Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Nazihah Noor
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Dec 14 2021 (IPS)

Failure to vaccinate most in poor countries sustains the COVID-19 pandemic. Rich country greed and patent monopolies block developing countries from affordably making the means to protect themselves.

Mutant menace
The SARS-CoV-2 virus has been mutating as it replicates. Numerous replications in hundreds of millions of hosts have generated many variants. Some mutations are more resilient than others, and better able to overcome human defences.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Early data suggest the B.1.1.529 Omicron variant is more transmissible than others, including Delta, and possibly more resistant to existing treatments and vaccines. Health authorities the world over are concerned WHO’s latest ‘variant of concern’ may trigger a new wave of preventable infections and deaths.

South Africans first scientifically identified the new variant, alerting global health authorities immediately. Instead of appreciating its prompt actions, southern African nations are being punished with travel restrictions.

In fact, Dutch health authorities acknowledge the new Omicron variant was already in western Europe before the first South African cases. Punitive responses – e.g., travel bans – may deter other governments from rapid action and notification, so essential for effective international cooperation.

Promises, promises
With huge inequalities in vaccinations – especially between high-income countries (HICs) and low-income countries (LICs) – the virus has been enabled to continue replicating, mutating, infecting and killing, especially those least protected.

Richer countries have taken more than half the first 7.5 billion vaccine doses. Rich countries have bought many – up to five – times their populations’ needs. Ten HICs will have more than 870 million excess doses by year’s end.

While some HICs have been shamed into pledging vaccine doses to LICs and lower middle-income countries (MICs), delivery has fallen well short of their modest promises. By late October, only about a tenth of the over 1.3 billion vaccine doses pledged had been delivered.

Nazihah Noor

Most rich countries have ignored WHO appeals to suspend boosters until the rest of the world is vaccinated. Ex-UK premier Gordon Brown notes that for every vaccine reaching LICs, there are six times as many boosters in rich nations.

US President Biden’s September summit set an end-2021 target of 40% vaccination of the world’s 92 poorest countries, but at least 82 are unlikely to meet this target.

As Brown observed, although the US accounts for half the vaccines donated, it has only delivered a quarter of its pledge. Most other rich countries have delivered less than a fifth. Only China and New Zealand have given over half of what they promised.

Apartheid victims
With vaccines being hoarded by HICs, less than 3% of LIC populations are fully vaccinated. By late November, only 5.8% in LICs had at least one vaccine dose, compared to 54% of the world.

Most LICs do not even book via COVAX – the global programme to distribute vaccines – as they cannot afford to pay for them. Also, the programme has never secured enough vaccine doses since its inception.

COVAX was supposed to provide two billion doses by end-2021, but under 576 million were actually delivered by November. Also, the WHO appeal to G20 countries to give COVAX priority has gone largely unheeded.

With LICs unable to vaccinate their populations, the pandemic will go on for years. WHO now expects around 200 million more infections in the year from 21 October, with total deaths expected to double from the five million to date! Unsurprisingly, vaccine apartheid’s worst victims are in the LICs.

Profits block progress
The World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial meetings – scheduled to start on 30 November – were expected to decide on the waiver proposal. With no resolution likely, the meeting has been postponed indefinitely, ostensibly due to Omicron.

First proposed in October 2020, it is now supported by well over a hundred of WTO’s 164 member states. The elaborated waiver proposal, co-sponsored by 63 countries, would allow others to more affordably make the means to fight the pandemic, without fear of intellectual property (IP) litigation.

But over 14 months later, the proposal remains blocked. Most European countries continue to oppose the waiver request to temporarily suspend IP rights protecting corporate monopolies on COVID-19 medical technologies and products for the pandemic’s duration.

As the pandemic increasingly infects and kills in poor countries, the public is being misled about the waiver proposal. It is dishonestly claimed that new vaccines cannot be developed without patent protection. Worse, all developing countries are falsely said to lack technical expertise to make vaccines.

Profits against people
LICs have received than one percent of all Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines and 0.2 percent of Moderna’s. Instead, the three have prioritized their most profitable contracts with rich governments, while paying lip service to poor countries.

Pfizer expects to sell three billion doses by year’s end, and four billion more in 2022. With COVID-19 now endemic, Pfizer CEO Alberto Bourla expects to sell boosters for years to come, while Moderna recently announced an Omicron-specific booster.

Using the firms’ own earnings reports, the People’s Vaccine Alliance (PVA) estimates mRNA vaccine manufacturers – Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna – will make pre-tax profits of US$34 billion this year.

Maximizing profits by blocking the waiver is effectively prolonging the pandemic. Instead of vaccinating those who have not yet had their first shot, they make much more by selling booster vaccinations to HICs.

Despite getting over US$8 billion in public funding, the three have refused to transfer vaccine technology to developing countries. Instead, Pfizer’s Bourla has dismissed technology transfer to developing countries as “dangerous nonsense”.

Profitable catastrophe
The main barrier to vaccinating the world is profits. Clearly, the Omicron danger is due to the world’s failure to vaccinate billions of vulnerable people in developing countries. This catastrophe has been worsened by ongoing European opposition to their effort to suspend IP monopolies.

The 12 billion vaccines made in 2021 could have vaccinated the entire world, but clearly did not. Omicron is plainly due to corporations’ ability to profiteer from the pandemic, refuse to share knowledge and know-how, and bully governments into unfair contracts.

Nazihah Noor is a public health policy researcher. She holds a Master of Public Health and a BSc in Biomedical Science from Imperial College London, specializing in global health.

 

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');   Related Articles

• Biden Disappoints, Must Do More, Not Less
• Rich Country Hypocrisy Exposed by Vaccine Inequities
• End Vaccine Apartheid Before Millions More Die
• IP, Vaccine Imperialism Cause Death and Suffering, Delay Recovery
• East Asian Lessons for Controlling Covid-19

There is a critical shortage of qualified healthcare staff in Malawi to deal with the growing mental health burden in the country. Credit: Charles Mpaka

By Charles Mpaka
Lilongwe, Malawi, Dec 13 2021 (IPS)

When a former deputy speaker of Parliament shot himself dead within the National Assembly buildings in Lilongwe in September 2021, it shook Malawi. It also turned attention to the mental health burden in the country.

Experts say that a sharp rise in suicide cases has become the most visible expression of the burden of mental health challenges in Malawi.

“There’s depression, stress and many other silent forms of disorders. More often, we act quickly on a mentally challenged person because he is causing havoc,” says Harry Kawiya, a psychiatric clinical officer at the Zomba Mental Hospital, Malawi’s only referral mental health facility and one of the two specialised institutions in the country. “But the rising of cases of suicides recently tells us the severity of the mental health problem among us, which we are not adequately addressing.”

National police records show that suicide cases have increased drastically in Malawi over the past three years. For instance, between January and March 2021, the country registered 76 suicides – an increase of nearly 50 percent over the same period last year.

One police station in Lilongwe registers an average of six cases every month, the station’s spokesperson, Foster Benjamin, tells IPS.

“This is a steep rise, and it’s worrying,” he says. “The reasons [why people are committing suicide] range from family disagreements to financial troubles. In almost all the cases, those that kill themselves are men.”

The former deputy speaker, Clement Chiwaya, 50, left a suicide note detailing frustrations with sorting out benefits, including an official vehicle which he had bought, as the reason.

In a village just outside Lilongwe, a man hanged himself around last year due to debts related to his small-scale tobacco farm.

His wife, Christina Makwecha, says she lost her 43-year-old husband in October 2020 after the tobacco marketing season had just closed.

“We made heavy losses such that we could not pay some of the debts for labourers and the inputs we got from agro-dealers,” says Makwecha, a mother of four children.

One evening on her return from a village savings group meeting in the area, she found the man hanging in a tree in a field not too far from their home.

“It was then that I remembered that for almost two weeks before the incident, he had become increasingly restless, unusually angry and started skipping meals,” she says.

While the country is registering a rising number of suicides, many Malawians lack the awareness of mental health disorders that lead to people killing themselves, says Dr Charles Masulani, Chief Executive Officer of the St John of God Hospitaller Services Ltd, a Catholic Church mental health hospital in Malawi.

“Just as people would know where to go when they have malaria because there is a lot of knowledge about malaria, we do not know about mental health disorders in Malawi. So, people tend to struggle within themselves without seeking help from counsellors, faith leaders or therapists, or any other who would offer help,” Masulani says.

Records at the hospital show that it registered 7,671 mental health patient consultations last year – including 4,142 men and 3,529 women.

The mental health disorders diagnosed included anxiety, bipolar disorder, psychosis, dementia, delusional disorder, depression, delirium, epilepsy, hippomania, antisocial personality disorder, learning disability and schizophrenia.

Experts say that the COVID-19 impact on businesses has worsened the high prevalence of mental health disorders in Malawi, and the government’s response has been falling short.

In 2017, the Office of Ombudsman investigation found glaring deficiencies in mental health management in the public health system.

It faulted the government for failing to fund district health offices adequately for them to be able to handle patients before sending them to the referral hospital.

The Ombudsman also blamed the Ministry of Health for the persistent acute shortage of psychiatric staff, which compromised the quality of care for patients with mental disorders.

The inquiry established, for instance, that in two districts in the central region, the mental healthcare worker to population ratio ranged between 1:80,840 and 1:558,470.

According to the report, the problem of staff shortage starts with how the training for doctors in Malawi is designed.

“Whilst the undergraduates are exposed to the different aspects of the medical profession including psychiatry, during the internship psychiatry is completely shunned thereby further depriving [the system of] additional and potential psychiatric staff,” reads the report.

The investigation further exposed inefficiencies in the procurement of psychotropic drugs for patients with mental disorders, leading to their unavailability most of the time.

Four years after the investigation, these challenges remain.

During the commemoration of World Mental Health Day in October, Dr Michael Udedi, a mental health expert in the Ministry of Health, admitted the critical shortage of specialised personnel in the public health system.

He said while the country does have some mental health clinicians and nurses in almost every district hospital of the country, there is only one psychiatrist based at Zomba Mental Hospital and no psychologist in public hospitals.

He also disclosed that in May this year, the Ministry of Health advertised vacancies to recruit psychologists; there was no response.

In addition, there is no dedicated budget for mental health, Udedi told IPS in an interview last week.

“Therefore, it is not easy to track the funding for mental health per se,” he says.

He, however, says the ministry does disburse some funding to the referral hospital. He also says it falls on district health offices to dedicate part of their funding from treasury towards mental health activities such as drug procurement.

In her report, the Ombudsman attributed the apparent lack of attention to mental health as a primary healthcare problem to a weak and old legislative framework.

The treatment of patients with mental disorders is catered for in the Mental Health Act passed in 1948 – when Malawi was still under British colonial rule.

“This law is out of touch with the current trends in mental health service delivery,” reads the report.

In 2000, Malawi developed its first National Mental Health Policy. But this too has had no significant impact on mental health service delivery. The policy has, thus, been under review.

Now the government hopes that the challenges in the sector will be addressed once a bill, currently being drafted, is tabled, and passed in Parliament, possibly in February next year.

The Mental Health Bill has a provision for ring-fenced mental health funding. According to Udedi, this is key to addressing most of the challenges in mental health.

“This will see to it that mental health is adequately funded. This would have an implication on human resources for mental health, that’s including support in training,” he says.

But Udedi also challenges communities to play their part in raising awareness, minimising stigma and discrimination towards people with mental health problems and linking such people with service providers for assistance.

 

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');   Related Articles

• Mental Health: Getting to Healthy, Happy
• Mental Health Strategic Plan for Bangladesh: An Overview
• http://www.ipsnews.net/2020/04/post-pandemic-mental-health-epidemic/

By Naureen Hossain
New York, Dec 13 2021 (IPS)

Governments are determined to control information and are prepared to imprison journalists to achieve this mission, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said following the release of their annual global census tracking journalists who were imprisoned and killed in 2021.

For the sixth year in a row, the census reported record numbers of incarcerated journalists. The census accounts for journalists held in government custody and remain imprisoned because of their work.

This year set a new global record with 293 journalists imprisoned as of December 1, 2021. Twenty-four journalists were killed during dangerous assignments, like reporting from conflict zones, in protests turned deadly, or in retaliation for their work.

What these numbers suggest, said CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon is that “governments are determined to control and manage information, and they are increasingly brazen in their efforts to do so.”

Along with the census, a special report from CPJ Editorial Director Arlene Getz, explained the trends.

Across different regions, many factors contributed to the common and “increasing intolerance of independent journalism”.

Government authorities, particularly in autocratic leaderships, have bolstered their efforts to silence dissent and criticism, which in turn has stifled press freedom in those regions.

Through the implementation of legal rulings and policies, journalists not only face the threat of imprisonment with alarming alacrity, but authorities manipulate legislation to extend their sentences or keep them in police custody.

Technological and legal policies to increase online surveillance impacted journalists’ ability to share stories online because they face the increasing risk of censorship and retaliation.

The report also says journalists now face diverse tactics to censor them through increased surveillance, internet shutdowns and legal rulings.

The special report reveals that at least 17 journalists were charged with cybercrimes, which could result in criminal prosecution for news reported and distributed online.

The CPJ census lists the countries with confirmed cases of jailed journalists.

This year, China topped the census list, with 50 journalists imprisoned.
This year marks the first time Hong Kong has been included in the census. Eleven journalists from Hong Kong-based news agencies were detained under mounting tensions from the pro-democracy protests and the implementation of the National Security Law in 2020.

Following China, Myanmar has risen in this year’s census in the wake of the military coup on February 2021 and the crackdown on media outlets with 26 jailed journalists.

However, the report suggests that this number may be much higher, and the situation is graver than reported. Several journalists have either fled the country in exile or gone into hiding. The deeper concern is that this crackdown on independent reporting will return to the harsh media censorship of previous military regimes.

Ethiopia has become the second-worst jailor of journalists in 2021 after Eritrea in sub-Saharan Africa. Many journalists have been arrested in the wake of the civil war in Ethiopia, between the federal government and armed forces from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, with nine journalists still in custody.

Though they ranked lower than the top ten countries in the census list, the rapid decline in media freedom still comes as a shock because past reports indicated greater freedom than under the current government.

The report says that further investigations into these cases and those in other countries with confirmed imprisonments and deaths show a startling and disturbing attitude toward press freedom.

What the CPJ report reveals, that for all the international community’s calls for action to improve press freedom and protection for journalists, for all the public outcry when cases are made public, the countries which are most demonstrably guilty of suppressing press freedom have done little to address impunity or to change their tactics.

