Africa

Ebrima Solo Sandeng, killed by Gambian agents nearly seven years ago, is finally honoured as a hero.

Over a thousand people gathered in the coast town of Ouidah, which was once an important port in the slave trade.

Kenya's football federation suspends 15 individuals pending investigations into match-fixing in the country.

Egypt's Al Ahly will face Auckland City of New Zealand in the first round while Wydad of Morocco take on Saudi side Al Hilal in the second round.

Flood victims in Pakistan would like to see the funding received for Pakistan's recovery disbursed to them urgently. Many still live in temporary accommodation after they lost their homes and family in the 2022 floods. - Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Jan 13 2023 (IPS)

People in flood-affected areas of Pakistan have welcomed the pledges at an UN-sponsored donor conference in Geneva on January 9 but want to see an immediate cash flow to facilitate their journeys toward normalcy.

“We need immediate assistance because we have lost all our belongings in floods. My 14-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter died when our mud-built house caved in. For the past six months, 12 members of our family have lived in a tent,” Altaf Shah, a daily wager in the Sukkur district of Sindh province, told IPS.

Shah, 51, said he heard from people about the assistance announced at the UN and hoped his house would be reconstructed.

In June 2022, Pakistan suffered huge losses due to torrential rains, which killed 1,200 people, including 399 children. One-third of the country was submerged, prompting the United Nations to appeal for assistance.

On January 9, more than $10bn was pledged by international financial institutions, donor agencies, and development partners for flood-affected areas’ rehabilitation, recovery, and reconstruction.

The major pledges made included $4.2 billion from the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB), $2 billion from the World Bank, $1.5 billion from the Asian Development Bank (ADB), $1 billion from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and $1 billion from Saudi Arabia.

Gohar Ahmed, a political analyst at the Quaid-i-Azam University Islamabad, wants the fair distribution of the amount among the affected population.

“Still thousands of people are without homes, food, and medicines. They require immediate help,” Ahmed said. According to him, the heavy downpours, described as an “unprecedented climate catastrophe,” has shattered the population.

He said that Pakistanis aren’t bothered about loans or grants but the reconstruction process in all sectors.

Ahmed said that the government should devise a transparent mechanism to distribute funds among the people still haunted by the flood’s aftermath.

Health economists told IPS that UN agencies and USAID have already been working with the government to restore healthcare services. WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA, and other international organizations were in the field during the floods and their aftermath.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif told Resilient Pakistan Conference about the country’s Resilient Recovery, Rehabilitation, and Reconstruction Framework (4RF), which laid out a multi-sectoral strategy for rehabilitation and reconstruction in a climate-resilient and inclusive manner.

Sharif said the climate crisis had severely threatened the nation’s capacity to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The return to business as usual was out of the question.

“The world needs to employ vision and solidarity to transition to a sustainable future of hope,” he said.

Pakistan witnessed a “monsoon on steroids” that affected 30 million people, displaced more than 8 million, and washed away roads over 8,000 kilometers.

According to the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), 2,000 health facilities, representing 10% of all health facilities in the country, have been either damaged or destroyed. As a result, over 8 million people in flood-affected districts urgently need health assistance.

United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) estimates that almost 650,000 pregnant women in flood-affected areas require maternal health services to ensure a safe pregnancy and childbirth. Up to 73,000 women expected to deliver next month will need skilled birth attendants, newborn care, and support.

Finance Minister Ishaq Dar said that $8.7 (90 pc) of the pledges were project loans.

Rozia Begum, a resident of Swat district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, said that she required medical assistance during the flood. Because it wasn’t forthcoming, she lost her premature child.

“Now, my sister-in-law is pregnant and needs multivitamins and regular checkups to enable her safe delivery,” Begum, 30, a schoolteacher, told IPS. She knew several child-bearing women in her locality were malnourished and couldn’t afford a balanced diet.

“The grants announced at the (Geneva) moot could help the needy women if made available immediately,” she said.

Affected people are also thankful to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, who urged the international community for “massive investments” to help Pakistan in his opening remarks at the Geneva moot.

“No country deserves to endure what happened to Pakistan,” the secretary general said.

