Loise, from Ruiru near Nairobi, also waits. Her son Simon Gititu was an electrician before he disappeared into the same pipeline. She later read in the press that ...

Instead of children going to school, the school comes to them. Eleven-year-old Mosammat Fatema Khatun waits each morning on the muddy bank of the Gumani River in Chatmohar, Pabna. When a wooden boat fitted with solar panels approaches, she steps aboard. This is her classroom, a literally floating school. 

The floating schools of Chalan Beel offer a local response to a much broader structural crisis. Across Bangladesh, climate hazards are increasingly disrupting children’s education.

‘Grasshoppers are widely eaten. Our customers have increased. We send packages to places like Abuja, Lagos, Kano, or even countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom. When we get many orders, especially from customers outside Maiduguri, we could sell about three bags in a day’, she told FairPlanet while sprinkling chili powder on a fresh portion for the first customer in line.

Grasshoppers are insects in the order Orthoptera and more than 10,000 species exist, many of ...

The picturesque Swat Valley, often dubbed the ‘Switzerland of Pakistan’ has experienced a significant increase in tourism, reaching its peak during the Eid al-Fitr celebrations in 2026, when its alpine ...

Yunus, 27, served as Deputy Coordinator of KontraS, a human rights group that investigated violence and enforced disappearances. On 16 March 2025, he stormed a closed-door meeting of House of Representatives members at a hotel, where they discussed revisions to military law. He shouted objections to the meeting, and security dragged him out, causing him to fall to the ground. The House passed the regulation days later, despite his protest.

A year ...

‘Their demand to hand over sensitive personal data about women and children, without any legal justification, is not just unethical; it’s unconstitutional. It shows how far the ruling party is willing to go to control and intimidate independent voices,’ Sapari, a women’s rights organisation in Georgia, told FairPlanet. 

Sapari informed that in a broader context, the Anti-Corruption Bureau is simply a tool used by the current government to carry out ...

The arrests came a day after a widely viewed episode of their show on 12 November, in which they hosted former President Serzh Sargsyan for a more than seven-hour live discussion. The broadcast quickly went viral, drawing around 268,000 views.

The arrests have deepened unease in Armenia’s pre-election climate. As the country approaches the June 2026 parliamentary elections, the polished image of ...

‘He’s so tiny; I’m afraid he’ll ever grow,’ she says. 

She knows a dozen new mums facing her situation in Joe Slovo Township informal settlement (one of the largest informal settlements in Nelson Mandela Bay), in the Eastern Cape. 

Eastern Cape is South Africa’s poorest province – a place where 78 per cent of kids are said to be living in poverty. A recent study by the University of the Western Cape says South Africa has one of the world’s lowest exclusive breastfeeding rates. Just 22 per cent of mothers do exclusive breastfeeding in 2024, far below the World Health Organisation target of 50 per cent by 2025, the report noted. 

Yet South Africa, ...

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I have worked in humanitarian response for many years, across a number of different contexts. What is happening in Sudan is not a food shortage in the conventional sense. It is the progressive dismantling of an entire food system, including farms, markets, trade routes, and community networks, by an ongoing conflict that has received nowhere near the international attention it warrants.

Sudan is now home to the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. More than 33 million people – over half the country’s population – depend on humanitarian aid just to survive. Of the three famines ...

‘I don’t do it because I want to. It’s hunger,’ Flores Sindi* says to FairPlanet. Sindi is a 17-year-old school dropout in Mudzi on the Zimbabwe-Mozambique northeast border district, where scores of teenage girls like her engage in transactional paid sex with international haulage truck drivers who shuttle lithium for export, mining gear, or commercial supermarket foodstuffs between Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, and South Africa. 

To speak freely, she has changed her surname out of extreme fear of shame and stigma.

Feminisation of poverty

The ‘Feminisation of Poverty’ is ...

The 110 men, women, and children on board were sold to slaveholders. McCrear and her family were bought by Memorable Creagh, a wealthy plantation owner. Although they tried to escape with the hope of returning home to unite with McCrear’s two brothers, they were recaptured. 

McCrear and her family’s attempt to escape, Dr Hannah Durkin noted, ‘brings to light the miserable ...

Nearly three years into the war that killed his mother, the 32-year-old humanitarian worker has witnessed how food insecurity leaves displaced families going hungry for days and children malnourished. This motivated him to pursue a course in agriculture for his master’s. He secured admission offers from five British universities, with one ...

