Africa

Conversation at the UN General Assembly side-event panel on synergies between SDGs and climate action. Credit: Karelia Pallan/Oxfam

By Abby Maxman
NEW YORK, Sep 25 2023 (IPS)

With its global representation, one would expect the UN General Assembly to touch on many diverse issues. And it does. But talks have repeatedly come back to one unifying call: if we want to save ourselves, our planet, and our future, we must act now.

In his remarks at the UN General Debate last Tuesday, President Biden reaffirmed the United States’ commitment to combat the intersecting challenges of the climate crisis, hunger, and worldwide inequality. Yet the following day at the Climate Ambition Summit, the U.S. was not recognized as a climate leader or granted speaking time since the U.S. had no new climate commitments.

In his remarks, President Biden said that extreme weather events around the world “tell the urgent story that awaits us if we fail to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.” Yet, with current policies in place, the United States accounts for more than one-third of planned global oil and gas expansion through 2050 and has the largest shortfall between its climate plans and what is needed to meet its fair share of emissions reductions to prevent catastrophic climate change.

Now President Biden and the United States government need to step up with more investments and more action – not only to be the climate president he promised, but also to realize the United States’ obligation as the largest historical emitter.

Abby Maxman visits Rufisque and Bargny, Senegal, where Oxfam partners are helping communities cope with climate change, protect the environment, and advocate for their rights. Credit: Djibril Dia/Oxfam

But this is not only about combatting climate change. The latest UN report confirms what many of us in the humanitarian sector have been emphasizing for years: the quests to combat climate change, fight inequality, and achieve our Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are not mutually exclusive missions.

During a recent trip to the Sahel, I visited Bargny, a coastal community south of Dakar. There, one woman activist, a mother and grandmother, shared her experience of losing her home to sea-level rise and erosion. She and other displaced families were promised land to resettle, only to have the government grant that land to a foreign company to build a coal-burning power plant.

According to the people we spoke with, this was done without any community consultation or compensation for the people affected. Unfortunately, such injustices are all too common because of our continued investment and reliance on fossil fuels.

Marginalized communities bear the brunt of decisions made on their own land and from thousands of miles away, and these people often have little say in the policies that impact their lives so profoundly.

As we approach the midpoint of the 2030 Agenda, we’re falling far short of our SDG targets that aim to protect communities like Bargny all around the world. Our research at Oxfam showcases the depth of this crisis: as extreme weather events and poverty surge, so does extreme inequality.

The carbon emissions of the richest 1 percent are more than double the emissions of the poorest half of humanity combined. But once we consider the investments of those at the very top, in addition to their lifestyles, the data is even more stark. On average, a billionaire emits a million times more greenhouse gases than the average person, and billionaires are also much more likely to use their wealth to invest in polluting industries.

Whether in response to the recent floods in Libya, rising hunger across nations, or the earth’s hottest and most brutal summer since global records began in 1880, the call for immediate climate action, with emphasis on reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, and safeguards for affected communities has never been louder.

The US, having historically contributed massively to climate pollution, shoulders an immense responsibility to lead the charge against climate disasters and empower and finance local leaders, young people, and marginalized communities.

This past Sunday, many of my Oxfam colleagues were part of the 75,000 people marching through New York City to demand an end to fossil fuels. They held up signs that said “climate change knows no borders.” What we do here – good or bad – affects all the countries represented in the United Nations.

It’s an uphill battle, but every moment, and every decision, counts. While President Biden’s words resonate with hope and commitment, we must see more action or they are merely platitudes. Time is running out, and the world watches, hopeful and expectant, for transformative actions that match these promising words.

Abby Maxman is the President and CEO of Oxfam America

IPS UN Bureau

 

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By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 25 2023 (IPS)

When the UN’s 193 member states reviewed the current status of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger by 2030, the verdict was mostly failures—and with little or no successes.

The hunger/poverty nexus was best characterized by Alvaro Lario, President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), who warned last week that under current trends, 575 million people will still be living in extreme poverty in 2030—and as many people suffering from hunger by 2030 as in 2015 (600 million people).

