Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Apr 27 2011 (IPS) – Shazia Kiran is seven months pregnant with her third child and worried she might be unable to juggle her work and the responsibilities of caring for a newborn. But what worries her more is that she has no maternity benefits, and she has not received her salary as a Lady Health Worker (LHW) for the last three months.
A health worker with her baby. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS.
We don t get maternity leave and the most my supervisor will allow will be ten days, after which I will have to get back to work, Kiran t…
NEW YORK, Jun 2 2011 (IPS) – Several years ago, anyone calling for an end to Washington s war on drugs would be considered a heretic. Today, high- level politicians and business people, backed by thousands of regular citizens, are doing just that.
The idea that there could be a mass public campaign for decriminalisation, because I didn t know anything about the issue, I thought that was a fringe perspective, Ricken Patel, co-founder and executive director of the global web movement , told IPS.
He presented a global petition calling for an end to the drug war to the Thursday. On Friday, he will meet with United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to present him with the same petition.
The Global Commission, whose members include former U.N. chief Kofi Annan, Gree…
WASHINGTON, Aug 23 2011 (IPS) – People do not normally leave their homes, their families, and their communities unless they have no other option. Yet as environmental stresses mount, we can expect to see a growing number of environmental refugees. Rising seas and increasingly devastating storms grab headlines, but expanding deserts, falling water tables, and toxic waste and radiation are also forcing people from their homes.
Advancing deserts are now on the move almost everywhere. The Sahara desert, for example, is expanding in every direction. As it advances northward, it is squeezing the populations of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria against the Mediterranean coast.
The Sahelian region of Africa the vast swath of savannah that separates the southern Sahara desert from the t…
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 19 2012 (IPS) – The proportion of abortions deemed unsafe rose from 44 percent in 1995 to almost half (49 percent) in 2008, according to a new study released Thursday.
Launched in London, : Incidence and Trends Worldwide from 1995 to 2008 by the and World Health Organisation (WHO) notes that in 2008, the global abortion rate was 28 per 1,000, virtually unchanged since 2003.
However, in hard numbers, there were 2.2 million more abortions in 2008 (43.8 million) compared with 2003 (41.6 million) due to the growing global population. Since 2003, the number of abortions fell by 0.6 million in the developed world, but increased by 2.8 million in developing countries.
According to a WHO report from March 2011, unsafe abortion is one of the three leadin…
Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Feb 29 2012 (IPS) – In Latin America, Argentina spends the most on healthcare. It has a vast infrastructure, highly qualified health professionals and the necessary material resources. But other countries in the region are achieving better and faster health outcomes with fewer resources.
This is one of the main conclusions of the study Retos postergados y nuevos desafíos del sistema de salud argentino (Postponed and New Challenges to the Argentine Health System) by Federico Tobar, Sofía Olaviaga and Romina Solano of the independent Centre for the Implementation of Public Policies Promoting Equity and Growth (CIPPEC).
The authors also point to inequities in access to health care in the provinces, and the need for health policies adapted …
Amantha Perera
In some parts of Colombo, informal housing structures, or slums, are built right on waterways. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS
COLOMBO, Apr 4 2012 (IPS) – Sri Lanka s capital city Colombo, the vibrant economic and administrative heart of the bustling island nation, is rapidly turning into a city of slums. Home to over 30 percent of the country s population, one in every two people living in the Greater Colombo Area is a slum dweller.
Sadly, Colombo s bulging urban population is not a rarity in South Asia, where most of the region s major metropol…
A nutritionist assesses the health of a child in the Sahel: red indicates severe malnutrition. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS
Jun 20 2012 – Since December 2011, the food crisis in Niger has displaced large numbers of people from areas of scarcity to parts of the country that enjoyed better harvests. The social impacts for these internal migrants are serious, not least in terms of disruption of education.
According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the country s second-largest city, Zinder, large-scale movements of people have been observed, particularly from the Gouré and Tanout regions, both north of Zinder,…
NEW YORK, Aug 2 2012 (IPS) – Roasted foie gras fillet, with fresh chestnuts and soymilk skin. This dish from Mugaritz, considered the third-best restaurant in the world, sounds exotic. But how this delicacy foie gras means fat liver is produced and at what cost have been unmasked in an investigation led by .
The organisation the internal management of multiple foie gras farms six in Spain and four in France. In the undercover study, which began in July 2011, activists shot footage and photographs and conducted interviews by pretending to be interested in the industry.
They want to hid…
In 2007, Angeline Mwarusena, who lives in the Democratic Republic of Congo, was repeatedly raped by soldiers from Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR). Credit: Einberger/argum/EED/IPS
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 26 2012 (IPS) – At a high-level event at the United Nations in New York on Tuesday, U.N. Women, the United Nations body for female empowerment and gender equality, called for stronger action from world leaders to prevent and punish sexual violence in conflict.
The fact remains that women s bodies remain a battleground, and impunity remains the norm rather than the exception, said Michelle Bachelet, a former president of Chile and the current executi…
Founder of the World Toilet Organisation Jack Sim says that on the African continent there has been some progress in terms of the community-led total sanitation approach. Courtesy: Meropa Communications
DURBAN, South Africa, Dec 10 2012 (IPS) – When the founder of the World Toilet Organisation Jack Sim turned 40, he literally began counting how many more days he had to live and felt a sense of urgency to do meaningful things with the remainder of his life.
“Can you imagine a person coming into this world and spending his life only helping himself? When this person dies, his life has had no meaning, so why did he bother coming here?” he asks.
A successful bus…