Category Archives: Poverty

‘Incredibly worried’: end of Covid disaster payment looms for many still out of work

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At 80% vaccination the support will be gone. Some will be hit hard, particularly if Australia’s economy doesn’t bounce back strongly

It’s the lifeline that’s kept nearly 2 million people in New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT on a steady weekly income during Covid lockdowns.

Since June, the government’s Covid-19 disaster payments – paid at either $750 or $450 a week, or $200 a week for existing welfare recipients – have been available to people who lost work due to stay-at-home restrictions.

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Zimbabwe’s older people: the pandemic’s silent victims

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Care facilities for older people used to be thought ‘un-African’. But destitution caused by Covid has seen demand for care homes soar

Lunch is Angelica Chibiku’s favourite time. At 12pm she sits on her neatly made bed waiting for her meal at the Society of the Destitute Aged (Soda) home for older people in Highfield, a township in south-west Harare.

Chibiku welcomes a helper into her room and cracks a few jokes. She loves to interact with those who bring her food and supplies.

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‘I was born a fighter’: the champion boxer changing young lives in Zimbabwe

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Boxing helped prizefighter Arifonso Zvenyika overcome real hardship. Now he teaches the sport he loves to aspiring fighters in a Harare ghetto

Beneath a corrugated iron roof in the crowded Harare suburb of Mbare, a group of boys darts back and forth across a smooth concrete floor, firing a series of rapid punches into the air.

A wiry older man, dressed in low-slung tracksuit bottoms and flip-flops, watches their moves, encouraging them to “Jab! Jab! Jab!”.

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‘The heaven of film-making’: how a Dalit orphan got to tell her own story

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A gift of a camera inspired Belmaya Nepali to rise above poverty and abuse to make documentaries

• I Am Belmaya review

Belmaya Nepali’s life changed for ever when, at 14, she was given a camera.

The British film-maker Sue Carpenter had come to Pokhara, a tourist city in central Nepal, to run a photography project with disadvantaged girls living in an institution. One of those girls was Belmaya.

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Manila’s newly homeless tell of survival in lockdown – photo essay

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As Covid hit, thousands of Filipinos were left trapped in the capital without work. Many ended up on the street and are still waiting to rebuild their lives

Like so many others before her, Michelle Sicat, a 28-year-old single mother from the province of Nueva Ecija, had come to Metro Manila to get a job to support her family. She left her daughter with her parents so she could work as a shop assistant in one of the city’s busiest commercial districts. Sicat’s sacrifice was one that many Filipinos from rural areas have to make.

Despite missing home, Sicat was happy to have a job. But then the Covid-19 pandemic struck. The Philippine government placed the entire island of Luzon – where the Metro Manila region is located – under the strictest level of lockdown. The restrictions forced most businesses to close. Most people were ordered to stay at home.

For many living on the streets, there is no shelter from the elements

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‘They wanted to kill me’: the lawyer taking on police brutality in Kenya

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Almost 20 years ago, a police shooting left David Makara without an arm and facing jail. Inspired by the blind lawyer who saved him, he now defends others facing injustice

When the police started shooting at David Makara in his home town of Nyahururu, in Kenya, he ran before quickly collapsing. Two bullets had hit him – one in his right arm, one in his hip – but he only realised when he looked down and saw his hand dangling from his wrist and blood pouring out.

“I thought I was going to die,” he says.

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‘Living in a cave is no life’: Pakistani villagers trapped by Taliban and poverty

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Seven years after fleeing army clashes with militants, 100 families eking out an existence on a hillside near the Afghan border are unable to return home

“Don’t talk to me about the government. They don’t help.”

Ninety-year-old Shah Mast is angry. He has been living in the cave he calls home for seven years, ever since an offensive by the Pakistan army against the Islamist militant group Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) destroyed his home.

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Cop26: Women must be heard on climate, say rights groups

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Those worst hit by global heating are left out of talks, says feminist coalition calling for systemic change

Women must be enabled to play a greater role at the Cop26 summit, as the needs of women and girls are being overlooked amid the global climate crisis, a coalition of feminist groups has said.

The Global Women’s Assembly for Climate Justice has laid out a call for action at the UN general assembly, including demands that world leaders meeting at Cop26, in Glasgow this November, must end fossil fuel expansion and move to 100% renewable energy.

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Salt-tolerant crops ‘revolutionise’ life for struggling Bangladeshi farmers

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As sea levels rise, growers are employing innovative methods to adapt to saline soils

Like millions of people across Bangladesh, Anita Bala, 45, relies on a small plot of land to feed her family.

But for years nothing would grow. Her husband farmed shrimp in the salty ponds on their land, but the surrounding ground was barren. Bala’s efforts to cultivate beans and pulses failed repeatedly. Eventually she gave up.

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Small farmers have the answer to feeding the world. Why isn’t the UN listening? | Elizabeth Mpofu and Henk Hobbelink

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We’re among the thousands boycotting the UN food summit – it’s been hijacked by corporate interests while the voices of small-scale farmers go unheard

Thursday’s UN food summit proposes to help solve the world’s nutrition crisis, with 800 million people going hungry and 1.9 billion labelled obese, by better aligning food systems with development goals. But it won’t achieve any of this. The summit was hijacked early on by powerful corporate interests – but people are resisting.

