Category Archives: Global development

The transgender women on the trail of Pakistan’s missing children | Thaslima Begum

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On Karachi’s streets, a team is leading the way where police have failed in investigating disappearances

Zigzagging through Karachi’s main road, Layla Gulnaz*, 46, is on a mission. Beneath a sweltering sun, she goes from one car to the next, peering intently at the backseat passengers as she asks for spare change. She approaches a black car with a family of five inside.

As the father reaches for change, Gulnaz quickly scans the faces of the three children in the back. To buy time, she makes small talk, but the man passes her a few rupees and hastily rolls up the car window.

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‘They see us as slaves’: Kenyan women head for the Gulf despite abuse fears | Jillian Keenan and Njeri Rugene

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Kenyan government reforms promise to make domestic work safer in a region notorious for labour trafficking – but are they working?

In a busy recruitment agency in Nairobi’s central business district, dozens of women line the halls. All hope that today they will secure a job as a domestic worker in the Gulf states, cooking, cleaning and caring for another family thousands of miles from their own homes.

Pamela Mbogo* is one of them. The 29-year-old has found a job in Saudi Arabia starting next month. It’s not her first time as a domestic worker. On the previous occasion she lived and worked for a family in Bahrain, where she was abused and locked inside the house for days at a time. Yet, this time, Mbogo believes it will be different.

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Tanzania president Magufuli condemned for authoritarian regime

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Amnesty and Human Rights Watch raise concerns over rising levels of abuses against activists, opponents and the press – including arrest of journalist Erick Kabendera

Tanzania’s president John Magufuli is presiding over an escalating campaign of repression that has targeted journalists, human rights defenders and political opponents ahead of his plans to run for re-election next year, two reports claim.

Magufuli – nicknamed “the Bulldozer” – is accused in two independent reports, by the human rights organisations Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, of presiding over rising levels of abuses against activists and opponents since his election in 2015.

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Kenya turns to Saudi investor to make water drinkable in arid Turkana region

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Authorities seek to build desalination plant in drought-stricken area sitting on top of a vast reservoir of salty water

Authorities in Kenya’s driest region are in talks with a Saudi investor to build a desalination plant, after hopes of finding drinking water from an aquifer were dashed.

Tito Ochieng, the director of water services in Turkana, in the north of the country, said the potential investor – Saudi-owned Almar Water – has already signed a deal to build a $160m (£125m) desalination plant in Mombasa.

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Rescued at sea: how did refugees’ lives in Europe turn out?

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In June 2018, Italian photographer Nicoló Lanfranchi joined the last ship patrolling the Mediterranean to save refugees. Then, over many months, he tracked them down to their new homes

• Life aboard the Aquarius: a photographic diary
• Photo diary part two: the Aquarius arrives in Malta

In early 2018 Italian-born photographer Nicoló Lanfranchi was living in Berlin combining reportage work with commercial projects. He travelled the world for German media, producing stark images of the slow death of Brazilian rivers and the dignity of survivors of the Haiti earthquake.

But he began watching with growing horror as a crisis unfolded closer to home. In his native Italy he could see an increasingly rightwing government cracking down on the rescue ships that patrolled the Mediterranean, particularly off the coast of Libya, threatening fines of tens of thousands of euros for bringing ashore people who were risking their lives trying to reach Europe in flimsy boats. By June, when the country’s hardline interior minister Matteo Salvini began closing Italy’s ports to the rescue ships, 45,000 migrants had already crossed the Mediterranean that year, with more than 1,000 deaths. Salvini’s crackdown worked. Ships began to vanish, until there was only one left: the Aquarius, run by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and SOS Méditerranée.

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Malawi protesters demand inquiry into allegations of rape by police officers

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EU and Britain ramp up pressure on government to act as street demonstrators converge on Lilongwe

Hundreds of rights campaigners have taken to the streets of Malawi’s capital to call for a government investigation into allegations of rape by police officers during ongoing post-election violence.

The EU ambassador to Malawi condemned the alleged sexual violence and called for “light to be shed on what happened.” The British high commissioner also reportedly called for a thorough investigation.

