Africa

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Seaweed farming using the off-bottom seaweed farming approach—tying algal fonds or seaweed seeds to ropes attached between wooden pegs driven into the ocean sediment. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

By Joyce Chimbi
MWAZARO BEACH, Kenya, Mar 8 2024 (IPS)

Nearly two kilometers into the Indian Ocean from the Mwazaro beach coastline in Lunga Lunga Sub-County, Kwale County, women can be spotted seated in the shallow ocean waters or tying strings to erected poles parallel to the waves. It is a captivating sight to see rows of seaweed farms in the Indian Ocean.

Seaweeds are a group of algae found in seawater and come in green, red, and brown species. The seaweed farms are a predominantly female-dominated form of aquaculture and their owners can only be spotted during low tide, especially in the morning. Once the tide comes in, the women will begin their journey back to the shores as the waters slowly rise.

Saumu Hamadi tells IPS that in 2016, residents of Mwambao village along the Mwazaro beach coastline started a community-led, community-driven initiative to conserve mangroves, protect the environment, and restore their fisheries, which had been destroyed by significant mangrove forest degradation.

“We realized that the more our mangroves disappeared, the fish ran away and so did the fishermen. We rely on fish for food and money. Men sell the big fish, such as the kingfish, shark, and rayfish, to the beach hotels, and women sell crabs and prawns by the roadside or in small village markets. The situation was threatening our daily bread and we decided to volunteer as a community to restore and protect our mangroves,” Hamadi explains.

Rehema Abdalla walking to her seaweed farm, located nearly 1.7 km away from the Mwazaro Beach coastline. Seaward farming is conducted in the ocean during low tides. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

 

Rehema Abdalla and Saumu Hamadi walking to their seaweed farms, where other women are already hard at work, sorting and packing their harvests. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

 

Rehema Abdalla and Saumu Hamadi weigh seaweed using a home scale. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

 

Women at work at the seaweed farm. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

“There were too many people cutting down mangrove trees, destroying the places that the fish we depend on call home. There was also a lot of soil erosion and the water flowing along the River Hamisi that pours into the Indian Ocean within this village’s coastline carried the soil into the ocean, polluting it. We formed two community groups: Mwambao Mkuyuni Youth and Bati Beach Mwambao. Women make up 80 percent of the members in both groups.”

Abdalla Bidii Lewa, a community coordinator on mangrove restoration in Pongwe Kikoneni ward where Mwambao village is located and chair of Bati Seaweed Farmers, tells IPS, “Mangroves have protected our villages and surrounding areas from extreme weather and disasters such as those that affected large parts of the coastal region during the heavy floods in November and early December 2023. Where houses were swept away and farmlands destroyed, we were safe from the disaster.”

Seaweed farming. Credit: Joyce Chimbi and Cecilia Russell/IPS

Research shows mangroves significantly prevent the progression of climate change while also playing a major role in limiting its impact. This is critical as temperatures rise dangerously, sea level shoots to alarming levels, and coastal climate-induced disasters become frequent, intense, and severe, with catastrophic results.

To avert coastal climate hazards and secure mangrove-related benefits for present and future generations, the community undertook mangrove conservation and restoration activities in earnest.

Then, in 2017, a scientist conducting research into seaweed farming using the off-bottom seaweed farming method—tying algal fonds or seaweed seeds to ropes attached between wooden pegs driven into the ocean sediment—approached women in the community.

“Of the two seaweed strains that grow on Kenya’s south coast, cottonii and spinosum, the scientist recommended that we plant spinosum and gave us the seeds. Seaweeds do not need something to grow on. We erect sticks into the ground inside the ocean water during low tides and plant seaweed seeds by tying them to strings fastened on these sticks. We harvest every 45 days. We have to tie the strings and place the sticks properly so that they are not swept away during high tides,” says Rehema Abdalla, a seaweed farmer in Mwambao village.

