Category Archives: Global development

‘I’m a victim of slavery but I’m just seen as an immigration problem’ | Annie Kelly

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Nancy Esiovwa says the five years since she escaped slavery have been as traumatic as her captivity. Now she is fighting the Home Office in court

Ten years ago, when she was being held as a slave in a family house in Bedfordshire, beaten and working without pay, the only thing that kept Nancy Esiovwa from despair was the belief that she would one day be free. Now she is. But her life since gaining freedom has, she says, been as traumatic and desperate as her experience at the hands of her traffickers.

Shortly after she was identified by the Home Office as a victim of modern slavery in 2014, Esiovwa was left without any kind of support. She ended up on the streets, homeless and destitute and facing violence and assault. The Home Office has turned down her application for asylum and refused to grant her leave to remain. She now lives in daily fear of facing immigration detention or being sent back to Nigeria – the same country to which her traffickers, who have threatened to kill her, have returned.

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‘We’re not afraid to lead’: Myanmar’s displaced find a new voice

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Fearful for their safety, many of the 241,000 people forced from their homes by conflict in Myanmar are reluctant to go back. Now campaigners are mobilising to resist organised returns

Bawk Nu Awng hasn’t been home since 2011. All three of the villages where she spent her childhood have been destroyed.

“War hit wherever my family lived,” she said. “I feel like it is my responsibility to engage in all matters related to peace.”

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Ebola: second death confirmed in Goma

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World Health Organization confirms a second person has died of the disease in a major transit hub in Democratic Republic of Congo

A second death linked to the Ebola virus has been confirmed in the densely populated city of Goma, located at the Democratic Republic of Congo’s porous border with Rwanda.

The first case of Ebola in Goma – an evangelical preacher – contributed to the World Health Organization decision to declare the Ebola crisis in DRC an international public health emergency.

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Green shoots: Indian state introduces guns-for-trees scheme

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Punjab residents must plant 10 trees to get a firearms licence – and send photos to prove it

Residents in a district of the Indian state of Punjab who want to buy a gun face an unlikely new hurdle: to secure a firearm licence, they must plant at least 10 trees.

Applicants in Ferozepur district are required to send photos of themselves with their saplings to officials, as well as follow-up pictures a month later to prove they are caring for their trees.

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Bob Geldof’s firm’s use of tax haven is legal, but the system hurts African nations

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Private equity company 8 Miles channels funds through Mauritius in a ‘depressingly routine’ arrangement

At their closest point, Europe and Africa are just eight miles apart. That’s the inspiration for the name of Sir Bob Geldof’s private equity firm, 8 Miles, set up to channel investment into successful businesses in Africa.

But we learned last week that 8 Miles’ cash travels considerably further than this on its way from one continent to the other. It has established a cluster of companies in Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, which funds pass through.

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‘It won’t be long’: why a Honduran community will soon be under water

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Rising sea levels are destroying coastal towns in Honduras – and shrimp farms which export to the UK and US are making it worse

Eric Pineda runs a modest beachfront restaurant which serves up plates of fresh fish and rice – and faces imminent destruction.

A recent tidal surge razed the nightclub next door, leaving a pastel pink ruin, and in the past two years, several other businesses between Pineda’s property and the Pacific Ocean have been destroyed by sudden waves.

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Obscene texts and corruption: the downfall of Puerto Rico’s governor – podcast

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Mass protests triggered by leaked text messages have led to the resignation of Ricardo Rosselló. Oliver Laughland discusses his time on the island. And: Larry Elliott on why sterling is at a 28-month low

Hundreds of thousands of people have lined the streets of Puerto Rico over the past couple of weeks in some of the largest demonstrations in the US territory’s history. They began in response to hundreds of pages of leaked text messages between the governor, Ricardo Rosselló, and 11 members of his inner circle, which made homophobic and sexist jokes and mocked the victims of Hurricane Maria.

However, the problems go further back than July. The Rosselló administration has been plagued by allegations of corruption and mismanagement during the response to Hurricane Maria. Shortly before the messages were leaked, the FBI arrested five former government officials and contractors accused of misappropriating millions of dollars in federal funds given to the island after the disaster.

