Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

Viraj from India, in a squat where he has been living for three months near Velika Kladusa, Bosnia. He hopes to join family in Italy. February 2022. Credit: Chiara Luxardo

By Sara Perria
Bihać, Bosnia, Apr 19 2022 (IPS)

Responding to several shouts Viraj emerges from the ruins of his shelter in northwest Bosnia. He is originally from India but is now squatting near Bihać in what remains of a house abandoned since the 1990s Balkans war.

“I was in the bathroom,” says Viraj – although there is no such facility. The building doesn’t even have windows, just gaps exposed to a freezing wind. Collapsing walls are patched with planks. Steps leading up from the road that are not missing shake under the weight of the few people venturing there.

“It’s just us living here now,” adds Sidar, an Iraqi in his late 30s. “We prefer to stay here. People come and go, but we’ll stay until it’s a good moment to cross.”

The two men are among some 2,000 or so migrants waiting for the opportunity to play the so-called ‘game’: the hazardous challenge of evading Croatian police on the nearby border and entering their goal of the European Union, illegally. They often need several attempts to succeed. Many prefer to squat closer to the border for months until spring offers an easier route across mountains.

A long day’s walk away, basic services, health facilities and food are provided in camps for migrants managed by Bosnia and the UN. Yet hundreds like Viraj and Sidar have opted instead for abandoned houses, warehouses and factories fallen into disuse, or skeletons of unfinished buildings surrounded by trash, with open toilets and improvised kitchens. Away from the headlines, they also exist mostly under the radar of humanitarian agencies.

“There are too many migrants in the camps,” says Sidar, citing issues with drug dealers, violence and lack of freedom there. “We can go in and out of this house when we want. In the camps we only have a couple of hours, then we have to go back. There’s more freedom here.”

The kitchen of a squat near Bihać, Bosnia. February 2022. Credit: Chiara Luxardo

Life is a long wait for this migrant population transiting Bosnia. “I get up, eat something and watch a movie,” says Viraj. “Bollywood movies or action movies like Fast and Furious 5.”

According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), very few request asylum in Bosnia, aiming instead for countries such as Germany, France or Italy. The Balkan route fell under the spotlight in 2015 during the so-called ‘long summer of migration’ when thousands of asylum seekers from Syria stretched Bosnia’s capacity as a ‘buffer zone’ and the IOM was put in charge of the camps, with the Danish Refugee Council (DRC), a humanitarian non-profit organisation, running healthcare.

Seven years later, management is transitioning to Bosnian authorities, against the backdrop of a complex and fragmented local political structure. Numbers of migrants are much lower now, with occupancy in the formal camps around 1,840 against a capacity of over 5,200.

Almost 90% of migrants are single men, mostly from Pakistan and heading to Italy. But there are also growing numbers of Afghans and some Cubans, Iranians and Bangladeshis. They occupy settlements divided along ethnic lines and clashes are not uncommon, with one death registered this month. Threatening scrawls have appeared on the walls of some shelters.

Laura Lungarotti, IOM’s chief of mission in Bosnia, says the situation has evolved “tremendously” over the past year. Numbers are sharply down and camps have more capacity. For this reason, migration in Bosnia now needs “durable solutions, not emergency ones.” Solutions come from the “inclusion of migrants in the health system, with resources dedicated to migrants used for the local population,” she says. But achieving this balance is not easy as long as many stay outside the formal system.

In another abandoned house, empty cans of energy drinks indicates the presence of migrants. Twenty young men — Pakistani and Afghans from the same Pashtun ethnic group — live in this house guarded by a chained dog. It’s a sign that the dog’s owner is a long term inhabitant and might be working as a smuggler for the others, an aid worker explains. Many have scabies after sleeping on bedding infested by the parasite and then returning to the same places after attempting ‘the game’. One also has an infection caused by a bad burn from cooking oil.

In camps such as the newly-rebuilt Lipa or in Sarajevo, they would have access to food, beds and a range of medical services, including a doctor, medicines, mental health facilities and an isolation room for Covid cases.

As migration experts point out, the international community has become effectively complicit in the ‘game’, which also involves human traffickers. Migrants trying to get to the EU treat the formal camps like Lipa as winter ‘pit-stops’, with the average length of stay just 40 days before moving on.

Professor Claudio Minca of the University of Bologna says this is the result of political ambiguities that have left a ‘gray area’ in the governance of these mobile and ephemeral ‘geographies’ based on information about the Balkan route shared through social media. This includes notes on mountains, rivers and fields, as well as smuggling networks, informal and institutional camps, and NGOs offering food and medical care to migrants.

A young Tajik asylum seeker with his 8 month old daughter in a squat near Velika Kladusa, Bosnia. February 2022. Credit: Chiara Luxardo

“It also reflects, to some extent, a sense of pride on the part of the refugees themselves, related to their determination to succeed not only in just crossing, but also in surviving when they are pushed back in preparation for the next attempt,” Minca and Jessica Collins say in their research paper ‘The Making of Migration’.

This grey area is also a source of tension with local Bosnian communities which sometimes perceive migrants as competing for resources, including health care.

Some migrants’ settlements are known and get support from local and international organisations, with food, portable showers and health checks. Only the UN, Red Cross and DRC are allowed by Bosnia to deliver food however. And migrants are banned from using public transport and taxis under a measure justified by ‘Covid restrictions’.

Healthcare: local versus global

Since migrants are extremely mobile, many pass under the radar. Cases of COVID, other airborne respiratory diseases, tuberculosis, scabies, related infections and antibiotic resistance remain difficult to analyse and detect.

The director of Bihać local hospital, Ademir Jusufagic, says that when the wave of migrants arrived in 2015 it was heartbreaking to see how many children were in need of medical assistance. But fast forward several years and a pandemic, the limitations of the local system stand out, despite some investments by the UN and international agencies to provide the hospital with an X-ray machine and ambulances.

The main challenge, he says, is the lack of finances, especially after an earthquake that heavily damaged the hospital. Low wages make it hard to find and retain doctors and nurses. Most of the young staff go abroad.

“Prevention is down to better investments at a state level. You need to provide higher salaries, especially in places like this,” he says.

From a health security perspective, Jusufagic cites cases among migrants of tuberculosis, which was not present locally, and a high percentage of scabies that can get infected. It is difficult to assess the impact of antibiotic resistance in a mobile population hoping to reach better economic and social conditions. Cases of syphilis and HIV are also reported.

“The first challenge was that there was no control of makeshift camps and no place to surely find people, as migrants were constantly on the move,” he said. “The moving is the biggest issue, as many things go uncontrolled, so we didn’t know what would happen in terms of basic epidemiological prevention in an environment that lacked basic hygiene. So the priority was to provide people the means to clean themselves.”

Meeting in a café along the route to the Croatian border, a well known activist explains how the gulf between local and global perspectives illustrates the source of much of the trouble, as well as the solution for managing healthcare.

“International agencies came having no knowledge of what Bosnia is today and its recent history,” says Ines Tanovic, manager of Kompas 071, an organization that supports migrants on their way to the ‘game’. “The humanitarian industry is a machine and it damages us on the ground with a kind of white-saviour syndrome. Here the focus became only on the migrants but not on the local population.”

As she talks, a group of Pakistanis from Peshawar donate the food they have been donated by an international organization and ask to take a shower “before trying the game.” Tanovic gives them the key smiling and continues to chat.

“People were seeing migrants receiving five jackets each, with no coordination. Then you would see these migrants sell the jackets to Bosnian people with an average salary of 400 euros. It was like seeing capitalism turning the poor against the poor.”

The memory of former Yugoslavia, “where everything was provided for”, also plays a role in the competition for health services, with the downsizing of the public sector in favour of the private, just as local poverty increased.

“Even if the international organisations bought ambulances and some machines, much more could have done for the locals,” Tanovic says.

Contradictions

Migrants’ journeys are notoriously long. Just how long can depend on how much money is paid to human smugglers who guide them through war-time minefields, usually in big groups, according to NGOs. It’s rare not to be caught by the police on the first attempt, so migrants return to the shelters they started from. Many are in bad physical condition after long treks.

“But in the end they all manage it, so attempts by the Croatian police to stop them sound like a waste of money that could be spent better,” comments Silvia Maraone, country coordinator of the Italian NGO Ipsia.

In a hill-top ruin occupied mainly by families from Syria and Afghanistan, a young father holds his 18-month-old daughter. An ethnic Tajik, he says he fled Afghanistan because he feared the Taliban would kill him. Caught in the “grey” zone of the “game”, he explains that his wife and other children are already in Germany but it would take nearly two years for his and his baby’s papers to be processed. “I can’t wait that long, I need to go to my family,” he says.

Names of asylum seekers have been changed or omitted to protect their identities. Additional reporting by Asim Beslija.

*Reporting for this article was funded by the European Journalism Centre, through the Global Health Security Call, a programme supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Excerpt:

Supported by the European Journalism Centre*

By Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury
SINGAPORE, Apr 19 2022 (IPS-Partners)

Pakistan’s impossibly debonair and incredibly urbane cricketing star turned politician, Imran Khan, is a man of a myriad parts. Where English is spoken and cricket is played, he remains a hero. Time was when leading his team in many a Test match he caused blood to rapidly pulsate through Pakistani veins. In a nation buffeted by the vicissitudes of misfortune and thirsting for pride, he had fulfilled his people’s dream by winning them the ultimate prize in cricket, the World Cup. But then he switched games and went into politics. The fates, with him for a while, eventually withdrew their favour. He gambled with a tactic that was no more than a political stunt. Alas it failed, and the Courts in his country refused him relief. But this essay is not so much about him. It about the Courts that finally caused his fall. It is also about the role the judicial organ of the State has played along the inscrutable path of Pakistan’s constitutional and political destiny.

Dr. Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury

Since Pakistan’s inception, the higher courts, manned by senior Civil Servants and lawyers schooled in the best of the English legal tradition, have often been politically interventionist, with both liberal and illiberal consequences. An example of the first kind was a judgment (later overturned) of the Sindh High Court in 1954 that at the first instance initially favoured Speaker Tamizuddin Ahmed when he challenged the annulment of the legislature by the Governor General Ghulam Mohammed; of the latter was the rulings of Chief Justice Munir Ahmed, the main propounder of the “doctrine of necessity” a principle that ruled the roost in Pakistan’s constitutional annals for a long time to come.

The doctrine draws upon the writings of a maxim attributed to the medieval jurist Henry de Bracton. It is that, “that which is otherwise not lawful is made lawful by necessity”, rooted in the Latin legal dictum Salus Populi Suprema Lex, meaning “the wellbeing of the people is the supreme law”. This is also embodied in the ‘Second Treatise of Government’ of the philosopher John Locke, often viewed as a great champion of democratic pluralism. Incidentally the doctrine has been cited thereafter in several Courts in the British Commonwealth.

Using this liberal interpretation as a justification, Pakistani military rulers starting from Field Marshal Ayub Khan in 1958, continued to use the concept as a most useful legal tool (Justice Munir strengthened it to justify Ayub’s martial law in his judgment in the case of Dosso versus State where he ruled that a military take-over assumed sanction if there was public, even tacit). To the Supreme Court’s credit, it has attempted to live it down, initially modifying it circumspectly and thereafter boldly striking it down. In a major challenge to it though belatedly, Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, on General Ziaul Huq’s take-over in the 1970s, ruled that no judge can offer any support to the acquisition of power by any unconstitutional functionary through modes other than envisaged in the Constitution. That was a great moral blow to any future unconstitutional change.

The death blow came recently. It happened last week when the Court headed by the newly appointed Chief Justice Umar Ata Bandial took suo moto cognizance of a controversial dismissal of a “no trust” motion by Deputy speaker Qasim Suri in the Pakistan National Assembly. It had been moved by the combined opposition against Imran Khan and required 272 in an Assembly of 372 members to pass. Because the ruling Coalition had broken down, the opposition had the numbers, but just about. But Suri, then acting for the Speaker, who belonged to Imran’s Tehreek-e-Insaaf party disallowed the motion just prior to voting on 3 April, on alleged grounds that some dissenting parliamentarians had been illegally influenced by a “foreign power”, that is, the United States. Thereafter President Arif Alvie dissolved the Assembly upon the Prime Minister’s advice and called for elections within 90 days. In public, Imran continued to insist on the allegations on US interference and trenchantly criticized what he termed as “treasonable actions” on part of his opponents, even though it placed him at odds with the seemingly all-powerful military and the Army Chief, General Qamar Bajwa.

After three days of mulling over the issues involved, the five-member bench headed by Bandial gave its “short order” ruling, upholding the supremacy of the Constitution at all costs. It also underscored the paramount role of the judiciary in protecting the nation’s basic law. The judges declared the Deputy Speakers dismissal of the motion as “unconstitutional”, as also the consequent dissolution of the Assembly by the President on the Prime Minister’s advice. It reinstated the assembly to status quo ante as on 3 April and ordered that nothing – no action of the President, the Prime Minister or the Speaker- could impede the process of voting and the election of the next Prime Minister which would have to happen by 9 April. When the Speaker, apparently influenced by Imran, appeared to demur, Bandial physically went to the Court at dead of night s presumably to prepare for an eventuality in which he might have had to take anti “contempt of court measures” against government supporters! Consequently, the voting was held as per court order, Imran and the Speaker resigned, and despite the turmoil Pakistan went through a democratic political change, albeit after some hiccups.

The “short order” of the judges drove what was possibly the last nail in the coffin of the doctrine of necessity in Pakistan. It was based on the theoretical perception that nothing should necessitate any action contrary to the tenets of the Constitution, in which the “well- being” of the people resided, and which reflected the people’s choice and will. The Court was reaching out to the highest source of law enshrined in the Latin adage Vox Populi Vox Dei, meaning “the voice of the people is the voice of God”. It was supposedly enunciated as an effective political maxim in English common law as early as in1327 AD by Walter Reynolds, Archbishop of Canterbury, who used it in a sermon bringing charges against King Edward 11.

