Africa

Safe Passages arranges food distribution for 120 immigrant families. Families also receive immigration information, legal information, and referrals, such as rental assistance programs, COVID-19 vaccination details, and parenting resources. Credit: Safe Passages

By SeiMi Chu
Stanford, Jul 18 2022 (IPS)

Veronica Vega’s husband was the first in the family to immigrate to Oakland, California. When 27 years ago Vega decided to join him, she was five months pregnant and walked across the Mexican border to come to the United States.

“It was a horrible experience. It was so sad to leave your country, your town, and your family behind. Everything was different – the country, the language, the community. That’s why I looked around to find somewhere I could belong,” Vega reflected.

She discovered Safe Passages, an organization that supports youth and families by providing enhanced services and community development through various programs. Vega no longer felt alone.

Now, Vega is the Community Development Manager at Safe Passages, and she assists other immigrants in getting the help they need to integrate into US society successfully.

Vega tells of a success story. She helped a family from Tijuana, Mexico, receive their acceptance to the renowned Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. DACA is an immigration policy that provides immigrants who came to the US as a child a work permit and a two-year period to reside in the country without facing deportation. After two years, immigrants need to submit a renewal application for DACA. US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) allows renewal subject to requirements.

The mother of two fled from Mexico to California because she faced domestic violence from her husband. She and her children contacted Safe Passages, where they met Vega.

Safe Passages serves about 5,000 families annually. One of their programs focuses on helping children who may face deportation due to their refugee status. Vega connected this family to one of their partners, East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC).

A private lawyer through EBCLC helped them receive their permanent residencies, and the service they received was free.

“When I heard they were considered permanent residents of the United States, I was so happy. They never realized they would receive anything, and I was so happy,” Vega said.

Vega helps families who fear deportation. She aids about 1,500 families per year with immigration resources.

She wants to partner with more non-profit organizations to help immigrant families.

“I was accepted into this country, and I love to work in the community. I love to help people regardless of race, age, and status,” Vega explained.

Alicia Perez, Chief Operating Officer of Safe Passages, described how the different programs at Safe Passages interconnect.

Safe Passages aims to support families with children with a big focus on school-based programs. They have after-school and tutoring programs, family resources, and health centers. Safe Passages makes the information accessible by ensuring materials are in the migrants’ home languages – informing them about their civil rights.

The organization provides immigrant families with Red Cards created by the immigrant Legal Resource Center. The Red Card informs families about their rights under the US Constitution, whether they are immigrants or not. Safe Passages asks families to carry their Red Cards in case they are stopped by law enforcement or the police.

“We believe all children should have access to education, health care, and support. By doing so, they are most likely to live fulfilling lives and be successful, regardless of race, economic status, ethnicity, or gender,” Perez said.

Refugee Processing Center’s Refugee Admission Report releases data on the number of refugee arrivals. California had the highest refugee arrivals from October 1, 2021, through May 31, 2022, with 1,128 people arriving in the state.

Florencia Reyes Donohue, a senior paralegal in Kids in Need of Defense’s (KIND) San Francisco office, helps prepare and file forms for unaccompanied child clients seeking protection in the US.

KIND’s mission is to ensure that no child goes into immigration court without high-quality legal representation and that unaccompanied children have access to the protection they need and deserve. The organization partners with pro bono attorneys from more than 700 law firms and corporations to represent clients at no cost.

KIND worked with 29,000 children from 2009 to 2021. In addition to legal services, they provide holistic care through its social services program. KIND ensured that children would have an easier time adjusting to a country they were unfamiliar with by addressing their traumas. KIND offers counseling referrals, social-emotional support, health insurance assistance, school enrollment, and job placements, among other services.

Reyes Donohue said she admired the bravery the children she worked with had. “They do this journey alone; they are incredibly resilient.”

Fathers attend their kids’ soccer team practices and Safe Passages’ parenting workshops. Safe Passages provides immigration information, parenting workshops, and referrals during these practices. Credit: Safe Passages

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By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Jul 18 2022 (IPS)

South Africa, the home land of the late giant fighter against Apartheid, racism and discrimination – Nelson Mandela “Mandiba”, is already ‘on the precipice of explosive xenophobic violence’ against migrants, refugees, asylum seekers – and even citizens perceived as outsiders.

Just three days ahead of this year’s Nelson Mandela International Day (18 July), a group of independent United Nations human rights experts condemned reports of escalating violence targeting foreign nationals in South Africa.

Today, the world honours a giant of our time; a leader of unparalleled courage and towering achievement; and a man of quiet dignity and deep humanity

António Guterres, UN Secretary-General

Known as Special Procedures of the UN Human Rights Council’s independent fact-finding and monitoring mechanisms that address either specific country situations or thematic issues in all parts of the world, the human rights experts warned that the ongoing xenophobic mobilisation is “broader and deeper,” and has become the central campaign strategy for some political parties in the country.

