Latest news with #SierraLeone
BBC News
4 hours ago
- Politics
- BBC News
Hull asylum seeker: 'I have years of work in me'
As part of Refugee Week, people in Hull, the scene of rioting and anti-immigration protests 10 months ago, have been learning more about two asylum seekers who have fled Sierra a sunny car park, Francis waves hello to us on his phone screen. Having spent seven months in Hull waiting to hear if he would be granted refugee status, he is now in Scotland preparing an appeal with a lawyer after his claim was are on a group call so Francis can speak to Daniel Roche, a director at Roche Civil Engineering in Hull, who wants to understand his story and what refugees can offer businesses in this country."Every refugee was an asylum seeker once", Francis adds. "When you make an application for refugee status, you are an asylum seeker. If you get that granted, you become a refugee."And can you work when you're a refugee?" asks Daniel. "Yes, if I get refugee status, I can work," replies says to have people like Francis on his team would solve a big headache in the industry. According to industry website Civil Edge, 225,000 new workers will be needed by 2027."All we talk about is a shortage of skilled labour," Daniel explains. As the pair continue to chat, they discover they have plenty in common. They each have two children, but one difference is that Francis is thousands of miles from his girls after he fled West Africa in fear of his life."Back home, I was involved in politics and worked on the elections in 2018. There was some election malpractice and because of saying what I saw, my life was at risk."Daniel adds: "It's not fair, is it? Because of the hand you were dealt, where you were born, things out of [Francis's] control, he's ended up in the UK, with qualifications that are useable here and he can't work."After the call, I join trustee Shirley Hart at Welcome House - a community base and support centre for asylum seekers in part of Refugee Week, representatives from the Refugee Council are there to offer advice and people are getting help to fill in forms, one of which is for Hull college, where they can apply for an English course if they have been here for six aroma of spiced food comes from the kitchen, where volunteers cook a hot meal whenever the centre is is useful to those who live in shared accommodation, who, according to the government, get £49.17 per week each to cover food, travel and clothes. Those in full board hotels get £8.86 per Welcome House, we meet Sillah, who says he fled Sierra Leone in fear of his arriving in Europe he has been diagnosed with hepatitis C and cirrhosis of the liver. He was living at a hotel in the city until he collapsed in March and had to spend three months in the meantime, his application for refugee status was refused and his hotel place was withdrawn, along with his allowance. His condition is controlled now with medication but doctors are unable to release him until he has somewhere to go."I don't want to take up a hospital bed," he says. "But I have nowhere to go. I can't go back [to Sierra Leone]."My life is in danger and without this medicine, I will collapse again." Home Office applications He is talking to Helen, a former Hull primary teacher, who wanted to hear about Sillah's hopes for the future."I'm 30 this year. I have many years of work in me and I want to work in care," he to charity Skills for Care, there are about 131,000 vacant posts in the caring industry."When we're getting to know people, we always ask what they do," Shirley adds."In one day, we had a vet, a doctor, an ophthalmologist and a civil engineer. I see educated, young men who want to work but can't work because asylum seekers can't work."And because of the backlog at the home office... that's why they're in hotels for months and years."At the end of March 2025, there were 79,000 cases awaiting an initial decision, relating to 110,000 people, but the figures suggest the Home Office is making its way through the number is 9% fewer than the end of March 2024. The number of cases awaiting an initial decision is 41% lower than the peak at the end of June 2023 (134,000 cases).Helen sighs."How lucky are we?" she says."Sillah's is just one story. There's a hotel full of people with stories; there's a room full of people here with stories."It is our duty to treat other human beings as human beings, not just numbers, cases and problems." Listen to highlights from Hull and East Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, watch the latest episode of Look North or tell us about a story you think we should be covering here.
