Gnawa: The African Sufis

One of Tewfic El-Sawy's long-term projects involves the various Sufi traditions in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa.  In 2009, The Travel Photographer was able to capture a number of international performers playing fusion music alongside the Gnawa, traditional Sufi musicians from Morocco.

Life Without Lights - Ghana

Year-round in Ghana, the sun sets at 6pm and rises at 6am – thus, the residents of communities lacking electricity live half of their lives in the dark. Over ten years ago, the government of Ghana began a massive campaign to provide the country’s rural north with electricity, but the project ceased almost immediately after it began. 

Living without lights is more than just a minor inconvenience. Electricity provides a paramount step on the ladder of economics, and northern villagers know what is being kept from them: lights to study and cook by, machinery and refrigeration, and a standard of living that would attract teachers, nurses, and other civil service workers from the city, not to mention foreign tourists. Potential economic growth is stifled and poverty’s cyclical nature is perpetuated.

Gold's Costly Dividends

This report identifies systemic failures on the part of Toronto-based Barrick Gold that kept the company from recognizing the risk of abuses, and responding to allegations that abuses had occurred. The report examines the impact of Canada's failure to regulate the overseas activities of its companies and also calls on Barrick to address environmental and health concerns around the Human Rights Impacts of Papua New Guinea’s Porgera Gold Mine with greater transparency.

Hunger In America

Hunger in America, by Christopher Anderson focuses attention on the more than 6 million Americans who are 60 and older don't have enough to eat. Many of them are eligible for federal help to buy food under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which used to be called food stamps.

Voices Of Haiti

Jeremy Cowart is a professional photographer from Nashville, Tennessee and wrote the following intro to his Haiti photo gallery:

"After the 7.0 earthquake rocked Haiti on January 12th of this year, I was deeply moved as most of you were. For days I watched as the television flashed images of gloom and doom... dead bodies, crumbled buildings... It just felt like a heartless display of numbers and statistics. "How were the people feeling?" I wondered. I was tired of hearing endless reports from strangers that just arrived to this devastated nation. So I decided to go to Port-Au-Prince myself and ask them directly. My question was simply "What do you have to say about all this?" 

Sophie Gerrard: The Coal Cycle Wallahs

Wobbling and pushing their bikes laden high with stolen coal, the Coal Cycle Wallahs slowly make their way through rural Jharkhand's steep and twisting forest roads.  Home to the largest coal belt in Asia, Jharkhand has been plagued by poverty, lawlessness, bad governance and corruption for over 50 years. The Coal Cycle Wallahs and the work they do, are a stark illustration of poverty in the midst of rich fossil fuel resource abundance.

Natabar Sarangi - The Source

Natabar Sarangi is just one of a growing number of farmers throughout the world who realise that if we do not begin to repair the damage taking place to our agricultural systems and our environment, we will lose not just our cultural identity but our fundamental right to a truly sustainable system of food security. 

It's about a global phenomenon taking place where a nonsustainable system systematically destroys a sustainable one, where short term profit has the power to overwhelm common sense and the consciousness of many millions, where progress is not progress but the wanton destruction of an ecosystem and environment we will never be able to replace.