Africa

The Queen joined a traditional dance in Nairobi and stopped to feed orphaned elephants.

The Rafah crossing with Gaza has been open and shut frequently over the years. Why is it so contentious for Egypt?

The couple had faced life in prison on charges of torture but agreed to a plea bargain.

IFAW recently translocated elephants into Kasungu National Park, which is on the Malawi-Zambia border. IFAW is implementing the Room to Roam initiative so that these elephants can have safe passage in the corridor. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

By Charles Mpaka
CHIPATA, ZAMBIA, Nov 1 2023 (IPS)

As we approach the forest in the village to appreciate Andrew Mbewe’s beekeeping enterprise, a bee from a hive close to the edge of the natural woodland stings him on the cheek.

He steps back quickly, waving everyone away from danger, as he grimaces and grumbles in pain while trying to take out the stinger to prevent his face from swelling.

“That’s one of the duties they are performing,” he says through his gritted teeth about his 18 beehives in this forest.

He examines the tips of his index and thumb fingernails to see if he has taken out the bee’s poison-injecting barb.

“These bees are guardians of this forest,” he says. “They protect it from invaders. That’s one of the reasons this forest is still standing today.”

Across the villages along the Chipata-Lundazi road, which cuts through a landscape that stretches between Kasungu National Park in Malawi and Lukusuzi and Luambe National Parks in Zambia’s Eastern Province, one feature is likely to catch the eye: impressive stands of natural forests among villages and smallholder farms.

Andrew Mbewe has 18 beehives in this forest. He quit poaching. Now he leads a community conservation group that fights poaching and implements alternative livelihood activities such as beekeeping. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

In Mbewe’s village in Chikomeni chiefdom in Lundazi district, these indigenous forests are home to over 700 beehives belonging to more than 140 families.

The forest protection duty that the bees are providing is an unintended consequence of the beekeeping enterprise. Fundamentally, the communities are sucking money out of the honeycombs in these beehives through sales of both raw and processed honey, some of which find space on the shelves of Zambia’s supermarkets.

It is one of the livelihood activities which Community Markets for Conservation (Comaco), in partnership with the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), are implementing within the broader wildlife conservation strategy in the Malawi-Zambia landscape.

Comaco’s driving force is that conservation can work when rural communities overcome the challenges of hunger and poverty.

It says these problems are often related to farming practices that degrade soils and drive deforestation and biodiversity loss.

Therefore, Comaco works with small-scale farmers to adopt climate-smart agriculture approaches such as making and using organic fertilisers and agroecology to revitalise soils so farmers achieve maximum crop productivity.

It also supports small farmers to add value to their produce and attractively brand the products so they are competitive in the market.

With burgeoning carbon trading as another revenue stream, this wildlife economy is raking in promising sums for both individual members and their groups, communities say.

The cooperative to which Mbewe belongs has used part of its revenue to purchase two vehicles – 5-tonne and 3-tonne trucks – which the group hires out for income. The money is invested in community projects such as building teachers’ houses and hospital shelters.

Luke Japhet Lungu, assistant project manager for the IFAW-Comaco Partnership Project, tells IPS that these activities are making people less and less reliant on exploiting natural resources for a living.

“You will not find a bag of charcoal here,” Lungu challenges.

“Because of the farming practices we adopted, people are realising that if they destroy the forest, they also destroy the productivity of their land and their income will suffer,” he says.

Along the way, people are also learning to live with the animals.

“Animals are able to move from one forest to another without disturbance. For the bigger ones, such as elephants, which would cause damage to our crops, we have a rapid communication system through our community scouts who work with government rangers.

“We have occasions of elephant invasions from the three parks. However, we have learnt to handle them better to minimise conflict. It’s a process,” Lungu says.

One man who has learnt to manage the animals he once hunted is Mbewe himself.

A battle-scared poacher for nearly a decade from the 1980s, he terrorised the 5,000-square-kilometre conservation area on poaching missions.

For his operations, he used rifles he rented from some officials within the government of Zambia, he claims.

“They were also my major market for ivory and other wildlife products,” he says.

Apparently, without knowing it, Mbewe was actually supplying a far bigger transnational market.

For over 30 years, from the late 1970s, the Malawi-Zambia conservation area was a major source and transit route for ivory to markets in China and Southeast Asia.

Elephant poaching rocked the landscape resulting in the decline of the species. In Kasungu National Park, for example, according to data from the Department of National Parks and Wildlife in Malawi, elephant numbers dwindled from 1,200 in the 1970s to just 50 in 2015.

In 2017, IFAW launched a five-year Combating Wildlife Crime project whose aim was to see elephant populations stabilise and increase in the landscape through reduced poaching.

The project supported park management operations and constructed or rehabilitated requisite structures such as vehicle workshops and offices.

It trained game rangers and judiciary officers in wildlife crime investigation and prosecution.

It provided game rangers with uniforms, decent housing, field allowances, patrol vehicles and equipment.

It supported community livelihood activities such as beekeeping and climate-friendly farming.

It also thrust communities to the centre of planning wildlife conservation measures.

Erastus Kancheya is the Area Warden for the Department of National Parks and Wildlife for the East Luangwa Area Management unit where Lukusuzi and Luambe National Parks lie.