The Guardian
7 hours ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
What it's really like … to know I'm going to miss my Harvard graduation because of Trump's travel ban
Next May, I should be walking across a stage at Harvard – my two-year-old daughter in my arms, my name called out, my doctoral hood placed over shoulders that have carried far more than academic ambition. It was going to be more than a graduation. It was to be a culmination, a reclamation. My daughter's presence would symbolise not only my personal triumph but the very journey that led me here: discovering my own uterine fibroid when I decided to become a mother inspired my doctorate. Together, mother and daughter would cross a finish line that generations before me weren't even allowed to approach. This summer, after years of balancing motherhood, research and rigorous study, I was ready to return briefly to Harvard to defend my doctoral dissertation – one final, vital step before next year's graduation. Instead, I am in Sierra Leone, denied the ability to return – not due to misconduct, overstaying or fraud – but simply for being Sierra Leonean. Under new restrictions enacted in June 2025, Sierra Leoneans – and nationals from several other countries – are now denied non-immigrant visas. Our individual circumstances do not matter. I have met every previous legal requirement. I have complied with every visa stipulation throughout my academic journey. I can demonstrate a clear intent to return home. My research is on African women's reproductive health, and I intend to continue working on the continent. Still: no. The sudden denial, without recourse or meaningful appeal, sends a chilling message to thousands of international students who now face a similar fate: educational dreams suspended, futures uncertain, doors closed without warning or reason. This amplifies the already overwhelming fears and hurdles we face. It has never been easy to get a visa. I had to prove financial solvency, undergo invasive medical screenings, pass extensive background checks, and demonstrate to US immigration authorities that my presence would constitute 'national value'. Even after fulfilling these rigorous demands, students such as me are now vulnerable to sudden exclusion. The impact of this ban reaches deeper than individual disappointments. It disrupts academic communities, weakens critical international collaborations, and undermines global scholarship that profoundly benefits the US. My research – focusing on uterine fibroids, a condition severely affecting women's lives across Africa and globally – is critical to advancing women's health. Through my social impact venture, Youterus Health, we centre African women's experiences, turning insight into action by mobilising resources and creating systemic solutions for neglected gynaecological conditions – including abnormal uterine bleeding, fibroids and adenomyosis. These conditions directly affect maternal health, economic empowerment and global equity. Our work elevates uterine care within maternal and reproductive health agendas, challenging historic neglect and reshaping healthier futures for women and communities everywhere. Harvard has embraced me and my work. When I gave birth to my daughter in 2023, I sat for my written exams just two weeks later. Harvard's unwavering support during that intense period made me believe that merit would always outweigh difficult circumstances. The US government's decision undermines this belief, revealing a deeper systemic issue: a harsh, bureaucratic racism selectively silencing voices from African and Middle Eastern countries. This exclusion is neither isolated nor new. African scholars have long navigated bureaucratic hurdles designed to quietly but persistently deny our presence. This latest policy continues a historical pattern of selective exclusion. Yet even during earlier restrictions, such as bans during Trump's first term, many of us held hope. We believed our achievements, resilience and the genuine value of our work would speak louder than our passports. Today, students from banned countries face intensified exclusion without clear paths for appeal or resolution. I have tried to remain positive, to respond with grace. But the truth is, this decision cuts deeply. It denies me not only the moment I earned on that graduation stage but dims the aspirations of countless others who, like me, envision using their education as a force for global good. What do we do when we've done everything right yet find ourselves standing at locked doors? We speak louder. We write bolder. We name these wounds clearly, defiantly. And we persist in rewriting the narrative. I am not just missing the Harvard graduation. The US will be missing what I can offer. Our value – my value – is not defined by a stamp in a passport. Yet, this moment calls for allies in academia, policy and beyond to recognise and actively challenge these systemic barriers. Because a closed door for some diminishes the potential of all. Fatou Wurie is a doctoral candidate at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and founder of Youterus Health, a pioneering African women's health venture.
Forbes
11 hours ago
- Health
- Forbes
Can Improving Taxation In Africa Help Meet Health Needs?
