IRIN
Road repairs a boon to villages
Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010DILI, 22 November 2010 (IRIN) – Timor-Leste’s government is engaging rural communities to improve the country’s road network, which is almost 60 percent unpaved, to create jobs and develop vital infrastructure.
The TIM-Works Project, being implemented by the Secretariat of State for Vocational Training and Employment, with technical assistance from the International Labour Organization (ILO), is [...]
Community involvement key to disaster preparedness
Thursday, November 18th, 2010DHAKA, 18 November 2010 (IRIN) – Working in one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world, Bangladeshi aid groups have learned that well-intentioned disaster relief programmes without community participation do little to protect those communities in the long run.
“Communities have been living with disasters for much longer than we have been talking about disaster [...]
Rohingya youth hunger for education
Wednesday, November 10th, 2010KUTUPALONG, 10 November 2010 (IRIN) – Ask any one of the 18,000 Rohingya youth at two government-run refugee camps in Bangladesh what they want most, the answer is unequivocally the same: education.
“Our future is blind without education,” said Sayed Alam, a lifelong resident of Kutupalong camp, one of two official camps set up to house [...]
Decades-old water dispute could destroy nation’s agriculture
Tuesday, September 21st, 2010DHAKA, 20 September 2010 (IRIN) – Ongoing wrangling over vital waterways that pass through China and India – the two most populous countries in the world – could lead to agricultural devastation further downstream in Bangladesh, experts warn.
The Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers – together one of the largest freshwater flows in the world – [...]
Population pressure, climate change drive search for new rice varieties
Monday, September 6th, 2010NAOGAON, 6 September 2010 (IRIN) – Like many farmers in Bangladesh, Abdul Aziz from Naogaon District in northwestern Bangladesh has had to adapt his plantings to increasingly erratic weather: “Twenty years ago we had a rainy season at this time. Now we don’t even know when the seasons come…Twenty years ago we experienced five months [...]
Taking toxins out of ship-breaking
Sunday, September 5th, 2010DHAKA, 3 September 2010 (IRIN) – A Dutch engineering company is trying to make safer the dangerous job of dismantling old ships contaminated with chemicals – by building the world’s first “green dock wharf” in Bangladesh.
Bangladesh has long been a final destination for decommissioned ships from around the world. Their scrap metal is valuable, but [...]
Killing women in the name of religion
Friday, August 13th, 2010DHAKA, 13 August 2010 (IRIN) – Nearly two decades after a peasant woman’s suicide first raised national awareness about the danger of religious rulings, and one month after a high court outlawed deadly edicts, killings of women in the name of religion continue in Bangladesh, human rights groups say.
Seventeen years ago, Nurjahan Begum, a peasant [...]
“Spectacular” reduction in child mortality rates
Wednesday, July 14th, 2010DILI, 14 July 2010 (IRIN) – Timor-Leste, one of the world’s newest and poorest nations, has achieved significant declines in infant mortality, under-five mortality and fertility rates, according to the country’s latest Demographic and Health Survey (DHS).
Preliminary data from the survey – the full results of which will be released later this year – indicate [...]
Amnesty warns against Timor-Leste’s “culture of impunity”
Tuesday, June 29th, 2010BANGKOK, 29 June 2010 (IRIN) – Amnesty International has urged the government of Timor-Leste to close a legal loophole that allows perpetrators of crimes against humanity to go unpunished.
Timor-Leste became formally independent in 2002 after a 24-year occupation by the Indonesian military in 1975-1999 that cost up to 200,000 lives, but gaps in the penal [...]
UN urges Asia to focus on gender in HIV policies
Monday, June 28th, 2010BANGKOK, 28 June 2010 (IRIN) – The UN is urging Asia Pacific governments to step up their efforts to address gender inequalities in HIV response as rates of infection among women in the region continue to rise.
Some 1.6 million women are living with HIV in the Asia Pacific region, while 35 percent of all HIV [...]