He says he sees these measures as enabling degraded protected areas like Lukusuzi National Park to “rise from the long-forgotten dust [and] awakening on the long road of meaningful conservation”.

Kancheya says engaging communities in co-management of the protected areas is also proving to be effective in the landscape.

Now, IFAW is leveraging this community partnership to sustain the achievements of the Combating Wildlife Crime project through its flagship Room to Roam initiative.

Patricio Ndadzela, Director for IFAW in Malawi and Zambia, describes Room to Roam as a broad, people-centred conservation strategy.

“This is an initiative that cuts across land use and planning, promotes climate-smart approaches to farming and ensures people and animals co-exist,” he says.

The approach aims to deliver benefits for climate, nature and people through biodiversity protection and restoration.

Room to Roam intends to build landscapes in which both animals and people can thrive.

In the process, some people are being transformed. Mbewe is one such person. From being a notorious poacher, he is now a ploughshare of conservation as chairperson of the Community Forest Management Group in his area. The cooperative enforces wildlife conservation and sustainable land management practices.

It is not easy work, he admits.

“There are hardened attitudes to change, and patience is required to teach. Sometimes, the earnings from the livelihood activities are insufficient or irregular. For instance, you don’t harvest honey every day or every month,” he says.

Yet, he says, the prospects are good and the challenges he faces now rank nowhere near what he encountered when he was a poacher.

One incident still makes him shudder: Stalking a herd of elephants at their drinking spot in Kasungu National Park one day, he came under unexpected gunfire from rangers.

“I was an experienced poacher. I knew at what time of the day to find the elephants and at what location. But the rangers saw me first. I was dead. I don’t understand how I escaped,” he says.

Today, on reflection, he regrets having ever lived the life of a poacher.

“I went into poaching for selfish reasons,” Mbewe says thoughtfully.

“Poaching was benefiting me only; the conservation work I am doing now is benefiting the entire community and future generations,” he tells IPS while rubbing the spot of the bee sting and looking relieved.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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A five-year-old boy holds up his cat amidst the wreckage of his home in Gaza. Credit: UNICEF/Mohammad Ajjour

By Lana Nusseibeh
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 1 2023 (IPS)

Thank you for your presence here with us in New York, and for the special dedication that Brazil has given to peace in our region.

I also pay special tribute to our briefers, and to their teams’ dedicated work in the most unimaginable circumstances on the ground in the Gaza Strip.

Commissioner-General Lazzarini, I was very shaken by your recent words to your staff over the weekend, in which you said, “I am constantly hoping that this hell on earth will soon come to an end.” I want to extend the UAE’s deep condolences for the 64 UNRWA workers killed in this war.

They paid the ultimate sacrifice for the lifesaving work the United Nations does every day around the world, and we have failed to protect them.

Last Friday, 121 countries – representing an overwhelming majority of the world – issued an unambiguous call for an immediate, durable, and sustained humanitarian truce in Gaza.

They stood up for the humanitarian imperative, for human rights, for international law, and most importantly, for the self-evident truth that Palestinian life is precious, equal, and deserving of the full protection of the law.

We have heard many say that the 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza are not Hamas, that this is not a war against them. And while these are welcome words, it is time that action reflected them.

The more than 8,000 people that have been killed in Gaza, and as we heard today, 70 percent of whom were women and children, were surely not all Hamas.

Nearly 1,000 children are missing and may be trapped or dead under the rubble. They are not Hamas. Will we help them?

The number of Palestinian children killed in just three weeks of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza exceeds the total number of children killed in conflicts worldwide in each of the last four years.

As Ms. Russell has so eloquently said, that should stain our moral conscience, if nothing else does. Children do deserve our special protection, and are entitled to it today. If we lean on the General Assembly’s moral authority in other settings, we must also respect it in this one.

Indeed, members of this Council have repeatedly expressed their concerns about the fraying of the international order. This Council ignoring the expressed will of the majority of the world may be what breaks it.

Colleagues, we need a ceasefire now. As Foreign Minister Vieira said, we need to ensure that safe, sustained, and at scale humanitarian aid reaches Gaza, now. And that access to electricity, clean water, and fuel is restored now.

The shutdown of cellular and internet services over the weekend as part of the offensive meant that wounded civilians were searching for help in the dark. As we have heard today, there have been 76 attacks on healthcare, including 20 hospitals and clinics damaged or destroyed. More than 650,000 people are sheltering in UNRWA facilities.

Let me be absolutely clear on this point: these sites are protected by international humanitarian law. Announcements that they are targets or warnings for them to evacuate do not, I repeat, do not alter their protected status. We need to see the rescission of dangerous unrealistic evacuation orders.

On Saturday, the Palestinian Red Crescent reported warnings from Israel to immediately evacuate al-Quds Hospital which hosts hundreds of patients, including new-born babies in incubators.

Around 12,000 civilians are also seeking refuge there right now as we sit here in this chamber in New York speaking to each other again and again, and debating the language of our humanitarian resolution and response.

An evacuation order in these conditions is cruel. It is reckless. And so is our delay as a Security Council. All of Gaza’s civilian population is at risk by the escalating hostilities, as are the Israeli and international hostages taken by Hamas. Wrongly taken by Hamas.

