Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

News and Views from the Global South

Updated: 3 days 22 hours ago

A Special Adviser to Probe Racism and Discrimination at UN

Thu, 01/27/2022 - 11:21

UN staff in New York. Credit: United Nations

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 27 2022 (IPS)

“Racism and discrimination have no place in our world — least of all at the United Nations”, warns UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who will soon appoint a Special Adviser to investigate the growing discrimination based on racial, national or ethnic origins in the world body.

“The diversity of our personnel is a source of profound richness. Yet I am fully aware and deeply concerned that colleagues have experienced the indignity, pain and consequences of workplace racism and racial discrimination. This is unacceptable,” says Guterres in a message to UN staffers January 25.

He has also pledged to establish a Steering Group to oversee implementation of the Strategic Action Plan on racial discrimination —and report progress to the Executive and Management Committees.

“These are the first steps in a relentless effort to address issues which tarnish the Organization’s core values and behaviours and demean our shared humanity”.

“With your support, we will build a culture of solidarity and anti-racism where every individual can bring their whole self to work in a safe environment, regardless of racial, national, or ethnic origin. This is the most effective way to transform the lives of the people we serve through enhanced professionalism, equality, dignity, and the promotion of racial diversity”, he implored.

According to his annual report submitted to the UN’s Administrative and Budgetary Committee last month the United Nations currently has more than 36,000 staffers in 463 duty stations world-wide.

“The work of the United Nations Secretariat is underpinned by the effective management of finance, human resources, information and communications technology, supply chains, facilities, conference services and security and safety operations, as well as communicating the work of the Organization to global audiences,” the report said.

A protest by UN staff in Geneva. Credit: United Nations

Asked for his comments, Aitor Arauz, President of the UN Staff Union (UNSU) and General Secretary of the UN International Civil Servants Federation (UNISERV), told IPS the publication of the SG’s Strategic Action Plan (SAP) is the culmination of a process of collective introspection, truth-telling and resolve to change that stemmed from a momentous town hall meeting convened by the New York Staff Union in June 2020, at the height of the global movement for racial justice.

“We praise the bravery of the colleagues who raised their voices to denounce the discrimination they experience in the workplace and to say, “Enough! The UN needs to do better.”

The Secretary-General listened, responded with determination, and “we could not be prouder to see how far the process has come since then”.

The inclusive consultations that fed into the SAP, Arauz said, provide solid guarantees of the UN staff community’s buy-in and support. The staff unions are ready to mobilise volunteers and ideas, but staff’s commitment must be matched with resources and political drive from senior leadership, he noted.

“A plan remains just a plan until it is realised… the work to meet our ambitious commitments starts now,” he declared.

Samir Sanbar, a former UN Assistant Secretary-General and head of the Department of Public Information (now re-christened Department of Global Communications) told IPS obviously racism and discrimination have no place in the United Nations.

“It is an integral requirement—almost an oath of office— and inherent in the spirit of the U.N. Charter”.

Since its establishment, most U.N. staff dedicated their careers and often risked their lives in areas of conflict to uphold human dignity and confront racism and discrimination, he pointed out.

A declaration to appoint “a Special Adviser and establish a Steering group to report to the Executive Management Committee” reflects a need to deal with a disappointing erosion of U.N .principles.

It seems to entail various appointments-including for aspiring diplomats and require some time to meet review, report and implement.

The Secretary-General, he said, must have perceived a certain requirement to declare the decision

“Clearly, in a changing world and shifting times, the UN and its role has changed. Yet its inclusive global framework and human objectives remain” declared Sanbar, who had served under five different secretaries-generals.

Meanwhile, a survey of over 688 UN staffers in Geneva in 2020 came up with some startling revelations re-affirming the fact, which has long remained under wraps, that “racism exists within the United Nations”.

The survey revealed that “more than one in three staff have personally experienced racial discrimination and/or have witnessed others facing racial discrimination in the workplace. And two-thirds of those who experienced racism did so on the basis of nationality”.

A separate survey by the UN Staff Union in New York was equally revealing.

According to the findings, 59% of the respondents said “they don’t feel the UN effectively addresses racial justice in the workplace, while every second respondent noted they don’t feel comfortable talking about racial discrimination at work”.

Meanwhile, the UN Secretariat in New York, faltered ingloriously, as it abruptly withdrew its own online survey on racism, in which it asked staffers to identify themselves either as “black, brown, white., mixed/multi-racial, and any other”.

But the most offensive of the categories listed in the survey was “yellow” – a longstanding Western racist description of Asians, including Japanese, Chinese and Koreans.

A non-apologetic message emailed to staffers read: “The United Nations Survey on Racism has been taken offline and will be revised and reissued, taking into account the legitimate concerns expressed by staff.”

The findings of the Geneva survey also revealed:

1. Among those who experienced or witnessed racism, a majority of staff indicated that racial discrimination affected opportunities for career advancement. A significant number of staff also indicated that racial discrimination manifested itself in the form of verbal abuse and exclusion from work events, such as decision-making, trainings, missions, assignments etc.

2. A large number who experienced or witnessed racial discrimination, harassment or abuse of authority indicated that they did not take any action. Lack of trust in the organization’s recourse mechanisms was cited as the most common reason. Many also stated that that they feared retaliation.

3. Respondents believed racism needed to be addressed in a number of different ways. These include accountability and zero tolerance, training and sensitization, greater transparency in hiring, broader diversity, and a more open dialogue on the issue.

In his message to staffers, Guterres also said: “I am committed to ensuring that our Secretariat benefits from the diverse perspectives, skill sets, and lived experiences of all our personnel. Addressing racism and racial discrimination is central to that effort. This will require robust investigative and accountability measures, coupled with persistence and sustained collective actions to enhance support and build trust.

In that spirit, “we launched an Organization-wide discussion on racism in our workplace in October 2020 under the leadership of the Task Force on Addressing Racism and Promoting Dignity for All. Today, I am pleased to share the Strategic Action Plan developed by the Task Force.”

The Plan outlines concrete actions to tackle racism in the workplace through accountability. It includes immediate actions to:

“I look forward to working with you in ensuring an inclusive and diverse workforce where everyone is respected and feels recognized and valued,” Guterres said.

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');

Categories: Africa

Road to COP27: Why Africa cannot be Complacent on Energy, Climate Change

Thu, 01/27/2022 - 11:05

Africa’s Practical Realities on Energy and Climate Change. Credit: United Nations

By Bitsat Yohannes-Kassahun
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 27 2022 (IPS)

A year ago, we welcomed 2021 with a sense of cautious optimism when the newly developed vaccines promised a shift in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. The focus turned towards building back better and doing things differently as many countries started to rethink and rebuild their shattered economies.

For African countries, however, the pandemic exposed the stark realities of global inequality. These countries scrambled to buttress their shattered food systems; they lacked industries to shift production to life-saving personal protection equipment even as young Africans were left out of schools because of lack of access to electricity and the internet, which made the shift to virtual learning almost impossible.

The pandemic revealed how Africa, despite its best efforts, was unprepared for some of the pressing emergencies of our times, be it the pandemic or the looming threat of climate change.

The UN Office of the Special Adviser for Africa is advocating for Africa to transition into 2022 with a sense of utmost urgency in building the continent’s resilience. We firmly believe that the foundational building blocks to this resilience lie in Africans’ access to reliable, affordable and sustainable energy.

For over a decade, the United Nations has touted energy as “The golden thread that connects economic growth, social equity, and environmental sustainability” to achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Energy is the key to unlocking Africa’s future envisioned in the African Union’s Agenda 2063.

Whether it is for economic transformation, ensuring food security, digitalizing education, revolutionizing health systems, building manufacturing and industrialization capacities, or sustaining peace by creating quality jobs and delivering services, no country in the world has achieved these ambitions without abundant and affordable access to energy.

Bitsat Yohannes-Kassahun is the Programme Management Officer at the UN Office of the Special Adviser for Africa.

Access to energy will make or break the continent’s effort to tackle climate change effects, including adverse weather events, water scarcity and significant threats to livelihoods.

However, Africans are getting the short end of the stick in the global race to combat climate change when it comes to energy.

First, the promised financing to invest in reliable energy systems and adaptation is trickling very slowly to where it is needed most.

Second, Africa could be handicapped if the global-level policies designed to limit greenhouse gas emissions and the proposed timelines toward net-zero emissions do not take the continent’s unique and nuanced circumstances into account.

Looking ahead at what 2022 holds for Africa’s quest for equitable energy access, it would be remiss not to reflect on three major events that took place in 2021 namely, the High-Level Dialogue on Energy (HLDE), the Food Systems Summit and the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 26).

Among other factors, energy remains vital to the full implementation of promises made at these events. In the roadmap that ensued after the HLDE, UN Secretary-General António Guterres set a target date of 2025 to ensure 500 million more people gain access to electricity and 1 billion more people gain access to clean cooking solutions.

The Food Systems Summit called for a transformation in global food systems “in ways that contribute to people’s nutrition, health and well-being, restore and protect nature, are climate neutral, adapted to local circumstances, and provide decent jobs and inclusive economies.”

The COP 26 outcome document calls for bold and strengthened goals by countries to reduce emissions through more ambitious Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) for COP 27.

What do these mean for African countries? These ambitious proposals require massive investments in capacity building, infrastructure development and regulations. Indeed, the amounts needed are much more than anything currently on the table.

While significant financial pledges have been made at these summits, African countries are wary of them being fulfilled, and rightfully so. Developed countries are still “progressing” towards delivering the $100 billion by 2020 climate finance goal (a broken promise) and now hope to reach it by 2023.

Added to previous failed promises, trust has further been eroded with a significantly varied and unequal pace of recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic evidenced, for example, in the mismatch between promised COVID-19 vaccine distribution pledges versus what has been delivered for African countries.

There are increasing calls for the private sector to fill these financing gaps. However, the private sector inherently operates on a profit-making model that differs from the public good model expected of the public sector. It requires tailored incentives, foolproof technologies that can guarantee certain profit margins, and risk minimization models for the sector to come in at a large enough scale.

In addition, the nuanced approach and extended timelines needed for Africa to achieve a balanced energy mix are getting lost in the shuffle. African countries should not be confined to limited options or cornered into untenable paths to energy access, especially with the call for public finance institutions to stop international support for the unabated fossil fuel energy sector in 2022.

The stakes are high for Africa to get it right, hence this urgent call to action towards building the continent’s energy systems. Energy presents a compelling multiplier effect for Africa’s renaissance. It is the cornerstone to ensuring food security by improving efficiency in food production, storage, transportation, and job creation through value addition.

Reductions in post-harvest losses, combined with improved cooking solutions, would have an added benefit of minimizing deforestation. Africa’s industrial revolution and achieving the African Continental Free Trade Area’s potential hinge on access to reliable, affordable, and adequate energy.

Finally, energy access is among the major building blocks to deliver services, adapt to climate risks and provide sustainable livelihoods, ensuring the continent’s peace, security and development for the next generation.

As we prepare for COP 27, we cannot be complacent. We must jointly advocate for Africa’s equitable future through a balanced energy mix and realistic timelines. We owe it to all Africans—past, present and future—to move beyond negotiating for the bare minimum.

Source: Africa Renewal, January 2022

Categories: Africa

Heatwave and Drought Hit South America’s Crops and Economy

Wed, 01/26/2022 - 13:26

Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Jorgelina Hiba
BUENOS AIRES, Jan 26 2022 (IPS)

Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, the three major agricultural producers in South America, are currently experiencing a prolonged period of drought and low water levels in their main rivers. This is severely impacting harvests, as well as river transport of important summer crops, with maize and soybeans the main casualties.

Although conditions may yet improve, the grain harvests of 2021 and 2022 could result in losses that will impact the economies of three countries, though experts say the potential magnitude is still difficult to foresee.

For soy, South America’s star grain, projections for possible losses caused by adverse weather in the countries vary. The most conservative forecasts come from the United States Department of Agriculture, which anticipates a 9.5 million tonne shortfall, while others forecast more acute losses, such as the Brazilian agency AgRural, which estimates a 20 million tonne reduction in production across the three countries.

Brazil is the world’s leading producer and exporter of soybeans and the world’s third largest producer of maize. Both grain crops are suffering this season due to the lack of rain in the country’s southern states, and will see smaller harvests than were expected a month ago

As for maize, it will be difficult for Argentina and Brazil to reach the output that they expected even a few weeks ago, according to a report by agribusiness consultant Marianela de Emilio. “The weather continues to put South America’s production projections on a tightrope, with planting area adjustments and potential yields down,” she explained.

Weather projections, at least until the end of March or early April, are not too encouraging for the entire region, as the La Niña climate pattern continues to impact South American weather, and contributes to drought in the three countries.

“As long as La Niña remains active, these patterns will continue, and projections are not optimistic for the short term, as we are still under the influence of a circulation pattern that inhibits rainfall in the Paraná basin area,” said Cindy Fernández of Argentina’s National Meteorological Service (SMN).

A trio in trouble

Forecasts already show what has been lost. Due to the drought, Brazil’s state-owned National Supply Company (Conab), which oversees agricultural planning, cut crop estimates for coarse grains that it had made in December. For soybeans, these were reduced from 142.8 million to 140.5 million tonnes, while for maize, the authority expects an output of 112.9 million instead of 117.2 million tonnes.

In Argentina, a lack of rainfall in the central-eastern region during the crop cycle forced estimates for the maize harvest to be cut by 8 million tonnes, from 56 million to 48 million tonnes, and soybeans from 45 million to 40 million tonnes. A heat wave hit the most fertile part of the country in the first weeks of January.

Meanwhile in Paraguay, the situation is no better, according to the country’s agriculture minister, Moisés Bertoni. “We were doing well until the last weeks of November, but December was very dry and in January very high temperatures arrived, which had an impact on soya, which is Paraguay’s main export crop,” he said.

The Rosario Stock Exchange (BCR) estimates that the drought will cut Paraguay’s expected soya production by 30%, which, along with a projected 5 million tonne shortfall in the maize harvest, could mean a loss of income of around US$4.5 billion for the nation. “Many producers have opted to feed the [damaged] maize to cattle, although we are still waiting for conditions to improve,” Bertoni added.

An unusual climate

This season’s difficulties aren’t entirely new, however. Paraguay, southern Brazil and northeastern Argentina cover a vast region of South America crossed by rivers that make up the Río de La Plata Basin, and have been experiencing a severe water deficit for almost three years, with two consecutive summers under the influence of La Niña.

According to Fernández of the SMN, it has been more than 20 years since normal or above-normal rainfall has been recorded in southern Brazil, with some exceptions. This means that the region has been suffering from a long-standing water deficit. In Argentina, the northeastern Litoral region has recorded below-normal rainfall for the last two years, particularly during the summer.

According to Paraguayan agronomist Luis Recalde, while this year’s event is not a completely unknown or new phenomenon, it is unusual in its magnitude and duration. “This above-average intensity and duration is partly attributable to climate change, and the likelihood for the future is that these events will recur more frequently,” he said.

For Recalde, the problems of the drought go beyond production and are socio-environmental. These range from losses in agricultural and livestock productivity “that will have lasting effects on the prices of basic food basket products” to the amplification of forest fires, which generate “great loss of biodiversity and damage to health in terms of air quality”.

River levels remain low

The rivers that make up the Río de La Plata basin, which covers an area of over 3 million km2, are experiencing extraordinarily low water levels, which began in the southern winter of 2019 and are still persisting. This phenomenon has various consequences for the human use of the rivers and their productive functions.

“The impacts of the lack of flow in the rivers are enormous and very diverse, but the most obvious for people are the shortage of water for consumption, and the rise in the prices of electricity, goods and fuels that are moved through the rivers or the energy generated in dams,” said Recalde.

For Paraguay, which transports part of its grain production by barge to the agro-export ports of Rosario in Argentina, the river’s low water level has become a problem for the state. “The barges go without a full load and that means a double cost for exports,” said Bertoni, the agriculture minister.

Argentina’s agro-industrial sector is also suffering millions of dollars in losses due to the Paraná river’s low water level. According to the Rosario Stock Exchange, in 2021 alone, some US$620 million were lost as ships were unable to fill their cargo to capacity due to drought-related production problems.

Economic impacts

The current drought has and will have severe economic impacts. The impact on the Argentine economy will be at least US$4.8 billion – equivalent to 1% of the country’s GDP – according to a report from the Rosario Stock Exchange.

“Even with the recovery of prices, the loss of net income for the producing sector already amounts to US$2.93 billion, which will result in less freight, less financial and intermediary services and less consumption,” the exchange’s report explains.

But the weather does not affect everyone equally. The stock exchange argued that the drought affects small and medium-sized producers in particular, many of them tenant farmers who no longer have their own fields. In rented fields, the result of the current agricultural campaign is already negative.

“There is a good chance that with the current costs, the producers who continue to pursue these activities will go back to making more soybeans and return to monoculture,” warned the BCR.

Carlos Achetoni, the president of the Federación Agraria Argentina, which represents medium and small producers across the country, said many are already in debt. “A bad harvest leaves many in a situation of bankruptcy, and this could force more producers out of the production circuit if help does not come from the state,” he said.

In Paraguay, according to Bertoni, agriculture accounts for 25% of GDP directly, a percentage that rises to 50% if one considers the activity it generates indirectly through services such as transport or agricultural machinery. “The impact of the drought in Paraguay is brutal, and even more so if we talk about soya, which accounts for 40% of our total exports,” he explained.

In Brazil, last year alone, the drought and the energy crisis it generated caused losses of some US$1.464 billion, according to the National Confederation of Industry (CNI).

Forecasts offer no relief

The outlook for weather across South America’s agricultural region does not look promising, according to the January–March 2022 quarterly forecast from Argentina’s meteorological service.

“There is an increased likelihood of warmer than usual average temperatures across much of the country. The regions with the highest probabilities in this category are the south of the Litoral, centre-south of [the provinces of] Santa Fe, Córdoba, Buenos Aires and La Pampa,” the report states. It is not good reading for these provinces, which are Argentina’s agricultural heartlands.

As for rainfall, the forecast shows that the Litoral is almost 50% more likely to see below-normal rainfall for this quarter of the year.

These conditions, said meteorological expert Cindy Fernandez, will extend across the whole of southern South America, including the large agricultural production area shared by southern Brazil, Paraguay and northeastern Argentina: “The area shares weather patterns, and is under the influence of La Niña for the second consecutive summer. The projections are not good, at least until the end of the summer.”