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British man charged with distributing bleach ‘cure’ to Ugandans

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Four men have been charged with distributing a phoney miracle cure which they claimed would cure HIV, malaria and cancer

A British man and three Ugandans have been charged and held in remand in connection with carrying out illegal clinical trials and administering people with industrial bleach.

Sam Little, 25, from Arlesey in Bedfordshire, Tim Tom, a pastor at Fort portal Christian fellowship, and herbalists Samuel Albert and Samula Tadeo were charged in Uganda for allegedly distributing a liquid called Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS) to villagers in poor areas, which they claimed cured HIV, malaria and cancer.

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‘My message is simple: use the toilet’: tackling open defecation in Nigeria

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Regular patrols are helping to ensure villagers in Kano state are practising good hygiene, to improve sanitation and cut disease

When Nasiru Ibrahim goes on patrol around his village, he’s not looking out for criminal activities, or the usual community problems. Instead, Ibrahim is making sure people in Yammawar Kafawa, in northern Nigeria’s Kano state, are using toilets.

Last October, the villagers agreed to stop defecating in fields, bushes and streets, and instead use the newly-built toilets, as part of the Nigerian government’s drive to end open defecation by 2025.

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Living without water: the crisis pushing people out of El Salvador

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El Salvador will run out of water within 80 years unless radical action is taken, a study found, while corporate interests, corruption and gangs worsen the problem

Just after 6am, Victor Funez fills a three-gallon plastic pitcher with water from a tap in the cemetery, balances it on his head and trudges home, where his wife waits to soak maize kernels so she can make tortillas for breakfast.

Funez, 38, stops briefly to help his daughter with some homework before heading back to the cemetery with the pink urn. This load fills large plastic milk and juice bottles used for drinking throughout the day.

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The Fairtrade mark is still trustworthy | Letter

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Joy and Richard Webb respond to recent negative coverage about the fair trade movement

As committed and hardworking supporters of fair trade for almost 30 years, we feel your correspondents (Letters, 27 July) missed the point of “The death of fair trade?” (The long read, 23 July) which showed how large corporations are trying to circumvent fair trade and undermine the highly successful Fairtrade mark with their own “fairly traded” and the like. Rest assured, the Fairtrade mark remains an absolutely trustworthy guarantee of internationally agreed standards.

Tim Gossling blames the EU for “not allowing” the production of Divine chocolate in Ghana. This is not true. The EU is primarily a trading bloc, it imposes tariffs on products from outside that bloc. That’s what trading blocs do. It benefits UK manufacturers and farmers, too. No wonder the TUC, CBI and NFU are all appalled at the thought of similar tariffs being slapped on our products after Brexit.

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India’s strongman PM: Modi to appear on Bear Grylls’ Man vs Wild

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Narendra Modi claims the programme will showcase India’s ‘beautiful mountains and mighty rivers’, in the latest in a string of choreographed media appearances

India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, will appear with Bear Grylls in a wilderness survival television programme, the latest in a series of Putin-style media appearances in which the 68-year-old leader projects himself as a man of action and a champion of the environment.

A trailer for the programme, Man vs Wild, which will air in India on 12 August, shows the two men cutting through forests, sniffing animal dung and floating down a river on a makeshift raft. In one scene, Modi holds an improvised spear and tells Grylls: “I’ll hold this for you.”

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‘People are dying’: how the climate crisis has sparked an exodus to the US

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As part of the Running Dry series, the Guardian looks at how drought and famine are forcing Guatemalan families to choose between starvation and migration

At sunrise, the misty fields around the village of Guior are already dotted with men, women and children sowing maize after an overnight rainstorm.

After several years of drought, the downpour brought some hope of relief to the subsistence farmers in this part of eastern Guatemala.

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Power play: reclaiming the story of Canada’s missing and murdered

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Tara Beagan’s drama about a Blackfoot woman seeking to avenge her sister’s murder confronts the violence suffered by Indigenous women from the standpoint of those affected

“You think we’re not at war here? As a Blackfoot woman I can tell you it sure as fuck feels like we are.” So begins Tara Beagan’s one-woman play Deer Woman, about an ex-soldier avenging the murder of her sister – and the 4,000 other Indigenous women and girls who have gone missing or been killed in Canada since the 1970s.

