A rickshaw rider, a domestic worker, a student and a photographer on how their lives have changed
Habibur Rahman, 48, rickshaw rider
Continue reading...Category Archives: Global development
The making of a megacity: how Dhaka transformed in 50 years of Bangladesh
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.
Continue reading...‘They can see us in the dark’: migrants grapple with hi-tech fortress EU
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.
Continue reading...‘Ugliest crime’: Outcry in Sudan over lack of justice for killing of teenage girl
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.
Continue reading...Diversify or risk unrest, oil producers warned in report
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.
Continue reading...‘The Yanomami could disappear’ – photographer Claudia Andujar on a people under threat in Brazil
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.”
Continue reading...‘Just write STOP’: the teenager helping Polish women flee abuse
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.
Continue reading...UN resolution hailed as ‘crucial turning point’ for victims of Sri Lanka civil war
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.
Continue reading...Abandoned: gangs in Guatemala replace families – photo essay
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.
Continue reading...The world has a vested interest in Somalia. Will it act to stop its collapse? | Vava Tampa
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.
Continue reading...Over 30 million people ‘one step away from starvation’, UN warns
The pandemic, climate crisis and conflict combining to drive ‘alarming’ levels of global hunger, says report
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).
Continue reading...‘I’ve lost everything once again’: Rohingya recount horror of Cox’s Bazar blaze
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.
Continue reading...Hundreds of people missing after Rohingya refugee camp fire
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.
Continue reading...Alone in Oman: Covid worsens abuse for trafficked women
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?”
Continue reading...Chariots of steel: Barcelona’s hidden army of scrap recyclers
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.
Continue reading...Open season in Sudan as trophy hunters flock to shoot rare ibex
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.
Continue reading...Girl, two, dies after being rescued from migrant boat in Canaries
Toddler from Mali has died in hospital after being resuscitated on a dock last week
A two-year-old girl from Mali who was rescued from a migrant boat and resuscitated on a dock in the Canary Islands last week has died in hospital, becoming the latest victim of the perilous Atlantic route from Africa to Europe.
The girl was one of 52 people travelling on a boat that had left the city of Dakhla in Western Sahara bound for the Spanish archipelago.
Continue reading...Covid ‘may leave 12 million children unable to read’
UN finds pandemic is widening education inequality with millions of girls unlikely to return to school
More than half of all children who turn 10 this year will reach their milestone birthday without being able to read a simple sentence, according to a new analysis of UN data.
Of those 70 million 10-year-olds, 11.5 million of them could be unable to read as a direct result of the impact on education of the Covid pandemic.
Continue reading...De Klerk seeks accountability. What about his own?
Apartheid-era South African president calls for justice for female victims of violence in Guardian article but some say his own record needs scrutiny
South Africans don’t give much thought to FW de Klerk these days. Like Mikhail Gorbachev, his fellow Nobel peace laureate, the last apartheid president is more highly regarded outside his own country than in it.
But some South Africans were taken aback to see De Klerk putting himself forward in a Guardian article on 10 March as an advocate of protecting women from violence and asserting that “holding perpetrators accountable, irrespective of how long ago the crime was committed, is essential to stamping out impunity and preventing future atrocities”.
Continue reading...UK aid budget cut unlawful, legal advice to Tory rebels says
Government could face judicial review if it does not reinstate its spending commitment, advice adds
The government will be in clear breach of the law and exposed to a judicial review if it presses ahead with a multibillion-pound cut in the UK’s foreign aid programme, according to legal advice given to Tory backbenchers.
Advice issued by the QC and peer Ken Macdonald said No 10 had acted outside the law when it abandoned its commitment to spend 0.7% of national income on aid.
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