Africa

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Mar 28 2019 (IPS)

Since the powerful march of hundreds of thousands of students in 1,000 towns against climate change, an unexpected campaign of delegitimation, ”demystification” and demonisation has started against Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager who started the movement. After searching the media, social media and websites, this campaign can be divided into four different groups.

Roberto Savio

The first could be called the stupid. A writer reports pictures of Greta eating a banana, claiming that this proves she has double standards. She wants to reduce gas emissions, and then she eats banana which come from far away. Why does she not eat an apple, which are produced locally in Sweden? Another writer observes that Greta has two beautiful large dogs, but those dogs must be eating meat, and cows are the greatest source of emission of methane (much more damaging than C02) and a cow uses up 15,000 litres of water before reaching the age of slaughter. Then, a third observes that Greta may well skip planes, but by using trains she is clearly using electrical power, which is still basically generated by coal. Then there is another reader protesting strongly because she has bought a sandwich in the train, which comes with a plastic wrap, and she is thus contributing to the damage caused by plastic to the seas. We are clearly in the realm of stupidity, because is impossible for anybody to do anything in this world without contributing to its degradation. This will only change when the political system corrects our lifestyle (just note how, by the sound of it, this is improbable!) If Greta were to ask her parents to give the two dogs away, were not to move from Stockholm at all, and were to eat only local apples, would this make such a substantive contribution to a better climate? Or is it more constructive to campaign and mobilise hundreds of thousands of people?

The second group can be called the jealous. These are the climate scientists who have written everywhere that they started to fight climate change even before Greta (who is now 16) was born. How is it possible that they have been ignored and now a little girl with no preparation is able to mobilise people all over the world? No self-criticism of the fact that they have not been able to inspire and communicate with students. Besides, Greta did not campaign as an expert. Her message in Davos, in Brussels, everywhere, was: Please listen to the scientists. An old Chinese proverb goes: never fight your allies.

The third group is the purists. They have been redistributing reports by Swedish journalists everywhere which delve into Greta’s background, discovering that her parents are active ecologists, that her father has always supported her, and that she has been influenced by a famous activist who has been behind her every step. They claim that in order to believe Greta, it would therefore have been necessary for her parents to have been indifferent to climate issues, and that she should have been totally alien to ecological circles. And this campaign continues, even though all Swedish journalist are unanimous in declaring that Greta has not been an instrument of anyone, and that she is only following only her commitments. Also because, by grace of the gods, she has a mental condition called Asperger’s Syndrome, which makes her a very single-minded person, indifferent to recognitions, compliments and compromises. So, in a letter to Le Figaro, one of the purists asks if it is logical to put hundreds of thousands of students from all over the world “under the guide of a zombie”. This category also includes many complaining that Greta is not denouncing the fact that Sweden is making money by selling weapons. Greta has denounced no one, so those responsible are quite happy. Greta has not started any campaign against finance because she does not understand that only by subduing finance can you change climate. And so on, according to the lenses through which her critics look at her.

And of course, there is the most legitimate group, the paternalists. This is a physiological group comprising those who think that young people have no idea about real life, and nothing serious will come out of the students’ movement, unless they listen to their elders. Their place is in school, not on the streets, they do not have the maturity to understand themes which require a scientific preparation. Exemplary is a letter published in Corriere della Sera, in which somebody observes that young people hardly read books any longer, use smartphones all day long and ignore classical music or theatre – they lack the gravitas necessary for real change. An extreme example of how paternalism is the twin of patriarchalism was a comment made by a well-dressed adult in a group observing the students marching for climate change: “I wonder how many of those girls are still virgin.” Asked about the relationship between virginity and climate change, the answer was: ”Well, until a girl is virgin, she can still have illusions, but not after.”

Those various reactions against a young girl who is simply asking to grow up in a sustainable world is clearly representative of how much society has changed in the last decade. We have come a long way. The period after the Second World War was characterised by the need to reconstruct, to make sacrifices, to make Europe an island of peace, to believe that politics were a participatory tool for changing society for the better. Social elevator, the certainty of young people that they would be better off than their parents, was everybody’s belief. Political rallies saw millions of people on the streets, with hopes and commitments. We all know how that world of idealism collapsed. With the destruction of the Berlin Wall, ideologies were the first to go. The keyword was pragmatism. But it was a pragmatism prisoner of the neoliberalism philosophy which was untouchable. As Margaret Thatcher famously said, There Is No Alternative (TINA). Social costs were unproductive, and finance took on a life by itself, no longer linked to the word of production. The state was pared down to the minimum. We should remember that Reagan proposed the abolition of the Ministry of Education and full privatisation of healthcare. The United Nations was considered obsolete: trade, not aid. For three decades, from Reagan (1981) to the great financial crisis of 2008, the motto was: compete, become rich, at national and Individual level. Politics become a mere administrative activity, devoid of long-term vision. The arrival of Internet changed society from an interactive and connected thread of relations based on platforms to share, into a net of parallel virtual worlds in which to seek refuge and avoid public action. The media followed by downgrading the complexity of information, concentrating on events and ignoring processes. TV basically passed into the field of entertainment with programmes that were shaping popular culture, like Big Brother, or the L’Isola dei Famosi (Island of the Famous). Greed was considered good for society and praised by Hollywood. We were all living in a financial bubble that burst in 2008. It was then clear that politics no longer controlled finance, but vice versa. According Bloomberg, in order to bail out the banking system, the United States had to spend 12.8 trillion dollars, Europe spent 5 trillion dollars, 1.6 trillion just to stabilise the euro. China spent 156 billion, and Japan over 110 billion. Nobody knows for sure how much it cost the world to save its banking system, which was (and is), without any control or regulatory body. If the amount paid to bail out the banks had been distributed to the 7.5 billion people of the world, they would each have received 2,571 dollars. Enough to start a frenzy of acquisitions, especially in the South of the world, with an enormous leap in production. It would have practically solved all the world’s social problems indicated as the Millennium Goals by the United Nations in an agreement subscribed to by all countries. But, by then, the banks were more important than people … and for their illicit activities, the ungrateful banks have paid in fines totalling over 800 billion dollars since their bailout. Let us remember that greed was already being praised in Hollywood in 1987 by Gordon Gekko in the famous film ‘Wall Street’. Gekko famously says: “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good”. It is no coincidence that at the time of the financial crisis of 2008, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, said: ”It is perhaps time to admit that we did not learn the full lesson of the greed-is-good ideology.” And the following year, in a speech to the Italian Senate, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone said: We have gone from free market to free greed.” And many manifestations of global civil society, like the World Social Forum, have been denouncing the submission of politics to finance, and how greed has become a value.

