Africa

I know the work we do isn’t easy but I truly believe that if I can help get voices out, I want to continue doing what I do. | Picture courtesy: Bisma Bhat

By Bisma Bhat
Feb 10 2022 (IPS)

My name is Bisma Bhat and I am a journalist in Srinagar, Kashmir. I currently work as a features writer at Free Press Kashmir, a weekly magazine.

I have lived in Srinagar all my life. My father passed away when I was very young. My two younger sisters and I were raised by our mother. Becoming a journalist was not a part of my life plan. After completing school, I got admission at Shri Mata Vaishnodevi University in Katra, Jammu and Kashmir, for a bachelor’s degree in architecture.

However, because the college was a little far from home and my mother was concerned about my safety, I decided not to go. Instead, I graduated with a bachelor’s in science from a women’s college in 2016. That same year the militant Burhan Wani was killed in an encounter, which led to a lot of tension in Kashmir.

Around that time I visited a nearby tertiary care hospital with my mother for her annual check-up. While I was waiting for her outside the doctor’s room, I saw an unconscious man with a bullet injury in his head being rushed down the corridor on a stretcher. I could hear his mother crying.

As my shock wore off, I remember thinking that I had not spotted even one journalist or media person in the hospital covering what was happening there. I was shaken up, but I also felt that I needed to do something.

Following that incident, I decided to apply to the Central University of Kashmir for a master’s in convergent journalism. I graduated in 2018 and got my first job at Kashmir Monitor, a daily English newspaper. I worked there for almost three years, up until August 2020. I then joined Free Press Kashmir.

It isn’t easy being a journalist in Kashmir. I sometimes only end up covering stories from Srinagar and the areas around me due to lack of connectivity and safety. I also can’t stay out for too long during the day and have to be back home before it gets dark

We currently don’t have a lot of reporters at Free Fresh Kashmir and so I also end up doing a lot of daily reporting work. However, my main interest lies in covering conflict-based and missing-persons stories. I also write for national news portals such as The Wire, Article 14, and Firstpost.

7.00 AM: I spend most of the morning finishing household chores—cleaning the house and utensils and also preparing food for my husband before he leaves for work. Because of COVID-19, my office has allowed me to work from home, but my husband has to go to office every day since he is a government employee with the Department of Education.

Whenever my father-in-law sees me doing household chores, he urges me to go to the office or go outside to source stories. He often tells me I should focus on my job and not spend too much time working at home.

1.00 PM: I quickly finish lunch and sit down with my laptop to start working on a new story. As a first step, I make a list of all the people I have to get in touch with to piece the story together. Once I’ve finished identifying potential sources for the story, I start calling each of them.

For me, talking to all the parties involved is very crucial to the process of writing a piece. I recently worked on a story in Peerbagh, Srinagar, where the domestic help had stolen INR 3–4 lakh and was on the run.

When I got to know about this case, I first reached out to the family whose house had been robbed and got the details from them over a phone call. I asked them exactly what had happened, when they found out, about the role of the placement agency in this entire incident, etc.

After speaking with them, I called the district police station and the agency that had placed the domestic help in that house to hear their version of the event. I won’t go into too much detail about what I found out through my calls because it is a bigger story I am currently working on and hope to pitch to national publications soon.

Having worked as a journalist for a few years, I am comfortable reaching out to people to ask for information. However, this wasn’t always the case. I remember when I started out as a journalist with Kashmir Monitor, I didn’t have many sources in the field.

It was very difficult to find stories, and often I had to travel to the location of the story to be able to write it. During my initial days, I also had to visit various government offices and interact with senior officials in order to get information for research.

As a young female journalist, this wasn’t an easy task. Sometimes I was offered information in exchange for ‘certain favours’. I remember being scared back then. I was very young and had just started building my career; I didn’t know how to handle those situations. It is only now, after having spent many years in this field, that I know how to approach people and how to respond in such instances.

3.00 PM: Once I’ve made notes from all my calls, I start researching online to see if articles covering similar cases have been published in India before. If I find any, I read them. When I need to, I also step out to speak to sources for the story that I am writing. As soon as I feel confident about the outline I have, I shut my laptop and bag. I prefer to start the actual process of writing only the next afternoon and I usually email the story to my editor by the evening.

I remember when Article 370 was abrogated in Kashmir in 2019. Neither could I go to the office nor could I email stories to my editor because all network towers had been blocked. At that time the government was allowing limited internet connection at the Media Facilitation Centre. So I would download my stories on a pen drive and travel all the way to the centre, only so I could share what was happening in Jammu and Kashmir with editors in Delhi.

It isn’t easy being a journalist in Kashmir. I sometimes only end up covering stories from Srinagar and the areas around me due to lack of connectivity and safety. I also can’t stay out for too long during the day and have to be back home before it gets dark.

However, when I got selected for the Sanjay Ghose Media Awards in 2020, it gave me the opportunity to travel to rural areas and write stories that I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to. As a part of the process, I was also able to work on five pieces covering issues related to women.

I spoke to a lot of women during that time and realised that they are all suffering in some way. Most of them aren’t aware of their rights and they don’t know whom to approach or what steps to take when they are ill-treated at home by their husbands or families.

I also realised that very few people from media organisations visit these parts of Srinagar and write about the problems that people are facing here. Reports of violence and conflict in areas such as Anantnag and Bandipora—areas that I was covering at the time—are fairly common.

However, there are very few human-interest stories. The voices of the people living in these places almost never reach us, let alone the rest of the country. As a journalist in Kashmir today, I want to try and change some of that.

6.00 PM: After preparing dinner, I make myself a cup of tea and pick up a book on the history of Kashmir that I’ve been reading. I usually enjoy conflict and war-based stories, but recently I’ve also found myself reaching out for historical fiction and non-fiction books on Kashmir.

Over the course of my career, I’ve realised how important it is to have hobbies and interests that help me relax. As journalists we encounter violence, bloodshed, and deaths almost on a daily basis, especially in a conflict area such as ours. These experiences often don’t leave you.

I still can’t seem to shake off the memory of this one story I was working on in 2020. It was about a girl in Kulgam who had been raped and left to die. When I went to talk to the family, it had only been three days since the girl’s death. I spent one or two hours with them so that they would feel comfortable sharing the details of the incident with me.

They were still in shock but they were also angry because they felt that nobody was doing anything—the entire valley, according to them, was quiet about what had happened. I remember them asking one question repeatedly: When did we get so insensitive?

After covering and writing stories like this on a regular basis, especially about violence against women, I decided to seek professional help for my mental health. Thinking about this case still causes me anxiety.

7.00 PM: I get a call on my phone; it’s the police. They assure me that it’s a routine verification call. They ask me where I work and what exactly I do. As I answer their questions, I try to remember if I’ve written something recently that could warrant a call from the police. As soon as they hang up, I call up my colleagues to check if they have also received similar calls. Thankfully, they inform me that they all did and were asked the same questions.

8.00 PM: My husband and I have dinner together and I tell him about the police call I received earlier. He gets worried and asks me to seriously consider changing my profession for my own safety. This is a conversation we’ve had many times—he tells me it’s too dangerous to do the work that I do, and I tell him that while I do understand the dangers, I don’t want to do any other job.

There is so much suffering in Kashmir. Every day someone’s son, brother, or father is reported missing. Recently I ended up helping a family I had never even met because of a story I had written about three Muslim boys who got arrested in Uttar Pradesh after cheering for Pakistan’s cricket team.

Out of the three boys, two were extremely poor and were on scholarship. In order to afford a lawyer, one of their families had to sell their cow. When I wrote and tweeted about the story, my Twitter feed was filled with messages from people wanting to help and transfer money to the family so that they could get their cow back.

I know the work we do isn’t easy but I truly believe that if I can help get voices out, if I can help someone in any way, I want to continue doing what I do.

As told to IDR.

Bisma Bhat works as a journalist with Free Press Kashmir. Her features have appeared in leading national news portals including Firstpost, Article 14, and The Wire. She has a master’s degree in convergent journalism. Bisma was awarded the Sanjoy Ghose Media Award 2020 for her reportage on the violence against women in Jammu and Kashmir.

 

This story was originally published by India Development Review (IDR)

Islamic police roll bulldozers over bottles in the city of Kano, where alcohol is banned.

By External Source
Feb 10 2022 (IPS-Partners)

 

ECW: You played a critical role in establishing Education Cannot Wait just five years ago. As the Chair of ECW’s High-Level Steering Group, what are some of the key successes achieved by ECW over the last five years; and what needs to be done in the next five years as we approach the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development deadline?

The Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown: Education Cannot Wait has had to deal with increasingly difficult challenges, from Myanmar, Syria and Yemen to the Sahel and now Afghanistan. Yet it is delivering beyond all expectations – with speed in its humanitarian efforts and depth in its coordinated approach to development – and is supporting our global efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, especially SDG4. This work – delivered in partnership with governments, donors, UN agencies, civil society organizations, the private sector and other key stakeholders, including the media – is having positive, concrete impacts aiming to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education for the world’s most vulnerable children and adolescents.

In just five years, the ECW Trust Fund has mobilized over US$1.1 billion and has a growing number of public and private sector donors. In January, ECW received its single largest contribution – an additional €200 million from Germany – which is now the Fund’s largest donor, followed by the United Kingdom and Denmark. At the country-level, an additional $1 billion worth of programming has been aligned to ECW multi-year resilience and joint programmes.

ECW and its partners have delivered investments in 42 countries to date. This includes 24 countries experiencing protracted crises supported through multi-year resilience education programme investments and 35 countries experiencing new or escalating crises supported through First Emergency Responses, including the Fund’s fast-acting response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

As well as catalyzing help for millions, over 5 million children and adolescents have been reached directly and given the hope and opportunity of a quality education. An additional 30 million have been reached through the Fund’s COVID-19 emergency education response, which provides remote learning, new water and sanitation facilities, and life-saving messaging that slowed the spread of the virus.

We know that investing in 12 years of quality education for girls is one of the best investments we can make, and I’m proud to say that around 50% of the children reached through ECW’s multi-year investments are girls, and around 48% of the 70,000 teachers we’ve reached are women.

