Joanna Moorhead

Girls now regularly start puberty aged eight or nine. How easy is it to cope at primary school?

It’s 10am on a stiflingly hot Monday morning and I am in a delivery room with one of the unluckiest mothers on the planet. She is Dahara Laouali, and at the moment she is lying on a narrow, dusty hospital trolley pushing her baby into the world. Although the birth is imminent, Dahara is making no noise at all. This is Niger, where the tradition is that mothers labour in silence.