The effects of Covid-19 continue to be felt, but in many places the fallout from civil war, displacement and natural disasters provide more pressing concerns. We look back on some of this year’s best shots from Global Development galleries and photo essays
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We can vaccinate 70% of the world against Covid by mid-2022. Here’s how
The WHO’s vaccination goal is achievable – but it will take proper funding, better vaccine distribution and jabs with longer shelf lives
While western countries scramble with their booster rollout to deal with the Omicron wave, only 8.4% of people in low-income countries have had at least one Covid vaccination dose.
The gap in the vaccination rates between high- and low-income countries is wider than ever. We cannot keep turning a blind eye to it.
Continue reading...Death of young woman after FGM revives calls for ban in Sierra Leone
Maseray Sei, 21, was found dead after undergoing the procedure in a centuries-old ritual carried out by a secret society for women
The death of a young woman in Sierra Leone, almost immediately after undergoing female genital mutilation, has sparked outrage and revived calls to end the practice.
The body of 21-year-old Maseray Sei was found on 20 December at Nyandeni village in Bonthe district, southern Sierra Leone, a day after the FGM took place. Sei’s family said that after the procedure the mother of two boys complained of a migraine and was in pain, with complications from FGM thought to be the cause, according to activists working on the case.
Continue reading...‘It was civil war’: photographing Mexico’s women’s rights protests
Mahé Elipe captures the visceral anger as International Women’s Day protests turned into a violent clash with police
On 8 March 2021, women across the world took part in protests to mark International Women’s Day. In Mexico, there is an added poignancy to the annual event, as at least 10 women are murdered in the country each day; in 2021 the date was was marred by additional violence.
In the runup to the day fences were erected around the national palace in Mexico City’s main square, where thousands of women were due to gather.
Continue reading...Trapped at Europe’s door: inside Belarus’s makeshift asylum dormitory
About 1,000 people, mostly Kurds, are waiting at a converted customs centre in Bruzgi for the chance to cross into EU
The giant warehouse towers over the Belarus countryside, less than a mile from the Polish border. In this 10,000 sq metre space patrolled by dozens of armed soldiers, 1,000 asylum seekers are crammed among countless industrial shelving units, held up on their way to Europe in the midst of a frigid winter.
“We’re trapped in this building,” says Alima Skandar, 40. “We don’t want to go back to Iraq and we can’t cross the border. Please, help us.”
Continue reading...‘Our house was gone, it was sea and sand’: life on the vanishing coasts – in pictures
Coastal communities in Mexico, Bangladesh and Somalia are struggling to adapt to the climate crisis. Many people have already lost livelihoods and homes to rising waters
Continue reading...From criminal to ‘teacher’: the ex-gangster tackling crime in Nairobi
One of the city’s most wanted, Peter Wainaina was given a second chance and used it to turn his life around and help others find different path out of poverty
At the entrance of Kibagare, a slum in Nairobi’s outskirts, boots of dead gangsters dangle from electricity wires that hover over ramshackle homes of wood and iron sheets.
With little state protection from crime, angry local people will often take the law into their own hands and beat an offender who is caught in the act, sometimes to death.
Continue reading...‘No roof, no seats, no desks’: photographing Yemen’s conflict-hit schools
Years of fighting mean children as old as 10 have never been to school. Khaled Ziad’s images document a generation whose entire future is at risk
Their classroom has no roof, no seats, no desks; most of the 50 small children sitting on the rubble-strewn floor have no pens or paper. But the students in this makeshift school in Hays, a village in Yemen’s Hodeidah province, are still among the luckiest in the country simply for having a teacher and a place to learn.
Seven years into a catastrophic war that sparked the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, Yemen’s conflict shows no signs of ending soon, and the future of an entire generation is at risk of being destroyed. About 3 million children are unable to attend school, according to the Red Cross, with 8.1 million needing urgent educational assistance.
Continue reading...Engineering the future: meet the Africa prize shortlist innovators
Turning invasive plants into a force for good and powering healthcare with solar – here are three of the 2022 nominees
From a solar-powered crib that treats jaundiced babies to fibre made from water hyacinth that absorbs oil spills, innovators from nine African countries have been shortlisted for the Royal Academy of Engineering’s 2022 Africa prize.
This year half of the shortlist of 16 are women, and for the first time it includes Togolese and Congolese inventors. The entrepreneurs will undergo eight months of business training and mentoring before a winner is chosen, who will receive £25,000, and three runners-up, who win £10,000 each. All the projects are sustainable solutions to issues such as access to healthcare, farming resilience, reducing waste, and energy efficiency. The Guardian spoke to three of the shortlisted candidates.
Continue reading...‘Families want a son at any cost’: the women forced to abort female foetuses in India
Laali and Meenakshi’s unborn daughters are among the country’s 46 million ‘missing’ women and girls over the past 50 years
Laali was alone at home when she realised her legs were drenched in blood. The bleeding did not stop for eight hours. As she fell unconscious, the 25-year-old thought she would die alongside the foetus she was losing.
She had been three months pregnant when she was taken for prenatal sex determination. “When I learned it was a girl, I started feeling as though I was suffocating,” she says.
Continue reading...Revealed: the secret ‘forced labour’ migration route from Vietnam to the UK
Observer investigation uncovers new trafficking gateway to the west after 500 migrants found in shocking conditions in Serbia
When construction began to great fanfare in 2019, the Linglong car tyre factory outside of Belgrade was heralded as the jewel in the crown of Serbia’s burgeoning strategic partnership with China.
Two years later, 500 Vietnamese construction workers were allegedly found last month working in conditions of forced labour with their passports confiscated and living in cramped and degrading conditions.