While the judges ruling will help correct a practice that had strayed from the original principles of liberal constitutional law, it will not end the woes of Pakistan. Those had resulted from concatenation of circumstances, political, economic, strategic, and historical. Pakistan has a new Prime Minister in Shahbaz Sharif, an experienced hand in governance. As a mark of protest, Imran took his party out of the Assembly and boycotted the election of his successor. The new government in place will face daunting challenges with the elections due in around a year’s time, a broken economy to fix, and a stubborn opponent to resist in the streets. Imran had lingered on the wicket, a tad too long after he was obviously out, which was not quite cricket. But he has the tenacity of a Robert Bruce and could well return to play another innings. But for now, the people of this nuclear weapon state and their neighbours, are heaving a sigh of relief as the immediate political imbroglio somewhat eases. Also, because from the chaos has emerged a strong institution, a guardian of democracy in a turbulent polity, the judiciary, which has established its authority sufficiently to be able to demonstrate Roma locuta, Causa finita, Rome has spoken, the case is finished!

Dr Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury is the Honorary Fellow at the Institute of South Asia Studies, NUS. He is a former Foreign Advisor (Foreign Minister) of Bangladesh and President and Distinguished Fellow of Cosmos Foundation. The views addressed in the article are his own. He can be reached at: isasiac @nus.edu.sg

This story was originally published by Dhaka Courier.

Refugees entering Poland from Ukraine at the Medyka border crossing point. March 2022. Credit: UNHCR/Chris Melzer

By Azza Karam
NEW YORK, Apr 19 2022 (IPS)

“The war in Ukraine is a European …and a Christian… matter… It does not require the involvement of a colourful array of religions or people”. These words were uttered and affirmed by some European Protestant men, working in interfaith circles in Europe. The ‘colourful’ encompassed other than European, mostly Christian – and likely mostly male.

Add this perspective to another one from a seasoned Catholic lay male leader, diplomat and academic, echoing representatives working in various Vatican offices, who maintain that if there is to be any religious engagement [e.g. a meeting with the Russian or Ukrainian senior Orthodox Church representatives] around Ukraine or Russia, “it is the Pope who should be doing this [not any other faith leaders or institutions] …and this is the preference of European governments”.

To these people, the fact that the war in Ukraine (and economic sanctions against Russia), have raised the price of oil, gas, and wheat (and therefore basic staples such as bread) for all other inhabitants of our world, is simply irrelevant.

The important fact appears to that Europe is suffering – and losing face in doing so, one might add. The fact that there are religious minorities in Ukraine also suffering, is not meriting as much attention. The supremacy of the Catholic Pope, who is a leader of but 16 percent of the world’s religious populations, is also apparent in the discourse of many esteemed European male leaders.

Were European governments to see value-added to religious involvement in affairs of state, then it would clearly be the Pope who would merit the role, out of the thousands – if not more – of other faith leaders in (the rest of) the world.

Yet so significant is the war in Ukraine, along with the role of Russia (and perhaps after that China) in geopolitics, and the changing political, financial and economic consequences around a world already damaged by the vagaries of Covid lockdowns and declines in tourism (which was the source of basic income for hundreds of millions of people), that it is a staple of many conversations – outside of Europe.

One such perspective of some seasoned diplomats in the USA, is that “religion and religious institutions have nothing to do with this war nor play much of a role in it. This is one politician’s madness”. Someone must have forgotten to send the memo with the words of a Patriarch of the largest Church in Russia, with over 120 million adherents worldwide, justifying the war – and using a homophobic discourse to do so.

Or maybe we erased the other memo where millions of Russians voted for this one “mad” politician (as millions of others voted for other mad politicians elsewhere in the world).

And yet, as we ponder the rampant ignorance about the intersections of politics and religion worldwide, and the arrogance of some European religious and political actors, and as some of us listen to religious leaders from other corners of the world, it would be wise to ponder a couple of questions: are we sure that all religions would have found the Patriarch of Russia’s language, and its subject, quite so distasteful? And, are we sure that it is one man causing all this carnage and hate (and profit to weapons manufacturers, mercenaries, and all who make money from war)?

There are many forms of this kind of arrogance of ignorance, which have coalesced to bring our world to this point where it would seem that almost every corner of it, is blighted. For some it is the blight of many forms of extremism: from launching war against a sovereign nation and killing its people, to horrific gang violence, to desecrating sacred sites and attacking pilgrims and devotees during their prayers, even during times which are holy to both attacked and attackers.

For others, it is the blight of democracy abused and myriad human rights systematically and deeply violated. For yet others the blight is having to live with various forms of hate speech and hate filled actions, including those with distinct anti-Semitic and Islamophobic blows. Holocaust deniers are reemerging out of many layers of rotten woodwork in all corners of the world.

The semantics of Islamophobia are being argued about in some western government circles, even as veiled women are being openly abused in some streets and denied access to jobs in countries claiming respect for religious freedom, and where even turbaned Sikh men continue to face abuse because they are mistaken as Muslims, and/or because their form of dress is deemed injurious to secular sensibilities.

For others the blight is to have to contend with shootings by lone gunmen of innocents in schools or subways or nightclubs or concerts. All this in the middle of a public health epidemic that has claimed the lives of millions – and we are still counting (where it is possible to have reliable data) – and while climate change is contributing to the largest numbers of refugees and forcibly displaced peoples ever in recorded collective human history.

Yet climate change is still being denied. And as for misogyny, it is the new normal in private and public spaces, everywhere in the world – in Europe too.

But it is not all gloom. The same European country which decried the one million Syrian refugees it allowed in (and subsequently quietly offloaded thousands of them to other countries), has announced no limit to the number of Ukrainians needing to enter it, and sometimes ensuring that some of the newer Ukrainian refugees receive access to homes before other refugees (who had waited longer but now must continue their wait). Another European country which let some refugees die of cold on its borders rather than allow them in, is now providing all manner of support to the Ukrainian ones.

The United States, which a few months ago lost significant credibility as a result of a messy exit after a 20 year struggle against the Taliban in Afghanistan (leaving the country largely back in control of the Taliban), is today resonating with righteous indignation, and crowing that “the West is back”. The European Union too, has seen the error of its ways of being overly dependent on cheap Russian gas, and oil, and is now hastening to rid itself of such a dependency.

The war in Ukraine (albeit apparently not the ongoing horrors in Myanmar, Yemen, Mali, Niger, Cameroon, and Ethiopia – to name but a few) is indeed impacting our world. Like Covid-19, the war will doubtless continue to influence political, financial, and socio-cultural frames for decades. But here is another question: are we sure that the rampant and now fully on display discriminatory arrogance of ethnocentrism, and its appendages, will change?

This April 2022, witnesses another form of coalescing. Bahá’ís celebrate Riḍván, a festival of joy and unity which commemorates the beginning of their Faith. For Hindus and many others also, this month marks the celebration of the Spring festival of the harvest, and the Hindu new year. For Sikhs as well, this April celebrates the birth of the religion as a collective faith.

Jews celebrate Pesach, or Passover, commemorating the exodus of the Jewish people escaping the slavery of the Egyptian Pharaoh. Christians (Western and Eastern) – celebrate the resurrection of Christ this Easter. All while Muslims observe the thirty days of fast known as Ramadan. There are more faith traditions celebrating and/or commemorating. Definitely the best time, then, to pray for – or for those of tender anti-religious sensibilities let us say ‘to reflect’ on: the twin birth of humility and mercy.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Excerpt:

The writer is Secretary General, Religions for Peace.

By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Apr 19 2022 (IPS)

Once deemed a basic human needs success story, Sri Lanka (SL) is now in its worst economic crisis since independence in 1948. Nonetheless, SL’s ‘moment of truth’ now offers lessons for other developing countries.

China scapegoat
SL has just defaulted on its foreign debt for the very first time. Attributing its current predicament to a Chinese ‘debt-trap’ is a new Cold War propaganda distraction – which we will undoubtedly hear much more of.

Anis Chowdhury

In this fable, SL is a country caught in a debt trap due to white elephant projects mooted and financed by borrowings from China. Blaming SL’s debt crisis on Chinese loans is not only factually wrong, but also prevents understanding the origins and nature of its current crisis.

Outstanding SL government foreign debt in April 2021 was US$35.1bn. Policy errors have reduced foreign direct investment (FDI), exports and government revenue, changing the composition of its foreign debt for the worst.

Debt to the Asian Development Bank (ADB), World Bank, China, Japan and other bilateral lenders, including India, came to about a tenth each. Borrowing from capital markets – 47%, or almost half – is mainly responsible for its debt unsustainability.

After all, borrowing from multilateral development banks – mainly the World Bank and ADB – and bilateral lenders are mostly on concessional terms, while debt from commercial sources incurs higher interest rates.

Commercial loans tend to be more short term, and subject to stricter conditions. As sovereign bonds or commercial loans become due, their full value must be repaid. External debt servicing costs surge accordingly.

As of April 2021, about 60% of SL’s debt was for durations of less than ten years. The US dollar denominated debt share rose sharply – from 36% in 2012 to 65% in 2019, as Chinese renminbi denominated loans remained around 2%.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Adding government guaranteed debt to state-owned enterprises, total borrowings from China were 17.2% of SL’s total public foreign debt liabilities in 2019. Meanwhile, commercial borrowings grew rapidly from merely 2.5% of foreign debt in 2004 to 56.8% in 2019.

The effective interest rate on commercial loans in January 2022 was 6.6% – more than double that for Chinese debt. Unsurprisingly, SL’s interest payments alone came to 95.4% of its declining government revenue in 2021!

Deep-rooted problems
Following its 2001 recession, SL recovered, before growth declined again after 2012 and the pandemic contraction in 2020. SL also experienced premature deindustrialization, with manufacturing’s GDP share falling from 22% in 1977 to 15% in 2017.

Government tax revenue declined from 18.4% of GDP (1990-92 average) to 12.7% (2017-19), and a 8.4% pandemic nadir in 2020. Non-tax revenue – mainly dividends and profits from public investments – fell from 2.3% of GDP in 2000 to 0.9% in 2015.

SL’s exports-GDP ratio almost halved from 39% in 2000 to 20% in 2010. This took a big hit during the pandemic, dropping to 17% in 2020. From 2000, FDI inflows into SL were between 1.1% and 1.8% of GDP, before falling to 0.5% in 2020.

During 2012-19, the share of International Monetary Fund (IMF) Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) in SL’s debt stock fell from 28% to 14%, as borrowings ballooned! SL’s debt crisis is clearly due to the policy choices of successive governments since the 1990s.

Crisis-prone
In February 2022, SL had only US$2.31 billion in foreign exchange reserves – too little to cover its import bill and debt repayment obligations of US$4 billion.

Its 22 million people face 12-hour power cuts, and extreme scarcities of food, fuel and other essential items such as medicines. Inflation reached an all-time high of 17.5% in February 2022, with food prices rising 24% in January-February 2022. But economic crisis is not new to SL.

As a commodity producer – mainly exporting tea, coffee, rubber and spices – export earnings have long been volatile, vulnerable to external shocks. Foreign exchange earnings have also come from ready-made garments, tourism and remittances, but their shares have grown little over decades.

Since 1965, SL has obtained 16 IMF loans, typically with onerous conditionalities. The last was in 2016, providing US$1.5 billion over 2016-19. Required austerity measures have squeezed public investment, hurting growth and welfare.

Two recent shocks made things worse. First, bomb blasts in Colombo churches and luxury hotels in April 2019 drastically cut tourist arrivals by 80%, squeezing foreign exchange earnings.

Second, the pandemic has damaged not only economic activity, but also foreign exchange reserves, as it often paid monopoly prices to get COVID-19 tests, treatments, equipment, vaccines and other needs.

Tax cuts galore
The ethno-populist policies of the Gotabaya Rajapaksa government – which came to power in 2019 – have added fuel to fire. Successfully mobilizing majority Buddhist Singhala sentiment – against Tamils, Muslims and Christians – he sought political support by cutting taxes on the ‘middle class’.

His government cut taxes across the board, collecting only 12.7% of GDP in revenue in 2017-19 – one of the lowest shares among middle-income countries. Losing about 2% of GDP in revenue, its tax-GDP ratio fell to 8.4% in 2020.

SL’s value-added tax rate was cut from 15% to 8%, while the VAT registration threshold was raised from one to 25 million SL rupees monthly. Other indirect taxes and the ‘pay-as-you-earn’ system were abolished.

The minimum income tax threshold was raised from 500,000 SL rupees annually to three million, with few earning that much! Personal income tax rates were not only reduced, but also became even less progressive.

The corporate income tax rate was cut from 28% to 24%. With a 33.5% drop in registered taxpayers (corporate and individual) between 2019 and 2020, SL’s tax base shrank.

Thus, even more of the population became exempt from direct taxes, increasing government popularity, especially among the middle class. But tax cuts failed to spur investment and growth – despite old claims by Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump and their ‘guru’, Arthur Laffer.

Successive SL governments thus failed to increase tax collection, squeezing government revenue. To finance budget deficits, they increasingly borrowed from international capital markets – at higher commercial rates, with shorter maturities.

As the government cut tax rates and exempted most from paying income tax, government revenue fell. Due to its falling revenue and deteriorating credit rating, the government had to borrow more, at higher interest rates.

Facing fiscal and foreign exchange constraints, the government declared SL a 100% organic farming nation in April 2021. Banning all fertilizer imports – ostensibly to promote ‘agro-ecological’ farming as part of a larger ‘green’ transformation – compounded the looming ‘perfect storm’.

Dropped in November 2021, the policy drastically cut agricultural output, with more food imports becoming necessary. Falling tea and rubber output also reduced export earnings, exacerbating foreign exchange shortfalls.

Evidently, the SL government addressed the economic challenges it faced with ‘populist’ policy choices. Instead of addressing longstanding problems faced, this effectively ‘kicked the can’ down the road, worsening the inevitable meltdown.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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A rainy day in the camps under COVID-19 lock-down, Maina IDP camp, Kachin, Myanmar. Credit: UNICEF/UNI358777/Oo.

