News

by Tim Gore, Oxfam In the early hours of a December Sunday morning, governments meeting at the UN climate change conference in Durban, South Africa,...

The risks to refugee education do not stop with COVID-19. Attacks on schools are a grim and growing reality. The report also elaborates on Africa’s Sahel region where violence has forced the closure of more than 2,500 schools affecting the education of 350,000 students.

The surging crisis is a combination of complex causes: intensifying conflict which has brought on an economic collapse, including dramatic food price increases in Yemen’s south, and a fuel import embargo hitting families in northern areas. The COVID-19 pandemic has compounded suffering as remittances have fallen, earning opportunities have dried up, health services been stretched to the limits and travel restrictions have compromised access to markets. On top of that, a locust plague and flash floods have battered local food production in some areas.

The word “church” is used by the Government but not “masjid”, “temple” or “mandir”, much like the duplicitous exclusion of non-Christian organisations in many “inter-faith services”. Is this an expression of indifference, intolerance, non-recognition or contempt for non-Christian faiths by an Afro-Christian-led Government? In an ethnically-plural society like ours, “church” cannot be used as a generic term. It connotes exclusion and discrimination.

Thirty-two of the world’s largest companies stand to see their profits jump by $109 billion more in 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic lays bare an economic model that delivers profits for the wealthiest on the back of the poorest, according to a new Oxfam report released this week.

The latest estimates are that a staggering 3 billion people or more cannot afford a healthy diet. In sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia, this is the case for 57 percent of the population – though no region, including North America and Europe, is spared.

Efforts to stem the impact of COVID-19 in low to middle-income countries could be creating a health time bomb in their slum communities by deepening existing inequalities, according to an international team of health researchers led by the University of Warwick.

As India recovers from the devastating effects of cyclones Amphan and Nisarga, water researchers at HR Wallingford in the UK are developing a method...

The Duterte administration has assigned former military generals to deal with Covid-19 and has sent police Special Forces to contain communities.

There are not only more children experiencing poverty than before, the poorest children are getting poorer as well. Before the pandemic, the average number of severe deprivations per child was around 0.7. It is now estimated to have increased by 15 percent to around 0.85.