Africa

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Credit: Mahila Housing Trust

By Bijal Brahmbhatt
AHMEDABAD, India, Jan 17 2020 (IPS)

As global temperatures continue to rise, vulnerable populations around the world are facing increasingly complex climate risks – with ongoing droughts in Zimbabwe and floods devastating Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta.

From flooding and cyclones to heatwaves and droughts, the stresses and shocks inflicted by growing climate extremes are severe. And they cannot be tackled by one-track solutions, especially in resource-poor developing countries.

Instead, players in the global development space should take a more integrated approach when helping strengthen communities most at risk from climate shocks, to ensure that the interrelated challenges they face are addressed in their entirety.

For instance, in developing countries, rural poor families are often drawn to urban areas in search of better prospects, but often end up living in slums in a vicious cycle of perpetual poverty.

As well as putting greater strain on infrastructure, this displacement exposes them to unsanitary conditions – leaving them more vulnerable to illnesses and climate stresses, and often unable to work or improve their circumstances as a result.

So, for resilience-building solutions to be impactful and work for the whole community, either/or solutions will not suffice. Approaches that are either technical or social might be effective in strengthening one aspect of climate resilience – such as building flood defences, or improving access to potable water – but not more complex, interrelated issues.

It is only by integrating both social and technical approaches to resilience-building that more comprehensive, sustainable solutions can be constructed.

Developing a hybrid model is one way to achieve this, which is precisely what India-based Mahila Housing Trust has done with its mission to empower women in poor communities across South Asia to build resilience against increasing climate pressures.

Founded as an autonomous non-profit in 1994, Mahila Housing Trust has evolved into an agile social enterprise – aided in recent years by mentoring and support from the Global Resilience Partnership.

Using a combined social-technical approach to development, Mahila Housing Trust bridges the gap between poor women within high-risk contexts and mainstream institutions.

Through this hybrid model, it helps women improve their living conditions, build resilience against climate stresses and develop the leadership skills, knowledge and confidence necessary to participate in local governance.

Meanwhile, it ensures its commercial viability by training women to become agents of resilience solutions – from green energy and heat-mitigating technologies, to health interventions such as improved access to drinking water and better sanitation facilities.

The not-for-profit side of Mahila Housing Trust delivers back-end support to its empowerment and resilience-building programmes, while the enterprise side ensures the organisation and its beneficiaries are able to generate funding and income.

This hybrid model has also enabled Mahila Housing Trust to launch “Awaas Sewa” – a social enterprise dedicated to the development and implementation of innovative climate-resilient technologies.

The enterprise identifies, pilots, rates and validates new solutions, then teaches women leaders how to market them – building resilience amongst poor communities and generating a turnover at the same time.

Operating across seven cities in India, Nepal and Bangladesh, the enterprise has so far trained more than 1,500 women leaders to become “climate-saathis”, or climate partners.

In these roles, the women have conducted energy audits and helped families in more than 100 informal settlements to invest in energy-saving and climate-resilient solutions – such as heat-resistant modular roofing.

By converting this network into a sustainable enterprise, these women leaders now earn an income through promoting and selling energy-efficient, climate stress-combatting solutions – helping 27,000 others in their communities become more resilient in the process.

Plus, if women in the community need financial support to purchase and install these solutions, Mahila Housing Trust also has women-led credit cooperatives, which provides financing for climate-resilient technologies.

Yet this commercial aspect is only one small component of the organisation’s model; its sustained results so far have only been achieved through building partnerships across all different levels and sectors.

Strengthening the resilience of poor communities requires a bespoke, holistic approach that directly engages people on the ground. Maintaining a focused yet collaborative approach, Mahila Housing Trust works closely with a multidisciplinary team of partners in a united effort to improve the living conditions in poor urban communities.

With the goal of empowering women to improve their circumstances at the very heart of Mahila Housing Trust’s work, its partnerships mean the organisation can develop cross-cutting resilience solutions that address urbanisation, livelihoods and climate resilience all at once.

By adopting such an integrated approach, rather than just strengthening climate or economic resilience, development players can forge wholesale resilience amongst even the most vulnerable communities.

The post Empowering Women in Poor Communities & Building Resilience Against Climate Pressure appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Bijal Brahmbhatt is Director, Mahila Housing Trust

The post Empowering Women in Poor Communities & Building Resilience Against Climate Pressure appeared first on Inter Press Service.

A company in Pokhara has enlarged household digesters into an industrial scale plant that uses climate-friendly technology that could ultimately be scaled nationwide to reduce Nepal’s balance of trade gap.