By Navid Hanif
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 18 2022 (IPS)

As the world is rocked by a confluence of crises, the global economic outlook for 2022 is becoming ever more uncertain and fragile. Prospects for sustainable development for all and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030 are bleak, particularly for developing countries.

The war in Ukraine is adding further stresses to a world economy still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic and under growing strain from climate change. These cascading crises affect all countries, but the impact is not equal for all.

While some, mostly developed countries, had access to cheap financing to cushion the socio-economic impacts of the pandemic and invest in recovery, many others did not.

Massive recovery packages in rich countries contrast sharply with poor countries, which had to juggle essential expenditures. For many, education and development budgets had to be cut to respond to COVID-19.

The UN system’s 2022 Financing for Sustainable Development Report: Bridging the Finance Divide, finds that the ‘finance divide’ between rich and poor countries has become a sustainable development divide.

Navid Hanif

Growth prospects are severely constrained in the developing world – even before taking the war in Ukraine and its repercussions into account, 1 in 5 developing countries are not expected to return to pre-COVID income levels by 2023.

This situation is likely to get worse because the fallout from the war is exacerbating the challenges confronted by developing countries. Food and fuel prices are reaching record highs. This strains the external and fiscal balances of import-dependent countries.

Supply chain disruptions add to inflationary pressures, setting up a very challenging environment for Central Banks – rising prices combined with deteriorating growth prospects. Tighter financial conditions and rising global interest rates will make it increasingly difficult, and no doubt impossible for some, to roll over their existing commercial debt.

Many vulnerable countries will not be able to absorb the combined shocks of a disrupted recovery, rising inflation, and sharply rising borrowing costs. Sri Lanka has just defaulted, and more widespread debt distress may well be on the horizon – which is likely to put the Sustainable Development Goals out of reach.

The lack of adequate and affordable financing for developing countries is making timely realization of the 2030 Agenda increasingly difficult. Their governments often have few avenues to raise funds domestically, due to underdeveloped domestic financial markets. But borrowing from abroad is both risky and expensive, with some African countries paying over 8% on their Eurobond issuances in 2021.

As the 2022 Financing for Sustainable Development Report notes, the only way to achieve a more equitable recovery is to bridge this finance divide. It will take determined action, on several fronts.

First, developing countries will need additional concessional public financing. Bilateral providers and the international financial institutions have stepped up in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but additional funding was not enough to prevent this divergent recovery. The fallout from the war in Ukraine is widening financing gaps and countries will need additional support.

Credit: UN Photo/Cia Pak

A first key test of international solidarity will be on Official Development Assistance (ODA). Additional support for refugees from the conflict in Ukraine, while important, must not come at the expense of cross-border ODA flows to other countries in need.

Development banks should make available more long-term countercyclical finance at affordable rates, easing financing pressures during crises. Donors should ensure that multilateral development banks see their capital increased and concessional windows replenished generously.

One immediate step development banks and official bilateral creditors could take themselves is to use state-contingent clauses more systematically in their own lending. This would mean automating debt repayment standstills, providing breathing space to countries in crises.

Development banks and development finance institutions at all levels could also work to strengthen the ‘development bank system’. National institutions tend to be smaller and fewer in the poorest countries. They would greatly benefit from capacity and financial support.

Multilateral and regional development banks can in turn benefit from national banks’ detailed knowledge of local markets.

Second, we must improve the costs and other terms of borrowing faced by developing countries in international financial markets. Excess returns for investors hint at market inefficiencies. We must close gaps in the international financial architecture – the lack of a sovereign debt restructuring mechanism adds uncertainty – and improve transparency by both debtors and creditors.

Transparency and better information for investors can help reduce costs. Short-term credit ratings are also an issue. Rating agencies assess a country’s creditworthiness over a very short horizon, often three years. Meanwhile, many public investments in sustainable development – in infrastructure, education, or innovation – only pay off over a much longer period.

Credit assessments are systematically biased against long-term investments. Thus, they poorly serve those investors that have long investment horizons, such as pension funds. Long-term sovereign ratings that take into account such investments, as well as long-term risks such as climate change, should complement existing assessments. Scenario analysis can help overcome the inherent difficulties of such long-term assessments.

Countries can also exploit growing investor interest in sustainable development and climate action. Sovereign green bonds, which can sometimes be issued at reduced cost (“greenium”), are a fast-growing market segment. A commitment to marine conservation recently helped Belize achieve more favorable terms with private creditors in debt restructuring.

Development finance institutions could also help by providing partial guarantees to sovereign borrowers, lowering interest in exchange for commitments to invest in the SDGs and climate action.

Third, many countries will need debt relief to avoid a protracted and costly debt crisis. Once debt has reached unsustainable levels, providing additional credit, even if at concessional rates, will only delay the reckoning.

The current mechanisms to deal with countries in debt distress are clearly inadequate. The Common Framework set up by the G20 in the fall of 2020 was a step in the right direction, but its shortcomings have become all too apparent.

No restructurings have been completed yet; there is no good answer to treating commercial debt; and many highly indebted developing countries are not eligible to approach the Common Framework at all.

The G20 must step up efforts to implement and deliver on the Common Framework more effectively. But as a more widespread debt crisis becomes a frightening possibility, a more fundamental reform of the sovereign debt architecture must be on the table as well.

The United Nations can provide a neutral venue that brings together creditors and debtors on equal footing to advance such discussions.

We at the UN believe that the SDGs can still be met. But without concerted bold action now on all fronts, the road ahead is looking very bumpy. Timely and bold policy choices will get us there.

Navid Hanif is the Director of the Financing for Sustainable Development Office of the United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA). He is also the UN sous Sherpa to the G20 finance and main tracks. He joined UNDESA in 2001. He was Senior Policy Adviser in the Division for Sustainable Development and member of the team for the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg in 2002. He served as the Chief of Policy Coordination Branch and later Director in the office for Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) support. He was the first head of the DESA Strategic Planning Unit established in 2010.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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The Yucatán peninsula in southeastern Mexico has abundant solar and wind resources, but relies on fossil fuels for electricity generation. The photo shows a wind turbine belonging to the state-owned CFE next to a section of the power grid between Cancún and Puerto Morelos, in the state of Quintana Roo. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MÉRIDA, Mexico , Apr 18 2022 (IPS)

At home, Isabel Bracamontes uses gas only for cooking. “We try to prepare food that doesn’t need cooking, like salads,” she says in the southeastern Mexican city of Mérida.

The 20-kilogram cooking gas cylinder lasts her between three and four months, and by using it less she saves money, since the price has increased in recent months. The electricity in her home comes from plants fired by gas that is essentially methane, which has 86 times more capacity to absorb heat than carbon dioxide over a period of 20 years, hence the danger it poses to the climate.

An environmental activist and mother of one, Bracamontes lives in a middle-class neighborhood where other families face a similar situation to hers with regard to gas.

The southeastern Yucatán peninsula, home to 5.1 million people, contributes almost five percent of Mexico’s gross domestic product (GDP), thanks to agriculture, tourism and services.

Comprised of the states of Campeche, Quintana Roo and Yucatán, of which Mérida is the capital, Yucatán receives enormous amounts of sun and wind but depends on gas to meet its electricity needs.

Tied to gas

Quietly, this fuel is spreading throughout the peninsula, which is particularly vulnerable to droughts, intense storms and rising sea levels – symptoms of the climate crisis, one of the main causes of which is the burning of fossil fuels.

The peninsula receives gas through the Mayakán pipeline, a 780-kilometer pipeline owned by the Italian company Engie. The gas is injected from Ciudad Pemex, in the state of Tabasco, adjacent to the west of the peninsula, and the pipeline has been in operation since 1999.

In 2020, the Cuxtal I expansion also came into operation, with a 16-kilometer pipeline which connects to the Cactus Gas Processing Complex in the state of Chiapas, to the south of the peninsula.

The government’s Comisión Federal de Electricidad (CFE) purchases gas from the state-owned oil giant Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) to deliver it to its thermoelectric plants Lerma in Campeche, Valladolid and Mérida II in Yucatán, as well as to the private combined cycle plants Mérida III and Valladolid III, which operate with gas and steam.“The big problem is the direction the energy sector is headed. It's not what the transition needs. Climate action is full of false solutions, like trying to fight climate change with gas." -- Pablo Ramírez

The peninsula has a generation capacity of 2455 megawatts (MW), of which combined cycle thermoelectricity contributes 1463, turbogas 368, conventional thermal 314, wind 244, solar 50, and internal combustion 14, according to the U.S. government’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

According to official Mexican data, five solar and wind farms are operating in the state of Yucatán alone. But communities opposed to renewable initiatives have managed to block at least six other projects of this type, due to their environmental impact and the failure to carry out consultations with local indigenous residents.

In December, the state of Yucatán was the sixth of the 32 Mexican states with the highest number of contracts for the installation of residential solar panels of less than 0.5 MW, with 12,458 producing a total of 89 MW. Quintana Roo had 3969 that produced 27 MW, while Campeche was the state with the fewest, with 1515 producing 11 MW, according to figures from the official Energy Regulatory Commission.

The national total amounted to 270,506 producing 2,031 MW.

In the entire peninsula, the CFE requires about 340 million cubic feet of gas per day for its plants in this region, while total demand is about 500 million, including 160 million for industry and commerce, according to the Confederation of National Chambers of Commerce, Services and Tourism.

A map of the Yucatán peninsula on the Caribbean Sea in southeastern Mexico shows the route of the 780-kilometer Mayakán pipeline, which carries natural gas from the state of Tabasco to the three states of that region. CREDIT: Sener

Running against the current on fossil fuels

Pablo Ramírez, Energy and Climate Change specialist with environmental watchdog Greenpeace Mexico, questioned the expansion of gas in Yucatán and the rest of the country.

“The big problem is the direction the energy sector is headed. It’s not what the transition needs. Climate action is full of false solutions, like trying to fight climate change with gas,” he told IPS from Mexico City.

Mexico is the 12th largest oil producer in the world and the 17th largest gas producer. In terms of proven reserves, it ranks 20th for crude oil and 41st for natural gas, but its hydrocarbon industry is declining due to the scarcity of easily extractable deposits.

In February, 75 percent of electricity generation was based on fossil fuels, followed by wind energy (7.5 percent), hydroelectric (7.0 percent), solar (4.94 percent), nuclear energy (4.23 percent), geothermal (1.56 percent) and biomass (0.07 percent), according to data from the non-governmental Energy Transition Observatory in Mexico.

In decline

Gas production has been declining in Latin America’s second largest economy. In February 2020, according to official data, extraction totaled 4.93 billion cubic feet per day, and had dropped to 4.83 billion 12 months later, and to 4.67 billion in February 2022.

The shortfall forces the country to import gas, especially from the United States, from which it has imported a maximum of 904.6 million and a minimum of 640 million cubic feet every February over the last three years.

For its distribution over a territory of almost two million square kilometers, a network of gas pipelines has been laid in this country of 131 million inhabitants, with 27 state and private pipelines. In addition, the construction of three others has been halted due to opposition from the communities through which they would run.

The recipients of the gas are 50 thermoelectric, combined cycle and turbogas plants, both state-owned and private. In addition, six more combined cycle plants, using two thermal sources, gas and steam, are under construction.

This shows how Mexico has tied itself to gas, despite its climatic effects, and the difficulties of abandoning it in the future, since this infrastructure has a useful life of decades. It also raises questions regarding the increase in international gas prices, due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The use of solar energy is still limited on the Yucatán peninsula, despite the high levels of solar radiation. The photo shows a hotel with solar panels on its roof in the city of Playa del Carmen, in Quintana Roo, one of the three states of Mexico’s southeastern region. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

Transition halted

In Mexico, the energy transition has been paralyzed since 2019 due to the policies of the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, which have favored fossil fuels and hydroelectric power plants, to the detriment of new clean energies.

In September 2021, López Obrador presented a legal proposal to annul the 2013 reforms that opened the power industry up to domestic and foreign private participation, so that the public sector would resume the direction of strategic planning in the industry.

The projected changes favor the CFE and prop up gas as the preeminent source of electricity.

At the national level, in January, the CFE directly awarded the construction of six combined cycle plants that would come into operation in 2024, to provide a total of 4,000 MW, with an investment of 3.4 billion dollars.

In the case of the Yucatán peninsula, the CFE would need 200 million cubic feet of gas per day for two new combined cycle plants in Mérida and Valladolid, with a capacity of 1519 MW, considering the projected annual growth in demand of between 3.2 and 3.5 percent.

Meanwhile, the peninsula is wasting its available renewable resources.

The US-based NREL reports that Campeche has a solar potential of 727,502 MW and wind power of 1599 MW; Yucatán, 757,820 and 6125, respectively; and Quintana Roo, 168,029 and 2035.

For the peninsula, the NREL suggested organizing regional clean energy auctions based on competitive renewable energy zones, introducing energy efficiency programs for government buildings and small businesses, designing energy procurement mechanisms for government buildings, and encouraging the deployment of renewable energy in local communities.

Bracamontes, the Mérida environmentalist and representative of the global youth movement Fridays for Future Mexico in Yucatán, criticized the waste of renewable energy potential.

“There are many alternatives to take advantage of the sun and wind and solid waste, the disposal of which the state has not solved,” she said. “We ignore all that potential. We must analyze what is best for us and what has the least impact. If we are still married to the idea that fossil fuels are the only way, we are wrong. Sunshine is free.”

The local population also faces energy instability under the current energy scheme. For example, the neighborhood where Bracamontes lives, in western Mérida, suffered three short blackouts in one week.

Like other cities on the peninsula, Mérida also has high electricity rates, even with public subsidies, and unstable electricity generation.

Greenpeace’s Ramírez said the winners of the electricity counter-reform are Pemex and the gas companies.

“The possibility of making a transition to renewable sources and distributed generation is erased,” he said. “We are talking about a model that has serious implications for health, air, soil and water pollution, and climate externalities, which are not in the equation.”

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A child is vaccinated against the poliovirus. Malawi detected a single case and embarked on a mass vaccination programme against the disease which causes paralysis. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

By Charles Mpaka
Blantyre, Malawi, Apr 18 2022 (IPS)

One polio case is one too many, global health experts say.

