Category Archives: Global development

Four-fifths of Sudan’s £861m debt to UK is interest

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Freedom of information data will increase calls for country to be granted debt amnesty

When Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, was in Sudan in January he offered £40m in aid to help its poorest people, who are facing unprecedented food scarcity in a debt-laden country where austerity is deepening.

Sudan, ruled by an unelected military-led transitional government after longtime ruler Omar al-Bashir was deposed in 2019, owes the UK almost £900m. But the Observer can reveal that almost 80% of that was accrued from interest, leading to calls for an unconditional debt amnesty.

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Chile imposes lockdowns to fight new Covid wave despite vaccination success

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Nearly half the population has received at least one vaccine dose but residents of the capital and other regions face strict new curbs

Despite mounting the world’s fastest per-capita Covid-19 vaccination campaign, Chile has been forced to announce strict new lockdowns as it plunges deeper into a severe second wave of cases which is stretching intensive care capacity.

Chile trails only Israel and the UAE in vaccine doses per 100 inhabitants worldwide, but new cases have risen quickly amid mixed health messaging, travel over the southern hemisphere summer holidays and the circulation of new variants.

Related: Chile emerges as global leader in Covid inoculations with 'pragmatic strategy'

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‘Reclaim These Streets’ and rubber duck rallies: human rights roundup – in pictures

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Coverage on recent struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Cardiff Bay to Thailand

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Covid third wave may overrun Africa’s healthcare, warns WHO

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Leap of 50% in cases in three months and just 7m jabs across continent ‘infecting 11 health workers an hour’

Rising cases of coronavirus in Africa threaten to overrun fragile healthcare systems and test the continent’s much-touted resilience to the disease, according to the World Health Organization’s regional office for the continent.

The global health body stated that infections were on the rise in at least 12 countries in Africa including Cameroon, Ethiopia, Kenya and Guinea.

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‘Bangladesh has come a long way’: people of Dhaka on half a century of independence

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A rickshaw rider, a domestic worker, a student and a photographer on how their lives have changed

Habibur Rahman, 48, rickshaw rider

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The making of a megacity: how Dhaka transformed in 50 years of Bangladesh

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In the half century since independence, the capital has grown from peaceful town to economic hub. But does it live up to the dreams of those still flocking to work there?

On the banks of the Buriganga, Old Dhaka’s boatmen only ever rest a moment before making their return journey, endlessly ferrying passengers back and forth across the river.

They pick them up at the Sadarghat docks, the historical trading hub that helped build the city, and row them towards the sprawling suburbs that have crept across what used to be open farmland two decades ago.

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‘They can see us in the dark’: migrants grapple with hi-tech fortress EU

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A powerful battery of drones, thermal cameras and heartbeat detectors are being deployed to exclude asylum seekers

Khaled has been playing “the game” for a year now. A former law student, he left Afghanistan in 2018, driven by precarious economic circumstances and fear for his security, as the Taliban were increasingly targeting Kabul.

But when he reached Europe, he realised the chances at winning the game were stacked against him. Getting to Europe’s borders was easy compared with actually crossing into the EU, he says, and there were more than physical obstacles preventing him from getting to Germany, where his uncle and girlfriend live.

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‘Ugliest crime’: Outcry in Sudan over lack of justice for killing of teenage girl

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Death of Samah el-Hadi, allegedly shot by her father, has led to outpouring of women sharing own stories of domestic violence

Thousands of people have signed a petition urging the Sudanese government to take action against a man released without charge by police after his 13-year-old daughter was shot dead.

Samah el-Hadi was shot three times and run over by a car, reports said. Neighbours have taken to social media to blame her father, who was briefly questioned by the authorities but released after telling them Samah had taken her own life. No postmortem was carried out on the girl’s body.

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Diversify or risk unrest, oil producers warned in report

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As world shifts to green energy, Iraq and Nigeria among those vulnerable to ‘wave of instability’

Oil-dependent countries that are not preparing to adapt to the global shift away from fossil fuels risk their own stability, warns a new report.

Algeria, Iraq and Nigeria are the most vulnerable to “a slow-motion wave of political instability”, according to the risk analysts Verisk Maplecroft.

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‘The Yanomami could disappear’ – photographer Claudia Andujar on a people under threat in Brazil

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Andujar lived with the tribe and fights for them. A timely show of her images comes to London soon


It is more than 50 years since Claudia Andujar began photographing the Yanomami, the people of the Amazon rainforest near Brazil’s border with Venezuela. Now 89, she is using her archive to increase their visibility, at a time when their survival is under renewed threat.

“The question of indigenous people should be more respected, more widely known. This is very important as it’s the only way the present [Brazilian] government will come to recognise their rights as human beings to occupy their land,” says Andujar, speaking from São Paulo. “This government isn’t interested in their rights.”

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‘Just write STOP’: the teenager helping Polish women flee abuse

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Schoolgirl’s fake cosmetics site helps hundreds of women as domestic violence rises during Covid

In April 2020, weeks after Poland went into its first Covid-19 lockdown, Krysia Paszko, a 17-year-old high school pupil, watched a TV report about Europe’s surge in domestic violence cases, which had increased by up to 60% on 2019, according to the World Health Organization. Poland’s largest women’s rights centre, Centrum Praw Kobiet (CPK), had reported a 50% increase in calls to its domestic violence hotline in March.

