Global Voices Online: Middle east, north africa

Climate change and war shape who gets sick, who gets care, and who adapts.

Originally published on Global Voices

ICRC’s projects provided solar energy and clean water for hundreds of thousands of Yemenis in 2025 alone — vital for health, hygiene and survival in communities where basic services are facing serious challenges. Picture by ICRC, used with permission.

By Ghadeer Zabarah

In Yemen’s capital, shifting weather patterns and ongoing conflict are no longer abstract concerns. They are actively shaping public health outcomes.

In a neighborhood of Sana’a, 17-year-old Malak Abdulmalik manages chronic respiratory symptoms that worsen with dust and seasonal changes. “I rely on my inhaler almost daily,” she explains, describing how air quality and temperature fluctuations directly affect her breathing.

Her cousin faced a different challenge. After consuming contaminated food, she contracted cholera, a waterborne disease that continues to threaten Yemenis. The illness caused severe dehydration and required 11 days of medical care. Shortly after recovery, she was diagnosed with Hepatitis A, an infection commonly linked to unsafe water and food.

According to the World Health Organization, Yemen has experienced recurrent cholera outbreaks driven largely by unsafe water and limited sanitation access, reporting the highest burden of cholera globally in 2024.

Stagnant water caused by flooding and poor drainage also creates mosquito breeding grounds, contributing to the spread of dengue fever.

The World Bank reports that climate change is expected to intensify extreme weather events in Yemen, which, combined with infrastructure destruction, places additional pressure on water and health systems.

Monitoring outbreaks and adapting on the ground

These cases reflect a broader pattern: environmental stress, damaged infrastructure from war, and limited health resources combine to increase disease risk.

This is what Hana’a Al-Zubairi, coordinator assistant at Yemen’s Ministry of Health and Environment, explains:

Cholera, dengue fever, and Hepatitis A are driven by both climate change and war-damaged infrastructure. Flooded sewage contaminates water, while stagnant pools create mosquito breeding grounds. Many respiratory illnesses remain unrecognized until severe.

“Respiratory illnesses are also increasingly common. Dust storms, rising temperatures, and seasonal shifts contribute to both upper and lower respiratory infections, placing additional strain on individuals and healthcare providers,” Al-Zubairi adds

Her response team conducts weekly district visits to monitor outbreaks, run awareness campaigns, and guide treatments. Seasonal disease spikes often coincide with harvest periods when crops are irrigated with unsafe water. Poverty and misinformation also limit vaccination uptake, leaving children particularly vulnerable.

Expanding health risks

Healthcare workers report that environmental and living conditions are influencing a wide range of illnesses.

Dr. Ali Al-Hamzi, a surgeon based in Yemen, contracted dengue fever after a mosquito bite in 2018. He describes the illness as physically and mentally exhausting, requiring weeks of recovery.

 “Prevention is critical,” he says, emphasizing mosquito control and household protection measures such as window screens. In his case, the disease was relatively mild, but severe cases can require patients to be admitted to intensive care units, he explains.

Delayed care and community-level challenges

Ashwaq Abdullah, a nurse with over 15 years of clinical experience and founder of her own clinic, highlights delayed treatment as a major challenge. “Many patients wait too long before seeking care,” she explains. “By the time they arrive, dehydration or infection has already reached a critical stage.”

During outbreaks at Al-Sabeen Hospital in the south of Sana’a, she observed how poverty forces many patients, especially from rural areas, to delay care, sometimes leading to severe complications such as kidney failure.

She also notes that respiratory illnesses, worsened by dust and changing weather, are becoming more complex, with viral infections increasingly developing bacterial complications. Her advice is clear: “Seek early medical care and maintain hygiene practices such as thoroughly washing fruits and vegetables to reduce risk.”

The role of humanitarian organizations

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Yemen, six diarrhea treatment facilities are currently supported across Yemen, providing medical supplies, hygiene kits, staff training, and operational support.

