Active Citizens

Indispensable—Native Hawaiian Elder Says of Indigenous Ocean Management Systems

By Joyce Chimbi
Indigenous people play a vital role in ocean protection due to their deep-rooted connection to the marine environment and their traditional knowledge of sustainable resource management. They often possess centuries-old practices and stewardship ethics that prioritize ecological balance and community well-being.

Tanzania’s Women Miners Digging for Equality in a Male-Dominated Industry

By Kizito Makoye
Under the scorching Tanzanian sun, Neema Mushi wipes sweat from her dust-covered face and swings her pickaxe into the earth. The impact sends dust swirling into the air, coating her tattered clothes. She barely notices. For the past eight years, this has been her life—digging, sifting, sieving, and hoping to strike gold in the male-dominated pits of Geita. It is a grueling task riddled with obstacles.

‘Noboa Did Not Receive a Blank Cheque: He Will Have to Show Tangible Results’

By CIVICUS

 
CIVICUS discusses Ecuador’s presidential election with Jorge Tapia de los Reyes, Coordinator of the Democracy and Politics Department and the Political Funding Observatory of the Citizenship and Development Foundation (FCD). FCD is an Ecuadorian civil society organisation that promotes participation, citizen monitoring and open government.

Smallholder Farmers Are Not ‘Beneficiaries’, but the ‘Co-Creators of Change’

By Naureen Hossain
Eliud Rugut comes from generations of farmers, yet his family expected him to move out of their home and pursue another career.

Want To Fix the World, Ubuntu (Humanity to Others) Can Help

By Busani Bafana
The world needs an urgent fix and humanity could just be it.

Global Disability Summit Galvanizes Education Support for Crisis-Impacted Children with Disabilities

By Joyce Chimbi
Of the nearly 234 million children and adolescents of school age affected by crises, 85 million are already out of school. At least 20 percent of them—or 17 million—are children living with disabilities.

Bangladesh’s Ethnic People Safeguarding Forests and Wildlife

By Rafiqul Islam
Kishore Kumar Chakma, a young man from an ethnic community in Rangamati district, voluntarily guards a village common forest (VCF) so that none can hunt wild animals and fell trees from it.

Epilepsy Patients in Africa Fight Stigma and Neglect

By Promise Eze
When Angela Asemota’s son began having seizures at six years old in 1996, people gossiped that he was possessed by evil spirits, leading her to seek healing from native healers and religious clerics. He underwent several traditional rituals and drank various concoctions, but the seizures persisted. It was not until his fourth year in secondary school in 2004 that she took him to a hospital, where he was diagnosed with epilepsy and began taking medication.

Papua New Guinea: Years of Environmental Clean Up Ahead Following New Report on Abandoned Bougainville Mine

By Catherine Wilson
Local communities are finally witnessing progress in their mission for justice, 36 years after the Panguna copper mine in Papua New Guinea’s Autonomous Region of Bougainville became the centre of landowner grievances about environmental damage.

Nuclear Testing in Kazakhstan Documentary Showcases Urgent Need for Nuclear Abolition

By Naureen Hossain
The documentary I Want to Live On: The Untold Stories of the Polygon exposes the lifelong impacts of nuclear testing in Kazakhstan’s Semey region. As a third-generation survivor born in Semey, international relations legal expert based in New York, Togzhan Yessenbayeva said she was aware of the “profound impact” that nuclear testing has had on her community and environment. She remarked that the tests in Semipalatinsk have left a “legacy of challenges” that people must deal with to this day.

Siddis of India—a Unique Community Moves Into the Mainstream With Tourist Venture

By Rina Mukherji
The Siddi community, descendants of slaves from Africa, is now becoming more involved with mainstream enterprises, including a forest homestay venture—which is changing their fortunes after years of discrimination on the Indian subcontinent where they were originally enslaved.

International Women’s Day, 2025
Rule Breakers: The Compelling True Story of Afghan Girls Who Risked All to Learn

By Joyce Chimbi and Naureen Hossain
Like the Afghan robotics team, Education Cannot Wait (ECW), the global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises in the United Nations, is breaking the 'rules' and continuing to educate young women in that country despite an edict from the Taliban denying girls a secondary school education.

International Women’s Day, 2025
UN: Women’s Rights Face ‘Unprecedented’ Pushbacks

By Naureen Hossain
Girls and women worldwide are facing growing threats to their security and rights, from threats to their education access to severe poverty and multiple forms of violence. In 2024, nearly one in four governments worldwide reported a backlash to women’s rights, as a new report from UN Women reveals.

International Women’s Day, 2025
In Zanzibar, Women Turn the Tide with Sponge Farming

By Kizito Makoye
In the early morning, as the tide pulls away, Zulfa Abdallah ties her scarf tightly around her head. She adjusts her goggles, places a snorkel across her forehead, and wades into the chest-deep waters off Jambiani village in Zanzibar. The Indian Ocean is her livelihood now, its waves offering a lifeline to women like her who confront challenges of poverty and climate change.

Anti-LGBTQI Legislation in Europe Curbs Speech Freedom, Democracy—Report

By Ed Holt
LGBTQI communities across Europe and Central Asia are being ‘weaponized’ by governments as part of a wider attack on fundamental human rights and freedoms, rights activists have warned.

African Leaders Challenged To Unite Against Energy Transition Mineral Oppressors

By Isaiah Esipisu
Renewable energy and climate change activists have challenged African heads of state to take a united stance to safeguard essential mineral resources, particularly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and other parts of the continent, which are selfishly exploited by foreign miners with disregard for poverty-stricken local communities.

Life-Changing Quarry Mining Shatters Lives in Zimbabwe

By Jeffrey Moyo
On Christmas Day in 2022, 27-year-old Thabani Dlodlo’s eight-year-old son drowned in a flooded pit dug up by quarry miners in the vicinity of Pumula North, a high-density suburb in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second-largest city. As if that was not enough, just a week after New Year’s Day the following year, Dlodlo’s neighbor, 36-year-old Sethule Hlengiwe, also lost her six-year-old daughter after she drowned in another pit flooded with rainwater near her home in Bulawayo.

Blamed for ‘Causing’ Droughts: Zimbabwe’s LGBTQI Community Faces Climate Crisis Head-on

By Farai Shawn Matiashe
Takudzwa Saruwaka is hoeing weeds in a cowpea field in eastern Zimbabwe one morning in February, trying to beat torrential rains threatening from the gray clouds above.

Bangladesh: UN Human Rights Denounces Former Government’s Violations Against Protestors

By IPS Correspondent
A new report from the UN Human Rights Office confirms that Bangladesh’s former government coordinated and committed human rights violations against its civilians to suppress the protest movement in July last year, with the high commissioner calling for justice and serious reform to end the cycle of violence and retribution.

What is Not Good for Democracy in Peru is Not Good for Women

By Mariela Jara
"We are facing a deeply conservative government that is opening the doors to all kinds of setbacks. We have a failed state with a democracy that is no longer a democracy," said Gina Vargas, a Peruvian feminist internationally recognized for her contributions to women's rights.

Belarus: Brutal Repression Continues Post Presidential Election, Say Human Rights Groups

By Ed Holt
In the months leading up to presidential elections at the end of January, Belarus’s authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko ordered the release of hundreds of political prisoners. Some observers saw this as a sign that the man who had led the former Soviet state for the last three decades could be planning a relaxation of his regime’s brutal repressions in return for a lessening of Western sanctions.
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