While our eyes have been trained on Gaza, the occupied West Bank has not been spared from violence either. Israeli settlers are escalating their attacks against Palestinian civilians, and forcing their displacement. These attacks must be prevented by the State of Israel.

Across the region, there have been several credible warnings of a wider escalation. The drums of war are beating.

Colleagues, taking these warnings seriously begins with stopping this war in Gaza. We do not serve Israel’s security by enabling it to go on. We cannot reverse the heinous October 7th attacks by condoning this war in which civilians are paying the price.

Ignoring what could happen day after day, will have devastating consequences, not only for Israelis and Palestinians, but for the prospects of peace and stability in our region.

As we work on responding to the General Assembly’s clear call on this body to live up to its responsibilities under the UN Charter, we should also keep in mind, always, the dying words of the dead so that their memories are a blessing to us.

I’d like to speak today of an Arab poet, Heba Abu Nada, a Palestinian woman killed in Khan Yunis several days ago.

“My friend circle diminishes, turning into little coffins scattered everywhere. As missiles launch, I can’t grasp the fleeting moments with my friends. These aren’t just names, they are reflections of us, each with a unique face and identity.”

Colleagues, we may have failed the dead, but we must channel our sorrow into saving the living. The time to reverse course is running out. What we, and 121 countries, are advocating for may be the harder road, but history warns us of the consequences of not taking it.

Lana Nusseibeh is Ambassador and Permanent Representative of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to the United Nations.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Excerpt:

In an address to the UN Security Council

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Nov 1 2023 (IPS)

Governments the world over are worried about investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) rules. These allow foreign investors to sue them for billions over new laws or policies reducing their profits.

Typically favouring powerful transnational corporations (TNCs), ISDS blocks policy changes needed to address new challenges. Companies have successfully sued governments for policy changes which allegedly reduce their profits.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

The wicked of Oz
Tobacco giant Philip Morris tried to block the Australian government’s demand for ‘plain packaging’, with larger and more graphic health warnings on cigarette packs, by suing under ISDS and also in Australian courts. In the domestic case, Australia’s highest court ruled the legislation constitutional.

The company then transferred Philip Morris Australia to Philip Morris Asia in Hong Kong. Invoking ISDS in the bilateral investment treaty (BIT) between Australia and Hong Kong, it sued Australia. Luckily, the ISDS tribunal ruled it had no jurisdiction as considering the case would constitute an abuse of process.

More recently, Australian Clive Palmer has hired a former Attorney-General to demand nearly A$341 billion from state governments after moving his major mining companies to Singapore in 2019. His two ISDS claims invoke the Australia-New Zealand-ASEAN Free Trade Agreement (ANZAFTA).

The first seeks about A$300 billion in compensation and for ‘moral damages’ after Australia’s highest court ruled in favour of the Western Australian (WA) state government. Palmer is challenging the 2022 WA legislation to indemnify the state, ensuring he would get nothing.

He is also demanding A$41.3 billion in compensation for rejecting exploration permits for the Waratah coal mine in Queensland. The licence was refused on environmental grounds, including increasing carbon emissions.

Palmer is expected to take a third ISDS case against Australia’s Federal and Queensland government decisions to reject his coal mine licence application due to its likely adverse impacts on the local environment, including waterways, and the Great Barrier Reef.

Even if the governments win these cases, they would still incur millions in legal expenses. The Philip Morris cases against Australia took five years, and cost A$24 million in legal expenses, of which only half was recovered by the government.

Evading ISDS?
After such costly experiences, almost a decade ago, Australia successfully demanded a ‘tobacco carve-out’ to the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s (TPP) ISDS provisions.

Australia’s new Southeast Asia Economic Strategy to 2040, announced on 6 September 2023, promises to review existing free trade agreements (FTAs) with the region. This will include agreements containing ISDS clauses, including the ANZAFTA and other bilateral and plurilateral agreements.

Using side-letters, Australia has already opted out of the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) ISDS provisions with both the UK and New Zealand.

In an ISDS case, the World Bank Group’s International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes ruled Pakistan had to pay over US$5.8 billion to an aggrieved investor. This is equivalent to its entire US$6 billion new IMF loan, about an eighth of its annual budget.

Other ISDS second thoughts
The New Zealand government is now also against ISDS. While ISDS is part of several of its FTAs – e.g., the CPTPP and China-New Zealand FTA – its government has opposed ISDS provisions in FTA negotiations since 2018.

Hence, there is no ISDS in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the New Zealand-United Kingdom FTA, and the New Zealand-European Union FTA.

While it was considered too late to exclude ISDS entirely from the CPTPP at a late stage in negotiations, New Zealand has secured side letters with Australia, Brunei, Malaysia, Peru and Viet Nam. This means ISDS does not apply between New Zealand and these countries.

The current Chilean government is also concerned about ISDS. Hence, it has asked all other CPTPP governments for side-letters excluding ISDS between them, but only New Zealand has agreed so far!

Rich nations wary of ISDS
The US removed most ISDS provisions when the Trump administration replaced the old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) in 2020.

ISDS was in the TPP because Obama administration negotiators wanted it. But most 2016 presidential aspirants to succeed him, including Democrats, rejected the TPP. Trump’s US Trade Representative (USTR) Lighthizer specifically cited ISDS as the reason for US withdrawal from the TPP.

