糖心传媒

RUSHINGA, Zimbabwe - Hundreds of women hired by charities to clear deadly landmines across Zimbabwe are now struggling to survive after the United States and other big donors slashed foreign aid - and with it, axed their jobs.

The women were working for international NGOs, including The HALO Trust and APOPO, in eastern Zimbabwe where former colonial rulers laid millions of anti-personnel landmines along the border with Mozambique during the 1970s Liberation War.

RUSHINGA, Zimbabwe - Agness Joe vividly remembers hearing a loud bang and then the screams of her husband and children.

Joe had stepped on a landmine as she walked from her farm in Mozambique back to her home in Zimbabwe in 2011. Both of her legs were gone below the knee. By some miracle, the baby on her back and her daughter walking nearby were unhurt.

When Loveness got a job offer from an English care provider in March, the 32-year-old Zimbabwean thought her dreams of building a new life abroad were finally coming true.

But just weeks later, the company told her they could not proceed because of new rules requiring care providers to prioritise employing workers

No sanitary pads mean no school for teenagers like Achol, who lives in one of the world's biggest refugee camps. Then again, most of her teachers have been sent home already.

Thanks to swingeing cuts to the U.S. aid budget under President Donald Trump, life at Kakuma camp in northern Kenya has got a whole lot harder.

Zimbabwean mother Getrude Mucheri had walked miles in the rain to get her expired contraceptive implant removed and a Depo-Provera birth control injection instead.

But the 35-year-old mother, who relies on free family-planning services, was out of luck when she arrived at the Chitakatira health clinic in eastern Zimbabwe.

Abigail Kadirire picks a dark green caterpillar with white stripes off a ragged and torn maize plant and puts it on her palm. She is clearly distressed.

"This is the second time this farming season that I am seeing it in my fields," the 42-year-old single mother-of-six said in Kamutepe village, in the northern Rushinga area, some 250 km (155 miles) from the capital Harare.

Loveness Madangawa prepares lunch over an open fire in Mutare in eastern Zimbabwe - she has an electric stove, but power cuts caused partly by drought hitting the main hydropower station means she has no choice. 

"It is not easy, but I am now used to it," the 35-year-old mother-of-three told Context in the densely populated suburb of Dangamvura.

In early November, Precious Chinonzura went to a telehealth, or e-health, booth in the local shopping centre in her village in Zimbabwe to see if she could get relief from bladder pains that had been bothering her for a month.

The 30-year-old consulted a doctor online and by evening the medication he prescribed had been delivered to her village of Nhedziwa from a telehealth booth in Chakohwa, some 22 km (14 miles) away.

Nigerian nurse Temitope Ogundare has laid out a fastidious, one-year plan to get himself a well-paid nursing gig in Britain.

Saving half his monthly salary of 45,000 naira ($29) - hard earned in a private clinic - he successfully financed the key English language test needed to bolster his credentials. 

When Zimbabwean mother-of-four Eunice Sinoya enrolled in a first aid course near the capital Harare she was lured by the college's promise of a job in Britain's care sector.

But more than a year on, she is sitting at home with her dream in tatters, the victim of a fraud that has cost her thousands of dollars.