Africa

More than 640 million Africans live without electricity. This has negative impacts not only on the population’s health and education outcomes it also limits the development the economy.

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Sexual and gender minorities remain dangerously vulnerable to human rights abuses across much of Sub-Saharan Africa. Despite immense legal and cultural barriers, civil society activists around the continent are rising up to improve the lives of LGBTI people. Brian Pellot spoke with two leading activists in Uganda and Botswana.

The NGO Natural Justice and its regional partners, with the support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, have jointly assisted a number of communities to develop community protocols in the context of extractive industries. You can download them and the project report here.

Like nobody else Thuli Madonsela stands for the compliance of constitutional maxims in South Africa. In her seven years in the office as “public protector”, she repeatedly uncovered various abuses of powers by the political elite. We talked to the winner of this year’s German Africa Award.

The German politics on Africa was busy on migration and refugee issues in West Africa, especially Nigeria. But the crisis of internally displaced people within Nigeria is far greater. Mausi Segun, Head of Human Rights Watch in Nigeria, warns that the conflict continues to smolder despite.

In many regions of the world the freedom of the Internet is just an illusion. Especially in Arab countries, the neighbouring states of Russia and Subsahara-Africa the year 2015 marked the lowest point for democratic participation and civil liberties.

United Nations Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, Maina Kiai, explains in this interview with Christine Meissler why he will never give up fighting for democracy and human rights.

Civil society organisations can be a vanguard of progress for the LGBTI community. Despite the growing number of laws and policies impeding LGBTI advocacy, activists and organisations successfully challenge these trends.