On concerns that aquaculture could form the entry point for mangrove degradation, Hamadi says, “It is not the case with seaweed. The mangroves are important to the survival of our seaweeds by ensuring that we have normal, safe tides and waves. When seaweeds are swept away, they stay trapped within the roots of the mangroves and we collect them from there. It is rare, but once in a while, the tides can be very strong.”

Lewa says seaweed farming is emerging as a new and sustainable climate change mitigation strategy while offering communities adjacent to mangroves and coastlines an alternative livelihood, reducing dependency on fishing and natural resources inside mangrove forests and the oceans. Seaweeds are superfoods, highly nutritious, can be used in sushi, soups, salads, and smoothies, and are an asset in the feed industry, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals.

“The amount of seaweed harvested depends on the amount planted and every 45 days, you will get a harvest. At the moment, one kilogram of seaweed goes for USD 0.22 (Ksh 35). I am currently targeting making USD 467 (Ksh 75,000) every 45 days from seaweed. We also sell seaweed seeds to other women doing mangrove conservation, such as Imani Gazi and the Gazi Women Mangrove Restoration Group, from within Kwale County,” Hamadi says.

Seaweeds compliment mangroves by absorbing nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorous, and carbon dioxide. They do not require soil, fertilizer, freshwater, or pesticides, and they significantly improve the environment in which they grow. Seaweeds efficiently absorb carbon dioxide, using it to grow and even when harvested, the carbon remains in the ocean.

Research shows that seaweed can pull more greenhouse gases from the water compared to seagrass, salt marshes, and mangroves based on biomass. Mwazaro’s beach community is on track to add seaweed as part of their blue carbon sink, setting the pace for other coastal communities.

All the same, the women are facing challenges such as a lack of mortar boats to help transport their harvest to the shore. Currently, they use a tedious process whereby they tie sacks of seaweed on their waste and wait for the onset of high tide in the early afternoon to push them from the seaweed farms to the shore. They are also struggling to access a larger market, currently relying on one major large-scale buyer and small buyers within the village and other mangrove conservation groups from neighboring villages.

IPS UN Bureau Report

This feature is published with the support of Open Society Foundations.

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Credit: WFP/Arete/Siegfried Modola

By Olivier De Schutter and Luis Felipe López-Calva
WASHINGTON DC, Mar 8 2024 (IPS)

Poverty is multidimensional. If we think of classical thinkers, Adam Smith referred to the basis of self-respect and the importance of being able to “appear in public without shame,” while John Rawls wrote about “primary goods,” which included rights and liberties as well as income and wealth.

Amartya Sen, advancing in formalization, brought the notion of “functionings” as the “beings and doings” effectively available to people in their capability set, so they can “pursue the life plans they have reasons to value.”

It is mainstream today to argue that poverty is multidimensional, moving beyond just access to goods and services. But exploring which dimensions are “appropriate” in each context has been a fundamental pursuit of development analysts and practitioners in recent decades.

It has been almost 30 years since Sabina Alkire devoted her work to the understanding, classification, and measurement of the many dimensions of poverty, particularly those that are “hidden” in our concepts and indicators.

Indeed, there are some dimensions associated with experiencing the condition of poverty that cannot be so easily observed and have not been properly measured yet are very important when it comes to policy effectiveness.

Those dimensions include aspects related to emotions that trigger behavioural responses: feelings of isolation, discrimination, effects on the sense of dignity and self-respect, and disempowerment. We have come a long way in our thinking about poverty, but our actions to tackle it and to understand the complex interactions between dimensions remains underdeveloped.

At the World Bank, the project on “Voices of the Poor,” started almost 30 years ago, strove to think differently about poverty. It drew on the views of 60,000 people living in poverty across 60 countries to better understand the challenges they faced, helping expand our understanding of poverty to include not only income and consumption but also lack of access to education and health, powerlessness, voicelessness, vulnerability, and fear.

Later, in 2012, the Social Observatory project used a broader view of poverty dimensions to make anti-poverty projects more adaptive—and ultimately more effective. Since 2018, the World Bank’s multidimensional poverty measure has gone beyond monetary deprivation to include other dimensions such as access to education, health, nutritional, and basic infrastructure services.