By Kunda Dixit
KASKI, Nepal, Jan 17 2020 (IPS)

Nepal’s future may not be in hydropower, as most assume, but actually in the dung heap. A new industrial-scale biogas plant near Pokhara has proved that livestock and farm waste producing flammable methane gas can replace imported LPG and chemical fertiliser.

Over the past 30 years, Nepal has become a world leader in spreading locally-designed household biogas digesters. There are now 300,000 of them, helping reduce deforestation, improving people’s health and lifting women out of drudgery and poverty.

Now, a company in Pokhara has enlarged household digesters into an industrial scale plant that uses climate-friendly technology that could ultimately be scaled nationwide to reduce Nepal’s balance of trade gap.

Biogas has a three-fold advantage. It reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and is therefore climate friendly. It allows us to manage raw waste. And it can slash our import bill for LPG and chemical fertiliser

Kushal Gurung’s grandfather was in the British Army, and he also applied for recruitment but failed the eyesight test. So, he set up Gandaki Urja in Pokhara that works with wind, solar and hydropower, but he believes Nepal’s best option for sustainable growth lies in energy from waste.

“Nepal must abandon fossil fuels, but even among renewable energy sources biogas has a three-fold advantage. It reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and is therefore climate friendly. It allows us to manage raw waste. And it can slash our import bill for LPG and chemical fertiliser,” says Gurung. “It is a win-win-win.”

A tipper truck has just arrived from Gorkha at Gandaki Urja’s biogas plant at Kotre near Pokhara, which with its dome digester looks like a nuclear reactor. The truck tilts its container to empty 5 tons of smelly poultry waste into a pit where rotting vegetables and cow dung from a farm in Syangja are all being mixed before being fed into the 4,000 cubic meter digester that is kept inflated.

In the absence of oxygen, bacteria already in the cow dung go to work to break down the waste into methane, carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulphide. The impurities are removed by filters to produce 200 cylinders of bio-CNG a day which are sold to big hotels and restaurants in Pokhara.

Customers pay a deposit for the cylinders and pressure regulators, and usually use up about two cylinders a day. The cost per kg for the bio-Compressed Natural Gas (bio-CNG) is the same as the state subsidised Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG). However, customers prefer the biogas because it saves them up to 30% cost because it has higher calorific value than LPG, and there is no residue that goes waste.

“So far, the customers are satisfied, and we see demand growing in the future as word spreads,” says Ashim Kayastha, Director of Gandaki Urja.

Half the plant’s revenue comes from bio-CNG and the other half from the effluent which is dried and sold as organic fertiliser. The plant can produce up to 11,000 tons of fertiliser a year and is sold to surrounding farms.

The future of bio-CNG depends on scaling up the technology since any municipality generating more than 40 tons of biodegradable waste per day could have its own biogas plant. Nepal imports 500,000 tons of chemical fertiliser a year, and if each of 100 municipalities produced 5,000 tons of organic fertiliser Nepal could slash its import bill.

This could also significantly reduce the country’s annual import of Rs33 billion worth of LPG from India which grew four-fold in the past 10 years, making up 2.5% of Nepal’s total import bill. But to scale up, industrial biogas needs the same government incentives as hydro, solar and wind power.

At the moment hydropower investors enjoy a 100% corporate tax holiday for 10 years, and 50% for the next five years. There is only 1% tax on imports of equipment for solar, wind and hydropower, there is no such provision for the equipment for industrial scale biogas. Instead, there is a tax on interest, and also VAT on bio-CNG.

 

 

“The government should look at this not only as an energy project, but at its multifaceted benefits,” says Kushal Gurung of Gandaki Urja. “There is a waste-to-energy and fertiliser angle, too. If we want to make Nepal fully organic in the next ten years, projects like these need to be prioritised.”

Gandaki Urja got a boost from an unlikely source, Business Oxygen (BO2) in Kathmandu which helps entrepreneurs running Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to scale up by injecting equity and providing technical assistance.

Says Siddhant Pandey of BO2: “We are always on the lookout for climate investments, and we realised that bio-CNG would be an incredible adaptive resilience investment. It would displace imports of LPG and fertiliser. It was going to be clean, no carbon footprint, and it made business sense because it met our internal return on investment expectation.”

The challenges are ensuring reliable sources of raw material and building knowhow for the technology within Nepal.

Says Pandey: “The Pokhara plant is a drop in the ocean, it can abe replicated in all 7 provinces. We know it is scalable, and it depends how proactive provincial governments will be.”