This article was originally published by ChinaDialogue

Categories: Africa

Future of Coral Reefs in the Time of Climate Change

Wed, 01/26/2022 - 08:53

Reef fish and corals in the waters of Seychelles archipelago. Credit: UNDP

By Geetika Chandwani and Ira Chandwani
NEW JERSEY, Jan 26 2022 (IPS)

Coral reefs are one of the world’s most biologically diverse and productive ecosystems. They provide abundant ecological goods and services and are central to the socio-economic and cultural welfare of coastal and island communities – throughout tropical and subtropical ocean countries – by contributing billions of dollars to the local and global economies, when combined with tourism and recreation.

Coral reefs also play a vital role in the protection of shorelines, fisheries, biodiversity and unique ecosystems. Building magnificent reefs, tiny coral polyps have developed an incredible ability to calcify and are the most prolific mineralizers on the planet.

They form immense structures like the Great Barrier Reef, which is a world heritage site. And in doing so, they make more minerals than any other organism and have adapted specialized structures that are well worth imitating.

Biomimicry is the concept of the imitation of models, systems, and elements of nature to solve complex human problems. It is an efficient, innovative, and sustainable way compared to conventional techniques, and hence it has scope in the future of sustainable habitats.

Biomineralization expert Brent Constantz of Stanford University was inspired to make a new type of cement for constructing buildings by copying how corals build reefs.

Making this cement through biomimicry removes carbon dioxide – a greenhouse gas that causes global warming, as noted by Carla A. Wise (12 March 2010) in “Biomimicry inventors tackle environmental problems” in https://www.hcn.org/issues/42.5/inspired-by-nature.

Corals have evolved chemical defenses to protect themselves from predators. These substances are important sources of new medicines that are being developed to treat cancer, arthritis, human bacterial infections, Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, and other maladies.

Further research is being developed for potential medical treatments, nutritional supplements, pesticides, cosmetics, and other commercial products. Unfortunately, the adverse effect of human activities adversely impacts upon these valuable maritime resources.

Among the most critical of threats are improper fishing activities (bottom trawling), land-based sources of pollution (such as sewage discharge, microplastic pollution), climate change, ocean warming and acidification, and habitat destruction through rapacious overfishing with China and Taiwan among the chief culprits.

Corals reefs are the foundation of tropical marine ecosystems that exist in a symbiotic relationship with algae and plankton that keep the world’s fish stocks sustained. Corals obtain their energy by consuming compounds derived from photosynthesis by the microorganisms inhabiting coral tissue.

This symbiosis is very sensitive and subject to subtle environmental changes, such as increased ocean acidity and rising temperature. When excessively stressed, the colorful algae are expelled from the corals, causing the corals to bleach and eventually die.

The most significant threat to coral reefs ever documented was the high temperature-related coral bleaching caused by the El Nino Southern Oscillation of 1997-98. Recovery of affected reefs has been primarily through the regrowth of surviving colonies.

Since then, significant coral recruitment has been observed, raising hopes for the recovery of several reefs if other major threats do not transpire in the near term.

Nevertheless, threats to coral reefs continue due to human activities including overfishing, destructive fishing practices, pollution, human settlement and development, mining, commercial shipping industry and rampant tourism in tropical coastal regions.

The effects of overfishing and bottom trawling on structurally complex habitats and fauna have been compared to the impacts of forest clear-cutting. As nets, beams, trawl doors, chains, and dredges pass over the seabed, the sediment surface and a considerable proportion of the vital habitat of animal and plant life are disturbed, sometimes permanently.

China’s distant water fishing where the fishing boats often use bottom trawling, dragging a net across the seabed entailing significant bycatch (including juvenile fish, sharks, seabirds, marine turtles), damages the seafloor, and irrevocably harms coral reefs. Trawling can also disturb areas where fish breeding stocks congregate, which artisanal fishing communities have traditionally used to identify critical fishing grounds.

Data on the dimensions of various destructive fishing practices (such as blast fishing, anchor damage, and the use of poisons), coral regrowth estimates, and time graphs of fish diversity, all reveal the full extent of all current destruction of coral reefs and their habitat.

Many countries have laws prohibiting blast fishing, but they are not fully implemented unfortunately, and are challenging to enforce in remote areas. The sound waves from the explosions of fish bombs are trapped underwater, making it difficult to detect from the surface. Effective management of Marine Protected Areas (MPA) is key to patrolling illegal fishing areas.

In northern Tanzania, illegal blast fishing poses a critical danger to its coral reefs. Blast fishing was banned in Tanzania in 2003 under the revised Fisheries Act. Such fishing practices carry a penalty however, such illegal practices provide fisherfolk an easy way (short cut) to boost their catch, especially in countries where enforcing maritime laws can be difficult.

A spot check by Anadoly News agency revealed that illegal fishing practices continue unabated in parts of the region as noted by Kizito Makoye (31 August 2021) in “Blast fishing by Tanzanian fishermen endangers marine life in Indian Ocean” in https://www.aa.com.tr/en/africa/blast-fishing-by-tanzanian-fishermen-endangers-marine-life-in-indian-ocean/2351382.

Dynamite fishing destroys both the food chain and the corals where fish hatchlings nest and grow in safe ecosystems. Without healthy coral reefs, these ecosystems and the fish that live within them die off. It kills the entire food chain, including algae, plankton, large and small fish, and the juveniles that do not grow old enough to breed.

Sustaining the needs of local fisherfolk requires careful examination, given the implications for their livelihoods and socioeconomic wellbeing. One study found that decline in the shark fin trade among communities in eastern Indonesia, led fisherfolk to pursue high-risk activities, including blast fishing, illegal transboundary fishing, and transnational crimes – as noted by the California Environmental Associates in “Trends in Marine Resources and Fisheries Management in Indonesia: A 2018 Review” in https://www.ceaconsulting.com/casestudies/indonesia-report/.

Given the complexity of these socio-economic conditions, additional research is required to identify sustainable and practical fisheries management measures that can reduce pressure on the most vulnerable fishing communities and thereby protect coastal livelihoods. Adverse conditions arising from a cycle of poverty results in resource degradation, and if pushed too hard, coral reefs may eventually lose their ability to bounce back even when economic conditions improve.

According to a World Bank report, 56% of the coastline of Benin, Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal, and Togo is subject to average erosion of 1.8 meters per year. Benin’s erosion rates are exceptionally high, with an average loss of 4 meters per year.

Beyond the economic cost, coastal degradation takes lives and destroys livelihoods – as noted in the World Bank publication (14 March 2019) in “West Africa’s Coast: Losing Over $3.8 Billion a Year to Erosion, Flooding and Pollution” in https://www.worldbank.org/en/region/afr/publication/west-africas-coast-losing-over-38-billion-a-year-to-erosion-flooding-and-pollution

Today, with many nations and communities practicing sustainable ecological programs, human perceptions of nature, the environment, climate and the oceans is changing. Undoubtedly, humans are an integral part of creation, nature, and the environment and therefore developing a new concept of environmental ethics is essential for a sustainable future for the planet.

There are projects that range from education programs, plastic pollution control, Crown of Thorns Starfish (COTS) eradication, coral nurseries, renewable energy development, and responsible stewardship.

The Global Fund for Coral Reefs (GCF) is a 10-year, USD 625 million blended finance vehicle consisting of a grant window, designed to incubate a pipeline of investible projects, and an investment window which GCF is funding as noted by GCF staff (11 Nov 2021) in “Global Fund for Coral Reefs brings together grant and investment windows at GCF COP26 event” in https://www.greenclimate.fund/news/global-fund-coral-reefs-brings-together-grant-and-investment-windows-gcf-cop26-event

Marine biologists vigilantly monitor coral reefs with the help of scuba divers and by deploying autonomous or human-operated underwater vehicles to capture visual data on coral reefs. There are research materials on the effects of oceanographic variables, such as sea temperature, turbulence, salinity, and nutrients feeding coral reefs and their influence on coral growth, reproduction, mortality, assimilation, and adaptation.

Coral plantations are costly and time-consuming, and species introductions are often very challenging. King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), located on the shore of the Red Sea, offers a unique combination of wonderful access to coral reefs and world-class research laboratories.

KAUST is working to identify heat-resilient corals and crossbreed them with coral populations elsewhere to increase their heat tolerance – as noted by Marta Vidal (17 Jan 2022) in Deutsche Welle (DW) News in “Could the Red Sea’s heat-resilient corals help restore the world’s dying reefs?” in https://www.dw.com/en/could-the-red-seas-heat-resilient-corals-help-restore-the-worlds-dying-reefs/a-60389699.

The CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing system is also helping scientists understand, and possibly improve, how coral reefs respond to the environmental stresses of climate change.

The economic value of coral reefs is rarely appreciated. Gains and losses in numbers activate a sense of realization when confronted with risky decisions related to the environment. Governments, key decision-makers, and individuals working together must advocate more of the actual value of coral reefs when used sustainably.

This will help specifically in restructuring aid and sustainable-conservation efforts to tackle causes of coral reef decline. The United Nations General Assembly has declared 2022 as the International Year of Artisanal Fisheries and Aquaculture (IYAFA 2022).

This timing from the world’s leading multilateral agency can serve as an excellent opportunity to promote the socioeconomic importance of coral reefs and the maintenance of vibrant coastal communities steeped in the culture of the peoples of the sea.

Gabriel Grimsditch, a marine ecosystem expert at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), said, “Apart from urgently cutting carbon emissions, humans can design a network of effective and equitable marine protected areas or locally managed marine areas to protect coral reefs”. Provide reference Combatting Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU) Fishing is one of the United Nations critical Sustainable Development Goals – SDG 14 is a problem of grave global concern.

At risk is a significant source of protein for hundreds of millions of people and the health of coral reefs. Stop Fish Bombing, an NGO registered as a charity in Hong Kong, has developed underwater bomb location technology in collaboration with the Californian tech company ShotSpotter to adapt their gunshot location technology to help detect and alert law enforcement and ultimately eradicate destructive fishing practices.

This innovative technology testing by the NGO Stop Fish Bombing must extend to all continents. Local announcements of such innovations can allow administrations to create alerts.

Coral reefs form barriers to protect the shoreline from waves and storms – where coral reef structures buffer shorelines against erosion and floods, helping to prevent loss of life and property damage.

Shoreline protection is necessary to retain and rebuild natural systems (such as cliffs, dunes, wetlands, and beaches) and to protect man’s artifacts (buildings, infrastructure, etc.). Working together with governments and law enforcement coastal communities can significantly improve the operational efficiency of enforcement activities and legal processes, which has the potential to have a global impact.

Geetika Chandwani is finishing her M.A. at the School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University, New Jersey and her daughter Ira Chandwani is a high school student in New Jersey.

Excerpt:

“A lack of respect for human life from conception to natural death and a lack of respect for the environment are both signs of a person claiming power over something that is not theirs to control”- Pope Francis

Categories: Africa

Battle for Palestine: & the Day When David Felled Goliath with a Stone

Wed, 01/26/2022 - 08:34

Credit: United Nations

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 26 2022 (IPS)

When Israeli Ambassador Gilat Erdan made an unusual presentation before the Security Council last week displaying a large rock, which he claimed, was hurled at Israeli vehicles in the Occupied Territories, a reporter at a UN press conference asked whether Palestinians will be given the right of reply— by displaying in the Security Council chamber an Uzi sub- machine gun or a bulldozer deployed by Israeli armed forces against civilian demonstrations.

Stephane Dujarric, the UN Spokesperson, provided a diplomatically cautious response: “I’m not going to get into that… it’s not for me to speak.”

During a debate on January 19, Ambassador Erdan sharply criticized the “Security Council’s bias, and in particular, the Council’s utter disregard for Palestinian rock-throwing terrorism”.

To make it clear that rocks are life-threatening weapons, Ambassador Erdan presented the Council with a rock to illustrate what was happening on the roads of Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem, asking the participants “how they would react if a similar rock were thrown at their vehicles”.

In 2021, he said, “Israelis suffered 1,775 rock attacks by Palestinian terrorists in addition to thousands of missiles, shootings, stabbings, and car ramming attacks”.

But for obvious reasons the rising Palestinian body count went unmentioned—nor Israeli military attacks on civilians.

Asked for his comments, Ian Williams, President of the Foreign Press Association in New York, told IPS having no sense of perspective is career plus for any Israeli representative at the UN.

“But Erdan seems to have forgotten his claimed history. King David felled Goliath with a stone and Erdan invites legitimate comparison between the Palestinian kids and the Israeli Goliath, poor and defenseless protected only by drones, missiles, planes and tanks from the rapacious stone throwers”.

Israeli ambassadors have been getting away with this risible posturing for too long, he added.

“It is time other delegates punctured their pretensions and challenged them – or just audibly hooted in derision”, declared Williams, a former President of the UN Correspondents’ Association (UNCA) and author of UNtold: The Real Story of the United Nations in Peace and War.

Dr Stephen Zunes, Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco, and coordinator of the program in Middle Eastern Studies, told IPS he “doesn’t recall stones ever being brought into a debate (in the UN Security Council), though there have certainly been props used before” (i.e., US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s vial of anthrax, when he addressed the Security Council in 2003 on information and intelligence he believed showed the possibility of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which eventually proved false).

“What I do find interesting is that the reporter chose to highlight the absurdity of a representative of a government– engaged in a foreign belligerent occupation which has been repeatedly cited for war crimes against the besieged population– would expect to be taken seriously in claiming they were justified in their repression out of fear of rocks,” said Dr Zunes, who is an authority on the politics of the UN Security Council and has written extensively on the UN’s most powerful political organ.

A demolished home in Beit Sira village, Ramallah, in the central West Bank. Credit: UNOCHA

The UN’s Middle East envoy, Tor Wennesland, told the Security Council January 19 “urgent action is required to prevent further deterioration of the economic, security and political situation across the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

Dr Ramzy Baroud, a Palestinian author and editor of The Palestine Chronicle, told IPS Erdan was clearly aiming at creating a distraction from the horrific events transpiring in Sheikh Jarrah and throughout occupied East Jerusalem at the moment.

He said the Salhiya family’s home was demolished January 19, rendering 15 people, mostly children, homeless. A few days earlier, a heart-wrenching event took place, when members of the Salhiya family threatened to set themselves ablaze as they agonized over the imminent loss of their family home.

“These events are being watched closely, first by Palestinians but also by people around the world. If the momentum of Israeli destruction continues, chances are we could witness another popular uprising. Erdan’s spectacle at the UN on Wednesday is a desperate act of preemptive propaganda to sway members of the international community from criticizing Israel,” he noted.

“Moreover, criticizing Palestinian weapons, however primitive or destructive, engages Israel in a misleading conversation that creates a moral equivalence between the occupier and the occupied, the colonialist and the colonized.”

Whether Palestinians use a stone, a gun or a clenched fist to resist and to defend themselves, Dr Baroud argued, their resistance is morally and legally justifiable. Israel, on the other hand, like all other military occupiers and colonialists, has neither a moral nor a legal argument to justify its oppression of Palestinians, the destruction of their homes and the killing of their children.

“Judging by the growing solidarity with Palestinians at all fronts, it is clear that Erdan’s sorry display is another exercise of political futility,” he declared.

Meanwhile, the overwhelming Israeli firepower that continues to be unleashed on Palestinian militant groups in the longstanding battle in the Occupied Territories is perhaps reminiscent of the Algerian war of independence (1954-1962) when France, the colonial power, used its vastly superior military strength to strike back at the insurgents with brutal ferocity.

While France was accused of using its air force to napalm civilians in the countryside, the Algerians were accused of using handmade bombs hidden in women’s handbags and left surreptitiously in cafes, restaurants and public places frequented by French nationals living in occupied territory.

In one of the memorable scenes in the 1967 cinematic classic “The Battle of Algiers,” which re-created Algeria’s war of independence against France, a handcuffed leader of the National Liberation Front (NLF), Ben M’Hidi, is brought before a group of highly-partisan French journalists for interrogation.

One of the journalists asks M’Hidi: “Don’t you think it is a bit cowardly to use women’s handbags and baskets to carry explosive devices that kill so many innocent people [in cafes and night clubs]?”

Responding with equal bluntness, the Algerian insurgent retorts: “And doesn’t it seem to you even more cowardly to drop napalm bombs on unarmed villages on a thousand times more innocent victims?”

“Of course, if we had your fighter planes, it would be a lot easier for us,” he adds. “Give us your bombers, and you can have our handbags and baskets.”

Like the Algerian insurgents, Palestinian militants were not fighting on a level battle field – as the Israeli military keeps unleashing its massive firepower on a virtually defenseless population in the Occupied Territories.

On the looks of it, it was not a level battle field but an uneven killing field.

“Perhaps it would be interesting to see the roles reversed: the Palestinians with American fighter planes and battle tanks and the Israelis with homemade rockets,” says one Arab diplomat, striking a parallel with the Algerian insurgency.

Besides F-16 fighter planes, the Israelis also used a wide array of U.S. weaponry, including Apache helicopters, M60 battle tanks, armored personnel carriers and heavy artillery. Israel’s prodigious military strength and its economic stability were attributed largely to unlimited US assistance and political support from American politicians.

In a statement released January 21, the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) said news in occupied East Jerusalem is rapidly escalating following Israeli police demolishing a Palestinian family’s home in Sheikh Jarrah on January 18 at around 3 AM local time. Along with demolishing the Salhiya family’s home, Israeli police arrested and beat several members of the family, including a 9-year-old-girl. Israel has even banned the family from returning to the neighborhood for 30 days.

Several members of Congress have spoken out against the recent home demolition in Sheikh Jarrah. Congresswoman Marie Newman tweeted, “15 Palestinians were left homeless after Israeli police evicted them in the middle of the night and demolished their homes in Sheikh Jarrah. This is one of more than 1,000 evictions or demolitions in the area since 2016. This must end.”

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez expressed her dismay about Israel’s ongoing human rights abuses, including the recent killing of 80-year-old US Palestinian citizen Omar Abdalmajeed Assad, who was arbitrarily detained, beaten and, according to eyewitness, left unresponsive by Israeli soldiers while driving to his home in the occupied West Bank.