Waiting for malaria vaccination in Uganda's Apac District (Photo by Hajarah Nalwadda) In Sierra Leone, there was a time when 'people were so happy to pay' local taxes, says Joanna Favour Tom-Kargbo, an economic justice manager for the NGO Christian Aid. For instance, her council would make a documentary to show where the money was being spent, such as road or market construction. In that kind of situation, 'you don't need to coerce people to pay. Citizens were willing.' The situation changed when the government used tax revenue to put on a lavish concert, Tom-Kargbo reports. It was poorly attended, and people considered it a waste of money. Trust in the tax system was broken. But this kind of trust can be repaired—and it may be more crucial than ever now. After the U.S. rapidly shut down its main foreign aid agency and eliminated over 80% of aid projects, many countries were left in the lurch. This was especially pressing for those that depended on U.S. assistance for basic health services, from vaccination to malaria prevention. Researchers have estimated that nearly 300,000 people, most of them children, have died from the resulting vacuum of healthcare. One of those is Bukar Mohammed, a 7-year-old boy living with sickle cell disease in Northern Nigeria. After he developed a fever in February, his mother raced with him to their usual clinic—only to be told it had closed the week before due to an abrupt cutoff of funds. The Trump administration, development officials in other wealthy countries, and aid critics around the world have called for nations receiving foreign assistance to find more of their own funds for development programs. This is partly out of necessity. 'If the general overseas development system freezes or decreases, then taxes become even more important than what they currently are,' notes Giovanni Occhiali, a development economist at the International Centre for Tax and Development. The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, which itself faces dozens of layoffs amidst a shrinking pool of money for global health, is urging African countries to fund their health sectors through improved and increased taxation. This could include solidarity levies, including taxes on airline tickets, imports, and cell phone services (though taxes on mobile financial transactions have proven very unpopular in countries including Ghana and Uganda). One UN proposal is for all low- and middle-income countries to tax revenue amounting to at least 15% of their GDP. To some extent, this turn toward domestic taxation is now happening. According to a World Health Organization survey, at least 24 countries are increasing domestic public funding for health. (However, more countries are cutting costs.) Governments are looking to increased taxation for areas beyond health. The Ethiopian government has proposed an organizational tax that to support disaster response, for instance. But in general, earmarking tax revenue for a specific purpose can risk making a country less responsive to emergencies. While governments may be able to temporarily reallocate some resources based on need, it's no simple task to find more domestic money to plug the gaps. Many people are calling for new taxes on unhealthy products like tobacco, alcohol, and sugar-sweetened beverages, both to increase public revenue and strengthen public health. Such 'sin taxes' already exist in South Africa and Botswana. In Zimbabwe, the finance minister recently introduced them in order to dedicate the proceeds to health projects. Yet there will be a lag as these taxes are rolled out. Thus, the World Health Organization is advising countries affected by the foreign assistance cuts to start the sin taxes right away, while rolling out health insurance in the longer term. Overall, improving tax collection sustainably and equitably takes a long time. It took Togo about 12 years to increase the tax–GDP ratio by 5%, according to Occhiali; for most African countries, growing taxation by half a percentage point a year is ambitious. 'Increasing domestic revenue mobilization is always a long-term endeavour,' Occhiali cautions. 'Any type of tax reform really needs to be carefully planned and executed over a number of years.' Indeed, tax changes that seem abrupt or unjust can have tragic consequences. Kenya was shaken by protests last year against proposed taxes on basic goods, following a string of other new taxes. Security forces killed at least 80 demonstrators, by one estimate. The outcry led to a government pledge to avoid new taxes. In Sierra Leone, 'most of the things have been taxed' already, says Tom-Kargbo. Particularly harsh for women feeding their families has been a 2024 tax of 5% on imported rice. This is aimed at bolstering Sierra Leone's own rice production, but the upshot is that many families have simply been forced to eat less rice. There are also now taxes on phone calls and text messages. In the context of waning foreign assistance around the world, Occhiali says, 'there is a risk that governments facing immediate cuts…might be incentivized to take short-term action that might prove counterproductive in the long term.' He advises focusing on better administering the taxes that already exist, rather than raising new ones. It may not be as glamorous as a rushed new tax, but strengthening the foundations of tax systems would ultimately be more helpful. