Category Archives: Global development

How snakebites became an invisible health crisis in Congo

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Daily life is fraught with danger for people living in remote areas of a country where health funding is as scarce as specialist medicine

All photographs by Hugh Kinsella Cunningham

In the vast jungles that cover the Democratic Republic of the Congo, one of the world’s most invisible health crises burns on. The country’s extensive equatorial forests are home to numerous species of venomous snakes, but their habitat is shared by secluded communities that are being forced to look further and further afield for their resources due to poverty and the pressures of conflict and climate change.

It puts DRC at the centre of an issue Médecins Sans Frontières has called a “neglected crisis”: death by snake bite.

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Amazon fires are a shameful indictment of our lust for excess

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The flames engulfing the world’s biggest rainforest are a human tragedy as well as an environmental one. We are all to blame

The scale of the devastation caused by the wildfires still raging in the Amazon is hard to comprehend. This is a rainforest that provides one-fifth of the world’s oxygen; it is hard not to feel powerless and despairing in the face of the disaster overtaking the region.

But however strong – and bitter – the feeling about this as an environmental catastrophe, we must never lose sight of the fact that it is also a human tragedy.

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Bangladesh imposes mobile phone blackout in Rohingya refugee camps

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Muslims who fled persecution in Myanmar face prospect of further isolation as government orders operators to shut down services

Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims living in refugee camps in Bangladesh face a communications blackout after the government ordered a ban on mobile phone services and sim cards.

The country’s telecommunications regulatory body cited security fears and illegal mobile use as it ordered operators to shut down services in the overcrowded camps in the south-eastern border district of Cox’s Bazar by next Sunday.

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‘Most renewable energy companies’ linked with claims of abuses in mines

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Corporate watchdog urges clean-up of supply chains as analysis finds weak regulation and enforcement has led to lack of scrutiny

Most of the world’s top companies extracting key minerals for electric vehicles, solar panels and wind turbines have been linked with human rights abuses in their mines, research has found.

Analysis published by the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC), an international corporate watchdog, revealed that 87% of the 23 largest companies mining cobalt, copper, lithium, manganese, nickel and zinc – the six minerals essential to the renewable energy industry – have faced allegations of abuse including land rights infringements, corruption, violence or death over the past 10 years.

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Malaria breakthrough as scientists find ‘highly effective’ way to kill parasite

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Drugs derived from Ivermectin, which makes human blood deadly to mosquitoes, could be available within two years

Human trials of new antimalarial drugs are in the pipeline after Kenyan scientists successfully used bacteria to kill the parasite that causes the disease.

The Kenya Medical Research Institute (Kemri) and global health partners say the breakthrough could potentially lead to the development of a new class of drugs in less than two years.

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Nigerian officials ponder next move in $9bn energy scandal

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As war of words continues over potential loss of assets, mixed messages of negotiation and scam emanate from government

Nigeria’s top government officials have met to discuss their next move in the $9bn (£7.4bn) energy scandal that is poised to cost their economy dear.

As they exited Monday’s high-level meeting, chaired by vice-president Yemi Osinbajo, the participants remained tight-lipped, refusing to comment on the talks.

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Stay home or risk being shot: Cameroon’s back-to-school crisis

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An education ban enforced by separatist rebels has affected 600,000 children in English-speaking areas

The lessons at Seraphine Akwa’s house were supposed to be secret. She had been teaching at a primary school in Bamenda, in anglophone Cameroon, but repeated threats had forced the headmaster to shut the school’s doors.

The threats were from the “Amba boys”, separatists who have been fighting a two-year battle with Cameroon’s francophone government to break off and form their own state, Ambazonia. They enforced a school boycott to protest against educational injustices against English-speakers.

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UN communications chief under fire for tweeting refugee’s details

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Melissa Fleming’s data breach led to girl’s name, location and phone number being retweeted to 2.3 million UNHCR followers

The UN’s newly appointed under secretary-general for global communications has been accused of an “astonishing” breach of confidentiality, after she tweeted an image of a child refugee that displayed personal details, including her name, location and family’s phone number.

The tweet, sent by Melissa Fleming, was retweeted by UNHCR to its 2.3 million followers over the weekend before being deleted. Fleming has since told the Guardian she is trying to locate the child’s family to apologise.

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‘The silence is suffocating’: family abuse ‘epidemic’ uncovered in Samoa | Eleanor Ainge Roy

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The beautiful Polynesian island is home to a fiercely traditional society rife with domestic violence

Blood on the walls. Bruises like smashed plums. As long as Sefina* can remember, family violence has been part of her life. She watched her mother routinely attacked by her stepfather. “Sorry,” her mother would whisper afterwards to the children.