But there is so much more that needs to be done. ECW needs an additional US$1 billion in urgent funding, bringing the total to $3 billion by 2026, to accelerate the impact of this breakout and breakthrough UN global fund. ECW wants to represent the UN at its best, and the Fund has become a UN model for reform, partnership, innovation, multilateralism and most importantly, results for crisis-affected girls and boys.

As we look forward to the next five years – and in our sprint to deliver inclusive and equitable quality education for all by 2030 – we must bridge the humanitarian-development nexus and deepen our investments to integrate short-term emergency responses into our longer-term development aid interventions in crisis-zones.

This will need to include what are called ‘whole-of-child’ holistic education packages that are adapted to the specific needs of girls and boys in crisis settings. Our transformative approaches hope to address access to gender-sensitive issues, water, sanitation and hygiene, mental health and psychosocial support, gender-sensitive issues, as well as protection, targeted responses for children with disabilities, refugees and IDPs, and embracing new and innovative ways of delivering education.

ECW: ECW has identified a minimum an additional $1 billion by 2026 in funding gap for education in emergencies and protracted crises. What must be done now to both close the funding gap and build even more effective approaches across various key actors like ECW, IFFEd, GPE, UN agencies, civil society organizations and donors?

The Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown: This year, ECW will launch its new Strategic Plan to deliver on our promise of quality education for the world’s most vulnerable children and adolescents. This is our investment in public goods, our investment in peace, and our investment in prosperity. The strategic plan will build on successes and lessons learned from the first rounds of multi-year investments and adapt to the amplified risks connected with armed conflicts, forced displacement, health pandemics, the climate crisis and protracted crises.

For the strategic plan period of 2023-2026, ECW is calling on all public and private supporters to contribute at least an additional US$1 billion. This increased funding will support the education of an additional 10 million children and youth furthest left behind in conflicts and emergencies – including 6 million girls to reach our 60% target.

Germany just announced €200 million (US$228.3 million), in new, additional funding for ECW. With this new multi-year announcement, Germany is now ECW’s number one donor and the Fund’s leading donor to commit to multi-year funding. I call on world leaders and the private sector to follow Germany’s inspiring example and immediately scale up funding to ECW and meet and surpass the generous contributions of ECW’s top three donors: Germany, the United Kingdom and Denmark.

These multi-year financial commitments are crucial to increase the predictability and effectiveness of education responses in protracted crisis settings. COVID-19 and climate change have compounded humanitarian needs with the number of people needing aid reaching new records in 2022 at 274 million people. More than 1% of the world’s population is now displaced. Recent estimates indicate that the number of crisis-impacted children being denied their human right to an education has now jumped to 128 million.

These crises are not going away. Environmental problems will intensify the pressures. This is our chance to literally change the course of humanity, by changing the lives of every single crisis-affected, out-of-school child today. We must continue to work even more efficiently and effectively across governments, global funds, UN agencies, public and private sector donors to rise to the challenge with decisive action and united resolve.

ECW: How can we activate the private sector to both address the funding gap and to help better deliver on the world’s promise and commitment for equitable, inclusive, quality education for every girl and boy, no matter who or where they are? Importantly, why is addressing the education in emergencies challenge a good investment from the perspective of the private sector?

The Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown: ECW offers a unique proposition for private sector companies, philanthropic foundations and corporate social responsibility operations. By partnering with ECW ¬– and following the visionary example of The LEGO Foundation and Verizon – you are partnering with the United Nations. This means global reach, global depth and global opportunities.

Investments in education deliver a fantastic return on investment by opening up new opportunities for skilled workers, and then new markets, and our work offers increased security, predictability and economic resilience across the globe.

According to UNESCO, for every dollar invested into girls’ rights and education, developing nations could see a return of $2.80. Making sure all girls finish secondary education by 2030 could boost the gross domestic product (GDP) of developing countries by 10% on average over the next decade.

Think about it this way: if every Fortune 500 company would invest just $22 million into Education Cannot Wait, we could raise $11 billion and reach close to 50 million children with the power of an education. I can’t think of a better investment that they could make today that will positively impact their future, children’s futures, and the future of humanity.

ECW: UN Secretary-General António Guterres is convening a summit on Transforming Education in September 2022. From your global vantage point as the United Nations’ Special Envoy for Global Education, what issues must be addressed to even more effectively transform the delivery of quality education in emergencies and protracted crises to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 4?

The Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown: We must invest in the education of those left furthest behind – refugees, internally displaced people, children with disabilities, and girls. And we need to invest not just in one-off responses, but systematic changes. This means ensuring we have the resources, plans, policies, training, education, infrastructure and human power needed to connect all the parts to deliver on our promise of universal, equitable education.

Continuity is also key. Our investment in education in emergencies is an investment in an end to poverty, an end to hunger, and a more peaceful, more stable world. If children are not able to complete a minimum of 12 years of quality education, we will fall short of every target.

And what happens to the best and the brightest in countries torn apart by armed conflicts and protracted crises? All too often, they leave their country and seek asylum in the developed world. This perpetuates negative cycles of poverty and derails concerted sustainable development efforts.

We need a global scholarship fund akin to the Fulbright, Kennedy and Mandela scholarships – but for refugees this time – a fund that is big enough to cope with the higher education needs of these refugees and displaced persons. We need to invest more in early childhood education and accompany children from the minute they are born to the moment they enter the workforce as strong, capable and powerful agents of change.

ECW: Humanitarian crises are lasting longer, children are forcibly displaced for years (even lifetimes), we are witnessing unprecedented global movements of people, schools are under attack, COVID-19 has disrupted education worldwide, and climate change is an existential risk to humanity. What are among the top 3 countries facing education crises today and how can we come together to address them?

The Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown: Afghanistan is by far the biggest humanitarian crisis in the world today. The world must come together with $4.4 billion in urgent funding. This includes a substantial investment in ECW’s multi-year resilience programme in Afghanistan, along with other global responses.

For the education response in Afghanistan, we must set tight guardrails that ensure girls have unrestricted access to education. Through the UN’s direct execution modality, we have the opportunity to fund girls’ education without funding the de-facto authorities. ECW’s partners on the ground such as UNICEF, UNESCO and Save the Children are ready to deliver. Now is the time to build back better, and make sure an entire generation of Afghan girls and boys is not forgotten.

Displacement, climate change, attacks on schools and other factors are pushing children and families across borders. ECW’s regional responses in the Sahel and in South America (in response to the Venezuela Regional Crisis), provide strong examples of how we can look at the big picture to deliver education not just at the country level, but across vast geographies and vast demographics.

No one crisis or country should take precedent. It is our humanitarian and moral imperative to reach every child in every country with the safety and hope a quality education provides.

ECW: Your latest book, Seven Ways to Change the World, provides a visionary look at the future of planet Earth. Why and how can we best break down the barriers to education, and better connect the dots to address the challenges of global health, climate change, nuclear proliferation, global financial instability, the humanitarian crisis and global inequality?

The Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown: This is about investing in public goods. Investments in climate action, global health, and education benefit every person on the planet. We need to replicate the system we have for UN peacekeeping, the IMF and World Bank to create a burden sharing formula for global public goods, including education.

Think about our promise through the Paris Agreement to transfer billions of resources, technology and know-how from developed countries to developing countries through funds such as the Green Climate Fund. We know that if we are going to address the climate crisis, we need to bring all our collective resources together to address this existential challenge.

The same should be true for education. Investing in education is investing in peace, global financial stability, and a more equal world. It’s investing in a public good that benefits both rich and poor alike. My question isn’t why should we invest in education now, but why we haven’t already put education at the top of the global agenda?

ECW: Finally, you are clearly an inspiring, tireless and compassionate man – former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, a UN Special Envoy, a best-selling author, a global humanitarian and true visionary. Why have you chosen to focus so much of your time and energy on education and why are you so passionately supportive of ECW’s mandate for crisis-affected children and youth?

The Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown: A few years ago, I and others saw a gap which was not being properly filled, hence Education Cannot Wait, and we were lucky to find as our first Director Yasmine Sherif. We had development aid which came in long-term programmes but could not deal with the immediate crisis faced by refugees. On the other side, we found that humanitarian aid was excluding education because it was focused on food, shelter and health. So, we had to fill the gap and did so by creating Education Cannot Wait – the UN’s global billion-dollar fund for education and emergencies.

ECW, led by Yasmine Sherif with her dynamic and diverse team of experts, is taking this crucial issue forward by not just providing aid for crisis-affected children, youth and refugees to get them the education that is their inherent human right, but also by coordinating and acting as a catalyst for other organizations to do more.

ECW is already delivering real education results for crisis-affected children and youth and can do even more with additional, urgent funding. I encourage donors to get involved without delay. Thank you.

About Gordon Brown

Gordon Brown is the United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education and former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Since September 2021, he also serves as WHO Ambassador for Global Health Financing.

He served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2007 to 2010 and is widely credited with preventing a second Great Depression through his stewardship of the 2009 London G20 summit. He was one of the first leaders during the global crisis to initiate calls for global financial action, while introducing a range of rescue measures in the UK. In April 2009, he hosted the G20 Summit in London where world leaders committed to make an additional $1.1 trillion available to help the world economy through the crisis and restore credit, growth and jobs. They also pledged to strengthen financial supervision and regulation.

Previously, he served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1997 to 2007, making him the longest-serving Chancellor in modern history. During ten years at the Treasury, Gordon masterminded many of Labour’s proudest achievements including the Minimum Wage, Sure Start, the Winter Fuel Allowance, the Child Trust Fund, the Child Tax Credit and paid paternity leave. His record on global justice includes his negotiation of debt cancellation for the world’s poorest nations and the tripling of the budget for life-saving aid. His time as Chancellor was also marked by major reform of Britain’s monetary and fiscal policy as well as the sustained investment in health, education and overseas aid.

His role in government continued to shape his views on the importance of education as a fundamental right of every child in the world and the key to unlocking better health, greater social stability, more rights and opportunities for women and a higher standard of living. He is a passionate advocate for global action to ensure education for all. In his role as UN Special Envoy for Global Education, he works closely with key partners to help galvanize support for global education investment and the use of innovative financing to reach the UN’s global goals. He is Chair of the High-Level Steering Group for Education Cannot Wait, Chair of the Inquiry on Protecting Children in Conflict; and Chair of the International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity.

