BOLIVIA: Amazon Nuts at Exploitative Prices

Bolivia is the world's leading exporter of the shelled Brazil nut, a nutritious food source that grows abundantly in the country's Amazon rainforest region. But in this tropical paradise, many of the nut-gatherers live in hellish conditions.

CUBA: Raising an Environmentally Conscious Generation

Every summer in Cuba, the complaint is heard over and over again: "These beaches are filthy!" Empty beer and soft drink bottles, plastic bags and cups, the remains of someone's picnic lunch, and innumerable cigarette butts are strewn on the sand every day, despite the threat of fines and the pleas of ecologists.

RIGHTS: From War Zone to Double Deckers, Hope Returns to Orphans

The two double-decker buses were a rarity on the Avissawella-Colombo road. One usually does not see slow-moving old English buses on the highway about 50 kilometres out of the capital Colombo.

HEALTH: Africa Leads World in Premature Infant Deaths

An estimated 13 million babies worldwide are born prematurely and more than one million die each year, say health experts.

SENEGAL: Scrambling to Keep Up With Education For All

In Diohine, a village of some 3,000 inhabitants in the Fatick region of central Senegal, real progress has been made towards educating all children, in spite of a lack of infrastructure.

HEALTH-ANGOLA: "It's Normal Here That Children Die Young"

Angelina Silva doesn’t remember the exact dates when her sons died. She just remembers their ages.

ZIMBABWE: Virgins Forced into Marriage to ‘Appease’ Evil Spirits

Three years after being seized from their families and forced to marry and have sex with adult men in a Shona ritual to appease an avenging spirit, five teenagers are facing a dismal reality.

MALAWI: Pre-school Education A Luxury

Less than a third of Malawi's children attend pre-school; the others will lag behind their peers for their entire school careers.

LATIN AMERICA: Strides and Setbacks for Domestic and Rural Workers

In the last few years, several Latin American countries have attempted to improve labour conditions for rural workers and domestics, whose labour rights have long been ignored. But the new laws, even those with limited scope, are not always enforced.

MALAYSIA: Gov’t Urged to Stem the Tide of Child Trafficking

"My family was starving. . . . I was sold to people who brought me here to work and feed my family back home," said Ah Mun, a victim of child trafficking.

RIGHTS-AFRICA: Uganda Women Seek Gender Recovery Plan

After two decades of war during which thousands of children were used as child soldiers and many women raped, northern Uganda’s recovery plan is to be spent on building roads rather than helping the country’s most vulnerable.

MIDEAST: More Palestinian Children Getting Jailed

Eight children between the ages of 10 and 17 were arrested and detained by Israeli soldiers during military raids Monday night and Tuesday morning in the northern West Bank cities Nablus and Qalqilia.

MADAGASCAR: Poverty Forces 2 Million Children into Hard Labour

Poverty has increased dramatically in Madagascar since January, when a national protest movement to end the regime of former president Marc Ravalomanana plunged the country into a socio-economic crisis. Since then, the number of child labourers has risen by a whopping 25 percent.

RIGHTS-YEMEN: Human Catastrophe Looms as War Rages On

In the searing heat of the desert near the Saudi border, the sound of heavy artillery echoes across the mountains every few minutes, hammering the ears of Askar Ragass and her terrified family.

HEALTH: Dutch Rethink Mixing Cannabis With Coffee

Along with "canal" and "dyke", young people visiting this city will learn some other interesting words in a very short time - words such as "cannabis", "bong", and "marijuana". The words are hard to avoid, especially in the tourist area that boasts a museum devoted to "hash".

LAOS: What People Cannot Eat is of Great Importance to Women – Part 2

"When I was born my mother could not eat anything but tiny fish and tea made from herbs for one whole year," says Dr Bhounsouane. "She was so weak that she could hardly walk. Post partum food taboos (phit kam) are a major problem in Laos for women," he said.

LAOS: Land Legislation Disempowers Women – Part 1

Ki is seven years old but looks more like three. His legs are bowed and skull misshapen. He looked at me with a blank stare. The health worker, Kheo, suggests rickets.

MIDEAST: Textbooks Become a Dream

A chronic shortage of school supplies, and severely overcrowded classrooms are crippling Gaza's educational system as tens of thousands of children begin a new school year.

SWAZILAND: Educating Angels

It is not a typical classroom setup where pupils sit in rows facing the front with a teacher lecturing before them.

ARGENTINA: In Children’s Art, the Sky’s Not Always Blue

The young students taught by Maruca, who has been giving free painting classes to children in a town in Argentina's pampas for the last 50 years, have won more than 1,000 international prizes for their artwork.

BRAZIL: Art is the Best Education

A broad range of projects in Brazil are using ballet and folk dances, classical and popular music, theatre, circus arts, capoeira - an Afro-Brazilian combination of dance and martial arts - fashion, visual arts and the audiovisual media to reach disadvantaged and at-risk children.