Africa

The men, from Nigeria and Liberia, armed themselves with metal poles and demanded to be taken to Britain.

Some of the male contraceptives supplied by charity Marie Stopes contained holes or risked bursting.

Ethiopia come from behind to upset visiting Ivory Coast 2-1 as Morocco ease past Burundi in 2021 Africa Cup of Nations qualifying.

A lion, which was reportedly being used to guard a house in Lagos, has been removed by a task force.

The Edo State government in Nigeria announces it will now pay its women's team the Edo Queens the same as its men's side Bendel Insurance.

Credit: UN Women

By Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 19 2019 (IPS)

If I could have one wish granted, it might well be a total end to rape. That means a significant weapon of war gone from the arsenal of conflict, the absence of a daily risk assessment for girls and women in public and private spaces, the removal of a violent assertion of power, and a far-reaching shift for our societies.

Rape isn’t an isolated brief act. It damages flesh and reverberates in memory. It can have life changing, unchosen results—a pregnancy or a transmitted disease. Its long-lasting, devastating effects reach others: family, friends, partners and colleagues.

In both conflict and in peace it shapes women’s decisions to move from communities through fear of attack or the stigma for survivors. Women and girls fleeing their homes as refugees also risk unsafe transport and insecure living conditions that can lack locked doors, adequate lighting and proper sanitation facilities.

Girls married as children in search of increased security at home or in refugee camps can get caught up in legitimized conditions of rape, with little recourse for those wishing to escape, such as shelter and safe accommodation.

In the vast majority of countries, adolescent girls are most at risk of sexual violence from a current or former husband, partner or boyfriend. As we know from our work on other forms of violence, home is not a safe place for millions of women and girls.

Almost universally, most perpetrators of rape go unreported or unpunished. For women to report in the first place requires a great deal of resilience to re-live the attack, a certain amount of knowledge of where to go, and a degree of confidence in the responsiveness of the services sought – if indeed there are services available to go to.

Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka. Credit: UN Women

In many countries, women know that they are overwhelmingly more likely to be blamed than believed when they report sexual assault, and they have to cope with an unwarranted sense of shame. The result of these aspects is a stifling of women’s voices around rape, significant under-reporting and continuing impunity for perpetrators.

Research shows that only a small fraction of adolescent girls who experience forced sex seek professional help. And less than 10 per cent of women who did seek help after experiencing violence contacted the police.

One positive step to increase accountability is to make rape universally illegal. Currently more than half of all countries do not yet have laws that explicitly criminalize marital rape or that are based on the principle of consent.

Along with criminalizing rape, we need to get much, much better at putting the victim at the centre of response and holding rapists to account. This means strengthening the capacity of law enforcement officials to investigate these crimes and supporting survivors through the criminal justice process, with access to legal aid, police and justice services as well as health and social services, especially for women who are most marginalized.

Having more women in police forces and training them adequately is a crucial first step in ensuring that survivors begin to trust again and feel that their complaint is being taken seriously at every stage of what can be a complex process.

Progress also requires that we successfully tackle the many institutional and structural barriers, patriarchal systems and negative stereotyping around gender that exist in security, police and judicial institutions, as they do in other institutions.

Those who use rape as a weapon know just how powerfully it traumatizes and how it suppresses voice and agency. This is an intolerable cost to society. No further generations must struggle to cope with a legacy of violation.

We are Generation Equality and we will end rape!

The post End Rape—an Intolerable Cost to Society appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka is Executive Director UN Women

The post End Rape—an Intolerable Cost to Society appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Vladimir Popov and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
BERLIN and KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 19 2019 (IPS)

Any balanced assessment of the so-called Chinese economic miracle will recognize that it was extremely successful, not only during the reform period from 1979, but also since Liberation in 1949 despite the setbacks of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

The Chinese economy grew at about 5% on average during 1949-1979 and at almost 10% in 1979-2019. Five percent growth was impressive, higher than in most countries of the world at that time, but ten percent growth over the last four decades is quite unprecedented.

Vladimir Popov

Miracle of economic liberalization?
The conventional explanation of this miracle is liberalization, or more accurately, the marketization reforms started in 1979 by Deng Xiaoping. But in other regions of the world, economic liberalization has had rather different outcomes.