And when Malawi announced in February this year that it had detected a polio case in the country’s capital Lilongwe, the alarm was significant, and the response from both the government and global health partners was swift, if not frantic.

Detected on a 3-year-old child, the poliovirus is described by experts as a significant public health concern for several reasons.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), polio has no cure, and it is a highly infectious disease.

“It invades the nervous system and can cause total paralysis within hours,” said WHO in a statement released on February 17, 2022, upon the Malawi Government’s announcement of the outbreak.

Furthermore, Malawi has not registered any cases of polio in 30 years. The country last reported a case of poliovirus in 1992.

In 2005, Malawi obtained a polio-free status.

The WHO further says that the last case of wild poliovirus in Africa was detected in northern Nigeria in 2016. Globally, there were only five cases of wild poliovirus recorded in 2021.

In addition, according to the United Nations health body, Africa was declared free of indigenous wild polio in August 2020 after eliminating all forms of wild polio.

To date, says WHO, polio remains endemic in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and laboratory test results on the case in Malawi showed that the strain was linked to the one found in Pakistan’s Sindh Province.

“As long as wild polio exists anywhere in the world, all countries remain at risk of importation of the virus,” Dr Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director for Africa, said upon the announcement.

Immediately after the outbreak, the government declared a Public Health Emergency.

It also instituted risk assessment and surveillance measures to contain any potential spread of the virus – but it assured that there was no evidence that the poliovirus was circulating in the community. There are no reports of additional cases of polio thus far.

Within 72 hours, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) Rapid Response Team arrived in the country to support the outbreak response.

These efforts were followed by a mass vaccination campaign, the first of four rounds, targeting 2.9 million children under five.

UNICEF procured 6.9 million polio vaccine doses for exercise.

UNICEF had partnered with WHO and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative’s Gavi, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Rotary and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in supporting the Ministry of Health to vaccinate children in four mass campaigns.

The phase ran from March 21 to 26, 2022.

A Poliovirus Outbreak Response Situation Report released by the government on April 4 says 2.97 million children aged between 0 – and 59 months had been vaccinated in the campaign, representing 102 percent administrative coverage.

The Ministry of Health says it is delighted with the campaign’s success.

“We attribute this to the dedicated workforce, the door-to-door approach and low presence of misconceptions, misinformation and disinformation surrounding polio vaccine,” the ministry’s spokesperson, Adrian Chikumbe, told IPS.

But the campaign was affected by some challenges, the Ministry of Health acknowledges in the vaccination campaign review report.

Malawi is reeling from the impacts of cyclones Ana and Gome, which hit the country in January this year, leading to flooding in many parts of the country and displacement of close to a million people. According to the report, the dispersion of the communities due to flooding increased the workload for vaccination teams.

“Polio campaigns with house-to-house strategy have not been conducted in-country in more than ten years, resulting in house-to-house vaccination not being strictly being followed in some areas. Grassroot social mobilisation was also delayed in some communities,” adds the report.

The second phase of the polio vaccination campaign is slated for late April.

“We urge all of us to sustain the gains in the first round of the campaign by making sure no eligible child is left behind in the subsequent rounds of the campaign. That way, our children will be adequately protected against polio which leads to paralysis or even death,” says Chikumbe.

UNICEF says the re-emergence of the wild poliovirus in Malawi, three decades after it was last detected, is “cause for serious concern”.

“Vaccination is the only way to protect the children of Malawi from this crippling disease which is highly infectious,” says UNICEF representative in Malawi, Rudolf Schwenk.

According to UNICEF, as an epidemic-prone, highly contagious disease, polio can spread easily through the movement of people from endemic to polio-free areas.

This polio vaccination campaign comes nine months after Malawi also administered another polio vaccination drive in July last year when the country undertook a week-long catch-up campaign that targeted 1.8 million children who missed the vaccine earlier.

Ministry of Health says the vaccination campaign last year was intended to immunise all children born after the world had switched from the Trivalent Oral Polio Vaccine (tOPV) to the Bivalent Oral Polio Vaccine (bOPV). The bOPV is said to protect children against all three types of polioviruses.

Community health activist Maziko Matemba tells IPS that one case of polio is one too many because of the high rate of spread of the virus and the severity of its effects.

“You need a rapid response to forestall its spread. You may not manage it if it slips through, so immunisation is key,” says Matemba, also executive director for Health and Rights Education Programme (HREP), a local non-governmental organisation.

But he says the re-emergence of the case after 30 years in Malawi should remind the government of the need to ensure the health system’s resilience.

He says this resilience can be achieved through adequate funding to the health sector.

“As a country, we need to ensure that our health system is resilient and robust. One way we can make it such is by meeting the Abuja Declaration on Health to allocate at least 15 percent of the national budget to the health sector.

“Twenty-one years after that declaration, we still can’t go past 10 percent in budget allocation to the health sector. Without sufficient funding, outbreaks of this nature can spiral out of control, and we will struggle to contain other health shocks,” Matemba says.

Since the last case in 1992, Malawi has sustained its polio surveillance through an independent committee of experts that oversees and coordinates the country’s polio monitoring and reporting system.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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A family evacuated from Irpin, Kyiv region, Ukraine. Credit: UNICEF/Julia Kochetova

By Oli Henman and Lysa John
LONDON / JOHANNESBURG, Apr 15 2022 (IPS)

Russia’s war in Ukraine has left many communities facing catastrophe. In a world already wracked by multiple crises such as searing inequality and escalating climate change, this conflict is tearing through communities.

Millions of people are directly affected. They face fragile circumstances, with immeasurable sadness caused by the death of loved ones, loss of livelihoods, displacement, destruction of homes, interruption of education, and more.

The conflict has also placed huge new burdens on the multilateral system, putting a further break on progress towards the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals that has already been set back by the negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Civil society representatives from both Ukraine and Russia have expressed their deep concerns about the needless suffering caused by the war. In Ukraine, they are responding to the situation in vital ways, from documenting war crimes and gathering information about missing persons to urging international institutions to live up to their responsibilities on peace and accountability.

In Russia, civil society has exposed media restrictions that have helped create a disinformation nightmare while protesting against the injustice of war.

The impacts of this conflict are being felt far beyond the war zones. Disruptions in international commerce are feeding inflation and food insecurity around the world disproportionately impacting the impoverished and excluded.

In this scenario, civil society groups across all continents have come together to support a five-point call for action issued by the Action for Sustainable Development coalition.

The message to the international community is simple:

1. Stop the war

We call for an immediate end to the war in Ukraine, a ceasefire and a withdrawal of Russian forces, and the phased removal of all sanctions according to an agreed timeline. The devastation of many cities and the killing of innocent civilians and civilian infrastructure cannot be justified.

Furthermore, it is unacceptable and insufficient that so far only a handful of men – and visibly no women – appear to have been involved in the peace negotiations.

We call for the peace negotiations to include civil society and representatives of those who are directly affected, especially from Ukraine and Russia, and particularly women.

2. Respect international human rights

We stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine. The rights of civilians must be respected. After more than a month of conflict, the humanitarian impacts are leading to massive displacement of people, loss of lives and livelihoods. We are very concerned that this grave violation of international law will have an extremely adverse impact on security and democracy in Europe and the world.

We also call for human rights to be respected in Russia. Many Russian people have stood up to condemn violence and their voices must be heard. Peaceful protest must be recognised as a legitimate form of expression.

We call for human rights to be fully respected in Ukraine and Russia, including international humanitarian rights and civic freedoms.

3. Stop militarism and aggression around the world

The rise in militarism and conflict is not limited to Russia. It is part of a growing catalogue of armed conflict. Violence in all its forms – authoritarianism, corruption and indiscriminate repression – affects the lives of millions of people around the globe and violates the human rights of people young and old in countries including: Afghanistan, Brazil, Central African Republic, Colombia, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Palestine, South Sudan, Syria and Yemen, to name just a few.

These conflicts often affect communities already living with fragile infrastructure and the devastating impacts of climate change. All conflicts must be treated with the same level of concern. The lives of everyone affected by conflict are of equal value.

We call for the same level of support to end conflicts and ensure financial support for displaced peoples and refugees from all conflicts.

4. Shift military funds to a just and sustainable future

The war in Ukraine has already had a devastating impact on the world economy, especially on global south countries. There are likely to be major disruptions and significant increases in the costs of energy and production, and increased food costs. At the same time budgets are being redirected towards military spending.

The militarism of Russia is fuelled by fossil fuels and it is therefore critical to halt investment in fossil fuels and shift immediately to renewable forms of energy. It is crucially important that we reduce oil and gas consumption and rapidly scale up investments in renewables in order to combat the climate crisis, and that we do so immediately.

We call for a specific commitment at the UN to reduce spending on military conflicts and to reinvest this spending on social protection and clean energy.

5. Establish a global peace fund

We call on member states to remember the founding vision of the UN and its Security Council, to deliver on the main reason it was created: to avoid any kind of war and the suffering of humankind.

The 2030 Agenda sets out a path towards a peaceful, just, sustainable and prosperous world. much more ambitious steps and actions must be undertaken to ensure that its targets and goals are met.

We call on member states to establish a global peace fund to strengthen the role of international mediators and peacekeepers. The UN must act!

The international community cannot be a bystander in Ukraine or any other conflict. We all have a responsibility to defend universal human rights and humanitarian principles by acting against cruelty and injustice wherever it may be.

Link to full statement here:
https://action4sd.org/2022/04/04/statement-of-solidarity-with-civilian-populations-and-a-call-for-a-negotiated-end-to-the-war-in-ukraine/

Oli Henman is the Global Coordinator the Action for Sustainable Development coalition in London. Lysa John is the Secretary General of the global civil society alliance, CIVICUS in Johannesburg.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Workmen at Dar Es Salaam harbour loading bags of wheat on a truck, in Tanzania. Global food prices have reached “a new all-time high,” the head of the Food and Agriculture Organization Qu Dongyu said, “hitting the poorest the hardest.” 8 April 2022. Credit: FAO/Giuseppe Bizzarri

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 15 2022 (IPS)

The unprecedented flow of arms to Ukraine, and the rising miliary spending by European nations to strengthen their defenses, are threatening to undermine development aid to the world’s poorer nations.

Yoke Ling, Executive Director of Third World Network told IPS the escalating military spending will definitely have a direct impact on a range of spending that the North has committed to developing countries — from official development assistance (ODA) to climate finance, “that is a legal obligation under the climate treaties”.

Even before the Russian-Ukraine war, she pointed out, the North has been reducing development financing. “So, we expect the regression to worsen,” she added.

A UN report, titled 2022 Financing for Sustainable Development Report: Bridging the Finance Divide released April 12, says record growth of Official Development Assistance, increased to its highest level ever in 2020, rising to $161.2 billion.

“Yet, 13 countries cut ODA, and the sum remains insufficient for the vast needs of developing countries”.

The UN also fears “the fallout from the crisis in Ukraine, with increased spending on refugees in Europe, may mean cuts to the aid provided to the poorest countries”.

In the face of a global crisis, near-time actions and additional international support are needed to prevent debt crises and address the high cost of borrowing, the report warns.

“However, the vast majority of developing countries will need active and urgent support to get back on track to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs).

The report estimates that in the poorest countries a 20 per cent increase in spending will be required for key sectors.

A New York Times report on March 29, said across Europe and Britain, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is reshaping spending priorities and forcing governments to prepare for threats thought to have been long buried — from a flood of European refugees to the possible use of chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons by a Russian leader who may feel backed into a corner.

“The result is a sudden reshuffling of budgets as military spending, essentials like agriculture and energy, and humanitarian assistance are shoved to the front of the line, with other pressing needs like education and social services likely to be downgraded,” said the Times.

Frederic Mousseau, Policy Director at the Oakland Institute, told IPS “whereas combination of droughts and conflicts result in massive human suffering and hunger in a number of countries, UN humanitarian appeals for these acute crises are chronically underfunded.”

Last year, he pointed out, only 45% of the UN appeal for Yemen and the Horn of Africa was funded, only 29% for Syria. With such shortfalls amidst the war on Ukraine, it is critical that all donor countries ensure their solidarity and support is focused on all victims.

Increase in military budgets in Europe will automatically result in more sales for the major Western arm exporters, i.e. USA, France and Germany.

The industrial military complex yields increased economic returns for these countries, and fuels conflicts across the world. In 2021, the second largest humanitarian aid requirement was for Yemen, whereas Saudi Arabia, waging war on this country, is the first importer of weapons from Western countries.

It is to be seen, he said, how actual aid budgets will be affected by the war in Ukraine.

“But regardless of what happens in Europe, a major issue that undermines our ability to promote peace and stability in the world -and reduce the need for international assistance, is the US military budget that continues to increase under the Biden administration to reach an all-time record of $813 billion this year”.

This is more spending than the next eleven countries combined, Mousseau pointed out.

“The USA is not just the highest military budget in the world, it is also the largest arm exporter and coincidently the largest aid donor. US international aid, however, represents just 4% of the US military spending. Priorities have to change drastically to meet the humanitarian and environmental challenges of the world’, he declared.

Vitalice Meja, Executive Director, Reality of Aid Africa, told IPS: “We support the humanitarian efforts going towards the Ukrainian people and remain in solidarity with them. We, however, believe that donors must still meet their other obligations on other global wars of poverty, and climate crisis on humanity.”

It is important especially for Africa that ODA remains focused on catalyzing development and tackle the ravaging climate change crisis and the rising inequalities, she said.

“Donors must allocate additional resources towards Ukraine and not simply by militarizing aid or shifting budget items and priorities from other global development challenges in response the War in Ukraine”.

It is key that donors, at the same time without shifting resources, should focus on building and strengthening Africa’s resilience in these times of harsh climate change and mass crop failure.

“They must secure sustainable climate finance and development resources to address the rising cases of inequality, extreme hunger and poverty in this part of the work.”

This is our war and it remains important and relevant. It must be aggressively be fought and won as well, Meja declared.