They are resorting to increasingly violent, intrusive, and invasive tactics to impede freedom of expression with a greater frequency. Even in the United States, 56 journalists were arrested or detained this year, primarily during protests.

The findings in the CPJ report reflects the continued tensions between governing authorities and the media. Without the media to hold them accountable, some governments will continue to act with impunity, sending the message of the lack of regard for freedom of expression if it threatens their power.

There is little hope that the number of jailed journalists will not be topped in the next year as long as countries act with impunity.

The CPJ will not give up its efforts to safeguard journalists.

In 2021, their advocacy contributed to the early release of over 100 journalists worldwide. In addition, they have recently launched a People’s tribunal to address impunity in journalist killings, which will rely on investigations and legal analysis to provide a framework for justice and accountability.

The CPJ’s Annual Report can be read here.

 

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');   Related Articles

• Belarusian Journalists Keep Reporting From Exile – Here’s How
• Is Press Freedom Incompatible with Gender Empowerment?
• World Press Freedom Day 2021

Family members of Priyantha Kumara, who died in the Sialkot mob attack, taking part in religious rites at his funeral.

By Ameen Izzadeen
COLOMBO, Si Lanka, Dec 13 2021 (IPS)

Every time, breaking news of a barbaric crime or terror act is reported from anywhere in the world, peace-loving Muslims the world over feel dejected and wish it had not been another tragedy that will make others glower at them with suspicion as though they too are complicit in the crime.

But often, what they dread is the case, for more than 90 percent of such inhumane and barbaric acts – like the Sialkot slaying of a Sri Lankan factory manager and the Easter Sunday massacres — are associated with Islamic extremism.

Last Friday’s lynching of factory Manager Priyantha Kumara Diyawadanage in Pakistan by an extremist mob will not be the last of such acts.

No amount of ‘We Are Sorry Sri Lanka’ placards, flowers and candles at makeshift memorials and political statements denouncing the crime can bring back his life that was cruelly brought to an end as a burnt offering on the altar of bigotry in an expression of savagery that has no place in civilized society.

However much Pakistanis who are humiliated by extremism dissociate themselves from the horrible act, however profound their apology is, however remorseful Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan, who decried the incident as Pakistan’s day of shame, is, the country will continue to be plagued by violent extremism unless and until extremism is rooted out by radical social reforms in line with the peaceful message of Islam.

The Priyantha Kumara lynching by a mob linked to an extremist outfit called Tehereek-e-Labbaik Pakistan, for tearing off a political poster that allegedly had some religious verses in Urdu warrants the immediate revocation of Pakistan’s blasphemy law or its amendment in keeping with the Islamic virtue of tolerance and magnanimity.

Research shows a higher prevalence of extremism in countries that have blasphemy laws than in countries that do not have such laws. Blasphemy laws are often misused to persecute the minorities or treat them as second-class citizens. Such laws are incompatible with the Islamic teaching which calls for protection of the minorities and non-interference in their worship.

If the Pakistan Government fails to make use of this heartrending incident as an opportunity to bring about radical reforms, it itself will be committing an act of blasphemy because its inaction allows the badly constructed law to distort and disgrace Islam.

Pakistan was carved out of the British Raj for the Muslims of the subcontinent. Its founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah promoted a theory of two nation two state, saying that the Muslims and Hindus were two different nations and belonged to two different civilizations and therefore needed to live in separate states.

The world’s first nation-state to be formed on the basis of religion, Pakistan, however, has never been a theocracy.

In a 2017 BBC interview, historian Ayesha Jalal pointed out that Jinnah envisaged Pakistan as a “homeland for India’s Muslims”, as opposed to an Islamic state. But she said that his theory had been used by Islamists “as an ideological device” to justify claims for Pakistan to be a theocratic state.

This is Pakistan’s existential crisis. While the extremists fight for the setting up of a theocracy, secular politicians skillfully make use of Islam and side with Islamists to swell their vote banks or to whip up nationalistic emotions against archrival India.

Perhaps, this was why Pakistan’s Defence Minister Pervez Khattak was seen belittling the gruesome murder of Priyantha Kumara, by calling it “youthful exuberance of Muslim youngsters” and “happens all the time”.

He reportedly added, “When the youth feel Islam has been attacked, they react to defend it.” This was while Premier Khan vowed to bring the murderous mob to justice and Pakistan police arrested more than 130 people.

If we play with fire, we get burnt. Pakistan has been burnt enough, yet it appears to have not learnt enough. Seven years ago this month, extremists carried out a gruesome school massacre in Peshawar. In this terror attack some 134 schoolchildren, aged between 8 and 18, and 16 staff members were brutally gunned down by the Pakistan Taliban. So why pamper the extremists?

In 2011, Pakistan’s Punjab Province Governor Salman Taseer was shot dead by a police guard over his opposition to the country’s blasphemy law that calls for death sentence to those who insult Islam or its holy personalities.

Taseer was also calling for the release of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman who was falsely accused by her neighbours of insulting the Prophet Muhammad. Taseer’s assassin was hailed as a hero by a large number of extremists who took to the street to celebrate the murder.

As a result of violent extremism, many non-Muslims find it difficult to accept the Muslims’ assertion that Islam is a religion of peace. What many do not understand is that there is little Islam in today’s world, although about 2 billion Muslims constitute one fourth of the world’s 8 billion population.

In Islam, jihad or holy war is not the norm, but a last resort exception to defend the oppressed. Vigilante justice has no place in Islam. The accused should be heard, Islam commands.

To whatever religion they belong, the problem with extremists is their ignorance of the teachings of the religion they are supposed to follow. As historian and comparative religions expert Karen Armstrong would say, “Terrorism has nothing to do with Muhammad, any more than the Crusades had anything to do with Jesus.”

Certainly, violence is not the answer to blasphemy. According to the Quran, the Prophet Muhammad was heaped the worst form of scorn. He was called a liar, a magician, a madman, and possessed. Garbage was thrown over his head and stone-throwing street urchins were set upon him.

Yet as commanded by God, he exercised beautiful patience — Sabran Jameelan — and when his companions sought permission to retaliate, he would teach them the virtues of patience and remind them that he was sent as a mercy to the whole world. He befriended his persecutors by practising the Quranic injunction which exhorts the Muslims to “repel that which is evil with that which is good (and virtuous)”.

Unfortunately, the verses on defensive wars the Prophet and the early Muslims were forced to fight were misinterpreted by latter day Muslim rulers and terrorists for political purposes. Glorification of violence in the name of Islam became the norm. Islam’s peaceful message was forgotten.

Also overlooked is the Quranic message against violence as explained in the story of angels who expressed their deep concern over bloodshed and mischief on earth when God wanted to create man. (Quran 2: 30.)

It appears that instead of Islam, some Muslims are following a violent creed and calling it Islam. The fake Islam is largely practised while the real Islam remains buried. The task before the Muslims is to search for the buried Islam, resurrect it and live it.

Ameen Izzadeen is the deputy editor of the Sunday Times, Sri Lanka. He also writes a weekly column for the Daily Mirror, Sri Lanka, on international politics and good governance issues; and is a visiting lecturer in journalism and international politics.

 

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');  

By External Source
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 13 2021 (IPS)

Created in 1945 following the devastation caused by World War II, the United Nations was mandated with the task of maintaining international peace and security as one of its primary political missions.

But the seriousness of its far-reaching mandate has been tempered by occasional moments of levity which have rocked the “glass house by the east river” with laughter — as recounted in a newly-released book on the United Nations titled “No Comment –and Don’t Quote me on That”.

Over the years, the UN has remained a rich source of anecdotes originating in the General Assembly, the Security Council, and the UN’s watering hole, the delegate’s lounge.

One of the memorable anecdotes, recounted in the book, is a confrontation that took place in the General Assembly Hall in October 1960 during the height of the Cold War, when Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev removed his shoe and kept banging on his desk on a point of order.

As the shoe-banging continued, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, whose speech was being rudely interrupted, turned to the President of the General Assembly and remarked: “Mr. President, I am waiting for a translation”, as the entire Assembly erupted in laughter.

The two working languages of the United Nations have been primarily English and French, although there are four other official languages recognized by the world body: Chinese, Arabic, Spanish and Russian—with translations available in all six languages to delegates on their earphones.

A former Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt, was fluent in three of the six languages: English, Arabic and French. Asked at a briefing with reporters about his fluency in languages, he jokingly said his primary language was Arabic “because when I fight with my wife, I fight in Arabic.”

A former US ambassador to the United Nations once provided an amusingly light-hearted definition of diplomacy: 97 percent alcohol, 2 percent protocol and one percent Geritol, a multi-vitamin drink probably meant to energize negotiations.

But diplomacy at the UN is much more than socializing– even as receptions and cocktail parties take place every day – until the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world body to a virtual standstill temporarily suspending the routinely heavy drinking, mostly duty-free liquor (and according to some diplomats,” the best things in life are mostly duty-free.”)

When the annual election of the President of General Assembly resulted in an unprecedented 73:73 tie in the 1970s, the outgoing President decided to break the deadlock with the flip of a coin, as agreed to by the two candidates. But according to a joke circulating in the delegate’s lounge, the tossed coin apparently had two heads and no tail. Rigged elections at the UN?

Just after a band of mercenaries tried to oust the government of the Maldives, a tiny island nation with no army, navy or air force back in the 1980s, I ignorantly asked a Maldivian diplomat about the strength of his country’s standing army. “Standing army?”, the diplomat asked with mock surprise, “We don’t even have a sitting army.”

When the right-wing, hardline conservative John Bolton was US Ambassador to the UN (2005-2006), he notoriously remarked: “There’s no such thing as the United Nations. If the U.N. secretariat building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.” The punchline, however, came from a New York Times columnist who said Bolton would do better as an urban planner than a US diplomat.

Meanwhile, when Ambassadors and other lower-ranking diplomats arrive in New York, most of them experience “culture shock” being forced to adjust to New York city living– including food, language and apartment living.

In the 1970s, the New York Daily News recounted a story, widely circulated in the UN delegate’s lounge, of a newly-arrived diplomat from a conflict-ridden country who was posted to New York– considered a safe-haven– following death threats against him by a rebel group in his home country. A few weeks after his arrival, he found a note slipped under his Manhattan apartment door with an ominous message: “The exterminator will be here tomorrow.”

Panicked at the thought the rebel group had extended its reach, he was about to rush to the nearest police precinct when he accosted the clerk at the reception desk in the lobby, who told him: “Sir, the exterminator will be here not to kill diplomats, but to exterminate roaches, bed bugs and mice.” That was one of the first diplomatic lessons in Manhattan apartment living.

Meanwhile, Thalif Deen, author of the book, “No Comment – and Don’t Quote me on That”, who was recently interviewed by Thanos Dimadis, executive director of The Association of Foreign Press Correspondents in the USA (AFPC-USA), recounts some of the even more unforgettable moments both inside and outside the UN.

Excerpts from the interview:

Q: You are a veteran journalist who has covered UN affairs for decades. Could you share a few of the lessons you have learned over the years as a UN correspondent? And when it comes to following and covering UN news, what has been the most difficult part of your job?

A: The United Nations has long been described as “the glass house by the east river.” But regrettably, the glass house is more opaque than transparent—particularly for news reporters.

The political reporting at the UN is largely focused on military conflicts, civil wars, genocide, human rights, peacekeeping, nuclear disarmament and war crimes—mostly underlying its primary mandate, namely, maintaining international peace and security.

But at IPS, our coverage was primarily on the UN’s socio-economic agenda, long neglected by the main stream media and international wire services. We aimed to fill that gap.

The author at the IPS Office in the UN Secretariat in New York.

Perhaps the most difficult part of the job was that journalists, rarely if ever, were able to get any on-the-record comments or reactions from ambassadors, diplomats and senior UN officials because most of them follow the advice given to Brits during war time censorship in the UK: “Be like Dad, Keep Mum”.

As Winston Churchill once remarked: “Diplomacy Is the art of telling people “to go to hell’ in such a way they ask for directions.” But as a general rule, most ambassadors and diplomats avoided all comments, particularly on politically sensitive issues, with the standard non-excuse: ”Sorry, we have to get clearance from our capital”. But that “clearance” never came.

Still, it was hard to beat a response from a tight-lipped Asian diplomat who once told me: “No Comment” – “And Don’t Quote Me on That.”

And most senior UN officials, on the other hand, never had even the basic courtesy or etiquette to respond to phone calls or email messages—or even an acknowledgment. The lines of communications were mostly dead.

When I complained to the media-savvy Shashi Tharoor, a former Under-Secretary-General for Public Information and a one-time journalist and prolific author, he was explicit in his response when he said that every UN official – “from an Under-Secretary-General to a window-washer”—has the right to express an opinion in his or her area of expertise. But that rarely or ever happened.

A Brazilian diplomat once gave me an exclusive inside story, but warned it was “not for attribution and strictly off the record”. But being familiar with the New York City’s cultural scene, he added: “Off, Off, Off the record. Like Off, Off Broadway.”

Still, there have been rare instances of UN officials, mostly former UN officials, who have no qualms about providing on-the-record comments. As I was doing a wrap-up of the historic, two-week long Earth Summit in Rio in June 1992, I approached Dr Gamani Corea, a former Secretary-General of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and a member of the Sri Lanka delegation, for a final comment on the disappointing results of the much-ballyhooed conference.

“We negotiated the size of the zero”, he said, with a tinge of sarcasm, as he held out his fingers to indicate zero. But that comment would come only from an ex-UN official.

Q: What were some of the historic moments during your journalistic career at the UN?

A: When the politically-charismatic Ernesto Che Guevara, once second-in-command to Cuban leader Fidel Castro, was at the United Nations to address the General Assembly sessions back in 1964, the U.N. headquarters came under attack – literally. The speech by the Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary was momentarily drowned by the sound of an explosion.

The anti-Castro forces in the United States, backed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), had mounted an insidious campaign to stop Che Guevara from speaking. A 3.5-inch bazooka was fired at the 39-storeyed Secretariat building by the East River while a vociferous CIA-inspired anti-Castro, anti-Che Guevara demonstration was taking place outside the U.N. building on New York’s First Avenue and 42nd street.

But the rocket launcher – which was apparently not as sophisticated as today’s shoulder-fired missiles and rocket-propelled grenades – missed its target, rattled windows, and fell into the river about 200 yards from the building. One newspaper report described it as “one of the wildest episodes since the United Nations moved into its East River headquarters in 1952.”