This article contains extracts from a newly-released book on the United Nations titled “No Comment – and Don’t Quote Me on That.” The link follows: https://www.rodericgrigson.com/no-comment-by-thalif-deen/

Categories: Africa

Youth Have the Spirit to Change Trajectory of Leprosy, says Yohei Sasakawa

Tue, 01/25/2022 - 16:31

Alice Cruz-UN, Special Rapporteur on eliminating discrimination against persons affected by leprosy and their family members, told the youth that their participation was crucial to removing legal discrimination. Her young son Leo asked the global audience not to forget leprosy. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

By Joyce Chimbi
Nairobi, Kenya, Jan 25 2022 (IPS)

Yohei Sasakawa said the youth have the power to change the world, and their participation in removing the stigma and myths about leprosy is crucial to the campaign to end the disease.

Sasakawa, the WHO Goodwill Ambassador for Leprosy Elimination and Chairman of the Nippon Foundation, was speaking at a webinar held in the run-up to World Leprosy Day on January 30. He engaged youth from Africa, Asia, and Latin America in an online discussion dubbed ‘Raising Awareness about Leprosy – Role of Youth’.

“The history of the world is changed by young people. The spirit of young people is essential in the fight against leprosy. Speak out and let the world understand leprosy better. Use online tools at your disposal to tell the world not to forget leprosy,” Sasakawa told participants.

“The younger generation has joined our efforts. Our goal is to hear from you, work with you and take action with you towards a day when there will be zero stigma and discrimination against those affected by leprosy.”

At the heart of discussions were highlights from three regional forums, stimulating conversations about leprosy and its related challenges and efforts to build collaboration and networks to combat an ancient disease at risk of being forgotten.

The webinar was organized against the backdrop of the global ‘Don’t Forget Leprosy’ campaign by the Sasakawa Leprosy Initiative. The initiative strategically links the WHO Goodwill Ambassador for Leprosy Elimination, Sasakawa Health Foundation, and the Nippon Foundation towards achieving a leprosy-free world.

Stigmatized, forced to migrate, denial of education, abandonment of children affected by leprosy, difficulties for those affected by leprosy, and women finding marriage partners – were highlighted in the discussions. Leprosy is even recognized as grounds for divorce in some countries.

These were only a few of the many challenges faced by those affected by the disease, speakers said.

Yohei Sasakawa, the WHO Goodwill Ambassador for Leprosy Elimination and Chairman of the Nippon Foundation, told youth from Africa, Asia, and Latin America that they had the means to change perceptions about leprosy. They were educated and knew how to use social media to benefit leprosy-affected communities. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

“We need collective efforts to address the disease itself and, at the same time, the rampant stigma associated with leprosy. Today, the second generation of those affected by leprosy still find difficulties getting a job because of the stigma,” Sasakawa said.

He said efforts to address leprosy are two-pronged, engaging global and well-respected figures and grassroots actors for community-level engagement.

Participants heard that youths learning about leprosy and sharing that it is curable could accelerate progress towards a world free from medical and social problems related to leprosy.

Youth participation could significantly help dispel myths rooted during the many centuries in which leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease, was incurable.

The online discussion followed three preparatory regional youth forums held in December 2021 and January 2022. The engagement was in anticipation of a Global Youth Forum on the theme, ‘Don’t Forget Leprosy’, organized by the Sasakawa Leprosy Initiative slated for March 2022.

Dr Michael Chen from HANDA, China, told participants how the first Asia Youth Forum engaged young people in a virtual meeting to discuss the reduction of stigma and discrimination faced by people affected by leprosy.

He said six Asian countries, including Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, and Nepal, participated. Discussions included the need to engage the younger generation in a world free of stigma and discrimination.

Similarly, Marcos Costa, from Morhan in Brazil, spoke of the first Latin American and Caribbean Virtual Meeting of young people affected by leprosy, their family members, and supporters.

The meeting, he said, sought to engage young people and their families in a dialogue centered on the challenges faced by those affected by the disease and to explore policy solutions to the problem.

“In Brazil, 45 percent of new leprosy cases were not diagnosed in 2020 because of COVID-19. The pandemic has compounded challenges facing young people as many of them are unemployed due to the stigma attached to people affected by leprosy,” he said.

Likewise, Tadesse Tesfaye from ENAPAL in Ethiopia summarized discussions during the first-ever Africa Youth Forum, with attendance from nine African countries, including Kenya, Nigeria, and Mozambique.

Tesfaye said the forum explored “how stigma and discrimination manifest upon persons affected by leprosy and their families and the need to build national, regional and international alliances to address social and medical challenges related to the disease.”

Within this context, Alice Cruz, the UN Special Rapporteur on eliminating discrimination against persons affected by leprosy and their family members, reminded the younger generation that leprosy was also a political factor and their voices were needed.

She called for diversity, new faces, ideas, innovations, and the engagement of young people and families affected by leprosy.

Cruz stressed that young people’s contribution to enforcing the human rights of people affected by leprosy should be encouraged. Their contribution was crucial to reforming the more than 150 laws and regulations in various parts of the world that discriminate against persons affected by leprosy.

Her young son, Leo, finalized her address calling for a world free of all forms of discrimination and one where leprosy was not forgotten.

Chen and Costa further drummed support for the engagement of young people especially through social media to raise awareness of leprosy and challenge long-standing stereotypes.

“We need to cultivate the potential of young people, provide sufficient funding to young people, and a supportive platform for young people to learn, grow, communicate and solve problems,” Chen said.

Dr Takahiro Nanri, the Sasakawa Health Foundation executive director, moderated a session between the Goodwill Ambassador and young participants, including Costa, Rahul Mahato from ATMA Swabhiman in India, and Joshua Mamane from IDEA in Niger, who is also from a family affected by leprosy.

The discussion stressed the need to engage young people in the fight against leprosy actively.

Sasakawa said youth participation would usher in a new and much-awaited era in global and grassroots efforts to fully tackle leprosy as medical, public health, and human rights issues.

Categories: Africa

Our Global Food Systems Are Rife with Injustice: Here’s How We Can Change This

Tue, 01/25/2022 - 12:05

Food systems can disenfranchise marginalised and vulnerable communities worldwide. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By External Source
Jan 25 2022 (IPS)

The pandemic – alongside growing threats from climate change, widespread malnutrition, economic instability and geopolitical conflict – has heightened problems with the ways we produce, distribute and consume food. And it’s made clear the urgent need to make global food systems more just.

An example of modern food injustice is that if you’re poor or an ethnic minority in the US, you’re less likely to have easy access to healthy food. This situation, worsened by COVID-19, has been termed food apartheid. It’s also often the case that corporations, not local growers, control the food produced by communities: taking money out of their hands.

If this is to change, it’s important to understand who wins within existing food systems and, more importantly, who loses by being pushed to the sidelines and losing out on access to healthy food.

To do this, those who design food systems need to consider how different factors that determine if someone is marginalised – like gender, age, disability, ethnicity and religion – can combine or intersect, making some people more vulnerable.

For example, international development programmes by governments and charities often focus on helping women because they are considered vulnerable. But this risks overlooking different causes of poverty including class and race issues, marginalising other vulnerable groups.

In Tanzania, this kind of oversimplification when deciding who receives resources has been found to reinforce existing power hierarchies within communities, meaning that those who had little social power to begin with – such as poorer women – don’t get to benefit from the resources provided.

Including people in the processes designed to help them is vital to ensure systems are improved. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

In contrast, research shows that development projects tend to do better when they take local community norms into account. For example, in Bangladesh, men and women from Hindu and Muslim communities work in wetlands, but each group plays a different role. Researchers found that community wetland management projects did better when people worked in accordance with their traditional roles according to both gender and religion.

Decolonising research can also encourage us to identify and challenge power, privilege and inequality in research. For example, it’s usually scholars from developed countries, rather than their counterparts in developing countries, who set research agendas and determine how money is spent

An intersectional approach helps us to move beyond simplistic categories like the “vulnerable woman”, instead drawing attention to the unequal flows of power that shape access to resources. This should be embedded at the deepest level within food science to ensure marginalised and vulnerable people are at the forefront of change.

Power dynamics

It’s also vital to understand how power dynamics structure decisions within food systems, whether that’s within households or inside government institutions.

When tackling issues faced by women and girls in Burundi, CARE International worked with a network of local male gender equality champions to analyse power systems, reflect on gender roles and encourage equal, active participation by women in community decisions. Outcomes included improvements in agricultural productivity as well as increasing women’s empowerment and gender equality.

Creating inclusive, safe spaces for marginalised voices is also critical. Creative approaches, such as theatre, dance and music, provide a powerful medium through which to achieve this.

For example, Roktim: Nurture Incarnadine, an Ananya Dance Theatre
production, explores feminist food politics through dance. Their performance highlights issues around sustainability and justice in food systems, and demonstrates the power of community action.

Injustice

Historical injustice has a large part to play in the ongoing failure of food systems. For example, when it comes to global food systems, we need to understand how colonialism has shaped food processes and how it continues to do so today.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the colonial government in Zambia promoted maize production over that of indigenous crops like millet and sorghum. Nowadays, maize production continues to receive substantial support, with almost 80% of the government’s annual agricultural budget spent on producing maize. Consequently, maize – which provides limited nutrients – dominates the Zambian diet, contributing to chronic food insecurity in the region.

Understanding how to better design food systems requires researchers to take into account how colonisation helped shape them in the first place. This allows us to acknowledge how colonial processes of exploitation and destruction, such as the transatlantic slave trade, are reflected in modern maize-dominated food systems across Africa.

And research from across the world is frequently only published in English, limiting the accessibility of that information within communities where English isn’t spoken.

Traditionally, science has seen itself as a process of impartial observation. Yet all research reflects cultural biases, and as researchers we are profoundly influenced by our own values. Becoming aware of how our scientific knowledge is created is a key step in achieving justice.

From the co-development of agricultural technologies to the design and launch of food programmes, researchers have a huge impact on what kind of science gets prioritised – and who benefits from it.

Harriet Elizabeth Smith, Research Fellow in Climate Risk, University of Leeds; Ruth Smith, PhD Researcher in Agriculture, University of Leeds, and Todd Rosenstock, Senior Scientist, Agriculture and the Environment, World Agroforestry (ICRAF)

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

Categories: Africa

The Rise of Religious Extremism & Anti-Muslim Politics in Sri Lanka

Tue, 01/25/2022 - 08:40

Muslims at a mosque in Sri Lanka. Credit: Financial Times, Sri Lanka

By Alan Keenan
BRUSSELS, Jan 25 2022 (IPS)

On 28 October, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa appointed the militant Buddhist monk Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara to head a presidential task force on legal reforms, shocking many in Sri Lanka and beyond. Gnanasara is the public face of the country’s leading anti-Muslim campaign group, Bodu Bala Sena (Army of Buddhist Power, or BBS). He is widely accused of inciting inter-communal violence, including two deadly anti-Muslim pogroms in June 2014 and March 2018.

Convicted of contempt of court for a separate incident, Gnanasara was sentenced to six years in prison but received a presidential pardon from Rajapaksa’s predecessor, Maithripala Sirisena, in his final months in office. The act of clemency came after intensive lobbying by nationalist monks and an upsurge of anti-Muslim sentiment in the aftermath of the 2019 Easter bombings, a series of attacks on churches and tourist hotels carried out by a small group claiming allegiance to the Islamic State, or ISIS.

Observers across the Sri Lankan political spectrum, including some Buddhist nationalists, expressed dismay – at times, outrage – that the president could name someone whose disrespect for the law and hostility to non-Sinhala Buddhist minorities are a matter of public record to head a commission ostensibly designed to prevent “discrimination” and ensure “humanitarian values”. Critics have called the appointment “irrational” and even “incomprehensible”.

In fact, it is anything but. The Rajapaksa government is deeply unpopular, including among large sections of its core Sinhala Buddhist constituency, and desperate to divert public attention from its economic mismanagement.

There is thus a clear if deeply unfortunate logic for it to bring back to the fore the best-known proponent of a theme that was key to getting the president elected: fear of Muslims as a source of “religious extremism”.

While it was in one sense surprising to see the open affirmation of Rajapaksa’s active support for the controversial monk after many years of distancing himself from Gnanasara, tight links between Sri Lankan government officials and the Buddhist clergy are nothing new. The 1978 constitution gives Buddhism the “foremost place” in the country’s religious landscape and the state the duty to “protect” it.

There is nothing comforting in this history, however. The Sinhala Buddhist majoritarian nature of the Sri Lankan state – ie, the extent to which the state represents and enforces majority interests at the expense of the rights of other communities – has had disastrous effects on the country’s ethnic and religious minorities.

The state’s transition from being structurally discriminatory to openly hostile toward Tamils (who are Hindu or Christian) – a process fed by Sinhala politicians’ warnings about the threat the community allegedly posed – ultimately led to three decades of devastating civil war.

During that period, from 1983 to 2009, terrorist attacks by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam provided some objective grounds for Sinhalese fears, reinforcing the narrative that the majority community was under threat. Now, there is growing reason to fear that this pattern may be repeating itself in the Sri Lankan state’s interactions with its Muslim citizens.

Credit: Sunday Times, Sri Lanka

The Rise of Anti-Muslim Politics

In November 2019, Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s successful campaign for Sri Lanka’s presidency made much of the slogan “one country, one law”, which had gained popularity after the 2019 Easter bombings. Its ambiguity was useful: at one level, it could be interpreted as merely asking for uniform treatment of all citizens and resonated with voters angry at the impunity with which politicians and their powerful supporters are able to violate the law.

But its discriminatory implication was also obvious from the start, hinting at a need to “protect” the Buddhist nature of state and society by eliminating the separate rules and treatment that many Sinhalese believe Muslims use to gain economic and political advantages.

Many Sinhalese have for years held the view that Sri Lankan Muslims are more concerned with advancing their own interests than working for the larger national interest. Even during the civil war, when Muslims remained overwhelmingly loyal to the state and played a critical role in fighting the Tamil insurgency, one regularly heard complaints in Sinhalese (as well as Tamil) circles that they were exploiting the conflict for personal and collective economic benefit.

Because Muslim lawmakers held the balance of power in parliament between the two major Sinhala-dominated parties, they were commonly accused of using their “kingmaker” role to gain undue advantages for their co-religionists.

By the early 2000s, many Sinhalese had also begun to express discomfort at the increasing numbers of Muslims, especially women, wearing religious attire and the growing focus among Muslims on practices meant to demonstrate religious piety. Many interpreted this trend as Muslims deliberately distancing themselves from the majority.

With the arrival of BBS ultra-nationalists on the political scene in late 2012 – whose message was amplified by the smaller militant Sinhalese groups Sinhala Ravaya and Ravana Balakaya – the public portrayal of Sri Lankan Muslims rapidly took on more overtly hostile forms. (The decade earlier had seen organised Buddhist activism, at times violent, directed against the growing number of evangelical churches; pressure on Christian evangelicals continues today, though not on the scale of anti-Muslim campaigns.)

At the height of its influence, in 2013 and 2014, BBS dominated news coverage and helped set the political agenda through rallies, speeches and vigilante actions aimed at containing the threat Muslims’ alleged “extremism” posed to Sri Lanka’s Sinhala Buddhist character. The range of allegations promoted by BBS and like-minded organisations, often through online hate speech, was broad and shifting.

They claimed that population growth meant that Muslims would eventually overtake the Sinhalese majority; that Muslim-owned businesses were secretly distributing products to sterilise Sinhalese in order to keep their numbers down; and that the system of halal food labelling was encroaching on the religious rights of others and covertly funding Islamist militants.

More generally, conservative religious practices adopted by increasing numbers of Muslims in a quest for greater piety were read by ultra-nationalists as evidence of growing “extremism” that threatened other communities. These charges were based on either outright falsehoods or malicious misinterpretations of complex social and religious developments among Sri Lankan Muslims.

The anti-Muslim rhetoric helped set off inter-communal violence late in the presidency of Gotabaya’s brother Mahinda Rajapaksa (2005-2015). These years saw a series of attacks on Muslim-owned businesses (with many alleging that Sinhala business rivals were backing the attackers) and disruption of political meetings held by anyone daring to challenge the Buddhist militants, against the backdrop of mass rallies denouncing the alleged threat posed by Muslims’ “extremism”.

In a June 2014 speech in the town of Aluthgama, Gnanasara declared to a large crowd: “This country still has a Sinhala police. A Sinhala army. If a single Sinhalese is touched, that will be the end of them all [Muslims]”. Minutes later, hundreds of his supporters marched through a nearby Muslim neighbourhood, sparking two days of devastation that left three Muslims and one Tamil security guard dead. Sinhala rioters, many of them brought in from outside the area, targeted mosques and Muslim-owned shops and homes for arson and destruction. The police were widely accused of standing by or even assisting the rioters.

Despite government denials, many independent observers told Crisis Group at the time that the Mahinda Rajapaksa administration was actively supporting the BBS and other anti-Muslim campaigns. They suspected the government of executing an electoral strategy designed to consolidate the Sinhala vote behind the government, which projected itself as the defender of Sinhalese Buddhist identity. The appearance of Gotabaya Rajapaksa, then defence secretary, at a BBS event in March 2013, and his known connections with senior monks associated with the group, fuelled the speculation.

More tangible evidence of state backing lay in the fact that police gave BBS and like-minded groups permission to hold rallies at a time when government critics were not allowed to do so. Police took no apparent action, moreover, to prevent or investigate repeated vigilante raids on Muslim-owned shops or violent efforts to silence critics of militant Buddhist organisations.

Nor was anyone prosecuted for any of these crimes. Multiple sources told Crisis Group that Senior Deputy Inspector General of Police Anura Senanayake, who worked closely with Gotabaya at the time, led efforts to persuade victims not to press charges. Following Mahinda’s defeat in the January 2015 election, officials announced they had evidence of close ties between Buddhist militants and military intelligence units, confirming what Muslim community leaders had previously told Crisis Group.

With the 2015 election of President Maithripala Sirisena, representing a united opposition determined to end the Rajapaksas’ rule, the strategy of demonising Muslims for electoral ends seemed to have failed. Sirisena’s yahapaalanaya (good governance) coalition won in part through strong Muslim and Tamil backing based on its promises to end the BBS-led reign of terror.

But while the new administration stopped tacitly encouraging anti-Muslim violence and hate speech, it lacked the political courage – and possibly the necessary support within the police and intelligence agencies – to crack down on Buddhist militant groups.

After a brief lull in anti-Muslim activism, 2016 and 2017 saw a series of small attacks on Muslim businesses by unknown assailants, encouraged by sustained hate speech campaigns in traditional and social media, backed by effective local networks.