But those affected by the floods are anxious the floods reach them.

Mushtaq Ali, a vegetable vendor, said that the UN should ensure direct financial aid to them. He said he lost his tiny home in Kalam Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and now lives with his father-in-law.

“The government should compensate people on the pattern of mechanism adopted during the Covid-19 pandemic and affected population received money on data of National Database Registration Authority,” Ali, 42, said.

UNICEF representative in Pakistan, Abdullah Fadil, told reporters that acute respiratory infections among children, a leading cause of child mortality worldwide, have skyrocketed in the flood-stricken areas.

The number of cases among children identified as suffering from severe acute malnutrition in the flood-affected areas monitored by UNICEF nearly doubled between July and December as compared to 2021, and estimated 1.5m children still need life-saving nutrition interventions, Dawn newspaper reported.

“UNICEF’s current appeal of $173.5m to provide life-saving support to women and children affected by the floods remains only 37 percent funded. Children living in Pakistan’s flood-affected areas have been pushed to the brink,” he was quoted as saying.

The rains may have ended, but the crisis for children has not. Nearly 10m girls and boys still need immediate, life-saving support and are heading into a bitter winter without adequate shelter. He added that severe acute malnutrition and respiratory and waterborne diseases, coupled with the cold, are putting millions of young lives at risk.

In response to the worsening child survival crisis, more than 800,000 children have been screened for malnutrition; 60,000 were identified as suffering from severe acute malnutrition — a life-threatening condition where children are too thin for their height — and referred for treatment with ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF).

Dr Abdul Ghafoor Shoro, secretary general Pakistan Medical Association (PMA), told IPS that the warning by UNICEF should serve as a wake-up call for the government.

“We demand immediate measures to save the lives and health of our children,” he said.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Anti-Austerity protests in 2006-2020. Credit: World Protests Platform

By Isabel Ortiz and Sara Burke
NEW YORK, Jan 13 2023 (IPS)

This week world leaders meet in Davos to discuss cooperation to address multiple crises, from COVID-19 and escalating inflation to slowing economic growth, debt distress and climate shocks.

Only three months earlier, finance ministers had gathered in Washington DC for the same reason. The mood was grim. The need for ambitious actions could not be greater; however, there were no agreements, evidencing the fragility of multilateralism and international cooperation.

Isabel Ortiz

Worse, policy makers -advised by the International Monetary Fund- are resorting to old, failed and regressive policies, such as austerity (now called “fiscal restraint” or “fiscal consolidation”), instead of much needed corporate/wealth taxation and debt reduction initiatives, to ensure an equitable recovery for all.

A recent global report alerts of the dangers of a post-pandemic wave of austerity, far more premature and severe than the one that followed the global financial crisis a decade ago. While governments started cutting public expenditures in 2021, a tsunami of budget cuts is expected in 143 countries in 2023, which will impact more than 6.7 billion people or 85% of the world population.

Analysis of the austerity measures considered or already implemented by governments worldwide shows their significant negative impacts on people, harming women in particular. These austerity policies are: targeting social protection, excluding vulnerable populations in need of support by cutting programs for families, the elderly and persons with disabilities (in 120 countries); cutting or capping the public sector wage bill, this is, reducing the number and salaries of civil servants, including frontline workers like teachers and health workers (in 91 countries); eliminating subsidies (in 80 countries); privatizing public services or reforming state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in areas such as public transport, energy, water; reforming hard-earned pensions by adjusting benefits and parameters, resulting in lower incomes for retirees (in 74 countries); (6) labor flexibilization reforms (in 60 countries); reducing employers’ social security contributions, making social security unsustainable (in 47 countries); and even cutting health expenditures despite COVID-19 is not over.

Sara Burke

Austerity and all the human suffering it causes is evitable, there are alternatives. There are at least nine financing options, available even in the poorest countries, fully endorsed by the UN and international financial institutions, from increasing progressive taxation to reducing debt. Policymakers must urgently look into these. Many countries have already implemented them.