In Latin America, the so-called Washington Consensus, implemented after the debt crises of the early 1980s, led to economic stagnation, the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s. Sub-Saharan Africa lost a quarter century to such policies, while the former Soviet Union and much of Eastern Europe lost real and potential output in the 1990s on a scale greater than in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Why did economic liberalization seem to work in China, but not in other regions? Reforms needed to accelerate growth depend on historical and other conditions, which are necessarily varied at different times for countries with various backgrounds.

Growth acceleration conditional
Rapid economic growth can only materialize if enough minimal conditions are met. Growth acceleration is complicated, requiring several crucial inputs—which may include infrastructure, human resources, enabling state institutions, and economic stimuli, among other things.

Without some crucial necessary ingredients, a growth acceleration may not start, or cannot be sustained. Some economists invoke ‘growth diagnostics’ to identify ‘binding constraints’ holding back economic growth.

In some cases, these constraints may be due to lack of market liberalization, e.g., when inappropriate regulation or state interventions deter productive investments and technological progress. In others, inappropriate liberalization may frustrate and block such progress.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Likewise, other factors, such as particular state capacities or capabilities, human resource deficits or infrastructure may be the key constraint. One size does not fit all. There is no universal formula which is not sensitive to conditions, historical and others.

Liberation and developmental governance
So, why did liberalization work in China, but not in Africa and Latin America? In China, the pre-conditions for the last four decades were mostly created in the preceding 1949-1979 period.

Without the progress and achievements of the Mao era, the market-oriented reforms since 1979 would not have had the same impressive results. Needed ingredients, most importantly, people or human resources, had already been prepared in the previous period.

Market reforms from 1979 accelerated economic growth because China already had capable governance created by the state, including the ruling communist party, after Liberation in 1949; the country had lacked such developmental governance for centuries.

Through party structures at all levels, including every village, China’s communist party-led government has been able to enforce rules and regulations all over the country more efficiently than any emperor, not to mention the infamously corrupt Kuomintang (KMT) regime of 1912-1949.

In the late nineteenth century, central government revenues were equivalent to only 3 percent of GDP compared to 12 percent in Japan right after the Meiji Restoration. Under the KMT government, this increased to only 5 percent of GDP.

Mao’s economic legacy
The Mao government left the Deng reform regime with revenues equivalent to a fifth of GDP. China’s crime rate in the 1970s was among the lowest in the world; a Chinese black market or shadow economy was virtually non-existent, and corruption was estimated by Transparency International to be the lowest in the developing world in 1985.

Literacy rates in China increased from 28 percent in 1949 to 65 percent at the end of the 1970s (compared to 41 percent in India). Chinese life expectancy almost doubled to 65 years in the mid-1970s from 35 years in 1950 while India’s rose from 35 to 52 years over the same period.

In short, without the foundations established during the Mao period following Liberation seven decades ago, the selective economic liberalization of the last four decades could well have been ruinous. Liberation also allowed the Chinese authorities to chart their own course without being subject to policy conditionalities imposed by foreign powers.

Vladimir Popov is Research Director at the Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute in Berlin and author of Mixed Fortunes: An Economic History of China, Russia and the West. Oxford University Press, New York, 2014.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram, a former economics professor, was United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development, and received the Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought in 2007.

The post Liberation, Not Liberalization, Responsible for China’s Economic Miracle appeared first on Inter Press Service.

A view of India Gate, a war memorial located in New Delhi, covered by a thick layer of smog. Credit: Malav Goswami/IPS

By Umar Manzoor Shah
NEW DELHI , Nov 19 2019 (IPS)

Ankita Gupta, a housewife from south Delhi, is anxious about whether she should send her 4-year-old daughter to kindergarten. Outside visibility is poor as smog — a combination of emissions from factories, vehicle exhausts, coal plants and chemicals reacting with sunlight — has settled over the city, surpassing dangerous levels.

Gupta knows that sending her daughter to school is akin to forcefully taking her inside a chemical factory and filling the toddler’s lungs with toxic and lethal smoke.

“Why should I endanger her life by letting her travel through the roads, which are infested with the toxic air? Everything comes later. It is her health which for me is supreme,” she told IPS.

Last week, New Delhi, India’s capital with a population of 11 million, shut down schools for the second time in two weeks, 17 flights were diverted and several delayed due to poor visibility and construction across the city was halted as the Air Quality Index (AQI) measured 447. The AQI works on a scale of 0 to 500, where 0 measures good air quality and 500 measures hazardous.

