Category Archives: Global development

Attacks on health workers in conflict zones at highest level ever – report

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More than 2,500 attacks in 2023, including medics killed and clinics bombed, in war zones such as Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine

Attacks on health workers, hospitals and clinics in conflict zones jumped 25% last year to their highest level on record, a new report has found.

While the increase was largely driven by new wars in Gaza and Sudan, continuing conflicts such as Ukraine and Myanmar also saw such attacks continue “at a relentless pace”, the Safeguarding Health in Conflict coalition said.

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Honduran city’s air pollution is almost 50 times higher than WHO guidelines

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San Pedro Sula is rated ‘dangerous’ as effects of forest fires, El Niño and the climate crisis cause a spike in respiratory illnesses

The air quality in San Pedro Sula, the second-largest city in Honduras, as been classified as the most polluted on the American continent due to forest fires and weather conditions aggravated by El Niño and the climate crisis.

IQAir, a Swiss air-quality organisation that draws data from more than 30,000 monitoring stations around the world, said on Thursday that air quality in the city of about 1 million people has reached “dangerous” levels.

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‘Bullet wounds are common’: crime rife in DRC’s rebel-besieged city of Goma

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Robberies, shootings, extortion and rapes have surged since the Rwandan-backed M23 militia cut off the eastern Congolese capital

In broad daylight on 16 April, three armed and uniformed men held up a city centre mobile phone shop.

Threatening staff, they helped themselves to about £700 worth of goods, before making off on a motorbike, disappearing into the busy streets of Goma, in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.

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Cop29 at a crossroads in Azerbaijan with focus on climate finance

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Fossil-fuel dependent country hopes to provide bridge between wealthy global north and poor south at November gathering

Oil is inescapable in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. The smell of it greets the visitor on arrival and from the shores of the Caspian Sea on which the city is built the tankers are eternally visible. Flares from refineries near the centre light up the night sky, and you do not have to travel far to see fields of “nodding donkeys”, small piston pump oil wells about 6 metres (20ft) tall, that look almost festive in their bright red and green livery.

It will be an interesting setting for the gathering of the 29th UN climate conference of the parties, which will take place at the Olympic Stadium in November.

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Nigerian activists condemn mass ‘forced marriages’ of 100 girls and young women

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Petition launched to halt mass ceremony that organisers say is for 100 orphans whose parents were killed by gangs

Human rights activists in Nigeria have launched a petition to stop a plan to push 100 girls and young women into marriage in a mass ceremony, which has caused outrage in the west African country.

The plan, sponsored by Abdulmalik Sarkindaji, the speaker of the national assembly in the largely Muslim north-western state of Niger, were criticised by Nigeria’s women’s affairs minister, Uju Kennedy Ohanenye. She said she would seek a court injunction to stop the ceremony next week and establish if any of the girls were minors.

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‘Nothing short of horrific’: Amnesty criticises arrest of man in Qatar ‘trapped’ by police on Grindr

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Manuel Guerrero Aviña thought he was meeting a date, but was confronted by police who charged him for drug possession

The family of a gay man who was arrested in Qatar say that he was “trapped” by a fake Grindr account and that he urgently needs access to HIV medicine or his health could collapse.

Manuel Guerrero Aviña, who has dual Mexican-British citizenship, was arrested in February after arranging to meet a man named “Gio” on the dating app. When he showed up to the meeting in his apartment lobby, Aviña was instead confronted by police officers.

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Starlink internet shutdown in Sudan will punish millions, Elon Musk warned

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With a widespread telecoms blackout already in place, emergency help and humanitarian aid at risk if satellite service withdrawn, say NGOs

Nearly 100 humanitarian groups in Sudan have warned Elon Musk he risks “collectively punishing” millions of Sudanese by shutting down his vital Starlink satellite internet service in the war-ravaged country.

Sudan has been grappling with a widespread telecommunications blackout for several months, with many aid groups using Starlink to operate during the humanitarian crisis which the UN has warned is the largest in decades.

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Outdated laws stalling progress on women’s rights in 20 countries across Africa – study

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Family law has not kept up with social shifts, with marital rape, child marriage and lack of property and custody rights persistent problems, research finds

Discriminatory family laws across parts of Africa are stalling progress on women’s rights in some countries, according to new research.

The human rights organisation Equality Now studied family law and practices in 20 African countries and found progress in recent decades, but said inequalities persisted in marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance and property laws.

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Kazakh court jails former minister for 24 years for brutal murder of wife

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Kazakhstan to toughen penalties for domestic violence as killing of Saltanat Nukenova prompts national outcry and shines spotlight on high femicide rates

A former Kazakh government minister has been sentenced to 24 years in prison for the torture and murder of his wife in one of the most high-profile cases of domestic violence in Kazakhstan’s history.

Kuandyk Bishimbayev, 44, was shown in surveillance footage repeatedly beating Saltanat Nukenova, 31, after they quarrelled in a restaurant he owned in Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana, in November 2023. A forensic examination later found evidence of strangulation.

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Global violence causing record numbers of internally displaced people

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Conflicts in Gaza, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have led to a total of 68m IDPs across the world

Conflict has forced more than 68 million people to leave their homes as of the end of 2023 – the highest figure since data became available 15 years ago.

Natural disasters made a further 7.7 million people homeless, pushing the total number of internally displaced people (IDPs) to a record 75.9 million, according to figures published by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre on Tuesday.