 

This story was originally published by The Nepali Times

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The post BIOGAS: Cow Dung Holds the Key to Nepal’s Green Economy appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Credit: UN Women

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 17 2020 (IPS)

The United States and 18 other UN member states have come under fire for denying a woman’s legitimate right to “bodily autonomy”—the right to self-governance over one’s own body without coercion or external pressure.

The Executive Director of Women’s March Global, Uma Mishra-Newbery, told IPS the United Nations has worked towards progress in fighting for women’s rights.

But many countries on the Human Rights Council continue to negotiate women’s human rights off the table, she pointed out.

In Sept 2019, she said, the world watched as the US, in partnership with 18 other member states, put forth a statement saying there is no international right to abortion.

She said UN member states have also witnessed “the continued and grave human rights violations in Saudi Arabia”, including the continued torture of imprisoned women human rights defenders like Loujain al-Hathloul.

“Yet the UN and member states fail to hold Saudi Arabia truly accountable for its actions. The UN must hold these governments accountable as they work to strip women’s rights away without repercussions”, she declared.

Beside the United States, the 18 countries singled out include Bahrain, Belarus, Brazil, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Guatemala, Haiti, Hungary, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Nigeria, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.

The member states who deny women access to safe and legal abortion represent 1.3 billion people, according to Women’s March Global.

As part of a global campaign for women’s reproductive rights, Women’s March Global has called attention to the “dangerous and alarming repeal of women’s rights to bodily autonomy, bringing international attention to these pressing issues.”

The 45 marches—the fourth annual event, with the participation of millions of women and allies – took place in Africa, Canada, Central and South America, Europe and Asia.

Purnima Mane, a former UN Assistant Secretary-General and Deputy Executive Director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), told IPS the March on January 18 to protest the inadequate progress and sometimes downright rollback of women’s right to exercise bodily autonomy through the right to abortion, “comes at a critical juncture in our history.”

She said as many as 48 of the 58 existing UN countries, signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

Nonetheless, the UN as a body, has been limited in its work on abortion, due to its exclusion as a right from human rights treaties as a result of significant opposition from many quarters, she added.

“Besides, these treaties are not legally binding and some countries specifically see these issues as covered by domestic law.”

For example, she said, the Programme of Action (PoA) of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), focuses on the obligation of governments to prevent unsafe abortion but does not refer to making abortion legal.

This obligation can of course open the door for national debates on how women’s overall health and bodily autonomy are linked. International human rights treaties which most governments have ratified, support the right of women to liberty and to health.

The UN often provides platforms to learn from examples of countries which have implemented these rights successfully, integrating women’s rights more broadly, including the right to bodily autonomy, said Mane, who is a former President and CEO of Pathfinder International.

Antonia Kirkland, a global lead at Equality Now, told IPS that UN Women, alongside the Mexican and French governments and feminists around the world, have chosen bodily autonomy and sexual and reproductive health rights as one of the Generation Equality Forum’s six Action Coalition themes to in the lead up to Beijing +25.

“This is a good sign that attention and resources are being focused in this direction and can hopefully help counteract moves towards greater restrictions on access to abortion in countries like the USA, as well as forced pregnancy and motherhood in Latin American countries”.

Kirkland said over the past few years, there has been an alarming and sustained rollback on women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights around the world.

Focusing the first women’s rights March of the new decade on bodily autonomy is about shining a much-needed spotlight on the systematic oppression that continues to prevent women and girls from exercising self-governance over their own body and reproductive choices, she noted.

Mane said abortion has, in fact, been available in many countries for years but it is heavily regulated with severe restrictions which make it difficult to access.

Over the last few years, these restrictions have grown rapidly almost globally. Animosity towards contraception complicates the situation even though there is ample evidence to show that preventing unintended pregnancies through access to modern contraception, reduces abortion rates in the first place, she added.

“The combination of restrictions in the practice of legal abortion and poor access to contraception for avoiding unintended pregnancies, lead to an increase in unsafe abortion and high rates of morbidity and mortality among women”, said Mane, who has served on boards of several international, non-profit organizations including as Governor of the Board of Governors, International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in Canada.

Mane also pointed out that women’s right to access to contraception is the first and essential step advocated by UNFPA for enhancing women’s health and reproductive rights.

“If women receive the needed education and information, have access to appropriate services and commodities, and benefit from a conducive policy and programme environment, their ability and right to make decisions concerning their own bodies will be enhanced which will benefit their health and well-being”.

She said the UN assists national governments in the process of making all of the above happen through the supportive role they play globally and nationally.

Organizations like UNFPA need all the support and encouragement they can get to do their bit in moving the world towards the goal of ensuring that women are in a position to make decisions concerning their own bodies and ultimately their own lives.”