The government responded declaring a public health emergency.

Children at risk from high levels of air pollution

Gupta is not the lone parent here who has been plunged into anxiety by the city’s worsening air quality.

Bijay Kumar, a mid-level employee in Delhi government, has similar concerns.

Last week, Kumar’s 14-year-old daughter, Ruchi, returned home from school with chest pains and sudden breathlessness. Her family rushed her to hospital where they were told that the ongoing high pollution was a cause of Ruchi’s illness. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), air pollution is linked to cases of pneumonia, stroke and ischaemic heart disease (characterised by reduced blood supply to the heart).

Courtesy: World Health Organisation (WHO)

Ruchi was admitted to hospital for two days.

“I even fret to imagine what if something bad had happened to my daughter. This toxic smoke is killing us all silently,” Kumar told IPS.

According to Sanjeev Verma, an environmental activist, air pollution in Delhi is becoming a silent killer, brutally murdering newborns, pregnant women and the elderly.

“Various studies have revealed that air pollution in Delhi is responsible for approximately 10,000 to 30,000 annual deaths. It is more than the people getting killed by the terror attacks on the country evert year. We are in a dire need to take drastic measures to put lid over the crises or else, the situation will turn catastrophic very very soon,” Verma told IPS. 

System of Air Quality and Weather Forecasting And Research (SAFAR), an air quality information service in India, also issued an advisory, asking people to reduce prolonged or heavy exertion.

“Take more breaks and do less intense activities. Asthmatics, keep medicine ready if symptoms of coughing or shortness of breath occur. Heart patients, see doctor, if get palpitations, shortness of breath, or unusual fatigue,” it said.

Too many private cars on the roads

But the heart of the pollution problem lies with the city’s overburdened roads, according to Samiya Noor, a research scholar in environment studies. Noor told IPS that the lakhs of public and private vehicles driving on Delhi roads every day contribute to nearly 72 percent of the city’s worsening air quality.

According to a 2019 economic survey, there are more than 10 million vehicles on the city’s roads very day, emitting toxic gases that play a major factor in worsening the air quality of country’s capital.  

Noor told IPS that in addition to vehicular pollution, domestic pollution, industrial emission, road dust, construction and the burning of garbage also contributes to Delhi’s total pollution load.

There has also been an 18.35 percent increase in industries operational  in Delhi in the last decade.

“In many of the industries, installed air pollution control devices are found in idle conditions which lead to the emission of pollutants directly into the atmosphere without any filtration. Construction of short chimneys also restricts the polluting gases from escaping into the upper layers of the atmosphere. This all, in unison, is wreaking havoc,” Noor said.

• The government is already restricting the number of vehicles on the roads. Known as the odd-even vehicle rule, private cars with old and even numbers on their licence plates are only allowed on the roads on alternating days.
• It was first implemented in 2016 and subsequently stopped in 2017. However, it was implemented again this month as smog levels rose but stopped last week.
• The government has also attributed, in part, the declining air quality to the burning of crop residue in north India.   

Humayun’s Tomb, a UNESCO Heritage site built in 1570, in New Delhi last week. Air pollution in New Delhi hit hazardous levels, forcing government to shut down schools and declare a public health emergency. Credit: Malav Goswami/IPS

A government response but is it enough?

This July, India formally joined the Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC), becoming the 65th country to join the partnership. The announcement underlined the country’s commitment to combat air pollution with a solutions-oriented approach.  

India also announced that it will work with coalition countries to adopt cleaner energy producation and management practices to promote clean air.

The BBC also reported that municipal authorities were also “converting vehicles to cleaner fuel, restricting vehicle use at specific times, banning the use of polluting industrial fuel, prohibiting the entry of the dirtiest vehicles into the city and closing some power stations”. 

But Rajesh Bhatia, a social activist based in New Delhi, said government efforts were not enough and the active participation of people is required to reduce the ongoing pollution in the county’s capital.

According to Bhatia, the use of public transport needs to be promoted and  an adequate number of feeder buses for Metro stations had to be provided. 

“There have been various researchers who have shown how frequent checking of Pollution Under Control Certificates [a certificate issued after a test on a vehicle’s emission levels] needs to be undertaken by the civic authorities in order to ensure that vehicles are emitting gases within permissible norms. People need to be educated to switch-off their vehicles when waiting at traffic intersections,” Bhatia told IPS. 