Their water and sanitation programs aim to improve access to clean water, a critical factor in preventing disease spread. According to ICRC, more than 580,000 people gained improved access to health care services, while around 390,000 people benefited from improved access to safe water through its interventions in the first half of 2025.

Humanitarian organizations, alongside teams such as the Ministry of Public Health and Population staff and community-based health workers, continue supporting disease response efforts through medical assistance, water and sanitation interventions, healthcare training, and the maintenance of essential treatment services despite ongoing systemic challenges

From crisis to climate solutions and resilience

The connection between climate change, conflict, and public health is undeniable. It is visible in water scarcity, disease outbreaks, and the increasing pressure on healthcare systems. Yet focusing only on vulnerability does not reflect the full reality on the ground.

Alongside these challenges, there is a continuous process of adaptation. Communities are not only responding to crises , they are actively developing solutions. They are adapting through renewable energy, solar-powered water systems, improved hygiene practices, community health awareness, and local health workers who continue disease surveillance despite limited resources. Adaptation is no longer an exception; it is becoming part of daily life in Yemen.

Expanding renewable energy, particularly solar energy, represents one of the most practical climate solutions for Yemen. Solar power is not only an alternative energy source; it is a lifeline that supports clean water access, strengthens healthcare services, and improves living conditions in areas affected by infrastructure damage and climate stress. Yemen’s diverse geography also creates opportunities for expanding sustainable energy solutions in different regions of the country through locally driven approaches.

At the same time, effective climate action depends on collaboration with local actors because communities understand their environment, risks, and needs better than external systems alone. This local knowledge makes climate interventions more sustainable and more connected to realities on the ground.

What becomes clear is that Yemen is not only a place of crisis, but also a place of continuous problem-solving. Where challenges exist, solutions also grow. Where climate risks increase, communities continue to adapt and build resilience through practical climate solutions.

In Yemen, adaptation is ongoing. Solutions are already being built. Resilience is not theoretical — it is happening every day through communities, local knowledge, and climate solutions that are shaping a more sustainable future.

Written by Guest Contributor

In Gaza’s displacement shelters, privacy is not suspended; it is erased

Originally published on Global Voices

Shelters, including a temporary improvised bathroom set up between the tents. Photo by the author, used with permission.

By Marwa Rommaneh

In the early morning hours, when schools are supposed to prepare to welcome students, the yards are filled with men sleeping on the ground. Movement begins before sunrise, and lines gradually form outside sanitation facilities. Gaza’s schools are no longer places of education, but have been transformed into displacement shelters, hosting hundreds of families within a single shared space.

In the first week of the war on Gaza in October 2023, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) reported that around 218,600 displaced people were sheltering in 92 of its schools across the Gaza Strip, while many others sought refuge in government schools and other buildings. Over time, these numbers grew, and overcrowding became an entrenched daily reality.

In these environments, it does not take long to realize that something fundamental has disappeared: privacy is no longer part of life.

A continuous collective scene

Everything that once took place behind the walls of a home is now exposed. Cooking, washing, resting, and daily routines all unfold in a single shared space, in front of everyone. There are no rooms, no closed doors, and no corners that offer even a moment of solitude. Life here is not lived separately, but in constant overlap, where the details of each family become part of a continuous collective scene.

This overlap is not only about limited space — it is also about the loss of the ability to be alone, even briefly. Silence becomes rare, and rest is practised cautiously, as if it were temporary in a place that does not allow stability.

During my involvement in polio vaccination campaigns in Gaza, where I worked in data entry and field support, the experience was not limited to its administrative dimension. It was a daily confrontation with this reality. Reaching children required navigating overcrowded spaces and working in environments that offered neither comfort nor privacy. There was no designated space for interaction or care; every step took place within a crowded setting where movement constantly intersected with daily life.

Over time, the loss of privacy is no longer a minor detail; it becomes part of the lived experience itself. Life is exposed, shared, and constantly visible, where nothing remains “private” as it once was understood.

The difficulty of daily life

The World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF have highlighted the growing health challenges facing children in Gaza, particularly the difficulty of delivering healthcare services and conducting vaccination campaigns in overcrowded and resource-limited settings.

