SOUTH AFRICA: A need to redefine “orphan
Child-headed households certainly exist in South Africa, but the commonly held wisdom, reinforced by the media, that extended families cannot absorb any more orphans, and the number of child-headed households has been rising steeply in recent years due to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, has never been backed up by solid data. New research by the Children’s Institute of the University of Cape Town has found that the popular perception of both “AIDS orphans” and child-headed households has little basis in reality. The Institute estimates that AIDS orphans actually only account for 37 percent of the total 18.2 million orphans in South Africa, and that 80 percent of those have a surviving parent.
Slum cooker protects environment, helps poor
Kenya’s huge and squalid slums don’t have much of anything, except mountains of trash that fill rivers and muddy streets, breeding disease. Now Kenyan designers have built a cooker that uses the trash as fuel to feed the poor, provide hot water and destroy toxic waste, as well as curbing the destruction of woodlands.
SUDAN: Biking for safer childbirth
Five powerful scrambler motorbikes with a sidecar “bed” have been deployed by the Ministry of Health to boost access to health facilities for pregnant women, officials said.
“We have a problem bringing critically sick people to the few referral facilities available,” said Atem Nathan Riek, director-general of primary healthcare for Southern Sudan, which has among the worst rates of maternal mortality in the world.
Madonna: The Child trafficker
Malawi’s courts are expected to rule on 3 April on Madonna’s petition for an 18-month interim adoption order for a four-year-old girl named Mercy, which local human rights organizations have termed as just another round of “child trafficking” by the rich and famous.
Brazil builds walls around Rio de Janeiro slums
The government of Rio de Janeiro is building concrete walls to prevent sprawling slums from spreading farther into the picturesque hills of this world-famous tourist destination…Construction has begun in two favelas, or shantytowns…Violence between gangs and with police periodically erupts beyond the favelas, forcing stores and roads in entire neighborhoods to shut down. Occasionally juvenile gangs ransack tourists on the beach in posh districts such as Ipanema or Leblon.
YEMEN: “We have run out of money”
Members of the tiny Jewish community in Sanaa, Yemen’s capital, say they have not received their monthly food rations or any government financial assistance for the past three months. Rabbi Yahya Yusuf, leader of the 65-member community, told IRIN the Jews had been “suffering terribly” of late; many had been finding it very difficult to even feed their children.
AFGHANISTAN: Food aid not reaching most vulnerable women, children
Despite a July 2008 joint emergency appeal for US$404 million to help the most vulnerable 550,000 pregnant and lactating women and under-five children in Afghanistan, nutritious food aid – specially fortified food -is yet to reach those in need. Some 24 percent of lactating women are malnourished, over 19 percent of pregnant women have a poor nutritional status (low on minerals, vitamins, food insecure and weak) and about 54 percent of under-five children are stunted, according to a joint survey by UN agencies and the government.