 

Operation Dudula

In a statement released on 15 July 2022, the United Nations independent human rights experts cited “Operation Dudula” as an example of the spreading hate speech.

Originally a social media campaign, Operation Dudula has become an umbrella for the mobilisation of “violent protests, vigilant eviolence, arson targeting migrant-owned homes and businesses, and even the murder of foreign nationals.”

According to the human rights experts, xenophobia is often explicitly racialised, targeting low-income Black migrants and refugees and, in some cases, South African citizens accused of being “too Black to be South Africans.”

 

Inequality

South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world, according to a recent World Bank’s report titled ‘Inequality in Southern Africa’.

The report highlighted how inequality is consistent as 10% of the population owns more than 80% of the wealth.

Out of its 60 million inhabitants, “an estimated 10 million people in South Africa live below the food poverty line, while the unemployment rate is at a record high of almost 40% amongst Black South Africans according to Statistics South Africa.”

Poverty, unemployment and crime are reportedly the greatest sources of contention as Operation Dudula and its members believe that illegal foreigners are the reason that South Africa’s public socioeconomic systems do not benefit its native Black majority.

Impoverished former European colonies –who also fall victims of deepening poverty and inequality–, South Africa’s neighbouring countries- Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and the enclaved Lesotho-, have been lastly a source of increasing migration.

 

Fueled by the Government

“Anti-migrant discourse from senior government officials has fanned the flames of violence, and government actors have failed to prevent further violence or hold perpetrators accountable,” say the UN human rights Special Rapporteurs.

According to the World Bank’s country review, the South African economy was already in a weak position when it entered the pandemic after a decade of low growth.

From 2021, the recovery is expected to continue in 2022, with Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth expected at 2.1% and to average 1.7% over the medium term.

Commodity prices remain important for South Africa, a major net exporter of minerals and net importer of oil, however, strengthening investment, including foreign direct investment, will be critical to propelling growth and creating jobs.

The World Bank goes on explaining that South Africa has made considerable strides to improve the wellbeing of its citizens since its transition to democracy in the mid-1990s, but progress has stagnated in the last decade.

The percentage of the population below the upper-middle-income-country poverty line fell from 68% to 56% between 2005 and 2010 but has since trended slightly upwards to 57% in 2015 and is projected to have reached 60% in 2020.

Structural challenges and weak growth have undermined progress in reducing poverty, which have been heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic, adds the review.

“The achievement of progress in household welfare is severely constrained by rising unemployment, which reached an unprecedented 35.3% in the fourth quarter of 2021. The unemployment rate is highest among youths aged between 15 and 24, at around 66.5%.”

In her extensively documented, detailed article on IPS: Myths Fuel Xenophobic Sentiment in South Africa, Fawzia Moodley also reported from Johannesburg on a study by the World Bank: Mixed Migration, Forced Displacement and Job Outcomes in South Africa.

Debunking the myth that foreign nationals are ‘stealing’ jobs from locals or are better off than locals is the finding that “one immigrant worker generated approximately two jobs for local residents in South Africa between 1996 and 2011”.

 

Nelson Mandela

“Today, the world honours a giant of our time; a leader of unparalleled courage and towering achievement; and a man of quiet dignity and deep humanity,” said the UN secretary general, António Guterres, in his message on the occasion of the 2022 Nelson Mandela International Day.

“Our world today is marred by war; overwhelmed by emergencies; blighted by racism, discrimination, poverty, and inequalities; and threatened by climate disaster,” adds Guterres.

“Let us find hope in Nelson Mandela’s example and inspiration in his vision.”

Nelson Mandela devoted his life to the service of humanity — as a human rights lawyer, a prisoner of conscience, an international peacemaker and the first democratically elected president of a free South Africa. See Mandela’s life >>. See also: Mandela Rules >>

“It is easy to break down and destroy. The heroes are those who make peace and build.”- Nelson Mandela.

 

Any politicians listening over there?

 

View of the solar park in the municipality of Escobar, located an hour's drive from Buenos Aires. Inaugurated this month, it is the first municipally financed and managed solar energy project, at a time when private investment has withdrawn from large clean energy projects in Argentina. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Jul 18 2022 (IPS)

The multitude of solar panels stands out along a dirt road in an unpopulated area. Although located just an hour’s drive from Buenos Aires, the new solar park in the municipality of Escobar is in a place of silence and solitude, symbolic of the difficulties faced by renewable energies in making inroads in Argentina.

The Escobar plant, inaugurated this month, is the first solar energy park with municipal investment and management, at a time when private initiative has practically withdrawn from clean energy projects in this South American country of 47 million people, which has been in the grip of a deep economic and financial crisis for years.

“There are 3,700 photovoltaic solar panels that produce electricity to be sold to one of the electric cooperatives that distributes power in the area. With this plant, we seek to position ourselves as a sustainable municipality and access financing for new projects,” Victoria Bandín, director of Innovation in the Municipality of Escobar, told IPS during a tour of the grounds of the six-hectare park.