And in 2023, the World Bank began publishing the multidimensional poverty index—an effort by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative and the United Nations Development Programme—which is especially pertinent for low-income countries.

More recently, researchers from the University of Oxford and the global anti-poverty movement ATD Fourth World uncovered a set of “hidden dimensions of poverty” through a three-year participatory research project in six countries (Bangladesh, Bolivia, France, Tanzania, the United Kingdom, and the United States) that sought to further refine our understanding of poverty.

The teams identified nine dimensions of poverty that were common across all countries, despite the vastly different circumstances in each, using the “merging of knowledge” methodology. This approach brings together people in poverty (with their knowledge of the reality of poverty), academics (with their scientific knowledge), and practitioners (with their action-based knowledge).

The identified dimensions included a lack of decent work or income, of course, but also feelings of powerlessness, lacking control, and experiencing “povertyism” (negative attitudes and behaviours toward people living in poverty).

These lesser-recognized and lesser-visible dimensions of poverty are no less important for policies designed to combat poverty than a person’s income or access to employment. Escaping poverty will be far more difficult if you don’t also address the discrimination people in poverty face, the shame they experience, or the “aspirations gap” that results from being raised in a low-income household.

But until now, policy makers have lacked the practical tools they need to properly capture and combat these hidden, and thus largely ignored, dimensions of poverty.

The Inclusive and Deliberative Elaboration and Evaluation of Policies (IDEEP) tool, which was presented at the ATD Fourth World, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank conference on Addressing the Hidden Dimensions of Poverty in Knowledge and Policies, is the first of its kind to help policy makers transform the findings of this research into action.

Created in partnership between the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights and ATD Fourth World, the IDEEP tool supports policy makers in designing, implementing, and evaluating anti-poverty policies in direct partnership with people in poverty, ensuring all its dimensions, including those that are “hidden,” are taken into account.

This is crucial, given that policies that do not account for the views and lived experiences of people in poverty tend to be riddled with blind spots, particularly around these hidden dimensions.

The IDEEP tool identified social isolation among disadvantaged communities as an unintended result of a housing project in Mauritius, for example, and institutional maltreatment resulting in fewer people accessing social protection benefits in France.

The right to participation is a human right. Only by upholding it will we achieve better informed, more effective, and more imaginative policy making. Yet the record of participatory processes in anti-poverty policy making is mixed, with policy makers often simply “informing” or “consulting” people in poverty, rather than recognizing them as the real experts about the obstacles they face.

To combat this, we need to go one step further in our efforts to fulfil the right to participation by introducing the idea of “deliberation,” which is defined in the IDEEP tool as bringing together different groups, including people in poverty, who meet, present arguments based on their unique insights, weigh them up, and propose actionable solutions.

The IDEEP tool offers a new, deliberative approach to anti-poverty policy making, one that recognizes the power imbalances inherent in traditional participatory processes and brings together different groups as equals to debate potential solutions before arriving at a consensus. This is a true merging of knowledge.

This approach is especially urgent as we rapidly head towards 2030, the target year for achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including the goal of eradicating extreme poverty for all people everywhere (SDG1). If we continue on a path of business as usual, we will not achieve this ambitious goal.

We need to widen our perspective and rethink how we can jumpstart a process of inclusive and sustainable growth for all; this includes engaging with those with lived experiences in poverty in the search for meaningful, holistic policy solutions. Without embracing this, efforts to combat poverty—and its hidden dimensions—will fall flat.

Olivier De Schutter is UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Human Rights Council; Luis Felipe Lopez-Calva is Global Director, Poverty and Equity Global Practice.

Source: World Bank

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Credit: UNESCO

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 8 2024 (IPS)

The Paris-based UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), whose mandate includes promoting the safety of journalists and ensuring press freedom worldwide, has pointed out that 2023 has been a particularly deadly year for journalists who work in conflict zones.