“Hunger remains a political issue, mostly caused by poverty, inequality, conflict, corruption and overall lack of access to food and resources. In a world of plenty, which produces enough food to feed everyone, how can there be hundreds of millions going hungry?” he asked.

According to the UN, all developing countries also suffer from severe debt problems. These countries cannot fund progress on the SDGs if they are facing exorbitant borrowing costs and paying more on debt servicing than on health or education.

“Developing countries face borrowing costs up to eight times higher than developed countries – a debt trap. And one in three countries around the world is now at high risk of a fiscal crisis. Over 40 per cent of people living in extreme poverty are in countries with severe debt challenges,” warned UN Secretary-General António Guterres last week.

The high-level segment of the General Assembly attracted about 88 Heads of State, six vice presidents, 43 Heads of Government, four deputy prime ministers, 41 ministers, seven chiefs of delegations, plus three high-level speakers from UN observer states.

The high-level meetings included the SDG Summit and a forum on Financing for Development (FfD), among others. The active participants also included scores of civil society organizatiions (CSOs).

Mandeep S. Tiwana, Chief Officer – Evidence and Engagement at CIVICUS told IPS that a major reason the SDGs are off-track is because 85% of the world’s population live in countries with severe civic space restrictions which severely impedes meaningful civil society partnerships and deprives communities of innovations in sustainable development, service delivery to the most excluded, and importantly, transparency, accountability and participation in how development policies are implemented.

The ambitious SDG Stimulus put forward by Secretary General Guterres, he pointed out, should be accompanied by guarantees for civic freedoms and effective civil society partnerships.

Otherwise, funds intended for sustainable development, that leaves ‘no one behind’, are likely to be channeled to support networks of patronage and to shore up repressive state apparatuses, he noted.

“It’s unacceptable in this 75th year of the celebration of the Universal of Declaration of Human Rights that civil society activists and investigative journalists should be persecuted for uncovering high level corruption and serious human rights violations”.

He said demanding transformative social and economic policies is a dangerous activity in far too many countries around the world.

“The globe is a facing an acute crisis of leadership due to a toxic mix of authoritarianism and populist nationalism which is leading to unabashed promotion of perceived national interest at the expense of the rules based international order intended to create a better world for all,” Tiwana declared.

Guterres gave a new political twist to the SDGs when he said the ”goals” were really ”promises”

“A promise to build a world of health, progress and opportunity for all. A promise to leave no one behind. And a promise to pay for it”.

This was not a promise made to one another as diplomats from the comfort of this chamber, he argued. “It was — always — a promise to people”.

People crushed under the grinding wheels of poverty. People starving in a world of plenty. Children denied a seat in a classroom. Families fleeing conflicts, seeking a better life. Parents watching helplessly as their children die of preventable disease.

People losing hope because they can’t find a job — or a safety net when they need it.
Entire communities literally on devastation’s doorstep because of changing climate.
So, the SDGs aren’t just a list of goals, he declared.

In an interview with IPS, Amitabh Behar, interim Executive Director of Oxfam International, said: “Unfortunately, in Oxfam’s programmatic, advocacy, and campaigning work, we see clearly that at this half-way point, we are very off-track to achieve the SDGs.”

The UN SG’s latest progress report shows that 80% of SDG targets are either showing weak progress or regression. Much blame is cast on the pandemic, but in reality – it simply magnified an already bleak trend.

By many measures, he said, Goal 10 is the furthest off-track of all the goals. For example, inequality between countries has risen for the first time in three decades.

Oxfam, a global organization that fights inequality to end poverty and injustice, is bringing this focus on inequality (Goal 10) and how it intersects with the entire 2030 agenda, said Behar who previously served as the Chief Executive Officer of Oxfam India.

At this year’s General Assembly, Oxfam pushed leaders to make bold commitments and more importantly follow-up with action to get the SDGs back on track.

“We know what works to address these challenges, and we know there are more than enough resources to do so. We must ensure that resources and capacity are in the hands of those on the frontlines tackling these complex issues.”

