Africa

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Bagosora was serving a 35-year sentence for his role in the massacre of 800,000 people.

Rwanda is selected as the first country in Africa to host the UCI Road World Championships, which it will stage in 2025.

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A player who says he scored two own goals to prevent a pre-arranged scoreline in Ghana's top flight is one of 24 people charged with match-fixing.

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Image by SilvanaGodoy from Pixabay

By Thomas Pogge
Sep 24 2021 (IPS)

Impact Funds would make the business of innovation more cost-effective and enable a triple win for the potential beneficiaries of innovations.

Globalized in 1995 through the TRIPS Agreement, humanity’s dominant mechanism for encouraging innovations involves 20-year product patents. Such temporary monopolies give innovators exclusive rights over production and sale of their innovation, thereby enabling them to collect large markups from early users.

The resulting high prices impede diffusion of innovations during their patent period. Coal-fired power plants in India were built without the latest “ultrasupercritical” green technology because its use would have required some $1.5 million per boiler in licensing fees. An excellent cure for hepatitis-C, sofosbuvir, was introduced in 2013 at a price of $84,000, about 3000x manufacturing cost. It has since reached only 5 million patients worldwide; the other 66 million remain infected and continue to spread the disease. During their long patent period, innovations produce a mere fraction of the social value they could produce if competitively priced.

Impact funds would bring revolutionary change. Where monopoly rewards turn innovators into jealous spies in search of possible infringers, impact rewards would encourage innovators actively to promote their registered innovation’s fast, wide and impactful diffusion

This access problem can be avoided by creating publicly financed impact funds that would reward innovations sold at competitive prices according to the social benefits achieved with them. As with the patent system, the fixed cost of innovation would largely fall on those who can afford it. Yet there would be no need to exclude the rest. With socially valued innovations rewarded from public funds, everyone can have access to them without monopoly markups.

Impact rewards can work in any domain where a uniform metric of social value can be formulated, such as health gains for pharmaceuticals, pollution reduction for green technologies, expertise and employment for education, nutrient yield and reduced use of fertilizers and pesticides for agriculture. Such a system would work best if many states jointly supported it, thereby greatly increasing its social value while diluting its cost.

The pharma sector is a good domain for exploring this idea. Its innovations protect and promote health, an appropriate purpose for public funding. Let us imagine then a Health Impact Fund that, supported by many countries, invites innovators to register any of their new pharmaceuticals for participation in ten consecutive annual payouts, each split among registered products according to health gains achieved in the preceding year.

With these rewards enabling innovators to recoup their R&D expenses and to make appropriate profits, registrants would have to accept competitive pricing during the reward period and also to waive any remaining monopoly privileges thereafter. In non-contributing affluent countries, however, registrants should remain free to charge monopoly prices. This exception would attract registrations by reducing their opportunity cost and would also give affluent countries more reason to join the funding coalition.

Some variant of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), as widely employed and refined in recent decades, could be used as a common metric for comparing and aggregating health gains across diverse diseases, therapies, demographic groups, lifestyles and cultures. To reassure funders and/or innovators, a maximum and/or minimum reward per QALY could be specified.

Assuming an initial contribution rate of 0.02% of gross national income and one-third weighted participation by states, the Health Impact Fund could get started with annual pools of $6 billion — less than 1% of the $800 billion the world currently spends each year on branded pharmaceuticals. States’ contributions would be offset by savings on (a) registered pharmaceuticals and (b) other health care costs, as well as by gains in (c) economic productivity and (d) consequent tax revenues.

With annual pools of $6 billion, each registered pharmaceutical would participate in $60 billion worth of disbursements over its ten-year reward period. A commercial innovator would register a product only if it expected to make a profit on top of recouping its R&D expenses. There is some debate over what these fixed costs of innovation amount to. The number of products registered with the Health Impact Fund would throw light on this question because of the Fund’s self-adjusting reward rate. Were it to attract roughly twenty products, with two entering and two exiting in a typical year, this would show that the prospect of $3 billion over ten years is seen as satisfactory — neither windfall nor hardship. This self-adjustment feature reassures innovators/contributors that the reward rate will not fall/rise to an unreasonable level.