Audrey Azoulay, UNESCO Director-General, said at least 38 journalists and media workers were killed in the line of work in countries in conflict in 2023, compared to 28 in 2022 and 20 in 2021.

The ongoing hostilities in the Middle East were responsible for a large majority of conflict-related killings, with UNESCO having so far reported 19 killings in Palestine, 3 in Lebanon and 2 in Israel since 7 October.

The killings of journalists also took place in conflict zones and civil wars in Afghanistan, Cameroon, Syria and Ukraine.

“This is a dramatic toll. Never in a recent conflict has the profession had to pay such a heavy price in such a short space of time”.

“I call on regional and international actors to take immediate action to ensure that international law is respected. Journalists should never, under any circumstances, be targeted. And it is the responsibility of all actors to ensure that they can continue to exercise their profession safely and independently,” she said.

Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), told IPS “the near-record high number of journalist killings in 2023 clearly indicates that we must work collectively to ensure that journalist killers are brought to justice, that a culture of safety prevails in newsrooms, and that the public’s right to be informed is protected from those whose power is threatened by the scrutiny of reporting.”

UNESCO said the figures do not include deaths of journalists and media workers in circumstances unrelated to their profession, which have also been reported in significant numbers in 2023.

And these tragedies are only the tip of the iceberg, with widespread damage and destruction of media infrastructure and offices and many other kinds of threats such as physical attack, detention, the confiscation of equipment or denial of access to reporting sites. Large numbers of journalists have also fled or stopped working.

Such a climate contributes to what UNESCO is describing as “zones of silence” opening up in many conflict zones, with severe consequences for access to information, both for local populations and the world at large.

This global trend can be explained by a significant decline in killings outside of conflict zones, which have reached their lowest total for at least fifteen years – especially in Latin America and the Caribbean, where 15 killings were reported, compared with 43 in 2022, according to UNESCO.

In a March 7 report, CPJ provided its most recent and preliminary account of journalist deaths in the war. “Our database will not include all of these casualties until we have completed further investigations into the circumstances surrounding them.”

“The Israel-Gaza war has taken a severe toll on journalists since Hamas launched its unprecedented attack against Israel on October 7 and Israel declared war on the militant Palestinian group, launching strikes on the blockaded Gaza Strip”.

CPJ said it is investigating all reports of journalists and media workers killed, injured, or missing in the war, which has led to the deadliest period for journalists since CPJ began gathering data in 1992.

As of March 7, CPJ’s preliminary investigations showed at least 95 journalists and media workers – higher than the UNESCO figures– were among the more than 31,000 killed since the war began on October 7—with more than 30,000 Palestinian deaths in Gaza and the West Bank and 1,200 deaths in Israel.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) told Reuters and Agence France Press news agencies last October that it could not guarantee the safety of their journalists operating in the Gaza Strip, after they had sought assurances that their journalists would not be targeted by Israeli strikes, according to a Reuters report.

Journalists in Gaza face particularly high risks as they try to cover the conflict during the Israeli ground assault, including devastating Israeli airstrikes, disrupted communications, supply shortages, and extensive power outages.

CPJ said reporting from the front lines of a conflict is one of the most challenging assignments a journalist can undertake.

“It is important that journalists prepare before an assignment to understand the environment they are entering –and the deadly threats they may face”.

Striking a more personal note, the CPJ said it is deeply saddened by the killing of Al-Jazeera Arabic camera operator Samer Abu Daqqa and the injuries suffered by his colleague, Al-Jazeera Gaza bureau chief Wael Dahdouh who was injured in what was believed to be an Israeli drone strike in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza, on December 15.

The CPJ called on international authorities to conduct an independent investigation into the attack to hold the perpetrators to account.

The wife, son, daughter and grandson of Wael Dahdouh, were also killed in an Israeli air raid.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Boxer Cindy Ngamba tells BBC Sport about her journey from Cameroon to England and the challenges she has faced in trying to earn a spot at the 2024 Paris Olympics.

A selection of the best photos from across the African continent this week.

A selection of the best photos from across the African continent this week.