But after the thirty years of greed-is good came the major financial crisis of 2008, due to the irresponsibility of the financial system. That crisis brought an additional negative social impact which was fear: fear of unemployment, fear for the future, fear of terrorism. It became clear that the social elevator that had worked since the end of the Second World War had stopped, with millions of young people from all over the world stuck in it. The American dream itself was in crisis. And a new decade came, one of fear. As usual in cases of fear, a new narrative emerges. After the thirty years of greed, we have now a decade of fear. Neoliberalism, TINA, have lost any credibility. All political parties have betrayed the hopes of their voters. The people have been left out by the elites, by those in the system. So, since 2008, nationalist populist parties that claimed to defend the people flourished all over Europe, where before the crisis they had been practically non-existent (except for Le Pen in France). They continue to flourish. In the last Dutch elections, a new populist party, The Forum for Democracy, won 16 seats in the Senate. Its leader, Thierry Baudet, has discarded the bewitched invention of climate change, idolatry of the sustainable, indoctrination of the left. This is a position common to all populist parties. Their success has been to direct the fear against the different: different religions, different customs, different cultures … in other words, immigrants. Xenophobia has joined nationalism and populism.

Every year there has been a decline in real revenue, in dignified jobs. Traditional political parties have lost credibility and electorates have switched to new politicians, not part of the elite, who speak on behalf of the people and look to the glorious past as the basis for the future, ignoring any technological development. The social divide, taken as the basis by the new political culture, went into full destructive speed: in just ten years, 28 people concentrated in their hands the same wealth as 2.3 billion people. This is money taken away from the general economy; it means that for every billionaire there are thousands of impoverished people. In just the last year, the 42.2 million people in the world with more than one million dollars in financial assets, grew by 2.3 million This is why Pope Francis says that behind every large property there is a social mortgage.

It took a long road to abandon the world which came out of the Second World War an arrive at the present one: a world where phenomena that are abnormalities, like war and poverty, are now considered normal by most young people. Corruption, which has of course always existed, has now become another natural fact. Democracy, which was considered the central foundation of society, is now considered a debatable possibility, with Orban, Salvini and company promoting illiberal democracy.

Fear and greed have changed our society. We are in the middle of a transition, to where nobody knows. What is clear is that the present system is no longer functional and requires very serious corrections. The tide of nationalism, populism and xenophobia is taking us backwards to miseries that we had forgotten, instead of forwards. Electoral campaigns are not based on programmes but on discrediting opponents. When Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, disagreed with Trump, the latter’s Trade Secretary said that there must be a special place in hell for the Canadian PM. TV debates have become a school of incivility. The question is: are we entering a new era based on incivility? For the first time in the history of the British parliament, the various opponents are unable to find a way out from a referendum based on facts that where all lies.

We must recognise that we are living in a world where positive things are few and apart. A political, cultural and social climate where nothing is accepted as legitimated, hiding the truth, and manipulated by the enemy. An era of transition, that should be called “the era of evil think”.

The reaction to Greta Thunberg and her mobilisation is a good example of “evil think”. Instead of raising sympathy and support, this young girl is being submitted to this new culture of “evil think”. And yet she is campaigning for survival of the planet, the only one we have, and where we must all live together, regardless of our myths, religions, parties and nationalities. She says: do not ask my generation to solve the problem of climate change, because when we have grown up, it will be already too late. When she reaches the age of 50, there will be 10 billion people, basically all living in towns. But in just ten years, when she will be 26, humankind will need 50 percent more energy and food, and 30 percent more water, an element which is already scarce in a great part of the world, and which is a source of income for private companies. No wonder she is trying to stimulate action!

Save the world NOW is a message that has been able to mobilise students from all over the world. In the era of “evil think”, instead of supporting her, there are those looking at what she eats, what her dogs eat, and what is behind her and manipulating her. In other words, we are in an era in which we are not able to think positively: an era shaped by greed and fear, and with what today’s culture has given us: evil thinking. It is a safe bet that if Greta had sold sportswear, she would have been accepted as a normal phenomenon, and nobody would look at whether she was eating bananas or apples. This is a good index of how we have lost the ability to dream and go forward.

Roberto Savio is publisher of OtherNews, Italian-Argentine Roberto Savio is an economist, journalist, communication expert, political commentator, activist for social and climate justice and advocate of an anti neoliberal global governance. Director for international relations of the European Center for Peace and Development.. He is co-founder of Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and its President Emeritus.

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Cyclone Idai’s aftermath in Mozambique. Credit: Denis Onyodi:IFRC/DRK/Climate Centre

By Sally Nyakanyanga
HARARE, Mar 28 2019 (IPS)

It was one of the worst tropical cyclones hit Southern Africa in recent times. Cyclone Idai, which has been characterised by heavy rains and flooding including mudslides in some parts of Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi, has left more than 750 dead, with thousands marooned in remote rural areas, whilst others are still unaccounted for. More than 1,5 million people are affected by the cyclone in the region.