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At least eight Israeli strikes on Gaza aid groups since October, says report

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Human Rights Watch says warnings were not issued before attacks, which have killed or injured dozens

Israeli forces have carried out at least eight strikes on humanitarian convoys and their facilities in Gaza since October, even after aid organisations provided their coordinates to the Israeli authorities, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.

HRW said the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) did not issue warnings to the aid organisations before the strikes, which killed or injured at least 31 people.

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Rohingya being forcibly conscripted in battle between Myanmar and rebels

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Myanmar military has conscripted 1,000 Rohingya men and boys since February, with fears some are being used as human shields, according to NGOs

For more than four hours Abdullah* waited in the darkness as soldiers marched 30 of his neighbours from their homes in the Myanmar border state of Rakhine and forced them by gunpoint to join him on the truck that would take them all to a military base.

By the morning they were standing in front of a military commander ordering them to fight with the army against a local rebel group – some of the 1,000 Rohingya people the Myanmar military has conscripted since February, according to Human Rights Watch.

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Death, disease and despair as fighting closes in on besieged Sudanese city

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Darfur is on the brink of another disaster as fighting intensifies around El Fasher, the last city in the region not controlled by the Rapid Support Forces

At the Abu Shouk camp for displaced people on the northern fringe of El Fasher in North Darfur, about seven people a day arrive with injuries sustained from nearby clashes between fighters from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and groups allied to the Sudanese army.

For months now the RSF have been besieging El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, trapping a million people in the last major population centre in Sudan’s vast Darfur region not under paramilitary control.

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Chad’s military leader Itno declared president as results contested by rival

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Prime minister, Masra, accuses officials of manipulating results that show he won 18.5% of vote to Itno’s 61%

Chad’s military leader, Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno, has been declared the winner of this week’s presidential election, according to provisional results that have been contested by his main rival, the prime minister, Succès Masra.

The national agency that manages Chad’s election released results of Monday’s vote weeks earlier than planned. The figures showed Itno won with 61% of the vote, and Masra fell far behind in second, on 18.5%. Gunfire erupted in the capital, N’Djamena, after the announcement, though it was unclear if it was celebratory.

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UN agency closes East Jerusalem HQ after arson attack by ‘Israeli extremists’

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Unrwa chief says compound has faced a number of attacks, with lives of UN staff at serious risk

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees has temporarily closed its East Jerusalem headquarters after weeks of attacks.

“This evening, Israeli residents set fire twice to the perimeter of the Unrwa headquarters in occupied East Jerusalem,” the head of the agency, Philippe Lazzarini, tweeted, lamenting that it was the second attack on the compound within days.

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Children ‘piled up and shot’: new details emerge of ethnic cleansing in Darfur

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As El Fasher stands on the ‘precipice of a massacre’, rights groups call for sanctions after new testimony describes atrocities carried out by RSF paramilitaries in Sudan

Gruesome new testimony details one of the worst atrocities of the year-long Sudanese civil war – the large-scale massacre of civilians as they desperately tried to flee an ethnic rampage in Darfur last summer.

Witnesses describe children, still alive, being “piled up and shot” by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) as they attempted to escape the regional capital of El Geneina in June last year during a bout of ethnic violence in which thousands of civilians were killed.

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UK officials under fire for congratulating ‘repressive’ new chief of Uganda’s army

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Activists call move ‘absurd’, as Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba, son of President Museveni, is accused of torture and abusing critics

Senior British government officials have congratulated the newly appointed head of the Ugandan army, a man accused of torture, in a move that has been called “absurd” and “disappointing”.

Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba, Uganda’s new chief of defence forces and son of President Yoweri Museveni, received a congratulatory letter from Britain’s most senior military officer, Adm Sir Tony Radakin, at a meeting with the British high commissioner, Kate Airey, and the British defence attache.

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Soaring number of migrants trapped in Yemen face abuse and starvation, say NGOs

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Urgent funding needed to help people return home as humanitarian crisis reaches critical levels, according to migration organisation

The number of African migrants stranded in Yemen, many of whom endure “horrifying and brutal” violence while trapped there, is reaching critical levels, according to international NGOs and civil society organisations based in the Arab state.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) put out a warning this week about the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, leading a call for urgent funding to support the “safe and voluntary return of migrants to their countries of origin”.

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‘A colonial mindset’: why global aid agencies need to get out of the way

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With the world’s humanitarian system in crisis, many NGOs now recognise that local charities can deliver much more at far less cost

Before civil war engulfed her Ethiopian home region of Tigray in 2020, Tsega Girma was a prosperous trader who sold stationery and other goods. But when hungry children displaced by the conflict started appearing in the streets, she sold everything and used the proceeds to buy them food.

After that money dried up, Tsega appealed to Tigray’s diaspora for donations. At the height of the war, her Emahoy Tsega Girma Charity Foundation provided meals to 24,000 children a day.

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Call for port extension to be halted as genocide remains are found on Namibia’s Shark Island

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Researchers say more bodies of Herero and Nama people from early 20th century concentration camp could be in waters around port

The Namibian authorities are being urged to halt plans to extend a port on the Shark Island peninsula after the discovery of unmarked graves and artefacts relating to the Herero and Nama genocide.

Forensic Architecture, a non-profit research agency, said it had located sites of executions, forced labour, imprisonment and sexual violence that occurred when the island was used by the German empire as a concentration camp between 1905 and 1907.

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