With the cost of a lawyer quite high in Africa, leaving poorer individuals to navigate the winding road to justice alone, community paralegals are helpind individuals and communities demand and realize their rights

Throughout the world, in countries as diverse as Kenya, Namibia, Russia, South Africa, the United States, and Zimbabwe, police often confiscate condoms from sex workers to use as evidence of prostitution, thereby compromising public health interventions aimed at reducing the spread of HIV/AIDS.

Forced HIV testing of sex workers violates their rights to privacy and dignity, can lead to stigma, discrimination and violence, and produces bad public health outcomes.

Following her involvement in workshops and discussions around female genital mutilation (FGM) in Sierra Leone, Chi Mgbako relates her experiences of listening to the views of young people from the country.

I'm walking home on the streets of Enugu from an afternoon of volunteer work in the orphanage, where I draw circles on the children's backs…

With Rwanda’s presidential elections scheduled for August, Chi Mgbako looks at the country's post-genocide government and argues that the Kagame administration is using the memory of the genocide to hold onto power. Highlighting the government’s censorship of the media and its alleged involvement in silencing the opposition, Mgbako argues that such actions trivialise the memory of those who lost their lives in the genocide and questions how this will help Rwanda achieve national unity.

A global conversation about the rights of sex workers is happening without African voices, writes Chi Mgbako. While activists on other continents have successfully organised to engage governments in dialogue, the criminalisation of the trade in Africa has pushed sex workers to the fringe, compromising more than economic protection in the industry as health, safety and legal rights are sidelined. Until African voices can be heard in the struggle, African sex workers will continue being denied their core rights as stigma and discrimination plague their ‘illegal’ livelihoods, argues Mgbako.