Almost two weeks after the cyclone hit, many of the areas have not been accessible as roads, bridges, homes were completely destroyed and communication cut off making it impossible for the rescue teams to provide support in the affected areas.

But as people begin to pick up the pieces of their lives, and as aid pours into the region from all corners of the world, questions are being asked about the disaster preparedness of many countries.

While the highest tolls of those affected are from Mozambique, eastern Zimbabwe was also hard hit by Cyclone Idai. There, large areas of water bodies are present where homes once were.

Meteorology and Early warning systems

Claris Madhuku, director for Youth Development Trust, a community-based nonprofit organisation based in Zimbabwe’s Chipinge and Chimanimani areas (the areas most affected by the cyclone), tells IPS that information provided by Zimbabwe’s meteorological department ahead of Cyclone Idai making landfall had been insufficient to prepare people of the danger.

In addition, many people did not have the capacity to cope with the cyclone and there were no safe alternative places for communities to flee to in the event of an evacuation.

“As an organisation we only managed to provide information on the cyclone by word of mouth as well as social media, in this case What’s app, which is rarely taken seriously as it is often seen as a gossip platform,” says Madhuku.

The country’s Civil Protection Unit, which is part of Zimbabwe’s Local Government Ministry, had told people to move to higher ground. It was a case of being between a rock and a hard place, as even those who sought refuge at high-lying areas were affected by mudslides.

Climate change expert, Dr. Leonard Unganai stated that almost every season tropical cyclones form in the southern hemisphere, but only five percent tend to make a landfall.

But since 2018 was the warmest year on record, as seen by the droughts and dry spells that characterised the 2018/2019 farming season, this created conducive conditions for cyclones to form.

“A tropical cyclone requires energy that’s why they tend to form mostly on the ocean as the ocean temperatures are a bit warm. Furthermore, with climate change, a situation whereby surface temperatures are rising even the oceans are warming up which creates favourable conditions for these extreme weather events to form,” says Unganai, adding that there is likely to be an increase in terms of the intensity of the severity of the cyclone system.

“We have a warm atmosphere and warm oceans such that when they strike they tend to cause a lot of destruction,” Unganai tells IPS.

Climate change adaptation and mitigation.

Unganai advised that there should be more awareness and education around climate change. In the case of Cyclone Idai there was lack of preparedness and people underestimated the gravity or amount of rain that would fall.

Local rescue operations in the aftermath have not all been effect as in some cases people resorted to using shovels and hoes to dig up rocks and trees. The lack of adequate equipment and tools to undertake rescue operations has been obvious and the country has turned to neighbours and other partners for assistance. South Africa has offered sniffer dogs in order to identify dead bodies trapped under boulders.

“There is a lot of panic as there is a mismatch of official statistics available about people who are missing, pointing to the fact that more people could have lost their lives,” Madhuku notes.

There is obviously a need for governments to put in place measures and systems to ensure adequate support and disaster mitigation. 

“We still going to get tropical cyclones affecting lives, we need to map areas that are susceptible – having long term plans to deal with future cyclones if they happen. Ideally we need to ensure that every part of the country should have some level of preparedness,” Unganai advises.

Where people are housed after a natural disaster is also import.

Some areas in Chimanimani and Chipinge had preciously designated for plantations, but in the aftermath of the cyclone there are settlements of people seeking shelter. 

Madhuku remembers back in 2000 when Cyclone Eline affected communities in the eastern part of the country. People had fled the destruction and ended up erecting permanent structures on the river banks and below the mountains.

The post Cyclone Idai: A Time to Reassess Disaster Management appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Environmental activist Wonne Afronelly says she wants to clean up the city sitting at the mouth of the Niger River, which carries a lot of the world's plastic pollution.

A special operations team seizes the tanker hijacked by migrants who did not want to return to Libya.

Dr. Ainka Granderson, manager of the Caribbean Natural Resources Institute's climate change programme in Trinidad and Tobago. Credit:Jewel Fraser/IPS

By Jewel Fraser
PORT-OF-SPAIN, Mar 28 2019 (IPS)

Fishers in Anguilla saw posted on Youtube this week a video they helped produce that depicts the impacts of climate change on their industry. Titled “Anguilla’s Fishing Dilemma”, the four-and-a-half minute video highlights some of the main challenges Anguilla’s 92 licensed fishers face in earning a living.

Kenyetta Alord, one of the fishers who worked on the video, told IPS that the video was important to “demonstrate to people that you definitely need help.” He and several other fishers produced the video as part of a workshop sponsored by the UK’s Darwin Plus project for climate change adaptation in fisheries. Darwin Plus helps Britain’s overseas territories, including those in the Eastern Caribbean such as Anguilla, by funding projects in the areas of conservation and environmental sustainability.

The workshop, which ran in late December, was conducted by the Trinidad-based Caribbean Natural Resources Institute (CANARI) and Anguilla’s Department of Fisheries and Marine Resources. “It was part of a campaign of mobilising the knowledge fishers have to get them and the agencies that support them to start taking action on climate change,” said Dr. Ainka Granderson, senior technical officer and manager of CANARI’s Climate Change and Risk Reduction Programme.

Twenty-five participants attended the workshop, including delegates from the Anguilla National Trust, dive operators, and government agencies that work in fisheries and marine resource management, Granderson said.

“The idea is that there is a lot of local knowledge about the impacts [of climate change] that have not been tapped into by the authorities,” she said. “So the workshop was to get [participants] thinking about how they can share their knowledge and raise awareness about these specific aspects.”

Granderson said fishers often may not have “a clear voice” when it comes to decision making with regard to the fishing industry. The workshop on communications using participatory videos was designed to help them “say what are their priority needs and what are the actions they would like to see to build their resilience.”

The fishing industry is important for Anguilla’s economy, said Director of Anguilla’s Department of Fisheries and Marine Resources Kafi Gumbs. She told IPS via e-mail that the fishing industry is “the second highest revenue generator” for Anguilla. “Besides revenue, it forms an important part of the locals’ diet and culture.”