Jennifer del Rosario-Malonzo, Executive Director, IBON International, told IPS: “We stand in solidarity with the peoples of Ukraine who are bearing the losses from the war. People’s rights and needs—in Ukraine, in Asia, and the rest of the global South—should be a priority over military spending”.

If some developed countries are lavish with their arms spending and military budgets today, while their “humanitarian” response involves cutting from other aid programs, are they saying that security interests come before long-term, public needs? She asked.

Outside the Ukraine war, developed countries have already broken their promise of providing USD100 billion of climate finance by 2020.

Sacrificing development aid budgets and climate finance will deepen poverty, inequalities, adverse climate impacts, and exclusion felt in the global South. Lack of ambition here risks reinforcing the economic and political grievances at the root of armed conflicts in Asia and elsewhere.

Solidarity and justice today call for ambition. We challenge developed countries to fulfill their existing aid commitments (minimum of 0.7% of GNI as ODA), together with providing new funding for people’s needs in Ukraine. We call for new and additional grants-based climate finance to indemnify the most affected peoples and communities suffering from losses and damages due to climate change.

Meanwhile, the UN report on Financing for Sustainable Development also points out that while rich countries were able to support their pandemic recovery with record sums borrowed at ultra-low interest rates, the poorest countries spent billions servicing debt, preventing them from investing in sustainable development.

“The pandemic shock plunged 77 million more people into extreme poverty in 2021, and by the end of the year many economies remained below pre-2019 levels”.

The report estimates that in 1 in 5 developing countries’ GDP per capita would not return to 2019 levels by the end of 2023, even before absorbing the impacts of the Ukraine war.

“As we are coming up to the halfway point of financing the world’s Sustainable Development Goals, the findings are alarming,” UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed said.

“There is no excuse for inaction at this defining moment of collective responsibility, to ensure hundreds of millions of people are lifted out of hunger and poverty. We must invest in access for decent and green jobs, social protection, healthcare and education leaving no one behind,“ she warned.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Yasmine Sherif, Director of Education Cannot Wait, at the “Blue Dot” established by UNICEF, UNHCR and partners in Chișinău. "Blue Dot" support centers offer protection, temporary shelter, food and psychosocial support to meet the urgent needs of families fleeing Ukraine. Credit: ECW

By Joyce Chimbi
Nairobi, Apr 14 2022 (IPS)

A brutal war now engulfs the young lives of an estimated 7.5 million children in Ukraine. Caught in the crossfire of bullets and missiles as the conflict escalates, children and young people have been plunged into a humanitarian crisis.

With their lives turned upside down, affected children are lost, traumatized, and among millions fleeing their homes into neighboring countries, including the Republic of Moldova, in search of safety, protection, and assistance.

Having seen the effects of the ongoing crisis firsthand, Yasmine Sherif, Director of Education Cannot Wait (ECW), tells IPS that affected children and their mothers arrive in Moldova visibly traumatized and need immediate psychosocial support.

“As a result of the conflict in Ukraine, across the region, there are more than 5 million refugees who have fled Ukraine and an additional 7.1 million people internally displaced. An estimated 400,000 people have passed through Moldova in search of safety thus far,” she says.

Students attending class at a local school in Ungheni, Moldova. The school hosts Ukraine refugee children who attend class with Moldovan pupils.
Credit: ECW

Sherif paints a picture of a country unprepared for the refugee crisis – despite its welcoming spirit and an open-door policy for refugees.

“Moldova is the poorest country in Europe with significant capacity gaps and is struggling to accommodate an inflow of refugees. Today, Moldova hosts at least 100,000 refugees, including 50,000 refugee girls and boys, of whom only 1,800 are currently enrolled in school.”

Sherif confirms that Moldova is registering the children as quickly as possible to attend school and that public schools are open to refugees. Still, she says there are pressing issues facing affected Ukrainian refugee children and that, as of now, Moldova is ill-equipped to address their educational needs.

Sherif says that the capacity was stretched in Moldova, and many parts of the education system needed development even before the refugee crisis.

With 50,000 children in the country needing to be enrolled, she says, the capacity is “now stretching beyond what was expected. Moldova was not ready for this crisis.”

ECW and its strategic partners US Agency for International Development (USAID),  Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office/UK (FCDO/UK), and Theirworld were looking at the capacity gap, including “urgent mental health and psychosocial services.”

Children in Moldova are taught in Romania, a Latin-derived language, while children in Ukraine speak Russia, a Slavic language – leading to language barriers. This requires additional teachers who can teach in Russia and are trained to handle children in crisis. For refugee children in the rural part of Moldova, access to safe water and sanitation is another pressing need.

Sherif spoke in the backdrop of a high-level mission to Moldova with its strategic partners in a coordinated and joint-up response in Moldova.

ECW has thus far contributed 6.5 million US dollars to support education in emergencies response to the Ukraine refugee crisis.

In March, the organization announced that it had made a grant of 5 million US dollars available for Ukraine’s First Emergency Response.

On April 13, ECW announced a new, initial US$1.5 million allocation to support the education in emergencies response, to be delivered in partnership with the Government of Moldova, to ensure refugee children and youth can access safe and protective learning opportunities.

During the high-level mission, USAID also announced an additional 18 million US dollar contribution to the ECW global trust fund to support ECW education responses in crisis-impacted countries across the globe. After Germany and the UK, this contribution makes the USA the third-largest donor to ECW – the UN global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises.

With an estimated $30 million funding gap for the emergency education response in Ukraine, ECW has escalated advocacy efforts, calling for donors and other strategic partners to help close the gap.

ECW Mission to Moldova delegation: ECW Director Yasmine Sherif and partners from USAID, FCDO/UK, Theirworld, World Vision, UNICEF and UNHCR at the steps of the UN House in Moldova.
Credit: ECW

UNHCR Representative to Moldova, Francesca Bonelli, says education is key to refugees living with dignity and “is one of the first services requested. We greatly appreciate the support of the Moldovan authorities, teachers, and communities in welcoming refugee learners.”

Theirworld President, Justin van Fleet, says the organization will announce additional funding. Theirworld is a global innovative children’s charity committed to ending the global education crisis and unleashing the potential of the next generation.

The funds, he says, will support refugee education projects in the coming weeks, harnessing the charity’s experiences from other emergencies and campaigning to ensure donors invest 10% of the humanitarian response funding into education.

“COVID-19 school closures have taught us that learning loss amounts to more than days missed in school,” says UNICEF Representative to Moldova Maha Damaj. “In Moldova, UNICEF is working with partners to help refugee children coming from Ukraine reclaim their learning experience in a safe and supportive environment, nurturing their resilience against the traumas of war.”

“As a leading donor to Education Cannot Wait, the UK is committed to protecting the right of all children to education, including those affected by the crisis.  We stand ready to support a coordinated education response for refugee children from Ukraine. Education must be prioritized as an integral part of the ongoing humanitarian response in Ukraine,” says Alicia Herbert, Director of Education, Gender and Equality and Gender Envoy, FCDO.

Whether contributed resources will meet the most pressing needs of affected Ukrainian children in Moldova, Sherif says it all depends on how long it takes to resolve the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

“More than 400,000 refugees have passed through Moldova. Should hostilities escalate further and new towns such as Odesa are captured, the second wave of refugees will be coming to Moldova and elsewhere,” Sherif says.

“Moldova is currently unprepared for a refugee crisis of this magnitude, and more funding will be required to meet the ongoing capacity gap. I appeal to governments and the private sector not to rest because there can be no peace until everyone has peace.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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By Raghbendra Jha
CANBERRA, Australia, Apr 14 2022 (IPS)

The World Bank lists Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu as Pacific Small Islands Developing States (PSIDS). . Some listings also include the Cook Islands, Niue and Tokelau. In September 2019, these countries had a combined population of 2.3 million spread over hundreds of islands spread over an area roughly equivalent to 15% of the surface area of the earth. Of these, the most populated country – Fiji – has a population of 900,000. The World Bank’s World Development Indicators reveal that annual per capita GDP of these islands fell from $4,340 in 2018 to $3,768 in 2020. It has probably fallen further during the pandemic.

Raghbendra Jha

Concurrently, the poverty head count ratio in these countries has been persistently high and has probably increased during the pandemic. The PSIDS face deep-rooted structural reasons why, unlike many developing countries in the world, they might not be able to grow rapidly and reduce poverty quickly. These reasons include the small size of their economies, their remoteness, inadequate access to large markets and skilled labour force and their vulnerability to external shocks.

Almost all the PSIDS have been subjected to extreme weather shocks including hurricanes and other climate change related disasters, apart from earthquakes, volcanic eruption and the like. The PSIDS face a disproportionately large number of external shocks. It has been estimated that the cost of climate-induced disasters can be as high as 30% of GDP.[2] In some cases threats of climate change can be existential. For instance, climate change is particularly threatening for the long-term habitability of the island state of Tuvalu. This is because the average height of the islands is less than 2 metres above sea level, with the highest point of Niulakita being about 4.6 metres above sea level. Indeed the PSIDS have been classified as among the most vulnerable to risk areas in the world.

When risk and vulnerability are so high, it is natural to turn to insurance as an antidote. However, just as there are strong structural reasons why economic growth and poverty reduction cannot accelerate rapidly in the PSIDS there are compelling structural reasons why insurance cannot be widely used in the PSIDS. Most citizens of the PSIDS are part of the informal economy.

The incidence of informality of economic activity is around 60 to 85% in Melanesia and Micronesia countries and is increasing in Polynesian countries.[3] More than half the workers are in the informal sector. A majority of these are women and/or have low levels of education. Therefore, it would be difficult for them to negotiate complex insurance contracts. Further, most climate insurance disasters are quite debilitating so that there the longer the delay in executing the insurance obligations the higher is the loss to the individuals. This would lead to dis-saving on the part of individual to meet their consumption needs. This would then reduce the resources available for investment and growth. Therefore, even a single climate disaster can have effects well beyond its immediate effect on humans and property.

A measure to complement individual insurance is aggregation of risks with the insurance being taken out by higher level entities. For instance, a tripartite partnership among insurers, aid agencies and the government can be created so that a country-specific risk pool can be created. This requires that the payout triggers be well defined.

There are clear advantages to making comprehensive housing insurance to be made compulsory for all income groups. Policyholders could also be encouraged to aggregate risks through cooperatives, credit unions and the like. Finally, the insurance policy can be held by the government or other national or international agencies. Payouts can be used to accommodate government services and maintain post-disaster programs.

If these provisions were accepted, then it would follow that quite a bit of the premium for insurance would have to be paid for by international aid. Multilateral aid would be preferred to bilateral aid as many of the insuring agencies could well be located in donor countries creating complex problems of moral hazard. In contrast, the use of multilateral aid would be more hands off.[4]

The case for providing insurance rapidly remains strong. Keeping this in mind, the UNDP has designed a climate risk insurance product for six PSIDS.[5] However, much remains to be done. Clearly any long-term meaningful insurance policy should not be viewed in isolation but should be embedded in a broader policy of providing climate change relief for PSIDS.

Raghbendra Jha [1] is Professor of Economics and Executive Director, Australia South Asia Research Centre, Australian National University

[1] This article draws on my article co-authored with D. Jain, A. Chida, R.D. Pathak and S. Russell “Climate risk insurance in Pacific Small Island Developing States: Possibilities, challenges and vulnerabilities – a comprehensive review”. See https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11027-022-10002-z

[2] See https://www.cgdev.org/publication/are-pacific-islands-insurable-challenges-opportunities-disaster-risk-finance

[3] See https://info.undp.org/docs/pdc/Documents/PSC/PC%20%20Prodoc%20Final%2017%20Dec%20(signed%20copy).pdf

[4] This further supports the general case for an increase in multilateral aid. See https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9701.2004.00596.x

[5] https://www.preventionweb.net/news/new-insurance-product-aid-fight-against-climate-change-pacific

Credit: United Nations

By Antonio Guterres
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 14 2022 (IPS)

Now, since the Russian Federation’s invasion of Ukraine, the world’s attention has been focused on the war’s terrifying levels of death, destruction and suffering.

From the start, the United Nations has been actively engaged in delivering humanitarian support to the people in Ukraine, the people who are paying the highest price, and to the host countries of the fastest-growing refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War.

But less attention has been paid to the global impact of the war in all its dimensions in a world that was already witnessing increased poverty, hunger and social unrest.

The war is supercharging a three-dimensional crisis — food, energy and finance — that is pummeling some of the world’s most vulnerable people, countries and economies.

And all this comes at a time when developing countries are already struggling with a slate of challenges not of their making — the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and a lack of access to adequate resources to finance the recovery in the context of persistent and growing inequalities.

We are now facing a perfect storm that threatens to devastate the economies of many developing countries.

That is why, in the earliest days of this war, I established the Global Crisis Response Group on Food, Energy and Finance, facilitated by a Task Team in the UN Secretariat, reporting to a Steering Committee involving all UN agencies and international financial institutions.

Today, we are launching the Task Team’s first Report.

I am joined by the Secretary-General of UNCTAD, Rebeca Grynspan, who coordinates the Task Team, and by the Deputy Secretary-General, who presides over the Steering Committee.

Ms. Grynspan will go through the recommendations.

But I want to highlight two overarching points made crystal clear in this report.

First, the impact of the war is global and systemic.

As many as 1.7 billion people — one-third of whom are already living in poverty — are now highly exposed to disruptions in food, energy and finance systems that are triggering increases in poverty and hunger.

Thirty-six countries count on Russia and Ukraine for more than half of their wheat imports — including some of the poorest and most vulnerable countries of the world.

Prices were already on the rise — but the war has made a bad situation far worse.

Wheat and maize prices have been very volatile since the war began but are still 30 per cent higher just since the start of the year.

At the same time, Russia is a top energy supplier.

Oil prices are up more than 60 per cent over the past year, accelerating the prevailing trends.

The same goes for natural gas prices, which have risen by 50 per cent in recent months.

And fertilizer prices have more than doubled.

As prices climb, so does hunger and malnutrition — especially for young children.