But as the country’s parliament convenes for the second day of its winter session in Delhi, pollution in the capital is expected to top the agenda. 

Prakash Javadekar, Minister of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, told reporters outside parliament yesterday that the government was slowly switching to electric vehicles but urged people to use public transport rather than their private vehicles.  

But for Sanjeev Sharma, a retired government school teacher, it is time to bid adieu to New Delhi — where he has lived for a quarter of a century. 

Along with his ailing wife, who is suffering from chronic bronchitis, Sharma is moving to Bangalore a southern India state where his son is working as a network engineer.

Sharma told IPS that in the very beginning of November, his wife’s health began to deteriorate and suffocation became a constant complaint. “She is on constant oxygen support but the medicos attending attending her told us that her condition is only worsening instead of getting any better in spite of increasing the  daily drug dose,” Sharma told IPS. 

While the capital is currently experiencing reduced levels of pollution, these are expected to rise dramatically by Thursday, according to SAFAR.

“Delhi is no longer a place to live during the winters. The air is getting thinker with toxic smoke with each passing day.

“Gone are the days when you used to find the place green and clean.”

 

** Additional reporting by Nalisha Adams in Johannesburg.

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The post Seeing Through the Smog: Can New Delhi Find a Way to Limit Air Pollution? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating. Credit: UN

By Farhana Haque Rahman
ROME, Nov 19 2019 (IPS)

Mottled and reddish, the Lake Oku puddle frog has made its tragic debut on the Red List, a rapidly expanding roll call of threatened species. It was once abundant in the Kilum-Ijim rainforest of Cameroon but has not been seen since 2010 and is now listed as critically endangered and possibly extinct.

Researchers attribute its demise to a deadly fungal disease caused by the chytrid fungus. As noted by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the skin fungus has devastated amphibian populations globally and holds the distinction of being the world’s most invasive killer, responsible for the decline of at least 500 amphibian species, including 90 presumed extinctions.

The IUCN’s Red List has expanded to cover more than 105,000 species of plants and animals, and its most recent update in July found that 27 percent of those assessed were at risk of extinction. No species on the list was deemed to have improved its status enough since 2018 to be placed in a lower threat category.

Human exploitation is often responsible, as with the now endangered red-capped mangabey monkey hunted for bushmeat while its forest habitat in West Africa is destroyed for agriculture; or the East African pancake tortoise critically endangered because of the global pet trade. Thousands of tree species now make the list too.

Farhana Haque Rahman

In its multi-faceted approach towards combating species loss, the IUCN has launched its First Line of Defence against Illegal Wildlife Trade program in eastern and southern Africa, engaging rural communities as key partners in tackling wildlife crime. But this is just a small part of a much wider challenge.

As Grethel Aguilar, IUCN acting director general, noted: “We must wake up to the fact that conserving nature’s diversity is in our interest, and is absolutely fundamental to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. States, businesses and civil society must urgently act to halt the overexploitation of nature, and must respect and support local communities and Indigenous Peoples in strengthening sustainable livelihoods.”

Jane Smart, global director of the IUCN Biodiversity Conservation Group, said the Red List update confirms the findings of the recent IPBES Global Biodiversity Assessment: “Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history.”

More than one million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades, “unless action is taken to reduce the intensity of drivers of bio-diversity loss”, according to a landmark report by IPBES, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

It bleakly warns that the global rate of species extinction is already at least tens to hundreds of times higher than it has averaged over the past 10 million years, and the rate will accelerate if action is not taken.

A summary was released in May and the full report is expected to be approved soon, assessing changes over the past 50 years and offering possible future scenarios.

Frightening statistics detail how 32 million hectares of primary or recovering forest were lost across much of the highly biodiverse tropics between 2010 and 2015 alone. Put in perspective that totals an area nearly the size of all Germany.

“Ecosystems, species, wild populations, local varieties and breeds of domesticated plants and animals are shrinking, deteriorating or vanishing. The essential, interconnected web of life on Earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed,” said Professor Josef Settele, co-chair of the report. “This loss is a direct result of human activity and constitutes a direct threat to human well-being in all regions of the world.”