Then, Sefina’s elder sister was nearly killed by a group of male relatives for breaking the curfew. “Sorry,” her sister told her as she later left the island for good.

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Sewage, Zika virus – and the team in Brazil mapping disease hotspots | Dom Phillips

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Volunteers in Salvador’s favelas are collecting data on deadly infections and inequality to help campaign for better sanitation

Wearing crisp, white T-shirts and carrying tablets, the students fan out through Marechal Rondon – a bustling favela spread over hillsides and a valley in Brazil’s north-eastern city of Salvador. As they walk, they map blocked drains and piles of rubbish on their tablets. These are the “infection points” that attract the rats and mosquitoes which, in turn, spread diseases like leptospirosis and the Zika virus, both prevalent here.

Student Alexandre Santos, 20, stops before a weigh-high tangle of wild plants overlooking a housing block. “We look at sewers, rubble, garbage. Now there is high vegetation,” Santos says, tapping in the data. “It goes straight into the data bank.”

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India: almost 2m people left off Assam register of citizens

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Rights groups warn of possible humanitarian crisis as those left off list face statelessness and detention

Almost 2 million people in north-east India face the threat of statelessness and detention after they were excluded from an official list designed to root out illegal immigrants.

Security was heightened in the border state of Assam on Saturday, as millions of people waited for the final release of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) – a major bureaucratic exercise that rights groups warn could create a humanitarian crisis.

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Ebola kills girl, 9, in Uganda as outbreak approaches 3,000 cases

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Doctors are battling to contain the virus and stop the epidemic spreading from the DRC to Uganda and Rwanda

A nine-year-old Congolese girl who tested positive for Ebola in neighbouring Uganda has died of the disease, as the World Health Organisation (WHO) warned that the current outbreak was approaching the grim milestone of 3,000 cases and 2,000 deaths.

Her death makes her the fourth case to cross into Uganda amid the continuing struggle to contain the deadly outbreak.

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‘A nightmarish mess’: millions in Assam brace for loss of citizenship

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People who cannot prove links to region from before 1971 face being sent to detention camps

Millions of people in north-eastern India could lose their citizenship on Saturday in what could become the biggest exercise in forced statelessness in living memory.

Human rights experts have raised serious concern over the drive against suspected illegal immigrants in the border state of Assam, warning it could create a humanitarian crisis that disproportionately affects Muslims and the region’s poorest communities.

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Salmon farming in the Beagle Channel enters troubled waters | Hannah Summers

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Victory for community concerned about the industry’s environmental costs strengthens calls for shakeup of rules along Chilean coast

A growing wave of resistance to the expansion of salmon farms along the Chilean coast has led to an important victory in the fight to protect a pristine fjord in southern Patagonia, home to indigenous groups and an array of stunning wildlife.

Dolphins, whales and colonies of penguins thrive in the 240km-long Beagle Channel, an area of outstanding natural beauty between Chile and Argentina which attracts tourists from all over the world.

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‘I lost my soul’: the teenage girls lured by traffickers from Nigerian camps | Philip Obaji Jr

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Traumatised refugee children are being enticed by tempting offers of escape from poverty, then sold into slavery – but survivors are fighting back

At the age of 15, Aisha and Halima were abducted from their compound in north-eastern Nigeria by Boko Haram insurgents. For a year they were held in captivity, and were raped. They managed to escape their captors, and find their way across the desert to a camp in Madinatu, in Borno state.

Though they had made it to relative safety, life in the camp was hard for the traumatised teenagers. They had had no contact with their family since their abductions, and there was little to eat. They had to fend off unwelcome advances by local community law enforcers, including members of the Civilian Joint Task Force, who, they say, offered food in exchange for sex.

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‘Invest or pay the price’: more than half of refugee children not in education

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UN refugee chief warns of generation condemned to grow up unable to find work, as special education envoy Gordon Brown calls for urgent funding

More than half of the world’s 7.1 million school-age refugee children are failing to get an education despite recent spikes in enrolment rates, the UN refugee agency has found.

School shortages, oversubscribed classrooms and a lack of teachers in host countries are among the barriers faced by the 3.7 million refugee children aged five to 18 who are currently out of school, according to a UNHCR report published on Friday. The vast majority are missing out on secondary school.

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‘The misdeeds of a few’: Nigeria speaks out over $46m fraud case

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Government says it will not stand in way of justice after 77 Nigerian nationals are among 80 suspects indicted in US

Nigeria’s federal government has urged the international community not to let a minority of individuals tarnish the country’s reputation after the revelation of a high-profile financial crime investigation by the US government.

At the same time officials warned Nigerian nationals across the globe that they will not stand in the way of justice being administered on those who break the law in other countries.

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