Biden and his USTR have maintained Trump’s anti-ISDS stance instead of reverting to Obama’s position. ISDS is not in Biden Administration ‘economic cooperation’ agreements such as the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework.

Meanwhile, the EU is urging withdrawal from the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) as its ISDS provisions will block needed European climate policies. Several EU and non-EU countries have already begun withdrawing from the ECT, arguing it constrains their ability to act against global warming.

Developing countries saying no
Many developing countries have already been withdrawing from their BITs while the RCEP does not include ISDS. So, the CPTPP, other BITs and FTAs’ ISDS provisions are out of date. Worse, they block addressing emergencies, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and global warming.

Countries should reject and even withdraw from BITs and FTAs with ISDS. After all, there is no evidence ISDS attracts foreign direct investment. More and more developing nations – including India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Ecuador, South Africa, etc. – have already withdrawn from such BITs.

Governments should urgently review and remove ISDS provisions in all existing BITs and FTAs, or withdraw from them, to avoid more costly ISDS cases. They must be more critical and careful in ensuring future economic cooperation agreements to ensure they really serve their current and future best interests.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Creativity pioneers in Milan, group Photo. Credit: Luca Dimoon/Moleskine Foundation

By Elena L. Pasquini
MILAN, Italy, Oct 31 2023 (IPS)

It all fits into an off-road vehicle that can reach even the most remote parts of Southern Africa to bring cinema where the essentials are lacking, where there’s no electricity to power a projector, and where perhaps no one has ever sat in front of a screen to watch a movie. With just the sun and a solar panel, a theater can be set up in areas where people struggle to access food and water and make a decent living. But what it truly requires is the courage to not view creativity as a luxury. Sydelle and Rowand, the founders of Sunshine Cinema, a network of mobile movie theaters, are not just entertaining people; they are crossing a bridge.

Crossing a bridge. That’s what creativity leaders do, according to Lwando Xaso. She is a lawyer, writer, and storyteller from South Africa, and in mid-October, she was in Milan moderating a panel that posed a challenging question: “Can creativity change the world?” She was present at “A Creativity Revival,” an “un-conference” whose participants shape the agenda and content. They are the “Creativity Pioneers,” women and men whose work is supported by a fund from the Moleskine Foundation and who had gathered in Italy from various corners of the world. Much like Rowand and Sydelle, they answered that challenging question with a resounding “yes.” “Creativity is not just something cute. It’s not just something nice. But creativity is something relevant. That is the key element nowadays to transform society for the better,” said Adama Sanneh, CEO of the Moleskine Foundation.

Adama Sanneh, CEO of Moleskine Foundation. Credit: Luca Dimoon/Moleskine Foundation

Crossing a bridge. That’s what South Africa is doing as well. “Our starting point is a place of violence. We come from a history of inequality, injustice, indignity, and oppression … We are moving across the bridge towards freedom, human dignity, equality, and justice. We’re moving away from trauma toward healing,” Xaso said. The tool her country is employing is its democratic Constitution, its “transformative constitutionalism.” But how does creativity relate to this transformation?

According to “Assessing the Impact of Culture and Creativity in Society,” a course and publication from the Impact Research Center of Erasmus University in Rotterdam, one of the most significant challenges in effecting social change is changing people’s behavior. Or, perhaps, their “hearts,” as Xaso emphasized. “A revolution can change regimes, but for transformation, we need to change hearts.” Xaso also explained: “Creativity and art were instruments of liberation. At the core of the anti-apartheid movement lay creativity. The majority of the country was never going to win the war against the apartheid government with arms alone … It was never going to happen. So, what are the other tools that can change the world? There was music. There was poetry. The ANC built a culture and a department for culture because they saw it as an instrument that can liberate the country …Art and justice reinforce each other.”

Rowand Roydon Pybus is also in Milan, sharing his experiences in crossing bridges. His tool is a network of solar-powered theaters that screen films made in Africa for those who lack access or cannot afford it. These films spark conversations on critical issues such as land rights and gender rights, thereby fostering change. They shed light on often-overlooked subjects. It’s not about just screening; Sunshine Cinema engages young people and train them as facilitators for these discussions. They use a vast collection of African movies to address vital questions in hyper-local environments, where the impact is most significant.

Moments of the conference “A creativity revival”. Credit: Luca Dimoon/Moleskine Foundation

However, assessing the scale of creativity’s social impact remains a challenge. As Eva Langerak writes in Erasmus University’s magazine, “The assumption that the cultural and creative sector adds substantial value to society is widely debated, and the discussion on how that value takes shape is quite controversial.” The social impact of arts, culture, and creativity can be defined as “those effects that go beyond the artifacts and the enactment of the event or performance itself and have a continuing influence on people’s lives.” This definition draws from the 1993 multi-authored work “The Social Impact of the Arts: A Discussion Document.” Measuring the social impact of creativity is not a straightforward task, but the significance of the cultural dimension has been recognized to the extent that participation in cultural life is considered a human right, as outlined in Article 27 of the Universal Declaration. This participation is crucial as it underpins ‘the ability to represent oneself and exercise other rights, including freedom of expression.’