In this context, overcrowding becomes more than a description; it becomes a condition that governs everything: movement, communication, and even the delivery of care. Every small detail is shaped by the lack of space and the density of people, making even the simplest tasks more complex.

Tents and shelters for displaced families in Gaza. Photo by the author, used with permission

Children live this reality every day, often without fully understanding or adapting to it. There is no space for normal play, and no environment that provides a sense of safety or comfort. For children with disabilities, the challenges are even greater, as they live in conditions that do not meet their basic needs.

Estimates by Save the Children indicate that during 2024, around 475 children each month in Gaza sustained injuries that could result in lifelong disabilities, including limb loss, hearing impairment, and severe eye injuries. In overcrowded environments, such realities further intensify the difficulty of daily life, where even the most basic conditions for safety and privacy are absent.

After the war: A reality that has not changed

Despite the notion of “after the war,” very little appears to have changed inside displacement shelters. Overcrowding persists, space remains limited, and daily life continues with the same routines that leave no room for personal space. There is no real return to homes, nor alternatives that provide even minimal comfort, only a continuation of the same conditions that have become normalized despite their harshness.

In this reality, “after the war” does not emerge as a new phase, but as an extension of what came before. The same queues, the same shared spaces, and the same sense that life is constantly lived in full view of others. It is as if time stopped at the moment of displacement, without offering people a real chance to regain any part of their previous lives.

This continuity does not only mean that conditions remain unchanged, but it also means they become deeply rooted. Over time, the loss of privacy is no longer temporary, but a long-term condition that reshapes how people relate to space and to themselves.

What do we lose when privacy disappears?

Displacement is not only the loss of a home, but the loss of an entire way of life, the loss of a space that once protected daily details and gave individuals the simple sense that part of their lives belonged only to them

In displacement shelters, people are not just living in temporary places, but in a new reality shaped by constant overcrowding. Over time, the loss of privacy ceases to be temporary and becomes part of everyday life, a reality that reshapes the relationship between people, space, and life itself.

Here, it is not only walls that disappear, but also the boundaries that once gave life its simplest meaning: the ability for a person to have a space of their own, even if it is nothing more than a small corner where no one is watching.

Marwa Rommaneh is a freelance writer and a Business Administration graduate from Al-Quds Open University, writing from Palestine. Written by Guest Contributor

The IDS mapping shows cameras clustered where opposition parties organize, not where ordinary crime is highest 

Originally published on Global Voices

Illustration showing a dictator using surveillance and automated control to watch, predict, and suppress citizens. Illustration by Khalid Bencherif. Used with permission.

By Khalid Bencherif

“On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters and on the wrapping of a cigarette packet — everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed — no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.” – George Orwell, “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

Orwell could not have imagined that eventually, even those few cubic centimetres inside the skull would be contested on a continent already plagued by corruption and tyranny. This matters especially on a continent where corruption, impunity, and executive appetite long predate artificial intelligence. And where AI adoption is outpacing the development of rights-respecting legal frameworks

Africa rushes for smart tools of tyranny

In the past, tyranny in Africa required prisons, informants, secret police, and visible repression. Today, more and more of it arrives as software, financed by credit, wrapped in the language of modernisation, and sold as an upgrade to public safety.

A March 2026 study by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and the African Digital Rights Network found that 11 African governments had collectively spent more than USD 2 billion on AI-powered surveillance systems. Nigeria alone accounted for more than USD 470 million. The kit includes high-definition CCTV, plate readers, facial recognition, biometric identity layers, and a control room where the feeds converge. Much of it is supplied or financed by Chinese firms and banks, while other layers come mainly from Israeli firms.

Statistics about AI-powered surveillance. By the Institute of Development Studies. Used with permission. 

The common justification usually given by African governments is that acquiring this equipment is necessary to fight crime, but the crime numbers are not decreasing. IDS researchers, having examined the installations across several cities, found little evidence that the cameras reduce offending, and the evidence actually shows that cameras cluster in neighbourhoods where opposition parties organise, where protests have happened and where the press has “made trouble” for ruling regimes.

