Asia

The latest Demographic and Health Survey for Nepal shows that more than half of the children in remote rural areas are chronically malnourished, and most of them are girls. “Girls are neglected because they are thought not to need strength,” Indra Raj Panta, programme officer for Decentralized Action for Children and Women in Jumla, told IRIN.  Photo: Natalie Bailey/IRIN

A migrant farm worker peers into an iris scanner in New Delhi in the first effort to officially record each Indian’s identity as an individual.  Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

For the past decade, hundreds of Afghan war widows have convened on a slope known as Tapaye Zanabad (the hill that women built) building mud hovels by hand and living as a community of sisters.  Photo: Washington Post

Breastfeeding babies is vital, say experts.”Some of the [Nestle] marketing strategy presents formula as better than breastfeeding,” Laurence Gray, World Vision’s Asia-Pacific advocacy director, told IRIN. However, in developing countries, formula is frequently prepared in unhygienic circumstances with unsafe water and misunderstood instructions, with bad results for babies. “In poor nations, formula-fed infants are four to six times more likely to die of infectious disease than breastfed babies,” said Gray. “The problem is not with the formula, but with the preparation,” he added.   Photo: UNICEF

“Domestic workers face beatings, sexual abuse, non-payment of wages and human trafficking situations. They run the gamut of physical and mental abuse used to control someone and in some households it is a slave owner mentality,” said Human Rights Watch (HRW) Deputy Director in Asia Phil Robertson. “There are enough cases of abuse that there has to be some sort of protective framework for these domestic workers.” To activists and domestic workers celebrating both in Geneva and abroad, the most groundbreaking part of the document is the acknowledgment that domestic work is, in fact, work.  Photo: David Swanson/IRIN

Feeding children has become harder for impoverished families, some of whom can no longer afford to provide a decent meal for them “We can no longer manage to offer our five children even a single decent meal. Prices are too high, I was recently laid off from my factory and now do only odd jobs, earning around Rs. 6,000 [US$70] a month. Almost the entire amount goes on buying food,” Fareed Ahmed, a textile factory worker, told IRIN. Photo: Kamila Hyat/IRIN