In 2020, he played a key role leading a group of 275 former world leaders, economists and educationalists calling for international action to prevent the global health crisis creating a “COVID generation” to avoid the reality of tens of millions of children with no hope of an education.

In his role as WHO Ambassador, Gordon has been invited by WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to raise awareness internationally on the great need for sustained global health financing, particularly from G20 and G7 countries, and the immediate task is to work together to finance the vaccination of the whole world and protect the poorest countries from the terrible effects of COVID-19 and other diseases.

In addition to his global education work Gordon is an advisor to the Graça Machel Trust, a Senior Panel Member at the Kofi Annan Foundation initiative on Electoral Integrity, and he is also an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Within the United Kingdom, Gordon is also the founder of Our Scottish Future, and the Alliance for Full Employment.

Gordon is the author of several books including Beyond the Crash: Overcoming the First Crisis of Globalisation, My Scotland, Our Britain and My Life, Our Times and most recently, Seven Ways to Change the World (Simon & Schuster, June 2021).

Gordon has a PhD in History from the University of Edinburgh and spent his early career working as a lecturer and in television production. He has been awarded several honorary doctorates, most recently Doctor of the University from The Open University.

He is married to Sarah Brown, the Chair of global children’s charity, Theirworld and Executive Chair of the Global Business Coalition for Education, and the couple live in Fife, Scotland with their two teenagers.

The African Storybook Project has developed writing and publishing apps that are promoting literacy. Credit: Saide

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Feb 10 2022 (IPS)

Suwaiba Hassan published an engrossing story. She used digital apps that are giving literacy a boost.

The student from Katsina State in Nigeria, Hassan, won a National Reading Competition for a story she created using the African Storybook reader app and the African Storybook maker app. Saide, an education NGO, developed the apps through its African Storybook (ASb) project.

The apps are easy-to-use storybook development tools allowing children to write and publish their own stories, which can be read and shared without internet connectivity.

Titi and Donkey was written by Suwaiba Hassan a student from Katsina State in Nigeria. Credit: ASB

Hassan turned to the online apps to help her write and publish her award-winning story – Titi and Donkey. The story is about a girl who narrowly escaped losing her grandmother’s money to a cunning donkey. Hassan wanted to inspire other girls to write and read in writing it. She did more. Her story motivated parents in her home state to encourage more girls to go to school after Hassan won a National Reading Competition and all expenses paid scholarships to cover all her education levels. Northern Nigeria has a high number of out-of-school children.

Conquering literacy one story at a time

The African Storybook Project has created a digital library of open license African storybooks to address the challenge of education inclusion and access to appropriate reading materials for young African children. It has been piloted in 15 African countries.

The applications are helping conquer illiteracy one story at a time by providing reading material in home languages that reflect local content for children to read, says Jenny Glennie, Saide Executive Director.

Saide contributes to the development of new open learning models, including the use of educational technology and open education resources in Sub Saharan Africa.

“We are promoting the idea that you have a publisher in your pocket and a library on your phone,” Glennie tells IPS.

On average, 2000 unique storybooks in 222 African languages have been published online, created mainly by students, teachers and librarians. More than 1.5 million children in Africa benefitted from the storybooks downloaded from the ASb website, especially after COVID-19 hit leading to the close of many schools.

The ASb project works with local educators and illustrators, including children, to develop, publish, and use relevant storybooks in children’s language.

According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), some 40 per cent of the global population does not access education in a language they understand.

UNESCO cautions that literacy promotion should be looked at from a perspective of multilingualism because several international and regional languages have expanded as lingua franca. In contrast, numerous minority and indigenous languages are endangered.

Literacy in local languages encourages reading and writing among learners because they use the material in their mother tongue every day, noted Belina Simushi, Education Programme Officer with the Impact Network Zambia, an education service provider operating schools in Zambia.

In Zambia, she said learners are taught in English, a foreign language.

“Our learners need books to be written in a local language, which I believe can act as a stepping stone for learning how to read and write,” said Simushi. She led a story-writing project in which teachers wrote over 300 storybooks they uploaded online using the ASb Storybook Maker and guide.

“I also believe that by accessing books written in Cinyanja [a language widely spoken in Zambia and Malawi], our learners can read about stories, cultures and other topics that can help them enjoy reading books and develop a love for reading books,”.

Righting illiteracy

Reading is an important skill in the development of young learners. Pupils at a primary school in Gwanda, Zimbabwe, enjoy a reading moment. Credit, Busani Bafana/IPS

According to the Lost Potential Tracker, nine out of 10 children in Sub Saharan Africa miss the age ten basic literacy milestones, according to the Lost Potential Tracker, an interactive analysis tool measuring the scale of the global learning crisis. The tool jointly created by the One Campaign, the Global Partnership for Education and Save the Children in 2021, shows the depth of the global learning crisis.

Alice Albright, CEO of the Global Partnership for Education, says reading and writing are essential building blocks for children to succeed.

“This tool shows the depth of the global learning crisis – and what a critical situation the world faces if we do not prioritise education.”

While Inger Ashing, CEO of Save the Children International, warned that the world faces an unprecedented education emergency worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic. Children in some of the poorest and conflict-affected countries are the most badly affected.

“If we are to live up to our commitments to achieving the full range of Sustainable Development Goals and the children’s right to education, then improving literacy levels is a must,” Ashing noted, emphasising that being able to read was a foundation skill that enabled children to realise their full potential.

The ASb apps have also opened new opportunities to promote and preserve some of Africa’s least spoken languages, which are on the verge of dying off because they are not written down, said Dorcas Wepukhulu, the East and West African Storybook Partner Development Coordinator at Saide.

“The apps have enabled a different learning process that goes beyond the usual stringing of words. It is motivating. The fact that the stories they have written can be published and read by others is something children are very proud of and want to do,” said Wepukhulu. She explained that they are encouraging many people across Sub Saharan Africa to use the apps while helping the marginalised talk about their experiences and boost languages that have not been published in creating reading materials.

Smangele Mathebula, African Storybook Partner Development Coordinator for Southern Africa,  noted that the apps had given children a chance to be fully present as they interact with technology in sharing their experiences.

The African Storybook Story Maker App won the 2021 Tech4Good Awards in Education given by UK-based Tech4Good Awards. The awards celebrate fantastic businesses, individuals and initiatives that use digital technologies to improve the lives of others and make the world a better place. Saide was also voted the Winner of Winners in the virtual awards ceremony.

“Emerging as the Winner of Winners in this year’s awards reinforces our efforts to continue promoting the use of the Story Maker across Sub-Saharan Africa as a way of empowering children to tell their own stories and for communities to self-publish,” Glennie said.

 

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By Simone Galimberti
KATHMANDU, Nepal, Feb 10 2022 (IPS)

The global consensus about an international treaty on pandemic prevention is certainly a milestone towards the creation of a global health security framework.

A new treaty is likely to bind the member states to higher standards of compliance, especially if a global accountability mechanism is also enforced.

Consider the disregard towards the International Health Regulations (2005), IHRs, the only tool available to control what in jargon is referred as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).

Despite numerous review exercises, some of which taken more than a decade ago in the aftermath of the first SARS outbreak in Asia and again after EBOLA hit Western Africa, the vast majorities of these regulations were not enforced in the following years.

The consequence is that we are still paying the price and very dearly.

Though the negotiations on the treaty details, especially the complex aspects of its binding legality, won’t be a cakewalk, such tool can offer a strong bulwark against future lethal cross border infections.

Yet a global treaty won’t be nearly enough alone to guarantee a pandemics free future.

What missing is the willpower to truly link preparedness and basic health care, something that is complex and very expensive at the same time.

A real breakthrough in the global health system will be seen when a new willingness is found unprecedented levels of basic health financing around the world, especially in the developing nations.

We need massive investments in building national health systems able to provide what it is normally referred as Universal Health Coverage, defined by the WHO, as access to a broad range of services, which would include the services that contribute to preparedness to future pandemic

If new resources are essential, the capacity of managing them properly is equally important so that the weakest member nations of the United Nations can strengthen their health system.

Unfortunately, for most of them, there is still a long way to go.

The WHO has a huge responsibility and duty to support such process but so far it failed and with it, the international community.

A different organization, starting from its governance, might instead radically change the status quo and enable the creation of trust that essential if we want more money to build national public health system based on equity.

In the case of the IHRs, it is true that primary responsibility of enforcing them lays with the member states, the WHO is the guardian and at the same time a key enabler in their implementation.

A stronger WHO could have done more not only to compel governments towards the implantation of the IHRs but also to be more effective in partnering with developing countries in rebooting their national primary health care centers and hospitals.

Instead, the agency’s reputed failures since the first outbreak of SARS in early 2000s showed the inability of a too complex and too political organization without adequate means.

That’s why we need to ensure that the WHO can play a much bigger role: not in replacing the ministries of health in the developing world but in supporting them in building equitable health systems.

For this to happen we do not need the WHO to be re-tooled and re-purposed but also re-founded.

The focus on the new treaty should not prevent drastic changes in how public health services are delivered in the developing nations and a lifting any “red line” in re-thinking the WHO.

Since 2017, Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus, its current Director General, embarked the organization into a process of key changes but these improvements, important as they are, do not go far enough.

What we need is a radical turnaround.

Following the Covid-19 pandemic, again new proposals have been made to strengthen the organization.

A lot of emphasis has been laid on increasing the predictability and availability of unmarked resources, so called of “Assessed Contributions”, rather than having, as happens now, a WHO totally relying on voluntary contributions from donors that so far constitute the vast majority of the resources it manages.

Such contributions are driven by interests and priorities of the donors rather than those of the agency.

A balancing in the budget contributions of the organization might surely help but at the same time it might be worthy reflecting that some of the most results-oriented agencies within the UN System are entirely dependent on such voluntary contribution.

This for example is the case of UNDP and UNICEF, the strongest and richest agencies within the UN System. Perhaps the real problem is not the lack of resources in itself but the politicization of an organization that is basically owned by its member states, the governments.

The same could be said for UNESCO.

It is not a coincidence that both agencies share low budgets and are among the weakest among their peers.

At UNICEF, for example there is nothing akin to the role played by the World Health Assembly that effectively controls the WHO.