The show, set deep in the woods with nothing but a cooler, holdall and bundled-up tarpaulin as props, is delivered as a mesmerising, shocking, and at times terrifying confession to a smartphone on a tripod. Lila, whose primary goal in life has been to protect her sister Hammy, is eventually deployed with the army overseas – only to discover that something horrible has happened while she was away.

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Unsavoury truths about fair trade | Letters

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Tim Gossling and Bob Caldwell advise checking the smallprint and question how trustworthy the movement is

The death of fair trade (Journal, 23 July) can partly be laid at the door of the EU. Its treatment of former colonies, restricting tariff-free trade to “primary produce” so that the profitable part of the businesses, manufacture, is protected, means that they may be independent in terms of politics, but are economically still the same colonies.

Take Ghana, which Samanth Subramanian mentions. Go and buy your bar of “Fairtrade” Divine chocolate. On the back it waxes lyrical about Kuapa Kokoo, the cocoa farmers’ organisation that tries to guarantee fair and stable prices for cocoa beans, with a bit extra for the social premium. Read to the end of the small print where it says: “Made in Germany”. Ghana has a perfectly good chocolate factory, at the port town of Tema, but workers only make chocolate for the local market, because that is all they are allowed to do. Ghana would be a lot richer if it could sell the manufactured product over here, but that would be in direct competition with the German manufacturer, which the EU is formed to protect. That is why I voted leave in the referendum – though I probably would not do so again, as Brexit is unlikely to improve the situation.
Tim Gossling
Cambridge

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We should all be shamed by the shocking death of a sick woman in UAE custody

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Alia Abdulnoor’s case reveals the grim reality of human rights during the ‘year of tolerance’ in the United Arab Emirates

When I learned of Alia Abdulnoor’s death and the conditions of her detention, I was both saddened and outraged. Unjustly detained in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Alia was denied her dignity along with a fair trial.

This death in custody should shame us all. Riddled with cancer, osteoporosis and liver fibrosis, she spent her final weeks chained to a bed, denied adequate care and made to sign a document stating that she didn’t want treatment, according to reports by human rights monitors.

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Moves to improve press freedom in Malaysia met with cautious optimism

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Proposal to replace restrictive legislation with independent media council could end closures of outlets but campaigners remain wary

The Malaysian government is considering repealing a restrictive media law and creating an independent watchdog to regulate the industry.

In a move that activists hope will become the first of many to improve press freedom in the country, the government is discussing the abolition of the Printing Presses and Publications Act (PPPA).

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The play’s the thing: the university using drama to bridge ethnic divides

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Ethiopia’s conflicts are reflected at universities but, by walking in each other’s shoes on stage, students learn to do so in life

Rainy season has begun in Ethiopia’s south. On a stormy morning at a university in the town of Wolkite, students are using drama to break down entrenched ethnic barriers.

Understanding between groups is a rarity in a country where violent conflict is common. Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, has promised greater stability, but tensions remain high in various regions and the education system is no more immune to deep-rooted tribal differences than anywhere else.

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EU moves to tackle deforestation caused by chocolate and other products

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Campaigners hail scheme to protect and restore forests around the world as ‘pivotal step’ towards ensuring goods remain untainted

The EU has taken a “pivotal step” towards addressing the deforestation caused by its consumption of soy, chocolate, meat and other products, environmental campaigners have said.

The EU said this week it had set out a new plan to protect and restore the world’s forests, which involves working with governments to promote better use of land and resources, managing supply chains, and carrying out research. A possible new regulation to “minimise the impact of EU consumption on deforestation and forest degradation” will also be assessed under the plan.

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Make environmental damage a war crime, say scientists

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Call for new Geneva convention to protect wildlife and nature reserves in conflict regions

International lawmakers should adopt a fifth Geneva convention that recognises damage to nature alongside other war crimes, according to an open letter by 24 prominent scientists.

The legal instrument should incorporate wildlife safeguards in conflict regions, including protections for nature reserves, controls on the spread of guns used for hunting and measures to hold military forces to account for damage to the environment, say the signatories to the letter, published in the journal Nature.

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