Continue reading...A seed for all seasons: can ancient methods future-proof food security in the Andes?
In Peru’s remote villages, farmers have used diverse crops to survive unpredictable weather for millennia. Now they are using this knowledge to adapt to the climate crisis
In a pastoral scene that has changed little in centuries, farmers wearing red woollen ponchos gather on a December morning in a semicircle to drink chicha, made from fermented maize, and mutter an invocation to Pachamama – Mother Earth – before sprinkling the dregs on the Andean soil.
Singing in Quechua, the language spread along the vast length of the Andes by the Incas, they hill the soil around plants in the numerous small plots terraced into a patchwork up and down the Peruvian mountainside.
Continue reading...The world on screen: the best movies from Africa, Asia and Latin America
From a Somali love story to a deep dive into Congolese rumba, Guardian writers pick their favourite recent world cinema releases
The Great Indian Kitchen
Continue reading...End trade barriers to help tackle climate crisis, says WTO chief
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala calls for changes to ensure developing nations are resilient to affects of extreme weather
Removing trade barriers around the world would help to tackle the climate crisis, enable a “just transition” away from fossil fuels and make developing countries more resilient to the impacts of global heating, the head of the World Trade Organization has said.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who took over as director general of the global watchdog last March, said: “Trade is part of the solution, not part of the problem … We need a global effort to climate-proof the supply chains and infrastructure of the most vulnerable economies or risk undoing hard-won economic progress and development.”
Continue reading...‘It’s so liberating’: India’s first salon run by transgender men
Founder Aryan Pasha wants La Beauté & Style to be an inclusive and comfortable space, as well as tackle prejudice and provide employment
The beauty treatments listed at the new La Beauté & Style salon are much the same as those offered by the dozen or so other parlours that dot the traffic-heavy Dilshad Extension area of Ghaziabad, 17 miles (28km) east of Delhi. But that is where the similarity ends.
The wall behind the reception desk is painted in rainbow colours; a mural of a trans man with flowing multicoloured locks decorates another wall; a woman wearing a sari is having her eyebrows plucked next to a trans man who is telling a stylist how he would like his hair cut.
Continue reading...Lebanon faces ‘depressing’ Christmas as internet crisis stops festive calls
With telecoms barely working, a plunging currency and young people emigrating, it’s a bleak Christmas for weary Lebanese
In Lebanon’s year of loss and deprivation, simple pleasures have steadily drained away along with its fortunes. But amid a crisis renowned for breaking new ground, few Lebanese had thought their ability to stay in touch was at risk – until a pre-Christmas warning sent shudders through the country.
The telecommunications minister, Johnny Corm, warned this week that a lack of funds and fuel could soon see Lebanon’s already struggling internet grind to a halt, making festive calls and messages even trickier than usual – and a financial and social disintegration like no other even more acute.
Continue reading...‘My grandmother hid Jewish children’: Poland’s underground refugee network
As thousands attempt to cross the Belarus-Poland border seeking asylum in Europe, local activists are trying to help
In the attic of a cottage in the woods near the Polish village of Narewka, a young Iraqi Kurd crouches, trembling with cold and fear. Through the skylight, the blue lights of police vans flash on the walls of his hiding place. Outside, dozens of border guards are searching for people like him in the snowstorm. Downstairs, the owner of the house sits in silence with his terrified wife and children.
The young Kurd is one of thousands of asylum seekers who entered Poland across the border with Belarus, where countless others have become trapped on their way to Europe. The Polish family have offered him shelter. But if the Polish police find him, he risks being sent back across the frontier into the sub-zero forests of Belarus, while his protectors risk being charged for aiding illegal immigration.
Continue reading...‘A breakthrough, not a breakdown’: one woman’s quest to transform mental health care in India
Psychologist Ratnaboli Ray’s recovery from a mental health crisis inspired her to fight for women suffering in ‘abysmal’ conditions in West Bengal’s state institutions
- Photography by Ranita Roy for the Guardian
Ratnaboli Ray regards one of the lowest points of her life as a breakthrough. After years in an arranged marriage in which she felt stifled and trapped, her mental health took a catastrophic turn in 1997, when she was in her mid-30s.
“I was feeling very caged, I was not able to express myself,” she says, from her home in West Bengal, India. She describes the psychological symptoms as like a pressure cooker bursting. “I used to get angry, have weeping spells. I was neglectful of my young son.”
Continue reading...Mandatory Covid jabs in Malawi ‘violate human rights’, say civil society groups
Measure aimed at frontline workers to reduce spread of Omicron variant may increase unrest in country with low vaccine take-up, critics warn
Civil rights groups in Malawi have cautioned the government on its decision to make the Covid-19 vaccination mandatory for frontline workers.
From January, it will be compulsory for public sector workers, including healthcare staff, police and teachers, as well as journalists, to be vaccinated, after an announcement by Malawi’s health minister, Khumbize Kandodo Chiponda, last week.
Continue reading...Asia’s factory workers at the sharp end of the west’s supply chain crisis
Migrant workers ate and slept in factories swarming with Covid, sealed off from outside world
For weeks, Hoang Thi Quynh* worked and slept inside a garment factory in Tien Giang province, in southern Vietnam. She would start her shift at 7.15am and then, after a day spent sewing sportswear garments, enter an empty hall of the factory complex and settle down for the night.
Each worker had a tent, set one or two metres apart, containing a foil mat, pillow, blanket and a box to store their belongings. No workers were permitted to meet anyone from outside the factory; even speaking to a visitor over the gates was forbidden.
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