When 12-year-old Teresa had her first kiss at a party in London with another girl, the young Gambian had no idea how her sexual orientation would make life an everyday struggle when she returned home.

Eight years later, she is on the run from Gambian President Yahya Jammeh’s men in black, the National Intelligence Agency (NIA), who have put her at the top of a list of 200 homosexuals to arrest and imprison under new anti-gay laws passed by the government in October.

Read more on Reuters

The post Lesbians flee to Senegal as Gambia cracks down on homosexuality appeared first on Misha Hussain.

On a stormy day in Dakar, Tina Gomis, a local woman in Sicap Mbao, laughs at the idea of selling her own excrement to the government. But this may soon become a reality in a city with a reputation for terrible waste management.

A pioneering SMS service and waste treatment system is dramatically bringing down sanitation costs in Senegal’s capital and, if successful, may even lead to customers making a small profit from their ordure instead of paying someone to take it away.

“We want to turn poo into gold; it’s not waste, but a raw material,” says Mbaye Mbeguere, from the Senegal National SanitationUtility (ONAS).

Read more on The Guardian

The post ‘We want to turn poo into gold’: how SMS is transforming Senegal’s sanitation appeared first on Misha Hussain.

There’s hardly a man to be seen in the maternity ward of the Maternal and Child Health Training Institute in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.

Despite the lack of any law forbidding men to enter the delivery room, fathers are normally not present during the birth of their own child – an attitude that needs to change, say the country’s first midwives, who are due to graduate next month.

“Men need to be involved in the labour process if we are to reduce maternal mortality,” says Mala Reberio, one of the 20 midwives being trained to international standards in Bangladesh, which is still heavily reliant on community skilled birth attendants, who lack the skill and the authority to perform more complicated deliveries. Currently, one in 500 women in Bangladesh dies during childbirth.

“If [men] could see firsthand the complications of childbirth, they would be more likely to send their pregnant wives to proper medical facilities and less likely to insist on early childbirth after marriage,” says Reberio. More than 75% of deliveries take place at home, and the average age of women having their first child is just 16 years, according to the UN.

Read more in The Guardian

The post Get men in the delivery room, say Bangladesh’s first midwives appeared first on Misha Hussain.

Senegal is the largest salt producer in west Africa, mining over 450,000 tonnes every year. Small-scale harvesters, who work in areas like Lake Retba and Fatick, are responsible for around one-third of production. However, many fail to iodise the salt. Annually, around 18 million children, mostly in Africa, are born mentally impaired due to maternal iodine deficiency.

Read more in The Guardian

The post Senegal looks to the salt of the Earth appeared first on Misha Hussain.

In Guinea, a land where witchcraft is sought for curing illness more than science, medicine men say the Ebola epidemic would have been over by now had they been properly included in the outbreak response.

From broken bones, to impotence, to madness, these traditional healers say they have a potion, spell or touch for many ailments Western doctors can’t treat.

But there’s only one cure for Ebola they say – knowledge.

Read more on Al Jazeera

The post Africa’s witch doctors help fight Ebola appeared first on Misha Hussain.

Strict abortion laws in Senegal are forcing women to seek clandestine abortions and as a last resort kill their own infants, according to a new report by human rights groups.

Backstreet abortions and infanticide, a consequence of the West African nation’s abortion legislation, account for 38 percent of detention cases among women in Senegal, the report said.

Unmarried pregnant girls are ostracised and sometimes take drastic measures, said Amy Sakho, who runs a drop-in centre for women for the Senegalese Association of Women Jurists (AJS).

“They leave the infants out in the middle of the forest to starve to death or get eaten by wild animals,” Sakho said. “Others strangle them or throw them in the septic tank.”

Read more on Reuters

The post In Senegal, women kill own babies due to strict abortion laws appeared first on Misha Hussain.

Ten-year-old Atahib goes to school in the Goudebou refugee camp in the savannah of Burkina Faso, not hoping to become a teacher or a doctor like his classmates. He wants to learn so he can better serve his Tuareg masters.

Each day, Atahib wakes up before the Muslim morning call to prayer to help his mother with her chores – unpaid work that people from their Bella ethnic group have been doing for the ligher-skinned Tuaregs for centuries in Mali, Niger and Mauritania.

Read more on Reuters

The post In Burkina Faso, some Mali refugees want to grow up to serve appeared first on Misha Hussain.

Hissène Habré, the former president of Chad, will be the first African leader tried for crimes against humanity by another African state. On 20 July, the 72-year-old was escorted from a spacious, air-conditioned prison in Dakar’s scenic Cap Manuel neighbourhood to the Palais de Justice – a stark contrast to the windowless cells in Chad where Habré is alleged to have held prisoners in the baking Sahel heat until they were summoned to be tortured or executed without trial.

Read more in the New Statesman

The post A late start for the trial of African justice appeared first on Misha Hussain.

When Mick-Sophie Anne started showing signs of puberty at age 10, her mother took a hot stone and firmly pushed it down on her daughter’s breasts in an attempt to flatten her chest.

At dusk, in a small, dark kitchen out of sight of the neighbours, Priscille Dissake would heat the fist-sized stone on a charcoal fire and press Mick-Sophie’s breasts every evening for two months. Dissake’s sister would help by pinning the girl down on the cold, hard floor to stop her running away.

New government research shows that ‘breast ironing,’ as the harmful custom is known, has seen a 50 percent decline since it was first accidentally uncovered during a 2005 survey by the German Technical Cooperation Agency (GTZ) on rape and incest in Cameroon.

A successful nationwide awareness campaign in schools, churches and across media outlets has drawn attention to the harmful physical and psychological consequences. However, despite the work of children’s rights activists, 1.3 million girls are still victims of the brutal practice today.

Mothers do it to try to protect their daughters from premarital sex, early pregnancy and rape.

Read more on the Thomson Reuters Foundation

The post In Cameroon, women “iron” daughters’ breasts to ward off men appeared first on Misha Hussain.

Hundreds of children flock at the site of a stranger in the Kutu Palong makeshift camp in southeastern Bangladesh, near the border with Burma. Some are wearing salvaged clothes; mostly, they are naked. “Hello, how are you?” they shout, repeating the one phrase they have picked up from the few aid workers that have gained permission from the Bangladesh authorities to enter the unregistered camp.

Read more in Time Magazine

The post For Rohingya in Bangladesh, No Place is Home appeared first on Misha Hussain.