The Health Impact Fund demonstrates that we can incentivize innovations in a way that avoids the severe access barriers of monopoly patents. These barriers therefore constitute an immense human rights violation. As illustrated by the hepatitis-C case, millions suffer and die each year because generic manufacturers are forbidden to sell them the medicines they need at competitive prices. Millions more suffer and die because high markups impede the diffusion of green technologies in poorer countries.

Impact funds would bring revolutionary change. Where monopoly rewards turn innovators into jealous spies in search of possible infringers, impact rewards would encourage innovators actively to promote their registered innovation’s fast, wide and impactful diffusion. Registrants would even subsidize it to poor buyers insofar as the increase in rewardable impact justifies the cost of the subsidy.

Impact funds would secure additional gains for human rights as well. Where patent rewards fail to incentivize innovations that meet needs specific to the poor, impact funds would encourage such innovations by assessing impact regardless of the economic position of the beneficiaries. Thus, pharmaceutical innovators could profitably develop and deploy good new treatments for the now notoriously neglected tropical diseases, which afflict over a billion people, and for other major diseases concentrated among the poor, like tuberculosis, malaria, hepatitis and pneumonia, which together kill some seven million people annually.

While patent rewards are largely indifferent to an innovation’s third-party effects, impact funds would take them fully into account. Thus, the Health Impact Fund would reward containment of a disease with a new medicine for having protected from infection people who never took the medicine. An innovator rewarded through monopoly markups, by contrast, is rewarded only insofar as its medicine fails to contain its target disease. By eradicating a disease, such an innovator would destroy its own future market.

Patent rewards tempt innovators in various ways to “put profits over people.” Impact funds align profits with human needs, making the business of innovation much more equitable in terms of research priorities and access to its fruits: innovators do well by doing good. By guiding innovators to organize their R&D and marketing holistically toward achieving the most cost-effective social gains, impact funds enable a triple win: for the potential beneficiaries of innovations, for the innovators and also for governments and taxpayers.

Thomas Pogge is the Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs and director of the Global Justice Program at Yale. He co-founded Academics Stand Against Poverty and Incentives for Global Health.

This article was originally published by OpenGlobalRights

Neither his family nor the police force could locate Reuben Kimutai Lel, who was actually in hospital.

Solar water heaters on top of buildings are found across Jordan. The country has embarked upon a climate-responsive economy recovery and a new growth trajectory strategy. Photo Credit: NDC Partnership

By Sania Farooqui
NEW DELHI, India, Sep 24 2021 (IPS)

For the first time in decades, Jordan’s economy contracted in 2020. COVID-19 took a heavy toll on the economy, and it was concerning for the country, particularly because Jordan had managed to grow at an average rate of 2%, despite regional and international shocks to its economy amounting to 44% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) over the past decade.

In 2020 GDP contracted 3.5% YOY, with a projected rebound towards the middle of 2021. The unemployment rate in Jordan increased to 22.7% of the labor force in 2020 from 19.1% a year earlier. It is the highest jobless rate since at least 2005.

The Government of Jordan (GoJ), in light of COVID-19, has taken steps to respond to both the health and economic risks associated with the pandemic. Both are said to be of concern because some of the pandemic restrictions continue to extend into 2021, and economic recovery could be stalled.

One of the key solutions that Jordan has readily embarked on is a climate-responsive recovery and a new growth trajectory strategy. Jordan’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) under the Paris Agreement on climate change is one of the key platforms through which it hopes to achieve its green development measures.

“Jordan’s climate-responsive and green economy framework focuses on several key sectors: water, waste management, energy, agriculture, tourism, and transport, in addition to health as a key adaptation sector,” says Lamia S. Al-Zoa’bi, Director of Development Plans and Programs in Jordan’s Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation (MOPIC) in an interview given to IPS News.

“In Jordan, the focus is on a climate-responsive, green recovery that can create jobs and economic transformation (JET), through a focus on public/private investments and climate finance,” says Al-Zoa’bi.

The climate action planning adopted a comprehensive set of strategic climate responses, including Jordan’s initial Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC) in 2015, followed by its first NDC in 2016. Building on these efforts, and in collaboration with national and internal stakeholders, the country launched its NDC Action Plan with priority projects in 2020, with support from the NDC Partnership.