Crucially, for the first time on such a scale of evidence, the report’s more than 400 authors rank the five main drivers of this global disaster. In descending order they are listed as: (1) changes in land and sea use; (2) direct exploitation of organisms; (3) climate change; (4) pollution and (5) invasive alien species.

Clearly such challenges are interwoven and cannot be tackled in isolation. Some species are affected by all of these main drivers, or a deadly combination. Researchers into the fungal diseases wiping out amphibians like the Lake Oku puddle frog believe the most important factor in the spread of the pathogens is the global trade in wildlife. Some have also suggested that local changes in climate have also enabled the chytrid fungus to flourish in new habitats.

That governments are failing to address these warnings comes as little surprise, however.

“Despite 40 years of global climate negotiations, with few exceptions, we have generally conducted business as usual and have largely failed to address this predicament,” declared 11,258 scientists grouped under the Alliance of World Scientists in a recent report, warning that the climate crisis is accelerating faster than most of them had expected and could reach potential irreversible climate tipping points, making large areas of Earth uninhabitable.

The UN Climate Change Conference, COP25, is to be held in Madrid from 2-13 December amidst severe signs of leadership stress. Brazil was to have hosted the summit but President Jair Bolsonaro ruled that out on his election and in the first nine months under his government over 7,600 sq km of rainforest were felled. The baton was then passed to Chile which pulled out because of ant-government unrest. And then this month President Donald Trump formally launched the process to withdraw the US from the 2015 Paris Agreement.

COP25 has unfinished business from COP24, held in Poland’s coal-mining area of Katowice, namely negotiating the final elements of the Paris Agreement ‘rulebook’. Work must also start on future emissions targets ahead of the crunch 2020 conference next November in Glasgow, in the knowledge that commitments submitted by governments and current greenhouse gas emission trajectories fall far short of what is needed to achieve the long-term goals of the Paris Agreement.

“Loss of species and climate change are the two great challenges facing humanity this century,” warns Lee Hannah, senior scientist in climate change biology at Conservation International. “The results are clear, we must act now on both…”

The post Climate Change and Loss of Species: Our Greatest Challenges appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Farhana Haque Rahman is Senior Vice President of IPS Inter Press Service; a journalist and communications expert, she is a former senior official of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

The post Climate Change and Loss of Species: Our Greatest Challenges appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Eliud Kipchoge made history in October by becoming the first person to run a marathon in under two hours. Here's how he did it.

Mbazira Moses and his friends are trying to rebuild their lives after fleeing anti-gay discrimination.

The incident in northern Mali comes weeks after one of the deadliest attacks in recent years.

A Dalit woman stands outside a dry toilet located in an upper caste villager’s home in Mainpuri, in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Credit: Shai Venkatraman/IPS

By External Source
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 18 2019 (IPS)

Ending the practice of defecating in the open, rather than in a toilet, will have “transformational benefits” for some of the world’s most vulnerable people, says the UN’s partner sanitation body, the WSSCC (Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council).

Ahead of World Toilet Day, which is marked annually on 19 November, WSSCC’s acting Executive Director, Sue Coates, has been speaking to UN News about how to end open defecation.

 

What is open defecation and where is it mostly practiced?

Open defecation is when people defecate in the open – for example, in fields, forests, bushes, lakes and rivers – rather than using a toilet. Globally, the practice is decreasing steadily, however its elimination by 2030, one of the targets of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires a substantial acceleration in toilet use particularly in Central and Southern Asia, Eastern and Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Poor sanitation and hygiene practices (for example, not handwashing with soap after defecation and before eating) contribute to over 800,000 deaths from diarrhoea annually, according to the World Health Organization (WHO)

UN agencies report that of the 673 million people practicing open defecation, 91 per cent live in rural areas. An increase in population in countries including Nigeria, Tanzania, Madagascar and Niger, but also in some Oceania states, is leading to localized growth in open defecation.

 

Why is open defecation such a serious problem?

Open defecation is an affront to the dignity, health and well-being, especially of girls and women. For example, hundreds of millions of girls and women around the world lack privacy when they are menstruating. Open defecation also risks exposing them to increased sexual exploitation and personal safety and is a risk to public health.

According to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), one gram of faeces can contain 10 million viruses, one million bacteria and one thousand parasite cysts. Poor sanitation and hygiene practices (for example, not handwashing with soap after defecation and before eating) contribute to over 800,000 deaths from diarrhoea annually, according to the World Health Organization (WHO): that’s more people than who die from malaria.