In recent years, citizens have protested austerity all around the world. A recent study on world protests shows that nearly 1,500 protests in the period 2006-2020 were against austerity. Citizens demand better public services, social protection, jobs with decent wages, tax and fiscal justice, equitable land distribution, and better living standards, among others. Protests against pension reforms, and high food and energy prices have also been very prevalent. Recently, the jobs and cost-of-living crises have been accentuated by the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in more protests despite lockdowns.

The majority of global protests against austerity and for economic justice have manifested people’s indignation at gross inequalities. The idea of the “1% versus the 99%,” that emerged a decade ago during protests over the 2008 financial crisis, has spread around the world, feeding grievances against elites and corporations manipulating public policies in their favor, while the majority of citizens continue to endure low living standards, aggravated by austerity cuts.

Let’s remember that trillions of dollars have been used to support corporations during the pandemic and to support military spending. Now people are being asked to endure austerity cuts, at a time when they are suffering a cost-of-living crisis. The 2023 meetings in Davos are being faced with new protests and demands to tax the rich.

Unless policymakers change course, we shouldn’t be surprised to see increasing waves of protests all over the world. Clashes in the street are likely to intensify if governments continue to fail to respond to people’s demands and persist in implementing harmful austerity policies. Governments need to listen to the demands of citizens that are legitimately protesting the denial of social, economic and civil rights. From jobs, public services and social security to tax and climate justice, the majority of protesters’ demands are in full accordance with United Nations proposals and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Leaders and policymakers will only generate further unrest if they fail to act on these legitimate demands.

Isabel Ortiz is Director of the Global Social Justice Program at Joseph Stiglitz’s Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University, former Director at the International Labour Organization (ILO) and UNICEF.

Sara Burke is Senior Policy Analyst at Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) New York

IPS UN Bureau

 

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US President Joseph R. Biden addresses the general debate of the General Assembly’s seventy-seventh session in September 2022. Credit: UN Photo/Cia Pak

By Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen
SAN FRANCISCO, USA, Jan 13 2023 (IPS)

The current notion of a “moderate Republican” is an oxymoron that helps to move the country rightward. Last week, every one of the GOP’s so-called “moderates” voted to install House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who won with the avid support of Donald Trump and got over the finish line by catering to such fascistic colleagues as Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert.

Recent news reports by many outlets — including the Washington Post, USA Today, The Hill, Bloomberg, CNN, NBC, Reuters, HuffPost and countless others — have popularized the idea of “moderate Republicans” in the House. The New York Times reported on “centrist Republicans.” But those “moderates” and “centrists” are actively supporting neofascist leadership.

Notably, Joe Biden made this implausible claim while campaigning in May 2019: “The thing that will fundamentally change things is with Donald Trump out of the White House. Not a joke. You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends.”

During his celebratory victory speech in November 2020, Biden bemoaned “the refusal of Democrats and Republicans to cooperate with one another,” proclaimed that the American people “want us to cooperate” and pledged “that’s the choice I’ll make.”

Later, as president, Biden came to a point when – in a ballyhooed speech last September — he offered some acknowledgment of ongoing Republican extremism, saying: “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic. Now, I want to be very clear up front: Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans”.

“Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology. I know because I’ve been able to work with these mainstream Republicans. But there is no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country.”

But as with routine media coverage, Biden does not acknowledge that every Republican now in the House is functionally a “MAGA Republican.” Claiming otherwise — calling some of them “moderate Republicans” — is like saying that someone who drives a getaway car during an armed robbery isn’t a criminal. Those who aid and abet right-wing extremism are part of the march toward fascism.

If a handful of — by some accounts a half-dozen, by others as many as 20 — House Republicans are “moderates,” then such media framing normalizes and legitimizes their tacit teamwork with the likes of Trump and ultra-right Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene that made McCarthy the speaker. In the process, the slickly evasive language makes possible the continual slippage of public reference points ever-further to the right.

So, during last week’s multiple ballots that concluded with McCarthy’s win, Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska was portrayed in the news as a “moderate Republican” who talked of seeking Democratic votes to help elect McCarthy and of possibly working with Democrats to find a “moderate” GOP speaker. Bacon labeled the anti-McCarthy holdouts “cowboys” and “the Taliban.”