Representing oneself is closely tied to identity, which is one of the questions that “creative pioneers” in Palestine are addressing through the “Wonder Cabinet,” a project in Bethlehem. Designed by architects Elias and Yousef Anastas, the Wonder Cabinet is a space for creative communities to come together and establish a safe place for Palestinian voices to express themselves, not only with regard to creative fields but also to share, learn, and gain exposure to different experiences. As Ilaria Speri, managing director, explained, “It brings together communities that have been physically separated over decades of occupation, with 65% of the West Bank under military rule, including checkpoints and segregated roads with different access permits.” This space offers the Palestinian community machinery, tools, knowledge, and an opportunity for reflection on identity and self-representation, thereby ensuring that the regional and local versions of their story are heard.

Art and creativity have a profound impact on society, encouraging critical thinking and prompting individuals to question their own experiences as well as those of others. This perspective is championed by authors such as François Matarasso, an artist, writer, and policy advisor, as well as Pascal Gielen. These insights hold particular significance in regions affected by conflict and warfare. In the words of Olena Rosstalna, the founder and manager of the Youth Drama Theater “Ama Tea” in Chernihiv, a city in northern Ukraine near the Russian border, the impact of art transcends the physical battlefronts. She observed, “It’s not just the war on the land; it’s also the war in the minds and for the minds, because the propaganda is very big. Brainwashing has persisted for decades.” Countering propaganda is among Ama Tea’s actions devoted to engaging the youth. Olena explained the genesis of their project: “We conceived this project in the early days of April or late March 2022, when the full-scale invasion by the Russian Federation happened. We were in a bomb shelter, thinking about what we could do to help in this dire situation.” Teaching critical thinking through a “fresh perspective” on art and literature has been a central focus for her team: “We manage to show the cases of propaganda not only in Ukrainian history, but in European history, in Polish, in Germany, [and] also taken in the context of World War Two,” she said. Olena’s work is geared primarily toward the youth. She stressed the importance of nurturing “the small seeds of creativity, conscientiousness, and responsibility” in the young generation, firmly believing that by doing so, they can secure a future for their country.

Olena describes herself as a “very small fish in a very big ocean,” yet she believes that everything starts from the ground up. “That’s why I’m deeply involved in grassroots initiatives in my work. Supporting local initiatives worldwide is crucial. It all begins with small steps and grassroots efforts. If we have a world of pioneers, one by one, all these initiatives will flourish into a beautiful garden,” she said. Communities often play a pivotal role in propelling social change. Community-led art projects, unite people to brainstorm solutions for local issues, according scholars. Solutions even where it seems impossible – that’s the essence of creativity, as Adama Sanneh eloquently wrote in Folios, the Moleskine Foundation’s periodical: “Revealing and exploring what is possible in seemingly impossible contexts. It’s about radical imagination and enlightenment during times of ignorance and resignation”.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Without land rights, women cannot make the necessary decisions to adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

By Joyce Chimbi
NAIROBI, Oct 31 2023 (IPS)

Although women account for more than three-quarters of the agricultural labour force and manage 40 percent of small-scale farms, historically, they neither owned nor controlled the land because land rights were passed down to male relatives. It is a historic gender injustice whereby women could only access land through close male relatives.

But as the vagaries of drought wreak havoc in the agricultural sector due to more failed rainfall seasons – with 2022 alone showing signs of a serious hydrological and ecological drought – gender and climate experts, such as Grace Gakii, tell IPS that women’s decision-making powers are much needed to ensure that extreme weather patterns do not paralyse the agricultural sector.

“The agriculture sector is the backbone of Kenya’s economy. It accounts for an estimated 33 percent of the country’s GDP and employs at least 40 percent of its population and 70 percent of the rural population. Without land rights, women cannot make the necessary decisions to either adapt or mitigate climate change,” she says.

“In mitigation, they cannot, for instance, decide if and when trees are planted. In adaptation, they have no say in, for instance, shifting to more climate-resilient crops. We have no shortage of indigenous seeds to help us navigate the rainfall deficit we are increasingly experiencing. But women have historically been denied the power to make these decisions even though it is women who provide the day-to-day farm labour.”

The revolutionary SACCO scheme is increasingly putting land rights in the hands of women and enabling them to access much-needed tools to build climate-resilient farming systems. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

The agriculture sector is the backbone of Kenya’s economy. It accounts for an estimated 33 percent of the country’s GDP. Women play a critical role in the sector. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

The agriculture sector employs at least 40 percent of the country’s population and 70 percent of the rural population. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

Serah Nyokabi says the revolutionary Savings and Credit Cooperative Society (SACCO) is increasingly putting land rights in the hands of women and facilitating access to the tools needed to build climate-resilient farming and food systems.

“I am a member of Afya SACCO. We save and take loans at a low interest. I use the loans to hire land in Central Kenya for farming and buy items such as seeds, fertilizer and even water. We rely on rainfall, and these days you cannot tell when it will rain, and even when it rains, it is often not enough. I also hire people to help me around the farm because I am a full-time teacher. SACCOs also buy large pieces of land, subdivide, and sell to members. I bought a piece of land this way, and they allow you to pay in small amounts over a six-month period,” she tells IPS.