Kirkland said the United Nations has a vital role to play in the protection of women and girls’ sexual and reproductive health and rights, and this involves working in partnership with member states to ensure that everyone is free to make their own decisions about their body, and is able to easily access family planning support, healthcare services and information.

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@ips.org

The post Women Activists Escalate Demand for “Bodily Autonomy” as 19 Nations Dissent appeared first on Inter Press Service.

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Yu Youhan, We Will Be Better, 1995.

By Vijay Prashad
Jan 16 2020 (IPS-Partners)

On Wednesday, 15 January, China and the United States agreed to suspend their full-scale trade war. From February 2018, the United States placed tariffs on Chinese goods that entered the US market, and then China retaliated. This tit-for-tat game continued for almost two years, causing massive disruption in the global value chain. In October 2019, the International Monetary Fund’s G-20 Surveillance Note reported that the global GDP suffered by a 0.8% drop merely because of the tariffs on goods such as aluminium, steel, soybeans, and car parts between the United States and China. Western attacks on Chinese 5G technology – and on the tech firm Huawei – are part of the pressure on China to buckle before the US-led order. But China did not bend. As a prelude to the ‘phase one’ deal, the United State Treasury Department stopped calling China a ‘currency manipulator’, a term that has haunted China’s for decades.

The suspension of the trade war comes with a ‘phase one’ deal whose text includes nine chapters on topics such as intellectual property rights to financial services. Most significantly, China has agreed to stop asking firms that invest in China to share their technology; this is a major departure for the Chinese model of development. The ‘phase one’ deal is merely the first stage in an ongoing process of negotiations and confrontations, which will be expected to continue for a long time yet. If ‘phase one’ goes well, and if the implementation and dialogue mechanisms work, then the two countries will move to ‘phase two’. Chinese diplomats say that they do not anticipate an immediate return to the pre-confrontation period, namely before the trade war began in February 2018.

News of a potential trade deal immediately moved the International Monetary Fund to revise its 2020 growth forecast for China from 5.8% to 6%. US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that the GDP numbers for the United States would be boosted to 2.5% for 2020 (though the IMF continues to predict a 1.9% GDP for the United States). It is likely that the low expectations for the global economy (at 2.5% GDP growth for 2020) might also be revised upwards for the year, although predictions for a severe global contraction remain intact; Deloitte’s CFO Signals for the fourth quarter of 2019 suggests that US companies have begun to further constrain investment in anticipation of a serious downturn – but not a recession – of the economy. US firms lost at least $46 billion as a consequence of the trade war started by US President Donald Trump in February 2018. Pressure from US firms on the White House and Trump’s need to make his ‘victory’ in the trade war an election issue drove the US to the table. By the fourth quarter of 2018, China’s economic growth rate was the slowest it has been since 1990, which is why China had been willing to discuss outstanding issues since February 2018.

Shi Guorui, The Yangtze River, 2013.

In the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research Dossier no. 24 – The World Oscillates Between Crises and Protests – there is an important section on the new ‘bipolar world’. It is widely recognised that US power has dwindled since the illegal attack on Iraq in 2003 and since the world financial crisis of 2007-08; at the same time, it is hard to deny the rapid growth of China’s economy and of China’s growing importance on the world stage. A decade ago, when China and Russia joined Brazil, India, and South Africa to form the BRICS, it appeared as if the global architecture was shifting from US unipolarity (with its allies as the spokes around the US hub) to multipolarity; but, with the deepening crisis in countries like Brazil and India, the new global architecture – according to Tsinghua University’s Institute for International Relations – will be one of bipolarity, with the US and China as the two poles of the global order.

China’s growth rates since the reform era began in 1978 remain perplexing. The attempt to explain this has spawned an enormous literature, some of it only partially explanatory but most of it petrified in clichés. Professor Wang Hui of Tsinghua University suggests that China’s policy framework is not along orthodox neoliberal lines, but that it has emerged out of the Chinese Communist Party’s commitment to sovereignty, out of the immense advances in health and education in the first decades of the revolutionary period, out of the enhancement of China’s economy by the socialist commodity economy of that period, out of the sustained struggles in the countryside to transform land relations, and out of the deep pragmatism of the Communists (‘cross the river by feeling for the stones’). Professor Hui warns that the stresses of market society have begun to engender new – and dangerous – contradictions for China. One of the overwhelming contradictions is the threats from the United States.

Zhang Xiaogang, Bloodline – Big Family no. 4, 1995.

The United States – which has the habit of dominance – tried its best to both manage and to prevent the growing global role of China. To manage China means to intimidate it to remain subordinate to US economic interests: Washington accused Beijing of currency manipulation and tried to get China to revise its currency to the benefit of the United States; this did not happen, and its failure to happen is a sign that China will not bow to US authority.