The info-infrastructure of dictatorships in Africa is not new, and it won’t be starting from zero. In most African countries, the state has long had an appetite for data. Records from communications, tax rolls, bank accounts, and administrative registries have been collected for decades and used with little legal restraint, even where protections exist on paper. What is new is the engine. AI turns the dormant files into a queryable archive. A name, a network, a pattern of travel, a history of transactions, now surface in seconds. 

Even the KGB, the Soviet Union’s secret police, as Yuval Noah Harari has pointed out, did not have enough people to read millions of reports on millions of citizens every day. The dust in the archive was itself a form of freedom. AI dissolves that dust.  

The AI-enabled surveillance now coming online in African cities is much cheaper thanks to Chinese open AI models and Israeli smart tools, because it rarely needs to punish anyone. Mass surveillance technologies — cameras, phone software, local internet networks — do not have to arrest anyone. They only need the citizens to know they are there. The awareness of being watched stops most action before it begins. 

The target list

Every movement for change on the continent has begun the same way. A group of people decides the risk of being seen in public is lower than the risk of staying silent. They gather. They post. The images travel. Sometimes the government falls. Sometimes it holds. The calculation in both cases turns on a single moment, when strangers become visible to each other and to the world as a movement. 

The upgrade changes that calculation at the source. 

AI-enabled surveillance is not a neutral grid cast over a city. It is configured around a target list, and that target list is political. The IDS mapping shows cameras clustered where opposition parties organise, not where ordinary crime is highest. 

The effect is pre-emptive; it suppresses dissent before it forms. Facial recognition at a bus stop does not need to arrest the organiser; it only needs to make clear that organising is no longer anonymous, and that being identified carries a cost. For instance, a protest planned for Sunday and identified on Saturday — through metadata, social media posts, network analysis and face-matching — rarely needs to be broken up by police. The organisers already know they have been seen, and they know what being seen can cost: arrest, charges filed later in court, or even being banned from government jobs. Often, the protest simply does not form. 

The logic compresses into a loop: the algorithm flags a person as a likely organiser, and that flag is treated as proof that the event would have occurred; thus, the person cannot be innocent because the alarm itself is the evidence. In a country with thin courts and a politicised security service, this becomes a machine that treats intention as guilt. 

Digital footprints widen the target list. Through the traces users leave online and through state-controlled communications, the state can build a profile of every citizen, then query it for signs of disloyalty. Not for what the person has done, but for what they have liked, who they have called or messaged, which rally their phone was near, which anti-government hashtag they shared. The quietest and most uncomfortable finding within the Atlantic Council’s report concerns this integration of administrative databases into something broader, a loyalty index, built out of records that were each introduced, separately, for a different reason.  

The consequence is that reform dies early. CIPESA (the Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa) documents the chilling effect across fourteen countries; a measurable retreat of expression, assembly, and independent media in places where the surveillance architecture has been built out without rights-based safeguards. The citizen who would have marched, posted, joined the committee, filed the complaint, now calculates and stays home. 

From North to South Africa, a new kind of everyday atmosphere settles in. The seed of change is aborted, not in a cell but in a bedroom, by a person who has understood that the database remembers, and that the algorithm does not distinguish between the opinion expressed and the opinion held. 

This is what the upgrade protects most efficiently. Not the state’s capacity to punish. It’s capacity to make punishment unnecessary. Foucault called this the panopticon: a design in which the inmate, uncertain whether the guard tower is occupied, learns to guard himself. 

Those who refuse

While AI surveillance is becoming a powerful tool for authoritarian regimes, there are small counter-efforts, underfunded, and racing against a procurement cycle that has already delivered the cameras and wired the databases. Several journalists and organisations are documenting abuses, litigating test cases, and pushing for rights-based AI governance. Civic technologists are turning the same tools back on the state, including fact-checking generative content, monitoring hate speech, observing elections, and offering open, safe, smart tools for journalists and activists. 