 

Why has it been so difficult to stop it?

Open defecation has been practiced for centuries; it is an ingrained cultural norm in some societies. Stopping it requires a sustained shift in the behaviour of whole communities so that a new norm, toilet use by all, is created and accepted. Ending open defecation requires an ongoing investment in the construction, maintenance and use of latrines, and other basic services.

 

How are people’s lives improved once they have a toilet to use?

On a day-to-day basis, the ability to use a toilet – at home and work, and in public places such as schools, health centres and markets – is a basic human right. Sanitation has transformational benefits supporting aspects of quality of life, equity and dignity for all people.

 

To what extent is sanitation a central part of overall development?

A lack of at least basic sanitation and hygiene services, including a lack of informed choice about menstrual health and hygiene, is a violation of the human rights to water and sanitation, as well as the rights to health, work, adequate standard of living, non-discrimination, human dignity, protection, information, and participation.

WHO and UNICEF report that in 2016, 21 per cent of healthcare facilities globally had no sanitation service, directly impacting more than 1.5 billion people, and over 620 million children worldwide lacked basic sanitation services at their school.

WHO estimates that every $1 invested in water and toilets returns an average of US $4 in saved medical costs, averted deaths and increased productivity. Hygiene promotion is also ranked as one of the most cost-effective public health interventions. Conversely, a lack of sanitation holds back economic growth.

 

How is the UN contributing to ending open defecation?

Member States and UN agencies are committed to ending open defecation and have urged the provision of financial resources, capacity-building and technology transfer to help developing countries, to provide safe, clean, accessible and affordable drinking water and sanitation for all.

Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG 6), on clean water and sanitation, requires access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all, and an end to open defecation, with special attention paid to the needs of women and girls, and those in vulnerable situations.

Increasingly, governments and their UN agency partners have roadmaps to tackle the issue, and WSSCC has been providing grants for community-based solutions for a decade. However, the SDG target is not on track.

It’s estimated that the global annual cost for providing even basic sanitation services is   $19.5 billion, but right now not enough funding is forthcoming. The UN Sustainable Development Goals Report in 2019 warns that while progress is being made in many SDG areas, the collective global response is not enough, leaving the most vulnerable people and countries to suffer the most.

This story was originally published by UN News

The post “Transformational Benefits” of Ending Outdoor Defecation appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Several international firms helped with theft of state funding, British lawmaker Peter Hain says.

The creature was reportedly being used to guard a house in the Nigerian city of Lagos.

The first Zimbabwean dollar notes in ten years were released this week. But how did we get here?

Comoros hold visiting Egypt to a 0-0 draw as Ghana edge past hosts Sao Tome in 2021 Africa Cup of Nations qualifying.

Credit: MONIKA DEUPALA/SONIA AWALE

By Sonia Awale
KATHMANDU, Nov 18 2019 (IPS)

For those who think that Nepal is too underdeveloped to make full use of artificial intelligence (AI), think again. That is exactly what they used to say about computers and mobile phones in the 1990s.

It may come as a surprise to many that Nepal has been gaining ground in AI, developing not only software using machine learning algorithms but producing world-class engineers. One company at the forefront is Fusemachines Nepal, which has started using industry experts to train AI students with cutting-edge technology to deliver intelligent solutions.

“I wanted to see if I can contribute in bringing the best AI education to Nepal and make Nepal known around the world as one of the best sources of AI talent,” says the Nepali founder of Fusemachines, Sameer Maskey, a professor at Columbia University.

This is the age of surveillance capitalism, where algorithms determine election outcomes, Siri knows what you want before you do, wearables correctly deduce the state of the heart and Facebook recognises friends.

 

 

AI simply imitates human thinking by recognising patterns in data, so that repetitive everyday work can be done by machines that learn as they go along.

Coming to terms with AI

Artificial Intelligence: Ability of computer systems or machines to make a decision like humans, or the ability to perform tasks requiring human intelligence

Machine Learning: A subset of artificial intelligence that provides a system with the ability to automatically learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed, relying on patterns generated from data

Deep Learning: Machine learning that is applied on a large set of data, also known as deep neural learning that uses deep neural networks to model complicated data

Natural Language Processing: Interaction between computers and human languages, deals with programming computers to process and analyse natural (human) language, this field of AI processes, analyses, interprets and distills information from human languages

Computer Vision: Enables computers to see, identify and process images in the same way that human vision does

Image Processing: Part of computer vision that entails analysis and manipulation to find insights from a digitised image

Big Data: Extremely large data sets on which AI is applied to reveal patterns, trends and associations and make decisions
Nepal missed the bus on natural resource processing, manufacturing and information technology. But experts say that training a critical mass of engineers in AI can allow the country’s economy to leapfrog and become globally competitive.

