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GLOBAL PRESS JOURNAL
Since 2006, Global Press has built and maintained over 40 independent news bureaus in some of the world’s least-covered places, where citizens lack credible access to accurate information. Global Press Journal, the award winning international news publication is staffed by professional female journalists who are from the coverage community. Their feature and investigative journalism is published in six languages and reaches audiences across 190 countries.
Image of a woman standing outside her home damaged by flooding.
Green
Jusly Felix

Perpetual Floods, Rivers Of Trash: Climate Change Hits Extra Hard In Haiti

The lack of government services in Port-de-Paix, Haiti, has spawned an ongoing crisis in the coastal city, where residents struggle to maintain their homes amid constant floods.

PORT-DE-PAIX, HAITIAnélie Ulysse’s home in Nan Palan, a small coastal neighborhood near the Port-de-Paix River, holds many memories. She lived there with her late husband and five children for over two decades.

But these days, her once busy home is largely silent; she lives alone in her corrugated iron-roofed home. Persistent flooding has left two of her five rooms too muddy to access.

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The Bitter Core Of Uganda's Billion-Dollar Cocoa Industry: Economic Injustice
Society
Patricia Lindrio

The Bitter Core Of Uganda's Billion-Dollar Cocoa Industry: Economic Injustice

Many of Uganda’s small-scale farmers rely on someone else to dry their beans, a practice that keeps them in a cycle of poverty. A new processing factory aims to change that.

BUNDIBUGYO — It’s harvest day on Edson Sabite’s 4-acre cocoa plantation on the hilly slopes in the Bundibugyo region of western Uganda. His two brothers and two teenage sons are helping in the garden by cutting the cocoa pods, removing the beans and placing them in basins, which will later get dried in the sun and sold.

The rural town sits in the Bundibugyo region, in western Uganda, where cocoa beans thrive in a tropical expanse blessed with particularly fertile soil. The area produces more than 70% of the cocoa the country exports. Sabite earns more than many farmers, growing his cocoa on land four times the size of most of the surrounding cocoa farms.

He has the storage facilities to dry his cocoa beans and transport them to buyers, ensuring he gets the highest price possible. But Sabite’s story isn’t typical; most cocoa farmers have small holdings and lack the facilities to dry their beans to secure a higher price than if sold wet, or freshly picked. They are forced to rely on middlemen.

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Photo of Delight Ziwacha, 19, doing chores at her home in Bikita, Zimbabwe. The first time she had sex, Ziwacha didn’t know she could get pregnant after having unprotected sex only once.
Society
Evidence Chenjerai

Zimbabwe Has A Serious Sex Ed Problem

Teachers and others say Zimbabwe’s current curriculum falls short and should be redesigned. But some question whether the subject should be taught in schools at all.

BIKITA — When Delight Ziwacha was 16, she didn’t know one could get pregnant after having unprotected sex only once. A friend told her that it had to happen multiple times. So, after experimenting with alcohol during a high school soccer tournament, she had unprotected sex with her 17-year-old boyfriend. A month and a half later, she found out she was pregnant.

“It only happened that one time,” she says.

Ziwacha, now 19, doesn’t remember ever receiving any sex education in school in Bikita, a district in southern Zimbabwe . The little she knew was from conversations with friends.

But Zimbabwe does have a Comprehensive Sexuality Education program, meant to equip young people like Ziwacha with knowledge about sex and help reduce teenage pregnancies, which have been soaring in the country, particularly during the coronavirus pandemic. Government data shows that in January and February 2021, nearly 5,000 girls age 17 and under got pregnant.

The trend has called the current sex education offered in schools into question. Some say it falls short and are asking the government to redesign it, while others want the curriculum scrapped altogether, saying that it only encourages young people to engage in early sex.

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Image of a woman who's a wholesale produce buyer looking for quality products amongst fruit and vegetable baskets set on the floor at the market in Maniche, Haiti.
Economy
Rose Hurguelle Point Du Jour

How Natural Disasters Threaten The "Madan Sara," The Women Driving Haiti's Economy

The Madan Sara provide a vital service by collecting farmers’ produce and selling it in urban communities. But natural disasters and growing insecurity have threatened their way of life.

MANICHE — For more than 20 years, single mother Cedeniese Lexima has supported herself and her four children by buying produce from local farmers to sell in the southwestern town of Les Cayes. She is one of hundreds of Haitian women known as Madan Sara, who provide an essential link in the country’s food supply chain.

The Madan Sara, named after a migratory bird adept at foraging food, work together and rely on public transport to move local produce between communities.

“I am not part of any Madan Sara group or any state-owned organization,” Lexima explains. “We are the ‘left behinds,’ but we do our best to help each other out and always travel in groups, never on our own.” Lexima says the mayor’s office does not give them the same support, such as health insurance, that it affords to other workers.