However, the symmetry is false. The infrastructure, the compute, the training data, the vendor contracts, the technical talent, all sit with the state and its foreign suppliers. They do not sit with the African citizen, who struggles every day for just their daily bread. A civic-tech app might monitor some corruption, but it cannot match the control room. 

The few cubic centimetres

Orwell’s dictatorship needed a ministry, a war, an informant behind every door. The new African version seems to need only a loan agreement for buying AI infrastructure, and a population that has been persuaded that the whole thing is for their convenience. 

The historian Yuval Noah Harari has warned that the combination of biometric sensors, facial and voice recognition “make it possible for the first time in history for a dictatorial government to follow all the citizens all the time,” and could produce totalitarian regimes “much, much worse than anything we saw in the 20th century.” That warning is usually aimed at Beijing. But Beijing and Tel Aviv are starting to export the tools to Africa. 

The fear on the continent is not that AI will turn any single African state into a dictatorship. The fear is that AI is lowering the cost of authoritarian capacity and raising its ceiling — at an unprecedented pace, at precisely the moment when the appetite of corrupt regimes is growing, and the legal and institutional safeguards meant to contain them are thin or absent.  

Certainly, AI can be a lever for development and well-being in Africa; for public services, for innovation, and for expression, too. But, without the underlying infrastructure of democracy and a free press, it becomes a nightmare. 

Khalid Bencherif is a freelance, award-winning Journalist from Morocco, based in Berlin, specializing in covering environmental and political issues in North Africa. He received the 2022 Michael Elliott Award for Excellence in African Storytelling, given by the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ). This piece was made possible by support from the International Center for Journalists’ Michael Elliott Award, which is celebrating its ten-year anniversary. Written by Guest Contributor

A community garden on Damascus's edge is quietly rebuilding Syria's agricultural memory

Originally published on Global Voices

The Solidarity Fields in Jaramana initiative is an extension of the “Solidarity Fields and Dignity” project. Picture by Lahlah. Used with permission.

By Leida Zeidan

This article was originally published in Lahlah in Arabic on April 7, 2026. This translation is republished on Global Voices as part of a content-sharing agreement. 

This post is part of Global Voices’ May 2026 Spotlight series, “Global crisis, local solutions.” This series offers stories of resistance and successful climate action, insight into how communities in the Global South are fighting back against the crisis, analysis of what this might mean for future generations, and more. You can support this coverage by donating here.

On a small plot of land on the outskirts of Jaramana, in rural Damascus, the earth has been transformed into a site for reviving local seed production. In stark contrast to the city's crowded streets, the green expanses of this area represent a departure from the ordinary. It is an attempt to return to rural life, nature, and farming. On these grounds, the initiative known as “Solidarity Fields in Jaramana” was launched at the beginning of last March, when a group of organizers and farming enthusiasts began restoring the production of local and indigenous seeds by preparing the soil, sowing, covering, and irrigating it with the goal of recovering crop varieties that had nearly disappeared, amid the country's deteriorating economic conditions and the decline of agriculture.

From Greece to Jaramana

The Solidarity Fields in Jaramana initiative is an extension of the “Solidarity Fields and Dignity” project, which operates across various regions of Syria with the aim of supporting agriculture and rebuilding the relationship between people and the land. It seeks to empower communities to produce their own food, share harvests with those in need, and create a different model of cooperative work, particularly as environmental challenges and climate change increasingly affect land and agriculture.

Muhannad Deeb, an artist and coordinator of the Solidarity Fields in Jaramana initiative, spoke to Lahlah magazine about the project's origins. It emerged, he said, “from the convergence between the Shughl wa Fan [Work and Art] initiative and ‘Solidarity Fields and Dignity in Syria,’ which was established in 2025 as an extension of the Solidarity Fields project in Greece.”