But if Bacon is a “moderate Republican,” it’s odd that he would help lead a rally before the 2020 election with MAGA firebrand and Students for Trump leader Charlie Kirk, which ended with a yell from Bacon: “Making America great again!” Or that he voted both times against impeaching President Trump, including after the Jan. 6 Capitol assault.

Or that he cosponsors the extreme Life at Conception Act. Or that he has questioned climate science: “I don’t think we know for certain how much of climate change is being caused by normal cyclical changes in weather versus human causes.”

Looking ahead, you can bet that after years of being touted as “Republican moderates” in Congress, a few will be trotted out in prime time at the 2024 Republican National Convention to assure the nation that the party’s nominee — whether Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis or some other extremist candidate — is a great fit for the presidency.

The impacts of such deception will owe a lot to the frequent media coverage that distinguishes between the most dangerously unhinged Republican politicians who dominate the House and the “moderate” ones who make that domination possible.

Applying adjectives like “moderate” to congressional Republicans is much worse than merely bad word choices. Our language “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish,” George Orwell wrote, “but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

And dangerous ones.

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of a dozen books, including ‘War Made Easy’ while his next book, ‘War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine’, will be published in Spring 2023 by The New Press.

Jeff Cohen is co-founder of RootsAction.org, a retired journalism professor at Ithaca College, and author of Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media. In 1986, he founded the media watch group FAIR.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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A selection of the best photos from across Africa this week.

Chad become the latest nation to fall foul of the age testing saga disrupting qualification for this year's Under-17 Africa Cup of Nations

The case was brought to court by a police officer who was dismissed in 2021 after getting pregnant.

The delayed 2022 African Nations Championship kicks off in Algeria - but with holders Morocco pulling out, how does the tournament benefit African football?

Defending champions Morocco have withdrawn from the African Nations Championship after being refused a direct flight to hosts Algeria.

Women receive food rations at a food distribution site in Herat, Afghanistan. Credit: UNICEF/Sayed Bidel

By Chloe Bryer, Azza Karam, Ruth Messinger and Negina Yari
NEW YORK, Jan 12 2023 (IPS)

Can you imagine what it would be like if women were simply not allowed to step outside of their homes, let alone to work for a living? When women choose to do so, and they can afford it, then it is a matter of choice. When women mostly cannot, as is the case in Afghanistan now, not only is half the population imprisoned, but children go hungry, and communities sink deeper into poverty.

World Bank data (as incomplete as it is), indicates that the average number of female-headed households (i.e. households where women are the primary – if not the only – breadwinners), is around 25%.

What that means is, that on average, a quarter of all households around the world depend on women earning an income. Children, families, communities, and nations –depend on women’s work, to the tune of a quarter of their labour force.

Economists are still pointing to the obvious challenges of counting female labour, which often lies disproportionately on the frontiers of the formal economy, such that women continue to serve as reserve armies of labour and frontline workers during industrialization.

Economists who work to document these specificities, also point out that as soon as these frontiers expand or change, women are expelled or relegated to the shadows of the informal economy and piece-rate labour, identifying this as an all too frequent failure to recognize the importance of the kind of work many women engage in, which both keeps an economy running, and enables its expansion and growth.

The Covid-19 Pandemic should have resulted in a clear realisation that all hands are necessary on deck, with so many women actually needed as first responders–the backbone of the public health crisis – everywhere in the world.

As economies take a nosedive and the realities of recession hit many of us, all economies need to be kept running, if not to expand and grow.

And beyond these very real challenges to counting women’s work – and making that work count – there is another very critical reality: culture. Lest we think only of the vagaries of women who take over “men’s jobs” (whatever that means in today’s world), we need to stop being blind to the fact that women are needed to serve other women.

In fact, in many parts of the world, including the supposedly liberal and ‘egalitarian’ Western world, many women still prefer to receive life-saving direct services from other women – in public health, in sanitation, in all levels of education, in nutritional spaces, and many, many others.

Now let us pause a moment and consider humanitarian disaster zones, where women and girls often need to be cared for – and this can only be done by and through other women.

Then let us envision a reality one step further – let’s call it a socially conservative country, which is facing humanitarian disaster, and is heavily dependent on international organisations (governmental and non- governmental) for the necessary humanitarian support.