In February 2018, Buddhist militants in Ampara damaged a mosque and Muslim-owned shops as the police looked on, following social media rumours that a Muslim-owned restaurant had injected sterilising chemicals into Sinhala customers’ food. The following month, four days of anti-Muslim rioting shook the central hill district of Kandy, sparked by the death of a Sinhala man assaulted weeks earlier by four Muslim men.

Gnanasara visited the victim’s family and later joined other militant leaders to address a crowd of protesters just hours before the riots began. Videos later appeared to show local politicians from the Rajapaksa family’s party, the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna, taking part in the mayhem. Two people were killed, many injured, hundreds of Muslim-owned houses and shops destroyed, and at least a dozen mosques damaged. The violence was severe enough for President Sirisena to declare a state of emergency, during which the army eventually brought things under control.

President Sirisena, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and senior ministers all condemned the violence and promised tough action in response. But despite hundreds of arrests, including of several prominent Buddhist activists, no one was held accountable for these incidents, which included well-documented attacks on Muslims by security forces, with eyewitnesses telling Crisis Group of numerous cases of complicity between the police and Buddhist rioters.

In August 2018, courts eventually convicted Gnanasara of contempt of court and criminal intimidation of a prominent Sinhala human rights activist. Many hailed his six-year sentence as a landmark, though Gnanasara has faced no jail time for attacks on or other actions against Muslims, and most of the slow-moving criminal cases against him in lower courts have now been dropped.

The partial victory over impunity was, however, short-lived. In 2019, in the aftermath of the horrific Easter Sunday suicide attacks, the Sri Lankan state for the first time adopted policies that directly discriminated against the Muslim minority. With tensions running high, President Sirisena’s government used the post-bombing state of emergency to prohibit the niqab, or full face covering, invoking national security concerns (the ban was rescinded in August 2019 when the emergency was lifted).

It also enacted new rules for government employees that, in effect, barred the full-length abaya, worn by many Muslim women teachers, especially in the Eastern Province (these were later withdrawn after being challenged by Sri Lanka’s Human Rights Commission). Anxious to salvage his sinking political fortunes as the November 2019 presidential election drew near, Sirisena then pardoned Gnanasara.

The nationalist monk immediately leapt into the political fray, joining his peers in protests demanding the resignation of Muslim ministers Rishad Bathiudeen and Azath Salley, accusing them – to date without convincing evidence – of involvement in the Easter attacks.

For many Sinhalese, especially Christians, as well as some Tamils, the Easter attacks seemed to confirm earlier warnings of a growing threat from “Islamic extremism”. Authorities responded to these fears in the attacks’ aftermath with what appeared to be the criminalisation of Muslims’ everyday practices.

Police arrested more than two thousand Muslims under emergency and terrorism laws, in all but a few cases with no evidence of links to the bombings or any threatening behaviour; they picked up many merely for having a Quran or other religious materials in Arabic script at home.

After the Easter bombings, the previously failed electoral strategy of shoring up Sinhala support through vilification of Muslims gained new traction. Gotabaya announced his candidacy just days after the attacks, promising to eradicate new forms of religiously motivated terrorism just as he had previously destroyed the Tamil Tigers when he was defence secretary.

At the polls, Gotabaya received overwhelming support from Sinhala voters, including many Catholics who had not previously backed him. The new president himself seemed to acknowledge the strategy’s success, declaring in his inaugural speech given in front of a Buddhist shrine: “I knew that I could win with only the votes of the Sinhala majority”.

Growing Tensions

Within months of taking office, Gotabaya deepened the state’s hostility toward Muslims on several fronts. His administration used COVID-19 lockdowns and ad hoc village-level quarantines to harass the community, which pro-government media outlets accused of spreading the virus. More damaging was the government’s decision on 1 April 2020 to ban burial of anyone even suspected of having died of the disease.

Announced the day after the first Muslim victim died, the decision was justified by a claim – quickly rejected by the World Health Organisation and Sri Lankan experts – that the virus could spread from interred remains through the groundwater. The policy, which stayed in place for nearly a year, had a profoundly cruel effect on Muslim families, who were forced to cremate their loved ones’ bodies against their religious convictions.

It was rescinded on 26 February, after a global advocacy campaign that sought to mobilise the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and member states of the UN Human Rights Council, which was due to assess Sri Lanka’s human rights record weeks later. Even after the ban was lifted, however, Sri Lanka has allowed burials in only one remote location, heavily guarded by the military – a limitation that continues to impose hardships on Muslims, as well as the smaller number of Christians and Hindus who choose to bury their dead.

On 12 March, the government also announced new regulations for “deradicalisation” of those “holding violent extremist religious ideology”. Issued under the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act, the rules allowed the defence ministry to detain anyone accused of causing “acts of violence or religious, racial or communal disharmony or feelings of ill will or hostility between different communities or racial or religious groups” for up to eighteen months, without any judicial process or oversight.

Human rights lawyers and Muslim leaders quickly filed suit in the Supreme Court, which in August put the measures on hold until it decides the case. Even if the court quashes the regulations, however, the government’s clear intention to establish a “deradicalisation” program leads some to believe it may enshrine similar powers in revisions to the counter-terrorism law it is presently preparing.

The regulations were issued without evidence that any significant number of Muslims in Sri Lanka posed a threat to security or would benefit from a program along the contemplated lines. They did, however, offer the government a face-saving way to release some of the hundreds of Muslims arrested after the Easter attacks who are still detained, in some cases without charge, by putting them into a “deradicalisation program”.

Holding large numbers of Muslims in special camps for another year or more, as the proposed deradicalisation program would do, however, would risk contributing to a collective sense of humiliation and anger that could itself push some toward “violent extremist religious ideology”. As Muslim activists regularly warn, the risk is particularly high as long as the government’s approach leaves no room for the possibility that Buddhists could promote their own forms of violent extremism.

Overlapping enquiries into the Easter bombings have, meanwhile, been politicised in ways that appear aimed at keeping alive fears of Muslims as a source of insecurity. As part of its broader attack on the independence of police and courts, Gotabaya’s government replaced the entire team looking into the bombings soon after coming to power, arrested the chief investigator, Shani Abeysekera, on what appear to be trumped-up charges, and demoted other officers. Another key investigator fled the country fearing arrest.

The administration has also refused to act on the key recommendations of a separate commission of enquiry – appointed by President Sirisena – into the bombings. These included, among others, prosecuting Sirisena, who is now a key government ally, and banning BBS, whose anti-Muslim incitement the commission found had contributed to the bombers’ turn to violence in a process of “reciprocal radicalisation”.

In what seems to be an attempt at maligning Muslim leaders, the Gotabaya administration also detained or charged a number of prominent Muslim personalities, seemingly without credible grounds. Ex-minister Bathiudeen faces terrorism and extremism charges – despite having been cleared of links to the Easter bombings by the presidential commission of enquiry.

On 2 December, a court released another Muslim lawmaker, Salley, after he had spent eight months in jail, citing lack of evidence. The prosecution of human rights lawyer and political activist Hejaaz Hizbullah for his supposed links to the Easter terrorist attacks also appears to be groundless, relying in part on coerced testimonies.

The government’s approach has angered Sri Lanka’s Catholic leadership, which has accused it, and the president himself, of covering up the “masterminds” behind the Easter bombings. Church leaders suggest that the government has been protecting Sirisena and refusing to follow up on evidence uncovered by the presidential commission that implies military intelligence officers had contact with some of the bombers before and on the day of the attack.

Backed by Pope Francis, Colombo’s archbishop Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith has called for an international investigation. Following an October online meeting that aired church criticisms, the police summoned one of the cardinal’s top advisers for three days of questioning.

A Dangerous Slogan

Stung by growing criticism of its handling of the Easter bombings investigation, and facing a grave economic crisis that has badly damaged its popular support, including among Sinhala Buddhists, the Rajapaksa government signalled with Gnanasara’s appointment that it is returning to the “one country, one law” agenda that helped get it elected.

Given the concept’s vagueness, however, and the deep contradiction between it and the explicit privileges that Buddhism enjoys under the constitution, no one is sure what Gnanasara’s task force will actually do. While it can, in principle, look into the practices of all religious and ethnic groups, few observers doubt that it will focus its attention on the Muslim minority.

It is expected to consider reforms to the madrasa education system – Muslim leaders have submitted proposals to the government – as well as government plans to regulate activities in mosques, monitor the import and translation of the Quran and other Arabic texts, ban the niqab and burqa, and outlaw cattle slaughter (an industry dominated by Muslims and often criticised by Buddhist activists).

Gnanasara’s task force also seems certain to weigh in on long-discussed changes to the Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act, a new version of which the cabinet approved in August. Over the past years, Muslims and others have bitterly debated possible reforms to the Act, with complicated overlap between human rights and feminist critiques of the legislation as patriarchal and oppressive and Buddhist nationalist criticisms of Muslims having their own marriage and family law.

Sri Lankan law enshrines distinct traditions of family law for Sinhalese in Kandy and Tamils in Jaffna, as well as for Muslims, but this Act has come in for particular criticism on account of allowing polygamy, setting no minimum age for marriage, requiring no explicit consent from the bride and establishing all-male courts to hear divorce cases.

But Gnanasara’s involvement in government efforts to alter it will likely weaken the leverage of Muslim feminist reformers pushing to strengthen women’s marriage and divorce rights and strengthen resistance to change from the all-male communal leadership, which has argued that feminist criticisms of the law, in effect, endorse Buddhist militant portrayals of Islam as a backward religion.

It remains to be seen, however, how far the government will allow or encourage Gnanasara to go. On the one hand, Buddhist nationalists appear to see “one country, one law” as a call for “a single law” that gives pre-eminence to Buddhist institutions while denying those of other religions official recognition.

Some top officials clearly see things the same way: it was particularly revealing that Gnanasara’s appointment was followed three weeks later by a series of large-scale Buddhist religious ceremonies in the sacred city of Anuradhapura, featuring the president, cabinet and top military brass alongside the Mahanayakes, Sri Lanka’s most powerful Buddhist clerics.

The two days of ceremonies were grand displays of the government’s project of more fully integrating state, military and Buddhist clergy on the basis of an overtly Sinhala nationalist political vision. On the other hand, in a December meeting, Foreign Minister G.L. Peiris assured ambassadors from Muslim countries that Sri Lanka would “continue to retain” “personal laws specific to Muslim, Kandyan and Tamil communities”.

Moreover, to date, Colombo has carefully calibrated its anti-Muslim policies so as to keep the backing of its hardline Buddhist nationalist supporters and win a degree of international support for helping “counter violent extremism”, while maintaining good relations with economic and political allies in the Muslim world.

The government may as yet have no precise agenda for the task force, but given Gnanasara’s charisma and theatrical skills, he is a potentially powerful, and dangerous, asset for reframing political debate, deepening divisions between Tamils and Muslims and possibly even provoking a new round of anti-Muslim unrest. He has been central in propagating Buddhist nationalist ideology over the last decade.

There is little that those outside of Sri Lanka, concerned about the rule of law, religious harmony and political stability, can do directly to address these dynamics. Foreign partners of the Sri Lankan state, can, however, be more careful about not inadvertently strengthening them.

Following the Easter bombings, a range of new programming by foreign donors has focused on counter-terrorism, preventing “violent extremism” and building “social cohesion”. In the words of one activist, though, “There is a lot of foreign funding to the government for ‘countering violent extremism’ but it only targets one faith. … No one dares tell the government to ‘rehabilitate’ Gnanasara or other extremist monks”.

Until such programming finds – or creates – the space to name and challenge the violent history, rhetoric and exclusionary political projects of all communities, it is more likely to perpetuate, rather than resist, the anti-Muslim ideology that today poses the greatest risk of destabilising violence in a country that has yet to recover from decades of brutal civil war.

The link to the original article: “One Country, One Law”: The Sri Lankan State’s Hostility toward Muslims Grows Deeper.

Alan Keenan is Senior Consultant, Sri Lanka, at the International Crisis Group in Brussels.

Source: International Crisis Group

Categories: Africa

Climate Inaction, Injustice Worsened by Finance Fiasco

Tue, 01/25/2022 - 07:40

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Jan 25 2022 (IPS)

Many factors frustrate the international cooperation needed to address the looming global warming catastrophe. As most rich nations have largely abdicated responsibility, developing countries need to think and act innovatively and cooperatively to better advance the South.

Climate action
The world is woefully offtrack to achieving the current international consensus that it is necessary to keep the global temperature rise by the end of the 21st century to no more than 1.5°C (degrees Celsius) above pre-industrial levels two centuries ago.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

The last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report warns that temperatures are then likely to exceed 2.2°C. Many climate scientists fear many underlying interactions and feedback effects are still little known or poorly understood. Hence, they have not been factored enough into current projections.

Although the threat of global warming was scientifically recognized almost half a century ago, there has been much foot ragging since. Contrary to widespread belief, industrialized nations – the earliest and biggest greenhouse gas emitters –have actually held back much more adequate responses to the climate threat.

Although the UN’s 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro secured the international community’s commitment to sustainable development, actual progress since has been modest at best. Undermining multilateralism – particularly since the end of the Cold War around the same time – has certainly not helped.

By effectively killing the Kyoto Protocol, the US has undermined the UN system and other multilateral initiatives not in its own interest since the first Cold War’s end. Consequently, most other signatory rich nations have not even tried to meet the Kyoto Protocol obligations they had signed up to.

Unsurprisingly, then Vice-President Al Gore – who presided over the US Senate’s 95-0 vote against the Kyoto Protocol – did not stress climate change in his 2000 presidential campaign. His public advocacy against global warming only began after his political ambitions ended with his controversial loss to George W. Bush.

Likewise, President Obama did little against global warming during his first presidential term – e.g., at the 2009 Copenhagen UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of Parties (COP) – before the US actively shaped the 2015 Paris Agreement.

But, unlike Kyoto, the Paris deal is voluntary – i.e., not binding. Nonetheless, climate action was dealt yet another blow when President Donald Trump withdrew the US in early 2017 before President Joe Biden brought the US back in 2021.

Climate finance
To induce developing countries to accept binding new obligations at the 2009 Copenhagen COP, the European Commission President, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown all pledged US$100 billion of climate finance annually – far from enough, but still a decent start.

But not even half this grossly inadequate, originally European commitment has actually been delivered. Other rich countries have generally given even less than the Europeans. All this is far short of what developing countries need to cope, worsened by requiring more aid to donor country export sales.

Most concessional climate finance since has been to mitigate climate change, with much less for adaptation. Worse, almost nothing has gone to help the typically impoverished victims of global warming for their cumulative ‘losses and damages’!

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 13 seeks to combat climate change and its impacts. Meanwhile, current global warming continues to worsen the effects of accumulated greenhouse gas emissions by industrialized countries.

In December 2015, the Paris COP reached agreement on a range of voluntary promises. Yet, climate scientists agree that neither the binding Kyoto Protocol nor the voluntary Paris Agreement can keep global warming by the end of the century under 1.5°C.

Economic damage to developing countries due to global warming so far is currently assessed at more than double the better documented adverse impacts on rich nations. But its victims get little help adapting to the daunting consequences of climate change, let alone ‘compensation’ for irreversible ‘losses and damages’.

Meanwhile, ostensible climate finance book-keeping involves considerable ‘creative accounting’. Thus, such resources have been exaggerated in various ways – e.g., by citing numbers for ‘blended finance’ and other dubious arrangements.

Thus, official ‘overseas development assistance’ or aid funds have been abused to subsidize ‘greenwashing’ public-private partnerships – e.g., by ‘de-risking’ profit-seeking private investments presented to the public as ‘climate-friendly’.

Climate justice
More recently, ‘climate justice’ is increasingly being demanded, especially of Western nations – instead of mere ‘climate action’. Although the climate action approach claims to treat all countries equally, by ignoring existing inequalities and disparities, climate action inevitably deepens them.

Invoking justice implies equitable actions are needed to redress the unequal implications of climate actions – e.g., reducing energy generation and use – for the poor and the rich – both people and countries. Thus, without addressing the need for equitable sustainable development, climate action often worsens inequities.

Hence, while claiming to offer seemingly fair solutions, some climate action measures – e.g., simply raising carbon prices, and thus, fuel costs for all – will be unfair in impact. Instead, climate justice measures must equitably address global warming and other climate change challenges.

The challenge – from a sustainable development perspective – is to address climate change while improving living standards equitably, especially for the worse off. This requires widespread generation and use of affordable renewable energy – instead of using fossil fuels – to slow global warming.

But markets are not going to do so on their own. Hence, novel, including hybrid means and much more affordable transfer of relevant technologies are needed to rapidly promote renewable energy use and ecological adaptation to global warming without adversely affecting the worse off.

Categories: Africa

Community Organization and Solidarity in Peru Tackle Hunger in Pandemic

Mon, 01/24/2022 - 17:44

Fortunata Palomino is an experienced community organizer from Carabayllo and general coordinator of the Network of Soup Kitchens of Metropolitan Lima, which includes 2,247 soup kitchens. She is critical of the neglect by the authorities and hopes that women will be trained, certified and incorporated into the labor market with respect for their rights. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, Jan 24 2022 (IPS)

It’s nine o’clock in the morning and Mauricia Rodríguez is already peeling garlic to season the day’s lunch at the Network of Organized Women of Villa Torreblanca, one of more than 2,400 solidarity-based soup kitchens that have emerged in the Peruvian capital in response to the worsening poverty caused by the partial or total halt of economic activities in the country due to COVID-19.

Up to Mar. 16, 2020 – when the government of then President Martin Vizcarra declared a state of national emergency in an attempt to curb the pandemic – Mauricia made a living selling snacks and meals at a school, while her husband drove a rented motorcycle cab, with which he provided local transportation services. But from one day to the next, they were left without their livelihood.

They were not alone. In this Andean country of 33 million people with solid macroeconomic fundamentals, the pandemic exposed structural flaws that cause deep inequality gaps. For example, seven out of 10 workers were working in the informal sector as of 2019, lacking pensions, health insurance and other labor rights, and with no possibility of saving money, like Mauricia and her husband.

As a result of the health emergency measures and the pandemic more than six million people became unemployed in 2020, most of them in the informal sector in the areas of commerce and services, where women play a predominant role. In Latin America, 34 million jobs were lost that year, according to the International Labor Organization.