The governance there is totally different and it is led by an Executive Board representing the member states that though, have considerable sway over the management of the agency (that’s why the Executive Director is always an American), it is less politicized and less controlling than an assembly of member states.

Perhaps what we should have is a global fund for public health more similar in its governance and delivery to UNICEF.

Such radical transformation, improbable at the moment, might be instrumental in truly rebuilding from scratch the WHO and instrumental in turning it into a much more effective agency with less competing centers of powers like is happening now with what are de-facto semi-independent regional offices.

As consequence a new organization branded as the Global Fund for Public Health could attract the huge investments that developing countries need to build strong and resilient health system, insuring Universal Health Coverage for all their citizens.

So far donors have been too narrow and selective when focusing on public health.

For example, the focus has been on prenatal and postnatal care, reproductive health, all very important domains of public health.

Yet such narrow focus on these areas through a silos approach prevented investing into creating, in partnership with the developing countries, reliable and equity-based health systems at disposal of the public.

Let’s not forget what the Secretary General said back in 2016 Seventieth session Agenda entitled “Strengthening the global health architecture” dedicated on strengthening of implementation of the recommendations of the High-level Panel on the Global Response to Health Crises Report, one of the several published so far to retrofit the health system to deal with global pandemics.

“I believe that WHO needs to reposition itself as an operational organization, clarifying its reporting lines and adjusting its business processes so that it can perform its operational role most effectively during times of health crises”.

Moreover in 2016 the Commission on a Global Health Risk Framework for the Future argued that “public health is the foundation of the health system and its first line of defense”.

For this to happen we need a new WHO and such a new organization could create the trust for an unprecedented mobilization of funding in public health, resources that World Bank and other regional banks and donor agencies should disburse.

Both Indonesia and Germany, respectively guiding this year the G 20 and the G 7, expressed a strong commitment to reform the global health system.

A narrow focus on a pandemic preparedness treaty would be a miss opportunity to truly revolutionize global health governance and with it, reset and transform the WHO.

Simone Galimberti is the Co-Founder of ENGAGE, an NGO partnering with youths living with disabilities. Opinions expressed are personal.

 

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Samuel Sorie Sesay, who died last month in Sierra Leone, fought for the British army in World War Two.

The upcoming British Punitive Expedition anniversary has reignited calls for the return of stolen treasures.

International judges blame Uganda for the death of 10-15,000 people between 1998 and 2003.

Pulses provide nutrients and energy and they help prevent diseases like diabetes and coronary conditions. The United Nations declared 10 February World Pulses Day.

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Feb 9 2022 (IPS)

Pulses and meat are both needed as part of your diet, however… While the total emissions of greenhouse gases from global livestock amount to 7.1 Gigatonnes of Co2-equivalent per year, representing 14.5% of all anthropogenic emissions, pulses have root nodules that absorb inert nitrogen from soil air and convert it into biologically useful ammonia, a process referred to as biological nitrogen fixation.

Moreover, cattle (raised for both beef and milk, as well as for inedible outputs like manure and draft power) are the animal species responsible for the most emissions, representing about 65% of the livestock sector’s emissions, according to a report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

Pulses, instead, provide nutrients and energy and they help prevent diseases like diabetes and coronary conditions.

“They are rich in proteins and minerals, have high fiber content and low-fat content, and no cholesterol. The carbohydrates in pulses are absorbed and digested slowly, and thus help control diabetes and obesity.”

 

Meat, instead…

Back to livestock, the Organisation says that, in terms of activities, feed production and processing (this includes land use change) and enteric fermentation from ruminants are the two main sources of emissions, representing 45% and 39% of total emissions, respectively.

And that manure storage and processing represent 10%. The remainder is attributable to the processing and transportation of animal products.

 

Pulses on display at a farmer’s market in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

 

Protein for the poor

In many cultures, pulses are considered as ‘protein for the poor’ and their high nutrient content makes them ideal for vegetarians and vegans to ensure adequate intakes of protein, minerals and vitamins, says FAO.

In addition to their function and role in reducing greenhouse gases emission, the world body highlights the following ten great benefits:

1. Pulses are naturally low in fat and contain no cholesterol, which can contribute to reducing the risk of cardiovascular diseases.
2. Pulses are also low in sodium. Sodium chloride – or salt – is a contributor to hypertension and can be avoided by consuming foods with lower sodium levels such as pulses.
3. They are a great source of plant-based protein. Surprisingly, 100 grams of dry lentils contain a remarkable 25 grams of protein! During cooking, pulses absorb considerable amounts of water thus reducing their protein content to around 8 percent.

Yet, you can still increase the protein quality of cooked pulses by simply combining them with cereals in your meal, for example, lentils with rice.

4. Pulses are a good source of iron. Iron deficiency is considered one of the most prevalent forms of malnutrition and is one of the most common types of anaemia. To help optimise the absorption of iron in our bodies from pulses, combine them with foods containing vitamin C (lemon juice on lentil curry for example).
5. Pulses are high in potassium, which supports heart health and plays an important role for digestive and muscular functions.
6. Pulses are often quoted among the top high fiber foods, necessary for supporting digestive health and helping to reduce the risks of cardiovascular diseases.
7. Pulses are an excellent source of folate – a B-vitamin naturally present in many foods – that is essential to the nervous system function and especially important during pregnancy to prevent fetal defects.
8. Pulses can be stored for a long time and therefore can help to increase the diversity of diets, especially in developing countries.
9. Pulses are low glycaemic index foods. They help to stabilize blood sugar and insulin levels, making them suitable for people with diabetes and ideal for weight management.
10. Finally, pulses are naturally gluten-free. This makes them an ideal option for coeliacs.

 

A full World Day for pulses

The United Nations declared 10 February World Pulses Day, keeping alive the positive momentum surrounding these healthy, nutritious and protein-rich legumes after FAO’s successful International Year of Pulses Campaign in 2016.

“They are our delicious ally in achieving food security, reducing malnutrition and creating a #ZeroHunger world.”

 

Love for pulses

“There is a lot to love about pulses! They are inexpensive, healthy, environmentally-friendly and, last but not least, tasty!”

“Red, green, white, black, brown… name a colour and we can give you a pulse! And what exactly is a pulse, you might ask? Well, pulses are a sub-group of legumes that are harvested for their dry seeds. Beans, lentils and peas are commonly known pulses.”

“But the world of pulses is much more than that! From lupins to lentils or cowpeas to chickpeas, pulses can surprise you with their breadth and depth,” explains the Food and Agriculture Organisation.

No matter whether they have an alluring name like velvet beans or a curious one like winged beans, pulses are wonderful foods for both human and environmental health, FAO underlines.

 

Vital and inexpensive

“They are a vital and generally inexpensive source of protein. They are full of vitamins and minerals that can help prevent diseases like diabetes and coronary conditions.”

Planet-wise, it adds, pulses are good for soil health, and many are also drought resistant and climate-resilient, their genetic diversity helping them adapt to changes in climate.

 

Less popular now!

Despite the many benefits, these extraordinary foods have lost popularity in recent years and worldwide consumption has decreased because of rising incomes and related consumer preferences, reports the world body.

Anyway, you surely know how to cook pulses. However, should you want to learn more, please click here: Pulses recipes from around the world!

Fostina Kachimera in her maize garden that she planted under irrigation. Since she has started to use irrigation she no longer lives in fear of dry spells. Credit: Esmie Komwa Eneya/IPS

By Esmie Komwa Eneya
BLANTYRE, MALAWI, Feb 9 2022 (IPS)

In the past, the people of Sande Village in Chikwawa district, Malawi, would go to bed with empty stomachs even when the rest of the country harvested bumper yields.

This is because the area in southern Malawi is prone to both floods and drought – making rain-fed agriculture difficult.

One woman farmer, Fostina Kachimera, said that after practising rain-fed agriculture over several years without results, she stopped farming and was just sitting idle because agriculture was her only option for employment.

“When we try to do rain-fed agriculture is either the crops will be swept away by floods or burnt by drought before they even start to produce fruits,” she said.

Chikwawa and Nsanje districts are situated in the Shire River valley.

According to Shire Valley Agriculture Development Division (Shivadd) programme manager Francis Mlewah, the valley has 313 215 hectares of land, but almost half experiences prolonged dry spells.

“In addition to that, its annual rainfall falls between 400 to 1000 mm, and this is below the average annual rainfall needed by most of the crops grown in the country,”  Mlewah says, explaining that optimal rainfall was above 1 200mm.

Then there is flooding.

“One-third of the land is situated along the country’s biggest river, and indeed farmers who cultivate their crops in these areas face floods almost every year,” he explained.

Now, this has become a song of the past because Kachimera and her fellow 259 farmers can now harvest three crops a year through irrigation. This has enabled them to produce enough food for the year and a surplus to sell.

All the farmers had also managed to build substantial houses which withstand floods – unlike in the past when floods often damaged their homes.

The Evangelical Association of Malawi came to their rescue in 2007 and introduced irrigation farming.

“We started as a club, but by 2010 we transformed into a scheme known as Sande.

“When we were starting, we were using water canes to irrigate our crops, but right now we are using water pumps which we purchased through the profits from irrigation farming, and almost every one of us has managed to buy one,” said the scheme’s chairperson Samuel Wise.

Apart from growing maize, the country’s staple food, Wise explained that the system produces different crops such as legumes, tubers, and vegetables.

According to him, the idea is to have diverse foods available to combat malnutrition and fetch reasonable prices on the market.

Once the irrigation started, the families started to live healthy lives.

They no longer lack necessities such as clothes, soap and can pay school fees for their children.

“In the past, transportation was so difficult for us since we could not afford even the cheapest bicycle, but now we have motorbikes that we bought with the farm proceeds,” he said.

Malawi’s Deputy Agriculture Minister Agnes Nkusankhoma recently visited the scheme and praised it.

“Finding the big area like this green is rare especially considering that this is the dry season, and these farmers made this place look like we are in the rainy season.”

Nkusankhoma encouraged them to register in the livestock subsidy program to add to what they are already doing because livestock production does well in these districts.

While the farmers relish their success, they lament the rising fuel prices. The water pumps are reliant on fuel – shrinking their profits.