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Photo of ​Asimwe Novia selecting mushrooms at the Mushroom Training and Resource Centre in Kyanamira, Kabale district, Uganda.
Society
Edna Namara

The Mushroom Industry Helping Ugandan Women To Grow Independent

To meet the need, Uganda trains farmers to grow the nutrient-rich fungi. Many beneficiaries are women seeking financial independence.

BUSHENYI — Dorothy Basemera Otim loves a hot bowl of wild mushroom gravy. The retired Ugandan news editor and television personality says for as long as she can remember, she has looked forward to the annual season when suddenly mushrooms spring out of the ground. But lately, that has been rare and unpredictable.

“In the last three years mushrooms have come twice and in different seasons,” she says, as she bends over to pluck some.

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Mongolia Is Late To The Internet, And Falling Prey To Digital Fraud
Society
Uranchimeg Tsogkhuu

Mongolia Is Late To The Internet, And Falling Prey To Digital Fraud

The internet is a new experience for many in the country. That makes people easy prey.

DALANZADGAD — After a lifetime spent tending to cattle in the Mongolian countryside, Sainaa Tserenjigmed settled in the provincial capital of Dalanzadgad and began dreaming of a house of her own.

To build it, she would need a loan of 30 million Mongolian togrogs ($8,800), an amount that seemed out of reach until Sainaa stumbled across a comment on Facebook offering low-interest loans without guarantors. Her interest was piqued.

It was early 2018 and the internet was still a brave new world for Sainaa. The previous year, she’d bought herself a small, white smartphone and her son installed internet at home. “Facebook seemed new and strange, so I started digging tirelessly,” she says. Soon, she was using the platform to watch videos, keep up with the news and communicate with her family and friends.

The person offering loans on Facebook had a foreign-sounding name but his online persona seemed trustworthy to Sainaa and he had many friends, lots of whom were Mongolians. She reached out, expressing a desire to take out a loan.

The response was quick, she says, and the subsequent correspondence unusually friendly. Sainaa was instructed to transfer $120 as a processing fee to receive the first tranche of money. To speed up the process, she decided to schedule four separate transactions in different amounts via Western Union, two to three days apart, amounting to $1,000 in total — more than twice the average monthly salary in Mongolia at the time.

But the person kept asking for more money.

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Photo of LGBT pride in Mexico City, 2019
LGBTQ Plus
Marissa Revilla

How Mexico Is Leaving Its Trans Citizens In ID Limbo

Without the option to change their ID documents to reflect their gender, trans residents in Chiapas and 12 other Mexican states are denied certain rights.

SAN CRISTÓBAL DE LAS CASAS — When Santiago Santiago Rodríguez began his hormonal transition a year ago, he discovered that he wouldn’t be able to change his name and gender on his documents in his home state of Chiapas, which doesn’t have a law regulating the administrative process.

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He decided to have his name changed in Mexico City, one of the country’s 19 states with a gender identity law, a type of legislation that guarantees a person’s right to modify their birth certificate through a simple administrative request. Fewer than half of the country’s 32 states have such laws.

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The HIV-Positive Ugandans Putting Anti-AIDS Campaign At Risk
Society
Nakisanze Segawa

The HIV-Positive Ugandans Putting Anti-AIDS Campaign At Risk

“Elite controllers” are those who have HIV but show no symptoms. They’re proving a roadblock to the country’s otherwise promising anti-infection campaign.

LWENGO, UGANDA — Ahmed was certain the test result was wrong. It was 2003, and he and his five months-pregnant wife were at a health facility where she was getting a checkup. As staff did for all expectant parents, a worker prodded them to get tested for HIV. Ahmed’s wife tested negative. He did not. “I thought it was impossible, that my results must have been mistakenly switched with another person’s,” he says. That week, he took two more tests. Both confirmed he was infected with the virus that causes AIDS.

Health workers and Ahmed’s four wives begged him to start antiretroviral therapy, a cocktail of medications that prevents the virus from multiplying and reduces a person’s likelihood of spreading HIV and developing AIDS. At the time, Ahmed was in his early 40s; to his family, forgoing treatment seemed like courting a premature death. But he didn’t feel sick — no fever, chills or other symptoms — so he refused. Accepting treatment would have meant accepting a diagnosis he didn’t entirely believe, and the stigma that came with it.

Ahmed lives in Lwengo, a town about 165 kilometers (102 miles) southwest of Kampala, the capital. Amid a sweep of banana, cassava and coffee fields, small, white-roofed houses, and tarmacked roads, HIV is something to hide lest neighbors shun or mock a person as a “walking dead.” (That’s why Ahmed asked to be identified only by his first name.)

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