Zainab Binta Jalloh was married off at age 15. Today, she is outspoken about her experience and the need for change. Image courtesy of Zainab. | Source: UNFPA.
FREETOWN, Sierra Leone/Johannesburg, South Africa, 27 March 2018 (UNFPA)* –“According to our tradition, a girl should get married when she reaches puberty,” said Zainab Binta Jalloh, a 23-year-old from Sierra Leone’s Koinadugu District.
She would know – she was married when she was 15 years old.
Two years early, when she was only 13, a 45-year-old man approached her parents with a marriage proposal. “He was rich, and he was using his wealth to influence my parents. My parents were pressuring me about him every day,” she told UNFPA.
LOVUA, Angola, 28 March 2018 (UNFPA)* –“There was a lot of violence. Armed men abused and killed young girls, even while they were fleeing,” said Felikanko, 44. She was one of more than a million people who escaped the outbreak of conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Kasai region.
HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam, 29 March 2018 (ILO News)*– The Better Work programme particularly benefits women, who in Vietnam make up 80 per cent of the workforce in the garment sector, one of the country’s largest industries. For many, the factory jobs are their first experience with formal employment.
Better Work – a joint programme of the ILO and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) – is active in eight countries, reaching more than two million workers and has been operating in Vietnam since 2009. Just over 500 garment factories, with a workforce of 700,000, participate in the programme in the country.
28 March 2018 — Internet user growth is booming and with more people that ever purchasing goods and services online, protecting their privacy must be a top priority, the United Nations has said.
Source: Video screen shot | The exponential growth in number of Internet users offers opportunities but also raises privacy concerns. | Source: UN News Centre.
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The main UN agency dealing with the economics of globalization said Wednesday 28 March 2018 that the privacy concerns raised after the revelation that a political data firm gained access to millions of Facebook users without their consent “vividly illustrates that most countries are ill prepared for the digital economy.”
Children are suffering significant trauma and stress one month after a series of major earthquakes hit Papua New Guinea, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on 28 March 2018 said, warning about the possible long-term negative consequences.
UNICEF/UN0188834/Nybo | In Mendi, Papua New Guinea, young earthquake survivors gather at a UNICEF-supported child friendly space to play and talk with counselors where young children under age five use puppets to work through their emotions.
“Children are still being confronted by fear, loss, confusion, family separation, deteriorated living conditions and disruption of social and school activities,” said Karen Allen, UNICEF Representative for Papua New Guinea.
The United Nations has reset its action plan to address the root causes of the complex crisis in Africa’s Sahel, a region now home to one out of five people worldwide requiring humanitarian assistance, the UN deputy chief on 28 March 2018 said.
WFP/Justin Smith | Drought has affected residents of the Mbera refugee camp, Mauritania, in the Sahel region of Africa.
“The Sahel is a priority for the Secretary-General and the entire United Nations system,” Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed told a conference being held in Nouakchott, Mauritania, to discuss strategies to tackle the Sahel crisis, which leaves 24 million people in need of humanitarian assistance this year.
28 March 2018 (openDemocracy/openMovements)* — Brazil’s institutions are collapsing one by one. The separation between the executive, the legislative and the judicial powers is a sham. There’s a state within the state.
Marielle was a child of the slums of Rio de Janeiro. She was black, beautiful, young and charismatic. She studied sociology and had an MA in public administration. She was a feminist, LGBT+, Black and human rights activist.
KATHMANDU, Nepal, 20 March 2018 (ILO)* – Punam Rana, 22, is a freed Kamaiya woman training to be a carpenter. The Kamaiya system was a form of bonded labour in which a worker and their family entered into an informal contract with a landlord to do agricultural work in return for payment-in-kind, such as a small percentage of the harvest.
Punam Rana and her family were free from the Kamaiya system | Source: ILO News
In times of hardship, Kamaiyas would have to indebt themselves to their landlord by taking loans.
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The informal nature of the arrangement and the inherent power imbalance that underlies the relationship between the Kamaiya and their landlord leaves Kamaiyas vulnerable to abuse and exploitation, often being subjected to poor working conditions and long-term debt bondage which carries over across generations.
27 March 2018 — Some 60,000 people displaced by ongoing hostilities in Nigeria’s crisis-torn Borno state will receive life-saving aid thanks to an allocation from the United Nations-managed country-based humanitarian assistance fund.
Photo/UNOCHA| The United Nations-managed Nigeria Humanitarian Fund (NHF) supports, amomg others, women livelihoods projects like this one, in Mafa, Borno state.
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“The crisis continues to displace thousands of vulnerable women, children and men every week. Many have gone through unspeakable hardship and the UN and its partners remain committed to help alleviate their suffering,” said Edward Kallon, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Nigeria.
The following is not meant to sound complacent, but the inclusion of arch war-hawk Bolton in Trump’s inner circle may actually turn out to be a good thing. For it will hasten America’s reckless foreign policies and its decline as a world power.
Admittedly, such an outlook is proffered against a very grim background.
John Bolton has been described not so much as “America First” as “Military First”. He is credited as being the chief architect of the Iraq War under the GW Bush administration.
He remains bumptiously unapologetic about promoting that war, which was based on lies and resulted in as many as one million deaths.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 