Accusations about the currency were quickly followed by claims that China had forced technology transfers or had stolen intellectual property, that China prevented access to financial services, and that it would not cut its industrial subsidies. Each US President over the course of the past decade – George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump – has accelerated the accusations against China and portrayed China as having advanced entirely by deceit.

When China refused to accept the US’ demands, and when it continued to develop its economic project – the Belt and Road Initiative – the United States moved to politically and militarily threaten China along several axes, some of these developed by Wu Xinbo, Dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University.

Indo-Pacific Strategy. In 2017, the United States and India began to develop an ‘Indo-Pacific’ strategy that would bring these two countries together against China’s Belt and Road Initiative (along the land of Eurasia) and its String of Pearls Initiative (in the Indian Ocean). The first Indo-Pacific Strategy document, produced by the US Department of Defence in June 2019, points its finger at China, which it says ‘seeks to reorder the region to its advantage by leveraging military modernisation, influence operations, and predatory economics to coerce other nations’. The United States and India – alongside Japan and other smaller states – are to create a bloc to prevent the emergence of China as a continental and global power. It is with no irony that the US defence department complains about ‘influence operations’ and ‘predatory economics’, both of which are closely understood to be US policies (including the Indo-Pacific Strategy itself).

The Use of Taiwan. The Indo-Pacific document promotes the defence of Taiwan as an essential pillar in US strategy. China has long insisted on pushing for the diplomatic isolation of Taiwan and for its eventual incorporation into China. Since it does not have an embassy in Washington, Taiwan has had – since 1971 – a Coordination Council for North American Affairs and then the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office; Trump changed it to the Taiwan Council for US Affairs, a name that has incensed Beijing. Not only have Trump and his officials said that they would like to increase US-Taiwan relations; the US has sold Taiwan F-16 fighters and fully backed the re-election of Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party – which asserts Taiwan’s independence from China – in the January 2020 presidential elections.

Liu Bolin, Hiding in New York No. 9 – Gun Rack, 2013.

Hong Kong and Xinjiang. The Indo-Pacific document of the US Defence Department says that the US – and India – express ‘deep concern’ about the fate of the Muslim population in China; at the same time, the US has said that it stands with the protest movement in Hong Kong. The concern about Chinese Muslims is not credible coming from the US, where Trump’s Muslim Ban defines his own attitude, and from India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi has driven a citizenship and refugee policy that is clearly anti-Muslim. The United States and its allies use the Hong Kong and Xinjiang cases to put pressure on China; people in Hong Kong and Xinjiang would be delusional if they believe that the US actually cares about democracy and Muslims.

In 1965, at the urging of several national liberation movements and governments in eastern Africa, the People’s Republic of China began to work with them to build the Tanzam Railway or the Great Uhuru Railway. This railway cut through old colonial boundaries that isolated Zambia and kept Tanzania from the interior of the continent. Mao told Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere that – despite China’s own poverty – as a national liberation project, the Chinese Revolution was ‘duty bound’ to assist their comrades in Africa to build the longest railroad on the continent. This is what they did.

China in Africa. For the past decade, the US and the Europeans have complained that China is the new colonial power in Africa. It is true that Chinese investment into Africa has increased astronomically, but in many countries the main economic partner remains the old colonial adversary. Nonetheless, this narrative of China as a colonial power is not about facts, but it is to serve a purpose – to disparage China’s commercial strategy in the Global South and the challenge that it poses to the hegemony of the US and its allies. The actual procedure from China is well-described in the 2013 Human Development Report: ‘China is providing preferential loans and setting up training programmes to modernize the garment and textile sectors in African countries. China has encouraged its mature industries such as leather to move closer to the supply chain in Africa and its modern firms in telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, electronics and construction to enter joint ventures with African businesses’. A few years ago, I asked Tanzania’s former Foreign Minister Ibrahim Kaduma what he thought of Chinese commercial interests in Africa. ‘African states need to come up with their own assessment of their path forward’, he said; they should not be guided by Western fearmongering.

Ta Men, Snow, 2016.

From February 2018, various dispute settlement mechanisms – including the Strategic Economic Dialogue – set up by the US and China have failed to operate. The most recent ‘phase one’ deal creates new platforms for discussion and debate and provides a roadmap to settle the chaos unleashed by this trade war. But this agreement is a ceasefire – not a peace treaty. The contests will continue; instability will remain. ‘Chaos and disorder’, as the Tsinghua University scholars write, will be the way ahead.

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