The Ministry of Environment, with support from the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI), launched the Green Growth National Action Place (GG-NAPs) 2021-2025, which are mainly medium-term implementation plans. A majority of actions in the GG-NAPs are climate responsive and aligned with NDCs, which have a longer time frame for implementation until 2030. Through the Partnership’s Climate Action Enhancement Package (CAEP), Jordan conducted a Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) for 35 priority climate actions contributing to the implementation of Jordan’s NDC as previously identified by Sectoral Working Groups jointly with a climate finance strategy.

Earlier in June 2021, The World Bank Group approved a US$500 million program to catalyze public and private investments in Jordan for a green and inclusive recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this statement, World Bank Group’s Mashreq Regional Director, Saroj Kumar Jha says, “Jordan has been one of the most active and pioneering countries in the region in ratifying and adopting international climate change initiatives, including the Paris Agreement. Jordan can now capitalize on these efforts to become an attractive destination for green and climate-related investments.”

The Inclusive, Transparent and Climate Responsive Investments is part of the US$1.1 billion recently announced for Program-for-Results (PforR), through combined loans and grants, financing support from the World Bank Group and other international partners to support Jordan in responding to the pandemic and promoting an early, climate-resilient, and inclusive recovery.

According to a report by the United Nations Environment Programme, the Mediterranean region, which is home to several countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), has been described as a ‘climate change hotspot’. According to the National Climate Change Adaptation Plan, climate-related hazards, such as extreme temperature droughts, flash floods, and storms, affect Jordan. These hazards are increasing in frequency and intensity over the years due to climate change.

Jordan, however, positioned itself well ahead in tackling these issues by advancing its climate policy framework under the Paris Agreement, which it ratified in 2016. Jordan was amongst the first countries to launch a Climate Change Policy in 2013 and has consistently issued its national communications under the United Nations Framework Convention (UNFCCC).

Ahead of COP26, Jordan is updating its NDC, building on a prioritization exercise conducted in 2020 in five key sectors as part of its engagement with the NDC Partnership. “The NDC Action Plan seeks to scale renewables and energy-efficient measures, adapt water, agriculture and health sectors to climate impacts, and strengthen the resilience of disadvantaged groups and vulnerable ecosystems,” says Al-Zoa’bi.

So far, cost-benefit analysis (CBA) for reducing GHG emissions and potential climate impacts have been conducted for 35 prioritized NDC actions.

“Generating new jobs while maintaining social protection is one of the main short-to-medium-term priorities, given the record unemployment that comprises almost 25% of the labor force. While existing jobs are under pressure from the tourism sector fallout, the path to recovery in international arrivals is uncertain. Increasing tax revenue is an important outcome, as both current and projected fiscal deficit levels require new sources of tax income. All of these are seen to be drivers for green recovery in Jordan,” Al-Zoa’bi says.

Jordan’s green growth pathway aims to provide substantial benefits for the country’s economy, people, and environment. This includes plans for reducing dependency on fuel imports through transformations in the transport sector. This helps to mitigate uncertain and exogenous economic shocks arising from volatility in fossil fuel prices and physical interruption supplies.

According to the Jordan Sustainable Consumption and Production National Action Plan 2016-2025, the combination of green growth and sustainable consumption and production efforts in energy, transport, water, agriculture, waste, and tourism has the potential to attract sustainable green investments amounting to 1.3 billion U.S dollars and create 51,000 new jobs over ten years.

“Jordan is updating its first NDC by raising its macroeconomic GHG emission reduction target, this forthcoming updated NDC with higher climate ambition aims at driving Jordan’s post-COVID-19 recovery process into a lower carbon and more climate-resilient development pathway steered by national green growth priorities while fully committing to the provisions of the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement,” concludes Al-Zoa’bi.

 

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A fisherman displays his catch of the day in Dominica. Credit: Alison Kentish/IPS

By Alison Kentish
DOMINICA, Sep 24 2021 (IPS)

On September 10th, on a sweltering summer afternoon, three fishers drove a van around the residential community of Castle Comfort in Dominica, blowing forcefully into their conch shells – the traditional call that there is fresh fish for sale in the area.

One of the men, Andrew Joseph, urged a customer to double her purchase of Yellowfin Tuna, stating that at five Eastern Caribbean dollars a pound (US$1.85), she was getting the deal of the summer. (In the lean season, that price can double).

“It’s good fish, it’s fresh, it’s cheap,” he told IPS, adding that, “People eat too much meat. This is what is good for the body and the brain.”