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), many countries could increase their tax-to-GDP ratios, by up to 9 percentage points, by improving tax design and public institutions. Rice for sale at the Lumley Market in Freetown, Sierra Leone (Photo by Saidu Bah) There are many reasons that tax is under-collected in some African countries. One is insufficient resourcing of tax agencies, which creates a vicious circle of not enough money for the overall public purse. When it comes to sufficiently taxing wealthy Africans, the difficulty tends to not be the legal system, but gaps in data and administrative capacity, says Ronald Waiswa, who worked for the Uganda Revenue Authority before joining the African Tax Administration Forum. Corruption is also a problem. And there's a more amorphous factor as well: low trust in governments to fairly collect tax and use it properly. If residents don't see the benefits of taxation, they have little reason to support it. They can even see their own governments as parasitic. As in many African nations, more tax collected in Sierra Leone goes to paying off external debt (primarily to the World Bank and IMF) than is spent on education and health. Sierra Leoneans aren't necessarily seeing the benefits of the tax they're increasingly being asked to pay, which often doesn't even remain in the country. 'We're seeing the impact of poor-quality health services. We are seeing the impact of poverty continue,' Tom-Kargbo notes. 'People are saying, 'Where even are our tax monies going?'' Sierra Leone has already tried earmarking taxes for free healthcare services, Tom-Kargbo reports. The problems have been implementation, accountability, and transparency—and inadequacy in these areas also lowers trust in the revenue authorities. In Ghana, transparency related to tax reforms makes people more likely to support them. In Somalia, focusing on services makes people especially comfortable with paying taxes. Systems are currently stacked against poorer consumers. In Uganda, 'Our domestic tax system now is really regressive,' comments Africa Kiiza, an economic justice adviser for Christian Aid. High earners are paying the same tax on salt, soap, and sugar as unemployed people, he says. Yet ordinary Ugandans aren't seeing those consumption taxes necessarily translate into public services like education and health. In South Africa, the Institute of Economic Justice is calling in the short term not for increased sales taxes, but increased corporate taxes and reduced tax breaks (though some economists believe that South Africa's VAT taxes can be designed well to not be regressive). Occhiali is not in favor of further increasing consumption taxes either. Sales tax is 'already the main source of government revenue across most of the continent,' he points out. 'It sounds a bit perverse to imagine that we should focus on taxes that are already performing relatively ignore the two main sources of revenue that are clearly underperforming': property tax and income tax. In the interest of equality, the Africa CDC recommends 'tiered tax structures to protect low-income populations while ensuring wealthy individuals and corporations contribute more.' Concretely, this could involve not taxing women selling tomatoes informally, for instance, but high earners. This may seem like a straightforward principle, but it's actually been the subject of much debate. One reason that so many African workers' incomes aren't taxed is that many of these workers are operating outside the formal system of labor contracts and official payments. 'Only about 4% of the population on average in the continent pays personal income tax,' according to Occhiali. Yet they are paying a variety of other charges, such as value-added taxes, import taxes and market stall fees. 'There has been, for a very long time, a lot of focus on getting onto the tax registry the vast majority of the informal sector, thinking that they were a gold mine,' Occhiali says, 'rather than pursuing the smaller number of well-off individuals within a country who are often evading a significant amount of their tax liability.' As a spectrum, informality can encompass both unregistered vegetable sellers and high-earning lawyers who don't declare all their income. It would be more productive to focus on the latter, he argues. The good news is that it shouldn't be logistically challenging to properly gather property tax and the income tax of high earners. Technology and data collection are improving in ways that can ease this, such as GIS-based assessments of building materials and structure sizes, which can be used to tax higher-value properties more. In Sierra Leone, Occhiali says, the size of the property register doubled with improved data collection. The bad news is that political will can be hard to amass. 'Political pressure plays an important role in this, arguably more than technical reasons,' Occhiali believes. Many politically connected people are reluctant to declare their own taxes or to target high earners, which has contributed to the current situation where wealthy Africans pay less in tax than the average. Progress can sometimes feel slow, but it's going in the right direction, according to Occhiali. In Uganda, a decade ago, only one of the 71 top government officials had ever paid individual income tax. And fewer than 30% of top lawyers were paying it. Since then, with a dedicated unit, the Uganda Revenue Authority has collected a significant amount of tax from rich people. So inequality within a country's tax system can be addressed. But it intersects with inequality in the global tax system. 'The reason why we pay so much in terms of interest,' Kiiza argues, 'is because our powers to negotiate fair loans and fairer terms of repayments are constrained at the global level, because of our poor representation or under-representation on the IMF boards and the key decision-making bodies.' These aspects are expected to be discussed at the Financing for Development conference that begins at the end of June. But countries including the U.S., where the IMF and World Bank are based, are blocking potential reforms. The current system is evidently stacked against Africa. According to the NGOs Christian Aid, Bond, and the Center for Economic and Social Rights, all of Africa holds only 4.7% of voting shares at the IMF and World Bank, slightly more than the U.K. (at 4.03%) and substantially less than the U.S. (at 16.5%). Unfairness within and between countries is linked, Kiiza stresses. 'Our governments are under capture, just like we are also under capture by these governments.'
