Compass Media

Magawa (an African giant pouched rat) has been awarded a prestigious gold medal for his work detecting land mines. Magawa has sniffed out 39 landmines and 28 unexploded munitions in his career.

The UK veterinary charity PDSA has presented him with its Gold Medal for "life-saving devotion to duty, in the location and clearance of deadly landmines in Cambodia”.

The seven-year-old rodent was trained by the Belgium-registered charity Apopo (), which is based in Tanzania and has been raising the animals - known as HeroRATs - to detect landmines and tuberculosis since the 1990s. The animals are certified after a year of training. In 2014 I visited the Herorats of Apopo in Tanzania.

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Three days after Kenya recorded its first COVID-19 infection in mid-March, the government decided to close all schools. A few weeks later, Gumato's parents decided to have their daughter undergo female genital mutilation (FGM), which is prohibited in Kenya but still practised by some tribes including the Gabra, a nomadic camel-herding tribe that lives in a semi-arid region in northeast Kenya..

"We were happy that schools closed, because this gave us a better opportunity to circumcise our girls," Gumato's mother explains. "School holidays normally are a bit short for the girls to fully recover.”

She wanted her daughter to undergo FGM, because Gabra men only marry circumcised girls.
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Read our story 'School closures in Kenya lead to rise in FGM’ on  (link in bio)
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Text: .dijkstra
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Seventeen-year-old Anna had just started her final year of boarding school when coronavirus came to Kenya. 'In school we got sanitary towels and plenty of food. But since I got home, we struggled. My mother lost her job, there was no money, no food, no sanitary towels so I started looking for money,' she says. 'I met a 24-year-old boy in the streets who offered me some money for food and sanitary towels. Because he was so nice to me, we started to have s*x and after one month I found out I was pregnant. The boy doesn't want to support me and wanted me to do an (illegal) abortion. I feel terrible about my life and I'm afraid that I won't be able to finish my school because my mother is a single mum so she needs to work and cannot support me with the baby’
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Read our story 'School closures in Kenya lead to rise in FGM’ on  (link in bio)
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Text: .dijkstra
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Sarah says she was r***d by a boy who offered her food in exchange for s*x after her school was closed and her parents could not afford to feed her.
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Read our story 'School closures in Kenya lead to rise in FGM’ on (link in description)
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Text: .dijkstra
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To help some of the hundreds of thousands of Kenyans who have lost their jobs because of the coronavirus pandemic, the government is paying people to brave open sewers to clean up their neighbourhoods
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Link to our story on BBC in description
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                               .dijkstra             

To help some of the hundreds of thousands of Kenyans who have lost their jobs because of the coronavirus pandemic, the government is paying people to brave open sewers to clean up their neighbourhoods
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Link in description
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I’ve seen many camels during my travels on the African continent, but I’ve never seen as many camels at one place as in Maikona, Northern Kenya.
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.dijkstra

Beautiful Rendille woman with her baby in Laisamis, Kenya.
On assignment for and
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.dijkstra

This Gabra man is a happy man. After not being able to speak for more than 30 years he regained his ability to speak. A miracle has happened!
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.dijkstra

Due to the school closings because of the corona crisis, girls in Kenya struggle even more to get access to sanitary towels. Today, I joined during their distribution of sanitary pads to teenage girls within their communities in Kibera. Through the 1,000 girls in Kibera get access to sanitary towels every month.
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.dijkstra

@ Kibera Slums Nairobi



The Change Makers of Stand Up And Shout () disinfect the streets of Nairobi by spraying every boda boda, matatu and more during this Covid-19 pandemic!
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.dijkstra