After his Assembly speech, Che Guevara was asked about the attack aimed at him. “The explosion has given the whole thing more flavor,” he joked, as he chomped on his Cuban cigar.

When he was told by a reporter that the New York City police had nabbed a woman, described as an anti-Castro Cuban exile, who had pulled out a hunting knife and jumped over the UN wall, intending to kill him, Che Guevara said: “It is better to be killed by a woman with a knife than by a man with a gun.”

A second historic moment was the visit of Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). On his 1974 visit, he avoided the hundreds of pro and anti-Arafat demonstrators outside the UN building by arriving in a helicopter which landed in the dead of night on the North Lawn of the UN campus adjoining the East River.

Arafat was escorted by security men into the UN building and to the Secretary-General’s 38th floor where he spent the night in a temporary bedroom. But that bedroom had not been used for years, and the color of water was brown when the bathroom’s faucet was opened. Mercifully, it was not an attempt by Israeli intelligence to poison the PLO leader.

There was also a legendary story of how Arafat, who was on an Israeli hit-list, never slept on the same bed on two consecutive nights. So, the chances are he never took that risk even inside the UN building.

Incidentally, when anti-Arafat New York protesters on First Avenue shouted: “Arafat Go Home”, his supporters responded that was precisely what he wanted—a home for the Palestinians to go to.

When Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi visited the UN in September 2009, the London Guardian said he “grabbed his 15 minutes of fame at the UN building in New York and ran with it. He ran with it so hard he stretched it to an hour and 40 minutes, six times longer than his allotted slot, to the dismay of UN organizers”.

Incidentally, according to one news report, there were 112 different spellings of the Libyan leader’s name, both in English and Arabic, including Muammar el-Qaddafi, Muammar Gaddafi, Muammar al-Gathafi, Muammar El Kadhafi, Moammar el Kazzafi, Moamer, El Qathafi, Mu’Ammar, Gadafi, and Moamar Gaddafi, amongst others.

The Wall Street Journal ran a cartoon making fun of the multiple spellings, with a visiting reporter, on a one-on-one interview in Tripoli, telling the Libyan leader: ”My editor sent me to find out whether you are really Qaddafi, Khaddafi, Gadafi, Qathafi or Kadhafi?”

Q: As a UN correspondent, how has covering UN affairs changed your view of the UN and its role on a global scale?

A: The UN’s biggest shortcoming is its failure to resolve some of the longstanding political issues, including Palestine, and more recently the military conflicts and civil wars in Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ethiopia and Myanmar, amongst others.

In most of these conflicts, the five veto-wielding permanent members (P-5) of the Security Council, namely the US, UK, France, China and Russia, are sharply divided and protect their allies– and their million-dollar arms markets because the P-5 are the primary arms suppliers to the warring parties in several of these conflicts.

Meanwhile, a new Cold War -– this time, between the US and China —is threatening to paralyze the UN’s most powerful body, even as military conflicts and civil wars are sweeping across the world. The growing criticism against the Security Council is directed largely at its collective failures to resolve ongoing conflicts and political crises in several hot spots.

The sharp divisions between China and Russia, on one side, and the Western powers on the other, are expected to continue, triggering the question: Has the Security Council outlived its usefulness or has it lost its political credibility: a question which also changed my views on the UN and its political effectiveness?

The five big powers are increasingly throwing their protective arms around their allies, despite growing charges of war crimes, genocide and human rights violations against some of these warring nations.

At the same time, the Security Council has come under heavy fire for the misuse of its veto powers, held by the Big Five, while discussions on the reform of the Council have dragged on for over 20 years.

The bottom line is that the P-5 want to hold onto the monopoly of the veto power. A proposal for the expansion of the permanent members, from five to maybe ten, comes with a catch: if new permanent members are appointed, they should have no veto powers.

The countries knocking at the Security Council door for permanent memberships include India, Brazil, Japan and Germany. But the opposition to these candidacies have come from Italy, Argentina, Mexico, Pakistan and South Korea. So, the reform of the Security Council remains deadlocked.

Meanwhile, the UN’s successes are largely in the field of humanitarian assistance, plus in development funding and environmental protection. During September through November 2021, the UN and its NGO (non-governmental organization) partners provided 7.2 million people in war-ravaged Afghanistan with food assistance; reached more than 880,000 people with primary and secondary healthcare consultations; assisted almost 199,000 drought-affected people through water trucking; and treated more than 178,000 children under five for acute malnutrition, according to the latest figures.

Thalif Deen, Senior Editor & Director, UN Bureau, Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency, served twice with the Sri Lanka delegation to the UN General Assembly sessions and is a Fulbright scholar with a Master’s Degree (MSc) in Journalism from Columbia University.

The link to Amazon via the author’s website follows: https://www.rodericgrigson.com/no-comment-by-thalif-deen/

 

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');  

On Cerro 18, above the affluent municipality of Lo Barnechea, in the coveted eastern sector of Santiago de Chile with a stunning view of the valley and the Andes Mountains, 300 families live in five camps or irregular settlements, many without water, electricity or sewage. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Dec 10 2021 (IPS)

Camps made up of thousands of tents and shacks have mushroomed in Chile due to the failure of housing policies and official subsidies for the sector, aggravated by the rise in poverty, the covid-19 pandemic and the massive influx of immigrants.

“Three years ago we were about to be evicted and when my children would head off to school they never knew if our little house would be there when they got home. One morning we were going to school and the carabineros (militarized police) were coming. Many times I had to go home early from work. It was chaotic, difficult and distressing,” Melanni Salas told IPS during a visit to the site.

Salas, 33, presides over Senda 23, one of the five camps that bring together 300 families who occupied public land in Cerro 18, in the municipality of Lo Barnechea, on the east side of Santiago. They have been building shacks with wood and other materials within their reach, which they are gradually trying to improve.

The threat of eviction ceased at the start of the covid pandemic, but the shadow still hangs over their heads because the municipality “built us a septic tank and gave us gifts for Christmas, but has said nothing about housing,” she said.

The community activist previously lived for 19 years as an “allegada”, the name given in Chile to people or families who share a house with relatives or friends, in overcrowded conditions. In 2016 she occupied the land where she and her husband Jorge built the precarious dwelling where she now lives with her three children aged 15, 13 and five years old.

“This used to be a garbage dump and now it is clean and there are houses,” said Salas. “Mine gets a little wet inside when it rains because it is made of wood and because of the strong wind. But I have drinking water, electricity and sewerage thanks to my mother-in-law who lives further up. The neighboring family has neither water nor sewage. They are a couple with three children and one of them, Colomba, was born a week ago.”

She explains that her neighbors “use the bathroom at their brother’s place who lives nearby, but during the pregnancy she went back to her mother’s house.”

In the camps people cook, wash, sleep and live together, observed by passers-by who have become accustomed to this new urban landscape. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Hundreds of homeless tents now line the main avenues of Santiago de Chile.

Explosive situation

“Every day more than 10 families come to live in an encampment in Chile,” says Fundación Techo Chile, a social organization dedicated to fighting against housing exclusion in the cities of this South American country.

The problem is also seen along the avenues and in the parks where hundreds of men and women set up tents to sleep, cook, wash and live together in full view of passers-by who have become accustomed to the scene.

In the last two years, the number of families living in 969 of these camps with almost no access to water, energy and sanitation services has increased to 81,643, a survey by the Fundación Techo Chile found.

In Chile, the term “campamentos” or camps has also come to refer to slums or shantytowns known traditionally as “callampas”, such as the one where Salas lives, which are built on occupied land and consist of houses made of light materials, although the neighborhoods are sometimes later improved and upgraded, but still lack basic services.

These slums are mainly in Santiago and Valparaíso, 120 kilometers north of the capital, in central Chile. But they are also found in the northern cities of Arica and Parinacota and the southern city of Araucanía.

They are home to 57,384 children under the age of 14 and some 25,000 immigrants, mostly Colombians, Venezuelans and Haitians. “Today, families live there who six months or two years ago were ‘allegados’ living in overcrowded, informal, precarious or abusive conditions. That is what is understood as a housing deficit,” Fundación Techo Chile’s executive director, Sebastián Bowen, told IPS.

“The 81,000 families living in camps are the most visible part of the problem, but the housing deficit, covering all the families who do not have access to decent housing, exceeds 600,000,” he said.

The State provides some 20,000 social housing solutions each year, a figure that is highly insufficient to meet the current need.

According to Bowen, “if we want to solve the problem of the camps, we must structurally change our housing policy to guarantee access to decent housing, especially for the most vulnerable families.”

This explosion coincided with the social protests that began in October 2019 and with the arrival of coronavirus in the country in March 2020.

According to the National Socioeconomic Characterization Survey (Casen), 10.8 percent of Chileans currently live in poverty, which means more than two million people, although social organizations say the real proportion is much higher.

Chile, with a population of 19 million people, is considered one of the most unequal countries in the world, as reflected by the fact that the 10 percent of households with the highest incomes earn 251.3 times more than the 10 percent with the lowest income.

View of some of the houses in Cerro 18, a shantytown where 300 families live, most of them without even the most basic services. In what used to be a garbage dump, on the hillside of one of the wealthy neighborhoods of the Chilean capital, they have built their houses using scrap wood and waste materials. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

The new constitution holds out hope

Benito Baranda, founder of the Fundación Techo, an organization that now operates in several Latin American countries, believes that the housing policy failed because it focuses on “market-based eradication, forming housing ghettos on land where people continue to live in a segregated manner.”

This policy is also based on a structure of subsidies “born during the dictatorship and which has remained in place because housing is not a right recognized in the constitution,” Baranda, now a member of the Constitutional Convention that is drafting a new constitution, which will finally replace the one inherited from the 1973-1990 military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, told IPS.

“The decision of where people are going to live was handed over to the market. Not only the construction of housing. And the land began to run out and the available and cheap places were in the ghettos,” he explained.

Baranda criticized the policy of “eradication”, “which created ghettos and generated much greater harm for people,” referring to the forced expulsions of slumdwellers and their relocation to social housing built on the outskirts of the cities, a policy initiated during the Pinochet dictatorship and which crystallized social segregation in the capital.

According to Baranda, “in the last four governments there has been the least construction of housing for the poorest families.”

Baranda was elected to the constituent assembly in a special election in May and proposes “to generate a mechanism that will progressively reduce the waiting times for housing, which today can stretch out to 20 years.”

Twenty-story buildings, where each floor has 50 17-square-meter apartments, are called “vertical ghettos” and are inhabited mainly by immigrants. These ones are located in the Estación Central neighborhood, along Alameda Avenue that crosses Santiago de Chile. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Privatization of social housing

Isabel Serra, an academic at the Diego Portales University Faculty of Architecture, believes that “the housing issue in Chile will be solved in some way through family networks…There is a lot of overcrowding here and small families are becoming the norm,” she told IPS.

According to Serra, the mushrooming of camps “clearly has to do with the influx of immigrants and this has grown especially in cities that are also functional or productive or extractivist hubs.”

She criticized the subsidy policy because these “are transferred to the private sector and what they do is drive up housing prices… and most of them are not used because they are not in line with the price of land and housing.”

“A highly financialized private market has made housing a tool for economic speculation…investors have decided to put their funds into the real estate market,” she said.

The problem has already reached the 155-member Constitutional Convention, which has been functioning since Jul. 4 and has a 12-month deadline to draft the new constitution, which must then be ratified in a plebiscite.

In September Melanni Salas and representatives of eight organizations met with Elisa Loncón, president of the Convention, to present her with the book “Constitution and Poverty”, which includes proposals to guarantee the right to housing.

“I hope they include this in the new constitution. The proposals were made by 25,000 excluded people…this document seeks to ensure that we are not left on the sidelines as always,” the community organizer explained.

A human right

Baranda said “in the constituent assembly we are working to get this enshrined as a right and to get the State to assume a leading role, not in the construction of housing itself, but in determining where people are going to live and creating the land bank that people have been demanding for so long.”

“We need the policies, by making land available and expropriating property that is not owned by the State, to create housing projects in places where there is social inclusion,” he stressed.

Serra agreed that “when the issue of housing is discussed in the constituent assembly, it will have to look at how the State buys and sells land.

“Housing is a basic human right and should be enshrined in the constitution, with all the parameters that are established for decent housing,” she argued.

Serra also called for “modernizing the instruments and the institutional framework dedicated to the provision of housing” because, she said, “currently the role of housing provision is clearly played by the market.”

She said it would require “a great deal of political will because land issues in general are political issues, very difficult to implement because there are many economic interests involved.”

Celia “Charito” Durán lives in the Mesana camp on Mariposas hill in the port city of Valparaíso, along with 165 other families, and counting.

The municipality delivers 3,000 liters of water per week to each house, using tanker trucks.

Durán said, however, that the priority is access “because if there is no road, we are cut off from everything: firefighters, water, ambulances.”

In Mesana there is no sewage system, only “cesspools, septic toilets and pipes through which people dump everything into the creek,” she told IPS by telephone.

On the hilltop the wind is very strong and every winter roofs are blown off and houses leak when it rains.

Durán, 56, has lived there since she was 37. She is confident that a solution to the social housing deficit will come out of the constituent assembly, after participating in meetings with Jaime Bassa, vice-president of the Constitutional Convention.

“We have the hope and expectation that the right to housing will be included. So, if tomorrow it is not fulfilled, you could go to the authorities with the right to protest about it,” she said.

“We want to be part of the city and not be segregated and forced to return to the camps,” Durán said.

Zakia Soman and Dr Noorjehan Safia Niaz are determined to ensure Muslim women take their rightful place in society.

By Mariya Salim
NEW DELHI, India, Dec 10 2021 (IPS)

Discriminated in society and concerned about the discrimination of women in their homes, the two women who co-founded the Bhartiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA) started the movement to further Muslim women’s leadership and help them reclaim their rights.

In an exclusive interview with IPS, Dr Noorjehan Safia Niaz and Zakia Soman say they started the BMMA or the Indian Muslim Women’s Movement to address communal tensions and prejudice within India and the inherent patriarchal prejudices faced within their homes and beyond.

Both Niaz and Soman say the ‘communal’ tensions, parlance for prejudice and violence against the Muslim minority in India, shaped their understandings of gender and identity. This led them to stand firmly on principles of gender justice and reforms – leading to the formation of BMMA. Since 2007 this movement has grown to more than 50,000 women.