Fusemachines Director of Academic Affairs Bülent Uyaniker, who was in Nepal recently, rejects the notion that Nepal is not ready for artificial intelligence applications. “It is happening already, it is inevitable. If there can be 8.5 million Facebook users in Nepal, then it has the special conditions for AI.”

Proof of this is the increasing number of software companies in Nepal using local engineering talent to work on software solutions for customers in North America or Europe. However, most of the engineers and recent graduates need training in AI to keep up with customer requirements. America alone will need 200,000 data scientists in the next five years, and most of these will come from the UK, Finland, Canada, Singapore, China and India.

Which is why Fusemachines Nepal is also emphasising education. Says the head of its global operations and strategy, Sumana Shrestha: “You cannot learn AI in a one-day bootcamp, it needs intelligent mathematics, but there is a huge demand versus supply gap for engineers proficient in machine learning or other AI components everywhere.”

Nepal established itself as a sought after destination in the past 20 years for outsourcing services such as software and app development, website design and big data management to overseas clients, mostly due to the country’s inexpensive English-speaking workforce.

This move from IT to AI will not just create jobs in Nepal, but also allow the country to increase efficiency and productivity in the workplace. General practitioners in rural hospitals will be able to make diagnoses faster so they can spend more time with patients, high-risk individuals can be identified with cancer screening, and targeted advertising and customised itineraries will lure potential tourists during Visit Nepal 2020.

Recently, a group of engineering students developed a model to help poultry entrepreneurs understand fowl behaviour and the state of their animals’ health, helping them to raise the farm’s business profile.

“With precision livestock farming we can generate patterns to help farmers recognise symptoms before an outbreak of a disease by implementing AI components such as image processing and deep learning,” explained engineering student Sajil Awale at Pulchok Engineering Campus. “This allows for timely intervention to prevent mass deaths and reduce losses.”

Computer vision (which enables computers to see and process images as humans would) can also help identify rotten fruit swiftly, and prevent misuse of pesticides by identifying areas on the farm that require chemicals, and the amounts needed. AI can also estimate future harvests, allowing farmers time to find markets for produce.

Engineers at Fusemachines Nepal are working on Nepal’s first optical character recognition (OCR) system so forms filled out with Nepali handwriting can be digitised and translated into English. This will have huge scope in Nepal’s banking, hospital and government sectors, where pen and paper continues to be the norm.

Sixit Bhatta, CEO of ride-sharing startup Tootle, says Nepal is ripe for AI applications: “Our efforts now should be on preparing for a world in which machines perform skills-oriented tasks and for humans to take on the roles that require creativity and empathy. But before that, the government should design policies that allow AI to grow, and not restrict it.”

Sumana Shrestha at Fusemachines Nepal says that as long as salaries for clerical staff are low, there is less potential for AI to flourish. But she adds: “The curse of cheap labour means companies will prefer to employ people to do repetitive work. But sooner or later, AI will be here. Nepal needs to develop despite government. And the private sector needs to prepare itself for disruption.”

This story was originally published by The Nepali Times

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The Ocean at sunset seen from SPC headquarters in Noumea. Credit: Cameron Diver

By Cameron Diver
NOUMEA, New Caledonia, Nov 18 2019 (IPS)

In just under a month, countries around the world will gather for UNFCCC COP 25. The hashtag for this year’s “Blue COP” is yet another reminder to us all that it is “Time For Action”. We can no longer afford to wait as the effects of the climate crisis become ever more present. Vulnerable populations, whether from Small Island States, the rural heartland or the world’s megacities, are becoming ever more vulnerable, and the wellbeing of people and planet continues to face its most existential threat.

At the Pacific Community (SPC), we are confronted every day by the striking dichotomy between the extreme vulnerability of our small island/large ocean Member States and the remarkable resilience and climate ambition of their peoples. We are also challenged by a new reality: under the effects of climate change, the islands and peoples of the Blue Pacific continent are both sustained and threatened by the ocean.