In addition, according to a report by the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics (INEI), poverty had climbed 10 percentage points to 30 percent, pushing another 3.33 million people into a precarious situation, who could no longer afford the basic basket of goods, estimated at 360 soles (92 dollars) a month.

Families in impoverished neighborhoods in the capital were among the hardest hit.

“The already existing poverty was aggravated by the pandemic. We saw people getting desperate, they had nothing to eat,” Esther Alvarez, a lawyer in charge of advocacy at the non-governmental CENCA Urban Development Institute, which has been working for more than 40 years in poor neighborhoods on the outskirts of Lima, such as those in the San Juan de Lurigancho district, told IPS by telephone.

Soup kitchens spontaneously emerged thanks to food donations and community organization based on solidarity, reciprocity and a humanitarian and rights-based approach, combining efforts with the local parishes, to address the growing hunger in areas invisible to the authorities, in the country’s capital itself.

In Lima, where a third of the national population is concentrated -almost 10 million inhabitants- poverty climbed from 14.2 percent to 27.5 percent, and it is estimated that with the crisis another 250,000 people have fallen into extreme poverty, unable to afford a basic food basket of 196 soles (49 dollars) a month.

Alvarez explained that in alliance with other civil society institutions, they organized the soup kitchens that emerged in different districts of Lima, creating a permanent online communication space, which continues to this day, while promoting the formation of the Network of Soup Kitchens of Metropolitan Lima.

The network and online communication space enable interaction between the organizers of the soup kitchens, mainly women, who have emerged as leaders in the fight against hunger and for the right to food, issues that should be addressed by the authorities.

Three women community organizers whose solidarity and efforts contribute to the food security of impoverished families in the area stand outside their local soup kitchen. From left to right, Mauricia Rodríguez, Fortunata Palomino and Elizabeth Huachilla. During the visit by IPS, the menu, cooked with firewood because of the lack of cooking gas, consisted of rice with panamito beans and fried bonito, a fish rich in Omega 3. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

Solidarity-based community efforts for a better life

The Network of Organized Women of Villa Torreblanca soup kitchen emerged in the upper part of the district of Carabayllo, located on the slopes of hills in the northern part of the capital. A few days after the national pandemic emergency was declared, it began to operate in the wooden house of Elizabeth Huachillo.

A native of Ayabaca in the northern highlands of Peru, she came to Lima at the age of 15 to find work and today, 40 years old and the mother of Lizbeth, 17, and Tracy, seven, she is the driving force behind the soup kitchen.

Huachillo drove a motorcycle taxi to support her family, but as a result of the lockdown she was unable to work and they were going hungry. “We had nothing to eat and I began to investigate how to create a soup kitchen. I looked up Señora Fortunata, who is a well-known and respected leader in the district, and together with her we launched it on Mar. 23,” 2020, she says while showing IPS the fish that will be served in today’s lunch.

Fortunata Palomino is 57 years old. From her native Ayacucho – a central Andean region devastated by the 1980-2000 internal armed conflict – she was sent to the capital by her parents when she was still a child. She went through many difficult situations to get ahead and put a roof over her head. She has four daughters who have managed to become professionals and she is proud she was able to make it possible for them to have an education.

While she and her husband ran their household, she became involved in different organizations to promote the rights of local people, including nutrition and a life free of violence for women and children.

She is familiar with the district and the plight of its people, especially in the shantytowns built on the hillsides where the houses are made of wood, families have no drinking water or sanitation and the roads are unpaved. “The authorites are absent here,” she complained.

She feels like a survivor when she thinks back to March 2020 and the terrible uncertainty, anxiety and fear that swept through the poorest families in her neighborhood.

“We were the first to start up a soup kitchen in Carabayllo, and many more followed suit, until there were 137,” she said.

In order to coordinate and strengthen their activities, they formed the Network of Soup Kitchens of Metropolitan Lima, of which she was elected general coordinator. As of November 2021, a total of 2,468 soup kitchens were registered there, feeding 257,000 people a day.

“Here in our soup kitchen we served 250 lunches a day at the peak of the crisis. Now we make 120 because some people have managed to return to their jobs as collectors, drivers or street vendors,” said Elizabeth Huachillo.

The solidarity price is two soles (51 cents). But nothing is charged in special cases, such as the elderly or people with tuberculosis. When the women find out someone has COVID, they leave the meals in plastic containers on their doorstep. And children orphaned by the death of their parents due to COVID-19 also receive free meals.

According to the Ministry of Women and Vulnerable Populations, in 2021, there were 98,000 minors orphaned by the pandemic.

“We are doing what the authorities should be doing because we could not remain indifferent to such desperation. Despite our efforts, it has been a struggle to achieve legal recognition of the soup kitchens so they can access budget funds; the law was passed last year and now it is time for it to be implemented,” Huachillo said.

With the political instability that Peru has experienced in recent years, four governments have already managed the pandemic, and each one has made some achievements in coordination with civil society organizations and the Food Security Board of the Municipality of Lima, a multisectoral body that brings together social organizations, non-governmental institutions and the State.

Esther Álvarez of CENCA said the challenges for this year include achieving the implementation of the food emergency law and the allocation of a budget for the soup kitchens to address the food emergency, and to get the government to approve a regulatory framework that incorporates them into a Zero Hunger Program.

For her part, Fortunata Palomino is thinking about the post-pandemic world and suggests that the government should train and certify the women currently running the soup kitchens in various activities so that they can join the formal labor market in the future. “We need our own incomes with jobs that respect our rights,” she said.

Categories: Africa

Investing in a Child’s Education is Investing in all of Humanity, Says ECW’s Yasmine Sherif Welcoming Germany’s €200 million Donation

Mon, 01/24/2022 - 16:05

Students attending class at the Souza Gare school in the Littoral region, Cameroon. The school hosts displaced children who have fled the violence in the North-West and South-West regions. The school is supported by ECW. Credit: ECW/Daniel Beloumou

By Busani Bafana
Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, Jan 24 2022 (IPS)

Education lifts millions out of poverty, but because the COVID-19 pandemic wiped out gains made in recent decades, a holistic approach to providing education in crises is crucial, says German Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development, Svenja Schulze.

“Education is a human right and can provide stability and protection for children and adolescents in times of crisis. Yet education is often one of the first services to be suspended, and among the last to be resumed,” Schulze noted following Germany’s announcement of €200 million (US$228.3 million) in new, additional funding to Education Cannot Wait (ECW), a United Nations global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crisis.

“Through Germany’s additional contribution to Education Cannot Wait on the International Day of Education, we intend to make a strong call for more international solidarity to support the education of crisis-affected girls and boys worldwide,” Schulze told IPS. She other countries with strong economies, such as G7 partners and private donors to invest in and prioritize education in times of crisis.

German Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development, Svenja Schulze today announced €200 million (US$228.3 million) in new, additional funding to Education Cannot Wait. Credit: Stefanie Loos

Germany’s contribution brings ECW’s Trust Fund to $1.1 billion. Over $1 billion has been leveraged through ECW in-country programmes, making ECW a US$2 billion global fund in just a few years since its establishment in 2016. Appropriately the announcement was made on the International Day of Education with the theme: ‘Changing Course, Transforming Education’.

“This new funding brings Germany’s total contributions to ECW to over €318.8 million ($362.7 million),” ECW’s Director, Yasmine Sherif, told IPS.

“It is a shining example of multilateralism being both bold and results-driven. With this new multi-year announcement, Germany becomes ECW’s number one donor, and Germany becomes the leading donor to commit to multi-year funding,” Sherif says.

IPS reporter Busani Bafana spoke with Schulze and Sherif following the announcement of the new funding. He asked them about the impact of global investments in realizing inclusive and equitable quality education.

Here are excerpts from the interview:

IPS: Why is it important to Germany to invest in multi-year resilience programmes in education through Education Cannot Wait – particularly for vulnerable children and adolescents impacted by armed conflicts, forced displacement, climate-induced disasters, and protracted crises?

Schulze: Germany is committed to the guiding principle of the 2030 Agenda, Leave No One Behind. The international community has agreed to focus on the most vulnerable and reach those who are currently the furthest behind.

Today, one in four school-aged children and adolescents worldwide lives in a country affected by crises. ECW’s multi-year resilience programmes are an appropriate response to the educational needs of crisis-affected children because they bridge the divide between short-term humanitarian interventions and longer-term development cooperation. Education Cannot Wait – the name ECW points out so clearly: now, with COVID-19, we can see the serious consequences of disrupted education even in our own country. For children and youth living in countries affected by crises, the situation is much worse. They need our ongoing assistance, and we need their talents in these challenging times.

With today’s new, additional contribution to ECW, Germany has become ECW’s number one donor – congratulations! What is it about ECW’s mandate and its work with other strategic donors and partners in delivering quality education for crisis-affected children and youth that appeal to Germany?

Schulze: In order to resolve today’s education challenges, we need multi-stakeholder partnerships. For Germany, ECW is a ground-breaking initiative because it brings together public and private actors in humanitarian aid and development cooperation. By combining innovative short-term and medium-term financing, ECW strengthens the international aid architecture to deliver quality education in emergencies.

Germany is also a strong partner of the Global Partnership for Education (GPE). Last year, we launched the Support Her Education (SHE) Initiative with a pledge of €100 million towards GPE’s Girls’ Education Accelerator. The focus on girls’ education is a priority for us in development as we know that girls can be agents of change for entire societies – just think of Greta Thunberg and her outreach for climate change. As a former Environment Minister, I am very aware of this. So, this money is an investment with a high return. And we will continue to strengthen international partnerships and improve coordination amongst development partners.

IPS: Today, ECW and BMZ announced a major contribution to the ECW global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises. Do you have a specific plan for this significant contribution?

Yasmine Sherif, Director of Education Cannot Wait, pictured in Afghanistan during a recent visit, welcomed the donation saying it would give children living in protracted crises an opportunity to be educated.
Credit: ECW/ Omid Fazel

Sherif: The money will be pooled into the ECW Global Trust Fund and delivered via our Multi-Year Resilience Programmes (MYRPs). In all, ECW supports MYRPs in 24 countries along with fast-acting First Emergency Responses (FERs) in 35 countries worldwide. Since ECW was launched, a total of 42 emergency and protracted crisis countries have benefitted from the fund’s investments. Our goal is to scale up our responses to reach even more children and youth with the safety, hope, and opportunity of quality education. This significant and generous contribution by Germany will enable ECW to scale up its added value and results in achieving results-driven and impact-yielding multi-year investments based on the humanitarian-development nexus in crisis-impacted countries and to ensure sustainability, local empowerment, and the Grand Bargain for those left furthest behind.

Education is an inherent human right, but it remains inaccessible to millions of crisis-affected children and adolescents. How successful is ECW in ensuring that this human right becomes a reality?

Global leaders have committed to providing universal and equitable education by 2030 as outlined in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (SDG4). ECW supports our global efforts to achieve these goals, specifically for the 128 million children and adolescents whose education has been disrupted in their young lives due to conflict, forced displacement, and climate disasters.

Decades of progress in achieving SDG4 have been pushed aside by the multiplying impacts of armed conflicts, forced displacement, climate-induced disasters, COVID-19, and protracted crises. According to UNESCO, as many as 258 million children and youth don’t attend school worldwide. Two out of three students are still impacted by full or partial school closures from COVID-19. Girls are particularly at risk, with estimates projecting that between 11 million and 20 million girls will not return to school after the pandemic. And over 617 million children and adolescents cannot read or do basic math. That’s more than the total population of Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States combined.

As you mention, ECW has a $1 billion funding gap for education in emergencies and protracted crises. How do you plan to close this gap?

Sherif: In just five years, ECW has met and surpassed its goals for resource mobilization. Part of our mission is underscoring the value of education in achieving our global goals for sustainable development. For every $1 spent on girls’ education, we generate approximately $2.80 in return. Making sure girls finish secondary education could boost the GDP of developing countries by 10 percent over the next decade.

As we’ve seen from Germany’s generous contribution today, key public donors are rising to this challenge and prioritizing education in their official development or/and humanitarian assistance. Now it’s time for others to follow suit, and we certainly hope Germany’s leadership will inspire them to do so.

The private sector needs to step up too. In a world where football teams sell for billions of dollars and billionaires fly themselves into space, how is it possible that we are not finding the resources to send every child to school?

Investing in a child’s education means investing in all of humanity. It is time to transform our perception of the world, our priorities, and how we shoulder our responsibility as a human family. I encourage world leaders and the private sector to join ECW’s movement to support crisis-affected children to realize their human right to quality, inclusive education.

ECW recently approved a $91.7 million Multi-Year Resilience Programmes investment in Bangladesh, Burundi, Lebanon, Libya, Pakistan, and Sudan. How many children are being reached through these investments?

Sherif: We recently announced a total of S$91.7 million in catalytic grant financing for new and expanded Multi-Year Resilience Programmes in Bangladesh, Burundi, Lebanon, Libya, Pakistan, and Sudan. All but Bangladesh are new multi-year investments, accelerating ECW’s growing expansion into countries impacted by protracted crises. These new multi-year investments announcements add to the multi-year catalytic grant announced earlier in 2021 for Iraq.

Across all countries, the catalytic grants aim to reach over 900,000 vulnerable children and adolescents, of whom 58 percent are girls. Half of the children and adolescents targeted are refugees or internally displaced, and 13 percent are children with disabilities.

These grants aim to leverage an additional US$250 million worth of public and private donors’ funding aligned to the multi-year programmes in these countries to reach a total of 3.3 million crisis-affected children.

You have traveled to schools where children access education in a safe environment for the first time. What impressed you most about the children, the teachers, and the parents?

Sherif: The vastness of human potential is what impresses me most when I meet with children, teachers, and their parents in places like Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lebanon, and beyond. If you teach a girl to read, she can lift up a nation. If you teach a boy to write, he can build a better world. In these places – truly the world’s toughest contexts – all that these children want is the opportunity to go to school, to learn, to grow, to thrive. When we deny their human right to an education, we are denying our own humanity. We can, and we must all do better for them, by working together.

We can still say Happy New Year … what is the biggest challenge for ECW at this stage in January 2022?

Sherif: Together with governments, UN agencies, civil society organizations, public donors, the private sector, and local communities, we need to transform the way we think about delivering education in emergencies and protracted crises. No single stakeholder can do it alone. At this year’s Transforming Education Summit, convened by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, we will ask ourselves how we can avert a generational catastrophe and rethink our education systems and financing to make good on our commitments and promises.

Are you optimistic that the world can achieve the SDGs, particularly SDG #4?

Sherif: Yes, I am optimistic by nature, but also realistic as this will require a global moonshot to achieve the SDGs by the 2030 deadline. We can do it. But every nation, every government, every person truly needs to come together to commit to them and deliver on our promises.

Categories: Africa

Up to 70% of Children in Developing Countries to Be Left Unable to Read?

Mon, 01/24/2022 - 11:21

Credit: Shafiqul Alam Kiron/IPS

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Jan 24 2022 (IPS)

“Unless we take action, the share of children leaving school in developing countries who are unable to read could increase from 53 to 70 percent.”

The alarm bell has been rung by the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, in his message on the International Day of Education, marked on 24 January 2022.

In fact, some 1.6 billion school and college students had their studies interrupted at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic — and it’s not over yet, said Guterres, adding that today, school closures continue to disrupt the lives of over 31 million students, “exacerbating a global learning crisis.”

“This generation of students now risk losing 17 trillion US dollars in lifetime earnings in present value, or about 14 percent of today's global Gross Domestic Product (GDP), as a result of COVID-19 pandemic-related school closures.”

The UN Education, Sciencia and Culture Organisation (UNESCO), the World Bank and the UN Children Fund (UNICEF) have quantified the economic dimension of this drama.

Giant losses

“This generation of students now risk losing 17 trillion US dollars in lifetime earnings in present value, or about 14 percent of today’s global Gross Domestic Product (GDP), as a result of COVID-19 pandemic-related school closures.”

The State of the Global Education Crisis: A Path to Recovery report, released in December 2021, shows that in low- and middle-income countries, the share of children living in Learning Poverty – already 53 percent before the pandemic – could potentially reach 70 percent given the long school closures and the ineffectiveness of remote learning to ensure full learning continuity during school closures.

According to the three world bodies’ report, simulations estimating that school closures resulted in significant learning losses are now being corroborated by real data.

And it provides some specific examples: regional evidence from Brazil, Pakistan, rural India, South Africa, and Mexico, among others, show substantial losses in maths and reading.

Analysis shows that in some countries, on average, learning losses are roughly proportional to the length of the closures. However, there was great heterogeneity across countries and by subject, students’ socioeconomic status, gender, and grade level.

“For example, results from two states in Mexico show significant learning losses in reading and in maths for students aged 10-15. The estimated learning losses were greater in maths than reading, and affected younger learners, students from low-income backgrounds, as well as girls disproportionately.”

Inequities of education, exacerbated

Learning to read is a milestone in every child’s life. Reading is a foundational skill, the report explains, adding that all children should be able to read by age 10. Reading is a gateway for learning as the child progresses through school – and conversely, an inability to read constraints opportunities for further learning.

“Beyond this, when children cannot read, it’s usually a clear indication that school systems aren’t well organised to help children learn in other areas such as maths, science, and the humanities either.”

And although it is possible to learn later in life with enough effort, children who don’t read by age 10 – or at the latest, by the end of primary school – usually fail to master reading later in their schooling career.

Even before COVID-19 disrupted education systems around the world, it was clear that many children around the world were not learning to read proficiently, according to the report. Even though the majority of children are in school, a large proportion are not acquiring fundamental skills.

“Moreover, 260 million children are not even in school. This is the leading edge of a learning crisis that threatens countries’ efforts to build human capital and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).”

No human capital

Without foundational learning, students often fail to thrive later in school or when they join the workforce.

“They don’t acquire the human capital they need to power their careers and economies once they leave school, or the skills that will help them become engaged citizens and nurture healthy, prosperous families. Importantly, a lack of foundational literacy skills in the early grades can lead to intergenerational transmission of poverty and vulnerability.”

As a major contributor to human capital deficits, the learning crisis undermines sustainable growth and poverty reduction.

To spotlight this crisis, the World Bank and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics jointly constructed the concept of Learning Poverty and an accompanying indicator.

“Learning poverty means being unable to read and understand a simple text by age 10.”

Aggravating global learning crisis

COVID-19 is now wreaking havoc on the lives of young children, students, and youth. The disruption of societies and economies caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is aggravating the global learning crisis and impacting education in unprecedented ways.