The community will benefit from the Shire Valley Transformation Programme – a government-led project financed by World Bank, the African Development Bank, and the Global Environment Facility.

According to the project’s coordinator, Stanly Chakhumbira, the project put 43 370 hectares under irrigation using gravity to divert water from the river to the canals. Once this is completed, farmers will no longer need to rely on fuel.

 

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A woman holding a child begs at an intersection in New Delhi. Credit: Ranjit Devraj/IPS.

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Feb 9 2022 (IPS)

If India ranks among the world’s fastest growing economies it is also where inequity is growing the fastest, thanks to endemic features unique to the country such as the caste system.

“It is not widely understood but India does not have a working class — instead it has large labouring castes that are trapped in an inherently iniquitous system,” says Manas Ray, professor in cultural studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata.

According to Ray, the labouring castes and their interests are poorly represented where it matters and they also have little guidance or support from voluntary agencies. “There’s no capable voluntary sector of the type that works to empower the marginalised in other countries in the region. In fact, hundreds of NGOs, including Amnesty International and Greenpeace, have been forced to shut down operations in India in recent years.”

“It is not widely understood but India does not have a working class — instead it has large labouring castes that are trapped in an inherently iniquitous system,”

Manas Ray, professor in cultural studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata

“A contrasting situation can be seen in Bangladesh, where powerful NGOs reach down to people at the grassroots and guide them on how to generate and manage surpluses,” says Ray. “It helps immensely that Bangladesh is not burdened by a caste system.”

Last year, Bangladesh posted a per capita income of $2,227 or $280 higher than that of its larger neighbour. “Bangladesh, once regarded as a ‘basket case,’ can now be expected to maintain this lead in the foreseeable future because of investments in the social sectors, especially education and health,” says Ray.

In a global report released in January, the British charity Oxfam describes India as ‘very unequal,’ with the top 10 percent of its 1.4 billion population having cornered 77 percent of the total national wealth. The report, Inequality Kills, estimates that inequality has been rising over the last three decades.

Oxfam calculates that it would take 941 years for a minimum wage worker in rural India to earn what a top paid executive at a leading Indian garment company earns in a year. India’s stark wealth inequality is attributed by Oxfam to “an economic system rigged in favour of the super-rich over the poor and marginalised.”

The report said that during 2021, when the COVID-19 pandemic caused 84 percent of Indian households to suffer a drop in income, the number of billionaires in the country grew from 102 to 142. During the worst months of the pandemic (March 2020 to November 2021), the wealth of India’s billionaires more than doubled, from $313 billion to $719 billion.

“The pandemic proved to be a crunch point which exposed the country’s uncaringly iniquitous system,” says Ray, referring to how a suddenly imposed lockdown left millions of internal migrant workers stranded in the cities with no jobs, food or shelter and with little choice but to trek to their distant homes in the rural hinterland, often hundreds of kilometres away.

It took petitions in the Supreme Court for government to admit that more than half a million people were walking down the highways trying to get home, often braving assaults by police charged with enforcing lockdown rules. Trade unions said the bulk of an estimated 200 million migrant workers in India’s different cities and towns lost their jobs.

In contrast to the callous treatment meted out to internal migrant workers, the government spared no costs in arranging special flights to fetch students and privileged people who found themselves stuck in foreign countries that had also imposed lockdowns to stop the spread of the highly contagious COVID-19 virus.

The Supreme Court has had to intervene on behalf of the poor and marginalised on other occasions where inequity has been glaring. For example, the court stepped in to order the distribution to poor and starving people of vast quantities of surplus grain rotting in state-run godowns.

On 7 January the apex court dismissed petitions challenging the government policy of reserving a quota of coveted post-graduate seats in India’s medical colleges for socially backward castes on the plea that it went against the principle of merit. The court did not buy that argument and pointed to India’s iniquitous system, which it said impacts on merit.

“Widespread inequalities in the availability of and access to educational facilities will result in the deprivation of certain classes of people who would be unable to effectively compete in such a system,” said Y. Chandrachud, handing down the judgement. “Special provisions enable such disadvantaged classes to overcome the barriers they face in effectively competing with forward classes and thus ensuring substantive equality.”

“Merit should be socially contextualised and re-conceptualised as an instrument that advances social goods like equality that we, as a society, value,” Chandrachud said, pointing to provisions in India’s constitution to award reserved quotas in jobs and educational opportunities to “remedy the structural disadvantages that certain groups suffer.”

Reserved quotas have, however, barely scratched the problem. Since 1983, the government has implemented a policy of reserving 50 percent of jobs in the coveted civil service for socially under privileged castes, but by 2019 only four individuals from these categories had made it to a list of 89 secretary-level positions.

How may such ingrained inequities be remedied? The Oxfam report called for higher taxes to be imposed on the richest 10 percent of the Indian population to help fund measures to reduce inequality. That’s easier than done because only one percent of Indians declare earnings sufficient to attract taxation.

In 2021 only 50.89 million individuals in a population of 1.4 billion people filed income tax returns, and only half that number paid any worthwhile tax.

Prabhat Patnaik, former professor of economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, agrees that that the solution to gross inequity lies in “taxing the rich and investing the proceeds for the neglected social sectors — it is shame that large numbers of people continue to have no access to health or education.”

The Oxfam report says that 63 million Indians are pushed into poverty each year because of unaffordable healthcare costs. Public spending on healthcare ranks among the lowest in the world — 1.8 percent of GDP in 2021. Although India is a major destination for medical tourism because of its fine specialty hospitals, several of its poorest states have infant mortality rates higher than those in sub-Saharan Africa.

Patnaik pointed to how government policies have consistently favoured the rich since the country embarked on economic liberalisation in the early 1980s. Inheritance tax was abolished in 1985 and in 2017 the government abolished wealth tax, allowing the concentration of wealth in rich families. In September 2019, corporate tax was slashed from 35 percent to 26 percent.

“In contrast to India’s policy of providing tax concessions to the rich the international trend is for the wealthy to ask that they be taxed more,” said Patnaik referring to the open letter from the Patriotic Millionaires group to the World Economic Forum’s virtual Davos in January asking to be taxed more to help economic recovery after the pandemic.

“As millionaires, we know that the current tax system is not fair. Most of us can say that while the world has gone through an immense amount of suffering in the last two years, we have actually seen our wealth rise during the pandemic — yet few if any of us can honestly say that we pay our fair share in taxes,” reads the letter, which was prompted by the Oxfam report.

Predictably there were no Indians among the list of 102 Patriotic Millionaires and there has been no statement on it from any quarter in India.

Ending poverty and hunger once and for all – is it possible? Credit: United Nations

By Andy Sumner and Eduardo Ortiz-Juarez
LONDON, Feb 9 2022 (IPS)

In 2010 and the following years, there was attention to the fact that much of global poverty had shifted to middle-income countries (for example here, here, and here).

The world’s poor hadn’t moved of course, but the countries that are home to large numbers of poor people had got better off on average and poverty hadn’t fallen as much as one might expect with economic growth in those countries moving from low-income to middle-income.

There were also some big questions over the country categories themselves. One could say the world’s poor live not in the world’s poorest countries but in fast growing countries and countries with burgeoning domestic resources to address poverty albeit ‘locked’ by domestic political economy (who doesn’t want cheap petrol?)

This idea of the distribution of global poverty has more recently been revisited (here and here), just as it seems that global poverty has shifted back to low-income countries (LICs). Or has it? To get a better picture of global poverty trends, locations, and to understand the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic, we need to understand the limitations of the data.

What can’t the data tell us?

We are facing one big, and one monumental, data problem. First, there are no real data for poverty in India over the last decade—a country with a substantial impact on global poverty counts given its large population.

Instead, the World Bank’s PovcalNet database extrapolates households’ consumption to compute poverty in India from 2011 to 2017 (not 2019, though why is not clear). Extrapolation is not unique to India’s data; the World Bank also infers poverty estimates of other countries if data for the reference year are not available. And there’s the rub. There is an underlying monumental problem.

The World Bank has over 6,000 distributions in its database but only a third—about 2,000—are real survey data, so interpolation/extrapolation is endemic (see Figure 1 for details).

All the figures in this blog post are based on that World Bank’s PovcalNet database (one difference: we take the 2017 World Bank estimate of poverty in India and apply it to 2019). So, everything here is based on the ‘official’ database used by the Bank who to their credit make publicly available.

Can we objectively say how many people live in poverty?

The World Bank uses the $1.90-a-day poverty line whose determination relies heavily on two decades worth of Consumer Price Index (CPI) data for some of the world’s poorest countries. This is contentious since errors could change the overall value of the poverty line and change the poverty headcount.

Every dime above the World Bank’s line adds on average almost 70 million more poor people. So, the global poverty count at $1.90 a day— almost 700 million people—rises by another 500 million people by the time one gets to $2.50 a day, which is the average poverty line of all developing countries (see Figure 2).

Further, the headcount increases by a billion people moving from the $1.90 to the World Bank’s ‘moderate’ poverty line of $3.20 a day. This $3.20 threshold is important as it is also the poverty line closely associated with headcounts of multidimensional poverty and the average poverty line among lower middle-income countries (LMICs), where most of the world’s multidimensionally poor live.

In Figure 2 we also include $5.50, the average poverty line of upper middle-income countries (UMICs), and $13 a day, as this is the line associated with ‘permanent’ escape from poverty used by the World Bank in Latin America.

So where do the world’s poor live? Hint: it depends on who you count as ‘poor’

Mostly in Africa and, now in contrast to a decade ago, low-income countries once more, right? Well again, it depends on where you draw the line. Around the income/consumption poverty line correlated with multidimensional poverty counts ($3.20 a day), the world’s poor live in South Asia as much as in sub-Saharan Africa (see Figure 3).

At the same time, if we use the World Bank’s moderate poverty line of $3.20, three quarters of the world’s poor remain in MICs (see Figure 4).

Then there’s the pandemic. We’ll never know for sure the impact of the pandemic on poverty, as we’d need surveys for a large number of developing countries before as well as after, and those just don’t exist.

Moreover, the pandemic is ongoing and could shape the prospects for growth and poverty reduction in developing countries for the next five to ten years given the slow and unequal global distribution of vaccines.