Little did he know that he was echoing the words of a scientist who is rallying the world, and the landmark United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) to put greater emphasis on the financial, nutritional and traditional benefits of aquatic foods.

“Foods coming from marine sources, inland sources, food from water, they are superfood, but this is being ignored in the global debate and at the country level, because we have had a focus on land production systems and we have to change that,” Shakuntala Haraksingh Thilsted, Global Lead for Nutrition and Public Health at World Fish told IPS.

The nutrition scientist is also the Vice-Chair of Action Track 4, Advancing Equitable Livelihoods, at the UNFSS.

As the landmark summit hopes to deliver urgent change in the way the world thinks about, produces and consumes food, issues like the linkages between aquatic systems and health are emerging.

So are other linkages a scoping report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) says the world cannot ignore. The report, approved in June, paves the way for a 3-year assessment of the interlinkages among biodiversity, water, food and health.

In the case of the UNFSS, it shows how food systems transformation can be achieved if tackled as one part of this network.

“It will assess the state of knowledge, including indigenous and local knowledge, on past, present, and possible future trends in these interlinkages, with a focus on biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people,” IPBES Executive Secretary Dr Anne Larigauderie told IPS.

“The IPBES nexus assessment will contribute to the development of a strengthened knowledge base for policymakers for the simultaneous implementation of the post-2020 global biodiversity framework, under the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the Paris Agreement adopted under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”

Landscape Ecology Professor Ralf Seppelt was one of the scoping experts for the nexus assessment. He says the science is clear on how food systems impact biodiversity and why agroecology must be a pillar of efforts to transform food systems.

“Micronutrients are lacking a lot. Micronutrients are provided by fruits and vegetables, which need pollination. So, the nexus is really strong between agroecological principles and the nutritional value of what we are producing,” he told IPS.

“Wherever we have to increase production, we should do it on agroecological principles. We should consider what farmers say and do, their needs, their access to production goods such as fertilizers and seeds, and it’s equally important to change our diets. It’s not just reducing harvest losses and food waste, but also about moving away from energy-rich, meat-based diets and feeding ourselves in an environmentally friendly way,” he said.

Professor Seppelt is also hoping that the voices of small farmers and indigenous communities are amplified in the global food transformation conversation. “IPBES made an enormous effort to work with indigenous peoples and local communities and include indigenous and local knowledge in its reports. We organized workshops, to collect a diversity of views about nature and its contributions to people, or ecosystem services to make the assessment as relevant as possible to a range of users,” he said.

For Thilsted, any plan to revamp food systems must come with a commitment to weed out inequality. She says from access to inputs and production to consumption and waste, inequality remains a problem.

“This unequal distribution of who wins, who loses, who does well, who does not do too well, who profits and who does not is putting a strain on food and nutrition and it is limiting our progress towards a sustainable development future,” she told IPS.

“COVID-19 has shown the fragility of the system and it is further displacing the vulnerable, for example, women and children who are being more exposed to food and nutrition insecurity.”

The IPBES nexus assessment hopes to better inform policymakers on these key issues.

It is not the first assessment of interlinkages. Earlier this year IPBES and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) launched a landmark workshop report that focused on tackling the climate and biodiversity crises as one.

Now, the current nexus assessment on interlinkages among biodiversity, water, food and health will explore options for sustainable approaches to water, climate change, adaptation and mitigation, food and health systems.

IPBES Executive Secretary Dr Anne Larigauderie says it also shows that there is hope for restoring the balance of nature.

“I would like people to remember and know that they are a part of nature, that the solutions for our common future are in nature; that nature can be conserved and restored to allow us, human beings, to simultaneously meet all our development goals. We can do this if we work together, act more based on equity, social and environmental justice, reflect on our values systems, and on our visions of what a good life actually is.”

 

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By Ian Richards
GENEVA, Sep 24 2021 (IPS)

Last week the World Bank announced it was “discontinuing” its “Doing Business” report, which ranks countries on the ease of opening and operating a company.

It cited the outcome of an investigation that found the World Bank had changed the rankings under pressure of funding. This wasn’t the first time the rankings had come in for criticism. A 2008 internal evaluation report highlighted their lack of transparency, while in 2018 the Bank’s chief economist, Paul Romer, resigned decrying data manipulation.