Learning poverty to rise

With more than a complete year of schooling lost in many parts of the world, learning poverty is estimated to rise to 63 percent in developing countries.

Gaping inequalities

UNESCO says that this fourth International Day of Education is marked “as our world stands at a turning point: gaping inequalities, a damaged planet, growing polarisation and the devastating impact of the global pandemic put us before a generational choice: Continue on an unsustainable path or radically change course.”

Education is key to charting the course towards more justice and sustainability, but it is “failing millions of children, youth and adults, increasing their exposure to poverty, violence and exploitation,” adds UNESCO.

Education, a human right

And here goes a needed reminder: the right to education is enshrined in article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The Declaration calls for “free and compulsory elementary education.”

The Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted in 1989, goes further to stipulate that countries “shall make higher education accessible to all.”

Challenges

“Education offers children a ladder out of poverty and a path to a promising future.”

But about 258 million children and adolescents around the world do not have the opportunity to enter or complete school, and 617 million children and adolescents cannot read and do basic maths…

And less than 40% of girls in sub-Saharan Africa complete lower secondary school and some four million children and youth refugees are out of school.

“Their right to education is being violated and it is unacceptable,” warns the United Nations.

“Without inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong opportunities for all, countries will not succeed in achieving gender equality and breaking the cycle of poverty that is leaving millions of children, youth and adults behind.”

Categories: Africa

The UN’s Vital Role in Afghanistan

Mon, 01/24/2022 - 08:42

A mother and her children fled conflict in Lashkargah and now live in a displaced persons camp in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan. Credit: UNICEF Afghanistan

By Sultan Barakat and Richard Ponzio
DOHA / WASHINGTON DC, Jan 24 2022 (IPS)

On December 22, 2021, the UN Security Council voted unanimously to allow for more humanitarian assistance to reach vulnerable Afghans, while preventing the abuse of these funds by their Taliban rulers.

With more than half of Afghanistan’s 39 million citizens—afflicted by drought, disease, and decades of war—depending upon critical life-saving aid to survive the harsh winter months, the decision to carve out an exception in UN sanctions against the ruling regime is timely.

All the more so as Afghanistan quickly becomes ground zero for United Nations humanitarian operations worldwide.

At the same time, addressing the underlying political, cultural, and socioeconomic challenges that continue to fuel widespread deprivation, violence, and corruption in Afghanistan requires a strategy and targeted investments in development and peacebuilding too.

Fortunately, these are also areas where the UN maintains a decades-long track record in Afghanistan (including from 1996-2001, the last period of Taliban rule) and elsewhere.

Moreover, the Security Council’s recent request to Secretary-General António Guterres to provide “strategic and operational recommendations” on the future of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), by January 31, 2022, offers an opportunity to adapt the world body to the country’s fast-changing political, security, social, and economic context.

To channel fresh ideas and critical observations in advance of the Secretary-General’s presented proposals to the Security Council on Wednesday, January 26 and subsequent UNAMA mandate review in March, we convened this past October a group of experts and former Special Representatives of the Secretary-General to Afghanistan at our institutes, the Centre for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies in Doha and the Stimson Center in Washington, D.C.

Inspired by this thoughtful, unfiltered exchange, we personally arrived at several, time-sensitive recommendations elaborated upon in our new policy brief A Step-by-Step Roadmap for Action on Afghanistan: What the United Nations and International Community Can and Should Do:

First, the United Nations should aid in negotiating some conditionalities put forward by Western powers. Whilst a step-by-step roadmap for cooperation is needed, vital life-saving humanitarian aid should never be made conditional on the Taliban taking certain actions.

Given the acute differences between the Taliban and the international community, diverse mechanisms are needed for addressing distinct humanitarian and non-humanitarian issues alike. Both sides have made opposing demands that essentially negate one another, while the needs of millions of innocent, vulnerable Afghans continue to grow.

In direct immediate support of malnutrition, urgent health services, and other kinds of emergency, life-saving support detailed in a new Humanitarian Response Plan, donor countries should take careful heed of the UN’s largest-ever humanitarian appeal for a single country, announced on 11 January 2022, requesting more than USD $5 billion this year for Afghanistan.

This follows from the USD 1.2 billion pledged by nearly 100 countries at a United Nations Secretary-General convened ministerial, on 13 September 2021 in Geneva, as well as subsequent additional pledges of humanitarian aid through international organizations, such as the World Food Program and UNDP, by South Korea, France, and Norway.

Second, there is a need to remain focused on the intersections of humanitarian, developmental, and peace challenges, rather than roll-out humanitarian-only models of response in Afghanistan. To advance more integrated approaches that break down the traditional siloes of the international aid system in responding to the Afghan crisis, the humanitarian-development-peace nexus offers a powerful framework.

The United Nations and other actors have implemented Triple Nexus programming in Afghanistan in recent years, including refugee return and reintegration, asset creation, and social safety net programming.

The world body can play a vital role as a convening power and knowledge broker, facilitating local-international and whole-of-society dialogue on how to adapt nexus programming concepts and approaches in the uncharted territories of Afghanistan’s fast evolving and highly challenging operating environment.

As bilateral aid likely recedes among most major donors, the UN could also serve as a chief oversight body and conduit of international assistance through multiple emergency trust funds. In doing so, it will provide de facto international development coordination assistance, with an eye to maintaining for all Afghan citizens the delivery of basic public services in such critical areas as healthcare, education, and power generation.

The world body is also well-placed to support the new Islamic Development Bank humanitarian trust fund and food security program for Afghanistan, announced on December 19, 2021 at a gathering of thirty Organization of Islamic Cooperation foreign ministers and deputy foreign ministers in Islamabad.

Third, durable peace in Afghanistan can only be reached through high-level political will that is best expressed through an empowered mandate and sufficient resources for UNAMA (ideally led by a Muslim diplomat with the gravitas and skills demonstrated by the UN trouble-shooter Lakhdar Brahimi).

For the UN to be truly catalytic, it is vital that it is entrusted with a comprehensive mandate to perform its full suite of well-known and field-tested functions, including in the areas of reconciliation, development coordination, and humanitarian action.

To get beyond the blame game and build trust between the Taliban and other Afghan parties, the world body must be allowed to provide its good offices and other peaceful settlement of dispute tools to resuscitate an intra-Afghan dialogue toward reconciliation and political reform.

At the same time, the Afghan Future Thought Forum, chaired by Fatima Gailani, continues to be the only independent platform that brings together influential and diverse Afghan stakeholders (men and women), including Taliban and former government officials, to produce practical solutions for long-term peace and recovery in Afghanistan.

With the support of the UN, this Afghan owned and led initiative can be leveraged to work toward a more representative governing structure that safeguards, for example, girls and women’s rights, freedom of moment, and against reprisals toward those who previously fought the Taliban.

Finally, the greatest obstacle to functioning relations between the Taliban and international community is the non-recognition of the new ruling regime in Kabul, which requires a medium to long-term vision to resolve. Although the Taliban are publicly seeking international recognition, these efforts are unlikely to bear fruit immediately.

Rather than continually seeking recognition, the Taliban interim administration should instead focus on governing Afghanistan and averting an economic and humanitarian catastrophe. Demonstrating some level of governing competence—as well as a desire to reconcile and share some governing authorities with past political rivals —through concerted action is the best way for the movement to gain slowly widespread international legitimacy and eventual recognition.

To avoid Afghanistan becoming once again an operating base for international terrorist groups or an even greater source of refugees—both vital interests of the international community, including the Western powers—a multi-faceted strategy that also deploys targeted resources beyond solely humanitarian aid is needed urgently.

With thousands of staff dedicated to alleviating human suffering across Afghanistan, coupled with the West’s almost non-existent political leverage with the Taliban regime, the United Nations must resume its central development and peacebuilding roles, in addition to delivering and coordinating immediate life-saving humanitarian aid.

With the backing of major global and regional powers and the cooperation of both Taliban and non-Taliban factions alike, the UN can help to place Afghanistan on a new development and political path toward a more stable country that, over time, improves the prospects for all Afghan citizens.

Sultan Barakat is Director of the Centre for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies in Doha, Qatar and Honorary Professor of Politics at the University of York. He also taught at York University (U.K.). Richard Ponzio is Senior Fellow and Director of the Global Governance, Justice & Security Program at the Stimson Center in Washington, D.C.

The authors wish to thank Muznah Siddiqui for her helpful research assistance for this commentary.

Categories: Africa

Human Rights Violations and Culture of Impunity in South Asia

Fri, 01/21/2022 - 14:52

South Asian countries grappling with the erosion of democratic norms, growing authoritarianism, the crackdown on freedom of press, speech and dissent, a report by Human Rights Watch says. Credit: 2017 Paula Bronstein for Human Rights Watch

By Sania Farooqui
New Delhi, Jan 21 2022 (IPS)

As countries across South Asia continue to battle the deadly Covid-19 pandemic, causing serious public health and economic crisis, this region, which is home to almost 2 billion people, is also grappling with the erosion of democratic norms, growing authoritarianism, the crackdown on freedom of press, speech and dissent.

Despite the committed efforts of human rights defenders across South Asia, achieving human rights objectives remains a challenging task. Almost all countries in the region – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka – face a common trend of human rights violations and a culture of impunity.

Afghanistan

In Afghanistan, the Taliban rule has had a devastating impact on the lives of Afghan women, girls, journalists and human rights defenders. “The crisis for women and girls in Afghanistan is escalating with no end in sight. Taliban policies have rapidly turned many women and girls into virtual prisoners in their homes, depriving the country of one of its most precious resources, the skills and talents of the female half of the populations,” said Heather Barr, associate women’s rights director at Human Rights Watch in this report.

This report states, “the Taliban’s return to power has made members of some ethnic and religious minorities feel more vulnerable to threats even from those not affiliated with the Taliban. Taliban authorities have also used intimidation to extract money, food, and services. Fighting has mostly ended in the country, but people expressed fear of violence and arbitrary arrests by the Taliban and lack of the rule of law and reported increased crime in some areas.”

A group of three dozen Human Rights Council appointed experts in this report said, “waves of measures such as barring women from returning to their jobs, requiring a male relative to accompany them in public spaces, prohibiting women from using public transport on their own, as well as imposing a strict dress code on women and girls. Taken together, these policies constitute a collective punishment of women and girls, grounded in gender-based bias and harmful practices.”

The UN high commissioner for human rights, Michelle Bachelet, has urged the UN security council to hold all perpetrators of human rights violations accountable, “I ask the security council to ensure that the perpetrators of these violations are accountable, I ask all states to use their influence with the Taliban to encourage respect for fundamental human rights. Denial of the fundamental rights of women and girls is massively damaging to the economy and the country as a whole,” Bachelet said.

The Taliban victory propelled Afghanistan “from humanitarian crisis to catastrophe”, with millions of Afghans facing severe food insecurity due to lost income, cash shortages, and rising food costs. Afghan refugees constitute one of the world’s largest refugees population, with more than 2.2 million refugees. “Afghanistan’s displacement crisis is one of the largest and most protracted in UNHCR’s seven-decade history,” says UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi.

Bangladesh

While Bangladesh, despite making economic progress and getting upgraded by the United Nations from the category of least developed country to developing country last November, the country continues to be in the news for enforced disappearances, abductions, torture and extrajudicial killings by its security forces with impunity.

In this letter written by 12 organizations to Under-Secretary-General Jean-Pierre Lacroix, urging the United Nations Department of Peace Operations to ban Bangladesh’s notoriously abusive paramilitary Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) from UN deployment.

As many as 600 people, including opposition leaders, activists, journalists, business people, and others, have been subjected to enforced disappearance since 2009. In this report, Dhaka–based rights organization Odhikar said that “some of the disappeared persons resurfaced in government’s custody after being arrested under the draconian Digital Security Act 2018.”

“Human rights defenders, journalists, and others critical of the government continue to be targeted with surveillance, politically motivated charges and arbitrary detention,” says this report. Earlier in November 2021, the United States slapped sanctions on elite Bangladeshi paramilitary force, Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), stating it threatens US national security interests by undermining the rule of law and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the economic prosperity of the people of Bangladesh. Bangladesh is the only South Asian country other than Afghanistan to receive US sanctions since 1998.

India

In 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government in India was downgraded from a free democracy to a “partially free democracy” by global political rights and liberties US-based nonprofit Freedom House. Following this, a Sweden based V-Dem institute said, India had become an “electoral autocracy”. The country has slid from No. 35 in 2006 to No. 53 today on The Economist’s list.

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) recommended India be designated as a “country of particular concern, or CPC, for engaging in and tolerating systematic, ongoing and egregious religious freedom violations, as defined by the International Religious Freedom Act in its report.

In its World Report 2022, Human Rights Watch said, “Indian authorities intensified their crackdown on activists, journalists, and other critics of the government using politically motivated prosecutions in 2021. “Attacks against religious minorities were carried out with impunity under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Hindu nationalist government.”

Indian authorities have continued to press charges against students, activities, journalists, including counter-terrorism and sedition laws. To undermine rights to privacy and freedom of expression, reports of Pegasus spyware, developed and sold by Israeli company NSO group, were used to target Indian human rights defenders, journalists, and opposition politicians.

The ongoing harassment of journalists, including particularly those reporting from and in Kashmir, including the recent crackdown on Kashmir’s independent press club being shut down, arbitrary detention of journalists, alleged custodial killings, and a broader pattern of systematic infringement of fundamental rights used against the local population,” the report said.

According to this report, calls for genocide have become more common than ever, “where Hindu extremists organized 12 events over 24 months in four states, calling for genocide of Muslims, attacks on Christian minority and insurrection against the government. In this interview, the founding president of Genocide Watch, has warned: “Genocide could very well happen in India.”

Nepal

In Nepal, lack of effective government leadership, inadequate and unequal access to health care, and a ‘pervasive culture of impunity’ continue to undermine the country’s fundamental human rights. “A lack of effective government leadership in Nepal means that little is done to uphold citizens’ rights, leaving millions to fend for themselves without adequate services such as for health or education, said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director, Human Rights Watch.

“Systemic impunity for human rights abuses extends to ongoing violations, undermining the principles of accountability and the rule of law in post-conflict Nepal. The report states that the authorities routinely fail to investigate or prosecute killings or torture allegedly carried by security forces,” the report states.

In October 2020, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) published 20 years of data, naming 286 people, mostly police officials, military personnel, and former Maoist insurgents, “as suspects in serious crimes, including torture, enforced disappearance and extrajudicial killings”.

Along with this, the situation of women’s and girls’ human rights continues to be alarming in the country. According to this report, Nepal has the highest rate of child marriages in Asia, with 33 percent of girls marrying before 18 years and 8 percent by 15. Reports also indicate there has been an increase in cases of rape in 2021, with widespread impunity for sexual violence.

Patriarchal Citizenship Law in Nepal which does not treat men and women unequally, has been criticized for undermining Nepali women’s identities and agency, subordinating them to the position of second-class citizens – also impacting children.

Pakistan

The Pakistan government, on the other hand, “harassed and at times persecuted human rights defenders, lawyers, and journalists for criticizing government officials and policies,” said this report by Human Rights Watch. Significant human rights issues include freedom of expression, attacks on civil society groups, freedom of religion and belief, forced disappearances by governments and their agents, unlawful or arbitrary killings, extrajudicial killings, torture, arbitrary detentions, terrorism, counter-terrorism and law enforcement abuses.

“Pakistan failed to enact a law criminalizing torture despite Pakistan’s obligation to do so under the Convention against Torture,” the report said. The country’s regressive blasphemy law provides a pretext for violence against religious minorities, leaving them vulnerable to arbitrary arrests and prosecution.

According to this report by Human Rights Without Frontiers, 1,865 people have been charged with blasphemy laws, with a significant spike in 2020, when 200 cases were registered.

This piece highlights the plight of thousands of Pakistan’s Baloch who security forces have abducted. International human rights law strictly prohibits enforced disappearances, in Pakistan, Prime Minister Imran Khan vowed that a draft law to criminalize enforced disappearances would be “fast-tracked”. A bill about enforced disappearances, which the National Assembly passed, mysteriously went missing after it was sent to the Senate.

The continued attack on journalists and activists for violations of the Electronic Crimes Act, the use of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), an anti-corruption agency to target critics, attacks and well-coordinated campaigns and attacks on women journalists on social media, and reported intimidation of nongovernmental organizations, including harassment and surveillance are all crackdowns which are only getting worse.

Sri Lanka

In Sri Lanka, the government continued to ‘suppress minority communities and harassed activists, and undermined democratic institutions.’ According to Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2022, “President Gotabaya Rajapaksha seems determined to reverse past rights improvements and protect those implicated in serious abuses. While promising reforms and justice to deflate international criticism, his administration has stepped up suppression of minority communities,” Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said.

The report highlights the harassment of security forces towards human rights defenders, journalists, lawyers and the families of victims of past abuses and suppression of peaceful protests. As covid-19 cases surged in the country, military-controlled response to the pandemic “led to serious right violations”.

A major concern from the minority Muslim and Christian communities in Sri Lanka was the government’s order not to allow the bodies of Covid victims to be buried. According to this report, “several bodies were forcibly cremated, despite experts saying that bodies could be buried with proper safety measures.” This order, which rights activists said was intended to target minorities and did not respect religions, after much criticism was reversed.

A leading British religious freedom advocacy group, CSW, in its report titled, “A Nation Divided: The state of freedom of religious or belief in Sri Lanka,” said the Muslim community experiences “severe” religious freedom violations. A key factor in the violations is the perception by Sinhalese-Buddhist nationalists that Muslims are a threat to both Buddhism and the Sinhalese. The report also noted attempts to “reduce the visibility of Islam through the destruction of mosques and restrictive stances on religious clothing.

Categories: Africa

Mali must not Be a New Site for Clashes Between Global Powers

Fri, 01/21/2022 - 07:57

The peacekeepers of the UN’s Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) on patrol in Aguelhok, Mali. Credit: MINUSMA/ Harandane Dicko

A decade after civil conflict erupted in Mali, hopes for an early resolution to insurgency and strife have not materialized, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for the country, El-Ghassim Wane, told the Security Council January 11 2022.

By Adam Dicko
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 21 2022 (IPS)

Last week, I was delighted to speak to the United Nations Security Council. In the ten years that my country has been experiencing conflict, violence, and instability, dozens of conferences and other international summits have been held without ever really making room for those who are mobilized on a daily basis for more social justice, the defense of human rights and achieving Malian peace.