Soman says she became conscious of her Muslim identity while interacting with women survivors of the Gujarat riots in 2002 in Ahmedabad. During these riots, many Muslim women were singled out and subjected to sexual violence.

“Gujarat riots were preceded by 9/11 (the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York in 2001) and the so-called war on terror. I felt a huge burden of my identity. My Muslim name invoked curiosity wherever I went,” Soman says.

She realised she was not alone, and many Muslim women shared her feelings.

“On the one hand, there was communalism and communal violence coupled with state neglect. On the other hand, we faced discrimination at home and within the family, wrongly in the name of religion.”

Soman says she was in an “abusive relationship”, and she and other Muslim women “decided to join hands and take charge of our situation.”

BMMA members in a leadership training program. The organisation has grown to more than 50 000 women and they have achieved significant successes.

The BMMA was born out of these sentiments to change a communal, patriarchal world.

For Niaz, the journey began in 1992, just after Babri Masjid, a mosque in Ayodhya, was demolished. What followed was communal violence across the country. Eighteen Muslims were murdered in Ayodhya following the demolition and houses and shops torched. Across the country, including in Mumbai, around 2,000 people were killed.

This communal violence and insecurity were the reasons Muslim women emerged as community leaders, she said.

“By this time, there was also a deeper understanding of all issues, especially of the core basic need for education, livelihood, health, security,” Niaz says. “Additionally, we also had seen from close quarters the legal discrimination that Muslim women faced because of lack of a codified Muslim family law.”

This became the core demand of the  BMMA because “we knew that if we don’t demand it, nobody else will. ‘Our Struggle, Our Leadership’ became our slogan. Muslim women must lead based on the values of the Holy Quran and the Indian Constitution. (She must) demand her rights which emanate from her religion and her identity as a citizen of this country,” Niaz says in an exclusive interview with IPS.

“Zakia approached me with the idea of a national platform, and that is how it all began. We worked for two years on the vision, mission, objectives, values and principles that would govern the movement, with other women leaders,” she said.

After speaking to other Muslim women leaders in various states and after two years of deliberations, in 2007, BMMA was formally launched.

Since its formation, BMMA has been leading change from within on various fronts.

Soman and Niaz recall the various victories and associate these with the relentless struggle of the members who continued to fight for their rights despite little to no resources and often felt the community’s ire for “daring to demand their rights’.

One such victory was the Haji Ali judgement which reversed a prohibition of women’s entry into the sanctum sanctorum of the religious shrine, Dargah/Shrine. BMMA had filed the Public Interest Litigation or PIL to stop the discriminatory practice. It was a victory endorsed by the Supreme Court of India and paved the way for women from other communities to demand the end of discrimination at religious places.

Another significant achievement was the filing of a PIL against triple divorce, polygamy and halala. The BMMA was a significant group that had the practice of triple divorce, a method where Muslim men could divorce their wives by merely pronouncing the term ‘Talaaq’ or divorce, thrice to them, abolished in 2019.

Forming Darul-Uloom-e-Niswaan and training 20 women to become qazis or religious scholars is a first in India and considered by both as a major achievement.

“Some of the women whom we have trained have even performed Nikahs (religious weddings), challenging patriarchal norms,” adds Niaz.

Despite the resource crunch and criticism, the leaders in the states and members continue to work with the most marginalised women, addressing issues ranging from applying scholarship schemes for their children and training them in livelihood skills to empowering them with information on Constitutional and Quranic rights

Most of the leaders run centres from their homes, many in poor ghettos to reach those in most need.

The movement and its leaders have been criticised for addressing women’s rights when Islamophobia and communal violence are on the rise.

Change and reform are slow and require continuous efforts and support from the larger community and progressive forces, according to Soman.

“It is not easy to take on the patriarchal religious establishment that has ruled over the community mindsets for decades. Neither is it easy to fight a discriminatory communal order in the face of state apathy,” says Soman.

“I do not care about the opinions of vested interests. I am satisfied when I look at how dozens of the riot survivor women have turned out to be fiery activists in the last two decades,” Soman says. BMMA has created leaders across the country.

“These women were voiceless in the cacophony of conservative men of religion. (The leaders) have now shown the whole world that gender justice is intrinsic to Islam. They have changed the perception about their religion in the eyes of ordinary Indians,” she says.

The path chosen was never easy. They were asked why the State should be involved in matters of shariah. They were insulted and called stooges of the right-right-wing Hindutva. This criticism came from both religious groups and the so-called secular-liberal feminists

With the additional challenge of COVID-19, Niaz is confident that the path chosen is the right one.

“Amid the heightened Islamophobia, lynchings and open calls for annihilating the community by the state and state-backed Hindutva forces, how can BMMA continue to speak for family law reforms in favour of Muslim women,” they were asked

Niaz’s answer is emphatic.

“Because if we don’t continue to speak and highlight the issue, nobody else will.”

The two women and the leaders from the Indian states, bound by shared objectives of empowering and uplifting Muslim women, find strength in each other. Niaz reflects on this relationship.

“We bond with each other within BMMA. I would like to believe we are soul-mates born with a common divinely sanctioned purpose. Just being with each other, talking to each other gives us strength.”

 

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');   Related Articles

• Dalit and Muslim Indian Women Leading Change in South Sudan
• Dr Aqsa Sheikh: Transgender Doctor Injecting Hope During COVID Pandemic
• The Struggle to End Female Genital Mutilation: A Dark Secret No More

By Marty Logan
KATHMANDU, Dec 10 2021 (IPS)

I suspect that most of you have at least heard of female genital mutilation, or FGM. It’s a practice that happens in numerous African countries, in which girls’ genitalia are removed or cut, for cultural or religious reasons. FGM has been condemned globally for years and campaigners continue working to end it.

But what might surprise you is that FGM happens in Asia too. And not just in one or two countries. According to today’s guest, Keshia Mahmood from Malaysia-based non-profit ARROW, the practice occurs in as many as 13 countries in both Southeast Asia and South Asia. That shocked me. I think I’m pretty well informed, and I lived in Malaysia for four years, but I didn’t know about FGM happening there. Interestingly, the United Nations joint programme to eliminate FGM works in 17 countries, but none of them are in Asia.

Keshia explains why FGM in Asia — which she refers to as FGM/C, or female genital mutilation or cutting — has been so under-exposed, but how that started changing after its elimination was included in one of the Sustainable Development Goals, whose deadline is 2030. Still, ending it will be a huge challenge, in part because practising communities believe that it is a much less invasive version of FGM than those performed in African countries. Another impediment is the growing medicalization of the practice, which lends it an air of legitimacy.

Keshia also discusses a new initiative co-led by ARROW called the Asia Network to end FGM/C, and some of the avenues it is pursuing to support partners working on the ground to end the practice. They have their work cut out for them: every year more than 1 million girls in Asia are cut in the name of culture and religion.

 

 

A worker checks the fans at the cryptocurrency farming operation, Bitfarms, in Quebec, Canada (image: Alamy)

By Joe Coroneo-Seaman
LONDON, Dec 10 2021 (IPS)

On 14 April this year, the price of a single Bitcoin reached a then all-time-high of around US$64,870. Just over a month later, the price of the world’s most popular digital currency had tumbled to $34,259.

A significant driver behind this sudden drop was the news that China had begun a sweeping crackdown on the cryptocurrency industry, driven by concerns about financial risk and excessive energy consumption. Bitcoin “mining” – the process by which transactions are verified and new coins are created – is highly energy intensive, leading to criticism of the currency’s oversized carbon footprint.

Before the clampdown, China accounted for two-thirds of Bitcoin mining worldwide. In the months since, mining companies have been quick to move their operations overseas. Recent data suggests that energy consumed by Bitcoin has increased in the US, Canada and Kazakhstan, and with it, pressure to address the currency’s soaring electricity appetite.

 

Power-hungry Bitcoin mining

Bitcoin is a decentralised digital currency, meaning that each time money is sent or received, the transaction is kept on a public record, rather than with a bank. But in the absence of a trusted authority to verify each transaction, the responsibility falls to participants in the Bitcoin network known as “miners”.

Herein lies Bitcoin’s energy problem. The more computing power you can muster, the more often you will be first to solve the puzzle and earn the Bitcoin. And the machines used to mine Bitcoin – application-specific integrated units (ASICs) – consume a lot of energy, to say the least.

To verify transactions, miners connect computers to the cryptocurrency network and use them to solve incredibly complex, randomly generated mathematical puzzles. But not just any computer will do the job: Bitcoin mining requires running multiple specialised computers almost 24/7 in order to achieve the computing power needed to find the solution.

Whoever solves the puzzle first is allowed to add a “block” of transactions to the global ledger, and is rewarded with a small amount of newly minted Bitcoin.

Herein lies Bitcoin’s energy problem. The more computing power you can muster, the more often you will be first to solve the puzzle and earn the Bitcoin. And the machines used to mine Bitcoin – application-specific integrated units (ASICs) – consume a lot of energy, to say the least.

In one year, the entire Bitcoin network consumes around 120 terawatt hours (TWh) of energy, or more than the whole of the Netherlands, according to estimates by Cambridge University’s Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI). If Bitcoin were a country, it would rank 32nd in the world by annual electricity consumption.

“That’s the price we pay to secure transactions,” says Anton Dek, cryptoasset and blockchain lead at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, and one of the creators of the index. Bitcoin’s energy usage isn’t an accidental by-product, he explains. Mining Bitcoin is purposefully designed to be costly – both in terms of electricity and money – to prevent would-be hackers from taking over the network.

So far, it seems to have worked. “We haven’t seen any double spending or any attacks on the network, partially because this attack would be too expensive. So it kind of makes sense, though that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be of concern,” says Dek.

 

Bitcoin mining: A climate disaster?

Bitcoin’s energy footprint has skyrocketed in recent years. In 2017, economics blog Digiconomist estimated that the network of specialised mining computers used 29 TWh annually, equal to 0.13% of total global electricity consumption. This had grown to around 0.65% by May this year, according to CBECI data.ƒcbeci

Unchecked, Bitcoin mining operations in China alone were set to generate 130.5 million metric tons of CO2 by 2024, around the same as the total annual emissions of the Czech Republic, according to a 2021 study in the journal Nature.

 

Crackdown

Since President Xi Jinping pledged last year that China would aim to be carbon neutral by 2060, the government’s stance on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency mining has hardened.

The first sign came in March this year, when Inner Mongolia announced it would phase out cryptocurrency mining entirely after the province failed to meet its 2020 target for reducing energy consumption.

Then in May, China’s Vice Premier Liu He declared at a State Council meeting that the government intended to “crackdown on Bitcoin mining and trading”.

Regional governments were quick to act, revoking licences of companies involved in cryptocurrency mining, cutting off power to mining facilities and in some cases giving firms just seven days to shut down their operations. By the end of June, one industry expert estimated that 90% of China’s Bitcoin mining centres – more than half of the global total at the time – had gone offline. In the same month, Bitcoin’s total electricity footprint was cut in half, according to CBECI data.

 

Mass exodus

“The crackdown in China has resulted in a mass exodus of miners,” explains Peter Wall, CEO of North American cryptocurrency mining firm Argo Blockchain. “Displaced Chinese miners are searching the globe for appropriate hosting sites for their machines.”

Countries with access to cheap electricity like Canada, Russia, Kazakhstan and, especially, the United States are now seeing a surge in interest from Chinese miners looking to partner with local firms. Latin American nations with similarly affordable electricity rates and a weak institutional framework for the industry are also emerging as destinations for the industry.

Venezuela and Paraguay are among those looking to attract miners unable to operate in China and Argentina could become a global bitcoin mining destination, with Canada-based Bitfarms announcing it had begun construction of a 210 MW Bitcoin mining facility in Argentina, the largest in the country. The mine will source its power directly from the Maranzana gas power station.

In September, El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele made headlines when he adopted the currency as legal tender, despite experts voicing concerns that the attendant increase in demand for electricity would make the country more dependent on energy imports than it already is.

So how will this “great mining migration”, as it is described in cryptocurrency circles, shape Bitcoin’s carbon footprint?

“We hope that the long-term impact of this migration is the re-installation of machines in jurisdictions in which mining operations can be powered by renewable energy,” says Wall.

The short-term reality may not be so rosy. In July, Beijing-based crypto-mining giant Bitmain agreed to move a batch of its mining machines to a 180 megawatt (MW) facility in Kazakhstan whose electricity is supplied by a local coal power plant. Given that just 1% of Kazakhstan’s energy mix is renewables, this may not be a one-off. In Canada, oil and gas company Black Rock Petroleum has agreed to host up to 1 million Bitcoin-mining machines relocated from China, with the first 200,000 units sourcing power directly from a natural gas well.

The new global hub of Bitcoin mining, however, is expected to be the US state of Texas. The state’s governor, Greg Abbott, is actively courting the cryptocurrency industry, tweeting in June that “Texas is open for crypto business.” Shenzhen-based BIT Mining plans to invest $26 million in a 57 MW facility in the state.

Texas offers “huge possibilities for mining to utilise renewable sources” says Wall. He points out that in the west of the state, wind turbines power 90% of the grid. Overall, however, the Texas energy grid is made up of just over one-fifth renewable energy, and has proven fragile in extreme weather conditions.

 

Greening Bitcoin

CBECI data now shows Bitcoin’s electricity consumption is climbing once again. As the network becomes more distributed across the globe, what options remain for tackling the currency’s carbon footprint?

One solution may be to rethink how Bitcoin transactions are verified. The current method is called “Proof of Work” because participants must do the work of mining to verify transactions.

The most commonly proposed alternative is “Proof of Stake”. This removes computing power from the equation. Instead of competing against each other, participants who have first made a deposit in Bitcoin are selected at random to verify transactions. The larger the deposit, the greater the chance of being selected and earning the reward.

Several smaller cryptocurrencies already use this method. Ethereum, one of Bitcoin’s main competitors, is expected to make the switch later this year, but some in the industry remain sceptical.

“We have no plans to shift away from Proof of Work,” says Wall. Miners will inevitably migrate to the cheapest electricity available on the grid and increasingly that is not coal, oil or gas plants, he argues. “We are at a point where renewable power is the same price or lower than power generated by fossil fuels.”

“It may be too late for existing digital currencies like Bitcoin to change their methods of confirming transactions,” agrees Truby, of Qatar University. The best option is to “focus on mitigating mining devices’ energy consumption by improving the devices and providing them with renewable energy,” he says.