In truth, the rankings had for some time faced a credibility issue. My colleagues and I saw this first hand. And there were a number of reasons for it.

Firstly, Doing Business had become too politicised. It was originally intended as a way to measure improvements in countries’ business environments. It used an index score based on the number of procedures and time to for example start a business or get a construction permit – there were ten indicators.

However, the Bank also used it to rank countries, fêting top scorers and reformers. Governments soon saw a good ranking as an end in itself, regardless of how it impacted their development. A slip in rank could be politically damaging.

The rankings ostensibly promised a rigorous evaluation of each country’s business environment. Yet with a small team in Washington DC operating in what the investigation described as a toxic environment, much of the work evaluating the ten indicators in 190 countries was farmed out to national volunteer panels, who were asked to amend or approve pre-filled questionnaires.

Credit: World Bank

Not all were experts on the matter and some did not even work in the country. Many we spoke to barely gave the questionnaire a glance before signing off. Further, the English questionnaires posed challenges in countries where the language isn’t commonly spoken.

The result was that governments didn’t always see their hard work reflected in the rankings, leading to lobbying campaigns that, perhaps unsurprisingly, favoured those with greater weight and not always in the right way.

Some governments complained that their score changed for little reason, and in the case of Chile, according to the party in power. The untransparent nature of the changes contrasts for example with UNCTAD’s Global Enterprise Registration index, which specifically invites input from the public.

The investigation confirmed a perception that rankings were helped by paying the World Bank to advise on reforms instead of turning to development institutions such as UNCTAD or UNDP.
It noted that, “the vast majority of Bank employees that we spoke to raised the issue of the inherent conflict of interest that advisory services create.”

The methodology also had its flaws. It did little to distinguish between good procedures, such as ensuring compliance with environmental rules, and unnecessary red tape, such as requiring yet another stamped and notarised copy of a document.

And while reforms to the business environment can be measured in the number of days and procedures saved, it didn’t measure their impact.

For example, at the start of Covid we helped Benin move the process of creating a business online, meaning it could be done from a mobile phone instead of spending days queuing at government offices in the tropical sun. It also cut total time to two hours. But it didn’t end there.

As a result of the changes, which made life easier for those short on time or far from the capital, the number of companies created increased by 43 percent, half started by under-30s, half in rural areas and a third owned by women. This impact, more than a simple ranking, should be the real cause for celebration.

So, what happens next? The Bank’s board has said it will “be working on a new approach to assessing the business and investment climate.” What could this look like, how can it encourage real development, how can it be depoliticised, and is it still relevant?

Doing Business is meant to promote development by making it easier for the private sector to operate.

Therefore, it shouldn’t just measure if reforms make procedures easier on paper, but if they’re actually leading to more companies being created, and if so where and by whom? In other words, is there a real development impact?

It should also measure if procedures are clearly understood. Because lack of clarity on which paperwork to prepare, where to go, how much to pay and what to expect often discourages business owners from registering, perpetuating the informal economy. Hanoi municipality in Vietnam shows how this can be done well.

The team should be sufficiently staffed to operate without an extensive reliance on volunteers, and any desk analysis should be double-checked with field visits to government offices, backed by surveys of private companies.

The team’s independence could be protected by a committee with membership from other development organisations. That committee would oversee the elaboration of each report. It would also hear appeals from governments who feel that the index does not correctly capture their situation.

The construction of the index should be published online, including the data collected, decisions on outliers and any other assumptions, such that a member of the public with adequate statistical expertise could reasonably generate the same results.

For transparency’s sake, the consideration of appeals by governments should also be published.

The index should be less political. This means no rankings. Reforms aren’t a race, and quality trumps quantity. An improved business environment is a means to an end but not an end in itself.

The final question though is whether such an index is still needed at a time when many governments, pushed by Covid and the demands of younger entrepreneurs, are shifting their administrative procedures online.

Earlier this year, Bhutan made it possible for small business owners to register their companies through a government website and receive automatically-generated legal documents by email in seconds.

As more governments adopt that same platform and technology, countries will soon be separated by hours or minutes rather than weeks and days. Procedures will be reduced to a single step.

Under this scenario, it is not clear that there will be anything left for Doing Business to measure.

Ian Richards, a development economist at the UN, helps governments improve their business environments and attract investment.

 

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