In Focus

By Ray Mwareya

Zimbabwe's idle youths, bending under a reality of 80% joblessness, and an economy stuffed by $9, 9 billion in external debt, are now hooked to playing or owning a “snooker” table.

By Stephen Fox Preconceptions that prosperity is always best facilitated by centralization are out-of-date. This is because there are an ever increasing number of socio-technical innovations that enable prosperous decentralization.

By Rey Ty

Government in the Philippines has responded with bullets when thousands of peasant protesters demanded for food aid and hunger relief.

By Ray Mhondera 

Ahmed, who has lived in Zimbabwe and Botswana on his 2400 miles journey to South Africa has received €3300 via Western Union from his cousin in Germany. H says he will pay £700 to fly from Johannesburg to Rabat, Morroco in April. €2200 will be paid to a sophisticated network of human smugglers who will ferry him across the Mediterranean and hopefully into the Spanish enclave of Cueta.

By Oboshi Agyeno

As EU is pushing hard to rectify the loopholes that caused the tragic and avoidable deaths of thousands of migrants in its territorial waters in 2015 alone, attention should also be focused on domestic conditions in Africa that encourage and sustain such perilous journey.

By Diego Cupolo

Today, as Cajamarca remains one of the poorest regions in Peru even after 20 years of gold extraction, Seifert poses the question: If Europe can modernize its mining techniques and limit environmental degradation, why can’t Peru? “When the strategy and tactics are unclear, little can be achieved by social movements. Newmont defends private investment and the people defend their water. Up until now, there has been no bridge of understanding between the two.”

By ALEENA BANIYA

Poverty and unemployment encourage thousands of Nepalese youth to leave home to find work in the Middle East every year. While many of them find a way to earn a living and support their families back home, some of them end up in heart-breaking tragedies.

By Irungu Peter

People often tend to think that refugees are fully fed by the WFP, clothed by the UNHCR and other humanitarian agencies. This is far from the reality on the ground.

By Carey Averbook & Leny Olivera

Climate change is about much more than climate change. Its impacts and driving factors intersect with a whole range of social, economic, political and cultural issues. Women, especially in the global South, are often particularly exposed to poverty, discrimination, lack of access to resources, exclusion from power and exposure to many forms of violence. When climate change impacts hit, the burdens women bear likewise increase disproportionately.

An engineering research team, led by Dr Anthony Robinson at Trinity College Dublin, has designed a locally assembled, clean and inexpensive cookstove for use in the developing world that converts a small portion of its heat into usable electricity.