SACCOs are a cash pooling scheme by a group of people to save and borrow low-interest loans amongst themselves. Kenya’s SACCO sector is popular and on an upward trajectory. Recent reports show that accumulated total deposits of savings grew from USD 3.8 billion in 2021 to USD 4.2 billion in 2022 (Ksh 564.89 billion to Ksh 629.45 billion)– representing a 9.84 percent increase. In 2021, the total membership of regulated SACCOs was 5.99 million members compared to 6.42 million members in 2022, and this represented an increase of 7.02 percent.

Gakii says that regulated SACCOs represent about half of all SACCOs in Kenya, as many others are unregulated. She says there are at least 22,000 SACCOs and more than 14 million members overall in this East African nation, transacting billions every year amongst themselves. Some SACCOs, such as Afya SACCO, have thousands of members and others less than 100 members.

Others, such as the well-known Muungano (cooperative) Women’s Group, own prime land and a fully occupied commercial high-rise building in Ongata Rongai on the outskirts of Nairobi, have an all-female membership, and many others, such as Afya SACCO have both men and women as members. Muungano Women’s Group raises about USD 40,000 in rent per month from the Ongata Rongai commercial building, which is fully occupied, and members have also purchased prime land of their own.

“SACCOs are very important to women. They were shunned by banks because the profile of a Kenyan woman was too risky. The percentage of women in gainful employment was very low because many worked for their husbands or fathers in the informal settlements. Due to our customary laws that favour men over women, women did not own property or any assets and therefore lacked the collateral needed to take out bank loans. In fact, women could only open a bank account accompanied by a male relative, preferably her husband. SACCOs have helped women navigate these challenges as all they need is to save with a SACCO, produce three guarantors within the SACCO to take a loan or simply borrow against their own savings,” Gakii explains.

Although the percentage of women holding land title deeds is still very small, as only one percent of all land title deeds are in the hands of women alone and five percent held jointly with men, Gakii stresses that this is progress and is to be celebrated.

“We have another large category of women that hire land for commercial farming. This would not have been possible without the loans from schemes such as SACCOs,” she says.

Gakii says women need access and control over land to play a much-needed role in the five pillars of climate resilience, including threshold capacity, coping capacity, recovery capacity, adaptive capacity, and transformative capacity.

“I taught agriculture in secondary schools for many years, and during that time, I had access to the small farm at the school for practical sessions, but back home, I could only execute the instructions from my husband. He was an accountant, and I was essentially the farmer, but he made all the decisions. Women interact with the soil on a day-to-day basis, but they cannot make decisions about how to best address the climate crisis. The result is a serious food crisis. We have large tracks of fertile lands, but here we are with a begging bowl,” Nyokabi observes.

“We started by experiencing floods and droughts in close succession. In 2018, we had two extremes in one season, whereby March, April and May were very rainy, followed by a very dry season in October, November, and December. Last month we were repeatedly warned to prepare for El Niño in the October-November-December season, but now we have been told that there will be no El Niño. In fact, there is no rain at all, and yet we are in the short rain season where we plant in October and harvest in December-January. The person who is more likely to note these changes and see a pattern is the one who is doing the day-to-day farming activities, and so the role of women in building resilient farming systems cannot be ignored.”

With an estimated 98 percent of agriculture in Kenya being rainfed and as climate change becomes a most pressing issue as a result of cumulative rainfall deficits over many years, the role of women in building climate resilience cannot be overemphasized, as is the need for interventions that can facilitate women’s access to land rights and much-needed farm inputs.

Kenya: Agriculture by Numbers

Women in Agriculture

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Excerpt:

Excluded by inheritance and ignored by big business, women farmers in Kenya are turning to innovative methods to become independent food producers and get the financial backing to ensure their success. Creating resilience is crucial to adapting to climate change and ensuring climate justice.
 

The record-breaking team were met at the airport in Johannesburg by a huge, rapturous crowd.

A rival presidential hopeful said Moïse Katumbi was not eligible to run on the grounds of nationality.

Uganda, Gabon, Niger and the CAR are accused of violating rights or not making democratic progress.

Aradhiya Khan, 25, a transwoman, got her vaccination in the middle of the night in July 2021, when the centre was less crowded, and stood in the women's line as there was none for her gender.

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Oct 31 2023 (IPS)

After months of warding off appeals from his employers to get vaccinated for the COVID-19 disease, Mohammad Yusuf, 24, working as a live-in domestic worker in Karachi’s Clifton area, finally relented and got his first shot.

“I believed that anyone who took the vaccine would die within two years,” he told IPS. He said he got this information from social media.

The people who finally convinced him were his parents living in the village of Rahil, in Sindh’s province of Umerkot district, where, according to Yusuf, “not a single case of COVID-19 has to date been found.” But because Karachi was rife with the virus then, his parents explained that he might catch the infection if he remained unvaccinated.

The other reason for his hesitancy was the fear that if he got COVID-19 and was hospitalized, he may die without saying goodbye to his family and be buried unceremoniously by strangers. “You either got well within ten days, or you’d die a very difficult and painful death with breathlessness, high fever, and then death,” is how he explained the disease and its symptoms.

Rakhi Matan, 40, a caretaker for the elderly, had heard, “If someone got COVID-19, the government would come and pick them up from their home and take them to a center, inject poison into you after which you died”. It was this fear that got her to vaccinate herself. But since the shot, she often falls sick and attributes it to the vaccine.