He said the lives and futures of millions of the most vulnerable people are directly impacted by the decisions and actions taken by leaders now and “we are running out of time”.

“We heard leaders reiterating their commitments to tackling issues of inequality, hunger, poverty and more. If they can work together to prioritize and finance the solutions to these issues, there is still hope to get the 2030 agenda back on track.”

Asked what was really needed to accelerate the pace, Behar said: “We are not seeing the financial and policy commitments from leaders needed to tackle the major challenges of our day – economic, gender and racial inequalities, the climate crisis, and the ongoing conflicts and humanitarian crises”.

Most of the trends and barriers which are contributing to the dire state of SDG implementation, he said, were in place before COVID, including the widespread unwillingness to put in place highly redistributive fiscal policy at the national level – or other measures to rein in the power of the top 1% of large corporations, and the failure of rich countries to meet their commitments or responsibilities, climate finance, official development assistance (ODA), debt relief and international finance reform.

“We support the Secretary-General’s emphasis on the importance of financing the SDGs and his call for an “SDG Stimulus” including a surge in development finance, reform of multi-lateral development banks, action on debt relief, the expansion of contingency financing in invest in basic services and clean energy, and to deal with the root causes of this situation”.

“We are calling on leaders to work on these areas so we can regain the momentum we’ve lost on the SDGs and get back on track before we’re too late,” he declared.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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By Joyce Chimbi
NAIROBI, Sep 22 2023 (IPS)

African countries are increasingly in the eye of deadly climate-induced disasters. Recent devastating extreme events include intense shattering earthquakes in Morocco, followed shortly by catastrophic floods in Libya this September that left 11,300 people dead, according to Libya’s Red Crescent.

A quarter of Libya’s Port City of Derna – the epicentre of this tragedy – was wiped off the map. Planet warming pollution made the tragedy in Libya 50 times more likely to occur and 50 percent worse. 

“As global warming intensifies, the outlook worsens, losses and damages increase and become increasingly difficult to avoid, the projections are dire – regional disparities and food security are poised to affect tens to hundreds of millions of people in low- and middle-income countries, flood risk is anticipated to result in an additional 48,000 deaths of children by 2030,” said Dr Adelle Thomas, lead author on the Sixth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the sixth in a series of reports which assess scientific, technical, and socio-economic information concerning climate change.

“For small islands and coastal communities, both slow onset and extreme events threaten to render these places uninhabitable. In this context, we find that current financial and institutional structures are failing to comprehensively address losses and damages, particularly in vulnerable developing nations. More than 50 percent of the debt increase in vulnerable nations is linked to funding disaster recoveries and reconstruction. It is an unjust and unsustainable predicament with those least responsible for climate change are shouldering the burdens and costs of loss and damage.”

Speaking during a special UN meeting on loss and damage on September 20, 2023, Amina J Mohammed, the Vice Secretary-General of the United Nations, said that this is an issue that the Secretary General of the United Nations “always got fire under our feet for and to make sure we deliver as we go to COP28. The imperative to act urgently and collectively, we all know, cannot be overstated, and this special meeting is taking place on the margins of the secretary general’s Climate Ambition Summit.”

Stressing that the global community must come together, redouble its efforts in rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris Agreement and significantly enhancing adaptation resilience in the face of these inevitable changes. It is also equally imperative that the global community address the irreversible impacts that have already been set in motion.

“Many nations, particularly those which are least responsible for the current climate crisis, find themselves at the frontline of its effects. To address the climate injustice, a historic decision was taken at COP27 to establish new funding arrangements, including a fund for loss and damage. It is possible to have a world that is secure, where no one is left behind. Keeping the promise of the 2030 agenda and also of the Paris Agreement,” Mohammed emphasised.

The special meeting on loss and damage supported efforts by the Transitional Committee in line with the mandate that was given to them by the parties of the Paris Agreement. Emphasizing that urgent action was needed as the least polluting countries were in the frontline of a deadly climate crisis.