Inflation is rising, purchasing power is eroding, growth prospects are shrinking, and development is being stalled and, in some cases, gains are receding.

Many developing economies are drowning in debt, with bond yields already on the rise since last September, leading now to increased risk premiums and exchange rate pressures.

This is setting in motion a potential vicious circle of inflation and stagnation – the so-called stagflation.

The report also shows that there is a direct correlation between rising food prices and social and political instability.

Our world cannot afford this. We need to act now.

And that leads to the second point clearly demonstrated by this report: we can do something about this three-dimensional crisis.

We have the capacity to cushion the blow.

The report offers more than a dozen recommendations, but I would boil down the messages to three fundamental points.

First — we must not make things worse. That means ensuring a steady flow of food and energy through open markets. It means lifting all unnecessary export restrictions, and this is not the time for protectionism. It means directing surpluses and reserves to those in need.
And keeping a lid on food prices and calming the volatility in food markets.

Second — we can maximize this moment to push for the transformational change our world needs. Look no further than the energy crisis. In the immediate-term, countries must resist hoarding, and release strategic stockpiles and additional reserves. But now is also the time to turn this crisis into an opportunity. We must work towards progressively phasing-out coal and other fossil fuels and accelerating the deployment of renewable energy and a just transition.

And third — we need to pull developing countries back from the financial brink.

The international financial system has deep pockets.

I have been strongly advocating for its reform. But developing countries need help now, and the funds are there.

So, we need to make them available to economies that need them most so that governments can avoid default, provide social safety nets for the poorest and most vulnerable, and continue to make critical investments in sustainable development.

This is not a crisis that can be solved piecemeal, country by country. This global and systemic emergency requires global and systemic solutions.

The report includes concrete recommendations for international financial institutions to increase liquidity and fiscal space.

As we approach the Spring Meetings of the World Bank and the IMF (April 18-24), we need political will and leadership. Resources are available.

We must speak with one voice: action today will prevent suffering tomorrow. Above all, this war must end.

The people of Ukraine cannot bear the violence being inflicted on them.

And the most vulnerable people around the globe cannot become collateral damage in yet another disaster for which they bear no responsibility.

We need to silence the guns and accelerate negotiations towards peace, now.

For the people of Ukraine. For the people of the region. And for the people of the world.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Excerpt:

UN Secretary-General at a Press Conference to Launch a new report on the global impact of the ongoing war in Ukraine

During ECW's high-level mission - with strategic partners USAID, FCDO/UK and Theirworld - USAID announced a new $18 million contribution, becoming ECW's third largest donor.

By External Source
Chișinău, Moldova, Apr 13 2022 (IPS-Partners)

Expanding on Education Cannot Wait’s (ECW) US$5 million Ukraine First Emergency Response grant announced in March, ECW today announced a new, initial US$1.5 million allocation to support the education in emergencies response for the Ukraine refugee crisis in Moldova while on mission with strategic partners USAID, FCDO/UK and Theirworld. This new allocation brings ECW’s total Ukraine crisis education response to US$6.5 million to date. The new grant will be delivered in partnership with the Government of Moldova to ensure refugee children and youth can access safe and protective learning opportunities. Investments will also benefit children in the host communities. The development of the grant will be facilitated through the coordination mechanism established for the education response.

During the high-level mission, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), announced an additional US$18 million contribution to the ECW global trust fund to further support ECW education responses in crisis-impacted countries across the globe. This contribution makes the USA the third largest donor to ECW – the United Nations global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises – after Germany and the UK.

With an estimated US$30 million funding gap for the emergency education response in Ukraine, ECW calls on donors and strategic partners to urgently provide additional funding to respond to the vast humanitarian crisis unfolding across the region.

According to recent reports, approximately 400,000 people have crossed the border into Moldova fleeing the escalation of the conflict in Ukraine since February. While the majority continued their journey towards other neighboring countries and Western Europe, Moldova hosts today an estimated 100,000 refugees. These include about 50,000 refugee girls and boys, of whom only 1,800 are currently enrolled in school.

“Refugee children from Ukraine have fled a brutal war and have arrived dispossessed and traumatized in Moldova. They are very vulnerable and need immediate support. Public schools are open to refugee children, however the capacity is over-stretched and there is a need for urgent mental health and psycho-social services, sanitation, and teachers to respond to the influx of pre-school and school-aged refugee children. With a coordinated and joint-up response in place in Moldova, we can act with speed and therefore we act now,” said Yasmine Sherif, Director of Education Cannot Wait.

“As a leading donor to Education Cannot Wait, the UK is committed to protecting the right of all children to education, including those affected by crisis. We stand ready to support a coordinated education response for refugee children from Ukraine. Education must be prioritized as an integral part of the ongoing humanitarian response in Ukraine,” said Alicia Herbert, Director of Education, Gender and Equality and Gender Envoy, FCDO.

“For children whose lives have been turned upside down, education offers vital stability and hope for the future. Theirworld will announce additional funding to support refugee education projects in the coming weeks, harnessing its experiences from other emergencies, and campaigning to ensure donors invest 10% of the humanitarian response funding into education,” said Justin van Fleet, President of Theirworld.

“Education is key to refugees living with dignity and is one of the first services requested. We greatly appreciate the support of the Moldovan authorities, teachers and communities in welcoming refugee learners,” said Francesca Bonelli, UNHCR Representative to Moldova.

“COVID-19 school closures have taught us that learning loss amounts to more than days missed in school,” said UNICEF Representative to Moldova Maha Damaj. “In Moldova, UNICEF is working with partners to help refugee children coming in from Ukraine reclaim their learning experience, in a safe and supportive environment, nurturing their resilience against the traumas of war.”

The war is putting children and adolescents living in Ukraine at grave risk. Recent estimates indicate that almost 5 million refugees have fled Ukraine, with an additional 7.1 million people internally displaced. All school-age children in Ukraine have seen their education disrupted by the conflict, and according to the latest estimates, more than 900 education facilities have been destroyed or damaged in the fighting, and as many as 3.3 million school-aged children require urgent humanitarian assistance.

The new ECW allocation will respond to the rapidly evolving situation in support of the Government of Moldova’s normative framework that is allowing the inclusion of refugee children into the national education system. As part of its overall crisis response, the allocation complements ECW’s US$5 million First Emergency Response in Ukraine. ECW works with governments, donors, UN agencies, civil society organizations and other strategic partners to ensure continuity of education for children impacted by the crisis.

View of the Ras Tanura terminal in Saudi Arabia, the oil exporter receiving the highest revenues in the context of the crisis generated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. CREDIT: Aramco

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Apr 13 2022 (IPS)

The oil and gas supply crisis unleashed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine represents new business opportunities for the oil-producing countries of the developing South, both traditional and emerging, and also for accelerating the global transition to green forms of energy.

“The countries with the most positive economic effects are the net exporters that depend on hydrocarbon revenues for a large portion of their budget, economic activity and foreign exchange,” Nate Graham, head of energy at the Washington-based think tank Inter-American Dialogue, told IPS.

In Latin America this is the case, Graham said, for “countries such as Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela, while on the other hand, countries in the Caribbean, Central America and Chile, which import oil and gas, will suffer the opposite effect.”

The opportunities arose after the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, due to the abrupt withdrawal, in markets with fragile balances, of some three million (159-liter) barrels per day of crude oil from Russia, and the decision of a large part of Europe to cancel gas imports from Russia and look for other suppliers.

Oil and gas producers in the South “are enjoying extraordinary revenues,” Venezuelan oil geopolitics expert Kenneth Ramirez told IPS, “but those who are not producers have higher energy bills and are suffering from higher prices for food, of which Russia and Ukraine are major suppliers.”

Graham said: “Even in oil-producing countries, rising consumer fuel prices put pressure on governments to provide subsidies, which can then be politically difficult to reverse when prices fall again.”

But it seems that it is not yet time to heed all the warnings, given the new “(black) gold rush” unleashed in a world dependent on fossil fuel energy and aware that it will continue to be so for several more decades.

The oil production vessel Liza Destiny is used by Exxon to develop oil fields under Atlantic waters that Guyana has not yet definitively demarcated with neighboring Venezuela. CREDIT: SBM Offshore

Room for everyone

In South America one of the first to benefit has been Guyana, which extracted from the Atlantic Ocean – in waters pending delimitation with Caracas, noted Ramirez, who chairs the private Venezuelan Council of International Relations – some 110,000 barrels per day (b/d) in 2021 and expects to add another 220,000 within a year.

To achieve this, U.S. oil giant Exxon, with a century and a half of experience in the industry, accelerated its decision to invest another 10 billion dollars in Guyana.

Neighboring Suriname is also hoping for new investments, and traditional exporters Colombia and Ecuador must be rubbing their hands together in anticipation. But the most striking note was a new contact between the United States and Venezuela.

Formal ties between the two political opponents are broken, Washington has imposed sanctions that prevent Caracas from freely trading its oil and the South American country has made a show of being Russia’s ally in the region.

Venezuela, a major oil exporter throughout the 20th century, with production exceeding three million b/d between 1997 and 2001, now produces less than 700,000 b/d, following a decline in its oil industry under the administration of President Nicolás Maduro, in office since 2013.

But the country has gigantic reserves, close to 300 billion barrels, mostly of heavy crude, and the market read the new contact from Washington as a sign that the United States has decided that the adiós to Russian supplies will last for a long time.

The US company Chevron, which maintains a minimum level of production in Venezuela with Washington’s permission, could invest to produce another 200,000 b/d in a year, and the state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) is studying the leasing of new oil tankers, according to industry sources.

A technician works at the Tema refinery in Ghana, an emerging oil producer in West Africa. CREDIT: TOR

In Africa, in addition to the best-known producers, such as Nigeria, Angola, Libya, Algeria and Egypt, there are the hopes of the smaller and newer producers, such as Equatorial Guinea, South Sudan and above all Ghana, which, from producing a few thousand barrels a day five years ago, now produces almost 170,000 barrels per day.

Iran is another long-time oil producer which is again flexing with the crisis: it maintains energy alliances with Russia while the tug-of-war with the United States – which has sanctioned it for more than 40 years – continues over its nuclear program, whose redefinition may free it from some sanctions.

Tehran, which produces 2.5 million b/d, is preparing to increase its crude oil exports from 1.2 to 1.4 million b/d, and has a long-term plan to return to a production level of four million b/d.

Among the major beneficiaries of the crisis are the Gulf Arab exporters and in general the partners of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which act in alliance with 10 other producers in the OPEC+ group.

Saudi Arabia’s Aramco alone already recorded pre-war profits of 110 billion dollars in 2021 (compared to 49 billion dollars in 2020). Both the kingdom and the neighboring United Arab Emirates have been asked by Washington to increase oil production in order to avoid a price spike.

The main benchmark crudes, U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) and North Sea Brent, were trading at around 70 dollars per barrel in 2021, but with the Ukraine crisis their prices soared: Brent has been holding steady this April at above 100 dollars and WTI at close to 95 dollars.

Global demand for crude oil is approximately 100 million b/d, of which OPEC contributes 32 million b/d, plus another 14 million b/d from the 10 OPEC+ allies, including Russia, Kazakhstan and Mexico.

OPEC+ rejected the request of large consumers, considering that the price increase is not due to market fundamentals but to the conflict in Ukraine, and agreed to add only 432,000 b/d to the group’s supply, starting in May.

“Nobody listened when we said more investments were needed in oil and gas,” said Emirati Oil Minister Suhail al-Mazroui. “Raising production will only be in a measured way and through a consensus among members.”

U.S. President Joe Biden then ordered the release of one million b/d for six months from his country’s strategic reserves of more than 650 million barrels, to increase the crude oil available to refineries and thus try to curb the rise in fuel prices.

Meanwhile, Algeria allowed itself the luxury of maintaining steady prices for the gas it exports to all its customers but not to Spain, in retaliation for a change in Madrid’s position on the dispute over the self-determination of the Saharawi people.

A crude desalter unit on its way to the Orinoco Oil Belt in southeastern Venezuela, considered the largest deposit of heavy crude on the planet and whose diminished production could receive a new boost as a result of the current energy crisis. CREDIT: PDVSA

The weight of Russia

And Moscow has stated that it will receive payment in rubles for its oil and gas exports to Europe, a region 40 percent dependent on Russian gas and 27 percent on its oil, with which it has not been able to completely do without after six weeks of war.

The late U.S. politician John McCain (1936-2018) said in 2014 that Russia “is a gas station masquerading as a country” to underline the nation’s heavyweight status in the field of fossil fuel energy.

Of the 1.7 trillion barrels of crude oil reserves on the planet, Russia has 107 billion, surpassed only by Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Iran and Iraq. The Eurasian country produces 10.8 million b/d (more than 10 percent of the world total), behind only the United States and almost as much as Saudi Arabia.

In gas its weight is even greater, since it has 20 percent of the world’s reserves (38 of 188 trillion cubic meters), making it the leader by far, and with its annual production of 638 billion cubic meters it covers more than 18 percent of global demand.

The richest will earn more

Among the winners, oil companies will earn the most, and this year the 25 largest could make profits between 100 and 120 billion dollars higher than in 2021, when, according to the U.S. organization Accountable.US, they made record profits of 237 billion dollars.

Consumers, meanwhile, will pay the price. In almost all of Latin America a liter of gasoline costs well over a dollar (1.75 dollars in Uruguay, 1.40 in Chile, and 1.32 in Guatemala, for example) and even in up-and-coming Guyana – which has crude oil but no refinery, Graham pointed out – it sells for almost 1.10 dollars.

In the United States, where one out of every five barrels of oil the world produces is consumed, a liter cost 75 cents a year ago and this April averaged 1.10 dollars, with higher prices on the Pacific coast.

Gasoline prices this year exceeded four dollars per gallon (more than a dollar per liter) in the United States, and in an attempt to curb prices the government is releasing part of its strategic crude reserves so that the refineries have sufficient supplies. CREDIT: Fidel Márquez/IPS

Path to greener energy

In Europe, “the majority are now betting on a pragmatic and possibilist vision, which continues to focus on renewable energies and energy efficiency, but a debate is opening up about the use of nuclear energy and even coal, which would make a better balance between energy security and climate change,” said Ramírez.

