Photo Blog

Adjitti Mahamat ,40, cooks the one big meal a day for as many as ten children, including Kadija Ahmat 2, (on her back). Kassira Village, Guera province, Chad. 13/2/12

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By George Fominyen

DAKAR (AlertNet) - Could a blend of black-eyed pea (cowpea), millet, maize, dried fruits of the baobab tree and groundnut paste be the solution to child malnutrition in Senegal?

Aissatou Diagne Deme believes so.

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In the last ten years, Guatemala’s food production capacity has declined alarmingly to the point where urban and rural populations, mostly women, now face the challenge of feeding their families with increasingly lower incomes and higher food prices.

The unanswered question is: how to keep eating well if everything costs more and people have less money?

Mary Guachac and Guachac, from rural community Pacutan II,  participates in a community meeting on agriculture.

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Photo credit OCHA/Stacey Winston

Aid is running out for hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis who have been forced to flee their homes due to intensified fighting between the army and militants near the Afghan border, says the United Nations.
Almost 700,000 people from Pakistan's volatile Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) have flooded into the neighbouring districts of Nowshera and Peshawar since January due to military operations against the Pakistani Taliban.

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This World Water Day, March 22, Sightsavers is highlighting the importance of clean water. Clean water and good sanitation is integral to our work preventing blindness and restoring sight in developing countries.

(Charlie Bibby/Financial Times/Sightsavers)

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Geeta Senma, 45, a rural, low caste Indian woman talks about her struggle to acquire land rights and start a farm cooperative with other women from Ganeshpura, her village 80 km (50 miles) northwest of Ahmedabad city.  In rural India, an estimated 15 million families are both poor and landless, says Landesa, an international charity working on land rights in the developing world. While some are headed by women, deep-rooted traditional views have meant that often wives, daughters and mothers lack legal entitlements and inheritance rights.

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At first glance, it looks like every other London bus stop.

Instead, one bus shelter in one of London’s most popular locations features a most unusual bit of advertising: an interactive billboard especially designed to play only to women and girls.

Called “Choices for Girls,” the 40-second advert - launched Feb. 22 by charity Plan UK – aims to sensitize public awareness of the plight of girls in developing countries, many of whom lack opportunities on a daily basis due to discrimination and poverty.

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BANGKOK (AlertNet) – It was an early Monday evening and the red light district in Thailand’s capital was already heaving -- full of locals and foreigners drinking sundowner cocktails and enjoying the flesh parading before their eyes. Street vendors were selling food, clothes, souvenirs and Valentine’s Day gifts.

They probably weren’t expecting a group of (mainly) fuchsia-clad men in towering heels, bouffant hairdos and sashes advocating safe sex, but that’s exactly what they got.

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Children sit in a temporary learning centre in a village in Prey Veng district, one of the provinces most affected by flooding. After the school was closed due to the floods, students studied at a pagoda and then at other people’s houses. While the school has reopened for a couple of weeks now, Save the Children and local school officials and village elders are hoping these temporary learning centres will become permanent places where children can safely study even after school has finished. As of now children don’t study after school, which starts at around 7 and finishes at 11. Chreykrohim village, Prey Veng province Dec 5, 2011.

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A flooded neighbourhood in Rangsit, Pathum Thani province November 18, 2011.

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Zanele, from the Nyanga township in Cape Town, is living with HIV. Thanks to antiretroviral therapy (ART), she will be able to lead a full life and look after her baby girl Lilathi. But living with HIV also makes her 20 to 30 times more vulnerable to tuberculosis (TB), and she became ill with the disease one month ago. TB is responsible for one in four AIDS deaths and the co-epidemic is particularly devastating in Africa.

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Sarah West is media manager at International HIV/AIDS Alliance. The opinions expressed are her own.

HIV alone accounts for 61,000 maternal deaths every year, with HIV positive mothers four to eight times more likely to die during childbirth than HIV negative women. Despite the medical advances that are available to test women for HIV and prevent mothers from passing HIV to their unborn child, every day 1000 children are born HIV positive. The figures are mind boggling. This World AIDS Day, on December 1, the International HIV/AIDS Alliance is focusing attention on the impact HIV has on women and girls.

The following pictures illustrate some of the work of the Alliance.

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Sarah West is media manager at the International HIV/AIDS Alliance. The opinions expressed are her own.

In sub-Saharan Africa, half of HIV transmission occurs among 15-24 year olds.

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Across the globe one billion people lack clean drinking water and 2.6 billion live without access to hygienic sanitation facilities. Each day, an average of 5,000 children die of preventable water and sanitation related diseases, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

Pictures provided by Sanitation and Hygiene Applied Research for Equity (SHARE) to highlight different types of sanitation for World Toilet Day.

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More than 5.4 million people in Sindh province have been affected by the floods, caused when torrential rains burst river banks in August. 

Many children and their families have been left marooned, living on roadsides or in makeshift camps, without clean drinking water or sanitation, while stagnant floodwaters have become breeding grounds for waterborne diseases and for mosquitoes carrying malaria.¿  

In Badin, one of the hardest-hit districts in the province, cases of malaria increased in the space of two weeks by 20 percent in children, a quarter of them under five. Malaria can kill if not treated in time. 

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David Darg, director of International Disaster Relief and Special Projects at Operation Blessing International, recently visited eastern Turkey where a 7.2-magnitude quake devastated Van province on Oct. 23, 2011.

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While aid efforts and media attention focus on Bangkok and the ever increasing risks of flooding in the giant metropolis, children and their families already forced to abandon their homes in Pathum Thani and Ayutthaya are struggling to get by in makeshift evacuation centres or other areas they’ve managed to find shelter.

“Families are facing increasing stress as floodwaters continue to rise – some have been forced to move several times from shelter to shelter because of flood waters fanning out into new areas," said Save the Children’s Annie Bodmer-Roy, following a visit to Ayuttheya.

"One boy I spoke to had already moved twice in one week and now might have to move again as families are being evacuated from his current shelter."

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By Natasha Elkington

Through my video “The children of Dadaab: Life through the Lens” I wanted to tell the story of the Somali children living in Kenya’s Dadaab. Living in the world’s largest refugee camp, they are the ones bearing the brunt of Africa’s worst famine in sixty years.

I wanted to see if I could tell their story through a different lens, showing their daily lives instead of just glaring down at their ribbed bodies and swollen eyes.

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