Figure 5 shows various scenarios of how much the poverty count in middle-income countries could have risen due to the pandemic. Our purpose is not to predict one precise poverty outcome but to show what different income shocks to those near the poverty line imply in terms of potential poverty impact in the absence of compensatory policy intervention. We thus use a set of universal, arbitrary shocks to estimate the extent of precarity.

In short, we are highlighting the fragility of progress on poverty reduction in the current pandemic context given the characteristics of the responses to the pandemic—i.e. lockdowns—combined with pre-existing conditions of high levels of informality of employment and the weaker coverage of social protection in the informal sector.

Our study illustrates the following: if the income shock is of this magnitude, the effect on poverty could be dramatic. What is evident is that millions of people in MICs live not that far above the $1.90-a-day poverty line (and the $3.20 poverty line) and thus could easily fall (back) into poverty as a result of disrupted economic activity due to lockdowns or ill health.

Why does this all matter? There are three reasons why

First, shockingly, we don’t really know how much income poverty there is in the world due to the missing India data. Of course, we do have multidimensional poverty estimates (at a global level the headcount could be double that of $1.90-a-day poverty).

Second, just because the data tells us that extreme poverty, at $1.90 a day, has moved back to LICs (at least prior to the pandemic), much of the global poverty remains in MICs. In fact, three quarters of the global poor at the $3.20 line are living in MICs, even if measured before the pandemic.

Third, the pandemic itself has rendered millions of people in MICs who are living just above the $1.90-a-day poverty line at risk of falling back, meaning the global poverty headcount could rise, and stop-start economic growth in the next few years could leave poverty rates higher.

What is clear from the pandemic is that every country will need a universal (probably annual) vaccination programme. And yet the Global South—with some exceptions, notably India and China as vaccine producers—is unlikely to have fair and equal access to the global supply of vaccines to achieve universal coverage.

Consequentially, economic growth and poverty reduction will likely proceed in starts and stops as infection waves peak and trough. Even the vaccines that do reach the Global South will need to be paid for and require state capacity to deliver.

That could mean the diversion of public spending and state capacity away from social spending and poverty reduction. The immediate impact of the pandemic has led to an expansion of social safety nets and policies, these need to become permanent and universal in the years ahead beyond the impact of the pandemic’s first phase on poverty is to be reduced and the Sustainable Development Goals ever met.

Andy Sumner is a Non-Resident Senior Research Fellow at UNU-WIDER. He is also a Professor of International Development at King’s College London, and Director of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Global Challenges Strategic Research Network on Global Poverty and Inequality Dynamics.

Eduardo Ortiz-Juarez is a Lecturer in Development Economics in the Department of International Development at King’s College London, with a particular interest in the study of poverty dynamics, inequalities, social policy, and green development.

 

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As people eye the benefits there are questions over the environmental cost and the timing.

By Sania Farooqui
NEW DELHI, India, Feb 8 2022 (IPS)

The Covid-19 pandemic affected countries and people globally, at the same time exacerbated vulnerabilities such as modern-day slavery. There are over 40.3 million people estimated to be in modern-day slavery, and certain population groups, sectors and geographies such as children, migrant workers, women and girls that were already vulnerable, became more vulnerable to recruitment and exploitation during the pandemic. The United Nations has called the pandemic more than a health crisis, “it is an economic crisis, a humanitarian crisis, and a human rights crisis.”

Romy Hawatt

UN Secretary- General António Guterres called the world to go into emergency mode in the COVID-19 battle, stating the global economy which continues to be uncertain, health systems which are overwhelmed and millions of more people being pushed into poverty.

“The world has slipped backwards”, said Romy Hawatt, founding member of the Global Sustainability Network (GSN) in an exclusive interview given to IPS News. “The modern-day abuses of human rights and dignity are completely abhorrent and unacceptable in all its forms and at all levels. Governments everywhere are falling short on their responsibilities to protect their citizens (especially children) and are not putting in the proportionate focus, attention and resources into fighting these crimes against humanity,” Hawatt said.

As a ‘social entrepreneur’ he has used his business success and platforms to directly develop, fund and implement solutions for social, cultural and environmental issues. What started many years ago as informal charity work, eventually turned him into becoming a philanthropist, supporter and benefactor of various charities and organizations, GSN being one of them.

Earlier in 2020, more than 50 independent UN human rights experts warned that the COVID-19 pandemic played into the hands of slavers and traffickers, and it required stronger government measures to prevent exploitation of vulnerable people. The statement urged governments and businesses to recognize how the loss of jobs, income or land could put vulnerable groups at great risk and that exploitation could mean forced labor, including the worst forms of child labor, or being sold, trafficked and sexually exploited.

This report states more than 70% of the 4.8 million sex exploitation victims are in the Asia and Pacific region. 1.5 million victims are living in developed countries, with an estimated 13,000 enslaved in the UK.

Romy Hawatt became a founding member of GSN a network organization which was founded in 2014 by Raza Jafar, The RT Rev Lord Bishop Alastair Redfern and S. E. Mons. Marcelo Sanchez got together with a vision for a world free of slavery, child labor and human trafficking. This was initiated after the signing of a Joint Declaration Against Modern Slavery by Pope Francis, Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew from Greece and senior representatives of the Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhists faiths.

With a rapidly growing number of change makers, and influencers joining GSN, Hawatt says, “each one of them play a prominent role in creating awareness, educating, articulating and lobbying the powers to be at the faith, government, academia, business, media and sports levels to harness the power of connections and collaborations to help achieve the United Nations Sustainability Development (SDG) Goal 8 and 8.7 objectives which focuses on ending modern-day slavery, human and human organ trafficking. The plan going forward is to get further on to the front foot and make as much of a sustainable impact as possible, by utilizing all mediums and platforms available to articulate, inspire, invigorate and support a plethora of influencers and collaborators like those associated with the GSN to undercover and expose all forms of human exploitation”.

As governments around the world from the time when the pandemic began in 2020, mandated lockdowns and worked with limited pandemic response opportunities, traffickers adapted their methods to the pandemic, including social media and other online platforms to recruit new victims.

“Women and girls have been recruited, often locally or online, for sexual exploitation, especially in private apartments. Children have been particularly affected – out of school and needing to support parents who have lost their livelihoods, increasingly targeted by traffickers at the local level and online, says this report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

“Traffickers responded to the closure of bars, clubs and massage parlours (due to lockdowns, curfews and other measures to control the spread of COVID-19) by moving the sexual exploitation of adults and children to private homes and apartments. In some countries traffickers have also capitalized on social distancing measures to transport victims across national borders, knowing that law enforcement has, at times, been unable to carefully inspect vehicles,” the report states.

According to this report, there are at least three ways in which COVID-19 impacts efforts to end modern day slavery: 1) heightening risks for those already exploited; 2) increasing the risks of exploitation, including child labour and child marriage; and 3) disrupting response efforts.

“Very simply put, traffickers target the most vulnerable and it is the women and children that fit this category, and especially those that are from poorer communities, perhaps are refugees, and those who lack education fall into the highest risk category of those who are trafficked.

“This is not just a third world problem; human trafficking is happening literally everywhere. Wittingly or unwittingly, we are all consumers that create demand and work in or drive supply chains that use and abuse fellow human beings. We therefore have an obligation to help fix it,” said Hawatt.

 

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How Aliou Cisse, a workmanlike player who became a disciplinarian coach, led Senegal to their first Africa Cup of Nations title.

The UN commemorates Safe Internet Day annually on February 8. Credit: International Telecommunication Union (ITU)

By Amanda Manyame
JOHANNESBURG, Feb 8 2022 (IPS)

The internet and digital technology have allowed children and young people to connect, exchange knowledge and information, and truly turn the world into a global village.

Although a lot of good has come from this level of connectivity, the ability to reach millions of people at the click of a button has also allowed bad actors access to a wider potential victim pool.

Most critically, increased accessibility to the internet has exacerbated the sexual exploitation and abuse of children and young people.

What happens offline has found its way online. Children and young people are repeatedly victimised as these crimes are usually captured in permanent digital images that are perpetually reshared online resulting in long-term impact that often lasts into adulthood.

There is an urgent need to develop adequate and future-proof laws that ensure safe, responsible, and positive use of the internet and digital technology to guarantee children and young people are able to safely enjoy online spaces.

While online sexual exploitation and abuse (OSEA) occurs in digital spaces, the roots of this form of violence are fundamentally the same as those that occur in the physical world. Sexism, gender-based discrimination, intersecting inequalities, cultural beliefs, and social norms underpin sexual abuse and exploitation that occurs “in the real world” as well as online.

The factors that make children and young people vulnerable to OSEA were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic prompted the closure of schools, recreational centers, after school activities and other places where children and young people tend to spend a majority of their time.

These necessary public health measures led to an unprecedented number of children and young people going online and using digital technologies, some for the first time and many with little or no supervision.

Many children are attending online school from home during the coronavirus outbreak. Credit: UNICEF/Lisa Adelson

Regulation of online sexual exploitation and abuse

At Equality Now, we believe that one of the ways to end OSEA and create secure and respectful online spaces is to have laws, policies, and measures that adopt a human rights-based approach and are informed by the needs and experiences of OSEA survivors.

OSEA is global and multi-jurisdictional because offenders, victims, and digital platforms are often located in different countries which presents legal challenges when prosecuting offenders. As such, legal remedies for survivors need to be multi-jurisdictional and enforceable internationally.

OSEA is not only found on the dark web but on the surface web where children and young people frequently socialise and create and share content. In Equality Now’s latest report, Ending Online Sexual Exploitation And Abuse Of Women And Girls: A Call For International Standards, we examined legal responses to this global problem.

Adolescent girls and legal experts in India, Kenya, Nigeria, the United Kingdom and the United States informed us of their experiences of OSEA on social media apps, which are easily accessible to children and young people and require very little data to access.

For instance, many girls shared that request for intimate images were a common occurrence and that reporting these incidents to the police was extremely difficult. They reported that they were afraid that the authorities and their community would shame them and that their reports would not be taken seriously.

In some instances, girls simply blocked the offenders and did not report the abuse to the police or the social media platform. The stigma associated with experiencing OSEA prevents victims from reporting, which only contributes to the vicious cycle of abuse.