Norway and Iceland, with their plentiful supply of geothermal, hydroelectric and wind power, have been using renewable energy to power cryptocurrency mining for years. El Salvador also claimed that its Bitcoin mining operations would be powered by “100% clean, 100% renewable, 0 emissions energy” from a volcano.

Against a backdrop of growing pressure on energy-intensive industries of all kinds to address their contribution to global carbon emissions, Wall is frank about the need for cryptocurrency to adapt: “Proving that crypto can be sustainable is pivotal to its success. The future of energy is green and renewable, so the future of crypto must reflect that.”

This article was originally published by ChinaDialogue

Biofortified crops address the world’s ‘hidden hunger. Credit: CGIAR, formerly the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research.

By Jan Low
WASHINGTON DC, Dec 10 2021 (IPS)

When one in five pre-school children is stunted due to chronic undernutrition, it is clear that global diets urgently need to improve and diversify to include more nutrient-rich fruits, vegetables and animal-source foods.

Yet with healthy diets out of reach for three billion people worldwide, resulting in insufficient vitamin and mineral intakes and bouts of illness, this shift cannot happen overnight. Instead, improving diets and nutrition must be seen as a holistic process.

Breeding staple foods, which are already accessible and affordable, with additional vitamins and micronutrients – known as “biofortification” – is a fundamental way to support better nutrition for all, but especially those who struggle to achieve a more diverse and nutritious diet.

Many factors contribute to inadequate diets around the world, from cost to climate change, all of which require a comprehensive and systemic transformation with innovation at every stage of the food chain, from incentives and new technologies for producers to education and improved livelihoods for consumers.

But to combat hunger, people simply need sufficient calories, and through biofortification, calories that are easiest to come by can also be source of key vitamins and minerals essential for good growth and strong immune systems.

In drought-stricken southern Madagascar, for example, which is experiencing the first climate-induced famine, a new effort is under way to deploy biofortified varieties of sweetpotato, which are enriched with vitamin A and fast maturing.

Since sweetpotato is a hardy crop that is already widely eaten, the biofortified version is a way to deliver crucial nutrition quickly in a form that Madagascans recognize and are likely to adopt.

A project backed by World Food Programme (WFP) and partners in Nyaruguru district in southern Rwanda is empowering women with agricultural and business skills. Cedit: WFP/JohnPaul Sesonga

The orange-fleshed sweetpotato has already helped make inroads in improving nutrition across Africa with more than six million households benefitting from the crop in 15 countries over the past 10 years. Just one small root, or 125g, of orange-fleshed sweetpotato meets the daily vitamin A needs of a young child.

Meanwhile, the biofortification of rice is expected to provide up to 30 per cent of vitamin A requirements in the Philippines, where it has recently been approved for cultivation and where more than 15 per cent of children under six are vitamin A deficient because fresh fruit and vegetables are often unaffordable.

Biofortification also offers a way to preserve and enhance the nutritional value of the most consumed cereals, including rice, wheat, millet, and sorghum.

One under-reported consequence of rising levels of CO2 emissions is the degradation of nutritional quality of staple foods, with some studies indicating that future CO2 concentrations could reduce levels of protein, iron and zinc in cereals by up to 10 per cent.

Biofortifying grains with zinc can ensure good growth and support more than 200 enzyme systems, which is especially important given that nutrient declines in crops could result in an additional 175 million people being zinc deficient by mid to late century.

Zinc-enhanced wheat not only offers up to 40 per cent higher concentrations of zinc, but is also high yielding and disease resistant, meaning it not only safeguards the crop’s nutritional value against climate change, but it safeguards its productivity as well.

Finally, iron enriched crops such as beans, millets, and potato can help support the proper cognitive development of children as well as their physical development, allowing them the best possible chance to reach their full potential and a prosperous, healthy future.

Almost one-fifth of the population in Rwanda are now eating iron-enhanced beans, which provide 80 per cent of the iron needs of young children and non-pregnant women.

By getting nutrition right in the early years, millions of children will be able to escape the limitations of inadequate diets.

Good nutrition through a diet rich with fruits, vegetables and animal-source foods is the foundation of a healthy, productive society. Yet poor households in low-income countries spend up to 70 per cent of their income on food, and having calories to prevent hunger is their first priority.

Using biofortified staples is a no-brainer way to get major micronutrients into the diet at low cost, a vital pathway towards better long-term, sustainable nutrition and health.

Jan Low is Principal Scientist, CGIAR’s International Potato Center, and 2016 World Food Prize Laureate.

 

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');  

Gladys Acosta, a Peruvian lawyer and sociologist who is the chair of the CEDAW Committee, considered the fundamental charter of women's rights in the world, stands on a stretch of the Costa Verde boardwalk in Lima after her interview with IPS. The Convention celebrated its 40th anniversary in September 2021. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, Dec 10 2021 (IPS)

“The level of injustice in the world cannot go on like this…I am not pessimistic about the future,” said Gladys Acosta, president of the CEDAW Committee, in an interview with IPS in the Peruvian capital.

The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) celebrated its 40th anniversary in September of this year as the binding legal tool for women’s rights for all 189 states parties.

Acosta, a Peruvian feminist lawyer and sociologist, chairs the Committee of 23 independent experts with four-year mandates to monitor the implementation of the Convention.

After an intense period of sessions, Acosta is in Lima and will return in 2022 to her duties in Geneva, where the Committee operates, to finish her term. Until then, she will enjoy her view of the Pacific Ocean and the soothing murmur of the waves for a few weeks.

After stating that she is not pessimistic about the future, she adds that, on the contrary, “I am very critical and pessimistic about what is happening today.”

“We are reaching the limit of an era that is in its death throes because the level of injustice in the world cannot go on like this,” said the expert, who has previously held senior regional positions in United Nations agencies.

Among the issues addressed in her conversation with IPS, Acosta mentioned the importance of analyzing gender-based violence as part of the systemic discrimination against women, and said the pandemic is marking a before and after not only in relation to this problem, but also a change of era where the question of caring for people becomes much more of a priority.

IPS: Do you consider that the covid-19 pandemic marks a before and after in relation to discrimination against women, a step backwards in terms of achievements? Is it possible to make this interpretation?

GLADYS ACOSTA: I think that this will be the case for everything, not just for women, discrimination or human rights; I dare to think that it will be seen as a change of era. We are coming from an era with the greatest concentration of wealth in the history of the world, with a population in growing poverty, which is reaching unsustainable levels.

It is very important to develop this awareness, because we have been sold the idea that having money or buying goods is the non plus ultra of everything. We are in a post-neoliberal world and nobody knows for sure how far we have come, but we are at a breaking point because this economy based on the exploitation of territories, of people, of knowledge is a constant illicit appropriation of everything, and today with the pandemic it has come to light that human beings need care.

This has become a central focus and has been put on the agenda; the pandemic has clearly demonstrated that the presence of this virus has been exacerbated in the absence of care.

(Acosta vehemently recalled that many years ago feminist economics proposed that the economic system could not live without women’s work, especially unpaid work. And she called for an analysis of the current situation with fresh eyes and making better connections in order to, for example, “stop looking at the growing problem of violence against women as something dislocated, a loose wheel”.)

When we in the Committee took a position regarding Nov. 25 (International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women), we saw that three forms of violence have been exacerbated: femicides, domestic violence and violence online, which has become widespread.

So, yes, there are some new things, but it is very clear that we have not resolved the basic forms of discrimination that are at the basis of society, which include social, political, economic, racial and cultural violence – and in places where there are castes: caste-based violence. There is a discriminatory base that is at its peak and I think it is a serious moment of very unequal and very unjust power relations that I view with great concern.

IPS: At the moment you describe, there is resistance put up by different population groups – young people, feminists, indigenous people – but it is difficult to bring them together in a concerted effort, as seen in Peru and other Latin American countries. Is this a great challenge?

GA: We are living in a highly conflictive time, it is not that we are being swept away by a right wing with no resistance. No. We are in a time of open conflict between political sectors, economic sectors, social sectors and there is a very clear resistance. And I am thinking on a global level, more globally as part of the Committee, not only with regard to what is happening in Peru. The environmental crises are very serious and covid has to do with that.

This is not an epidemic that can be seen as detached from human aggression against nature. Environmental crises accelerated in the twentieth century due to the model of industrialization, production and economic development. Now they are trying to reverse the situation, but global agreements are not easy and do not bear the desired fruits quickly because there are enormous economic interests involved.

Interests that are prepared to kill the planet! They say: “What does it matter, in thirty years we won’t be here.” Just like that, with an atrocious pragmatism. And within these environmental conflicts, we women bear the brunt.

Secondly, there is the social conflict that takes place within and outside these circumstances. And there is an atmosphere of conflict, I would say violent, armed, in different parts of the world and it has to do with this madness of arms production, because this is a war-economic model that produces and sells arms left and right.

And the big countries, even those that seem very democratic and progressive – and I say this because I see it in the Committee – are big producers of arms and sell them to countries that have conflicts and this has repercussions on women’s lives.

(Acosta explained that the Committee would address this problem with arms-producing nations and expects the resistance movement to grow. “The problem I find is that this perversity in the economy is unfortunately linked to a dominance in mass media and with a top-level technology. And I think that these elements, which are more macro, have to be included in the analysis of women’s issues”.)

Gladys Acosta sits on Lima’s malecon or boardwalk after an intense year as chair of the CEDAW Committee, made up of 23 independent experts who monitor compliance with the Convention against all forms of discrimination against women. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

IPS: Ecofeminists warn of the risk to the sustainability of life, indigenous peoples warn of the threat to nature as long as there are weak or complicit States. How does the Committee contribute to this reflection?

GA: First of all, States still exist. Although the economic power of transnational corporations is enormous, this is the sphere in which we move, we discuss with the States Parties, of which there are 189 in this Convention, in an interesting dynamic of pressure to respect international human rights standards, among which international standards for the protection of women’s rights are very important.

Women’s rights have an enormous connection with the sustainability of life, but not from an essentialist point of view. You brought up the issue of indigenous peoples and it seems to me that in many ways we are discussing a general recommendation on the rights of indigenous women and girls. There is an ancestral indigenous wisdom, especially that of women, which must be protected in a more effective sense.

There is an enormous knowledge about nature, food, seeds and seed reproduction; knowledge about how nature is suffering – they know the symptoms of this suffering and how we could do things differently. It is knowledge that has been handed down through the generations and that fortunately still exists and must be protected.

IPS: In another interview with IPS, in 2009, when you were regional representative of the predecessor organization of UN Women, you said that policies should not see women as a vulnerable sector; do you think there has been progress against that vision described as paternalistic?

GA: I would say there are both. It seems to me that the mobilization today in the world in favor of women’s rights is much more powerful, broader and more political. I think that in different countries you find everything, equality policies that have been very positive and that have opened the way for greater respect of women’s rights and greater access to education, university and work.

I would even say that the issue of parity has advanced despite the fact that something that worries me is also appearing, which is that some very retrograde sectors are taking advantage of the issue and want to make it their own when in reality the only thing they are looking for is more power for themselves. Women end up being nothing more than decorative elements within their political stance.

(Acosta highlighted in this context the emergence of younger movements, of young people who demand more power, and who have more vision about which direction to take than adults and older people, and said she had confidence in these movements, while clarifying that she meant the ones that take a “critical stance”.)

That is why I am not pessimistic about the future. I am very critical and pessimistic about what is happening today, but I do not think that this will remain the same. That is why I say that we are reaching the limit of an era that is in its death throes because the level of injustice in the world cannot go on like this.

This is going to explode and hopefully the damage to people will be minimal. But I know that the level of conflict will not remain unchanged.

Excerpt:

Mariela Jara interviews GLADYS ACOSTA, Chair of the CEDAW Committee. This article is part of IPS coverage of the 16 days of activism against gender-based violence that began on Nov. 25, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, and end on Dec. 10, Human Rights Day.

By External Source
Dec 9 2021 (IPS-Partners)

Helen Grant became actively involved in politics in 2006 and was elected as Member of Parliament for the Kent constituency of Maidstone & The Weald at the 2010 General Election.

Helen was Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Sport and Civil Society from October 2013 to March 2015. She was Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Minister for the Courts and Victims and Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Women and Equalities from September 2012 to October 2013.

In January 2021 Grant was appointed as the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy for Girls’ Education, leading the UK’s efforts internationally to ensure all girls get 12 years of quality education. One of her goals is to drive a global campaign to improve learning and get 40 million more girls into school around the world by 2025. Helen is also the Prime Minister’s Trade Envoy to Nigeria.

ECW: Why is the UK putting girls’ education at the top of its international development agenda and where does education in emergencies and protracted crises fit into this?

Helen Grant: Achieving Sustainable Development Goal 4 – realizing the right to quality education for all by 2030 – is a major priority for the UK government. We have particularly focused on girls’ education not only because girls are more likely than boys to miss out on education but also because it is a particularly powerful investment that can create healthier societies, increase per capita GDP and reduce violence. The UK used its G7 presidency to ask G7 leaders and other partners to sign up to ambitious targets of 40 million more girls in school and 20 million more reading by the end of primary school, by 2026. We also published our Girls’ Education Action Plan that sets out our roadmap to achieving these targets.

However, we will not deliver education for all without reaching children affected by crisis. We know that children in fragile and conflict-affected countries are more than twice as likely to be out of school compared with those in countries not affected by conflict [1]. This is particularly acute for girls; current trends also show that girls are particularly affected and will not reach 100% lower secondary completion in crisis-affected countries until at least 2063 [2].

That is why education in emergencies and protracted crises is a priority for the UK. It is also why I am proud that the UK is a founding member and the current largest donor to Education Cannot Wait

ECW: The climate crisis is an education crisis, especially for girls. Through the UK’s leadership of the November climate talks (COP26), new efforts are being taken to bring together actors and connect the dots between education, climate change and humanitarian relief. Why is connecting the dots so important for achievement of the SDGs and Paris Agreement targets, especially between girls’ education and climate action?

Helen Grant: Globally, at least 200 million adolescent girls are currently living on the frontline of climate crisis as they belong to the poorest households in the poorest areas and are therefore most vulnerable to the negative impacts. We also know that extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and severe, disrupting the education of nearly 40 million children a year. As climate shocks become more frequent and severe, disrupting the education of millions of children, we will need a fully resourced and effective emergency response to provide protection and keep children learning.

It is so important to connect all of these dots as educating girls can make a huge difference in addressing climate change and its impact. When girls go to school, they and their families can cope better with severe weather events. Education also allows girls and women to participate much more in decisions and leadership in relation to climate resilience, adaption, and mitigation.