“More than 110 million Africans are being directly affected by climate and water-related hazards in 2022, and that caused more than 8.5 billion dollars in economic damages. Our global projected economic cost of loss and damage are to be in the range of hundreds of billions by 2030,” Mohammed expounded.

At the same time, unsustainable debt burdens, spiralling inflation and currency fluctuations are adding to the difficulties and hardships that the most vulnerable countries face. Initiatives such as the SDGs Stimulus to Deliver Agenda 2030 are now in place to keep the 2030 promise by offsetting challenging market conditions faced by developing countries and accelerating progress towards the SDGs.

Genaro Matías Godoy González, a youth representative from YOUNGO – the official children and youth constituency of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) emphasised that climate inaction should pay a price and that “the call for loss and damage finance is inherently a call for both climate action and climate justice. It means the hope of reparations for the billions of people whose livelihoods are lost and the responsibility of decision-makers to fix the pathway of a monetary and financial system that helps our world to expand its growth but fails to account for planetary boundaries on how we should direct growth.”

González spoke of the need for transformative change – recognising the climate and ecological debt to the people and ecosystem. To rebuild and regenerate the lost livelihoods – international financial institutions have a moral imperative to be part of the transition and transformation of our global financial system.

“Central banks must include the risk of financial inaction in the risk assessments of its monetary policy, report accordingly, and the right incentives put in place. Climate financing for addressing loss and damage must not come at the expense of other forms of climate financing to support comprehensive climate action. It must be new and additional and aligned with SDGs, conservation of nature and climate resilience development. They should not create more debt burden for developing countries that are already trying to survive the climate crisis while being strangled by debt and being forced to extract nature,” he said.

To underpin the need for effective financial models for loss and damages, Thomas delivered a dire warning from the heart of the Sixth IPCC assessment report – “Human-induced climate change has inflicted widespread and severe losses and damages – disproportionately affecting developing countries and the most vulnerable among us. The numbers paint an alarming picture – about 3.3 billion people reside in highly vulnerable countries, exposing them to the most severe climate impacts. Human mortality from extreme events was 15 times higher in highly vulnerable regions.”

“Millions of people are grappling with acute food insecurity, concentrated in Africa, Asia, Central and South America, least developed countries and small islands. Severe droughts have resulted in nearly six million children in the developing world becoming underweight. Extreme events are resulting in billions of dollars in damages – at times, exceeding the GDP of developing countries,” Thomas added.

Losses and damages have wrecked greater economic havoc and impoverished regions and among more vulnerable populations, including the poor, women, children and indigenous peoples. The scientific evidence is undeniable – urgent, comprehensive and transformative action is imperative to respond to the escalating levels of loss and damage.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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The SDG Summit gets underway in the General Assembly hall at UN Headquarters in New York. September 2023. Credit: UN Photo/Cia Pak

By Simone Galimberti
KATHMANDU, Nepal, Sep 22 2023 (IPS)

What does transformative and sweeping really mean in the overarching efforts to achieve the Agenda 2030?

With the conclusion of the second edition of the SDG Summit, it is time for stocktaking on what was agreed at the United Nations HQ in New York this week. At the core of the Summit were not the several Leaders’ Dialogues that, as important as it can be to have heads of state and government reflecting on the Agenda, are just talking shops without any practical implications.

Instead, what deserves more scrutiny is the Political Declaration that was issued during the Summit after months of negotiations facilitated by the governments of Ireland and Qatar. The document has been heralded as truly significant, a “transformative and sweeping” game-changer that will be able to reposition sustainable development at the center of the global deliberations.

But is it really so?

Certainly, the Declaration contains some bold language that truly makes an attempt at securing the international community’s steadfast leadership towards the Agenda 2030. Yet would this be enough to command not only the commitment of the world’s government to achieve it but also a through follow up and implementation in the months and years ahead?

As we know, the SDGs are far from being on track and each report being published, confirms it. The fact that the Declaration is comprehensive because it covers the whole spectrum of policy making that is covered by the 17 SDGs contained in the Agenda, is hardly enough.

