Mon Mon Myat
RANGOON, Feb 24 2010 (IPS) – When Aye Aye (not her real name) leaves her youngest son at home each night, she tells him that she has to work selling snacks. But what Aye actually sells is sex so that her 12-year-old son, a Grade 7 student, can finish his education.
Every night I work with the intention of giving my son some money the next morning before he goes to school, said Aye, 51. She has three other older children, all of whom are married.
Her 38-year-old friend Pan Phyu, also a sex worker, has a greater burden. After her husband died, she takes care of three children apart from her mother and uncle.
But Aye and Phyu s source of income is fast declining, because it is no longer that easy to get clients at their age. Many younger women are i…
Mohamed Fofanah
FREETOWN, Apr 1 2010 (IPS) – Lying forgotten in the bush somewhere is a sign declaring Ogoo Farm is an open defecation-free community.
This peri-urban community of roughly 3000 people was one of the villages where UNICEF and the Sierra Leone ministry of health implemented the pilot phase of a Community-Led Total Sanitation Programme in 2008.
The programme trains communities on the dangers of open defecation which contaminates streams and other water sources and mobilises action to end the practice.
According to the latest UNICEF and World Health Organization data, only 11 percent of people in Sierra Leone have access to adequate sanitation facilities; in the rural areas it is just five percent. Only about half of the population and less than a…
FREETOWN, Apr 30 2010 (IPS) – A woman alone: Josephine Bangali fetches water from the well to set to boil over a wood fire so she can sterilise her instruments.
At a government hospital in Makeni, Sierra Leone. Credit: Nancy Palus/IRIN
The clinic is built of mud. In one of its three rooms stands a rickety bed where she can admit in-patients; it is also the room where Bangali delivers babies. She relies on a kerosene lamp at night supplemented with a torch when she can afford batteries.
The underlying causes of mat…
Daniela Estrada
SANTIAGO, Jun 14 2010 (IPS) – In Chile, women carry the entire burden of maternity, says teacher Fabiola Quiñones, who applauds the government s proposal to extend pre- and post- natal leave to six months but only if all new mothers who work can have that option.
President Sebastián Piñera and three expectant mothers at installation of presidential commission. Credit: Chilean President …
Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 13 2010 (IPS) – You can only have one mother, as the saying goes, but in Brazil there are 215 ways of becoming a mother, one for each of the ethnic groups in this South American country. Promoting maternal health while respecting cultural traditions is a major health challenge.
A Marubo woman has her blood pressure checked. Credit: Courtesy of Edmar Chaperman/FUNASA
Silvia Angelice de Almeida, who works at the state National Health Foundation s (FUNASA)…
Emilio Godoy
IZÚCAR DE MATAMOROS, Mexico, Aug 4 2010 (IPS) – People want to get rid of the factory. It has to go. There s already been an accident, a taxi driver said on the drive to the pesticide plant belonging to the Agricultura Nacional company in this southern Mexican city.
After the chemical explosion in March, protesters from Izúcar blocked the factory, now closed. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS
On the night of Mar. 24, life ch…
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 2 2010 (IPS) – The United Nations stands accused of marginalising water and sanitation in its much-touted Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) aimed at improving the lives of billions of people in the developing world.
But will this shortcoming be rectified at the MDG summit of world leaders scheduled to take place in New York, September 20-22?
Anders Berntell, executive director of the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI), told IPS water has definitely not yet received proper attention in the draft outcome document to be adopted at the U.N. summit.
He pointed out that good management of water resources and provision of drinking water and sanitation are prerequisites for fulfilling all the different MDGs including the reduction of extrem…
Peter Richards
PORT OF SPAIN, Sep 24 2010 (IPS) – The new government of Trinidad and Tobago wasted little time. In fact, Finance Minister Winston Dookeran took less than 30 seconds of a two-hour budget presentation to announce that the People s Partnership government, headed by the country s first female prime minister, Kamla Persad Bissessar, was scrapping the $66.6 million dollar smelter plant project involving investors from China and Brazil.
In addition to the health and environmental risk, there is also serious concern as to Alutrint s viability and the optimal use of our gas. This project shall cease and an alternative strategy will be put into place for the southwest peninsula, Dookeran said.
The proposed 125,000 metric-tonnes-per-year aluminum smelter complex…
Stanley Kwenda
HARARE, Oct 18 2010 (IPS) – Zimbabwe s debt burden of about 8.3 billion dollars, owed to internal and external institutions, is crowding out essential national budget items such as health and basic services, with detrimental effects for particularly women.
An activist s t-shirt displays the message of the ZIMCODD anti-debt campaign. Credit: Stanley Kwenda/IPS
Indications are that many Zimbabwean women opt to give birth at home, with some children …
Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, Nov 19 2010 (IPS) – U.S. regulators are poised to decide as early as next week whether to approve a genetically modified salmon for human consumption.
It would be the first GM animal approved for human consumption, and there are fears that the review process is overlooking key ripple effects of approving the fish.
These ripple effects are both positive, such as public health benefits, and negative, such as environmental degradation, say researchers.
The debate over the salmon, which would be raised on fish farms and which contains inserted genes from two other species of fish that allow it to grow faster and require less feed than conventional salmon, has focused on whether the fish would pose a hazard to human health or, were it …