It was personal experience that turned Gul Bano and her cleric husband, Ahmed Khan, into ambassadors against early marriage and its worst corollary – obstetric fistula which allows excretory matter to flow out through the birth canal.
In his keynote address to the Global Colloquium of University Presidents at New York's Columbia University last week, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon spoke of the growing power exercised by the world's younger generation in an age of high- speed technology and the information superhighway.
Teenage pregnancies are on the rise in Guatemala, along with the drop-out rate in schools, family breakdown and many other related social ills.
Naseema Akhtar, 38, worries that her daily treks to collect clean water from the mountain springs around her village of Bonpora, in Kashmir’s Kupwara district, are getting longer. She is already doing more than seven km every day.
The physical damage done to Osh, the city in southern Kyrgyzstan that was engulfed in interethnic violence almost two years ago, is steadily being repaired. The psychological scars, on the other hand, may take generations to heal.
The trial for the theft of babies of political prisoners during Argentina’s 1976-1983 dictatorship is nearing its end after more than three decades of work by the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who have so far tracked down 105 of an estimated 500 missing children.
Hamza has memories no 17-year-old should. "I was desperate. I didn't talk to anyone. I didn't want to go outside the house. I was very nervous. I'd be irritated with the simplest matters."
Kokpa Pascale Moangue, a Baka Pygmy in southeastern Cameroon, has given his children the one thing he always longed for, but his parents could not give him – an education. And he was able to achieve it by obtaining a simple piece of paper: a birth registration certificate.
Standing under a canopy just inside Jerusalem’s Old City walls, a group of 20 Palestinian children are banging drums, clapping their hands and singing in Portuguese. This is capoeira, the traditional Afro-Brazilian sport that mixes dance, music and martial arts, and it is sweeping through the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
In a move expected to deepen political reform, the quasi-civilian government in Myanmar (also known as Burma) is permitting the distribution of leaflets that will help thousands of people in the country’s ethnic enclaves learn to resist forced labour.
The armed forces of Peru have launched a campaign to rescue at least 50 children who are in the hands of the last surviving remnant of the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas.
The International Criminal Court delivered its first verdict Wednesday: Thomas Lubanga Dyilo was found guilty of recruiting children under the age of 15 to fight in a militia group in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
Wilber Geovany Hernández was gunned down as he left his night classes at a school in the capital of El Salvador. He was the 11th murder victim among the country's schoolchildren since the school year began on Jan. 23.
For Taiseer Khatib and his wife Lana, the most difficult aspect of Israel’s policy of forced family separation is the impact it is having on their children. "Our children are paying the price psychologically. We are trying to protect them, but they have a good sense of what’s going on and they understand that there’s something wrong," Khatib, who has two children under the age of five, Adnan and Yosra, tells IPS.
With climate change advancing to the forefront of the most urgent issues facing the islands of the Caribbean, young people – who arguably have the most to gain and lose in future scenarios – are becoming increasingly engaged in charting a path to environmental sustainability.
Drug abuse, known to be widespread among youth in India’s northern Kashmir state, is now showing a new trend whereby teenage girls and women are increasingly turning into substance abusers and addicts.
The world’s two worst polio-affected countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan, have exhausted themselves in failed attempts to wipe out the crippling ailment.
As the Senate debates the merits of the Canadian government's newly-passed omnibus crime bill, organisations across the country have raised serious issues with the legislation, particularly when it comes to amendments relating to the treatment of young offenders.
Vaccines against drug addiction appear to be a better strategy than the repressive worldwide "war on drugs", but first they must overcome resistance from pharmaceutical laboratories and secure financial backing, scientists say.
Amid increasing reports of physical abuses resulting in deaths in youth detention and correctional centres across the country, an Indonesian state commission has embarked on a national campaign to scrap detention and imprisonment of children altogether.
"I want my own computer so that I can talk to my cousins who live in Italy," says eight-year-old Camila Ojeda, sitting in front of a computer monitor on a bus that acts as a mobile cybercafé in the Paraguayan capital.