This is why the UK is committed to action and at COP26 we launched a wide-ranging consultation to guide the UK’s future work on these critical issues. We want to listen and learn from all involved, from young people affected by this crisis as well as teachers and civil society organisations. As the UK Prime Minister’s Special Envoy for Girls’ Education, I am personally committed to highlighting the links between climate change and girls’ education and will continue to do so in 2022 and beyond.

ECW: In January 2021 you were appointed as the UK Prime Minister’s Special Envoy for Girls’ Education, leading the UK’s efforts internationally to ensure all girls get 12 years of quality education. For the UK, and yourself personally, why is it crucial that we invest in girls’ education now in emergencies & protracted crises? What can be done to accelerate efforts to achieve equitable, inclusive education by 2030?

Helen Grant: I am hugely honoured to be the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy for Girls’ Education. In this role I globally champion the message that providing every girl on the planet with 12 years of quality education is one of the best ways of tackling many of the problems facing the world today such as poverty, climate change and inequality.

It is crucial to invest in girl’s education in crisis affected countries; only 27% of refugee girls are enrolled in secondary schools and 20 million girls are at risk of dropping out in the next year due to conflict and crisis [3]. Out-of-school girls are at greater risk of violence, sexual abuse, early and forced marriage and human trafficking. All of this creates a very real risk of a lost generation of girls.

The scale of the challenge, especially in emergencies and crisis, means that coordinated and concerted global effort is needed. Specifically, we need predictable funding for funds like ECW that enables long-term planning and action to ensure girls in conflict and crisis receive quality education. We also need high-quality and sustainable interventions which means ensuring a comprehensive package of support that moves away from simply providing textbooks but includes a focus on learning, protection and the wellbeing of children and school staff.

ECW: An estimated 4.2 million children are out of school in Afghanistan, including 2.2 million girls. What are the UK’s plans for girls’ education in Afghanistan?

Helen Grant: Education has been at the heart of Afghanistan’s development gains of the last 20 years, helping to transform women’s role in society and push back poverty. We must ensure that Afghanistan’s education systems are operational as soon as possible. This includes opening secondary schools and other education spaces for girls so that they can continue to access 12 years of quality education; and ensuring that schools are protected as safe places. It is also imperative that female teachers are able to work safely and without barriers.

The UK is working with international partners to help coordinate the education response in Afghanistan. I’m proud that ECW was able to swiftly stand up a First Emergency Response for Afghanistan to support internally displaced children which will reach 38000 children with temporary learning.

ECW: As a member of the UK Parliament, a mother of two and a lawyer, how can education secure other basic human rights for children and adolescents, especially for girls, who are among those left furthest behind and vulnerable in emergencies and protracted crises?

Helen Grant: Investing in girls’ education is a game changer. A child of a mother who can read is 50% more likely to live beyond the age of 5 years, twice as likely to attend school themselves, and 50% more likely to be immunised. Girls who are educated are more able to choose if, when, and how many children they have. Education also opens up employment opportunities for girls, helping to lift them and their families out of extreme poverty. Girls’ education is therefore vital to women and girls, but also in levelling-up society, boosting incomes and developing economies and nations.

These benefits are just as important, if not more so, for girls in emergencies and protracted crises.Quality education can also provide much needed practical knowledge and physical and psychological protection to girls and boys.Lastly, the evidence shows us that girls’ education can also decrease the likelihood of conflict and increase resilience to climate disasters – as such, education is a critical pillar in reducing the risk of future crises.

ECW: From your leadership vantage point, how can investments in education benefit the global economy, improve peace and security and help us build back better from the triple-C crisis threats of conflict, climate change and COVID-19?

Helen Grant: Even before the COVID-19 pandemic the world was facing a learning crisis. Tragically the pandemic has now become the largest disruptor of education in modern history, affecting 1.6 billion children and young people at the height of the pandemic. Without remedial support, a further 72 million children may fall behind. Children living in emergency and protracted crises affected countries are at particular risk; not only they are more likely to be out of school already, but they are also more vulnerable to threats such as food insecurity, climate change shocks and violence which we know can disrupt education further.

Getting all children into quality education is critical if we are to avoid undoing the global gains of the last two decades. Educating children is also key to breaking the cycle of conflict that exists in many countries in the world, with each year of education reduces the risk of conflict by around 20%. Finally, it can also help build children’s future resilience to climate change shocks. As such, education not only helps children today but protects the children of the future by supporting more peaceful and resilience societies.

Missing out on school has long-term consequences not only for individual children’s life prospects but also the prospects of nations. We must reopen schools as soon as possible to tackle the global learning crisis and protect children’s futures.

ECW: Our readers would like to know you a little better on a personal level and reading is a key component of education. Could you please share with us two or three books that have influenced you the most personally and/or professionally, and why you’d recommend them to other people to read?

Helen Grant: There is just one book that I would like to mention, which is Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngosi Adichie.

It is a novel set in the country of my father’s birth – Nigeria. And with an English mother, I’m extremely proud of both my British heritage and Nigerian heritage. I love visiting Africa.

The book touches on domestic violence, religious oppression and coming of age in a fast-changing country. I was a family lawyer for 23 years prior to politics, specialising in domestic violence and child abuse work. The writer has covered these issues with great subtlety and sensitivity. In addition to the physical suffering, it shows so clearly how violence and abuse crushes self-confidence and self-esteem in victims, wrecks families and ruins lives.

I recommend the book to others and will read it again myself for sure.

[1] GEM Report, Policy Paper 21, June 2015, p.2.
[2] INEE Mind the Gap Report – 2021
[3] INEE Mind the Gap Report – 2021

 

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');  

Credit: Albert Oppong-Ansah/IPS

By External Source
Dec 9 2021 (IPS)

Plastic waste of all shapes and sizes permeates the world’s oceans. It shows up on beaches, in fish and even in Arctic sea ice. And a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine makes clear that the U.S. is a big part of the problem.

As the report shows, the U.S. produces a large share of the global supply of plastic resin – the precursor material to all plastic industrial and consumer products. It also imports and exports billions of dollars’ worth of plastic products every year.

On a per capita basis, the U.S. produces an order of magnitude more plastic waste than China – a nation often vilified over pollution-related issues. These findings build off a study published in 2020 that concluded that the U.S. is the largest global source of plastic waste, including plastics shipped to other countries that later are mismanaged

On a per capita basis, the U.S. produces an order of magnitude more plastic waste than China – a nation often vilified over pollution-related issues. These findings build off a study published in 2020 that concluded that the U.S. is the largest global source of plastic waste, including plastics shipped to other countries that later are mismanaged.

And only a small fraction of plastic in U.S. household waste streams is recycled. The study calls current U.S. recycling systems “grossly insufficient to manage the diversity, complexity and quantity of plastic waste.”

As scientists who study the effects of plastic pollution on marine ecosystems, we view this report as an important first step on a long road to reducing ocean plastic pollution. While it’s important to make clear how the U.S. is contributing to ocean plastic waste, we see a need for specific, actionable goals and recommendations to mitigate the plastic pollution crisis, and would have liked to see the report go further in that direction.

 

Plastic is showing up in seafood

Researchers started documenting marine plastic pollution in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Public and scientific interest in the issue exploded in the early 2000s after oceanographer Charles Moore drew attention to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – a region in the central north Pacific where ocean currents concentrate floating plastic trash into spinning collections thousands of miles across.

More plastic garbage patches have now been found in the South Pacific, the North and South Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean. Unsurprisingly, plastic pervades marine food webs. Over 700 marine species are known to ingest plastic, including over 200 species of fish that humans eat.

Humans also consume plastic that fragments into beverages and food from packaging and inhale microplastic particles in household dust. Scientists are only beginning to assess what this means for public health. Research to date suggests that exposure to plastic-associated chemicals may interfere with hormones that regulate many processes in our bodies, cause developmental problems in children, or alter human metabolic processes in ways that promote obesity

 

A need for a national strategy

The new report is a sweeping overview of marine plastic pollution, grounded in science. However, many of its conclusions and recommendations have been proposed in various forms for years, and in our view the report could have done more to advance those discussions.

For example, it strongly recommends developing a national marine debris monitoring program, led by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Debris Program. We agree with this proposal, but the report does not address what to monitor, how to do it or what the specific goals of monitoring should be.

Ideally, we believe the federal government should create a coalition of relevant agencies, such as NOAA, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health, to tackle plastic pollution. Agencies have done this in the past in response to acute pollution events, such as the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, but not for chronic problems like marine debris. The report proposes a cross-government effort as well but does not provide specifics.

 

In 2019 volunteers for the nonprofit Surfrider Foundation removed nearly 300,000 pounds of trash from U.S. beaches, nearly all of it plastic.
Surfrider Foundation, CC BY-ND

 

An underfunded problem

Actions to detect, track and remove plastic waste from the ocean will require substantial financial support. But there’s little federal funding for marine debris research and cleanup. In 2020, for example, NOAA’s Marine Debris Program budget request was $US7 million, which represents 0.1% of NOAA’s $5.65B 2020 budget. Proposed funding for the Marine Debris Program increased by $9 million for fiscal 2022, which is a step in the right direction.

Even so, making progress on ocean plastic waste will require considerably more funding for academic research, nongovernmental organizations and NOAA’s marine debris activities. Increased support for these programs will help close knowledge gaps, increase public awareness and spur effective action across the entire life cycle of plastics.

 

Corporate responsibility and equity

The private sector also has a crucial role to play in reducing plastic use and waste. We would have liked to see more discussion in the report of how businesses and industries contribute to the accumulation of ocean plastic waste and their role in solutions.

The report correctly notes that plastic pollution is an environmental justice issue. Minority and low-income communities are disproportionately affected by many activities that produce plastic waste, from oil drilling emissions to toxic chemicals released during the production or incineration of plastics. Some proposals in the report, such as better waste management and increased recycling, may benefit these communities – but only if they are directly involved in planning and carrying them out.

The study also highlights the need to produce less plastic and scale up effective plastic recycling. More public and private funding for solutions like reusable and refillable containers, reduced packaging and standardized plastic recycling processes would increase opportunities for consumers to shift away from single-use disposable products.

Plastic pollution threatens the world’s oceans. It also poses direct and indirect risks to human health. We hope the bipartisan support this study has received is a sign that U.S. leaders are ready to take far-reaching action on this critical environmental problem.

Matthew Savoca, Postdoctoral researcher, Stanford University; Anna Robuck, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Lauren Kashiwabara, Master’s Degree Student in Biological Sciences, University of the Pacific

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

Yasmine Sherif, Director of Education Cannot Wait, on a recent visit to a refugee site in the village of Modale, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where children's education is being supported.  Sherif says for those living in protracted crises, the risks of GBV are compounded. Courtesy: Education Cannot Wait

By Joyce Chimbi
Nairobi, Dec 9 2021 (IPS)

The statistics are dire: One in three women have experienced a form of gender-based violence in their lifetime, be it sexual violence, physical violence, or child marriage. The message is clear: Women and girls deserve a safer, brighter future – free from gender-based violence.

For those living in protracted crises, the risks are compounded as these often create new risks for girls forced to travel long distances to and from schools and learning spaces, or the lack of safe and gender-segregated WASH facilities. These risks, in turn, often compel families to keep their girls out of school and even to marry them off as children to reduce the risk of gender-based violence in and around schools.

This is why Education Cannot Wait (ECW) – the UN global fund for education in emergencies – has become the first global fund to join the Call to Action on Protection from Gender-Based Violence in Emergencies. The ‘Call to Action’ is a multi-stakeholder initiative to transform how gender-based violence is addressed in humanitarian emergencies. ECW made the announcement during the ‘16 Days of Activism against Violence against Women and Girls’ campaign that kicked off on November 25 and ends on December 10.

“To no one is the campaign so real as it is for girls and adolescent girls who want to go to school, but face gender-based violence in emergency and protracted crisis contexts. These girls fear for their lives, they fear for their security, and they desperately need safe learning spaces so they can reach their full potential and be assured of their inherent human right to live free from fear and violence and to quality education,” said Yasmine Sherif, Director of Education Cannot Wait.

Yasmine Sherif, the Director of Education Cannot Wait, says girls often fear for their lives and are in desperate need of safe spaces so they can reach their full potential. Credit: ECW

Sherif is talking about the one in four children in Africa who live in conflict zones. She is also referring to UNESCO projections which show that 9 million girls between 6-11 years of age – compared with 6 million boys of the same age – living in sub-Saharan Africa will never go to school. These estimates were before the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, with school closures and COVID-19 restrictions, the situation has worsened.

The United Nations estimates that women and girls together account for 72 per cent of all human trafficking victims reported globally. Three out of four child trafficking victims are girls. A majority of women and girls are trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation. Globally, 15 million adolescent girls, aged 15–19 years, have experienced forced sex.

ECW points out that in armed conflicts, forced displacement, climate-induced disasters and protracted crises, gender-based violence risks are exacerbated, increasing the challenges already faced by girls, adolescent girls and women, as they are disproportionately affected by the impact of emergencies on education.

Although education is a fundamental human right for all children and adolescents, ECW finds that families are more likely to prioritize boys’ education, choosing not to pay for girls’ school fees, uniforms and other supplies as a result of the economic impact of armed conflicts, forced displacement and other crises.

Sherif and other experts in girls’ education emphasize that better-designed education programmes with a strong, gender-sensitive, protection component can help mitigate such risk – by keeping girls and women safer and supporting them when they experience gender-based violence. This provides them with the skills and knowledge they need to improve their own lives.

Joining forces with more than 95 stakeholders including governments, UN agencies, international NGOs, donors, and local civil society organizations, ECW “aims to contribute to change and foster accountability from the humanitarian system to address gender-based violence from the earliest phases of a crisis.”

All girls have a fundamental right to access safe, quality and inclusive education. Education Cannot Wait believes women and girls need a brighter future, without fear of gender-based violence. Credit: Joyce Chimbi

As the United Nations global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises, ECW is positioned to make and implement bold commitments to support gender-based violence risk mitigation.

The 16 Days campaign, which this year has the theme, ‘Orange the world: End violence against women now!’, has become an important rallying point to raise awareness and make a difference.

Mary Chepkwony, a field coordinator for the Kenya-based Rural Women Peace Link tells IPS that bold commitments to safeguard the rights of women, girls and adolescent girls are timely and critical.

“Gender-based violence cases are on an unprecedented increase, hence the need to strengthen local- and rural-based women organizations to improve the safety and security of women and girls,” she says.

