Healthcare worker of Manang Delivering vaccine through risky road after flood in 2021. CREDIT: Badri Acharya/IPS
KATHMANDU, Aug 23 2023 (IPS) – Badri Acharya is currently at the helm of the public health office in Pokhara, a prominent city within Nepal s Himalayan region and a renowned tourist hotspot.
However, in the past, he worked in the field, leading and delivering essential public health provisions in the isolated and demanding terrain of the Manang district-some 198 km north from Pokhara during the tumultuous period of the Covid-19 pandemic a…
Traders take cattle to market in winter rain along the road to Woliso, Ethiopia. Credit: Apollo Habtamu
NAIROBI, Kenya, Dec 8 2023 (IPS) – Africa is contending with a climate crisis it did not create without sufficient recognition for the unique rights and needs of the world’s youngest and fastest-growing population. Not only is the continent least responsible for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, having historically produced just a , but it is also disproportionately impacted by the consequences of emissions generated elsewhere.
And when climate disasters such as cyclones in Mozambique and Malawi, or droughts in the Horn of Africa strike, the subsequent…
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, May 6 2024 (IPS) – On 22 April, Dominica’s High Court struck down two sections of the country’s Sexual Offences Act that criminalised consensual same-sex relations, finding them unconstitutional. This made Dominica the sixth country in the Commonwealth Caribbean – and the fourth in the Eastern Caribbean – to decriminalise same-sex relations through the courts, and the first in 2024.
Similar decisions were made in , and in 2022 – but progress then threatened to stall. Change in Dominica revives the hopes of LGBTQI+ activists in the five remaining English-speaking Caribbean states – Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, St Lucia and St Vincent and the …
International Women’s Day, March 8 2020
The year 2020 began with a shock report, Mind the 100 Year Gap, from the World Economic Forum which projected that gender equity would take at least 100 years to realise. Women and girls play a crucial role in society. However, they bear the brunt of patriarchy, their needs often unmet by traditional humanitarian responses and their health and education needs not prioritised. In the run-up to International Women’s Day with its theme, “I am Generation Equality: Realising Women’s Rights” IPS is publishing a series of features, opinion and editorials from experts and affiliated journalists around the world on women.
Apr 13 2020 (IPS) – In the second week of March the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared COVID-19 . By mid-March the disease had spread rapidly in many countries around the world.
Governments are taking drastic steps, including the complete lockdown of cities, as well as extensive health interventions to try and stem the disease which is caused by a new coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2.
There is still a great deal that’s not known about SARS-CoV-2. This limited scien…
ROME, Mar 30 2020 (IPS) – As the coronavirus pandemic shifts around the world, now stretching even the developed health services of richer nations to breaking point, here at IPS our dedicated journalists in developing countries are standing strong in giving a voice to the Global South.
This means IPS, with its far-flung network of correspondents and contributors, is committed as ever to reporting from the countries least able to resist this pandemic but which remain beyond the glare of the mainstream media.
It also means continuing our coverage of fundamental issues that have remained at the core of our mission for more than 55 years. Recent articles we have posted, beyond our coronavirus news, include HIV testing in Africa, FGM in Djibouti, impact on the war in Yemen, …
Left: German Ambassador to Singapore Ulrich Sante and Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan at the official opening of the German European School Singapore on Sept 13, 2018. Dr Sante says he will be leaving Singapore with a heavy heart but also a treasure trove of good memories. PHOTO: GERMAN EUROPEAN SCHOOL SINGAPORE
SINGAPORE, Jun 15 2020 – The departing German envoy in Singapore, Ambassador Ulrich Sante, in a recent published article in the Straits Times shared some of his thoughts with the readership including on the impact on the community of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Among other things he has noted that it has implanted in us what in German is called Lebe…
SINGAPORE, May 26 2020 – Despite all the preoccupation with the current raging pandemic, it sadly appears that there has been no let-up in the global arms race among the major powers. In mid-May, the United States President Donald Trump, at an event for his new Space Force at the White House made a significant announcement, It was that the US was building right now an “incredible” new missile which would travel faster than any other in the world “by a factor of almost three”. This was obviously a response to the latest Russian ‘Avangard’ missile, which Russian President Vladimir Putin claims in invincible, with a speed of twenty times that of sound. The Chinese, reportedly are also feverishly working on their own hypersonic counterparts. All these would be strategic tools to…
Credit: UNFPA
UNITED NATIONS, May 7 2020 (IPS) – The world’s poorer nations, reeling under an unrelenting attack on their fragile economies by the COVID-19 pandemic, have suffered an equally deadly body blow: being buried under heavy debt burdens.
Abiy Ahmed, prime minister of Ethiopia who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019, said last week that in 2019, 64 countries, nearly half of them in sub-Saharan Africa, spent more on than on health.
Ethiopia alone, he said, spends twice as much on paying off external debt as on health. “We spend 47 percent of our on debt servicing”, he wrote in an oped piece in the New York Times.
According to the UK-base…
NEW YORK and WASHINGTON D.C. , Sep 2 2020 (IPS) – On 27 August the that it will suspend the Doing Business Report over data irregularities, until it conducts a review and audit. The halting of the report was welcomed by trade unions, academics and human rights groups.
The World Bank’s ranks countries based on business regulations in 190 economies. The more regulations are slashed, the better a country does in the ranking. Most indicators are based on a standardized case study such as the conditions facing a small firm in the largest commercial city -this study characterizes the country.
Isabel Ortiz
Global reports that present comparable internation…