Twenty-year-old Fabrice Shyaka sells popcorn in brown paper bags five nights a week from his stand in a small alleyway, situated next to a DVD shop blaring loud music, and a supermarket. Here in Kanombe, a suburb in the Rwandan capital of Kigali, he is the only person selling popcorn in the area.
-- International Women’s Day and the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) are overlooking a critical trend: while girls and women are making notable gains, boys and men are falling behind.
Lupita Nyong’o’s Oscar victory for her supporting performance in the critically acclaimed film “12 Years a Slave” has raised hopes of a much-needed boost to Kenya’s fledgling entertainment industry.
Evelyn Mhasi, a qualified nurse, has not worked in her profession for the last seven years. Hiring in several Zimbabwean government sectors, including nursing, remains frozen despite colleges churning out skilled professionals each year.
In the midst of a nationwide movement for policymakers to raise minimum wages for millions of workers in the United States, experts here continue to debate the advantages and drawbacks of raising the federal rate.
Admire Gumbo, 26, from Harare’s Mabvuku high density-suburb, is loathe to leave Zimbabwe to return to Botswana. However, he feels he has no choice but to return to the neighbouring country where he worked for three years as a manual labourer.
It was a decision based on simple sums. Ananda, 28, from Weligama in the southern Sri Lankan district Matara decided to risk it all boarding a boat to Australia last year because he never had enough money.
Ghana’s economy registered 7.1 percent growth last year but 23-year-old Jennifer Esi Avemee has had difficulty securing a permanent job since graduating in 2011. “It's very stressful,” she laments. “It's very hard to sustain yourself.”
President Barack Obama is vowing to spend his remaining time in office encouraging bipartisan efforts to strengthen the U.S. middle class by ensuring it is open to those from all backgrounds.
It didn’t take the financial crisis for hundreds of thousands of workers across Europe to protest the new plague of the labour market – precarity. But the financial crisis has only made it worse.
It took world leaders some time to realise that the financial crisis initiated by the collapse of the subprime mortgage segment of U.S. financial markets in 2007 would not exhaust its effects in an ordinary recession.
The people in the textile factory where Lourdes Soler presented the design of her skirts had never seen such detailed “blueprints” of a garment. Spain’s depressed labour market forced the technical architect to reinvent herself and create her own job – a growing trend in this crisis-stricken country.
Hazem Maher, 16, from Hebron in the southern West Bank, works a backbreaking 12-hour day in the fruit and vegetable market in the city of El Bireh, next to Ramallah. He earns just over 15 dollars a day as a porter.
In the 10 years since late president Néstor Kirchner, who was succeeded by his wife Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in 2007, first took office in Argentina, poverty has fallen, employment has climbed and educational coverage has expanded, although there is no agreement on the exact statistics.
As the European Union accuses Hungary of shifting towards authoritarianism, a spike in emigration from the country has led many to speak of a politically motivated exodus. Others suggest that economic conditions play a role in the westward flow of brainpower that is leaving Hungary's future uncertain.
The recent agreement for the normalisation of relations between Serbia and Kosovo has confirmed that the European Union (EU) is still acting as a “magnet”, attracting its external neighbours and transforming and integrating them. Thanks to its prospects for EU membership, the whole Balkan area has become more stable and secure. Unfortunately, this virtuous magnetism no longer exerts the same force of attraction on our own citizens.
Regardless of who is responsible for Egypt's current political impasse – be it the administration of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi or an aggressive secular opposition – local experts are certain of at least one fact: Egypt's dire economic circumstances will not improve without political stability.
The European Union (EU) has asked its citizens to brace for further economic misery. In a report on European economic prospects released on May 3, the European Commission said that further deterioration is expected to last at least until 2015. But, as every such report says, things will then get better.
As former Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe employees went to the Labour Court in Harare this week hoping for a ruling in favour of the finalisation of their retrenchment packages, the country’s public and private sectors continue to lay off workers without paying the promised compensation.
The huge impact of the economic crisis on male employment in Portugal has led to a sharp increase in the proportion of women who have become the main breadwinners in their families. But that has not translated into progress towards equality.
“In Gaza we don't lead normal lives, we just cope, and adapt to our abnormal lives under siege and occupation,” says Dr. Mona El-Farra, a physician and a long-time human rights and women's rights activist in the Gaza Strip. On International Women's Day, when many of the world's women are fighting for workplace equality and an end to domestic violence, Farra and the majority of Gaza's women fight for the most basic of rights.