She said authorities in Anguilla were concerned that the impacts of climate change could lead to the collapse of the fishing industry and related ecosystem services. In addition, her department was concerned about possible migration “and/or no or delayed migration” of some pelagics; sea level rise; loss of calcium carbonate plants and animals such as conch and lobster, the latter being Anguilla’s main fisheries export; as well as damage to reefs and water inundation, since “a lot of the hospitality businesses which the local fishers depend on are along the coast.”

The fishers also feel the impacts of climate change in the form of rougher seas, said Granderson, that seriously reduce the number of days they are able to fish. “Snow storms in the U.S. produce groundswells, making very rough sea conditions. Every two weeks there are days when they cannot go out. It is an ongoing issue.”

Alord confirmed that rough seas pose a major challenge for local fishers. “Now you have to wait at least a month or two before you go out. Before, there were calm days in every month,” he said. But “now we have to wait two months to go out, so we are earning a lot less.”

And because of the increasing fishing effort required, due in part to the effects of climate change, fishers also have to go further out to sea, greatly increasing their fuel costs. “Fuel is incredibly expensive on these small islands, which rely on fossil fuel. They spend a lot of money,” Granderson told IPS.

Alord told IPS that his boat, which carries a crew of three, routinely spends hundreds of dollars on fishing trips in one week.

He said the training in video production was valuable for helping the fishers to showcase their concerns. It helped them appreciate the importance of identifying a target audience for their video, as well as helped them in crafting their message in the most effective way.

Alord said, “We had to show why we need these things in place. We have to present the videos in the most [graphic] way where we definitely have to make them understand what we are saying.”

Granderson said the workshop training was successful partly because most of the fishers in Anguilla are young.”Because of that they were very accustomed to using Youtube.There was already a fisher who has his own Youtube channel that everybody follows, so they were tech savvy and used to using video,” Granderson said.

She said she was pleased with the response of the Anguillan fishers and their turnout for the workshop, which was unusually high.”There are a lot requests for their time, so there is a lot of stakeholder fatigue.” She added that the quality of the video produced was also superior to that of other participatory videos CANARI had done over the years. “We will do an official launch next week….The feedback was generally very positive,” Granderson said.

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Meretha Pierson, a nurse in the leprosy clinic of Majuro, Marshall Islands, shows the medication to cure leprosy that are provided for free. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
MAJURO, Mar 28 2019 (IPS)

Meretha Pierson has been a nurse for the past seven years, working in the government-run leprosy clinic in Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands. Her patients come in all ages, from different economic backgrounds and different professions. But, aside from their diagnosis, they all have something else in common: everyone wants to keep their illness a secret.

“Everyone requests me not to tell their neighbours. But women who are young, request me to not inform even their spouses. ‘Please don’t tell my husband,’ they say.  Sometimes, such a request is really hard to keep,” Pierson tells IPS.

Unwanted labels

There is a reason why Pierson, one of the handful of trained health workers who can detect a case of leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease, can’t always promise full confidentiality to her patients.

Marshall Islands is believed to have 50 to 80 new cases of leprosy every year – a number that is very big for a population of only 60,000.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), if more than 1 in every 10,000 people are affected by leprosy, then it should be considered as a disease that has not been eliminated.

Marshall Islands, as classified by the WHO, is therefore far from eliminating the disease.

But it is a classification that the government is eager to get rid of. In mid-2018, the government and the country’s Ministry of Health, ran a three-month long health screening campaign where over 27,000 citizens were tested for both leprosy and tuberculosis so that every affected person could receive treatment.

Concrete details on the number of leprosy cases are yet to be made public, but health workers like Pierson have already been instructed to keep a close eye on the patients who do not return to report on their health and who stop treatment in the middle of the course. And this is why it makes it really difficult to keep the promise of not alerting anyone to their illness as health workers are often compelled to seek out the patients.

Tracking these patients down and convincing them to restart their medication is both a necessity and a requirement that forms part of the government’s new campaign to curb the disease.

But as they do so, the requests for confidentiality becomes more frequent.

“They do not want us to go to their houses. So, we make phone calls, call them to a place outside of their homes and their neighbourhood and that’s where we do our counselling and advise them to return to the clinic for a check-up and continue the treatment. But it’s hard,” Pierson tells IPS.

The leprosy hotspots in the Marshall Islands. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Discrimination towards the caregiver

However, it is not only patients who are stigmatised on this island nation. Health workers themselves often bear the brunt themselves in a society where over 80 percent of the population are of Christian faith. Pierson, a Mormon, says that she has often faced discrimination from her neighbours and relatives who have suspected her of having leprosy.

“They think because I work in a leprosy clinic, I am carrying the germ or the disease myself. Some even ask why I do not give up this job. I have to always tell them that I am a nurse and I do not have leprosy myself. Even in the church, I get those stares,” she says. Fortunately, her husband is supportive and has never asked her to leave her job.

The hotspots

There are around 30 atolls that comprise the Marshall Islands and about a quarter of them are known as the hotspots of leprosy, according to Dr. Ken Jetton, the main physician at the country’s Department of Public Health.

Jetton officially diagnoses and confirms leprosy cases after Pierson detects a possible case and refers the patient to him.

He tells IPS that few of these ‘hotspots’ include the atolls of Kwajalein, Ailinglaplap, Mili, Arno, Wotje and Ebon. During the recent mass health screening, about 47 new cases were reported from these places.

The data sheet is yet to be complied, but once this is done, a proper plan will be drawn up to treat each patient until they are cured, Jetton reveals. The medication, Multi Drug Therapy (MDT), an oral medicine, is given free of charge in 6 packs for children and 12 packs for adults.