Learning from the report that France had implemented a scheme in pharmacies that women could use to report domestic violence using the codewords “Mask 19”, Paszko had an idea. With help from a graphic designer friend, she created a Facebook page for a fictitious cosmetics company.

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UN resolution hailed as ‘crucial turning point’ for victims of Sri Lanka civil war

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UK-led action ramps up scrutiny of the regime against a backdrop of worsening human rights abuses

Civil rights groups have welcomed a UK-led UN resolution on Sri Lanka as a “crucial turning point for justice” for victims of the country’s nearly 30-year-long conflict.

The resolution, which ramps up international monitoring and scrutiny of the country, was passed on Tuesday by the human rights council after the UN high commissioner for human rights warned Sri Lanka could rapidly descend into violence unless decisive international action was taken. Michelle Bachelet expressed alarm over “worrying trends” in the country since President Gotabaya Rajapaksa took office in 2019 and last month told the human rights council the country had “closed the door” on ending impunity for past abuses.

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Abandoned: gangs in Guatemala replace families – photo essay

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Decades of migration to the US left generations of children behind for whom gangs are substitute families

Photographs and text by Ignacio Marin

Since she arrived in Guatemala City a few decades ago, she has lived in the same humble home. Between bare concrete walls and under a tin roof, she raised three children. Now Berenice is raising her 15-year-old grandson since his mother left for the US and his father was murdered.

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The world has a vested interest in Somalia. Will it act to stop its collapse? | Vava Tampa

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Starvation, al-Shabaab and postponed elections have made the country a ready gun. If the trigger is pulled, global trade is at risk

Frantz Fanon once quipped: “Africa is shaped like a revolver, and Congo is the trigger.”

More than 60 years later, I think the French philosopher’s assessment is only half true. It leaves out Somalia – which once held the crown as the “Switzerland of Africa”, but is now again on the verge of political disintegration.

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Over 30 million people ‘one step away from starvation’, UN warns

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The pandemic, climate crisis and conflict combining to drive ‘alarming’ levels of global hunger, says report

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    • Acute hunger is likely to soar in more than 20 countries in the next few months, the UN has warned.

    Families in pockets of Yemen and South Sudan are already in the grip of starvation, according to a report on hunger hotspots published by the agency’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP).

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    ‘I’ve lost everything once again’: Rohingya recount horror of Cox’s Bazar blaze

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    Refugees caught up in the deadly blaze describe panic and despair after fire tore through the Balukhali area on Monday

    Marium Khatun, 40, was feeding her 10-month-old son at home when she first saw the fire and smoke nearby. Realising a huge blaze was ripping through the Cox’s Bazar refugee camp just metres from her two-room shack, she panicked.

    “I suddenly noticed people were running, scattered on the road in front of my house. I came to the door and saw this huge fire around 30 metres (100ft) away from my house. I couldn’t think straight.

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    Hundreds of people missing after Rohingya refugee camp fire

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    At least 15 people killed as blaze spread across Bangladesh camp of about 124,000 refugees from Myanmar

    Hundreds of people are missing with at least 15 confirmed dead, including three children, after a fire tore through a camp for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.

    The toll was exacerbated by barbed wire fencing that caged refuges into areas of the sprawling Balukhali camp that were going up in flames, aid workers said.

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    Alone in Oman: Covid worsens abuse for trafficked women

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    Women from Sierra Leone tricked into servitude find themselves sold on under Gulf’s kafala system

    Isha knew she was in trouble when her passport was snatched from her hands. The 27-year-old from Sierra Leone had just arrived in the Omani capital, Muscat, believing she was to start a well-paid job at a restaurant. Instead, her recruitment agent bundled her into a car and drove her to a house where she was told she would be working as a live-in maid.

    “My agent told me he could take my passport because he had bought me,” she says. “I was confused. How can you buy a human being?”

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    Chariots of steel: Barcelona’s hidden army of scrap recyclers

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    Thousands of migrants play a key role in collecting Catalonia’s waste but must live on the margins

    They are everywhere and yet they are almost invisible, living below the social radar as they crisscross the city pushing supermarket trolleys piled with metal tubing, old microwaves and empty beer cans.

    The chatarreros are Barcelona’s itinerant scrap-metal collectors, and there are thousands of them. Most are undocumented migrants and so there is no official census, but Federico Demaria, a social scientist at the University of Barcelona who is conducting a study of the informal recyclers in Catalonia, believes there are between 50,000 and 100,000 in the region. About half are from sub-Saharan Africa; the rest are from eastern Europe, elsewhere in Africa and Spain.

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    Open season in Sudan as trophy hunters flock to shoot rare ibex

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    Conservationists fear for endangered Nubian ibex in Sudan as westerners sold permits to hunt

    Sudanese conservationists have accused trophy hunters of exploiting the country’s political transition to hunt the country’s unprotected rare animals.

    Photographs posted online of westerners posing with the body of a rare Nubian ibex angered Sudanese wildlife campaigners this week. They called for Facebook to remove the pages of tour groups promoting such hunts.

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