How is it conceivable that in such a context, women can be excluded from serving? And yet this is precisely what the Taliban have decreed on December 24, when it barred women from working in national and international NGOs. And this is after they banned women from higher education.

Many international NGOs halted their work in Afghanistan, explaining that they cannot work without their women staff – as a matter of principle, but also as a question of practical necessity. Yet, the United Nations – the premier multilateral entity – continues to see how they could compromise with the Taliban rule, for the sake of ‘the greater good – real humanitarian needs’.

Thank goodness they are letting the UN continue to work with their women employees, runs one way of thinking. We will not fail to deliver humanitarian needs, runs another UN way of thinking.

Of course, humanitarian needs are essential to human survival – and thus, should never be held hostage. But why is the United Nations being accountable for humanitarian needs only?

Meanwhile, the Taliban claim that these edicts about womens’ work and education are a matter of religious propriety, a claim which, as of this moment, is not strongly challenged by another multilateral entity – the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), encompassing 56 governments and members of the United Nations.

While individual governments have spoken out, this multilateral entity has remained relatively silent on the Islamic justice of such a decree. Is it because this multilateral religious entity sees no need to speak to humanitarian needs?

Or is it because it sees no value to hard economic realities where women’s agency plays a central role? Or perhaps it is because there is no unanimity on the Islamic justification behind such decrees?

In light of this hostage-taking of humanitarian relief efforts, a group of women of faith leaders, have come together to ask some simple questions of the two multilateral entities involved. They have sent a letter with over 150 international NGO sign ons.

Multilateralism is supposed to be the guarantor of all human rights and dignity, for all people, at all times. But as governmental regimes weaken, so do traditional multilateral entities heavily reliant on those governments. Time for community based transnational networks based on intergenerational, multicultural, gender sensitive leaders.

Rev Dr Chloe Bryer is Executive Director, Interfaith Center of New York; Prof Azza Karam is Secretary General, Religions for Peace; Ruth Messinger is Social Justice Consultant, Jewish Theological Seminary; and Negina Yari is Country Director, Afghans4Tomorrow

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Indian doctoral students are stuck due to Australian visa delays. Credit: Unsplash

By Neena Bhandari
Sydney, Jan 12 2023 (IPS)

When Megha Jacob, who had been applying for a doctoral degree at various overseas universities, received an offer from the Australian National University’s Department of Chemistry to do a fully funded PhD, she was thrilled and immediately accepted the position.

It was January 2022. She submitted her visa application and resigned from her job at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. One year later, she is still waiting for her visa to be processed.

Several international Indian students enrolled in doctoral degree courses in Australia’s leading universities have been waiting for their visas to be approved for months, some for up to two years. “The protracted delays have put our lives on hold. We seek clarity and a definitive timeline so we can plan our future,” say students from one of the WhatsApp groups formed by Indian doctoral students facing Australian visa processing delays.

Since the easing of Australia’s stringent COVID-19 restrictions, these students allege, the visa processing time for doctoral degree students has increased. “The median processing time for offshore student visa application was 18 days for the Postgraduate Research Sector in November 2022,” an Australian Department of Home Affairs (DHA) spokesperson tells IPS. However, the most recent processing time on the DHA website for 500 – Student visa (subclass 500) Postgraduate Research Sector shows 90 percent of applications are processed in 10 months.

Processing times will take some time to improve as the department works through older applications in the backlog, according to DHA. Processing times can vary due to applicants’ circumstances, including how long it takes to perform required checks on the supporting information provided by the applicant; and how long it takes to receive information from external agencies. This particularly relates to health, character and national security requirements.

Jacob says, “I have been submitting additional information, such as published research papers, but the last updated date on my visa application page on the DHA portal is still nine months old! I wonder if there is a technical glitch in the system or has my application fallen through the cracks.”

“When I called the DHA last month, I was told that waiting time for 90 percent of applicants is nine months [now its 10 months], and for the remaining 10 percent of applicants, we do not know how long it’s going to take. Presumably, some of us are in that 10 percent. But we don’t know why and what has placed our application in that category,” she adds.