Hundreds of social movements and civil society groups across the world representing small-scale and subsistence food producers, consumers and environmentalists are protesting about the summit for being undemocratic, non-transparent and focused only on strengthening only one food system: that backed by the big corporations. Civil society bodies active at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), for instance, are running a massive grassroots boycott of the summit, and there is a website and several actions dedicated to it. Grain, a small nonprofit group campaigning for biodiversity-based food systems, shut down its website and social media in protest on Thursday and many other organisations are holding their own protests around the world. An online alternative forum in July, running in parallel with the pre-summit meeting in Rome, attracted about 9,000 participants. This week, even more are expected.

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More than 100 countries face spending cuts as Covid worsens debt crisis, report warns

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As pandemic widens inequalities, many developing countries spend more on debt than health, study says

More than 100 countries face cuts to public spending on health, education and social protection as the Covid-19 pandemic compounds already high levels of debt, a new report says.

The International Monetary Fund believes that 35 to 40 countries are “debt distressed” – defined as when a country is experiencing difficulties in servicing its debt, such as when there are arrears or debt restructuring.

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Most infants in 91 countries are malnourished, warns Unicef

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Climate crisis, conflict and Covid stunting progress on nutrition, UN says on eve of food security summit

Only a third of children under two in many developing countries are fed what they need for healthy growth and no progress has been made on improving their nutrition over the past decade.

Unicef, the UN’s children’s agency, said in a report published on Wednesday that a combination of crises from Covid-19 to conflict and the climate breakdown had stunted progress on children’s nutrition in 91 countries.

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Drought puts 2.1 million Kenyans at risk of starvation

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National disaster declared as crops fail after poor rains and locusts, while ethnic conflicts add to crisis

An estimated 2.1 million Kenyans face starvation due to a drought in half the country, which is affecting harvests.

The National Drought Management Authority (NDMA) said people living in 23 counties across the arid north, northeastern and coastal parts of the country will be in “urgent need” of food aid over the next six months, after poor rains between March and May this year.

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Criticism of animal farming in the west risks health of world’s poorest | Emma Naluyima Mugerwa and Lora Iannotti

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In the developing world most people are not factory farming and livestock is essential to preventing poverty and malnutrition

The pandemic has pushed poverty and malnutrition to rates not seen in more than a decade, wiping out years of progress. In 2020, the number of people in extreme poverty rose by 97 million and the number of malnourished people by between 118 million and 161 million.

Recent data from the World Bank and the UN shows how poverty is heavily concentrated in rural communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America where people are surviving by smallholder farming. This autumn there will be two key events that could rally support for them.

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‘£3k just to hold the bed’: Exorbitant Covid care costs push Indians into poverty

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A struggling healthcare system and inflated prices mean hospital treatment can result in a lifetime of debt for many

Anil Goel remembers the night in May when he received a call from his desperate nephew asking for money for his Covid treatment. The nephew had been admitted to a private hospital with his wife and four other family members with Covid complications but had used up all of his savings.

“I was shocked by the request as this was a young man who was doing well in life otherwise. But the high hospital bills and the black marketing just exhausted all of his savings within days. After all, six family members were on life support,” said Goel.

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Afghans at risk of near-universal poverty, UN report warns

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Study suggests a worst-case scenario where 97% of Afghans would sink below poverty line by 2022

Afghanistan’s population of 38 million people risks being plunged into near-universal poverty faced with a “catastrophic deterioration” of the country’s heavily aid-dependent economy, according to a warning issued by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The study, which examines a series of scenarios facing the already impoverished country under the Taliban’s new hardline rule, suggests a worst-case scenario where as many as 97% of Afghans would sink below the poverty line by next year – a staggering increase of 25%.

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‘I feel more secure’: how a holistic approach helps India’s beggars build a better life

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In Rajasthan a project developing self-esteem and skills is getting people off the streets and into work

Pandit Tulsidas, 52, was resting under a tree by a road junction in Jaipur, Rajasthan, where he had begged for years.

When an official approached him about a government scheme that would teach him job skills, he rejected the offer. When the man said his meals would be looked after and he would have a room to share with only one other person, he refused again.

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‘Deeply rooted tradition’: one man’s long fight to end illegal dowries in India

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After 15 years campaigning, Satya Naresh believes it’s time for government action to stop the custom that causes a woman to die every hour through murder or suicide

For more than a decade, Satya Naresh has been trying to persuade India’s men to stop a wedding custom that he sees as one of the country’s worst social evils.

He wants men to declare: “I don’t want dowry”. The line is the name of the website he set up in 2006 as part of his campaign. Naresh wants Indian men not to expect the money, motorbike, sofa, TV, iPhone, gold jewellery or fridge that a future wife is expected to come with.

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‘Swazi gold’: grandmothers in Eswatini growing cannabis to make ends meet

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In the poverty-stricken kingdom, an older generation rely on growing marijuana to feed children orphaned by Aids epidemic

In Nhlangano, in the south of Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), the illegal farming of the mountainous kingdom’s famous “Swazi gold” is a risk many grandmothers are ready to take.

In what is known locally as the “gardens of Eden”, a generation of grandparents are growing cannabis, many of them sole carers for some of the many children orphaned by the HIV/Aids epidemic that gripped southern Africa.

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Haiti needs help, but ‘not from aid workers who never leave their SUVs’

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Beset by earthquakes, poverty and gang violence, the country is desperate for aid. However it must be the right kind, say locals

The death toll is still rising 10 days after a catastrophic earthquake struck southern Haiti on the morning of 14 August, levelling much of Les Cayes and the surrounding region.

More than 2,200 deaths have been recorded so far, while at least 30,000 families have had to abandon their homes. Many were sleeping on the streets when Tropical Storm Grace struck two days later, bringing high winds and pelting rain.

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