The news moved quickly from phone screens to everyday conversations. By early morning, it had reached homes, mosques, and marketplaces across the Kashmir Valley. For many residents, the first reaction was disbelief. Others described a sense of shock, followed by confusion. Within hours, small groups began forming outside mosques after Fajr (early morning) prayers in parts of Srinagar, Budgam, and Bandipora. In some areas, protests broke out. Protesters raised slogans like ...

International Women’s Day offers a kaleidoscopic view of women’s lives in Latin America, marked by challenges and contradictions, yet sustained by collective resistance. The day may be the highlight, but the whole month has become a continuous stage for activism, with cities hosting rallies, community gatherings, and cultural initiatives celebrating women and gender rights. 

Since the pandemic, participation in protests around women’s and gender ...

In Douala, the capital of Cameroon’s Littoral region, plastic waste frequently piles up in public spaces such as markets, streets and roundabouts. During heavy rainfall, discarded plastics are washed into gutters and drainage systems, blocking waterways and exacerbating flooding. As waste builds up, some residents burn plastics to reduce the growing piles, releasing toxic fumes into the air. 

This practice is dangerous to health. ‘In some sections of the market and on ...

Kibera’s origins trace back to 1904, when Nubian soldiers in the British Imperial East African Company were settled on forest land outside Nairobi. They called this land ‘Kibra’, from their word for ‘land of forest’. Following Kenya’s independence in 1963, Kibera was reclassified as an ‘unauthorised settlement on state land,’ – rendering its residents legal squatters. By then, rapid population growth had already replaced the forest with an ever-denser patchwork of single-room dwellings.

Today, the Kenyan government owns all the land on which Kibera stands, and to this day does not officially acknowledge the settlement – a legal fiction that has been used, repeatedly, to justify withholding basic services and, periodically, to threaten ...

For the next few years, Parul says she dreaded her menstruation. ‘First you find a clean cloth, then keep adjusting it and finally figure out how to dispose of it,’ she said. Later, an Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) worker in her village encouraged her to switch to sanitary pads. It helped, but the cost quickly added up. Parul’s story reflects a wider reality in India, where millions of women still rely on improvised materials during their periods, often because ...

It was a Monday morning in 2003 when Flora Saidi left her home in Kadewere village under Traditional Authority Chowe in Mangochi, hoping to find piecework to feed her family. She left behind her 19-year-old son, Saidi Daitoni, a young man with albinism.

When she returned home empty-handed later that afternoon, her son had managed to earn a small amount of money. They agreed to share it with his girlfriend, who was visiting. Saidi left with her to look for change so they could divide the money properly. He never returned.

The following morning, Flora began ...

The agreement remains unsigned, with talks currently on hold following a ruling by the US Supreme Court affecting President Donald Trump’s usage of emergency powers to impose tariffs, prompting both sides to reassess certain provisions before moving forward.

The trade agreement negotiations are part of New Delhi’s ...

They came from across India: environmental conventions, official programmes in Srinagar, and district-level events in Bandipora.

“This one was from Delhi,” Bilal says quietly, stretching his arm towards a plaque placed within reach of his mattress. “I was a delegate for the award.” The inscription reads: Rising India, Real Heroes – Bilal Ahmad Dar, Ambassador, Swachh Bharat Mission. It was presented to him at the third ...

Asadi, a communist dissident living today in exile in Paris, and Khamenei, a young cleric, were both political prisoners in Tehran’s Moshtarek prison in 1974-1975, during the reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. 

In his 2010 memoir, Letters to My Torturer: Love, Revolution, ...

According to findings of a recent study by a team of 21 international researchers, these attitudes are a result of long ...

‘I feel very bad about the situation,’ Vituwa, 49, told FairPlanet. 

The demolition exercise started shortly before Christmas when water and land-based excavators accompanied by armed police entered Makoko and began demolishing stilt houses. The state government defended the exercise, saying they are demolishing structures near the high voltage power lines, actions it claimed were necessary for public safety. ‘No responsible government anywhere in the world can allow people to ...

Ana has spent ten nights sleeping at the doors of Zona 7, a detention centre in  Caracas, waiting for information on her son who was detained in October last year. The news, however, caught her at home, where she was resting from a nasty cough she had gotten due to the critical conditions she had slept in for the last couple of days. 

While the announcement marks the ...