Understanding the gaps in country’s leprosy elimination campaign is one of the reasons why a team from the Sasakawa Memorial Health Foundation (SMHF), led but its executive director Takahiro Nanri, as well as the world’s leading expert on leprosy, Dr. Arturo Cunanan, are travelling around the Marshall Islands and the Micronesia region. They have been meeting with senior government and health officials and leprosy experts and have visited clinics in Marshall Islands and the Federated State of Micronesia. Yohei Sasakawa, chair of the Nippon Foundation, the parent body for SMHF, is the WHO Goodwill Ambassador for Leprosy Elimination, and Japan’s Ambassador for the Human Rights of People Affected by leprosy. He will be touring the region in April to also assess the progress governments have made.

However, Pierson says that despite the screening and follow up activities, social stigma, especially towards the female leprosy patients might take longer than expected to fade away. This is because the island nation is still largely ignorant of the fact that leprosy as a curable disease, she explains.

Patience, therefore, is the key, she reminds. “We must be patient and  also have empathy for those who hide their diseases from others. They are vulnerable and scared of losing their dignity and we need to understand this,” says the nurse.

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The post “Don’t Tell My Husband I Have Leprosy”: Social Stigma Silences Marshall Islands’ Women appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Residents in a rural South African community get cheap online access from a network they own and run.

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A lack of gender equality in career opportunity and long work hours perpetuate wage differences between men and women.

By Kazuo Yamaguchi
CHICAGO, Illinois, Mar 27 2019 (IPS)

Japan is not making progress in gender equality, at least relative to the rest of the world. Despite the Japanese government’s attempts in recent years to pass legislation promoting the economic activity of women, Japan ranked a miserable 110 out of 149 in the World Economic Forum’s 2018 Gender Gap Index, which benchmarks countries on their progress toward gender parity across four major areas.

While this rank is a slight improvement over 114 out of 146 in 2017, it remains the same or lower than in the preceding years (111 in 2016 and 101 in 2015).

Among the primary reasons for Japan’s low ranking is its large gender wage gap. At 24.5 percent in 2018, the gender wage gap is the second largest among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations, surpassed only by South Korea.

Why is this gap so large in Japan? A major cause is the large number of women who are “non-regular” workers. “Regular” workers in Japan are employed on indefinite terms without specific job obligations and are strongly protected from firings and layoffs, while non-regular workers—including many fulltime employees—have fixed-term contracts with specific job obligations.

Just over 53 percent of employed women ages 20 to 65 fall into the non-regular category, compared with just 14.1 percent of employed men in 2014.

As is true elsewhere, Japan’s non-regular employees have nearly uniformly low wages, irrespective of age and gender. For regular employees, on the other hand, wages increase with age until the employee reaches approximately 50 years old.

This is because in a large majority of Japanese firms, regular employees receive wage premiums based on years of service. The gender disparity in the proportion of non-regular employees is perpetuated by the employers’ perception that new graduates are more desirable candidates for regular employment.

Because employers tend to prioritize the hiring of these younger job seekers for regular employment, women who leave their jobs for childrearing and attempt to re-enter the job market at a later date have very limited opportunities for regular employment.

However, my analysis of the gender wage gap by a combination of employment types (four categories distinguishing regular versus non-regular employment and full-time versus part-time work) and age categories finds that gender differences in employment type—specifically the larger proportion of women than men employed in non-regular positions—explain only 36 percent of the gender wage gap (Yamaguchi 2011).

In fact, the primary factor is actually the gender wage gap within full-time regular employment, which accounts for more than half of the overall gender wage gap. The elimination of the gender wage gap among regular workers is therefore a more pressing issue than fixing the overrepresentation of women in non-regular employment.

A major cause of gender wage disparity among regular employees in Japan is the dearth of female managers. According to the 2016 Basic Survey on Equality of Employment Opportunity by the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare, women hold 6.4 percent of the positions of department director or equivalent; 8.9 percent of section head or equivalent; and 14.7 percent of task-unit supervisor or equivalent.

This same survey also asked employers with very few female managers for the possible causes of the paucity of women in the higher ranks. The two major reasons identified among many prespecified possible reasons were “at the moment, there are no women who have the necessary knowledge, experience, or judgment capability” and “women retire before attaining managerial positions due to their short years of service.” Such perceptions held by employers are misguided, as my own research (Yamaguchi 2016) reveals a very different picture.

I conducted an analysis of firms with 100 or more employees and found that only 21 percent of the gender disparity among regular workers in middle management (section heads) and above could be explained by gender differences in education and employment experience.

The rest of the disparity arose from gender differences in the rate of promotion to managerial positions among employees with the same levels of education and experience. The limited employment duration of women was not a major factor.

My analysis further showed that being male increased the odds of becoming a manager more than tenfold, whereas being a college graduate made it only 1.65 times more likely. (The study controlled for other determinants for becoming a manager.)

We regard societies where social opportunities and rewards are determined primarily by individual achievements as “modern” and societies where they are determined by an ascribed status as “pre-modern.”

Although “post-modernism” has been discussed in Japan, contemporary Japanese society maintains characteristics that cannot even be considered “modern.” Gender at birth is what determines whether a person becomes a manager in Japan, not individual achievement such as earning a college degree.

Gender-segregated career tracks are largely to blame for the country’s gender inequality in the rate of promotion to managerial positions. In Japan, there is a managerial career track (sogo shoku) and a dead-end clerical track (ippan shoku).

This track system is strongly associated with gender. Many women do not pursuesogo shoku jobs despite their greater opportunity for career development because they require regular overtime hours.

Indeed, among women, the major correlate of becoming a manager is the presence of long work hours, indicating that women who do not work long overtime hours are deprived of opportunities to become managers.

However, extended work hours for women are incompatible with Japanese family roles after marriage due to the strong persistence of traditional division of labor in which the burden of childcare and household tasks is chiefly borne by women.

