A darker cloud is befalling underage girls along Southern Africa’s trade routes as the extreme weather crisis fuels desperate survival sex among the region’s youngest and most impoverished rural women.

‘I don’t do it because I want to. It’s hunger,’ Flores Sindi* says to FairPlanet. Sindi is a 17-year-old school dropout in

Matilda McCrear was just two when she was kidnapped in 1860 along with her mother Grace and three sisters by slave traders in present-day Nigeria. They were forced onto Clotilda, the last slave ship to transport Africans to the United States. The ship docked in Alabama in Jul...

Ismail Shikheldin was a step closer to escaping Sudan’s civil war to build a future abroad when he made it to the interview stage of the UK government’s Chevening Scholarship. His hope was dashed when he received an email in March, informing him that his application had been withdrawn, about two weeks before his interview. ‘I was in shock because this is something I have been...

On the morning of 1 March 2026, the usually crowded lanes of Srinagar’s old city fell into an unusual quiet. Overnight, reports had spread rapidly across social media and messaging platforms claiming that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, had been killed in a strike amid escalating tensions in West Asia.

The news mo...

Being a feminist in Latin America isn’t easy, nor is being a woman. In a region where at least 19,254 femicides have been registered in the last five years, this year’s International Women’s Month carried a sense of urgency as a reflection of the many political shifts that are reshaping women’s lives across a turbulent region...