Children and young people are going online without information on how to protect themselves or identify and report offenders. Their caregivers are also not always well equipped to manage these challenges.

Digital platforms need to improve their systems for reporting OSEA by making it easier for children, young people, and their caregivers to report abuse and exploitation and track the progress of their reports.

They must also ensure that they have systems in place to respond in a timely manner to complaints and inform users of the decisions and actions they have taken.

It has become clear that relying on digital platforms to self-regulate has not been sufficient in preventing OSEA, thus governments and international bodies must take a more proactive approach and develop and implement laws that regulate the policies and practices adopted and applied by digital platforms.

National laws should require that these reports are also passed on to national authorities and monitoring bodies, not only when the incidents are criminal, as is currently the case. This will enable authorities and monitoring bodies to understand offending pathways better and be better equipped to detect OSEA.

Balancing digital rights with preventing online sexual exploitation and abuse

A critical and often contentious issue is how to effectively balance between users’ various digital rights and interests — freedom of expression online and online privacy with protection from online harms, such as OSEA.

For instance, there are concerns that regulating what users post online and holding digital platforms liable for user-generated content online could lead to self-censorship and/or digital platforms erring on the side of caution and removing content which would, in turn, infringe on users’ freedom of expression.

An approach that can be adopted is a principle established under international human rights law, that in the event of a violation of the rights of others, the freedom of expression of alleged offenders can be limited if the limitations are legal, legitimate, necessary and proportionate.

But for this approach to be effective, there must first be legal clarity on what constitutes OSEA. Laws should define OSEA, and exclude speech or expression that is in fact OSEA from freedom of expression protection.

This would be similar to the case of children, where many countries categorically exclude offers or requests to obtain Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) from freedom of expression protections.

Still with this protection provided for CSAM, the detection of adolescents in CSAM on the internet is a challenge for law enforcement and digital platforms. Human reviewers and automated tools that detect CSAM online cannot always be sure that images of young people who have reached puberty are not images of adults.

Technology companies have made great strides in developing tools to detect CSAM on their platforms and we call on them to use these capabilities to address this gap in technological tools and work with law enforcement and child protection specialists who can bring their skills to improve detection of adolescent victims.

Our report found that laws at the international and national levels are currently inadequate to deal with the global and multi-jurisdictional nature of OSEA and the legal complexities this brings.

The existence of gaps and lacunae in the law due to the rapid evolution of technology and the law’s failure to keep pace has created patchwork offences and a lack of coherence in the law which has made reporting, prosecution, and online content moderation difficult.

Across many countries, this leaves children and young people with inadequate or no safeguards from OSEA.

Equality Now calls on the international community to develop and adopt legally binding international standards that provide for protection of all vulnerable people from all forms of OSEA. The international standards would demonstrate consensus on the severity of OSEA and provide a framework for legal implementation, policies, programs, and international cooperation.

Amanda Manyame is Digital Law and Rights Advisor at Equality Now

 

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Disseminating science via social media entails a public service. Throughout the pandemic, for instance, the value of science communication to the public has been instrumental with many scientists being called upon to provide accurate information about the latest scientific advancements. Credit: Bigstock

By Esther Ngumbi
URBANA, Illinois, Feb 8 2022 (IPS)

In the spirit of science communication, I posted via twitter a video clip of a bee that had taken a little too much of pollen. It received over 30,000 views and had over 100,000 impressions. Over the years, before the pandemic, thanks to several science communication workshops and trainings about various ways to communicate science, I have continued to grow as a science communicator.

The appreciation and appetite for science communication was on the rise among institutions of higher learning, professional societies and early career and junior scientists prior to the pandemic was equally growing. The National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine published a report on best practices while pointing out potential research areas to advance science communication.

Throughout the literature, there was a proliferation in journal articles, book chapters, and technical reports and web resources by Professional societies such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Workshops on science communication were routinely embedded in Professional Society annual meetings.

Science communication will continue to be important into the future. Social media and other avenues of communicating science are here to stay and they are shaping present day and potentially future academic cultures

It is critical to keep nurturing this emerging appreciation of science communication, particularly as institutions of higher learning and professional societies regain the momentum and begin rebuilding after COVID-19.

Thanks to science communications, many large-scale science related challenges and great advances in scientific discoveries with major implications to humanity have been translated into solutions and communicated effectively with the public. With on-going science-related challenges like COVID-19 and the climate crisis, science communication is more crucial than ever.

But, with no major incentives, it may be difficult to convince graduate students, postdocs, and tenured and untenured professors to partake of science communication. This is understandable because of the many demands in academia.

New graduate students, newly minted PhDs who may have transitioned to post-Doctoral fellowships and newly recruited Assistant Professors may have a hard time deciding if it is worth parking in science communication. However, as I know firsthand, it can be very beneficial to people’s careers to engage in it.

Oftentimes, when scientists publish in scientific journals, the audience is small. This is because, scientific articles can only be accessed by far fewer people, since journals require expensive subscriptions. But if they take the extra step of communicating their research, and disseminating it widely via blog, op-eds and social media, they can reach a much bigger audience.

Indeed, disseminating science via social media entails a public service. Throughout the pandemic, for instance, the value of science communication to the public has been instrumental with many scientists being called upon to provide accurate information about the latest scientific advancements.

This has led to vast increases in their followings on Twitter and Instagram from people outside academic circles. Sharing our scientific findings with the public allows us to practice speaking and writing in non-scientific language in a timely manner while reaching more diverse audiences. This can also build trust among various communities and the public.

Science communication can also help advance one’s career. For instance, since external reputation is a key metric that is used by universities to evaluate and promote professors, being active and disseminating your science via social media can help establish that reputation that would benefit you professionally. This is something that’s happened in my own career.

Being active online can help you build your professional network, which can lead to peers recommending you awards, inviting you to give talks and participate on panels, or asking you to judge to conference presentations and other competitions.

Newly formed networks may also lead to the birth of new collaborations and co-writing grant proposals. I can attest to this too as I built my professional network through Twitter. For example, I’ve received invitations to present in university departments and opportunities to present my work at the Entomological Society of America.

Moreover, the social media platforms offer ways to track impact. In Twitter, for example, you can track how many people re-tweeted the tweet, how many people interacted with the tweet, how many people accessed the links, and from what geographical location where they from.

All these data can help science communicators to better understand their audience while finding creative ways to continue engaging audiences. It can also be included in portfolio for academic promotion.

Of course, there are negatives that can come about with science communication on social media. The large volumes of science and other information shared can come at the expense of quality, and people with enough followers, but no expertise can have influence over science conversations and easily spread misinformation.

At the same time, science is continuously evolving, and the results today may improve in the future, and that is always a difficult point to communicate to non-scientists. It is also possible that those with followers can be sponsored by companies or organizations to share certain opinions and specific content. But the benefits outweigh the negatives.

So, if you want to start engaging in science communication, first, find out what already exists in your department, institution, region, and professional society. Explore what opportunities are available to begin your science communication efforts. In addition, inquire from your department if there are science communication classes you can attend.

Science communication will continue to be important into the future. Social media and other avenues of communicating science are here to stay and they are shaping present day and potentially future academic cultures.

Newbies and those who have not tried to partake of science communication can take their first steps. In the end, both the academic community and the public benefit when scientists share their discoveries with the public.

 

Dr. Esther Ngumbi is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and a Senior Food Security Fellow with the Aspen Institute, New Voices.

Managing the life cycle of plastics, from production to end-of-life management is crucial to solving plastic pollution crisis. Credit: Antoine Giret/Unsplash

By Samira Sadeque
New York, Feb 8 2022 (IPS)

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly affected plastic waste management, as the world saw a rise in single-use sanitary products, and many cities abandoned their recycling and waste management efforts in the first few months, Eirik Lindebjerg of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) told IPS.

“For example, in March 2020, amid potential hygiene concerns, some major coffee chains paused filling reusable containers in favour of single-use receptacles,” he said. “We also saw many regulators around the world pausing or delaying bans, taxes, or fees on plastic items as well as recycling initiatives in response to sanitary and hygiene concerns.”

He added that some such measures included a pushback against the use of single-use plastic straws, stirrers, and cotton buds in the United Kingdom; meanwhile, the United States saw more than 100 cities halting curbside recycling programmes.

Lindebjerg, WWF’s Global Plastics Policy Manager, spoke with IPS as more than 70 business and financial institutions produced a statement demanding a legally binding treaty to address plastic pollution, ahead of February’s UNEA-5.2, which will be a continuation of UNEA-5.1, which took place in February 2021.

“We need to create proper systems for controlling and regulating plastic pollution, at local, national and global levels,” Lindebjerg said. “Governments need to cooperate and step up their game drastically.”

Excerpts of the interview:

Inter Press Service (IPS): A part of the statement reads: ‘This requires governments to align on regulatory measures that cover the whole life cycle of plastics, not limiting the scope of negotiations to address waste management challenges only.’ What would an approach that considers the ‘whole life cycle of plastics’ entail?

Eirik Lindebjerg (EL): A “whole life cycle of plastics” approach addresses all the potential risks of plastic pollution at each life cycle stage, from the extraction of raw materials to processing materials into plastic and its end-of-life management. Essentially, it is about introducing measures to stop plastic pollution at the stages where it is most efficient, instead of only focusing on high-cost infrastructure to clean up the problem afterwards.

A lifecycle approach would entail a mix of the measures, such as banning certain unnecessary and highly damaging product categories (like certain types of single-use plastics and intentionally added microplastics), product and design standards (to make sure a product produced in one country can be safely reused or recycled in another), as well as global requirements on waste management. Essentially, enabling better regulation of how we make, use and reuse plastic.

A new treaty should include all relevant measures necessary to solve the problem along the entire lifecycle and prioritise those most effective and least costly measures.

Categories of measure in the treaty could be:

• Harmonised regulatory standards and common definitions across markets;
• Clear national targets and action plans for tackling plastic pollution;
• Common reporting metrics and methodologies across the plastic value chain that can calculate discharge rates of plastics by country;
• Coordinated investment approaches toward infrastructure development in key markets and innovation.

IPS: How would a ‘circular economy for plastics’, as mentioned in the statement, add to the efforts to tackle climate change?

