SEVILLE & BHUBANESWAR, Jul 2 2025 (IPS)* –While droughts creep in stealthily, their impacts are often more devastating and far-reaching than any other disaster.
In Nairobi’s Kibera, the largest urban informal settlement in Africa, girls and women wait their turn for the scarce water supply. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS
Inter-community conflict, extremist violence, and violence and injustice against vulnerable girls and women happen at the intersection of climate-induced droughts and drought-impoverished communities.
Five consecutive years of failed rain in Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya brought the worst drought in seventy years to the Horn of Africa by 2023.
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 26 2025 (IPS)* –The demand for cobalt and other minerals is fueling a decades-long humanitarian crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) Living in Camp Roe in the Democratic Republic of Congo Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe
In pursuit of money to support their families, Congolese laborers face abuse and life-threatening conditions working in unregulated mines.
(UN News)* —Conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa in the last two years reportedly killed, maimed, or displaced over 12 million children across the region, according to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
Alarmingly, 110 million children in the region live in countries affected by war, with homes, schools and health facilities damaged or destroyed in fighting.
(UN News)* — The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is deepening at an alarming rate, a senior United Nations official warned on Monday , as Israeli military operations and attacks on civilians seeking aid continue to exact a devastating toll on lives and infrastructure.
Briefing ambassadors in the Security Council, Assistant Secretary-General for the Middle East Khaled Khiari said more than 1,000 Palestinians had been killed since mid-June alone, many of them while seeking aid.
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, 27 June 2025 – “I gave birth on the ground at the camp with the help of a woman. She is still asking me for money because I couldn’t pay her,” 18-year-old Jeanette* told UNFPA, the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency.
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 22 2022 (IPS)* – The ominous warnings keep coming non-stop: some of the world’s developing nations, mostly in Africa and Asia, are heading towards mass hunger and starvation.
Credit: World Food Programme (WFP)
The World Food Programme (WFP) warned last week that as many as 828 million people go to bed hungry every night while the number of those facing acute food insecurity has soared — from 135 million to 345 million — since 2019. A total of 50 million people in 45 countries are teetering on the edge of famine.
But in what seems like a cruel paradox the US Department of Agriculture estimates that a staggering $161 billion worth of food is dumped yearly into landfills in the United States.
How conflict and extreme weather have displaced millions and fuelled severe food insecurity in the Horn of Africa country
Farhia Ali and her daughter Ruqiya at a health clinic in Mogadishu. The family counts among the many displaced people sheltering in Somalia’s capital and other urban areas. Photo: WFP/Sara Cuevas Gallardo
—The cramped streets of Mogadishu buzz with cars, donkey-drawn carts and three-wheeled vehicles known as tuk-tuks – all competing to navigate the slippery, muddy channels carved out by unexpectedly heavy rains.
Somalia’s unpredictable weather has struck again. The rainy season, marked by a massive and deadly downpour hitting the capital in May, has destroyed homes and infrastructure. But the upcoming dry season risks wreaking even more devastation.
The world’s richest 1% increased their wealth by more than $33.9 trillion in real terms since 2015, reveals new Oxfam analysis ahead of the world’s largest development financing talks in a decade, in Seville, Spain.
Almost a billion of us go to bed hungry every night. Not because there isn’t enough food for everyone, but because of the deep injustice in the way food is produced and accessed. | OXFAM.
This is more than enough to eliminate annual poverty 22 times over at the World Bank’s highest poverty line of $8.30 a day.
The wealth of just 3,000 billionaires has surged $6.5 trillion in real terms since 2015, and now comprises the equivalent of 14.6% of global GDP.
(UN News)* — A decade after the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), development is facing serious headwinds – including what UN officials describe as a “silent crisis” of surging debt service payments in low-income countries.
After years of hiding under a false identity, a Syrian father in Jordan reclaims his name and secures a future for his family.
Outside of Salem Al-Ahmed’s tent in Lubban. Photo: Shaden Abdulrahman/NRC
Life in hiding
Salem Al-Ahmad* fled Syria in 2012, using his cousin’s name to escape arrest as a military deserter. Once in Jordan, he was able to register as an asylum seeker and obtain a Ministry of Interior card.
He settled in Al Lubban, west of Amman, where he married Buthainah, a fellow refugee. Together, they had five children: Tasneem, Nidal, Omar, Sinan, and Ameer, all registered under Salem’s assumed name.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 