My country – and the Sahel as a whole – are rich with dynamic and innovative civil societies and youth. After 10 years of failed strategies to resolve the Sahelian crises, it is time for a change in strategy, a more humble approach, and the development of common solutions in which the local populations feel truly reflected.

I am speaking out to make that a reality, in the name of Anta, a young girl from the center of Mali who was the first victim of the security crisis, forced to flee her village to find refuge in an IDP camp, and who witnessed the killing of her parents by terrorist groups.

And in the name of Amadou, a young man from the south who is seeking economic opportunities, who is barely out of his teens, and who has to leave his homeland and venture out to sea, risking his own life to seek a better life. I speak on behalf of all those young Malians who aspire for a better tomorrow.

Two years of fighting Covid-19, there is another virus which has been spreading in Mali and the Sahel and whose many variants are dangerously feeding the crises and instability that have brought us together today: it is the virus of social, economic, political, and environmental inequality.

This virus has triggered glaring disparities, particularly in access to essential services. In Mali alone, just 2-3% of the pastoralist nomadic children attend school and healthy life expectancy is just 50 years. This virus robs millions of young Malians of happiness and forces most of them to live in poverty.

Adam Dicko. Credit: Sylvain Cherkaoui/Oxfam

It mutates and adapts itself by profiting from a system corrupted by bad political governance, lack of transparency, and a lack of democracy, which means that many of my fellow Malians do not feel part of a society that, at best, ignores them and at worst, excludes them.

This inequality virus is insidious. When power and wealth are monopolized by a small minority, trust in the very system that allows this to happen is broken.

The deterioration of the Malian crisis has laid bare the inadequacy of the current military response, which has been unable to overcome or even contain the threat. Young people are turning against the state – the most fragile joining extremist groups for financial and security reasons.

Young Malians are watching the media in bewilderment as they see global leaders feign support for Mali, while acting in their own best interest, just like what happened in Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, to name a few.

Mali must not become a new site of clashes between global powers – and the UN Security Council can ensure this. Mali deserves better than to become a place for settling political scores.

Unfortunately, Mali is now facing the consequences of poor political and economic governance which is feeding into despair, hunger, and poverty, and young people are the main victims. This crucial governance issue has been downplayed for too long by those who claim to be trying to solve the Sahelian crises. Yet it is at the core of the challenges we face in Mali.

Currently, there has been some talk of bringing back the state to areas where it has been absent for years and which have been taken over by so-called jihadist groups. But we never question the type of state we are talking about reinstating. Is it really a solution to bring back a state which is often perceived by young people as indifferent to their fate, or even a predator? Mali is suffering from a broken social contract. Our challenge is not only to bring back the state, but to transform the state and its public actions so that they benefit all Malians.

Our problems are rooted in this pyramid of inequalities. Whilst inequality is like a virus that spreads, mutates, and kills, there are vaccines to combat this epidemic.

Fighting inequality is well within our reach. This is about massive reinvestment in high-quality social policies that benefit everyone.

MINUSMA has an important role to play in this respect, provided that it integrates local conflict management solutions and local communities. It is time to stop with “top-down” decisions; budgets voted on in New York must no longer determine the needs on the ground.

Given the prevailing political situation in my country, I repeat my call for the Security Council to lead in finding rapid solutions to the political situation between the Malian Government and ECOWAS for the benefit of citizens, especially the young people, whose future looks increasingly bleak. The Malian population is the first victim of the sanctions and yet they have already suffered enough.

Young people are already committed to renewing mindsets and behaviors that ensure true hope and renewal can be reborn in our country.

Adam DICKO is the Executive Director of AJCAD, Association des Jeunes pour la Citoyenneté Active et la Démocratie, an organization active throughout Mali to promote social justice and democratic values.

Categories: Africa

Covax, the Developing World’s Hope against COVID, Has Made It Only Halfway

Thu, 01/20/2022 - 19:21

Delivery of syringes for the vaccination campaign in El Salvador. Latin American countries have made steady progress in immunizing their populations, partly through direct negotiations between their governments and suppliers and partly through international cooperation. CREDIT: PAHO

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Jan 20 2022 (IPS)

The Covax initiative, the hope of the countries of the developing South to immunize their populations against COVID-19, only met half of its goals in 2021. And as 2022 begins, and the omicron variant of the virus is spreading fast, the scheme still depends on the decisions of pharmaceutical companies and the goodwill of donor governments.

José Manuel Durão Barroso, president of the Gavi Vaccine Alliance, one of the entities leading the Covax initiative, warned at the outset that “as long as a large part of the world’s population is unvaccinated, variants will continue to emerge and the pandemic will drag on.”

“We will only prevent variants from emerging if we are able to protect the entire world population, not just the rich areas,” added Durão Barroso, former prime minister of Portugal (2002-2004) and former president of the European Commission (2004-2014), in an email interview with IPS.

Covax, a global access fund for COVID-19 vaccines established in April 2020 as an alliance of countries, multilateral organizations and private foundations, had brought together 184 countries by October that year and set out to procure and distribute hundreds of millions of vaccines against the disease equitably in countries of the developing South.

Under the scheme, one group of countries self-funds and pays for the vaccines sent to it by Covax, while another, the poorest, are to receive the immunizations free of charge.

Shortly after the first vaccines were applied in industrialized countries in late 2020, an encouraging first shipment of 600,000 doses of the British Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine arrived at the international airport in Accra, Ghana, the first country to benefit from the Covax mechanism, on Feb. 24, 2021.

The initiative was launched to distribute and apply, in more than a hundred countries, two billion doses throughout 2021, to ensure equitable immunization of 40 percent of the world’s population, before reaching 70 percent in the first half of 2022 – figures aimed at curbing the pandemic"As long as a large part of the world's population is unvaccinated, variants will continue to emerge and the pandemic will drag on. We will only prevent variants from emerging if we are able to protect the entire world population, not just the rich areas." -- José Manuel Durão Barroso

But disaster lurked around the corner. India was hit by a sudden, devastating wave of COVID-19 infections, and the overcrowded country stopped exporting vaccines. And the Serum Institute of India (SII), the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, was to be the source of the vaccines for the Gavi-Covax mechanism.

While high-income countries such as the United States, Canada, European nations and Israel purchased large quantities of vaccines from pharmaceutical transnationals, sometimes in excess of their populations, it was logical for Covax to seek supplies from India’s SII, where doses were also cheaper.

A dose prepared by the SII could cost three dollars, compared to 50 or 100 percent more in a Western pharmaceutical company.

Thus, while its recipients in the South awaited vaccines under great pressure from their local populations, Covax had to announce in April and May that there would be delays, which occurred in the following months, placing many countries in an uncertain and impotent wait while the virus variants raged.

By early January 2022, the number of infected cases exceeded 300 million worldwide and deaths surpassed 5.5 million, with two populous countries in the South, India and Brazil, following the worst-hit country in absolute numbers: the United States.

Instead of two billion doses, Covax distributed less than half of that – 900 million – throughout 2021. And as of November 2021 it had delivered less than 600 million doses, although it reached 900 million thanks to donations of 310 million doses in December.

What went wrong?

Durão Barroso explained that “the unfortunate epidemiological situation in India, combined with the fact that only a few vaccines had received the WHO emergency use listing and were available for global supply at that time, significantly delayed the launch of Covax.”

This situation “together with export restrictions, the hoarding of vaccines by many richer countries, and manufacturers who do not prioritize vaccine equity, meant that we could not access as many doses as we expected in the second and third quarters of the year,” added the head of Gavi.

When the race against the clock for vaccines began, “many governments in high-income countries made reference to global solidarity,” so that all nations would have access to immunizations, recalled Kate Elder, senior vaccines policy advisor at the humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

“Pharmaceutical companies said they would do their part to ensure that the mistakes of the past were not repeated and that it was not just high-income countries that would have access to medical innovations,” Elder said in her response to a list of questions from IPS.

“However, this did not happen and calls to move away from the business-as-usual approach were ignored. High-income countries started buying up COVID-19 vaccine doses even before they were available,” she said.

The corporate behavior contradicted earlier assertions that antiviral vaccines should be global public goods, and pharmaceutical corporations, as in other circumstances in the past, prioritized sales to the highest bidder and sought primarily their own financial gain, according to MSF.

Donations arrive

The result of the first few months was that Covax only delivered one million doses in February 2021, 23 million in March, 15 million in April, and 30 million in May. From early on it was clear that reaching the goal of two billion doses in 10 months was impossible.

Confidence in vaccine delivery mechanisms, and in immunization itself, eroded, for example in Gambia, Namibia or Nigeria in Africa, or in Afghanistan and Pakistan in Asia. Anxiety also escalated because, having received the first dose of a vaccine, people demanded the second even more loudly

The first shipment of vaccines by Covax to a developing country arrived at the international airport in Accra, Ghana on Feb. 24, 2021. CREDIT: Krishnan/Covax

The countries of the developing South then began or intensified their search for vaccines outside of Covax. And, in parallel, some made progress in the production of their own vaccines, as was the case of Saudi Arabia, India and Singapore in Asia, Egypt in Africa and Argentina, Brazil, Cuba and Mexico in Latin America.

In the second half of 2021, donations began to appear, like a lifeline. Rich countries, having vaccinated large segments of their population and with vaccines or supplies such as syringes available, began to donate, often under the Covax umbrella, millions of doses to countries in the developing South.

Donor countries have so far offered Covax 591 million doses to be delivered in 2021 and the first half of 2022, and the scheme has sent 259 million doses to recipient countries, which partially explains the acceleration of deliveries in November (155 million) and December (310 million) 2021.

The main donors to Covax have been the United States (145 million doses), a group of 16 European Union members (81 million), the United Kingdom (11.5 million) and Canada and Japan (8.4 million doses each).

However, in some cases the doses arrived very close to their expiration date – or with a shortage of syringes or freezers to preserve them, as in Somalia and East Timor – forcing them to be discarded or sometimes sent back, as happened in the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan.

The road ahead

Covax, in Elder’s view, was “naively ambitious,” and its success “was tied to unsound assumptions. Foreseeable challenges were not factored into the design of the mechanism and some poor policy decisions were made.”

“From its design to its governance and accountability mechanisms, the exclusion of meaningful participation of key stakeholders has undermined Covax’s ability to succeed,” the MSF vaccines policy expert argued.

The hoarding of vaccines and medicines by high-income countries has already happened on other occasions, such as during the HIV/AIDS epidemic or with regard to access to vaccines against pneumococcus, human papillomavirus or rotavirus.

For Elder, “if we want to learn from this experience to improve access to vaccines, the first step is to make a radical change. This basically means making the technology and innovation of medical tools public to guarantee an equitable model and decentralize production.

“Technology born of public investment cannot be owned by corporations, it must be a global public good,” she said.

In addition, “it is necessary to strengthen multilateral organizations and regional platforms, since each region knows best what its needs are, instead of public-private alliances based on the goodwill of pharmaceutical companies, which, at the end of the day, we already know what their interests are going to be.”

Durão Barroso said that Covax “has reached a point where it can now meet the demand of the countries it serves. However, there is a real risk that the supply disruption will continue in 2022.”

So “we have asked manufacturers to be more transparent about when they will make doses available, and from donor governments we have asked for larger and more predictable donations. This is finally happening,” added the head of Gavi.

Durão Barroso stressed that in the face of the spread of different variants “it is absolutely critical that we avoid a scenario of vaccine nationalism 2.0, where rich countries immobilize the supply of new vaccines.

“We depend on countries’ commitment to multilateralism and manufacturers’ commitment to transparency to ensure that we don’t fall behind again,” he stated.

Categories: Africa

Health Workers Lauded for Role in Leprosy Treatment During Pandemic

Thu, 01/20/2022 - 15:46

Yohei Sasakawa, WHO Goodwill Ambassador for Leprosy Elimination and Chairperson of the Nippon Foundation, thanks participants at a webinar ‘Raising Awareness about Leprosy, Role of Health Professionals at the Grassroots Level’ organized by the Sasakawa Leprosy Initiative. He is with other participants from Japan, India and Nepal in the “Don’t Forget Leprosy” campaign event.

By Joyce Chimbi
Nairobi, Kenya, Jan 20 2022 (IPS)

The human rights of people affected by leprosy are central to Yohei Sasakawa’s concept of a leprosy-free world.

Sasakawa, the WHO Goodwill Ambassador for Leprosy Elimination and Chairman of the Nippon Foundation, was speaking at a webinar ‘Raising Awareness about Leprosy, Role of Health Professionals at the Grassroots Level’ organized by the Sasakawa Leprosy Initiative.

A leprosy-free world was one where “patients and those cured of leprosy live free of discrimination and, people around them will be free of the misunderstanding, ignorance and fear that perpetuate discrimination”, he told the webinar.

Sasakawa Leprosy Initiative is a strategic alliance between WHO Goodwill Ambassador for Leprosy Elimination, the Nippon Foundation and Sasakawa Health Foundation for achieving a world without leprosy and problems related to the disease. The initiative spearheaded a campaign, “Don’t Forget Leprosy”, to raise awareness about the condition in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.

The WHO Goodwill Ambassador envisions a post-COVID world where those affected by leprosy will be liberated from such stigma and discrimination in keeping with human rights.

Sasakawa says this world is now at risk of delaying leprosy elimination due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as there was a 37 percent drop in reported new cases and leprosy programs in many countries have stalled or scaled back.

Participants heard about the role of health professionals in combating leprosy, recognition of this role and the successes and challenges faced in addressing leprosy during the ongoing health pandemic.

Their role, Sasakawa said, was a central pillar to the vision of a leprosy free world as it helps reduce transmission and disability.

An estimated three to four million people live with some form of disability caused by leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease.

“The ‘Don’t Forget Leprosy’ is a global campaign because our voices alone are not enough. Stopping leprosy requires (the involvement of) all of us, from India and Nepal to all other countries around the world,” he said.

Dr Rashmi Shukla outlined efforts in India to identify and treat patients with leprosy. He was speaking at a webinar ‘Raising Awareness about Leprosy, Role of Health Professionals at the Grassroots Level’ organized by the Sasakawa Leprosy Initiative. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

Dinesh Basnet, Central President of the International Association for Integration, Dignity and Economic Advancement (IDEA) in Nepal, said he was happy to see progress in recent years.

“More so Nepal’s efforts to track and eliminate leprosy. Even during the pandemic, detection and treatment interventions were uninterrupted, and this has been possible due to government commitment and unrelenting efforts of health professionals,” said Basnet.

“People affected by leprosy were not forgotten as communication continued through WhatsApp groups, and this was critical during the lockdown.”

Dr Indra Napit, a senior Orthopedic Surgeon at Anandaban Hospital, Nepal, spoke about innovative technology in the trial of Autologous Blood products to promote ulcer healing in Leprosy. He added that a new drug was on trial to manage reactions to this form of treatment at this leprosy mission.

In a video message, Birodh Khatiwada, Nepal’s Minister of Health and Population, spoke of Nepal’s undisrupted program to address leprosy, including the continued supply of leprosy medication despite the pandemic.

He says Nepal has already prepared the National Leprosy Roadmap, 2021-2030, National Leprosy Strategy 2021-2025, in line with the Global Leprosy Strategy, Neglected Tropical Diseases Roadmap and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Sasakawa emphasized that it was indeed the ultimate goal for India and other affected countries worldwide to reach zero leprosy cases by 2030.

Despite challenges in the fight to eliminate leprosy, a ray of hope shines through, with Anju Sharma sharing good practices in case finding in India amid the ongoing health pandemic.

Sharma is an accredited Social Health Activist and is considered a driving force behind India’s public health system and an essential link between the community and the public health system.

“Screening for leprosy during the pandemic is much more difficult. As COVID-19 cases increase, so does my responsibilities because I have to strictly follow COVID-19 protocols, and this takes a lot of time,” Sharma explained.

“Due to the pandemic, people are hesitant about getting screened. But I reassure them that protocols will be observed and remind them that failure to detect and treat leprosy can lead to disability.”

Dr Venkata Ranganadha Rao Pemmaraju, acting team leader, WHO Global Leprosy Programme, emphasized that discussing the role of health workers was critical, and hearing from those in the frontlines helps efforts to eliminate the pandemic move forward.

WHO, he said, subscribes to the Don’t Forget Leprosy campaign. He lauded ongoing efforts to sustain counselling for those affected by leprosy and those who tracked and managed Nepal-India cross border leprosy cases despite challenges COVID-19 protocols like restrictions on movement and lockdowns.

Dinesh Basnet, a person affected by leprosy thanked health care workers and others for their efforts in eliminating the disease. He was talking at a webinar ‘Raising Awareness about Leprosy, Role of Health Professionals at the Grassroots Level’ organized by the Sasakawa Leprosy Initiative. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

Similarly, Dr Rabindra Baskota, the Leprosy Control and Disability Management Section director in Nepal’s Ministry of Health and Population, confirmed that health workers had been relentless to find new cases, raising awareness on leprosy and treating patients despite ongoing challenges.

“Still, there is a need to train community health workers to detect new cases and manage reactions to leprosy treatment even as older and more experienced health workers retire,” he said.

Dr Anil Kumar, the deputy director-general (Leprosy) in India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, who spoke about good practices in combating leprosy said that a leprosy-free India was not very far off.

Despite a notable decline in screening and detecting cases due to COVID-19, he said critical interventions were nonetheless rolled out, and that leprosy-related services continued at the grassroots level.

“Migrant labourers were screened for leprosy at point of return to home districts and patients on treatment tracked. Treatment defaulters were cross notified based on the address in treatment record,” Kumar said.

“A WhatsApp group titled Leprosy Action Group was created for cross notification, and members included state leprosy officers and partners. Supportive supervision and monitoring up to sub-district level using virtual platforms continues.”

Executive Director of the Sasakawa Health Foundation, Dr Takahiro Nanri, moderated a panel discussion that included a session to further shed light on additional support needed to achieve leprosy elimination milestones.

Sasakawa suggested that health workers’ training included human rights, and the panel lauded health workers for their passionate and proactive steps to eliminate the disease.