As a result, Japanese firms’ insistence on long work hours is an inherent source of gender inequality, especially for the attainment of managerial positions.

Another major cause of the gender wage gap is the high degree of gender segregation in professions. In OECD countries, women tend to be overrepresented in the human services professions, such as education, health care, and social work. In Japan, two additional characteristics exist.

First, even among human service professions, women are underrepresented in the high-status professions—for example, the proportion of women among physicians and college educators in Japan is the lowest among OECD nations.

Second, women are seriously underrepresented in non-human-service professions—such as research, engineering, law, and accounting.

My latest research takes a close look at the gender wage gap among professionals, focusing on the Japanese and US labor markets.

Drawing on a 2005 nationwide survey for Japan and the 2010 US Population Census, I looked at gender proportions in the two categories of careers described above: the human services professions, excluding high-status professions, such as physicians and college educators, which I chose to call Type-II professions, and other professions, including high-status human service professions and all non-human-service professions, which I called Type-I professions.

The research showed that in Japan, the proportion of women in the latter category is remarkably low: in the United States, 12.7 percent of female employees are in Type-I professions, compared with fewer than 2 percent of Japanese female employees (see chart). Women’s jobs in Japan are clearly concentrated in Type-II professions.

This division of professions leads to a large gender wage gap for two reasons. First, while gender wage disparity in Type-I professions is very small, women are severely underrepresented in these professions.

Second, there are large gender wage disparities within Type-II professions. Whereas the average wage for males in Type-II professions is higher than the wages of male clerical, sales, or manual workers, the average wage for females in Type-II professions is not only lower than the average wage for males in the same type of work, but it is also lower than the average wage of male clerical, sales, and manual workers.

My research also shows that the smaller proportion of women in management and Type-I professions cannot be explained by gender differences in educational background, including college majors (Yamaguchi, forthcoming).

Japan and Turkey are the only two countries in the OECD where college graduation rates of women are still lower than those of men, and therefore, we may expect that gender equalization would reduce gender inequality in the attainment of high-status occupations.

My analysis reveals, however, that if current gender-specific matching of education and occupation continues as the college graduation rate of women increases, it will be reflected mostly by the increase of women in already female-overrepresented Type-II professions.

The increase of women in female-underrepresented managerial and Type-I professions, on the other hand, will be minimal. Hence, on average, achieving gender equality in educational attainment will not greatly reduce the gender wage gap.

The only exception to this rule would lie in the equalization in the proportion of college graduates majoring in science and engineering. This would increase the share of female scientists and engineers, thus reducing gender disparity in the proportion of Type-I professions and thereby narrowing the gender wage gap to some extent.

The fact that educational background does not explain gender segregation among professions in Japan suggests that the segregation is a reflection of Japanese hiring practices. As a result of practices rooted in gender stereotypes, women lack the opportunity to go into professions other than those deemed suitable for women.

The main careers open to Japanese women are extensions of women’s traditional family roles, such as children’s education, nursing, and other supportive roles in health care.

Employers in Japan ought to acknowledge that the workplace is not an extension of gender divisions at home, but rather a place for individuals to fulfill their potential and contribute to society. But such an acknowledgment, for the most part, remains to be seen.

Although the government aims to pay equal wages for equal jobs—especially for regular and irregular workers with the same job—I believe that providing equal occupational opportunity, especially for managerial and high-status professional positions, is more critical for the reduction of the gender wage gap in Japan.

Moreover, since the lack of opportunity for women persists not only because of hiring practices but also because of the long work hours required, the government should aim to create the conditions for better work-life balance. It could do so by changing the work culture that relies on long work hours and by promoting flexible workplaces. It could also encourage a change in the attitude that assumes child-care and home-care responsibilities are only for women.

*The article was first published in Finance & Development, the IMF’s quarterly print magazine and online editorial platform, which publishes cutting-edge analysis and insight on the latest trends and research in international finance, economics, and development.

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Excerpt:

KAZUO YAMAGUCHI is the Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago*.

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Cabinet Secretary Sicily Kariuki pushing hard for UHC in Kenya. Credit: MOH Kenya

By Felipe Jaramillo and Siddharth Chatterjee
NAIROBI, Kenya, Mar 27 2019 (IPS)

Consider this. One million Kenyans fall into poverty every year due to catastrophic out of pocket health expenditures.

For the almost four in every five Kenyans who lack access to medical insurance, the fear that they are just an accident or serious illness away from destitution.

Ill health is easily the most destructive wrecking-ball to any country’s plans for sustainable development, which validates President Uhuru Kenyatta’s commitment to deliver Universal Health Coverage (UHC) by 2022, as part of his Big Four development agenda.

The number of Kenyans who continue to suffer from communicable diseases such as HIV/AIDS, malaria and TB, as well as the increasing burden of non-communicable diseases like diabetes, cancer and hypertension, present formidable challenges to the country.

Among the poorest in Kenya, only 3% have health insurance, which is provided by the National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF). Among the wealthiest, many who also have private cover, this rises to 42%, indicating again that the poorest are at risk of being left behind even further, and do not have an appropriate safety-net to fall back on.

Felipe Jaramillo

Investing in UHC is: 1) a moral obligation – it is not acceptable that some members of society should face death, disability, ill health or impoverishment for reasons that could be addressed at limited cost; and 2) a very smart investment – prevention of malnutrition and ill health will have enormous benefits in terms of longer and more productive lives, higher earnings, and averted care costs.

But delivering quality affordable healthcare for all comes at a cost. And this cost should certainly not be carried by those who cannot afford it.

The delivery of UHC requires robust financing structures. When people have to pay most of the cost for health services out of their own pockets, the poor are often unable to obtain many of the services they need, and even the rich may be exposed to financial hardship in the event of severe or long-term illness. Pooling funds from compulsory funding sources (such as mandatory insurance contributions) can minimise the financial risks of illness across a population.

