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From a Saudi campaign to stop violence against women to a live debate on humanitarianism in the network age, check out what's in the pipeline for Thomson Reuters Foundation correspondents this week
A sneak peek at what’s on our radar for the week of April 29
It’s been less than a week since we bundled our AlertNet and TrustLaw news services into a single site – the new trust.org – and we’re hungry for your feedback. Web launches are always an iterative process, requiring tinkering and bug-catching along the way, so all suggestions are welcome. Leave your comments below.
To mark the launch of the new site last week – and to celebrate Thomson Reuters Foundation’s 30th birthday – we commissioned opinion pieces from big thinkers in the worlds of humanitarianism, media development, women’s rights and anti-corruption. The commentary-fest continues this week with the likes of U.N. refugee chief Antonio Guterres, Afghan women’s rights champion Sima Samar and Sarah Costa, head of the Women’s Right Commission.
We’re ushering in May with a special package of stories on internal displacement. Katy Migiro has crunched the numbers from a new report by the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre and they’re not pretty. The horror of Syria’s civil war has pushed global displacement to a record high of 29 million. Unlike refugees, internally displaced people receive few legal protections or emergency assistance. Check out her factbox and Africa analysis and stay tuned for more tomorrow from Somalia.
Speaking of Somalia, the United Nations is tripling the number of international staff it has in Mogadishu by July. Does this reflect a greater commitment to the failed state or a deteriorating humanitarian situation?
Here are just a few of the other questions our correspondents’ will be asking this week:
How is Saudi Arabia proposing to fight violence against women?
Answer: through a provocative ad campaign featuring an image of a woman in full niqab showing clear signs of physical abuse on one of her eyes. Such pictures are pretty much unheard of in the conservative kingdom, which remains one of the world’s most repressive when it comes to women’s rights and freedoms. Maria Caspani will have more.
What has Washington learned from its $60 billion reconstruction programme in Iraq?
Or to put it another way, given a track record of massive fraud waste and abuse, how does the United States intend to make sure development assistance to Afghanistan doesn’t end up in the wrong hands as NATO troops withdraw? Stella Dawson has an interview with the U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq.
How can new communications bring people in need closer to people who can help?
That’s a question posed in a report by the U.N. Office for Humanitarian Affairs, which posits a fundamental shift in power from capital cities and headquarters to the people aid agencies aim to assist – a shift to which humanitarian responders must adapt to or risk becoming irrelevant. Join our live debate – Humanitarianism in the network age – at 1100 GMT on May 1 and watch out for Astrid Zweynert’s analysis of the report.
What has the U.N. Special Rapporteur on violence against women found in India?
Four months after the fatal gang rape of a student in Delhi sparked public outrage, Rashida Manjoo is in India to find out more about the rising tide of violence against women and girls in the world’s biggest democracy. Some of the accounts she’s heard moved her to tears – and that was before the latest outrage: the gang rape and torture of a five-year-old girl. Nita Bhalla will be seeking out the special rapporteur’s views.
How can hackers make oil, gas and mining companies more honest?
Luke Balleny will be attending “Follow the Data Hack Day”, an event designed to bring together industry experts, software developers and designers to use extractive industry data to build models to hold the big diggers up to greater scrutiny. Nerdy but intriguing.
Meanwhile, Anastasia Moloney is just back from a trip into a Colombian conflict zone while Nita Bhalla has colourful multimedia on women doing men’s jobs in one of India’s most patriarchal regions. And as always, we’re keeping a close eye on ethnic violence in Myanmar.
Meanwhile, here are 10 things we learned last week:
- Big banks are joining forces to fight human trafficking
- Bangladesh’s factory collapse has exposed wider risks
- The world’s poorest nations are willing to take a low-carbon path
- Africa’s Sahel region is bracing for record hunger
- Brazil has made progress on an anti-bribery bill – but is it enough?
- Activists want Britain to stop aid for Darfur’s “failed” peace process
- Central African Republic’s crisis has taken 1 million kids out of school
- Rape evidence is languishing untested in U.S. police storage
- India’s disaster relief agency is not ready for calamities
- Colombian families are fleeing to keep the children from being recruited by rebels
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