EL: Plastic is responsible for generating 1.8 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions a year across its lifecycle. That is more than the annual emissions from aviation and shipping combined. A circular economy for plastics would mean significant GHG emission reduction related to plastic pollution and virgin plastic production.

It would ultimately mean that all plastics used stays within the economy. It would mean zero virgin fossil fuel plastic production and zero leakage to the environment. It would most likely entail a reduction of plastics consumption, especially the unnecessary uses that are so common today. It would be built around reuse and recycling. New business models would create new job opportunities. Biodiversity would benefit both from eliminating pollution and reducing the footprint from production and consumption.

Such an approach can potentially reduce the costs and tackle the negative impacts of the plastics system. Research has shown that this approach could reduce the annual volume of plastic entering the oceans by 80 percent and GHG emissions from plastic by 25 percent, while promoting job creation and better working conditions. By one estimate, a circular economy approach could create 700,000 quality jobs across the plastic value chain by 2040. An increase in plastic material value through design for recycling can also lead to significant improvements in waste pickers’ working conditions and earnings.

IPS: Could you share in detail how to ‘keep plastics in the economy and out of the environment’?

EL: The Reduce-Reuse-Recycle hierarchy must guide policies, production, and consumption practices. We must stop producing and consuming unnecessary plastic products and packaging. Plastic products must be designed for being reused or recycled. And producers must be made accountable for the end of life of the products.

Today, most plastic products are being designed with the intention of becoming waste at the end of life. But when the right incentives are put in place, there are a lot of examples demonstrating that it is perfectly possible to have a more circular system, such as deposit return systems for PET bottles in many countries.

Several comprehensive interventions which can support the transition to a circular economy have already been identified. For example, the Pew Charitable Trusts has proposed nine systemic interventions in line with circular economy principles:

1. Reduce growth in plastic production and consumption;
2. Substitute plastic with paper and compostable materials;
3. Design products and packaging for recycling;
4. Expand waste collection rates in the middle- to low-income countries;
5. Double mechanical recycling capacity globally;
6. Develop plastic-to-plastic conversion;
7. Build facilities to dispose of the plastic that cannot be recycled economically;
8. Reduce plastic waste exports by 90%;
9. Roll out known solutions for four microplastic sources.

IPS: There is considerable evidence that climate change and environmental pollution disproportionately affect marginalised communities. How does it work for communities where plastic is just a cost-effective alternative for many objects?

EL: Unfortunately, this is true for plastic as well. Marginalised communities disproportionately bear the cost of plastic pollution: pen burning, open dumpsites, polluted drinking water, soil pollution, damages to marine ecosystems and fish stocks are all implications that disproportionately affect low income and marginalised communities.

Incineration plants and oil and gas refineries are built predominantly in low-income and marginalised communities exposing them to health and economic risks. In addition, incinerators and landfills are disproportionately situated in indigenous communities because their lands have unclear tenure status. Crude oil and gas refineries are also disproportionately built in low-income and marginalised communities. This exposes these communities to chemical pollutants released during the incineration and refining processes.

IPS: Of the countries that have not yet backed this new treaty, which ones are crucial in the global economy? How do you plan to get them to participate?

EL: China is the largest economic actor that has not yet formally expressed support for the treaty but has expressed an openness to engage in negotiations through a recent declaration from trade ministers at the World Trade Organisation and has engaged progressively on the issue at a global level regarding plastic waste trade. Therefore, it is likely that China will support a mandate decision at UNEA and play an essential role in the treaty negotiations.

 

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There have been eight coups, successful and unsuccessful, in West and Central Africa between 2020 and 2022.

By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 8 2022 (IPS)

Calls, even screams, to fight inflation above all else are getting shriller. Thankfully, even The Economist (5 Feb. 2022) reminds all, Fighting inflation could put the world in a slump.

No inflation consensus
International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva doubts the world faces a runaway inflation threat. She urges policymakers to carefully calibrate fiscal and monetary policies, with more “specificity”, as not ‘one size fits all’.

Anis Chowdhury

Widespread reversal of COVID-19 spending and low interest rates threaten recovery. Similarly, Bank of England chief economist Huw Pill stressed the central bank was not going all out to tighten monetary policy.

Instead, like Georgieva, he advocates a more nuanced approach, reasoning, “As the pandemic recedes and the level and composition of global demand and supply normalise, these inflationary pressures should subside”.

US inflation phobia
Inflation hawk Larry Summers – Clinton’s last Treasury Secretary and Director of the National Economic Council during Obama’s first two years – claims it is “wishful thinking” that current inflationary pressures will subside.

He insists, “The painful lesson of the 1960s, 1970s and the 1982 recession is that excessive demand stimulus leads not just to inflation, but to stagflation and ultimately recession, as inflation must eventually be brought under control”. But Summers’ economic history is partial, tendentious and misleading.

Draconian policy prescriptions supposedly inflict ‘short-term pain for long-term gain’, but care little for their ramifications. Summers has nothing to say about how the early 1980s’ interest rate hikes pushed nations into default, triggering debt crises, and over a decade of stagnation in much of the global South.

Most governments can do little to tackle rising commodity, especially fuel and food prices. Conventional monetary tightening reduces overall inflation, typically by inflicting much unemployment, without affecting international sources of inflation.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Recent US wage growth
The recent US wages growth that Summers is obsessed with is actually very different in cause and consequence from the pay rises in the decades he decries. Europeans have also been quick to point out how different inflation on their continent has been.

First, recent wages growth is not due to workers’ collective bargaining, as in the 1960s. Or ‘wage-indexation’, linking wage growth to inflation during the 1970s.

Workers’ bargaining power has declined greatly since the 1980s, with labour market deregulation increasing casualization.

Meanwhile, foreign direct investment has accelerated offshoring, while technological changes have reduced labour needs. Many have changed to self-employment, informal work and other ‘off-the-books labour’. By 2020, there were more than two billion in informal work, mostly in developing countries.

The pandemic has greatly increased ‘gig work’, especially in higher income countries. More piecework remuneration and illusions of independence barely compensate for less bargaining power, and greater labour, work and income insecurity. Working from home increases unpaid overtime work as ‘wage theft’ becomes more widespread.

Second, apparent wage rises may be a statistical anomaly. An estimated third of the total US non-farm workforce, many low-paid – quit their jobs in 2021 for health and safety reasons while better paid workers remained in employment.

IMF research also found labour supply declined in the US and the UK as older workers and mothers with young children quit due to pandemic related challenges. This changing composition of employment has raised the average wage.

Consider a job market with three workers – A, B and C, with hourly wages of $10, $20 and $60 respectively. The average hourly wage is $30. If worker A quits, the average hourly wage – for workers B and C – will be $40. This raises the average hourly wage by $10 – not due to wage growth, but the changing workforce composition.

The higher reported US wages reflect the one-time impact of increased minimum pay, especially when paid by major employers with a nationwide presence such as Target, Southwest Airlines, CVS Health and Walgreens.

Bleak prospects
The IMF’s October 2021 World Economic Outlook saw bleak prospects for low-skilled and young workers. This seems consistent with why low paid workers are reluctant to work for a pittance at great personal risk to themselves.

Many younger workers face special difficulties, e.g., parents of young children due to inadequate childcare facilities and pandemic school disruptions. The mismatch between available jobs and what people want has also grown.

Current inflationary pressure resembles the post-World War Two situation, with pent-up demand for consumer goods unleashed before war-disrupted supplies were restored. Inflation reached nearly 20% in 1947 before collapsing.

Current consumption demand still faces supply chain disruptions due to the pandemic. But such situations are very unlike the episodes Summers cites to make his alarmist case for prioritizing inflation.

Conventional anti-inflationary policies – e.g., fiscal austerity, raising interest rates and credit tightening – are not only inappropriate for dealing with current inflationary pressures, but can be very harmful – as the IMF chief warns.

Understanding inflation
The pandemic has triggered large price increases – notably for food, clothing, fuel and communications. The mismatch between labour supply and demand in some sectors has also become more acute.

Meanwhile, US government data show US non-financial corporations raked in their largest profits ever since 1950 in the second half of 2021 despite rising labour costs. But Summers denies that monopolistic corporate behaviour has contributed to price increases.

Overall corporate profits rose 37% from the previous year while employee compensation only increased 12%, despite “the second year of a pandemic which began by wiping out 20 million jobs”.

US Senator Sherrod Brown (Democrat-Ohio) has asserted that “prices are high because corporations are raising them – so they can keep paying themselves with ever-larger executive bonuses and stock buybacks”.

Rising house prices and accommodation rentals are also raising living costs. Following the 2008-2009 global financial crisis (GFC), governments ill-advisedly abandoned fiscal recovery efforts early. Unconventional monetary policies became the main policy tool since.

This has encouraged real estate and financial asset speculation, instead of investing in productive capacity. Fiscal austerity and continued reliance on market solutions also deter government actions to address key supply chain bottlenecks.

Lack of effective coordination between fiscal and monetary authorities – e.g., in responding to the pandemic – has exacerbated such situations. Instead, commodity and real estate speculation has been much enabled.

Such perverse incentives have undermined needed investments in information and communications technology (ICT), renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, healthcare and education. Businesses have even paid out dividends and bonuses with COVID relief funds. Thus, billionaires got billions more.

Nuance and specificity
Effective coordination between fiscal and monetary authorities is vital for a nuanced approach to ensure sustainable, inclusive and resilient recovery. Fiscal-monetary policy coordination is also needed for a range of long-overdue reforms to address structural factors exacerbating inflationary tendencies and pressures.

But earlier reforms to ensure central bank independence and strict ‘fiscal rules’ in favour of market solutions have undermined government fiscal and monetary capacities to act effectively. Thus, such policies and related ones – e.g., inflation-targeting – must be irreversibly consigned to the policy garbage bin.

Knee-jerk responses to fear mongering by inflation hawks will derail global recovery which the IMF deems “disruptive”. The Fund is also concerned about “divergent” recoveries between rich and poor nations.

Instead of the new Cold War preference for economic sanctions at the slightest pretext, much better and more sustained international cooperation and policy coordination are needed. They must address global supply chain disruptions, stabilize international commodity prices and minimize harmful policy spill overs.

 

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