The country began its COVID-19 vaccination campaign first by inoculating health workers on February 2, 2021, a year after the first case was reported in February 2020. This was followed closely by senior citizens and gradually to everyone over 18 years of age.

According to data from the Ministry of National Health Services Regulations and Coordination (MoNHSR&C), by March 2022, of the total eligible population of a little over 143 million, more than 125 million had received their first jab.

Dr Rana Imran Sikander, executive director at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences and who was then heading the COVID-19 ward there, was the first person in Pakistan to receive the shot from the batch of 500,000 Sinopharm vaccines received from China.

It was also the time when “myths and conspiracies abounded,” leading to hesitancy and fear of side effects. The more far-fetched conspiracy theories circulating in his hospital included ‘Bill Gates wants to reduce the world’s population,’ ‘the United States is injecting microchips into humans to make them their slaves,’ ‘Gates wants to alter their DNA.’

“Seeing me well and alive gave a huge boost to my co-workers,” said Sikander, who luckily has not caught COVID-19 even once. It could also be because he had also volunteered a dose six months prior to the official shot for the vaccine trial, he said.

Gallup Pakistan carried out 13 surveys (from March 2020 to January 2022) to understand people’s attitudes towards the pandemic. It also recorded the change in their perception towards the disease and the vaccine over a two-year period.

“The most alarming finding was that for close to 60 percent of health professionals, social media was a key source of information, and as high as one in five doctors were not willing to take the vaccine,” Bilal I. Gilani, executive director at Gallup Pakistan, told IPS. A consistent perception among Pakistanis in general, during all these months, he said, was “that COVID-19 was a foreign conspiracy.”

Like epidemiologists study viruses and find solutions on how to control the spread of diseases, anthropologist Dr Heidi Larson studies misinformation and tries to contain it before it spreads like wildfire. She is, therefore, not surprised as to why Sikander’s colleagues were “hesitant or losing confidence in vaccines.”

She has been studying the trend of how rumors start, flourish, and then taper, for 13 years under her Vaccine Confidence Project that she started in 2010.

At a recent Global Media Dialogue, held earlier this month, organized by the Internews, Larson spoke to a group of journalists about how important it was for health workers and policymakers to “listen” to what people are saying and why and “even listen to the rumors,” and they will “reveal that they [people] are not being heard”.

“That’s the cue to address the rumors,” she said. Already the findings say there is a drop in confidence around basic childhood vaccines, which she finds “pretty significant” and worrying as “we’ve never seen such a drop,” she said.

But how did the Pakistan government manage to get 130 million (above the age of 15) of the 250 million Pakistanis vaccinated for at least two doses in two years (by May 2022) after the pandemic? Given that the polio virus has continued to be found in Pakistan with communities refusing to get their children administered the oral vaccine, there was a fear among government officials it may face the same challenge with the COVID-19 vaccine.

Looking back to the two years of the pandemic, when he was the federal minister for planning and headed the National Command and Control Centre (NCOC) that had been set up to plan and contain the pandemic, Asad Umar said the two most important ingredients — “transparency and sharing of real-time data with the media when COVID-19 struck” was how they managed to dispel misinformation.

“By the time we were ready to vaccinate the people, the media had become our allies and played a huge role in supporting us in fighting misinformation and even disinformation.”

The other reason was that “for a change, all political parties were on board, and there was across-the-board consensus and confidence on the decisions made by the NCOC,” he said. The center disbanded as quickly as it was formed. “It’s a good model and needs to be institutionalized if we are to fight any future catastrophes, natural or health,” said Umar.

In July 2021, 76 percent of Pakistanis claimed that the government was controlling the COVID-19 situation well, according to a Gallup survey, although it diminished to just 41 percent by 2022.

It was “the oneness of message and consistency, coupled with an efficient vaccine delivery, which helped fight vaccine hesitancy,” said Dr Zaeem Ul Haq, a health and risk communication (real-time exchange of information, advice and opinions between experts and people who face a health hazard) expert who led communication and community engagement part of Pakistan’s response to the pandemic.

But to understand how the country succeeded in vaccinating millions of people, Haq said it was important to differentiate between vaccine-resistant (due to vested interests and political or religious beliefs difficult to convert) and vaccine-hesitant (if their questions around vaccines are appropriately answered can be converted) groups to be able to continue fighting misinformation. Unfortunately, in Pakistan, he said, these terms were used interchangeably and erroneously by the Pakistani media, which must be avoided, especially in the case of childhood immunization.

He shared that with simple and consistent messaging, combined with an age-appropriate, systematic administration of a vaccine, this reason-specific hesitancy declined in subsequent surveys.”

Dr Zafar Mirza, former special advisor to the prime minister for health, the government’s use of innovative approaches helped reach diverse and underserved populations.

“We put out pro-vaccination messages replacing the ringtones for nearly 150 million mobile phones, which made a huge impact,” he said. The Gallup survey found that by 2022, 84 percent of adult Pakistanis with mobile phone access had received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Another task carried out successfully was by the brigade of female community health workers and vaccinators, who convinced people to get vaccinated.

“Through the over 8,000 vaccinators and health workers and 300,000 community leaders, we managed to reach a population of 35 million in the remotest parts of Pakistan,” said Mirza.