Graham believes that “the present crisis underscores the geopolitical risks of dependence on foreign oil and gas and the importance of reducing it for security reasons, which can be an accelerating factor for the transition to renewable technologies and green hydrogen (obtained from clean energy sources).”

But “on the other hand, some may interpret the present crisis as a reason to increase domestic and regional hydrocarbon production in the short term, which may extend dependence on fossil fuels, while companies recover the costs of new investments,” he said.

In addition, there is pressure on governments to provide fuel subsidies to lessen the impact of the crisis on consumers, which may be politically difficult to reverse and might thus generate the opposite effect to what is needed to drive the energy transition, Graham said.

The International Energy Agency (IEA), made up of major industrialized consumers, recognized at its Mar. 24 meeting held to assess measures to address the crisis “the importance to energy security and clean energy transitions of ensuring clean, affordable, reliable, resilient, and secure energy infrastructure.”

Energy security and the transition to clean energies are “inextricably linked” in the view of the IEA, and its executive director, Fatih Birol, stated that “the response to this energy crisis will be an acceleration of the transition to clean energy,” not necessarily for climate reasons, but for energy security.

Credit: WHO

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Apr 13 2022 (IPS)

People around the world are unknowingly being exposed to water laced with antibiotics, which could spark the rise of drug-resistant pathogens and potentially fuel another global pandemic, warns a new report.

The study, elaborated by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), found that, globally, not enough attention is being focused on the threat posed by antimicrobial resistance with most antibiotics being excreted into the environment via toilets or through open defecation.

Already in 2015, 34.8 billion daily doses of antibiotics were consumed, with up to 90 percent of them excreted into the environment as active substances. Since then the amount of daily consumed antibiotics has been increasing considerably.

 

80% of wastewater, untreated

While 80 percent of wastewater in the world is not treated, even in developed countries treatment facilities are often unable to filter out dangerous bugs.

This could breed superbugs that can evade modern medicine and trigger a pandemic, the report’s authors warned.

In 2019, antibiotic-resistant infections were linked to the deaths of nearly 5 million people. Without immediate action, those infections could cause up to 10 million deaths per year by 2050, the report found.

“Another pandemic is hiding in plain sight,” the report said. “The consequences of the continuing development and spread of antimicrobial resistance could be catastrophic.”

 

What are antimicrobials?

Antimicrobials are agents intended to kill or inhibit the growth of pathogens. They include antibiotics, fungicides, antiviral agents, parasiticides, as well as some disinfectants, antiseptics and natural products.

Antimicrobial resistance occurs when microbes, such as bacteria, viruses, parasites and fungi evolve to become immune to the drugs to which they were previously susceptible, explains the report.

The more microbes are exposed to pharmaceuticals, the more likely they are to adapt to them.

 

A recent study on pharmaceutical pollution of the world’s rivers concluded that higher levels of antibiotic-resistant pathogens were found in low- to middle-income countries and were associated with areas with poor wastewater and waste management infrastructure and pharmaceutical manufacturing. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

 

What to do?

According to the report, this global threat can be tackled by curbing the release of antibiotic-tinged pollution, including through improved wastewater treatment and more targeted use of antibiotics – too often these drugs are used when they need not be.

The report also called for enhanced environmental governance and national action plans to limit the release of antimicrobials.

UNEP urged countries to embrace the One Health approach, which is centred on the idea that human and animal health are interdependent and linked to the health of the ecosystems in which they co-exist.

The strategy, for example, calls on countries to “limit deforestation, which often brings humans face-to-face with virus-carrying wild animals, giving pathogens a chance to jump species.”

The COVID-19 pandemic provides lessons learned, one of which is the need to prevent and tackle various health threats concurrently, especially their environmental dimensions, said the report.

 

Five main sources

A recent study on pharmaceutical pollution of the world’s rivers concluded that higher levels of antibiotic-resistant pathogens were found in low- to middle-income countries and were associated with areas with poor wastewater and waste management infrastructure and pharmaceutical manufacturing.

According to the UNEP report, five main pollutant sources contribute to the development and spread of antimicrobial resistance. They are:

• poor sanitation, sewage and waste effluent, aggravated, for example, by open defecation and the overuse of antibiotics to treat diarrhoea;

• effluent from pharmaceutical manufacturing;

• waste from healthcare facilities;

• use of antimicrobials and manure in crop production; and

• releases from animal production.

 

Many diseases are climate-sensitive

Higher temperatures are also associated with increased antimicrobial resistant infections, says the report.

“Many diseases are climate-sensitive, and changes in environmental conditions and temperature may lead to an increase in the spread of bacterial, viral, parasitic, fungal and vector-borne diseases.”

 

How modern medicine is turning into an environmental curse

Back in 2018, the world environmental body had already warned that the aquatic and human health consequences of pharmaceutical drugs entering the environment through wastewater treatment plants is not yet well understood.

As the world’s population expands and we become wealthier, drugs and chemical-based care products become more prevalent.

“While pharmaceuticals are essential for human health and well-being, less is known on the effects they have on the freshwater sources on which we depend for our existence, and their impact on human health and biota”.

The occurrence of pharmaceutical substances in the environment is of global concern.

According to a study published in June 2018 in the United States of America – Pharmaceutical manufacturing facility discharges can substantially increase the pharmaceutical load to U.S. wastewaters – drug manufacturing facilities are an important source of environmental pollution.

“Wastewater treatment plants are unable to filter out chemical compounds used to manufacture personal care products and drugs, so these chemicals seep into freshwater systems and into the oceans.”

On this, Birguy Lamizana, Programme Management Officer at UN Environment and expert on wastewater and ecosystems, explained that modern wastewater treatment plants mostly reduce solids and bacteria by oxidising the water. They were not designed to deal with complex chemical compounds.

 

The world, woefully unprepared

On 2 March 2022, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) explained that although pandemics are a fact of human life, the world was blindsided by the impact and devastation of COVID-19.

UNDP reminded that in the two years since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global pandemic, “we could not have envisioned how completely it would invade every aspect of our lives—from the catastrophic toll it has taken on physical and mental health and health systems, to our jobs and education, to supply chains, and the trust in the systems designed to protect us.”

Every aspect of our lives has changed since the global COVID-19 pandemic was declared in March 2020, including work and education, our ability to access goods and trust in the systems designed to keep us safe, it added.

“Entire economies have been devastated. Domestic violence rates have skyrocketed. Families, friends and communities have become divided over vaccines and masks. Vaccine inequity continues to deepen the gap between rich and poor nations.”

 

Would COVID-19 be the last pandemic?

The report, ‘COVID-19: Make it the Last Pandemic’ confirmed what we have seen played out in real time, that we were woefully unprepared.

“This was not because the world lacked the money and the know-how. It didn’t. The brutal truth was there was no good reason, financial or otherwise.”

Years of warnings from public health officials, infectious disease experts and scientists have been ignored.

Even though most people alive did not experience the 1918 flu pandemic, the 2000s saw several dangerous outbreaks—SARS, Ebola, Zika and MERS—which sounded warning bells that weren’t heeded.

Likewise, the slow response to the HIV pandemic in the early ’80’s highlighted the importance of taking decisive action early, the report goes on.

And the 2021 Global Health Security Index found that two years into the pandemic, despite some progress, all countries remain “dangerously unprepared” for the next major outbreak.

Earl Green, project manager, discusses the Arundo donax bio-mass project with sugar cane farmers in Orange Walk, Belize. Credit: Zadie Neufville/IPS

By Zadie Neufville
Kingston, Apr 13 2022 (IPS)

In September 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK-based Commonwealth Secretariat announced that it had dispatched highly skilled climate finance advisors to four member nations to help them navigate the often-complicated process of accessing climate funds. Belize, the Caribbean Community’s (CARICOM) only Central American member, was one of the recipients.

Since then, with the support of the Commonwealth Climate Finance Access Hub (CCFAH), Belize has completed a climate finance landscape study, devised a five-year strategy to access international funds, and established a dedicated Climate Finance Unit in the Ministry of Finance, Economic Development and Investment. The unit works collaboratively with the National Climate Change Office (NCCO), which sits under the Ministry of Sustainable Development, Climate Change and Disaster Risk Management.

With some 28 climate change-related projects in varying stages of development, Belize needed to find a way to speed up the project development process from concept to implementation if the country were to realise its commitments, said Leroy Martinez, an economist in the Climate Finance Unit. The often-cumbersome application process for the Green Climate Fund (GCF), among other schemes, can mean projects linger for years before implementation.

In January 2022, the government announced the launch of the new Climate Finance Unit. Director Carlos Pol explained that the aim was to “maximise access to climate finance, provide the technical and other support to access and fast track projects,” while helping the private sector identify funding to carry out much-needed programmes. He noted that Belize is also being supported to build human and institutional capacity.

On long-term placement with the NCCO, working under the guidance of Belize’s Chief Climate Change Officer, Dr Lennox Gladden, is Commonwealth national climate finance advisor Ranga Pallawala, a highly skilled finance expert deployed to help Belize make “successful applications and proposals to international funds”.

Climate change impacts from wind, flood and drought have been extensive, Pol said. The damage has led to annual losses of about 7 percent of the country’s GDP, or US$123 million, which, when added to the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, elevated Belize’s debt-to-GDP rating to an unsustainable 130 percent.

Pallawala told IPS that his role includes helping to build and strengthen capacity in climate financing of Belize. He would also “strengthen their capacity to plan, access, deliver, monitor and report on climate finance in line with national priorities, and access to knowledge sharing through the commonwealth’s pool of experts”.

Pol told IPS that, as the Commonwealth’s assigned climate finance adviser, Pallawala assisted in developing a National Climate Finance Strategy to, among other things, identify likely projects and possible funding sources. Pallawala also worked with the National Climate Change Office to carry out a climate landscape study, which Pol said: “Identified the country’s needs, the funding available and that which was needed to achieve the recommendations coming out of the NDC [Nationally Determined Contribution or national climate plan]”.

The Commonwealth Climate Finance Hub work in Belize also aims to support the GCF accreditation process of local institutions, streamline climate finance and seek new opportunities to ensure that climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies are at the centre of the government’s development policies and plans.

The CCFAH will allow the country to streamline its NDC ambitions and help improve its ability to source additional funding from external sources. It will help to develop strong private/public partnership projects, benefit from the expertise within the Commonwealth’s pool of international advisers and fast track project proposals, among other things. In addition, a debt-for-climate swap initiative announced earlier this year will allow Belize to reduce its public debt by directing its debt service payments to fund some climate change projects.

In the current scenario, Pol explained Belize could use available funds to support the “early entry of projects” to minimise delays in implementation. The country has experienced challenges in this regard in the past, for example, with the start-up of the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (5Cs) Arundo donax biomass project.

In 2016, the 5Cs began an ambitious project to reduce Belize’s fuel bill by using local wild grass as a substitute for the bagasse, a by-product of sugar production used to fuel the furnaces. A local wild cane with the scientific name of Arundo donax was identified as a potentially suitable renewable crop for augmenting the supply of bagasse year-round. But despite a partnership with the national electricity provider BelcoGen, the project experienced delays.

As project manager Earl Green told IPS, the absence of funds to do some requisite studies slowed implementation. In 2018, the GCF provided US$694,000 for a project preparation facility. Even with good results from the pilot phases, the GCF did not fund the studies to determine the growth rates of the wild cane.

With Pallawala on board, delays like those experienced with the Arundo donax project could be a thing of the past. Additional funding is now in place to establish cultivation plots with two species of wild cane have been planted.

Pallawala said his role is to support the CFU in building stronger projects and enhancing existing ones, “not to overlap what others are doing, but to look at all the available sources of funds and help the country develop projects that will capitalise on all the opportunities”.

This year Belize also announced a debt-for-nature-swap that effectively frees up funds that would otherwise be used to service debt to pay for its implementation of climate change projects.

So far, Belize has received just over US2.2 million in readiness funding; US600,000 in adaptation funding for water projects and US902,937 for fisheries and coastal projects; just under US 8 million to build resilience in rural areas and just under US2.2 million for project preparation funding.

To date, through its advisers, the Commonwealth Secretariat has helped member countries access more than US46 million to fund 36 climate projects through the Climate Finance Access Hub. An additional US762 million worth of projects are in the pipeline.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Credit: Michael Duff/UNFPA

By External Source
Apr 13 2022 (IPS)

The United Nations Population Fund recently released the 2022 State of World Population report. It highlights that almost half of all pregnancies between 2015 and 2019 were unintended. That amounts to roughly 121 million unintended pregnancies each year.

Unintended pregnancy is defined as pregnancy among women who were not planning to have any (more) children. This includes pregnancies that occurred earlier than desired. The report also says over 60% of unintended pregnancies end in abortion. And 45% of all abortions performed globally are unsafe. About 7 million women a year are hospitalised as a result.

While the global rate of unintended pregnancies in Europe and North America was 35 per 1,000 women aged 15 to 49, in sub-Saharan Africa it was 91 per 1,000 women. Within the region it ranged from 49 in Niger to 145 in Uganda

Up to 257 million women who want to avoid pregnancy are not using safe, modern contraception methods. And about a quarter of all women are not able to say no to sex.

A closer look at regional estimates shows how far behind African countries are in preventing these unplanned pregnancies and protecting the reproductive rights of women and girls. While the global rate of unintended pregnancies in Europe and North America was 35 per 1,000 women aged 15 to 49, in sub-Saharan Africa it was 91 per 1,000 women. Within the region it ranged from 49 in Niger to 145 in Uganda.

The drivers of unintended pregnancies in sub-Saharan Africa are complex and operate at individual, household, community and policy levels. Understanding them is important to develop policies and effective interventions to reduce unintended pregnancies and unsafe abortion in the region.

In my view, based on research done in a number of African countries, the high rate of adolescent childbearing in Africa could be the main factor contributing to the stark regional differences reported.