The Greek Solidarity Fields project was founded by Suleiman Dakdouk, a Syrian refugee, and his fellow Syrians in Greece. Beginning with just 0.4 hectares, two cows, and three sheep, the project eventually expanded to more than 15 hectares, spread across displaced communities. The initiative was built on a principle of self-sufficiency, organizing work residencies, farms, poultry raising, crop harvesting and marketing, as well as the production of food items including dairy products, cheeses, beverages, and other daily necessities. It also established shops to market any surplus production. 

The Shughl wa Fan initiative, for its part, was founded in 2008 as an artistic, cultural, and developmental project aimed at raising awareness within Syrian society about its role in preserving living spaces, and recognizing the impact of art on creating a better environment, engaging local communities alongside governmental institutions, and clarifying the role of artists in society. This alignment in vision and goals led to collaboration and ultimately to the establishment of the Solidarity Fields in Jaramana.

Deeb continues:

After connecting and meeting with the general coordinator of Solidarity Fields in Syria, Suleiman Dakdouk, the Jaramana Solidarity Fields was established in March 2026, work in the field began, and interested parties, farmers, volunteers, and friends were invited to engage with the experience.

Local seeds and food security

The importance of local seeds lies in the fact that they represent the primary source of planting material for farmers. According to FAO, community-based seed systems can account for 80 to 90 percent of total seeds consumed, particularly for self-pollinated crops. Ensuring a supply of local seeds also helps reduce dependence on food aid.

Local seeds are well-suited to local climates and low-input farming systems, and they carry wide genetic diversity, making them resistant to disease and adaptable to climate variation. FAO notes that community seed system activities tend toward integration and self-organization, encompassing the ways in which farmers produce, disseminate, and access seeds directly from their harvests, or through exchange and barter with friends, neighbors, relatives, and through local markets.

Deeb describes the heart of the Solidarity Fields work as relying on “diverse agricultural experiences that are shared to enrich the project,” adding that the initiative sources its seeds primarily from household gardens, “where most people rely on their home plots to produce vegetables.”

According to Deeb, indigenous seeds can be identified by experts, but the most reliable method remains obtaining them from a mature, locally grown fruit. Seed planting is the project's first phase: the initiative has allocated approximately 300 dunams (around 75 acres) of farmland for cultivating the seedlings that emerge from these seeds. After the cultivation and harvest process is complete, the produce is distributed in a way that ensures the project's continuity and the availability of authentic local seeds going forward.

Seeds are the fundamental source of human food and the carriers of the genetic traits of crop varieties and types. Over time, through improvement, selection, and adaptation, the highest-quality varieties have emerged. Improving seeds and obtaining high-quality varieties is essential to increasing production and meeting environmental challenges. FAO underscores that food security depends critically on farmers having access to good seeds appropriate to their environment. Without good seeds, there can be no good crops. This makes projects that provide local seeds particularly significant, especially in post-war and post-disaster periods. 

The importance of Indigenous seeds

The war in Syria caused the rural population to shrink by 50 percent between 2011 and 2016, leading to heavy losses in crop and livestock production, the destruction of irrigation systems, damage to vast agricultural areas, and sharp increases in the costs of agricultural inputs such as seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides. The blockade of certain areas also prevented the transport of seeds, pushing farmers to rely on imported varieties. When war ravages a country, the continuity of its agricultural systems is also destroyed. Farmers may keep their lives but lose land and seed stocks carefully stewarded for generations, lacking the resources for reconstruction. 

Deeb considers this initiative especially significant following the years of drought and conflict, arguing that it “helps increase the number of farmers adopting this approach, thereby expanding the areas cultivated with local seeds, particularly as production costs are reduced through the elimination of chemical pesticides and fertilizers.”

He also believes the initiative has the potential to bring about lasting change in agricultural practice and to influence farmers and local communities: “Most farmers rely on experience before adopting any method in their work, so it's possible for the results of this experiment to influence farmers and the wider community, making it more widespread.”

Given the challenges facing agriculture in Syria and the decline in agricultural output in recent years, the production of local seeds represents a vital step toward ensuring sustainable farming and toward rebuilding the farmer's relationship with the land and their dependence on it as a source of food, in the face of both climatic and political crises.

Written by Guest Contributor