Concerns are rife that COVID-19-driven economic insecurity is increasing girls and women’s vulnerability to gender-based violence in homes globally. Additionally, school-related gender-based violence is a major obstacle to universal schooling and the right to education for girls.

Meaningful partnerships with local women organizations are crucial for the design and implementation of safe, quality and inclusive education to ensure that girls are not left behind.

“This week, Education Cannot Wait launched two new guidance notes on gender-based violence risk mitigation measures and meaningful engagement of local women organizations,” says Sherif. These guidance notes will help ECW and its partners to support commitments to eliminate gender-based violence risks among women, girls and adolescent girls.

These short and practical guidance notes are based on global best practices and are being systematically integrated in the design and implementation of EWC-supported investments.

“We firmly believe that education in emergencies and protracted crises can greatly contribute to reducing the incidence of gender-based violence by creating safer education in emergency programming. Girls’ access, retention, and learning outcomes can only increase, creating a lasting positive impact on their communities,” says Sherif.

She explains that education in emergencies programming and protection – particularly gender-based violence risk mitigation – reinforce each other and when combined, can lead to positive outcomes for girls and their communities.

Chepkwony applauds these efforts, saying ongoing risk mitigation efforts around the world are a step in the right direction for the safety of women and girls.

ECW already supports these risk mitigation measures across its broad global portfolio. For instance, in Syria and Somalia, referral mechanisms to the gender-based violence sub-cluster were established to ensure disclosure of cases are dealt with according to best practice.

 

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');   Related Articles

• Act to Save Children Living Precarious Lives in Cameroon’s Forgotten and Neglected Conflict
• Education Cannot Wait Investments Change Lives for Children, Including At-Risk Girls, Children with Disabilities and Teachers in South Sudan
• Education Cannot Wait Urges Urgent Action for World’s Biggest Humanitarian Crisis in Afghanistan

Amal Kabashi addressing the UN Security Council last week. Credit: United Nations

By Amal Kabashi
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec 9 2021 (IPS)

As a feminist activist and defender of women’s rights in Iraq, I would like to share with you my growing concerns about the assassinations, kidnappings, assaults, threats of assassination against and defamation of feminist activists and human rights defenders, which they have faced especially during the popular protests in October 2019–2020, all of which have occurred with impunity.

Over the last two years Iraqi women have faced daily challenges in realizing their full, equal and meaningful participation in establishing peace and securing protection from violence in Iraq.

As part of my work with the Iraqi Women Network, I have played a prominent role in drafting the first National Action Plan (NAP) for Resolution 1325 and in preparing the second NAP (2021–2024), which focuses on the role of Iraqi women in achieving stability, security, and peace, as well as combating terrorism and extremism.

Last week, I was invited to provide a civil society perspective and recommendations when the Security Council met to discuss the situation in Iraq. I focused on three key issues that must be addressed to end this cycle of discrimination and exclusion against Iraqi women.

First, the elections and the present negotiations for forming a new government are both critical for ensuring women’s meaningful participation and promoting democracy in Iraq.

The early elections in Iraq last month were organized in response to the demands of the peaceful protests that shook the country from October 2019–2020. Women played a key role in these protests and defied social norms. Protestors were confronted with excessive use of force that left over 600 dead and thousands wounded.

Despite the boycott of the elections that followed, they proceeded under wide monitoring by the United Nations (UN) and the European Union. 3,240 candidates, including 950 women, participated in the elections to compete for 329 seats in the House of Representatives.

The elections resulted in the emergence of new political movements and independent winners. Moreover, many women candidates received thousands of votes, indicating the general electorate’s support for women’s political participation. The results of the election have raised the percentage of women’s representation to more than 28%.

I can’t emphasize enough the critical role of and need for women as active participants in parliament and in negotiations to form the new government. Their meaningful representation must also be reflected through an increase in the number of women in ministerial positions and to ensure gender equality and equal opportunity, which the constitution affirms.

Second, while women’s engagement and increased participation in the electoral process is encouraging, an enabling environment for their participation is essential, as they still face serious barriers of discrimination, inequality and stereotyping of gender roles in the family, society, and law.

During the 2014–2021 parliamentary sessions we advocated for Parliament to pass a law against domestic violence. However, we failed. Despite the existence of such a law in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. This is due to the tyrannical mentality of many Iraqi legislators, who reject such efforts because they claim for the privacy of family life.

Yet the Iraqi constitution guarantees protection from all forms of violence and abuse in the family, school and society. These fundamental principles, as well as Iraq’s international legal obligations, require the establishment of national laws and regulations that protect women and girls from gender-based violence in all spheres of society.

This year has witnessed some encouraging legislation, such as the Yazidi Survivors’ Law. This law is part of the framework of transitional justice adopted by the Iraqi government to address the consequences of terrorism and violent extremism.

However, the law focuses on providing material compensation to women survivors and does not take the necessary measures to institutionalize psychological, health and social services for the survivors and their children.

The law also fails to address access to justice for survivors of gender-based violence and their children born to fathers affiliated with ISIS, particularly in terms of registering their births and obtaining civil documentation.

There are also gaps in the government program to implement rehabilitation and support the integration of ISIS families into their local communities. This has a profound impact on the ongoing stigmatization of women and girls forced to join ISIS or marry their fighters. The delay in resolving the situation of these families makes them ticking time bombs that threaten peace and societal security.

Stability in my country also needs strengthened law and justice enforcement institutions that are gender sensitive. This is essential for fighting impunity, corruption, and militarism, all of which negatively affect women’s rights and women’s participation in promoting social cohesion, reconciliation, and peacebuilding.

Third, a national mechanism to support inclusion of women is critical to ensure oversight of and adequate resources for implementing Iraq’s NAP on 1325. The absence of such a mechanism has contributed to the weakening of women’s participation in decision-making bodies, and in development programs.

We, as a national feminist movement, have called for the Iraqi government to form a National Council for Women’s Empowerment with representation of the government, Parliament, and the Supreme Judicial Council, as well as civil society organizations concerned with women and media.

This Council is needed to effectively lead work at the level of state institutions and local communities, realize the women, peace, and security (WPS) agenda, and invest in Iraqi women’s potential to reform the political process and build a state of equal citizenship and social justice.

In closing, I urged the UN Security Council to:

• Call on the Government of Iraq to fulfill its duty to provide the legal framework and the necessary mechanisms to protect women and girls, and support victims to access justice in line with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and Resolution 1325 (2000) and subsequent resolutions on WPS. This includes enacting the anti-domestic violence law, amending the Iraqi Penal Code and preventing attempts to legislate laws based on sectarian grounds to regulate personal affairs.
• Call upon the Government of Iraq to create the National Council for Women’s Empowerment and allocate the necessary budget to implement the NAP on 1325.
• Ensure the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) prioritizes protection for women’s rights in its support to the Government of Iraq for judicial and legal reform, as stipulated by Resolution 2576 (2021).
• Call on the Government of Iraq to ensure accountability for the killings of human rights defenders and civil society activists during the 2019–2020 protests and protect the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly.
• Call on the international community to fund women human rights defenders, their organizations and all civil society representatives and NGOs working to promote human rights, gender justice and the inclusion of women in peacebuilding and sustainable development.

We need sweeping and urgent action from the UN Security Council, the government of Iraq and the international community on all these fronts if we are to see truly sustainable and inclusive peace in Iraq. The futures of all Iraqis depend on it.

Amal Kabashi is the Executive Director of the Iraqi Women Network, which was established in 2004 as a civil society feminist alliance and includes more than 100 local organizations from all over Iraq.

 

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');  

Long staircases, like the ones in this section of the Pavão-Pavãozinho favela, are the daily slog of residents of the steep hillside slums of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – a symbol of Latin America's urban inequalities. CREDIT: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec 8 2021 (IPS)

The Brazilian megalopolis of São Paulo recorded 932 flooded premises on Feb. 10, 2020. The Mexican city of Tula de Allende was under water for 48 hours in September 2021. In Lima it almost never rains, but the rivers in the Peruvian capital overflowed in 2017 and left several outlying municipalities covered with mud.

Floods have become increasingly frequent in large Latin American cities, probably due to the effects of global warming and also to local factors, such as the extensive areas of concrete and asphalt that have replaced vegetation.

Extreme weather events are aggravating inequality “in a Latin America that has the most inequitable societies in the world,” said engineer Manuel Rodríguez, professor emeritus at the Universidad de los Andes who served as Colombia’s first minister of environment and sustainable development (1993-1996).

“The poorest of the poor live in shantytowns and slums in the areas most vulnerable to environmental risks, on undevelopable land along riverbanks or in the foothills,” where they are tragically affected by floods and landslides, he told IPS by telephone from Bogotá."There is a spatial inequality that results from the low-density expansion model of cities, which pushes low-income families to the periphery, makes access to public transportation difficult and requires long commutes." -- Pablo Lazo

This is especially important in Latin America, the world’s most urban region, where one in five people live in cities.

Thus, in addition to the 932 points of flooding reported to the fire department on Feb. 10, 2020, São Paulo also suffered 166 landslides that destroyed many houses. No deaths were reported on that day, but torrential rains usually claim lives in Greater São Paulo, which is home to 22 million people.

Brazil’s largest city, which spreads among rolling hills and numerous small valleys, has many neighborhoods that have had to learn to cope with flooding in the rainiest summers. This is due to the 300 streams that crisscross the area, most of which are covered by avenues or enclosed in channels that are unable to contain heavy downpours.

A good part of the 1.28 million inhabitants of the “favelas” or shantytowns of São Paulo, according to the 2010 official census, live on low-lying land, often along streams, without sanitation, and they are the first victims of floods. The poor make up 11 percent of the population of São Paulo proper.

In Rio de Janeiro there are also riverside favelas, but the ones built on hillsides or on the tops of hills that separate the city and some neighborhoods are much better known. The risk in these areas is landslides, which have killed many people.

In Brazil’s second largest city, favelas are home to 1.39 million people, 22 percent of the total population, according to the 2010 census.

“The topography allows them to live close to their jobs” so the choice is “between formal employment or living where housing is cheaper,” said Carolina Guimarães, coordinator of Rede Nossa São Paulo, a non-governmental organization that seeks to promote a “fair, democratic and sustainable” city.

This favela is next to a middle-class neighborhood in São Bernardo do Campo, the former capital of the automobile industry on the outskirts of São Paulo. The industry attracted migrants from other parts of the country who, without the jobs they dreamed of, could only build their precarious houses on occupied land on a hillside. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Lima, which has 10 million inhabitants, and other cities in Peru and Ecuador were victims of El Niño Costero, a climatic phenomenon that warms the waters of the Pacific Ocean but only near these two countries, where it also leads to more intense rainfall.

These and other Andean countries also face the threat of melting glaciers that could deprive the population of the Andes highlands of water, said Rodríguez. In the Caribbean, the biggest threat is hurricanes, which are becoming more frequent and more intense.

Greater poverty, more impacts

In addition to the fact that these phenomena hit the poor harder in Latin America, in the world’s most unequal region the poor have fewer resources to overcome the losses caused by the climate crisis, added the Colombian expert.

“Buying a new refrigerator and other appliances damaged each time it floods costs them much more. Poverty is a cause, driving them to disaster, and also a consequence of the disasters themselves,” said Guimarães, a former knowledge management coordinator at UN Habitat, the UN agency for human settlements.

It is a perverse logic.

The real estate business drives up the costs of the best, safest sites complete with infrastructure and services. There are too many at-risk areas where the poor “build their homes with their own hands,” without the support of a public policy that ensures them housing with “access to the city,” she told IPS by telephone from São Paulo.

“There is a spatial inequality that results from the low-density expansion model of cities, which pushes low-income families to the periphery, makes access to public transportation difficult and requires long commutes,” said Pablo Lazo, director of Urban Development and Accessibility at the World Resources Institute (WRI) in Mexico."Building a more equitable and democratic city requires including, in planning, low-income areas that sustain the city in day-to-day life but don’t have the right to participate in decision-making.” -- Aruan Braga

WRI Mexico designed the Urban Inequality Index (UDI), a tool for the formulation of public policies, which initially covers 74 metropolitan areas. It measures the public’s access to formal employment and services such as education, health and transportation, as well as food and culture.

This urbanization model also gives rise to shantytowns in risky areas, “a constant pattern that is repeated in Mexico City, whose eastern neighborhoods are built on hillsides, where water runs off very quickly, fueling landslides,” he said in an interview with IPS via video call from the Mexican capital.

Greater Mexico City is home to nearly 20 million people.

Rodríguez said this precariousness “is a widespread phenomenon in Latin America and the Caribbean, where 25 percent of the urban population lives in informal settlements.” Pushed to the periphery, where land is cheaper, but there are no jobs or public services, nor urbanization, the poor prefer slums near the center, he said.

Each one of hundreds of tents in a Homeless Workers Movement camp in 2017 represents a family that dreamed of obtaining a plot of land in the center of the industrial city of São Bernardo do Campo. The land they occupied had unclear ownership, but the attempt did not pan out. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Making inequality even more glaring

“The covid-19 pandemic laid bare the inequalities,” Lazo stressed.

As an example, he said “there were more deaths on the eastern periphery of Mexico City, where inequality is greater. One factor is distance: it takes five times longer to get to the hospital from the periphery than from the center, so many people don’t even take patients to the hospital.”

In addition, without water for hygiene and hand washing, the disease spreads more readily among the poor.

There is also a disparate power relationship between cities themselves. Tula de Allende, a city of 115,000 inhabitants located 70 kilometers north of the Mexican capital, suffered a major two-day flood in September 2021, not only because of the rains.

Mexico City’s water authorities discharged an excess of rainwater and wastewater into the Tula River that could flood the capital and its outlying neighborhoods, to the detriment of the city downstream, where the river overflow displaced more than 10,000 people and left a hospital without electricity, resulting in the death of 16 patients.

Concerted action is needed. A new governance model based on planning and coordination at a citywide level could be the way forward, said Lazo.

In Rio de Janeiro, Aruan Braga, urban policy coordinator for the Favelas Observatory, told IPS that “building a more equitable and democratic city requires including, in planning, low-income areas that sustain the city in day-to-day life but don’t have the right to participate in decision-making.”

Favelas lining hills are the best-known image of Rio de Janeiro, but there is also a large vulnerable population in low-lying, flood-prone areas. One example is the Maré Complex, where some 130,000 people live in 16 favelas.