Located 50 kilometers from the Argentine capital, to which it is connected by a freeway, Escobar is a municipality on the northern edge of Greater Buenos Aires, a gigantic metropolitan area of 15 million inhabitants where the country’s greatest wealth and poverty live side by side.

Escobar’s extensive green areas have attracted thousands of families in recent years seeking to get away from the cement and noise of Buenos Aires, which has fuelled the construction of dozens of upscale high-security private housing developments.

Escobar is also home to a large community of Bolivian immigrants, who play a key role in the production of fruits and vegetables. In fact, the fresh food market that supplies the stores of several municipalities in the area bears the name “Bolivian Community”.

Next to the market, which is very close to the solar park, the white, inflated tarp of a biodigester, in which the market’s organic waste is processed, stands out.

Eliseo Acchura is about to send spoiled food discarded by stallholders to the biodigester at Escobar’s fruit and vegetable market. The biodigester, operating since last year, produces biogas that is then converted into electricity used in the market. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

“I pick up almost a ton of fruit and vegetables per day that the stallholders discard, and after 40 to 60 days of decomposition in the biodigester, we have biogas,” Eliseo Acchura, who works on the project inaugurated last year with support from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), told IPS.

The biogas is used to generate electricity to supply part of the market.

“We have rural areas and we seek to preserve ourselves as a green place on the edge of the great gray blob that is the greater metropolitan area,” Guillermo Bochatón, coordinator of the Sustainable Escobar program, which is carrying out several environmental initiatives, told IPS.

The rise and fall of renewables

Clean energies experienced a boom in Argentina starting in 2016, thanks to the Renovar Program, which managed to attract domestic and foreign private investors.

Through this program, the national government guaranteed the purchase of electricity for 20 years at a fixed rate in dollars and created a guaranty fund with the participation of international credit institutions to guarantee payment.

The share of renewable sources in the total electricity mix, almost non-existent in 2015, grew significantly since 2016, reaching a record high of 13 percent on average in 2021.

Today, Argentina’s electricity system has an installed capacity of almost 43,000 MW, of which 5,175 MW are renewable. The main source of generation is thermal (powered by natural gas and, to a lesser extent, oil) making up 59 percent of the total, followed by large hydroelectric projects, which make up 25 percent (only hydroelectric projects of less than 50 MW are considered renewable).

Among renewables, the largest share last year came from wind (74 percent), followed by solar (13 percent), small hydro (7 percent) and bioenergies, according to official data

Of the 189 renewable energy projects in operation, 133 were commissioned over the last four years.

The biodigester at Escobar’s wholesale fruit market was inaugurated last year and is part of the environmentally friendly initiatives launched in this municipality near the Argentine capital. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Clean energies today face two major problems in this country, according to Marcelo Alvarez, a member of the board of directors of the Argentine Chamber of Renewable Energies (CADER).

One has to do with infrastructure due to the saturation of the electricity transmission networks that deliver electric power to large cities. Another is the lack of financing, as a result of the macroeconomic conditions in the country.

“Even private ventures in distributed generation today are practically reserved only for environmental activists, because the lack of financing and extremely low electricity rates make them unprofitable,” Alvarez explained.

He said that the way things are going, the country is not likely to meet the goal set by law in 2015, for 20 percent of the national electricity mix to come from domestic sources by 2025.

“From a technical point of view, Argentina’s potential for renewable energies is enormous, because it has the necessary natural resources. And economically too, because in the medium term the costs of electricity production will fall,” Gabriel Blanco, a specialist in renewable energies from the National University of the Center of the Province of Buenos Aires (UNICEN), told Ecoamericas.

“The main obstacle is that there is no political will, because the decision is to bet on the energy business of fossil fuels, large hydroelectric and nuclear power plants,” he added.

The Escobar solar park has an installed capacity of 2.3 MW and required an investment of some two million dollars, which will be recovered with the sale of electricity within seven years, said the mayor of Escobar, Ariel Sujarchuk. “Between 23 and 53 more years of useful life of pure profit will be left after that,” he added.

The inauguration was also attended by Environment Minister Juan Cabandié, who pledged more than 1.7 million dollars in government funds for the expansion of the solar park, which has a large piece of land available for the installation of more panels.

In his speech in Escobar, Cabandié criticized industrialized countries for failing to comply with the financing needed to transform the economies of developing countries, as pledged under the Paris Agreement on climate change, adopted in the French capital in 2015.

The minister said that “the sector responsible for damaging the planet is in the Northern, not the Southern, hemisphere,” and argued that it is the countries of the North that must assume “the responsibility of financing the transition to sustainability of the countries of the South.”

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This virtual event was hosted by BRAC, the Permanent Mission of Bangladesh to the UN, and the Permanent Mission of Rwanda to the UN on the sidelines of the 2022 UN High Level Political Forum.

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