After all, the expectations were high as the document was supposed to be an actionable and provide impetus for change.

Real leadership means and implies actions and after the conclusion of the Summit, no one can be optimistic that the governments will concretely step up. The reality, no matter how much the UN is trying to portray it in a such a way, those expecting doable, concrete and detailed advances, are now feeling disappointed and frustrated and rightly so.

It is true that the final text does offer a lot of attention has been given to the inter-linked challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss. Yet for these two global issues, any figures estimated to address them, disappeared from the final approved document.

Indeed, any references to the goal of delivering 100 billion US Dollar by 2025 (yearly, let’s not forget it, even if this detail did not make even in one of the initial draft circulated) did not find space in the approved Declaration. The same could be said for the $700 billion biodiversity fund included in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

A consolation could be found in having the proposal of an SDG Stimulus, one of the key proposals being pushed by the UN Secretary Geneal, being mentioned. Unfortunately, also in this case, the number of $ 500 billion annually proposed by Mr. Guterres did not make the final cut.

With the industrialized nations struggling to deliver on their promises in the field of climate action, having a paragraph, even though a brief one on the Stimulus, can be seen as a victory especially for Mr. Guterres. The Secretary General might feel mixed emotions about the final Political Declaration.

It is true that his ambitious idea of the Summit of the Future, scheduled in 2024, got included even though apparently without much enthusiasm from the international community. Yet, on the other hand, the concept of a New Social Contract, so central to the reform agenda of Mr. Guterres, was completely ignored.

This might be unsurprising considered the political implications (and consequences) of what can be described as a bold attempt at reviewing and renewing the relationships and dynamics between the state and its citizens.

After all, at the United Nations everything that sounds too political (and truly transformative) is going to be strongly pushed back by the member states, especially those which have their own “unique” understanding of democracy and human rights.

Positively and probably unexpected was the attention that the Declaration gave to the latter. Indeed, human rights found acceptance in the document not only once but multiple times and this is praiseworthy, albeit, only symbolically.

A disappointment is the fact that no space was given to the importance of civic engagement, itself an element instrumental to bring forward the idea of a New Social Contract. Yet, even without any linkages to this overtly progressive idea, civic engagement and with it, one of its greatest manifestations, volunteering, did not find any space in the document.

Apparently UNV was not particularly active in the drafting process nor throughout the jamboree of side events organized around the SDG Summit and this is quite alarming. Even more is the fact that the Declaration does not offer any transformative plans or promises to empower youths.

It is as if the Policy Brief published in April by the Office of the Secretary General, Meaningful Youth Engagement in Policymaking and Decision-Making Process was not at all digested by the member states involved in the drafting of the final document.

On this regard, the establishment of an UN Youth Office, another key part of the reform agenda of Mr. Guterres, while significant, it is not at all transformative if tools and mechanisms are not created to enable youths to participate.

The issue of localization of the SDGs, probably, the best approach to involve and mobilize citizens, especially the youths in the pursuit of the Agenda 2030, also did not find due prominence. Likewise, the whole process of the Voluntary National Reviews or VNRs was not highlighted the way it should have been.

It remains quite incomprehensible why the member states are not so keen to translate the SDGs at local level. “We will continue to integrate the SDGs into our national policy frameworks and develop national plans for transformative and accelerated action” reads the Declaration.

“We will make implementing the 2030 Agenda and achieving the SDGs a central focus in national planning and oversight mechanisms”, the document further adds.

This acknowledgement is certainly welcomed but only a lot of political capital and commitment will be able to translate these lofty sentences in a truly revolution in the way policy making is currently carried out that is, far too remote and disconnected from the people.

Yet localizing the SDGs should have been seen as a true game changer and much more focus should have been devoted to. We should have gone well beyond the statement found in the Declaration, according to which, the Leaders says that “will further localize the SDGs and advance integrated planning and implementation at the local level.”

The Political Declaration is a positive document but, in no measure, a game changing one. The reality is that governments are not truly held accountable to implement their SDGs.

