Poor hygiene practices
“Cholera in this region is not only a water scarcity problem, it also aggravated by the poor hygienic practices that are deeply rooted in people’s culture. Water is scarce and considered as a very precious commodity, but handling it is quite unhygienic,” Félicité Tchibindat, the country representative for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Cameroon, tells IPS.
Cultural practices are still primitive in most villages and urban areas.
Northerners have a culture where people publicly share water jars, from which everyone drinks from.
“These practices and many others make them vulnerable to water vector diseases. [It is the] reason why cholera can easily spread to other communities. Cholera outbreaks are a result of …
Joseph Chamie is a former director of the United Nations Population Division
Contraceptives on sale at a store in Sanaa, Yemen. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS
NEW YORK, Oct 1 2014 (IPS) – For most of human history, reproductive rights essentially meant men and women accepting the number, timing and spacing of their children, as well as possible childlessness. All this changed radically in the second half of the 20th century with the introduction of new medical technologies aimed at both preventing and assisting human reproduction.
Those technologies ushered in historic changes in reproductive rights and behaviour that continue to reverberate around the world, g…
Rashmi Chopra is a fellow in the Health and Human Rights Division at Human Rights Watch.
Monica Wambui, 37, who is deaf, receives HIV/AIDS information in sign language. Wambui was among more than 40 people with disabilities who attended a workshop organised by the USAID-funded APHIAplus Nuru ya Bonde project in Nakuru, Kenya. Credit: USAID/George Obanyi
NEW YORK, Nov 28 2014 (IPS) – Jane is a young Zambian mother with a physical disability in Lusaka, who uses a wheelchair to get around. She does not let clinics without ramps or without wheelchair accessible toilets and equipment stop her from claiming her right to health care, including HIV prevention services.
In Serfanguri relief camp in Kokrajhar, several tents were erected, but they were inadequate to properly house the roughly 2,000 people who had arrived there on Dec. 23, 2014. This single tent houses 25 women and children. Credit: Priyanka Borpujari/IPS
KOKRAJHAR, India, Jan 29 2015 (IPS) – The tarpaulin sheet, when stretched and tied to bamboo poles, is about the length and breadth of a large SUV. Yet, about 25 women and children have been sleeping beneath these makeshift shelters at several relief camps across Kokrajhar, a district in the north-eastern Indian state of Assam.
The inhabitants of these camps – about 240,000 of them across three other d…
Preethi Sundaram is Policy Officer and author of the report and Fiona Salter is a writer, both at International Planned Parenthood Federation.
Young girls in the village of Sonu Khan Almani in Pakistan’s Sindh province perform most of the household chores, like making bread. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS
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Rapid global change has undoubtedly opened doors for women to participate in social, economic and political life but gender inequality still holds w…
One of her defence lawyers hugs Carmelina Pérez when an appeals court in eastern El Salvador declares her innocent of homicide, on Apr. 23. She had been sentenced to 30 years in prison in June 2014 after suffering a miscarriage. In El Salvador women, especially the poor, suffer from the penalisation of abortion under any…
Nelson Mandela, then Deputy President of the African National Congress of South Africa, raises his fist in the air while addressing the Special Committee Against Apartheid in the General Assembly Hall, June 22, 1990. Global alliance CIVICUS commemorated Mandela Day with a reminder that many rights defenders are jailed …
A reporter stands at a roadblock outside Fukushima’s 20 kilometre exclusive zone in March 2011. Credit: Suvendrini Kakuchi/IPS
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Asian nations fear that the Paris Climate Deal will be a watered down minimalistic product without any teeth. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS
NEW DELHI, India, Nov 22 2015 (IPS) – On a late Friday afternoon as choking smog descended on the Indian Capital, Francois Richier, the French ambassador to India , took some hard questions from scores of journalists about the upcoming climate change talks in Paris this month.
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Juvenile desert locust hoppers. Photo: FAO/G.Tortoli
CAIRO, Apr 13 2016 (IPS) – Now that Yemenis begin to hope that their year-long armed conflict may come to an end as a result of the Gulf Cooperation …