From Somalia to South Sudan, torrential rains have devastated crops and made roads impassable, sending the cost of food soaring
Before the floods hit her village, crumpling buildings, ripping out pathways and submerging swathes of land, Nurto Mohamed Hassan could buy a kilogram of rice for the equivalent of about 70p.
Now the cost is more than £1. This may not seem a lot in isolation but, for people with little money and families to feed, it is a significant rise.
Continue reading...Europol detains alleged members of group responsible for trafficking 10,000 migrants into Britain
Authorities in France and the Netherlands have arrested more than 20 suspected members of a people-smuggling gang responsible for transporting as many as 10,000 migrants from France into Britain, the European police agency has said.
The network is believed to have made about €70m (£59m) from its human trafficking operations, which used refrigerated lorries to smuggle Afghan, Iranian, Iraqi-Kurdish and Syrian migrants into the UK.
Continue reading...Leicester workers allegedly paid £3 an hour in ‘miserable conditions’, with other serious labour abuses suspected in the north-west
Concerns over the ongoing situation of up to 10,000 garment workers in Leicester, who are feared to be trapped in conditions of modern slavery and paid £3 an hour, have been raised in Parliament.
Andrew Bridgen, MP for North West Leicestershire, raised a question on Tuesday about the continuing state of working conditions in factories supplying the UK’s booming fast fashion industry, and sought a meeting with business secretary Kelly Tolhurst for clarity over enforcement of the national minimum wage.
Continue reading...Chief minister argues initiative will empower women, but move sparks controversy in conservative Indian state
When women reach the polling booths to cast their vote in current village council elections in Rajasthan, they may be asked to remove their veil, showing their faces in front of strangers.
The move is controversial in this vast, conservative rural hinterland, where the veil is worn by Hindu and Muslim women as well as other groups.
Continue reading...Exit permits to be scrapped, but requirement for domestic workers to give employers 72 hours’ notice is ‘problematic’, say activists
Domestic workers in Qatar must give their employers advance notice before leaving the country, in a new policy that campaigners say raises concerns for those trapped in abusive situations.
As pressure mounts on Qatar to tackle labour exploitation ahead of the 2022 World Cup, it announced last week that it was abolishing restrictions on leaving the country for nearly all migrant workers, who previously had to obtain their employer’s permission.
Continue reading...Policymakers urged to act on climate and bridge digital divide as study shows soaring inequality is affecting millions
Inequality has reached unprecedented levels, with more than 70% of the global population living in countries where the wealth gap is growing, according to a new UN report.
Social and economic disparities have soared even in countries such as Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, where inequality had been falling in recent decades, found the World Social Report.
Continue reading...Unpublished report claims water from contaminated reservoir leaves 3 million in Zimbabwe’s capital at risk of disease
Water being pumped to millions of residents in Zimbabwe’s capital city came from reservoirs contaminated by dangerous toxins, according to a report seen by the Guardian.
A study conducted by South African company Nanotech Water Solutions concluded that the health of 3 million Harare residents may be endangered by the provision of water containing toxins that can cause liver and central nervous system diseases.
Continue reading...Rapidly growing sector could prove lucrative as Britain seeks post-Brexit trade opportunities
UK investors could seize a $24bn investment opportunity by helping to connect millions of people without access to electricity to off-grid home solar power systems.
The market for pay-as-you-go home solar packages is expected to boom in Africa, where millions of homes are using mobile technology to rent low-cost solar panels.
Continue reading...The 16-year-old, from Eritrea, had been in the facility for more than a year and died of an unknown illness and lack of medical care
A 16-year-old is the latest person to die in a network of Libyan detention centres where refugees and migrants are locked up indefinitely after they are returned to the war-torn north African country by the EU-funded coastguard.
Fellow detainees in Sabaa detention centre, Tripoli, named the boy as Adal Debretsion, an Eritrean who had reportedly been locked up for more than a year. They said the teenager died on 12 January of an unknown illness and a lack of medical care.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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).
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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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