For hours the city is on pause as its hawkers and traders, soldiers and civilians shelter from the relentless downpour. Then the rain stops and the streets burst to life again.

A year ago this chaotic lakeside city lived in fear. It was on the brink of being overrun by a rebel army made up of ethnic Tutsi fighters supported with arms, money and volunteers from neighboring Rwanda.

Goma is no longer under siege but the surrounding countryside of the eastern Congo remains embattled. It is a complicated war that includes rebel groups, warlords, ethnic enmities and United Nations forces. Currently the Congo army and the United Nations are fighting together against the rebels of the FDLR.

Dino Mahtani said most of the gold was controlled by rebel groups who use the proceeds to buy arms.

Mr Mahtani, who is due to report to a meeting of the UN Security Council this week, said: “This money helps sustain them [the armed groups] in the field.

“Most gold is shipped to Dubai via Uganda,” he added.

Mr Mahtani, who co-ordinates UN arms embargo experts, told BBC File on 4: “Recently there was a a Congolese Senate report which talked of roughly $1.24bn (£739m) worth of gold or 40 tonnes of material smuggled out on a yearly basis without any customs declaration.”

Disabled people are seldom taken care of by institutions here; mostly they are either left to their own devices on the street or kept behind closed doors because their families are ashamed of them.

“The traditional perception is that a child with disabilities is the result of a curse, or the work of the devil,” said Fantahun Melles, who heads the International Labour Organization’s programmes for the disabled in Ethiopia.

“The situation is worse in the countryside than in the cities. Generally speaking, people think the only place for a disabled person is in the street to beg or in front of a church, otherwise they are ... segregated from the community, which can lead to serious mental disorders,” he told AFP.

The disease, which started from Mahi local government area, has spread to as many as nine other local government areas and threatening other communities in the neighbouring Borno state.

The report said shifting seasons are destroying harvests and causing widespread hunger — but this is just one of the multiple climate change impacts taking their toll on the world’s poorest people, warning that multiple climate impacts could reverse 50 years of work to end poverty.

The report, Suffering the Science — Climate Change, People and Poverty, was published ahead of the G8 Summit in Italy, where climate change and food security are high on the agenda.

From a distance, they hear echoing blasts of heavy weaponry. A Mogadishu district is under attack from radical insurgents once again and the Ugandan peacekeepers calmly scan their radio to locate the clashes.

“Here in Mogadishu, it is like that,” says major Barigye Bahoku, spokesman for the African Mission in Somalia (AMISOM). “We have a word for that: VUCA”.

The Horn of Africa country has been at war for nearly two decades. Foreign forces and peacekeepers have come and gone but an end to the bloodshed still looks out of reach.

The latest round of bloodletting in the Somali capital kicked off on May 7 when hardline Islamist groups launched a fresh offensive aimed at removing internationally-backed President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed.

That was two years ago, but the long sentence is not her greatest worry. Achieng, who is incarcerated at Kodiaga prison in Kisumu, gave birth to her fourth child, a boy, at the prison’s health centre, one-and-a-half years ago.

Achieng, 32, who hails from Ng’iya in Siaya, separated from her husband due to domestic problems.

“My husband, a driver, chased me away in 2005 since he had plans to marry another woman,” she says.

But the worst was yet to come, since Achieng was arrested on suspicion of robbery.