Health Cabinet Secretary Sicily Kariuki recently unveiled a team of experts to spearhead radical reforms at the NHIF. This new initiative will build on past efforts at reforming NHIF, which were only partially implemented. The team will analyse the financial sustainability of NHIF, oversee legal and regulatory reforms among other propose organisational reforms to reposition NHIF as a national social health insurance provider and ensure its accountability and transparency.

Siddharth Chatterjee

The realization of UHC in Kenya will only be achieved if the Government of Kenya will increase its budget allocation towards health and lead solid health system strengthening initiatives – as for example the NHIF reform – to increase efficiency, effectiveness and accountability within the health sector.

The health system strengthening initiatives currently on their way in Kenya are critical, yet exciting, and require “all hands-on deck” and much collaboration.

The Government of Kenya can count on the support of the World Bank, and United Nations family as its development partners.

Within the United Nations Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF) 2018-2022 for example, the human capital development pillar (which includes health) is receiving the largest share of human and financial resources – and rightly so, as we recognise the importance of supporting the Country to realise the vision of UHC by 2022.

The World Banks’ Transforming Health Systems for Universal Care Project for Kenya is improving utilization and quality of primary health care services with a focus on reproductive, maternal, new-born, child, and adolescent health services. Supporting health financing reforms is a key component of this project. Under the recently approved Kenya Social and Economic inclusion Project (with US$ 250 million IDA credit and US$ 70 million of DFID grant), the Bank is supporting the Government to systematically enrol and register National Safety Net Program beneficiaries in the NHIF through an established referral mechanism.

The Government of Kenya is aligning forces as well with the private sector. Through the United Nations’s SDG Partnership Platform, the Government has already been identifying and scaling up transformative primary health care partnerships through galvanising support from the private and philanthropic sectors.

The successful delivery of the NHIF reform will demonstrate Kenya’s ability to efficiently pool revenues to cover for a healthcare package with essential services for all Kenyans, at all ages. This again will enhance confidence to join and invest in NHIF and create opportunities within the health sector to develop new partnership models for the delivery of care which all will help the Country to make rapid strides towards the realization of UHC.

Kenya can lead the way in realising Universal Health Coverage – and we stand with Kenya to “Deliver as One” and leave no one behind.

Siddharth Chatterjee is the UN Resident Coordinator to Kenya.

Felipe Jaramillo is the World Bank country director for Eritrea, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda, based in Nairobi

The post NHIF Reform Crtical to Affordable Health For All in Kenya appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Credit: Getty Images

By Richard Mahapatra
NEW DELHI, Mar 27 2019 (IPS)

The India Meteorological Department (IMD) on January 16 declared that 2018 was the sixth- warmest year in the last 117 years or since 1901, when recording started. Pointing towards changing weather and climate parameters, it also noted that the last monsoon rainfall was the sixth-lowest since 1901.

“The 2018 annual mean land surface air temperature for the country was +0.41°C above the 1981-2010 average, thus making 2018 the sixth-warmest year on record since 1901,” said a release from IMD.

That India is witnessing consistent warmer seasons is clear from the IMD’s analysis that pointed out that 11 out of 15 warmest years were in the last 15 years (2002-2018). The last year was also the consecutive third-warmest year after 2016 and 2017.

“The past decade (2001-2010/2009-2018) was also the warmest on record, with anomalies of 0.23°C/0.37°C. The annual mean temperature during 1901-2018 showed an increasing trend of 0.6°C/100 years, with a significant increasing trend in maximum temperature (1.0°C/100 years), and relatively lower increasing trend (0.2°C/100 years) in minimum temperature,” said IMD.

Climate change impacts are likely to lower the living standards of nearly half of India’s population, says a new World Bank report.

According to the report titled ‘South Asia’s Hotspots: Impacts of Temperature and Precipitation Changes on Living Standards’, rising temperatures and erratic rainfall pattern could cost India 2.8 per cent of its GDP.

It says that almost half of South Asia, including India, lives in vulnerable areas and will suffer from declining living standards.

Approximately 60 crore Indians live in areas where changes in average temperature and precipitation will negatively impact living standards. These areas, called hotspots, were identified using spatial granular climate and household data analysis.

The analysis was done for two scenarios—one indicating a pathway where climate change mitigating actions were taken and the other where current trends of carbon emissions continued.

“We have attempted to identify how climate change will affect household consumption, and that is the basis of the estimation and hotspot mapping. The granular data is from the household level, which is aggregated to give larger level analyses at block, district, state and country levels,” Muthukumara Mani, lead economist, World Bank South Asia region told Down To Earth.

A warming trend is now witnessed in all seasons including the winter (January-February). “The country averaged season mean temperatures during all the four seasons, with the winter season (January-February, +0.59°C) being the 5th warmest since 1901 and the pre-monsoon season (March-May, with an anomaly of +0.55°C above average) being the 7th warmest ever since 1901,” said IMD.

Similarly, there is a declining trend for the monsoon as well. “The 2018 Northeast monsoon season (October-December) rainfall over the country as a whole was substantially below normal (56 per cent of LPA, 1951-2000 average). This was 6th lowest since 1901,” reported the IMD release.

The post Changing Weather Will Affect Living Standards of Half of India’s Population appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Richard Mahapatra is Managing Editor, Down To Earth, Asia's premier fortnightly on politics of environment and development published by the Centre for Science and Environment, New Delhi, India

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A mother washes kitchen utensils in the Aguas Calientes River, while her children play. She told IPS that this small river, part of the watershed of the Lempa River - the longest in El Salvador - always had an abundant flow, but now due to climate change and the use of water for the irrigation of sugar cane, the water level is down. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN CARLOS LEMPA, El Salvador, Mar 27 2019 (IPS)

For nearly three decades, several communities in southeastern El Salvador have collectively and efficiently managed the water they consume, but monoculture production and climate change put their water at risk.

