Alex Duval Smith reports from the Mbera refugee camp in south-east Mauritania, which is host to rising numbers of people fleeing conflict in central Mali. Even though armed groups have agreed a peace deal with the government in Bamako, there are about 42,000 people in the camp, mainly Tuareg and Arab refugees, with their numbers bolstered by the recent arrival of more than 500 Fulani nomads. Mali and Mauritania both have high rates of child marriage, but NGOs working at the camp are trying to provide education and training opportunities to dissuade both child marriage and young men from joining armed groups.
Khabar Lahariya is an Indian newspaper that has come a long way: from fortnightly publications hand-delivered around villages, its reportage now includes video and WhatsApp updates. But what makes the publication special is the way it is breaking gender and caste taboos. The newspaper is the first and only paper in India staffed, edited and run entirely by women, mostly from low-caste, rural backgrounds. We’ve also had reports from India in the past two weeks on how little is being done to help Indians displaced by the Maoist insurgency, and on schools in Delhi that are opening up a safe space for children to speak up about sexual abuse.
Elsewhere on the site
‘My job is to make children hopeful’: inside Liberia’s deaf school
Conakry hairdressers dispense cut-and-dried contraceptive advice
Peruvian women protest against tide of murder and sexual crime
As the mercury soars, fear grows over ‘air-con effect’
Kenya’s Ogiek people face ‘colonial approach to conservation’
Iraqi children pay high health cost of war-induced air pollution
Cambodia proves fertile ground for foreign surrogacy
Opinion
Kevin Hyland: Britain must address sex trafficking from Nigeria to Europe
Jimmy Smith: Veganism is not the key to sustainable development
Multimedia
Olympians find fetching water in Uganda far from child’s play – in pictures
Students Speak
Is peace a prerequisite for development? Why are the least peaceful countries often among the poorest? What’s the link between peace and progress? We want your views. Submit a response of 250 words or fewer, and we’ll publish the best ones.
Book extracts
In an extract from South Sudan: The Untold Story from Independence to Civil War, Hilde F Johnson, former head of the UN there, shares how the world’s newest nation descended into war in December 2013.
In Today We Drop Bombs, Tomorrow We Build Bridges, Peter Gill laments aid agencies’ waning independence and the dangers staff face.
What you said
Jimmy Smith’s repudiation of the vegan lifestyle attracted hundreds of comments. VashtiGwynn wrote:
There are marginal lands where crop production isn’t possible (uplands, deserts, wetlands, forests) but there is a very strong argument for allowing these to revert to a natural state, rather than decimating their biodiversity by crowding them with livestock. I doubt the assertion that the Sahel is better off lightly farmed. Farming and scrub-clearing has been one of the primary causes of ever-spreading desertification and sub-Saharan countries increasingly face recurrent crop failures … This sort of subsistence farming is therefore manifestly unsustainable, and should not be romanticised as ‘natural’ or ‘pastoral’.
Highlight from the blogosphere
The International Solidarity Mission has been investigating how the Jalaur Mega dam in the Philippines threatens to displace indigenous people in Panay island. Writing for Global Voices, Karlo Mikhail Mongaya, who lives on the island, writes that local people are afraid that the dam will cause flooding and landslides as well as the drowning not only of their homes and villages, but also of their agricultural lands and cultural heritage, as six burial grounds and sacred sites would be destroyed.
Farmers tackling climate change event
Join Guardian sustainable business for a seminar on 21 September to discuss how to support the developing world’s farmers, from Colombia to Ivory Coast, and help end rural poverty.
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 @LizFordGuardian on Twitter, and join Guardian Global development on Facebook.
