Category Archives: Global development

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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‘They paid a guy to kill me’: health workers fight homophobia in Uganda

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A lesbian activist in a rural town has developed a new strategy to reach those most at risk of HIV

Maria Nantale is enjoying a beer at a rickety wooden bar after a long day’s work. “Forty people tested today,” she reflects. “Found three positives. One of them is in denial. She has run away.”

Twice a week, from dawn until dusk, Nantale holds an “outreach” in the town of Mbale, population 76,000. The aim is to combat HIV among those most at risk: LGBT Ugandans, drug addicts and sex workers.

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The Nobel peace prize can inspire Abiy Ahmed to new heights in Ethiopia

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Global acclaim for the peace he forged with Eritrea should buoy a leader facing the persecution of ethnic minorities at home

The Nobel prize awarded last week to Ethiopia’s prime minister, Dr Abiy Ahmed, honoured his achievements as a peacemaker. Most widely recognised was his success in thawing relations with Eritrea, the breakaway republic with which Ethiopia had remained on a war footing since the country gained independence in 1993.

No less significant, however, was his management of the internal conflict between the Ethiopian government and protesters in Oromia, the region surrounding Addis Ababa, the capital. Rather than attempting to shut down the protests by force, Abiy acknowledged their grievances, and opened up political space. He freed political prisoners jailed by previous administrations, and restored the legitimacy of parties formerly branded as terrorist organisations.

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Experts dispel claims of China debt-trap diplomacy in Pacific but risks remain

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Beijing should substantially reform its lending practices, Lowy Institute says

China has not engaged in deliberate “debt-trap diplomacy” in the Pacific, but the burgeoning scale of China’s lending, and institutional weakness within Pacific states, pose clear risks for small states being overwhelmed by debt, a new report argues.

And an infrastructure arms race between China and other countries with interests in the region – including Australia – might only exacerbate the problem.

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Aid agencies accused of failure to make good on Oxfam abuse scandal pledges

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MPs point to lack of progress on promised safeguarding improvements for whistleblowers and survivors

MPs have accused aid organisations of “dragging their feet” over combating sexual exploitation and abuse in the sector, despite safeguarding pledges made in 2018 after the Oxfam abuse scandal.

Work to improve protection and support for whistleblowers has “stalled”, and more needs to be done to protect survivors, a report by the UK international development committee (IDC) has said.

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Wahala: trouble in the Niger delta – photo essay

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Photographer Robin Hinsch travelled to the Niger delta, visiting the gas flaring sites, artisanal refineries, and meeting the communities living in the hugely polluted environments caused by the oil industry

Covering 70,000 sq km (27,000 sq miles) of wetlands, the Niger delta was formed primarily by sediment deposition. It is home to more than 30 million people and 40 different ethnic groups, making up 7.5% of Nigeria’s total land mass.

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Up to 90% of 10-year-olds in world’s poorest countries struggle to read

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World Bank targets ‘learning poverty’ as research shows major shortfall in basic reading skills among least privileged children

Nine out of 10 children in the world’s poorest countries are unable to read a basic book by the age of 10 – a situation mirrored in reverse in rich countries, where only 9% cannot do so by the same age.

Data compiled by the World Bank and the UN also shows that when low- and middle-income countries are taken together – a total of 135 states – more than half of all children cannot read a simple text at 10 years old.

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Niger’s president blames explosive birth rate on ‘a misreading of Islam’

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Mahamadou Issoufou calls for ‘responsible parenthood’ as he warns population boom will undermine climate adaptation

A misreading of Islam led to Niger’s explosive birth rate, hampering the country’s fight to adapt to the climate crisis and preserve its shrinking resources, the country’s president has said.

This nexus of issues is likely to have an increasingly direct impact on European politics, said Mahamadou Issoufou, who warned warned that migration may exceed the levels it reached during the second world war.

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Soap opera could be unlikely form of birth control in Uganda

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An NGO has recut and overdubbed a Venezuelan telenovela to raise awareness of sexual health

Uganda has one of the highest birth rates in the world. It also has some of the most dedicated soap opera watchers anywhere in Africa.

Now a group of enterprising Ugandans is aiming to tackle the former through the medium of the latter. Soap operas are expensive to make, however, so they plan instead to “hack” a Venezuelan import, recutting the existing series and overdubbing it with Ugandan actors.

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Did children die because of ‘white saviour’ Renee Bach?

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Unqualified missionary denies she sought to portray herself as a doctor at centre where at least 105 children died

Zuriah Namutamba still has questions about how her grandson died. About whether the actions of a young American woman, a missionary without any medical training, contributed to Twalali Kifabi’s death.

Zuriah is not the only relative in Uganda demanding answers over the work of the US missionary organisation Serving His Children (SHC) and its founder, Renee Bach, who has now left the country.

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How do we feed the world without destroying it? | Bob Geldof

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An international summit next year will tackle the world’s most enduring crisis – hunger. Radical action is needed

Hunger is the most awful and profound expression of poverty. It exists in every country. It is something that most people can identify with on some perhaps primordial level. It is innate. The fear of hunger is etched into our DNA, passed down the generations from hungry, scared ancestors. It is in our bones. It is in my Irish bones.

First, the good news. For several decades global hunger has been decreasing. This is mostly thanks to the sweat and ingenuity of the 500 million smallholders who produce 80% of the food consumed in the developing world. It is also thanks to the work of exceptional NGOs, to economic growth and to the innovation of businesses all along the supply chain. It’s thanks, too, to the support of governments and international organisations. And it’s to increased political stability in some places.

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Kashmir families live in fear as loved ones are detained far from home

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Relatives tell of 1,000km bus journeys to Agra where prisoners are held after Modi crackdown

The last time he saw her, Mehraj-ud-din Wani assured his wife that he would soon be a free man.

Wani was speaking to his wife, Gulshan, from behind bars in Srinagar jail in Kashmir. “He was certain that he would be released,” she said. “He said that he will be home in a matter of days.”

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