Translator Serge Tian in village of Gueyede in south-west Côte d’Ivoire. He translates sub-prefect Kouassi Koffi’s message about the spread of Ebola in West Africa and how people can recognise the virus and avoid infection. Credit: Marc-Andre Boisvert/IPS

GUEYEDE, Côte d’Ivoire, Aug 16 2014 (IPS) – The whole village of Gueyede in south-west Côte d’Ivoire gathers under the tattered roof of a shelter as the rain drizzles outside, and listens carefully as sub-prefect Kouassi Koffi talks.

“We are not allowed any complacency. You might not know Ebola. And it is better that you don’t,” says Koffi, the highest governmental authority of the area, through trans…

Joeva Rock is a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at the American University in Washington, DC, focusing on colonial legacies in West Africa.

First shipment of the ramped-up U.S. military response to Ebola arriving in Liberia. Credit: US Army Africa/CC-BY-2.0

WASHINGTON, Sep 28 2014 (IPS) – Six months into West Africa’s Ebola crisis, the international community is finally heeding calls for substantial intervention in the region.

On Sep. 16, U.S. President Barack Obama a multimillion-dollar U.S. response to the spreading contagion. The crisis, which began in March 2014, has , an alarming figure that if the disease is not contai…

Filipino rice farmers claim that national heritage sites like the 2,000-year-old Ifugao Rice Terraces are threatened by the looming presence of genetically modified crops. Credit: Courtesy Diana Mendoza

MANILA, Nov 26 2014 (IPS) – Jon Sarmiento, a farmer in the Cavite province in southern Manila, plants a variety of fruits and vegetables, but his main crop, rice, is under threat. He claims that approval by the Philippine government of the genetically modified ‘golden rice’ that is fortified with beta-carotene, which the body converts into vitamin A, could ruin his livelihood.

Sarmiento, who is also the sustainable agriculture programme officer of PAKISAMA, a nati…

NEW YORK, Mar 11 2015 (IPS) – The somber face of a young man from Sierra Leone has become the emblem of Ebola’s living survivors, suffering in silence without families, papers, or homes.

A photo of Jimmy Thoronka appeared this week in local British papers. An undeclared refugee, he went missing after competing in last summer’s Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. The 20-year-old was a star sprinter but fell apart as Ebola took his uncle, then his adoptive mother and four siblings. He had already lost his birth parents in the country’s civil war.

Scared to go back, he decided to stay on after his visa ran out.

Thus began a seven-month spell of ‘living rough” on the streets. There were days without meals, sleeping in parks or night buses in London. When his whe…

School children in Nepal’s Matatirtha village practice an earthquake drill in the event of a natural disaster. A 7.8-magnitude earthquake in Nepal on Apr. 25, 2015, has endangered the lives of close to a million children. Credit: Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade/CC-BY-2.0

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 27 2015 (IPS) – The death toll has now passed 3,300, and there is no telling how much farther it will climb. Search and rescue operations in Nepal entered their third day Monday, as the government and international aid agencies scramble to cope with the aftermath of a 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck this South Asian nation on Apr. 25.

Severe aftershock…

Father Edwin Gariguez is a Catholic priest from the Philippines. He currently serves as the Executive Secretary of the National Secretariat for Social Action, the advocacy and social development arm of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines. He was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2012 for leading a grassroots movement against an illegal mining project to protect Mindoro Island’s biodiversity and its indigenous people.

Candlelight vigil co-organised by 350.org, the global grassroots climate movement, held just before the Pope’s visit to the Philippines in January this year. Photo credit: LJ Pasion

MANILA, Jun …

At night, groups of people from the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and intersex (LGBTI) community gather in meeting spots like this one in the El Vedado neighbourhood in Havana, Cuba. Others go to cruising spots for quick anonymous sex. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

HAVANA, Nov 13 2015 (IPS) – When night falls, young men can be seen sitting on a dismantled bus stop on a remote hill far from the centre of the C…

Credit: Anne Holmes/IPS

Mombasa, Kenya, Apr 7 2016 (IPS) – There is a ‘Little Boy’ who has nothing to do with the atomic bomb that the United States dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. This time it is about another ‘Little Boy’ who has been devastating the harvests in many regions, especially in Africa.

This ‘Little Boy’ (from El Niño in Spanish) is a band of warm ocean water that develops in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific including the coasts of South America. In Latin America the term El Niño refers to the Child Jesus, so named because the pool of warm water in the Pacific near South America is often at its …

May 30 2016 – It is easy to miss stories about child domestic workers being tortured and killed. Easy because stories of children being killed have become eerily regular. It is May 28 and there is the report of 14-year-old Konika Rani being hacked to death by a drug addict with three of her classmates also grievously injured by him. There is also the horror of having to read about a six-year-old being left critically wounded after being raped by her neighbour. Next to this is the news of 11-year-old Hasina Akhter dying in hospital from the fatal wounds inflicted on her, presumably by her employers.

It s hard to choose which incident merits more atte…

Margaret Chan (left), Director-General of the World Health Organization visiting Sierra Leone during the Ebola crisis in December 2014.

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 24 2016 (IPS) – Health problems increasingly transcend the borders of the World Health Organization’s 194 member states, a challenge which the six candidates vying to lead the global body must address with care.

Those 194 member states will pick the next Director-General of the world’s peak health body in May 2017, after the current six candidates are whittled down by the World Health Organization (WHO) Executive Board in January. The successful candidate will replace current Director-General Dr Margare…