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Dressing Afghanistan: young designers get creative in Kabul

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In a deeply conservative society ravaged by years of war, Afghan women still want to be free to wear clothes with style

Photography by Ivan Armando Flores

There’s a steady stream of customers coming through the doors of Rahiba Rahimi’s fashion studio. The 25-year-old’s bold, intricate designs are fitted on mannequins and hung on rails around her showroom in Kabul.

Rahimi is the lead designer and co-proprietor of Laman, a clothing label she helped build in the Afghan capital five years ago.

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Turkey accused of using threats and deception to deport Syrian refugees

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Amnesty claims people bussed out in handcuffs were beaten or signed ‘voluntary return’ forms in belief they would get blankets

Hundreds of Syrian refugees in Turkey have been compelled to return to their war-torn home country, some in handcuffs, after receiving threats of violence or being tricked into signing “voluntary return” agreements.

These are the claims contained in a hard-hitting report by Amnesty International, released on Friday, which claims to have documented at least 20 cases of forced illegal deportations by Turkish authorities.

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JK Rowling urges students not to volunteer at orphanages

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Author highlights evidence suggesting that ‘orphanage tourism’ drives families apart and makes children vulnerable to abuse

JK Rowling has called on students around the world not to volunteer at orphanages, pointing to emerging evidence that “orphanage tourism” drives family separation and child trafficking.

Speaking at the One Young World summit in London, the global forum for young leaders, the Harry Potter author and founder and president of children’s charity Lumos, said orphanages do “irreparable harm” and “perpetuate the abuse” of children and communities.

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Lord Dubs: Britain’s ‘hardening’ stance on asylum means children will suffer

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Labour peer heads push to ‘save family reunion’ amid fears Brexit will stop young refugees from joining relatives in UK

Britain’s “hardening” attitude to asylum seekers threatens to end one of the last safe routes for children to reach the UK, Alf Dubs has said.

Lord Dubs believes the Home Office is targeting a permanent reduction in childrens’ rights, under an EU law known as the Dublin regulation, to join family in the UK after Brexit.

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Nusrat Jahan Rafi: 16 sentenced to death over Bangladesh murder

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Student set on fire after refusing to withdraw sexual harassment claim against headteacher

Sixteen Bangladeshis have been sentenced to death for the murder of a 19-year-old student, Nusrat Jahan Rafi, who was burned to death in April after complaining of being sexually harassed by her school principal.

Among those found guilty were former members of the school’s administration, teachers and pupils – 12 of the 16 having confessed to participating in the killing in which Rafi was lured on to the school’s roof, doused in paraffin and set alight.

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Jordan urged to stop imprisoning women for defying the wishes of men

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Amnesty calls for end to detentions under male ‘guardianship’ system

Amnesty International has called on Jordan to end what it has described as an abusive system that jails women if they disobey their male “guardians” or have relationships deemed inappropriate.

Despite recent efforts to give women better protections, Amnesty said in a new report published on Wednesday that Jordan still allows the arbitrary detention of women, including when male family members – usually fathers or brothers – complain to the authorities that they have been absent without permission.

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Violence is hurting South Africa: we need new thinking to break the cycle

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Three activists argue that a radical approach is required in a country where conflict and rape are endemic

The spotlight on South Africa may have subsided with the departure of the royals, but foreigners are camping outside the UN refugee agency in Cape Town, clamouring to leave because they are no longer safe.

Last month brought a surge in xenophobic attacks in and around Johannesburg, and there were huge protests in Cape Town and across the country against the government’s failure to deal with rising violence against women. Gender-based violence is an hourly occurrence.

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Two-thirds of British people see overseas aid as ‘a major priority’

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Survey of EU citizens reveals overwhelming belief in importance of helping people in poorer countries

The British public remains firmly behind efforts to support people in poorer countries, with almost two-thirds of people canvassed in a survey of EU citizens believing that maintaining overseas aid at its current level should be “a major priority”.

The results from Eurobarometer, the EU’s polling organisation, also found that almost 90% of people thought helping people in developing countries should be a priority of the EU and national governments.

