Just over a decade ago, Shajahan Bepari made a living by farming paddy and jute on a small scale and selling poultry reared on his 0.15-acre land in Shariatpur's Zajira.

But then, the government came calling as plans for the construction of a hitherto elusive bridge over the Padma gained steam.

Shajahan soon parted with his land and a place to call home for a sum that was one and a half times higher than its market value.

The controversial River Club site in Cape Town, where giant international retailer Amazon plans to build a South African headquarters, has been embroiled in a protracted legal battle – with rival indigenous groups campaigning for and against the development. Here are the voices of indigenous communities against the development.

PRESS RELEASES | 26 MAY 2017

The island nation of Cabo Verde is facing record levels of food insecurity due to drought, the COVID-19 pandemic and the conflict in Ukraine, affecting some 181,000 people, or 32 per cent of the country, the World Food Programme (WFP) reported on Thursday. 

Recent hard-won gains in food security and nutrition are at risk, the UN agency said, forcing the government this week to declare a social and economic emergency. 

Tensions are spiking once again in the chronically turbulent eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The M23 rebel movement — widely thought to be long dead — has dramatically resurrected. And DRC president Félix Tshisekedi has accused Rwandan president Paul Kagame of again backing it with military support.

Sub-division of ancestral land has all but wiped out farming in Kisii, driving poverty and malnutrition and pushing the population into migration in search of greener pastures.

When my father died in the early 1990s, my mother and my two siblings moved to Kisii in Southwest Kenya. Widowed in her early 30s, my mother inherited about four acres of my father’s ancestral land on which to eke out a living for her young family.