A toll-free helpline, the Sehat Tahaffuz-1166, launched just before the pandemic in November 2019 to provide guidance for polio and its vaccine, was used to disseminate information about COVID-19.

“At one point, we had 500 call agents and 30 doctors daily assuaging the apprehensions and concerns about the infection and later the vaccine itself,” Mirza told IPS. From approximately 300 calls per day in 2019, it reached to 25,000, although the agents have attended as many as 70,000 calls in a day, too, he added.

For its part, UNICEF helped the government in battling vaccine hesitancy on social media platforms. “Through regular static posts and short videos, we communicated verified information about the vaccine’s efficacy. We posted messages from doctors, religious leaders, youth representatives, celebrities, community leaders, and even vaccinated individuals on our social media accounts,” UNICEF’s communications specialist, A. Sami Malik, told IPS. In addition, it regularly organized live interactive sessions on FB, Twitter Space, and Instagram, with experts providing responses to people’s questions and concerns.

This is not the last of the pandemics. Scientists are already warning of the possibility of a COVID-19-like pandemic at the scale of 2.5 percent to 3.3 percent yearly and 47 percent to 57 percent in the next 25 years. While vaccine hesitancy may have lowered, it has not ended after the pandemic. In fact, it gets fueled every time there is a reemergence of measles and polio in Pakistan. While vaccines must be delivered to the public in a coherent and effective manner to ensure public confidence in them, it will pay dividends if, as Dr Larson says, countries in general and Pakistan in particular, can recognize “the importance of emotions in people’s decision-making and in their willingness to cooperate.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Air strikes continue in Gaza. Credit: World Health Organization (WHO)

By Norman Solomon
SAN FRANCISCO, USA, Oct 31 2023 (IPS)

For three weeks, President Biden has played a key role in backing Israel’s war crimes while touting himself as a compassionate advocate of restraint. That pretense is lethal nonsense as Israel persists with mass killing of civilians in Gaza.

The same crucial standards that fully condemned Hamas’s murders of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7 should apply to Israel’s ongoing murders that have already taken the lives of at least several times as many Palestinian civilians. And Israel is just getting started.

“We need an immediate ceasefire,” Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib wrote in an email Saturday evening, “but the White House and Congress continue to unconditionally support the Israeli government’s genocidal actions.”

That unconditional support makes Biden and the vast majority of Congress directly complicit with mass murder and genocide, defined as “the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.” The definition clearly fits the words and deeds of Israel’s leaders.

“Israel has dropped approximately 12,000 tons of explosives on Gaza so far and has reportedly killed multiple senior Hamas commanders, but the majority of the casualties have been women and children,” Time magazine summed up at the end of last week.

Israel’s military has been shamelessly slaughtering civilians in homes, stores, markets, mosques, refugee camps and healthcare facilities. Imagine what can be expected now that communications between Gaza and the outside world are even less possible.

For reporters, being on the ground in Gaza is very dangerous; Israel’s assault has already killed at least 29 journalists. For the Israeli government, the fewer journalists alive in Gaza the better; media reliance on Israeli handouts, news conferences and interviews is ideal.

Pro-Israel frames of reference and word choices are routine in U.S. mainstream media. Yet some exceptional reporting has shed light on the merciless cruelty of Israel’s actions in Gaza, where 2.2 million people live.

For example, on Oct. 28, PBS News Weekend provided a human reality check as Israel began a ground assault while stepping up its bombing of Gaza. “As Israeli ground operations intensified there, suddenly the phone and internet signal went out,” correspondent Leila Molana-Allen reported.

“So, people in Gaza, voiceless through the night as they were under these intense bombardments. People were unable to call ambulances, and we’ve heard this morning that ambulance drivers were standing at high points throughout, trying to see where the explosions were, so they could just drive directly there. People unable to communicate with their families to see if they’re alright. People this morning saying ‘we’ve been digging children out of the rubble with our bare hands because we can’t call for help.’”

While people in Gaza “are under some of the most intense bombardment we’ve ever seen,” Molana-Allen added, they have no safe place to go: “Even though they’re still being told to move to the south, in fact most people can’t get to the south because they have no fuel for their cars, they can’t travel, and even in the south bombardment continues.”

Meanwhile, Biden has continued to publicly express his unequivocal support for what Israel is doing. After he spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week, the White House issued a statement without the slightest mention of concern about what Israel’s bombing was inflicting on civilians.

Instead, the statement said, “the President reiterated that Israel has every right and responsibility to defend its citizens from terrorism and to do so in a manner consistent with international humanitarian law.”

Biden’s support for continuing the carnage in Gaza is matched by Congress. As Israel began its fourth week of terrorizing and killing, only 18 members of the House were on the list of lawmakers cosponsoring H.Res. 786, “Calling for an immediate de-escalation and cease-fire in Israel and occupied Palestine.” All of those 18 cosponsors are people of color.

While Israel kills large numbers of Palestinian civilians each day — and clearly intends to kill many thousands more — we can see “progressive” masks falling away from numerous members of Congress who remain cravenly frozen in political conformity.

“In a dark time,” poet Theodore Roethke wrote, “the eye begins to see.”

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including War Made Easy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, was published in summer 2023 by The New Press.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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