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Kamiti penitentiary in the outskirts of Nairobi hosts more than 4,200 detainees. The Consolata Missionary Sisters are committed to a programme of training for the young prisoners. Standing in front of the main entrance to Kamiti penitentiary, the visitor has no idea of what lies behind the barrier of poles, wire nets, walls topped with […]

On January 25, 2019, a massive mining dam collapsed in north central Brazil, devastating the nearby community of Brumandinho. Dozens are confirmed dead and hundreds are missing—and the numbers continue to grow. The dam was 280 feet high and nearly a half-mile wide. This tragedy could have been avoided. The company responsible for this disaster,

The Limpopo River Basin is a fragile environment threatened by the combined pressure, of climate change, urban waste disposal and mining activities. The sluggish waters of the Limpopo, called Espiritu Santo River by the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama in 1498 and much later the “great grey-green, greasy Limpopo» by Rudyard Kipling, flow from South

Manihot esculenta, commonly called cassava (Family Euphorbiaceae) is one of the most important and widely cultivated tropical food crops. It is a semi-woody perennial shrub growing to an average of up to 3 metres high; having single to few stems, sparingly branching. Cassava is the third largest source of food carbohydrates in the tropics, after

Lake Tiberias where, according to the Gospels, Jesus walked on the water: Israel is trying to fill it with desalinated sea water. In Israel the situation of Lake Tiberias grows ever more critical, the lake upon which (according to the Gospel accounts) Jesus walked. It is drying up due to a five-year drought in Israel,

In 2018, 40 missionaries were killed in the world, 17 more, almost double, compared to 23 in 2017. Among them 35 were priests, one seminarian and four lay people. After eight consecutive years in which the highest number of missionaries killed was in America, in 2018 Africa had the primacy of the bloodshed: 19 priests,

It is an ancient pre-Christian and early Christian tradition to grant asylum to refugees in holy places. In Europe, this tradition was revived by the Charter of Groningen, passed in 1987 by religious communities and grass-roots church initiatives. It says: “When we have good reason to assume that a refugee or asylum seeker, threatened with

The Niger River is the main source of life of large parts of West Africa. But owing to climate change and human activities, riparian populations face growing challenges. Sailing down the Niger River from the Fouta Djalon Mountains of Guinea to the sands of Timbuktu, the pearl of the desert and to the mangroves of

Asia is exporting the Tuk Tuk, tricycles, to Africa. Now for the electrical version. Growing urbanisation and increasing pollution in African cities demand a new approach capable of providing transport systems that are clean and cost effective. In order to understand how to respond to this problem creatively, it is useful to analyse the solutions

The commercial war between the USA and the rest of the world has only just begun and some voices point out that the current escalation of tariffs can last up to 20 years.  Since Trump came to power he has not stopped sending signals that pointed to his disenchantment with the economic agreements of his