officials charged with corruption over award of Uganda refugee camp deals

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Money laundering and abuse of office also among allegations levelled at two senior figures

Two senior Ugandan government officials have been charged with money laundering, corruption and abuse of office over the awarding of contracts at refugee camps.

Robert Baryamwesigwa and Fred Kiwanuka, both at the time commandants at the Bidi-Bidi refugee settlement in Yumbe district in the north of the country, were charged this week with demanding and receiving bribes of more than 393m Ugandan shillings (about £82,000).

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‘Moria is a hell’: new arrivals describe life in a Greek refugee camp

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Originally intended to hold 3,000 people, 19,000 now live at the Moria refugee camp – with no electricity, scant water and, for many, no shelter at all. Journalist Harriet Grant and photographer Giorgos Moutafis met some of those attempting to cope with life there

Above a hill on the north shore of Lesbos, volunteers watch the sea and the twinkling lights of Turkey day and night with binoculars. The coastguard hurry to respond when they see a boat approaching, trying to arrive in time to stop children falling in the icy cold water as they clamber onto rocks and beaches.

On the morning of 11 January, a group of migrants from Afghanistan make it ashore without being spotted and walk to an olive grove where they light a fire and call for help.

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Losing DfID would be a calamity for the world’s poor – and for Britain

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British aid saves lives, commands global respect and chimes with the public mood. Merging DfID with the Foreign Office would be disastrous

Britain has a proud track record of supporting the world’s poorest through its aid commitments. This is not only morally the right thing to do, it is also the smart thing to do.

This cast-iron commitment to the poorest indirectly creates significant soft power for Britain. Disrupt this commitment by merging the Department for International Development (DfID) into the Foreign Office and diverting more aid to UK national interest, and you produce a lose-lose: the world’s poorest (wrongly) suffer, and significant British soft power immediately drains away, at precisely the time when the country is trying to redefine its role in the world.

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Catastrophic conditions greet refugees arriving on Lesbos

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EU countries need to act urgently to support Greece with ‘unmanageable’ levels of arrivals, UN warns

It’s just getting light on the north coast of Lesbos and in an olive grove by the side of the road a group of refugees are breaking up branches and feeding a fire to keep the children warm. They are a small group, 25 people, all of them from Afghanistan. They climbed out of a boat on the shore at 1.30am and lit the fire while they called for help.

Jalila is 18 and has travelled to the Greek island alone from Afghanistan. “But these people in the boat are my new family” she says cheerily. She is in good spirits, though shivering uncontrollably.

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UN sounds alarm over unprecedented levels of hunger in southern Africa

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Women and children bear brunt as drought and extreme weather leave tens of millions short of food

Southern Africa is in the throes of a climate emergency, with hunger levels in the region on a previously unseen scale, the UN has warned.

Years of drought, widespread flooding and economic disarray have left 45 million people facing severe food shortages, with women and children bearing the brunt of the crisis, said the World Food Programme (WFP).

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One in four countries beset by civil strife as global unrest soars

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Researchers predict worldwide turmoil will continue in 2020, with Venezuela, Iran and Libya at greatest risk

A quarter of all countries experienced a dramatic surge in civil unrest last year in a worrying trend that is likely to continue into 2020, researchers have found.

Verisk Maplecroft, a leading risk analysis and strategic forecasting company, said in a report published on Thursday that 47 countries experienced a significant rise in the number of protests over the course of the past year. Hong Kong, Chile, Nigeria, Sudan, Haiti and Lebanon were among the states affected.

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Nigeria’s child development crisis is a tragedy. Here’s how we can end it

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Investment in health and education and an end to early marriage could transform Africa’s most populous country

If you want a window on the condition of children in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, there is no better vantage point than the Katanga health centre in the impoverished northern state of Jigawa.

In a hut that passes for a nutrition clinic, a group of 25 women wait with their children. Tiny bodies bearing the hallmarks of acute malnutrition – distended stomachs and twig-thin limbs – are lifted into a weighing harness and their arms measured to check for signs of wasting. Ali, who has just reached his first birthday, weighs only 5kg – the average age of a two-month-old in the UK. His mother is 14.

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How vegetarianism is going back to its roots in Africa

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Health and climate concerns are behind the growth of plant-based diets which were once prevalent on the continent

In the meat-loving capital of Burkina Faso, customers at a small roadside joint eat bean balls, grilled tofu skewers and peanut butter rice while a report about chickens unfit for consumption being dumped on the street airs on the midday news.

A sign above the door proudly welcomes customers: “Vegetarian restaurant Nasa. Food for the love of health.” In Ouagadougou’s first plant-based restaurant, there are no knives on the tables.

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‘The dates are drying’: profits shrivel for farmers as the heat rises in Tunisia

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Irrigation systems and oases in the arid south are failing to keep up with the demands of thirsty palm plantations

Mansour Rajeb is wrapping a plastic protective sheet around the branch of a date palm in his oasis near the village of Bchelli, in southern Tunisia. Tying it up, he lingers.

“I’m worried,” he says. “The quality is getting worse. The dates are getting drier.”

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Malawi police face legal action over failure to investigate alleged rapes

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Lawyers move to make headway with inquiry into accusations of police abuses during post-election violence

A group of lawyers in Malawi is taking legal action against the police for failing to investigate allegations of rape against their officers during post-election protests.

Mphatso Iphani, a spokesperson for the Women Lawyers Association of Malawi, said that three months since the alleged attacks, “no concrete action has been taken, despite the sheer amount of evidence that the girls and women were assaulted”.

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US states move to stop prisons charging inmates for reading and video calls

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Draft bill aims to curb rise of pay-per-minute ebooks and costly facetime calls in prisons where visits are banned or restricted

Lawmakers in three US states are drafting a bill that they hope will end the growing trend of prisons charging inmates high fees for reading ebooks or making video calls to their families, while paying under a dollar an hour for prison labour.

State prisons in nine states have struck deals with private equity telecom companies to introduce pay-per-minute reading and video conferencing services in their facilities.

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