“These are the collateral effects of climate change, as well as deforestation and monoculture,” the president of the Lempa Abajo Community Development Association, Patrocinio Dubón, told IPS.

Dubón is a native of San Carlos Lempa, a village in the eastern municipality of Tecoluca where the offices of the association – which administers a community water project that emerged 25 years ago – are located

Like other nearby villages, San Carlos Lempa includes the name of the Lempa River, which runs across more than 440 km of this small Central American country before flowing into the Pacific Ocean. It is the longest in El Salvador and is vital to the life and agricultural activity of a considerable part of the local rural communities.

These coastal lands, former cotton plantations, were parceled out and distributed to part of the recently demobilised guerrillas after the end of El Salvador’s 1980-1992 civil war.

Because the indiscriminate use of agrochemicals in cotton and later sugar cane had polluted the aquifers, residents of San Marcos Lempa stopped using that water and instead sought a cleaner source, which they found in a well located 13 km further north.

With the support of international development aid, they set up the community water project, which now supplies 26 nearby communities comprising some 2,000 families who would otherwise find it difficult to have access to piped water.

According to official figures, 95.5 percent of urban households have access to piped water, but the figure drops to 76.5 percent in rural areas.

The beneficiaries of the water project pay 5.65 dollars per month for 15 cubic metres, the amount needed to supply a family of six. With the installation of water meters in each household, it is possible to verify if consumption has increased, and the cost is added to the bill.

To access this community network, each family had to pay 389 dollars for the installation and other costs of the system, but if they did not have the money, they were allowed to pay the amount in six installments.

Patrocinio Dubón, a former guerrilla fighter who lost his right arm in a 1989 battle during El Salvador’s civil war, is the president of the Lempa Abajo Community Development Association, whose water project supplies San Carlos Lempa and 26 other villages in the municipality of Tecoluca, San Vicente department, in eastern El Salvador. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Currently, about 70 percent of local residents are connected to the system, and the rest get their water from neighbors who are hooked up.

Threats to the community water system

However, the sustainability of the project is now at risk because the impacts of climate change, deforestation and sugarcane monoculture have hit the country’s watersheds, and this region is no exception, Dubón said.

The water level in the well that supplies San Carlos Lempa, he noted, has dropped almost three metres from the optimum level it was at a few years ago, which has made it necessary to adopt rationing measures.

“We have been rationing it for the past two years, serving different communities on different days,” he said.

A technical study will soon begin to be carried out, and “we are going to ration it even more,” Dubón added.

The sugar industry, whose primary raw material is sugar cane, is a powerful sector with influence on the economy and politics of this Central American country of 7.3 million people.

The Sugar Association, which represents the industry, is made up of six sugar mills, the majority of which are controlled by influential Salvadoran agribusiness families.

The sugar sector generates some 48,000 direct jobs and another 187,000 indirect jobs, and generates more than 186.5 million dollars in revenue, according to industry figures.

However, the industry has been under constant fire from environmental groups due to the pollution caused by the expansion of the crop, whether through the indiscriminate use of agrochemicals, excessive consumption of water for irrigation, or other harmful practices for the environment.

These include the burning of sugar cane to remove the outer leaves around the stalks before harvesting, to make it easier and faster for the thousands of sugar cane workers to cut the cane. But the fires pollute the environment.

However, the most worrying thing is the intensive use of water to irrigate the fields.

Silvia Ramírez shows how the water level has dropped in small rivers around the village of San Fernando in eastern El Salvador, due, among other reasons, to the excessive use of water by sugarcane producers, who build small dams to divert the water to their crops, affecting the surrounding rural communities. Credit: Courtesy of Edgardo Ayala

In a 2016 article, IPS focused on the impacts of the sugar cane industry on the way of life of peasant farmers and onl local ecosystems. At the time, the industry downplayed the effects and claimed that it irrigated just 15 percent of the 116,000 hectares dedicated that year to sugar cane.

The problems faced by the San Carlos Lempa water system are no exception.

In the village of San Fernando, also in the municipality of Tecoluca, the water supply has been affected by the same issues.

“We are rationing it to take care of it,” Silvia Ramírez, administrator of the Santa Mónica Water Board, told IPS.

Because the beneficiaries also manage their consumption through water meters, the local families “have learned to use it rationally,” she said.

In other municipalities in the country, which receive water from the state-run water company, faucets often run dry, even in households connected to the main water grid.
to the main grid, they often have no water.

Salvadoran media regularly report roadblocks by angry residents in urban neighborhoods or rural municipalities complaining about the lack of water.

Controversial water bill

The water conversation efforts of rural communities contrast with the decisions that Salvadoran legislators are reaching with respect to a controversial water bill, especially the article that stipulates the creation of a National Water Authority (ANA).

The lawmakers in the Environment and Climate Change Commission in the legislature reached an agreement on Mar. 18 that the industrial and agricultural sectors should participate in the board of directors of the new water authority.

The agreement, which was given a green light by eight of the 11 members of the legislative commission, has not yet been discussed or approved in the plenary session. But it does have the backing of all of the political parties represented in the commission, except for the ruling Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, which steps down from power in June.

This means that, if the bill moves on to debate in the coming weeks, there is already a preliminary agreement for these influential sectors, with interests alien to those of the general population, to not only participate in the water authority, but also to control the decisions taken regarding water supplies.

The social movement, which began with protest marches during the week of International Water Day, celebrated on Friday, Mar. 22, argues that only public bodies should participate in the water authority.

“If we include these private sectors, which are only moved by the profit margin, it’s like the fox guarding the henhouse,” activist Marielos de León told IPS.

The ANA would consist of the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources, the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock, city governments, citizen water boards and the University of El Salvador, in addition to the two private sectors in question.

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• Central America Hashes Out Agenda for Sustainable Use of Water

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