The VNRs mechanism is utterly inadequate and not only because it is voluntary but it is so also structurally speaking. Ultimately, there is no real watchdog with powers over the countries lacking their commitments in terms of delivering the SDGs nor the UN System has any real leverage to force the member states to submit their VNRs through a binding timeframe.

I wish the SDG Summit would resemble a COP Process like the annual one related to Climate Change with real pressure and real negotiations occurring. As per its current design, the leaders at the Summit just come to talk, preach, complain or condescending but there is no real high-level bargaining.

That’s why, for example, the wording on climate change, mentioned throughout the document, as significant as they are, do not touch the real debate of phasing down and phasing out fossil fuels.

In this context the fact that the Political Declaration did not mince a word on the ongoing but stalled negotiations on a legally binding mechanism or Treaty on Business and Human Rights, becomes, unfortunately, something superfluous and expendable.

The Writer is the Co-Founder of ENGAGE and The Good Leadership and is based in Kathmandu.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Miriam Poma stands in the electromechanical workshop for high-end vehicles that she co-owns in the city of El Alto, adjacent to La Paz, Bolivia. In the past, she had several jobs in the informal sector and also had to overcome a lot of resistance to working as an automotive mechanic. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Sep 21 2023 (IPS)

In Bolivia, more and more women have gone from being homemakers or street vendors to joining the noisy world of engines, their hands now covered in grease after learning that special touch to make a car work. But they frequently have to put up with machismo or sexism, injustice and mistrust of their skills with tools.

Automotive mechanics is traditionally associated with masculine men wearing oil-stained coveralls. In La Paz and other Bolivian cities over the years many auto repair shops have upgraded from precarious workshops on the street to modern facilities with high-tech equipment.

Vehicles have also transitioned from human-operated nut-and-gear systems to cars governed by electronics.

But openness to women has not evolved in the same way in the profession, as it is unusual to find female mechanics.

And auto repair shops do not appear in studies on informal employment in Latin America by the International Labor Organization (ILO), although mechanic shops are very much present in the informal sector.

“At the age of five I learned about fractions through tears. My father would ask me for a fork wrench (middle wrench, in Bolivia), but since I didn’t know which one it was, he would throw it at my head,” Miriam Poma Cabezas, a senior electromechanical technician, now 50 and divorced, told IPS.

Since that incident, a mixture of anecdote and forced apprenticeship, 45 years have passed, most of them dedicated to the profession of mechanics specializing in engines and now in the electronics of high-end vehicles, in a workshop of which she is co-owner in the city of El Alto, next to La Paz, the country’s political capital.

On a busy street in the La Paz neighborhood of Sopocachi, Ana Castillo uses complex techniques to dismantle rubber tires, identify the damage, and clean and apply chemicals to fix them. At 56, she is an expert in the trade.

She charges about a dollar and a half for each repaired tire, which involves exerting vigorous effort to loosen rusted lug nuts, in order to find the puncture in worn tires amidst the fine black dust that has darkened her hands for 20 years.

“God put me here and I love it because you have to use your strength. I would go crazy sitting still,” Castillo, who completed law school, though she never practiced law, tells IPS as she quickly operates a wrench that creaks as it loosens one of the nuts, stuck hard and moldy from water and dirt.

But she does not only repair tires. She is also a specialist in rebuilding classic cars, an activity for which she is becoming very well-known.

Ana Castillo checks one of the rims she has on the sidewalk of her workshop on a busy street of the Sopocachi neighborhood in the Bolivian city of La Paz. Automotive mechanics holds no mysteries for Castillo, who is also a specialist in rebuilding antique cars. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS

With a great deal of effort, Poma managed to set up her own high-level electromechanical repair shop, but before that she had spent years working as an informal self-employed worker, not only in automotive mechanics.

For her part, Castillo complained about the municipal seizure of a piece of land where she wanted to build the mechanic shop of her dreams, together with her husband Mario Cardona. A court ruling granted them the right to use the land and a city council resolution upheld it, but they still have not been given back the land.