Many students in the WhatsApp group have individually reached out to the DHA through email, the complaints section or via phone, but they have received only generic responses. “I have even written to the Commonwealth Ombudsman and received a similar reply that they are conducting necessary background checks, which can take several months,” says Deepak Chahal, who has a master’s from the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology in Thiruvananthapuram (Kerala).

Chahal, who enrolled as a doctoral student in Macquarie University’s Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics in December 2020, has been waiting for the past two years for his visa to be processed. He says, “I had begun working remotely due to COVID-19 restrictions, but I can’t continue remotely anymore as I need access to Australian observatories to collect data and the lab to analyse it. I’ve already spent two years doing the research, so abandoning it now is not an option.”

For students in the field of applied science, technology and engineering, working remotely is not an option as they require access to a host of resources –laboratory, equipment, data, fast internet connectivity, and availability of supervisors to oversee their experiments.

“We are losing precious research time as we don’t even know if our visa application will be successful after all this waiting. Our lives are hanging in the balance,” says a 26-year-old applicant from Mumbai (Maharashtra), enrolled in The University of Sydney’s School of Chemistry, who requested anonymity. He applied for his visa in August 2022, as his date of joining was October 1. [Students can submit their application no later than six weeks before their course starts and no earlier than 12 weeks.] He has had to defer his research until his visa application is finalised.

Indian High Commissioner to Australia, Manpreet Vohra, tells IPS, “Many Indian doctorate students with admissions secured at various Australian universities have indeed been waiting for a very long time for their visas to be issued. This has delayed their research and, in some cases, has also jeopardised the grants that have been assured to them. We have been raising this matter regularly with Australian authorities and have urged them for early redressal of the difficulties that the doctorate students are facing.”

The DHA data shows that the higher education sector visa grant rate for 2022-2023 was 76.5 percent to November 30, 2022.

One beacon of hope, these students say, has been the support from Australian universities and the faculty. Dr Clement Canonne, Lecturer at the University of Sydney’s School of Computer Science, recently Tweeted on his personal account: “My hope for 2023 is not to have to raise the PhD and Postgraduate Research #AustralianVisas processing delays issue anymore, and to see not only the current backlog processed, but also increased transparency & communication from @ausgov for applicants.”

There were 1608 Indian nationals enrolled in Doctoral Degree courses out of the 96,005 Indian international students enrolled across all education sectors as of the year-to-date October 2022, according to a spokesperson for the Australian Government’s Department of Education. International students from India across all education sectors contributed $3.729 billion to the Australian economy in the 2021-22 financial year.

Speaking in his personal capacity and not expressing an official university viewpoint, Canonne tells IPS, “Students from India’s premier STEM institutes have many other options. When they, and Chinese and European students, choose to come to work with us, it’s because the research aligns. It’s really disheartening when these exceptional students are accepted, we work hard to apply for funding and get the grant, but then we can’t use the money to do the research for which it is meant because the students’ visa applications are pending for months, even years.”

The Department of Education data shows that in 2019, internationals accounted for 61 percent of Higher Degree Research students in engineering and related technologies and 57 percent in Information Technology.

“We chose Australia because it was a “perfect fit” when it came to the high ranking of Australian universities, professors in our field of research, lab facilities and other resources, full scholarship and shorter duration to complete a PhD in 3.5 years as against five years in most other countries,” says Parkarsh Kumar from Ranchi (Jharkhand), who is enrolled in UNSW Sydney’s Department of Material Science.

He says, “I completed my master’s degree from National Taiwan University on a scholarship and had two job offers, which I declined because I wanted to do a PhD and one day become a professor in an Indian institution. I was a role model in our family and community, but now everyone jokes that don’t be like him because I am sitting at home since January 2022 waiting for my visa application to be processed.”

Many of these students had left their jobs to pursue research, some against the wishes of their parents and elders. The long visa processing delays have caused them mental and financial stress. “If I apply for a job, I am asked why have I not worked for the past 10 months. If I say it’s because I am waiting for my Australian student visa, they immediately reject, stating that then there is no certainty on how long you will work for us,” says Jacob, who has socially isolated herself because while her family is very supportive, the societal pressure of being constantly asked, “When are you going to Australia?” is too much for her.