 

Drivers of unintended pregnancy

At the individual level, poverty, lack of autonomy and low education attainment limit women’s and girls’ access to accurate contraceptive information and services. Some women and girls simply cannot afford to pay for contraceptives. In places where contraceptives are freely available, some women lack accurate knowledge of them and how they work.

In some settings, people interpret religion as prohibiting contraceptive use. They use religion to deny young people accurate contraceptive information. When women and girls lack access to accurate contraceptive information and services, their risk of unintended pregnancy increases.

In a study conducted by the African Population and Health Research Center, adolescent girls in Kenya told us they got pregnant because they were young and naive about relationships and contraceptives. Some of them had to exchange sex for their basic needs. Others were sexually violated. Because they did not seek care in clinics or know about emergency contraception, they were vulnerable to unintended pregnancy. Some had dropped out of school.

At household level, parents seldom communicate well about methods of preventing pregnancy. Where they do talk about it, they focus on abstinence rather than contraceptives, and they sometimes use fear tactics. Another household driver is insufficient financial support from the family, pushing girls into transactional relationships.

Quality contraceptive services consist of accurate and sensitive counselling, a wide range of options, and well trained providers. Research has shown that in communities where such services are available and accessible, more women and girls are able to plan their pregnancies.

However, access to quality services is lacking in many African communities. Stock-outs remain a problem for family planning programmes. The COVID-19 pandemic also disrupted the supply of contraceptives and services.

Unintended pregnancies are far higher in gender unequal communities and countries compared to more gender equal countries. Sociocultural norms sometimes discourage women and girls from exercising their choice to use contraceptives, including condoms.

Policy and legal constraints continue to limit access to comprehensive sexuality education and safe abortion in most African countries. Most African countries offer students some sexuality education in response to the HIV epidemic. But what they offer is far from comprehensive and is mostly abstinence-based.

The global gag rule reinstated by the Trump administration also limited access to family planning. This is a US federal policy that prohibited foreign nongovernmental organisations that received US international family planning assistance from using their own, non-US funds to support abortion services in any way.

Many countries in Africa depend on donor funds for their family planning programmes. The global gag rule meant a significant reduction in funding for programmes and clinics providing access to contraceptives for millions of women in Africa. Some programmes and clinics had to close or downsize.

 

Ways forward

The relationship between social and economic development and unintended pregnancy goes both ways. When women and girls are not empowered or lack autonomy, they are less likely to use contraceptives. They are prone to unintended pregnancy.

Unintended pregnancy, especially among young people, can be disempowering. It can prevent girls and young women from getting the education and skills they need to improve their economic prospects and productivity. Breaking this cycle of early unintended pregnancy is critical to realising socio-economic development in Africa.

Given the deep and lifelong effects of unintended pregnancy on women, their families and society, decision-makers and health systems should prioritise the prevention of unintended pregnancy. This would entail increasing access to quality contraceptive services, particularly in resource-poor settings, and expanding access to sexual and reproductive health information, especially for boys and girls.

Anthony Idowu Ajayi, Associate research scientist, African Population and Health Research Center

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

By Karin Kleinbooi
CAPETOWN, South Africa, Apr 13 2022 (IPS)

Which country do you think best recognises the potential for changes to food systems to reduce emissions? Presumably a developed country, where agriculture is predominantly intensive, heavily subsidised and fuelled by fertilisers and irrigation, and where high consumption of animal proteins is the norm?

Not so, – as we found when we analysed the national climate plans for 14 countries, including the US, UK, China, Senegal and Bangladesh, in partnership with the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.

Perhaps counter-intuitively it was Colombia and Kenya that stood out from the other countries as having submitted plans to the UN climate talks that best took into account the potential for food systems reform to drive down greenhouse gas emissions, and deliver a range of other benefits including improved health and livelihoods, enhanced food security, better gender equality, and wider environmental gains such as clean water and nature recovery.

Conservative estimates suggest that changing the way we produce and consume food could reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by at least 10.3 billion tonnes a year – 20% of the cut needed by 2050 to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius and – hopefully – prevent catastrophic climate change.

And yet, none of the countries whose ‘nationally determined contributions’ or NDCs we analysed are currently doing enough to realise the myriad opportunities.

For example, none of the country plans we analysed include specific measures on changing diets, even though this has the potential to reduce emissions by nearly a billion tonnes a year, as well as provide associated health and other environmental benefits.

China’s plan does include a target to promote ‘green and low-carbon lifestyles’, but it does not clarify whether this includes sustainable and healthy diets.

Meanwhile, Germany is the only country that commits to move away from harmful subsidies that prop up intensive agriculture, contribute to higher emissions and degrade nature.

Similarly, none of the countries we looked at fully account for emissions from food imports, particularly those linked to deforestation and the destruction of ecosystems, in spite of commitments made at the last UN climate meeting to end and reverse deforestation by 2030.

Food loss and waste is another big gap in most of the country plans we reviewed. One-third of all food produced in the world – approximately 1.3 billion tonnes – is lost or wasted every year.

But France is the only country whose NDC includes comprehensive measures to reduce it. China passed an anti-food-waste law last April, accompanied by a large-scale “clear your plate” campaign but this is not yet reflected in its NDC.

Globally, women play a central role in food production and children’s nutrition, so any efforts to meaningfully reform food systems to reduce emissions must engage them. Vanuatu, Canada, Kenya and Senegal have all made efforts to ensure their NDCs are gender inclusive.

In contrast, the UK only includes a general reference to ‘gender equality’ and China and the US fail to specifically mention women as a key stakeholder group.

Colombia, Senegal, and Kenya have the most ambitious measures in place to promote more agroecological and regenerative locally-led agriculture, which is less emissions intensive and good for sustainable livelihoods and equality.

Colombia’s plan includes measures to reduce emissions from cocoa, coffee, and sugar production, as well as from livestock including through sustainable management, restoration of degraded grazing areas, and energy generation from waste. In addition, the NDC includes measures to strengthen local agricultural capacities through training and workshops.

Colombia’s NDC also sets out measures to protect, conserve, and recover natural resources and ecosystems as well as strengthen its protected areas. Specifically, the NDC includes commitments to restore, rehabilitate, or recover 18,000 hectares of degraded land in protected areas; conserve paramos, watersheds, mangroves, and seagrass fields; and promote the conservation and restoration of natural ecosystems that have been used for cattle.

The Colombian NDC acknowledges the importance of engaging with smallholders and local communities, and the central role of Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities in preserving the country’s forests.

The involvement of rural communities is seen as essential for transforming agricultural practices, avoiding the expansion of the agricultural frontier, and safeguarding the country’s food security.

Meanwhile, Kenya’s NDC identifies agriculture as one of the sectors most vulnerable to climate change, and also as a key to meeting ambitious adaptation and mitigation targets. It promotes ‘climate smart’ agriculture that sustainably increases productivity, resilience, reduces or removes greenhouse gases, and enhances the achievement of national food security and development goals.

The strategy unites agriculture, development, and climate change and emphasises the need for good coordination.

Kenya’s NDC aims to build the resilience of the agricultural system through the sustainable management of land, soil, water, and other natural resources as well as insurance and other safety nets; and to strengthen communication systems on climate-smart agriculture extension services and agro-weather issues.

The plan also includes measures to build climate resilience for marginalised communities by developing social safety net structures for women, youth, and other vulnerable groups. It promotes access for these groups to enterprise funds, climate finance and credit lines.

There are ways in which both Colombia and Kenya can improve their plans, for example by strengthening commitments on nutritious and sustainable diets. They, along with all the other signatories to the UN process, have the opportunity to do this ahead of the next big UN meeting in Egypt later this year.

The toolkit we have developed with the Global Alliance gives governments the guidance they need to improve the process, content and implementation of their NDCs to realise the huge benefits of food systems reform for the environment, society and the economy. With food prices rocketing and climate change already hitting people hard, there is no time to lose.

Karin Kleinbooi is a Senior Programme Manager at Solidaridad Eastern, Central and Southern Africa. Solidaridad is a civil society organisation that works throughout the whole supply chain to make sustainability the norm and enable farmers and workers to earn a decent income, produce in balance with nature, and shape their own future. Karin is responsible for facilitating policy advocacy through multi-stakeholder platforms with various actors (including farmers, CSOs, the private sector, Government and regional institutions). She currently focuses on value chain transparency, food systems transformation, and creating enabling environments for sustainability.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Traffickers target unemployed youth in Kenya. While the government is working to combat this crime, COVID-19 impacted their efforts. Here a police officer is in discussion with a community policing committee that works together to combat criminal activities, like trafficking. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

By Joyce Chimbi
Nairobi, Kenya, Apr 13 2022 (IPS)

Ahmed Bakari’s ill-fated journey to ‘greener pastures’ started with a social media private message from a stranger back in 2017. The message said an international NGO was recruiting teachers and translators to work in Somalia.

“I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Communication in 2013. Other than for the odd job here and there, I was mostly unemployed,” Bakari tells IPS.

“My mother raised five of us single-handedly, and I was her hope. Taking loans to put me through university, but it was all amounting to nothing.”

With a starting salary of $500 and additional food and housing allowances, Bakari had no dilemma – he was going to Somalia.

Growing up in Lamu, a small group of islands situated on Kenya’s northern coastline, he knew that Somalia was not far from the border, and the journey there was uneventful.

Upon arrival in Somalia, he says, the unexpected happened. Bakari was taken to a house where he cooked and cleaned for between 10 to 20 men – without pay.

“I do not know what was going on in that house because they would come in and go at all hours. I lived under lock and key for one year. One day there was a disagreement among them, and a fight broke out. During the chaos, I found my chance to leave the house,” he recounts.

“I remained in Somalia for another six weeks until somebody helped me get to the Dadaab border. I crossed over into Kenya like a refugee because I was afraid of telling my story.”

Young people in Nairobi and Kenya’s coastal regions are particularly vulnerable to human trafficking into Somalia. Despite ongoing instability in the horn of Africa nation, many young people are lured with promises of opportunities to work in humanitarian NGOs and as teachers and translators.

Bakari, who now runs an eatery in Mombasa, says criminal groups are particularly interested in young people who can speak Arabic, Swahili, English and Somali.

“Criminals take advantage of historical marginalisation of communities in the coastal region, very high youth unemployment rates and poverty. They also use radical Islamic teachings to lure young and desperate minds,” Abubakar Mahmud, an activist against human trafficking, tells IPS.

“There was a time when the Pwani si Kenya (Swahili for ‘coastal region is not Kenya’) was gaining traction as a backlash campaign against the national government. These are the emotions that terror groups are happy to stir and exploit,”  Mahmud says, adding they also take advantage of the high levels of youth unemployment.

According to the most recent census released in 2020, youth unemployment is a serious issue in Kenya. More than a third of Kenyan youth aged 18 to 34 years are unemployed, and the situation has worsened since COVID-19.

Kenya National Crime Research Centre says this East African nation is a source, transit route and destination for human trafficking victims. People from Uganda, Burundi and Ethiopia are trafficked into Kenya for hard labour. Ethiopians are trafficked into South Africa for hard labour.

The US Department of State 2021 Trafficking in Persons Report finds that the government of Kenya does not fully meet “the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking but is making significant efforts to do so.”

These efforts include the Counter-Trafficking in Persons Act of 2010, which criminalised sex trafficking and labour trafficking and prescribed penalties of 30 years to life imprisonment, a fine of not less than $274,980 or both.

The government also allocated $183,320 to the National Assistance Trust Fund for Assisting Victims of Trafficking in 2020-2021.

The report finds that “criminals involved in terrorist networks lure and recruit Kenyan adults and children to join non-state armed groups, primarily al-Shabab in Somalia, sometimes with fraudulent promises of lucrative employment.”

For years, Al-Shabab has operated clandestine bases in Somalia just across Kenya’s eastern border, enabling the terror group to expand its operations into Kenya and other East African countries.

“From my experience, they will befriend you and some of your friends and relatives on social media. You will feel safe because you have friends in common. They will even tell you that you grew up in the same neighbourhood years ago. You end up trusting them very quickly and getting involved with them without asking the right questions,” Bakari cautions.

Mukaru Muthomi, a police officer with the National Police Service, says that in 2019, Kenya banned trade between Kenya and Somalia through the Lamu border due to insecurity and combat criminal activities such as existing networks and syndicates dealing in human trafficking.

The Lamu border crossing is one of four that join Kenya and Somalia, and other border points are in Kenya’s Mandera, Wajir and Garissa Counties.

He says the government is vigilant along the Dadaab and Mandera border point routes used by Somali refugees crossing into Kenya. Kenya hosts more than 500,000 refugees from Somalia.

Mahmud says human trafficking is a pressing issue in Kenya partly because criminals are increasingly taking advantage of the large numbers of refugees from Ethiopia, Sudan, and Somalia to complicate the country’s fight against human trafficking.

In 2019, the government identified 853 victims of human trafficking and another 383 victims in 2020. Mahmud is quick to warn that many cases have gone unreported, and COVID-19 hampered efforts to counter human trafficking. He also says there are not enough officers to combat human trafficking.

Nevertheless, Kenya’s Trafficking in Persons Report shows the country’s investigative capacity of the Anti-Human Trafficking and Child Protection Unit is gradually increasing. Personnel increased from 33 to 37 officers deployed in human trafficking hotspots. There are 27 officers in Nairobi and 10 in Mombasa, with plans to open a third office in Kisumu.

“Increasing personnel is good, but the government must address the root of these problems because human trafficking into and out of Kenya is interlinked with poverty. Find job opportunities for young people,” Mahmud observes.

The census, he says, showed that “3.7 million young people between 18 and 34 years without a job were not even actively looking for work because they have no hope of finding employment in Kenya. This is a ticking time bomb.”

This article is part of a series of features from across the globe on human trafficking. IPS coverage is supported by the Airways Aviation Group.

The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN ) http://gsngoal8.com/ is pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 8 with a special emphasis on Goal 8.7, which ‘takes immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms’.

The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalization of indifference, such as exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking”.

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