Categories: Africa

Count Me in: Working Together for Disability Inclusion in Guatemala

Thu, 01/20/2022 - 07:41

The organization “Mujeres con Capacidad de Soñar a Colores” during one of their awareness-raising performances. Credit: Diana Alvarado (@alvaradodii) and Mujeres con Capacidad de Soñar a Colores , UNDP

By Peride Blind
GUATEMALA CITY, Jan 20 2022 (IPS)

“Persons with disabilities are capable and equal. It is time the world understands that,” says Antonio Palma, a UN Volunteer at the Resident Coordinator’s Office in Guatemala. Antonio, who has a visual impairment, expresses what many other persons with disabilities feel. Ignored, mistreated, misunderstood, underestimated, condescended to.

People with disabilities are diverse, and they experience exclusion and marginalization in different ways and to different degrees.

About 1 in 10 Guatemalans has a disability. That’s one out of every ten neighbours, friends, relatives, co-workers, passers-by, or distant strangers.

You might think that ten per cent of the population would get some recognition. But the country has little data on persons with disabilities, making them less visible in public policy and often left with little or no access to basic services in health, education, work, among other areas.

Some people might think that providing such services is a charitable gesture. What that perspective ignores is that persons with disabilities are people, and as such they have human rights.

Fulfilling the human rights of persons with disabilities requires certain steps so that they can participate and be fully included in society.

The UN Country Team (UNCT) in Guatemala recognizes this basic principle. We are a proud pioneer of the Disability Inclusion Strategy of the Secretary General and a two-time implementer of the United Nations Partnership on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Indigenous Guatemalan woman with physical disability. Credit: Huayra Bello (@huaybello) and Mujeres con Capacidad de Soñar a Colores , UNDP

To advance our work in this area, we at the UNCT in Guatemala recently conducted an in-depth analysis of disability inclusion in the country. Through interviews, focus groups, and surveys, we identified some concrete gaps and challenges, for example in terms of the legal and public administration system. Our ultimate goal: end exclusion and leave no one behind.

Here’s what we found, and what we’re doing about it.

• DATA

• RESOURCES: The National Council for the Attention of Persons with Disabilities (CONADI) has a mandate to implement the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. But their budget is very limited so the UNCT provides additional training to boost the capacity of organizations of persons with disabilities to help ensure they can support CONADI and lead the way on inclusion.

• PRACTICES: The more that the many forms of exclusion and discrimination are rooted out, the more room is made for the positive inclusion of persons with disabilities. With this aim, the team in Guatemala supported the creation of the first Consultative Council of Organizations of Persons with Disabilities bringing the urban and the rural together, with a gender focus. The Council, once operationalized in 2022, will vet all projects and programmes of the UN System in Guatemala to ensure inclusion and accessibility.

• COMMUNICATIONS: Noting the importance of persons with disabilities advocating for their rights, the UN Team in Guatemala launched a fifteen-day communications campaign #YoMeSumo prior to the International Day of Persons with Disabilities 2021. Each day of the campaign features the story of a Guatemalan with disability and how they are advocating for their rights. See all the videos on our YouTube channel.

The UN Team in Guatemala believes in leading by example. Having recently signed our first UNCT-wide non-discrimination declaration, all 22 members now encourage persons with disabilities to apply in their job vacancy announcements and have adopted the practice of hiring personnel with disabilities.

In 2021, the UN Team provided additional training on disability inclusion to staff to create a more inclusive and welcoming environment. To this end, the UN Guatemala carried out a review of employment practices and office accessibility, and adopted a Manual on Accessible Communication.

In all these efforts, the UN Team is fostering collaboration between the UN, government, and persons and organizations of persons with disabilities.

Antonio Palma, the UN Volunteer, has long dreamed of working at the world’s most influential human rights organization. He is excited to help shift perceptions about persons with disabilities in Guatemala from within the UN by using strategic and inclusive communication.

Working together, we may increase inclusion and unity. Antonio Palma offers his vision for building unity: “All Guatemalans are one, regardless of any differences.”

Adds the UN Resident Coordinator in Guatemala, José Miguel Barreto: “COVID-19 has taught us yet again that we all need one another. The world is more beautiful, more secure, and more just when everyone is included, including persons with disabilities. Each one of us can do something to make that happen.”

Source: UNDP

Peride Blind is Strategic Planning officer/RCO Team Leader, UNCT in Guatemala. The article was written with editorial support from Paul VanDeCarr, Development Coordination Office. To learn more about the work of the UNCT in Guatemala, visit: https://guatemala.un.org/.

Categories: Africa

Renewables Are Cheaper Than Ever – So Why Are Household Energy Bills Only Going up?

Wed, 01/19/2022 - 19:26

A wind farm in Curacao. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By External Source
Jan 19 2022 (IPS)

Not for the first time, global energy markets are in turmoil. Internationally traded gas prices more than quadrupled in 2021. In their wake, many energy suppliers have gone bust and household bills across Europe are set to soar. Energy prices are driving up the cost of living and inflation, but this is also a moment to realise the old saying: “never waste a good crisis”.

Some of the causes of sky-high energy bills are unavoidable – there is little that most governments can do about the wholesale price of gas itself. Fossil fuel companies make huge investments that take years to mature, breeding periods of moderate prices followed by supply squeezes when prices rocket. Gas prices softened over the previous decade and the arrival of the pandemic in 2020 depressed demand.

The design of electricity systems has failed to catch up with the revolution in renewable energy. Competitive electricity markets, established in many countries to try and minimise costs, are actually suffering the greatest price rises

Regions without domestic gas supplies or which have depleted most of their gas reserves in recent decades get a lot of their gas by importing it. European periphery countries, including the UK and many parts of the Mediterranean, assumed they could rely on global supplies of liquefied natural gas.

But tankers from the big gas producers such as Qatar can turn to Europe or Asia depending on who pays the highest price. Now there is a scramble, and Asian demand dominates.

The knock-on effect to energy bills is amplified in the UK and other countries in Europe where electricity is organised through wholesale markets (in which generators bid to operate if the price is right) and in which most homes rely on gas for heating.

Average home energy bills in the UK, which rose to over £1,200 (US$1,630) in 2021, are predicted to shoot up by around 50% in 2022. Up to half of the rise will come not from the gas you burn, but from the impact of gas on electricity prices.

So why is a gas price crunch being felt just as strongly in electricity bills? After all, gas generates less than half of electricity – under 40% in the UK and only about 20% across the EU.

Renewables generate over a quarter of UK power, nuclear and imports another quarter. The cost of generating power from wind and solar has tumbled over the past decade globally, falling by over 40% for onshore wind and by far more for solar and offshore wind.

The last fixed-price government contracts offered for offshore wind energy in Britain – hardly the cheapest of renewables – were under 5p per kilowatt hour (kWh). That’s less than a quarter of the typical domestic tariff (what most people pay for electricity at home) that consumers are set to face in 2022. Households are paying for their electricity several times what it now costs to generate and transmit it from the cleanest energy sources at scale.

The design of electricity systems has failed to catch up with the revolution in renewable energy. Competitive electricity markets, established in many countries to try and minimise costs, are actually suffering the greatest price rises. This is not because governments elsewhere use taxes to subsidise electricity (though some do), but because in wholesale electricity markets, the most expensive generator sets the price.

Since renewables and nuclear will always run when they can, it is fossil fuels – and at present, unequivocally gas, plus the cost of taxes on CO₂ pollution – which set the price almost all the time, because some gas plants are needed most of the time, and they won’t operate unless the electricity price is high enough to cover their operating cost. It’s a bit like having to pay the peak-period price for every train journey you take.

If renewables are now so much cheaper, why can’t consumers buy electricity directly from them and avoid paying the gas and carbon costs?

A new golden age

Energy markets aren’t designed to cope efficiently with sources like renewables which cost a lot to build but far less than fossil fuels to run. Governments offer long-term, fixed-price contracts to generators for their output of renewable energy. This has been the biggest driver of investment, while competitive auctions of these contracts, to companies keen to build renewables, have slashed building costs the most.

In contrast, households and other small consumers can rarely buy fixed-price contracts more than a year or two ahead, given the uncertainties in wholesale prices along with governments encouraging competitive switching between suppliers.

The electricity generated from renewables contracts is fed into the rest of the system, which balances the variable output from renewables by generating more or less from conventional sources.

That adds about around 1p per kWh to the cost of renewable electricity in the UK and Europe. Even accounting for this, the gap between cheap renewables and expensive final electricity is becoming unconscionable.

A decade ago, many energy experts projected a “golden age of gas”. Countries are likely to continue burning gas for some years. But with the drive to cut emissions and the advent of cheap renewables, electricity is likely to dominate the energy system in future, powering heat pumps, electric vehicles and more.

This golden age of electricity cannot arrive as long as the price of electricity is decided by fossil fuels and their carbon costs.

What would electricity markets appropriate for renewable energy look like? In research I led with colleagues on electricity prices, we proposed a green power pool which would aggregate long-term contracts with renewable energy generators and sell the power on to consumers. The price would mainly be set by the actual investment costs of generators, rather than gas-driven wholesale markets.

When there isn’t enough renewable power being generated or stored – like on cold and calm winter days – the green power pool would buy electricity from the wholesale market for limited periods and quantities.

To minimise those costs (and emissions), contracts could give discounts to customers who can use electricity outside of peak times, or those with two-way electric vehicle connections who can sell power back to the grid.

It won’t happen overnight. It won’t cut bills tomorrow. But new electricity needs a new market – one which cuts energy bills at the same time as decarbonising the energy system.

Michael Grubb, Professor of Energy and Climate Change, UCL

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

Categories: Africa

Human Trafficking, Rape, Extortion Behind ‘Forced Conversions’, say Experts

Wed, 01/19/2022 - 11:54

A woman hides her face with the poster protesting forced conversions during the Aurat March (Women's March) in 2021. Experts say ‘forced conversions’, usually of underage girls, involve abduction, rape, human trafficking and other serious offences. Activists and experts have called improved legislation. Credit: Aurat March Karachi

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Jan 19 2022 (IPS)

Two years after Michelle, 15, was kidnapped, sold, forced to convert to Islam and married to a stranger, relatives still ostracise her.

“My aunts and uncles have left us, and my two older brothers, till a few months ago, were not even talking to me,” said Michelle, talking to IPS over the phone from Faisalabad, in the Punjab province of Pakistan. They believe she has brought dishonour to them.

Her captors and even the cleric who officiated the marriage are free despite committing multiple offences, including abduction, trafficking and rape.

“There are several laws that can be invoked for tackling offences, such as kidnapping and abductions,” lamented Peter Jacob, executive director of the Center for Social Justice (CSJ), a research and advocacy organisation. “But the prosecution has failed to do so.”

Most of the young, female victims belong to the Christian (in Punjab) and Hindu (in Sindh) minorities and followed the same pattern.

Experts and activists demand legislation to prevent ‘forced conversions’ that are often associated with human trafficking, abduction and rape. The white poster on the left says: ‘Forced conversion unacceptable’. The blue poster says: ‘Underage marriage is a crime’. Credit: NCJP.

“This year, at least 62 such cases have been reported,” he told IPS over the phone from the eastern city of Lahore, in the Punjab province.

In the predominantly Muslim nation of 220 million people, the Christians and Hindus in Pakistan are estimated to be 1.27% and 2.14%, respectively, according to the 2017 census.

Dr Ramesh Kumar Vankwani, a member of the national assembly from the ruling Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, also the patron-in-chief of the Pakistan Hindu Council, told IPS “hundreds of cases” remain unreported.

Rukhsana Khokhar, senior project manager at the Karachi-based non-profit, Legal Aid Society, agreed with Vankwani.

“The victim’s family is hesitant to approach the police because of their harsh attitude,” she said.

“The affected family is diffident to report the crime because of the repercussions from the powerful and influential another side.”

Moreover, Khokhar said, the road to justice was tedious and complicated, but it was also expensive and often beyond their means.

In a majority of the cases, the adolescent girls from Hindu communities are uneducated, belong to poor families and are “surrounded by misogyny and patriarchy,” she said.

However, the reason for the conversion of educated Hindu girls belonging to well-off families was different. They want to seek escape from being forced into marrying uneducated Hindu men from their community. The only way out is for them is to convert to Islam.

Khokhar, who has been studying this issue for over a decade, believed that sensitisation was one way of overcoming the issue since societal prejudices remained the most significant barrier. This should include the clerics who officiate the nikah (the ceremony where the couple is legally wed under Islamic law), the investigating officers working on such cases and the district administration.

According to Vankwani, many parliamentarians concede the issue persists, but it is not as rampant as to be of concern.

“I say, even if it’s just one person who is forcibly converted, it becomes our responsibility to stop this practise through legislation,” he says.

Over the years, there have been several attempts to regulate conversions through legislative means without success.

In 2019, the Sindh assembly, for the second time, rejected a bill criminalising forced religious conversions. The first attempt was in 2016.

Safina Javed, Vice President Pakistan Minority Rights Commission, Sindh chapter, holding a poster. Credit: Safina Javed

In 2020, the Standing Committee on Religious Affairs and Interfaith Harmony had rejected the Protection of Rights of Minorities Bill, 2020, which recommended an age limit of 18 years for conversion.

The parliamentary committee shot down a draft of yet another anti-forced conversion bill opposed earlier in the year by the ministry of religious affairs even before it could be tabled in the national assembly.

The excuse made by the minister for religious affairs, Noorul Haq Qadri, was the “unfavourable” environment.

According to political and integrity risk analyst Huma Yusuf, the current “social, religious and political environment” was too oppressive in a Talibanized Pakistan for the law to find favour from any quarter.

“A key problem is that the term ‘forced conversion’ glosses over what’s really at stake. Reportedly, some 1,000 girls from religious minorities, primarily Hindus, are forced to convert each year,” Yusuf says.

“These conversions can involve abduction, rape, violence, human trafficking and extortion. They also enrich clerics who receive payments for solemnising such marriages, corrupt police officials who take bribes instead of investigating, and magistrates who look the other way. By rejecting the bill, our lawmakers are condoning these other activities. How does this serve Islam?”

The reasons for rejecting the most recent bill by the ministry and the parliamentary committee were the minimum age (set to be 18 years) kept for converting to another religion, a 90-day contemplation period before conversion and testifying before a judge.

The bill stated that the “age will be ascertained based on the child’s birth certificate, school enrolment certificate, or the official database. In the absence of all, the person’s age may be determined through a medical examination”.

“There are about 20 laws that place some or the other restrictions on a person below 18 years of age,” pointed out Jacob, including getting a driver’s license, voting or seeking employment.

“These are reasonable restrictions and enhance the scope of freedoms and protect the rights in those specific areas.”

He also found the 90-day contemplation period logical for a “matter that is individually and socially important and should not be dealt with casually or hastily”.

Further, says Jacob, testifying before a judge eliminates the possibility of covering the crime of kidnapping by marriage and will ensure that conversion is not under any duress, deceit, threat or fraudulent misrepresentation.

Terming the bill a “dam” that was drafted to “restrain the spread of Islam,” Pir Abdul Khaliq, 66, who heads the century-old madressa Ahya Darul Uloom, in Dharki, in Sindh province’s Ghotki district, was happy it was “rejected”.

This madressa (a “hotbed” for alleged conversions), next to the shrine of Khanqah-i-Aalia Qadria Bharchundi Sharif, has a chain of nearly 200 seminaries spread across Sindh (140), Punjab (30) and almost two dozen in Balochistan.

Since he took over the reins of the seminary from his father 50 years ago, he says, he has converted scores of men and women of their “free will”. Talking to IPS over the phone from Dharki, he conceded he was among those who had threatened the ministry that his followers would “come on the streets and hold protests” if the bill was passed.

Having converted entire families, “from 80-year-olds to some as young as eight”, he says no one ever objected to that, so why the need for a law.

“If an underage child converts alongside the parents or guardians, there is no objection,” responded Khokhar. The objection raised was of the conversion of single adolescents like Michelle.

“Why are they never elderly women, why do they have to flee to another city to convert and why are the parents not allowed to meet them?” she asked.

“There is no age to conversion,” responded Khaliq, but insisted he “respected the age of marriage”, which is 18 in Sindh.

However, many underage Hindu girls from Sindh are taken to Punjab, where the legal age of marriage is 16, says Khokhar. She believes it would help halt forced conversion if the age restriction of 18 years for conversion and marriage was “enforced uniformly” throughout the country.

In 2019, two Hindu sisters, Raveena and Reena, made headlines by going to the court seeking protection from their family, saying they had wilfully accepted Islam. The family insisted they were abducted.

The sisters were converted before their marriage in Sindh (where the age for marriage is 18) but married in Punjab (where the age for marriage is 16).

However, the court allowed the sisters to go to their husbands but sent a five-member fact-finding team to ascertain this was not a forced conversion.

The report recommended religious conversion be carried out through a “proper process and be formalised or registered in a court of law”.

At times, says Khaliq, girls eloped and converted to Islam because they had fallen in love with Muslim men and “not for the love of religion”.

In that case, says the cleric, the woman is given “a day or two to think over her decision”. But if she still insists on conversion, he performs the ceremony. “Marriage between a Muslim and Hindu is not permissible in Islam,” he says, and so she converts.

He also pointed out that there are times the woman realises she has made a wrong judgement, but after having fled her parent’s home, the chances of her being accepted by her family are very slim on her return.

“She has little recourse but to follow the original plan of converting to Islam”.

However, he reiterated, his seminary would not perform the nikah if the girl was underage.

“We will convert her only, and then she can go back to her parents till she attains the age of marriage. If her family won’t accept her new religion, and which happens in most cases, we provide her shelter, till she attains the legal age of marriage,” says Khaliq.

Responding to Khokhar’s query of moving to another city to convert, Khaliq explains: “Once the girl elopes with the man and the parents go to the police, many forces come into play, including the feudal lord of the area and the police. Fearful of their life, their first thought is to find a safe place.”

If it were passed, the bill would have effectively addressed this issue by restricting the person applying for a conversion certificate to get it issued from the judge of the area where the non-Muslim resided, says Jacob.

He, however, refuses to let the rejection dampen his spirit. “We have no other option but to fight taking the legal route to ensure a fixed process for conversion is followed,” says Jacob.

Along with Dr Vankwani, he is working with the Council of Islamic Ideology (tasked with giving legal advice on Islamic issues to the government and the parliament) to develop a draft bill that would be acceptable to all faiths.

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 ) 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”.

Categories: Africa

Pages

THIS IS THE NEW BETA VERSION OF EUROPA VARIETAS NEWS CENTER - under construction
the old site is here
Copy & Drop - Can`t find your favourite site? Send us the RSS or URL to the following address: info(@)europavarietas(dot)org.

You are here

Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

Pages