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Cyntoia Brown: trafficked, enslaved, jailed for life at 16 – and fighting back

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She was still a teenager when she was sold into sexual slavery and sentenced to life imprisonment for murder. Now Cyntoia Brown-Long hopes her new memoir will highlight the flaws in the US justice system that failed her so badly

Cyntoia Brown-Long was just 16 when she was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of a man she claims bought her for sex. The homeless runaway had been in and out of the juvenile justice system, survived multiple rapes and assaults and was forced into sex slavery by her then-boyfriend, a pimp known as Kut Throat, who regularly sold her for drug money.

Yet few details of Brown-Long’s troubled childhood were heard by the Tennessee court in 2004, which instead repeatedly described her as a “teen prostitute” and tried her as an adult. Today, 15 years on and just months after her life sentence was commuted by the state governor, Brown-Long has rewritten the narrative behind her incarceration – and her past – in a memoir she began while still in prison.

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‘Be afraid’: one woman’s fight to hold Liberia’s warlords to account

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Faced by a ‘rising chorus of voices’, not least that of legislator Rustonlyn Dennis, President George Weah is considering setting up a long-awaited tribunal into decades-old war crimes

As a child in Liberia’s first civil war, Rustonlyn Dennis remembers seeing dead bodies in the street. In 1991, her immediate family managed to get out of the shattered capital, Monrovia, and survived, but a dozen relatives starved to death.

Civilians were attacked, child soldiers recruited and ethnic groups were targeted in that war, setting a pattern for many of the wars that were to follow on the African continent. Hundreds of thousands of people died.

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University vice-chancellor stands aside over blackmail claims in Pakistan

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Javed Iqbal denies involvement in scandal over alleged use of CCTV footage to extort money from students in Balochistan

The vice-chancellor of a university in the volatile region of Balochistan in Pakistan has temporarily stepped down from his role following the launch of an investigation into allegations of harassment and blackmail on campus.

Javed Iqbal said on Sunday that he was leaving his post at the University of Balochistan until the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) concluded its inquiry into claims that CCTV footage of students was used by university officials to blackmail them. Most of the students allegedly affected were female.

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Lake Chad shrinking? It’s a story that masks serious failures of governance | Oli Brown and Janani Vivekananda

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Our two-year study shows the lake has been stable since the 1990s. Costly ‘solutions’ shift focus from the complex causes of the region’s deadly crisis

Lake Chad is a hydrological miracle – a life-giving, freshwater lake in the Sahara desert. But the region around the lake has been engulfed in a violent crisis for more than a decade, which has left nearly 10 million people in urgent need of humanitarian assistance.

Military crackdowns on insurgent groups such as Boko Haram have failed to end the violence. Bringing durable peace to the region requires unpicking a Gordian knot of many interlinked factors: poverty, sectarian mistrust, political marginalisation and corruption. The risks posed by the climate crisis to the rainfall-dependent livelihoods of the people of Lake Chad are an important strand of this challenge.

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‘Whistles, warnings, kaboom!’: a day with a landmine clearance team | Jamie Fullerton

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Aki Ra was a child soldier for Pol Pot, laying mines around Siem Reap. Now he is using his expertise to clear land in rural Cambodia and make it safe again

The rusty tailfin of the mortar round can be seen poking through the roots and mud of a small dirt patch, next to a skull and crossbones sign.

Aki Ra thinks the bomb could have been lying in rural Siem Reap, Cambodia, for 40 years. If it hadn’t been found, it may have added another death to the approximately 20,000 people killed by explosives laid in the country from the late 1960s to the 1990s.

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Lawyers challenge UK imports of ‘slavery-tainted’ Uzbek cotton

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Rights team argues preferential tariffs promote goods produced by hundreds of thousands of unpaid labourers in Uzbekistan

The government is facing legal action to try and stop the importation of cotton harvested with state-sponsored forced labour from Uzbekistan into the UK.

The Uzbek-German Forum for Human Rights and the Global Legal Action Network (Glan), a team of human rights lawyers, are launching a judicial review of preferential tariffs applied to Uzbek cotton, arguing that it is promoting the importation of goods tainted with modern slavery. The country has faced sustained criticism over the mass enforced mobilisation of hundreds of thousands of Uzbeks to work as unpaid labourers during harvest and planting seasons.

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