High-income countries now spend an average of 9% of their foreign aid budgets on hosting refugees, according to the OECD. Net aid spending reached a record high last year, with domestic refugee costs accounting for the bulk of the rise. Yet Publish What You Fund claims only a quarter of of aid meets transparency standards. The campaign group analysed funds from 46 donors and found most had failed to meet commitments to publish enough details about their development projects.
Emma Graham-Harrison reports on the crisis in Burundi, where teams of thugs are crossing the borders into refugee camps in neighbouring countries to launch murderous attacks on exiles, according to survivors. More than a quarter of a million people have fled in terror but the world’s attention is elsewhere.
Elsewhere on the site
‘I lost my youth in prison’: Salvadoran women seek redress over abortion law
On the frontline in Brazil’s war on Zika: ‘I felt I was in a horror movie’
Boko Haram: soaring numbers of children used in suicide attacks, says Unicef
50 million years of work could be lost to anxiety and depression
‘A system of privilege and benefits’: is a global tax body needed?
Ethiopia’s clampdown on dissent tests ethnic federal structure
Opinion
Governments should ensure street children have a legal form of ID so they can attend school and seek protection from violence, writes Usha Elumalai, a pavement dweller and child rights campaigner from Chennai in India. Marking International Day for Street Children, Elumalai writes: “Whenever someone from the street tries to enrol in school, they are asked for documents such as a birth certificate, which we simply don’t have. Without a legal identity, we are powerless.”
Multimedia
Migrant workers make up 94% of Qatar’s workforce, but they face daily segregation in the country’s capital. Pete Pattisson captured footage of men being escorted from public spaces.
The Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone kept many women away from health clinics, and, now that the epidemic is over, they are slowly returning. Photographer Kate Holt visited the country’s free clinics that aim to stop children and mothers dying.
Women smeared with red paint joined protests in the Peruvian capital, Lima, to highlight the forced sterilisations overseen by former president Alberto Fujimori.
‘I don’t know when I last ate’: getting aid to South Sudan’s north, in pictures.
What you said
On We street children need a legal identity. It’s a basic human right, Sam Wood wrote:
Dear Usha, lovely yet heart-rending article. Passing such high hurdles, to be in college is a tremendous achievement. Congratulations.
I am ashamed to say that I live in the same city and yet not particularly sensitive to those living on the streets. I probably have passed by your living space and yet blind. The fight against injustice is hard, prolonged and nasty, especially in the neoliberal, corporate-friendly governing structures in India at present. Your article hopefully would keep the fires of dissent burning. You didn’t mention your caste, perhaps deliberately so. But it is the doubly oppressed, i.e. the Dalits who would be in such a situation for three generations. If so, you are triply oppressed - Dalit, poor and a woman. You have risen up in spite of that. Congratulations.
Highlight from the blogosphere
What does it mean to “formalise” the informal sector? The International Institute for Environment and Development shares examples of successful efforts to support the millions of people working in the informal economy.
And finally …
Poverty matters will return in two weeks with another roundup of the latest news and comment. In the meantime, keep up to date on the Global development website. Follow @gdndevelopment and the team –@swajones, @LizFordGuardian, @clarnic and @CarlaOkai – on Twitter, and join Guardian Global development on Facebook.