Responding to this reality, in 2018 Pacific Leaders adopted an expanded definition of human security to include the implications of climate change and environmental degradation, and, in the 2019 Kainaki II Declaration, they called for “urgent, transformational global climate change action” to limit global warming to 1.5°C, transition out of fossil fuels, achieve net zero carbon by 2050, increase global climate finance and invest in science-based initiatives to improve our collective understanding of risk and vulnerability, while providing a robust evidence-base for informed policy making. The Kainaki II Declaration is also a milestone in its express recognition of the ocean-climate nexus and its appeal to “all parties attending COP 25 to welcome the focus on oceans, consider developing a work programme on oceans within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change process and convene a workshop on the climate-ocean nexus in 2020”.

Cameron Diver

But it is not only for the island Nations of the Pacific that the nexus between climate change and our ocean is critical. It is just as vital for other Small Island Developing States and, whether they realise it or not, for countries and peoples around the globe, from the coastline to the highest mountains and the farthest reaches of the planet’s great continental landmasses. The recent IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC) highlighted that “It is virtually certain that the global ocean has warmed unabated since 1970 and has taken up more than 90% of the excess heat in the climate system” with observed negative impacts on ecosystems, people and ecosystem services. The SROCC underscored the risks this creates for, among others, biodiversity, water use and access, vulnerability to extreme weather events, changes in the distribution of natural resources and “intrinsic values important for human identity”.

In this context, where ocean change is driven by climate change and each, in turn, compounds the negative impact of the other, we cannot ignore the science and we should not ignore the crosscutting benefits of combined ocean/climate action. And SPC is already bringing its capacity and partnerships to bear to take action.

As a partner of the Because the Ocean Initiative and the Ocean Pathway Partnership, SPC supported the third regional workshop on the integration of the ocean into NDCs under the Paris Agreement, together with a special ocean-climate negotiators symposium in May 2019. Over past years, SPC’s teams have implemented significant programmes of work on the restoration of ecosystem services and adaptation to climate change, contributed to the Pacific Marine Climate Change Report Card, led and published research on the vulnerability of tropical Pacific fisheries and aquaculture to climate change and, with our partners, developed projections for the future geographic distribution of tuna stocks under the effects of a warming ocean. And through platforms such as the Pacific Community Centre for Ocean Science (PCCOS), we will convene partnerships, facilitate knowledge exchange and action to strengthen the collaborative contribution ocean science can bring to climate action, as one of our key initiatives under the upcoming United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development.

A view of Majuro, Marshall Islands. Credit: Cameron Diver

From 2 to 13 December in Madrid, under the incoming Chilean presidency, SPC fully intends to leverage the opportunity provided by the “Blue COP” and mobilise its partnerships to highlight the powerful synergies between ocean action and climate action. We will be convening several events presenting a Pacific perspective on the SROCC, highlighting the impact of climate change on maritime boundaries, emphasising the contribution of ocean science for climate action and outlining a 2030-2050 vision for resilient, green and clean ports in the Pacific islands region. At SPC, we are convinced that to deliver on the promise of the Paris Agreement, we need a healthy and sustainably managed ocean. As such, we are also working actively with our Member States and partners like the Green Climate Fund, the European Union, the Agence Française de Développement and others to integrate the ocean into projects that will strengthen action for climate change mitigation, adaptation and resilience in the Pacific.

The celebrated Pacific author Epeli Hau’ofa wrote “the sea is our pathway to each other and to everyone else, the sea is our endless saga, the sea is our most powerful metaphor, the ocean is in us”. That eloquent statement of a fundamental ocean identity comes from the heart of Oceania, from the strength of the cultures and traditions of the Blue Pacific. Imagine how powerful it would be if we collectively harnessed “the ocean in us” as a driving force for increased climate ambition and enhanced climate action. COP 25 is our chance to do just that! It is our chance to ensure the ocean is recognised as part of the climate solution. And it is our chance to embed the nexus between climate change and the ocean into our thinking, our cooperation and, above all, our action.

The post The Ocean in Us: Ocean Action for Climate Ambition appeared first on Inter Press Service.

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Cameron Diver is Deputy Director-General, the Pacific Community (SPC)

The post The Ocean in Us: Ocean Action for Climate Ambition appeared first on Inter Press Service.

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