Author: WHES

A lonely road: For the poor in the Deep South’s cities, simply applying for a job exposes the barriers of a particularly pervasive and isolating form of poverty

She set off on the latest day of job hunting wearing tiny star-shaped earrings that belonged to her 18-month-old daughter and frayed $6 shoes from Walmart that were the more comfortable of her two pairs. In her backpack she had stashed a ham and cheese sandwich for lunch, hand sanitizer for the bus and pocket change for printing résumés at the public library. She carried a spiral notebook with a handwritten list of job openings that she’d titled her “Plan of Action for the Week.”

Inside Eritrea: Conscription and poverty drive exodus from secretive African state

Russom, whose name has been changed here for his own protection, was giving a rare account of a military bootcamp in Eritrea, one of Africa’s most secretive totalitarian states. It forms part of a compulsory “national service” for young men and women, an indefinite purgatory that robs them of the best years of their lives and is the key to understanding why so many flee its borders

This superintendent has figured out how to make school work for poor kids. Jennings, Mo. schools leader added more mental health care, a food pantry and shelter for homeless kids

JENNINGS, Mo. — School districts don’t usually operate homeless shelters for their students. Nor do they often run food banks or have a system in place to provide whatever clothes kids need. Few offer regular access to pediatricians and mental health counselors, or make washers and dryers available to families desperate to get clean.

60 million people have been forced to flee war

GENEVA, Dec 18 (UNHCR) – With almost a million people having crossed the Mediterranean as refugees and migrants so far this year, and conflicts in Syria and elsewhere continuing to generate staggering levels of human suffering, 2015 is likely to exceed all previous records for global forced displacement, the UN Refugee Agency warned in a new report today.

Weak agricultural finance, drought feed malnutrition in Zimbabwe

Around 80 percent of South Sudan’s working-age youth are unemployed or underemployed, and many have joined the conflict. Loyola-Marymount University’s professor of African Studies, Jok Madut Jok.explains: “Why do all these unemployed youths flock to the conflict? They join because they have nothing to lose because corruption has not allowed resources to trickle down” to create jobs for them and give them a future, he told IRIN. Photo: Jason Patinkin/IRIN