A case like so many others

The automotive mechanics sector is just one example of those in which the participation of Bolivian women is particularly difficult, because they are seen as traditionally male professions and there is strong resistance to women breaking into the field, whether out of necessity or a sense of vocation.

The 2018 Annual Report of the UN Women agency, based on figures from the National Institute of Statistics, states that seven out of 10 women in Bolivia are economically active, work in informal conditions and lack labor rights, which makes it difficult to specifically identify how many work as mechanics.

UN Women highlights that Bolivia “is the third country in the world, after Rwanda and Cuba, with the highest political participation of women”: 51 percent in the Chamber of Deputies and 44 percent in the Senate.

But this high female presence in politics in this South American country of 12.3 million inhabitants does not translate into a boost for women in other areas, particularly business and formal employment.

The president of the Chamber of Businesswomen of Bolivia (Camebol), Silvia Quevedo, told IPS that there is no “state incentive (for women’s participation) in any particular job” and encourages “women themselves to forge their own way, based on the quality of their work.”

Camebol emerged in the department of Santa Cruz, the most economically developed in the country, and has since spread to six of Bolivia’s nine regions. It has a thousand members and its purpose, together with strengthening its institutional framework, is to influence public policies to promote equal opportunities in business.

A study conducted by the ILO on Bolivian self-employed women workers in the informal sector shows that the department of La Paz accounts for 31.8 percent of this segment, with an average age of 45 years and eight years of schooling, below the 12 years of compulsory basic education.

In the city of La Paz, 75 percent of self-employed women work in commerce, 15 percent in manufacturing and eight percent in community services. In the other two largest cities in the country, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz, the proportions are similar, according to the report.

Electromechanics specialist Miriam Poma checks on a screen the problems of a high-end vehicle in her specialized workshop in the Bolivian city of El Alto, adjacent to La Paz. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS

Experienced hands

Miriam Poma told IPS that she began to create her own source of employment at the age of 16, on the bustling commercial Huyustus Street in La Paz, where thousands of vendors sell all kinds of merchandise. She sold shoes and handbags.

But soon after, she decided to devote herself full time to repairing Volkswagen vehicles, and ended up as head mechanical assistant to her father, Marcelino Poma, who competed in rally races until he was 70 years old.

Creativity to adapt at a young age to the opportunities of street commerce led Ana Castillo to sell pork sandwiches. She was 14 years old at the time, forced by the responsibility of caring for her two younger brothers after they had all been abandoned by their mother.

“I know how to make everything: sausages, pickles, sauces; I’m not afraid to start from scratch,” Castillo, who helped her two younger brothers earn degrees in business administration and social communication, told IPS enthusiastically.

In the formal economy, “foreign trade has a woman’s face,” said Quevedo, the president of Camebol, based on surveys of the participation of its members in export companies.

Quevedo is an economist with extensive knowledge in agriculture who specializes in exports.

In 2022, international sales of non-traditional products amounted to 9.7 billion dollars, according to the Bolivian Institute of Foreign Trade (IBCE), in a country with a GDP of 41 billion dollars.

But there are still prejudices about women’s efficiency in men’s jobs, as the two women mechanics noted.

Poma said the customers in her father’s repair shop initially did not trust her to tune their engines, and tried to keep her from working on their vehicles.

Her brother, Julio Poma, would say he had done the work, and only after the client expressed complete satisfaction would he reveal that the work was actually done by his sister.

Recently, Poma tried to pass on her knowledge to men in the field of motor electronics, but no one was interested in a female instructor who was also a racing driver in 2006. In order to attract students, she had to hire a foreign expert.

A study carried out by the Women’s Institute of La Paz, belonging to the city government, indicated the level of interest in learning gastronomy, computer technology, cell phone use and education in small business finances.

Among the non-conventional trades, the respondents called for training in masonry, plumbing and electricity, a spokesperson for the Institute told IPS. The Institute conducts training workshops for 1,450 low-income women heads of households between the ages of 25 and 70.