The long visa delay is prompting some to apply for a PhD in other countries or get a job. The Group of Eight (Go8), representing Australia’s leading research-intensive universities, in its submission dated December 16, 2022, to Australia’s 2023-24 Permanent Migration Program inquiry, noted that “visa backlogs are not just about the number of applicants in the queue, but about the critical expertise that Australia is missing out on, or stands to lose, because of avoidable processing delays.” It urged the DHA “to consider ways to improve and streamline visa assessment processes to facilitate migration in areas of priority or strategic need.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Why Africa's most-populous country is introducing new bank notes weeks before an election.

By Luis Brizuela and Jorge Luis Baños
HAVANA, Jan 11 2023 (IPS)

Félix Morffi supports the energy needs of his home with the help of the sun, in some cases through handcrafted solutions that make the most of an alternative source that is abundant in Cuba, but still used very little.

With two tanks, glass, aluminum sheets, as well as cinderblocks, sand and cement, the 86-year-old retiree created, in 2006, a solar heater that meets his household needs.

“You build it today and tomorrow you have hot water; anyone can do it, and if they have a bit of advice, all the better,” said the retired mid-level machine and tool repair technician who lives in the municipality of Regla, one of the 15 that make up Havana.

 

 

He also designed and made a dryer that uses the heat of the sun to dehydrate fruits, spices and tubers, which he assembled mostly with recycled products such as pieces of wood, nylon, acrylic and aluminum sheets.

On the roof of his house, 16 solar panels imported in 2019 provide five kilowatts of power (kWp) and help run his small automotive repair shop where he works on vehicles for state-owned companies and private individuals, an independent enterprise that he set up next to his house.

The innovator believes that despite the economic conditions, with a little ingenuity people can take advantage of the natural elements, because “the sun shines for everyone; the wind is there and costs you nothing, but your wealth is in your brain”

In addition to covering his household needs, he provides the surplus electricity to the national grid, the National Electric Power System (SEN).

Morffi said more training is needed among personnel involved in several processes, and he cited delays of more than a year between the signing of the contract with Unión Eléctrica and the beginning of payments for the energy surpluses provided to the SEN, as well as “inconsistency with respect to the assembly” of the equipment.

Although Cuba has a national policy on renewable energy sources, “there is still a lot of ignorance and very little desire to do things, and do them well. Awareness-raising is needed,” he argued.

The innovator believes that despite the economic conditions, with a little ingenuity people can take advantage of the natural elements, because “the sun shines for everyone; the wind is there and costs you nothing, but your wealth is in your brain.”

In his backyard, a small solar panel keeps the water flowing from a well for his barnyard fowl and an artificial pond holding a variety of ornamental fish as well as tilapia for family consumption.

The construction of a small biodigester, about four cubic meters in size, is also at an advanced stage on his land, aimed at using methane gas from the decomposition of animal manure and crop waste, for cooking.

Morffi, who manages these activities with the backing of several family members, also plans to import three small wind turbines of 0.5 kWp each and a new batch of 4 kWp solar PV panels.

His vision is to turn his house into a space for the production and promotion of renewable energies in Cuba.

To this end, he has the support of the non-governmental Cuban Society for the Promotion of Renewable Energy Sources and Respect for the Environment (Cubasolar), of which Morffi has been a member since 2004.

Since 2014, Cuba has had a Policy for the Development of Renewable Energy Sources and their Efficient Use. And in 2019, Decree Law 345 established regulations to increase the share of renewables in electricity generation and steadily decrease the proportion represented by fossil fuels.

According to studies, this archipelago of more than 110,800 square kilometers with an annual average of 330 sunny days receives an average solar radiation of more than five kilowatts per square meter per day, considered to be a high level that provides enormous potential in terms of energy.

The solar energy program appears to be the most advanced and with the best opportunities for growth. Over the last decade, several solar parks have been built, providing more than 75 percent of the renewable energy produced locally.

But clean sources account for just five percent of the island’s electricity generation, an outlook that the authorities want to radically transform, setting an ambitious goal of 37 percent by 2030.

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