BBC News
a day ago
- Sport
- BBC News
Ex-parachute regiment officer Mike Ellicock sets rowing record
A former Parachute Regiment officer has set a new record for rowing solo around Great Ellicock, 50 and from Lewes, East Sussex, departed from his home town on 30 April and returned to the same spot, the John Harvey Tavern, on Wednesday evening, after completing the 1,820 mile (2,929km) journey in 49 Ellicock was aiming to raise £30,000 and awareness for the charity Support Our said he was "incredibly grateful to have been able to get around safely and so fast". He is also the first person to complete the journey via the Great said: "As a 25-year-old platoon commander, I was wounded in action during a hostage rescue in Sierra Leone but made a full recovery and subsequently had the privilege of commanding paratroopers on operations again before making a successful and rewarding transition into civilian life."Not all my former brothers in arms were so fortunate - and that's why I chose this challenge as a way to honour them and raise money for Support Our Paras." Mr Ellicock had previously completed the 125 mile (201km) Devizes to Westminster canoe 2013 he set a world record for running the London Marathon while carrying a 40lb (18kg) pack in just under three and a half hours.
Zawya
4 days ago
- Politics
- Zawya
Ambassador of the Republic of Sierra Leone paid a courtesy call on African Union Commission (AUC) Chairperson
AFRICA H.E. Harold Bundu Saffa, Ambassador of the Republic of Sierra Leone to Ethiopia&Permanent Representative to the AU, paid a courtesy call on H.E. @ymahmoudali, Chairperson of the AU Commission, to convey a message of congratulations on his election. They took the opportunity to exchange views on the ongoing efforts to restore constitutional order in the Republic of Guinea&on the broader developments in the West African region. Distributed by APO Group on behalf of African Union (AU). Disclaimer: The contents of this press release was provided from an external third party provider. This website is not responsible for, and does not control, such external content. This content is provided on an 'as is' and 'as available' basis and has not been edited in any way. Neither this website nor our affiliates guarantee the accuracy of or endorse the views or opinions expressed in this press release. The press release is provided for informational purposes only. The content does not provide tax, legal or investment advice or opinion regarding the suitability, value or profitability of any particular security, portfolio or investment strategy. Neither this website nor our affiliates shall be liable for any errors or inaccuracies in the content, or for any actions taken by you in reliance thereon. You expressly agree that your use of the information within this article is at your sole risk. To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, this website, its parent company, its subsidiaries, its affiliates and the respective shareholders, directors, officers, employees, agents, advertisers, content providers and licensors will not be liable (jointly or severally) to you for any direct, indirect, consequential, special, incidental, punitive or exemplary damages, including without limitation, lost profits, lost savings and lost revenues, whether in negligence, tort, contract or any other theory of liability, even if the parties have been advised of the possibility or could have foreseen any such damages. © ZAWYA 2025