On the shores of Guanabara Bay and the Cunha channel, so polluted they are like an open sewer, the complex suffers “floods every year,” said Braga, a sociologist with a master’s degree in development policies, who explained that the Maré Complex was built on a large piece of land reclaimed from mangroves and flood plains.

It was built by settlers relocated from more central favelas or from wealthy and beachside neighborhoods five decades ago, in a wave of “expulsion” from favelas that continues today. Maré also grew because it is next to Avenida Brasil, the main access route to the city center, and because it is home to industrial facilities.

View of a favela on a central hill in Rio de Janeiro, Santa Tereza. The upper part is a middle-class neighborhood of intellectuals and artists. The city’s hillsides are home to many favelas known for their high rates of violent crime. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

New policies for a new model

The four interviewees agreed that public policies are needed to make it possible to start reducing urban inequality in Latin America.

Lazo highlighted the need for mechanisms to control the market’s “greed”, such as a requirement that private housing projects include low-cost units.

“In France that proportion is 50 percent,” he said, to illustrate.

Braga said one good possibility for reducing the housing deficit in Rio de Janeiro would be by allocating empty public buildings to social housing. There are many unused state-owned buildings because the city was the capital of the country until 1960.

Movements seeking community solutions, “social urbanism”, urban agriculture and mobilization of the population for a more equitable and inclusive city point to the future, according to Guimarães.

Her Rede Nossa São Paulo has conducted studies on inequality that pointed to a difference of up to 22.6 years – from 58.3 to 80.9 years – in life expectancy between poor and rich neighborhoods in the city.

Bogota is in the process of organizing its territorial planning and there is talk of the “30-minute city”, following the example of Paris, which seeks to ensure that no one has to walk more than 15 minutes to do everything they need, Rodriguez said, describing a new model in Latin America.

Over the coming decades the proportion aged 65 years and older in countries with below replacement fertility will increase substantially. Credit: K. S. Harikrishnan/IPS

By Joseph Chamie
PORTLAND, USA, Dec 8 2021 (IPS)

Many low fertility countries are having future fertility fantasies. It’s time for them to end those fantasies and prepare for a future of below replacement fertility with demographic ageing and without immigration declining populations.

Over the past 50 years the general fertility pattern has been unmistakable: once a nation’s fertility rate falls below the replacement level, it tends to stay there. Despite this demographic pattern, the governments of many countries with below replacement fertility believe that they can persuade couples to have additional children.

Today the fertility rates of approximately 80 countries and territories are below the replacement level, i.e., less than 2.1 children per woman. Together those countries represent nearly two-thirds of the world’s population of nearly 8 billion people (Figure 1).

 

Source: United Nations Population Division.

 

Countries with below replacement fertility are all the developed countries as well many developing countries, including Brazil, Chile, China, Columbia, Cuba, Iran, Malaysia, Maldives, Nepal, South Korea, Thailand and Turkey. The latest addition to this group is India, which recently announced that its fertility rate had fallen just below the replacement level at 2.0 births per woman.

Many of those countries have fertility rates that are more than a half child below the replacement level. For example, the total fertility rates for China, Italy and Japan are 1.3 births per woman. An even lower fertility rate is that of South Korea, which at 0.8 births per woman is the world’s lowest (Figure 2).

 

Source: National surveys and United Nations Population Division.

 

Largely the result of sustained below replacement fertility levels, many countries are experiencing or facing population decline. By midcentury, for example, the populations of nearly 40 countries are expected to be smaller than they are today, including China, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Poland, Russia, South Korea, Spain and Ukraine (Figure 3).

 

Source: United Nations Population Division.

 

In addition to population decline, the age structures of those countries will undergo rapid demographic ageing. Over the coming decades the proportion aged 65 years and older in countries with below replacement fertility will increase substantially.

Largely the result of sustained below replacement fertility levels, many countries are experiencing or facing population decline. By midcentury, for example, the populations of nearly 40 countries are expected to be smaller than they are today, including China, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Poland, Russia, South Korea, Spain and Ukraine

By 2050, for example, many nations, including Belarus, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Costa Rica, Cuba, France, Germany, Hungary, New Zealand, Sweden, Thailand, the United Kingdom and Ukraine, are expected to have approximately one-fourth of their populations aged 65 years and older. Also in some countries, such as Greece, Italy, Japan, Poland, Singapore and South Korea, the proportion elderly will be no less than one-third of their populations.

Rather than turning to international migration to increase or stabilize the size of their populations and labor forces, as some countries such as Australia, Canada and the United States are doing, many countries want to raise their low fertility levels. Those governments maintain that the only truly sustainable solution to population decline and demographic ageing is to raise the fertility rates of their own indigenous populations to at least the replacement level.

While immigration may increase the size of the population and labor force as is occurring in some countries, it will not reverse population ageing, which is the result of low fertility levels and increased longevity. In addition, the numbers of immigrants needed to offset population aging in most cases would not only be unacceptably large, but also over the longer term the immigrants themselves would age and eventually join the elderly population.

Of course, fertility rebounds in the near future are certainly possible and cannot be ruled out. However, population projections for countries over the 21st century generally expect that once fertility rates fall below the replacement level, they will remain there.

Virtually every country’s fertility rate is expected to remain below the replacement level once its fertility rate has fallen below 2.1 births per woman. In addition, by the close of the century only about 20 countries, virtually all in Africa, are projected to have fertility rates slightly about the replacement level, or about 2.2 births per woman.

Some countries believe that the demographic consequences of below replacement fertility constitute threats to their economy, society and culture. Those countries have attempted to return to at least replacement level fertility through pro-natalist policies, programs and various incentives, including reduced taxes, subsidized care for children, parental leave and financial bonuses, as well as limiting access to contraceptives and abortion. However, governmental pro-natalist attempts have by and large failed to raise fertility back to the replacement level.

Powerful forces are responsible for bringing about and maintaining fertility rates below replacement levels. In addition to urbanization, education, employment and modern contraceptives, other important forces influencing the fertility decisions of women and men include the costs of living, pressures and demands of childrearing, improved status of women, decline of marriage, increased divorce and separation, career aspirations, childlessness and independent lifestyles.

Given the likely trends in fertility rates, many countries should anticipate and prepare for a demographic future of smaller and older populations. Official retirement ages, for example, will need to be raised, perhaps to 70 years, which will not only increase the size of the labor force, but also reduce the numbers of retired persons.

In addition, countries will need to turn to and invest in advanced robotics, androids and artificial intelligence. Not only will existing and emerging technologies help to address the shrinking labor forces, but they will also contribute to meeting the needs of elderly persons.

Besides programs promoting healthy ageing, preparing people for old age and making services and assistance readily available will be required for the growing numbers and proportions of elderly persons. To meet the increasing demands, governments will need to seriously reconsider their budgets, taxes and priorities, particularly expenditures on healthcare and defense.

The era of relatively high fertility, which was most recently experienced during the mid-20th century, is largely over. It is increasingly being replaced by low fertility rates, typically below replacement levels.

In all likelihood, world population is projected to add billions more in the coming decades, likely reaching 10 billion around mid-century. At the same time, countries need to acknowledge the realities of today’s fertility levels and their likely trends and major consequences in the coming decades.

In sum, many governments of low fertility countries need to dismiss their fantasies about returning to the comparatively high fertility levels of the past. They need to prepare their countries for a future of sustained below replacement fertility with demographic ageing and without immigration declining populations.

 

Joseph Chamie is an international consulting demographer, a former director of the United Nations Population Division and author of numerous publications on population issues, including his recent book, “Births, Deaths, Migrations and Other Important Population Matters.”

 

Representatives from the APDA Global Young Leaders' Course during their presentations to the Asian and Arab parliamentarians, with Dr Hanna Yoon, who led the first youth course. Credit: APDA

By Erin Lee, Jayun Choi, Seungeun Lee and Chaeeun Shin
Seoul, South Korea, Dec 8 2021 (IPS)

Whether you look at society, the environment, or technology – the world is changing rapidly. Global organizations strive to adapt to this change. The United Nations, for example, has developed the Sustainable Development Goals as a blueprint for human development.

Youth must and should be at the forefront when tackling the changing world. Consequently, a socially literate, educated generation equipped to tackle these challenges is crucial, and many institutions are taking up this challenge.

The APDA Global Young Leaders’ Course is one such initiative. It has just completed its first year, supported by UNFPA, IPPF, and AFPPD.

The program’s founder Dr Hanna Yoon says future societal issues will be complex and multifaceted.

She wanted “to create a program where young leaders could learn to explore the relationships between two seemingly unrelated ideas.”

APDA Global Young Leaders’ Course participants learned new skills during the inaugural course. The participants, who are all at school, were required to create projects which would benefit people and the planet. Credit: APDA

Yoon devised the Leaders’ Course to help students develop skills to assist them in dealing with diversity. The course curriculum brought them in contact with unique ideas and perspectives, leadership through teamwork, and the ability to solve problems.

The program effectively combines a holistic curriculum and active learning techniques. APDA’s holistic curriculum, which featured ten different experts, seeks to prepare students for the multicultural societies of the future.

Dr Helen Lee taught students about the design thinking process, which they would later utilize in their projects.

Dr Osamu Kusumoto, APDA’s secretary-general, spoke about population issues.

Students learned how to initiate and manage innovative startups from Semoon Yoon from the World Economic Forum (WEF).

The vice executive director of Okayama University, Professor Mitsunobu Kano, introduced solutions that use medical care for social issues.

Farhana Haque Rahman, senior vice president of IPS, encouraged the students to write journals and spoke about the role of media in contemporary society.

Dr David Smith (need the first name, please), associate professor, Anglia Ruskin University, lectured on the correlation between ethnicity and inequality in global health.

Siobhán Tracey from Concern Worldwide Korea informed the students about the cause and impact of hunger.

UNFPA regional advisor Dr RintaroMori gave a lecture on aging and low birth rate.

Kevin Sanjoto, the group CEO at Alfabeta, taught about the fourth industrial revolution with its components of artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and more, which can solve social problems.
Finally, Mr Saroj Dash, the director of the international programs of Concern Worldwide Korea, taught about climate-smart agriculture.

The course also featured various active learning opportunities, which prompted students to develop their knowledge and skills. They participated in discussions, carried out group activities, and gave presentations based on what they — and their teammates — had learned.

These problem-solving activities encouraged students to explore the material on their own. They based their learning on the design thinking process, which allowed students to consider a fundamental problem and independently create a solution.

It also ensured that students had room to develop their perspectives about what they had learned. These varying viewpoints could then be shared and improved as the students worked together.

APDA’s active, interdisciplinary approach sets it apart from the other programs.

It pushes students to challenge their pre-existing beliefs and understand the nuances behind various social issues. It also provides students with the right tools to harness the information they learned.

This process has helped us uncover our potential as the leaders of the 21st century.

At the end of the course, the future leaders presented at a youth forum. The teams then spoke to parliamentarians about the proposals they had been developing throughout the course. The students joined teams based on their interests in the global issues identified.

These issues included technological inequality among different social classes, another was negligent/careless littering, and a third was an uninformed citizenry.

The first team spoke about utilizing technology to empower social minorities and resolve poverty.

Their presentation included proposals like involving the youth in smart agriculture.
The second team discussed ways to reduce littering while increasing recycling. They introduced an application that utilizes collective intelligence to map out trash cans in public spaces.

The third and final team spoke about the need for an information-sharing system between government departments and firms. They used the Australian precedent to support their views on sharing health information.

Moreover, they devised a plan to call on the youth to combat the older persons’ issues with internet technology.

After the presentation, teams answered questions and debated their ideas with Arab and Asian parliamentarians.

The open discussion ranged from general feedback and questions of how to encourage the youth to participate in parliaments to specific inquiries regarding several policies proposed by the teams. Delegates also asked the students to collaborate with the youth in their countries.

Students eagerly responded to their offers, hoping to maintain a close and steady relationship in the future.

• This opinion editorial was written by the APDA Global Young Leaders’ Course students. The writers are all school-going pupils selected by their schools. This is the first in a series of opinion editorials written by participants on the 2021 course.
• Editing: Dr Hanna Yoon

 

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');   Related Articles

• Nothing About Us, Without Us, Asian Youth Tell Parliamentarians
• Global Solutions Needed for Pandemics, So All Can Live in Dignity
• Young Migrant Workers Bear Brunt of COVID-19 Pandemic

Credit: European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD)

By Cevat Aksoy, Maxim Chupilkin, Zsoka Koczan and Alexander Plekhanov
LONDON, Dec 8 2021 (IPS)

Officially reported deaths from Covid-19 started to rise again in autumn 2021 in a number of economies in the EBRD regions. While in advanced economies in Europe the mortality rate has remained low despite the pick-up in Covid-19 cases, in the EBRD regions the mortality and infection rates continued to move in tandem.

Reflecting this, daily Covid-19 deaths per million population were four times higher in the EBRD regions than in advanced Europe as of November 2021.

These patterns may in part reflect differences in vaccination rates. In the EBRD regions, 36 per cent of the population (of all ages) were fully vaccinated by November 15 compared with 72 per cent in advanced economies in Europe.

Aggregate numbers mask significant differences within the EBRD regions, with these shares ranging from 9 per cent in Armenia to 65 per cent in Lithuania.

The regression analysis conducted by Cevat Aksoy, Maxim Chupilkin and Zsoka Koczan in the EBRD’s Office of the Chief Economist links differences in vaccination rates across more than 100 economies (including 28 economies in the EBRD regions) to average beliefs about safety of vaccines.

Attitudes towards vaccines are inferred from Wellcome Global Monitor, a representative survey conducted in 2018.

The analysis also takes into account Covid-19 deaths, income per capita, demographic factors, quality of economic institutions, early availability of vaccines, people’s mobility (movements to transit stations, places of work, retail and recreation and grocery stores compiled by Google Analytics) and other relevant factors.

Since the economic and epidemiological situation may itself be affected by the vaccine rollout, mobility indices and Covid-19 deaths relate to 2020, the period prior to the vaccination campaign.

As could be expected, Covid-19 vaccination rates are typically higher in economies where a larger share of the population believe vaccines to be safe and effective. In the EBRD regions, the prevalence of such beliefs was relatively low before the Covid-19 crisis.

On the supply side, the share of the population that was fully vaccinated in October 2021 is higher in economies with higher number of doctors per capita and where vaccinations started earlier, according to the regression analysis.

On the demand side, a ten percentage point improvement in attitudes toward vaccines increases the vaccination rate by about 2 percentage points. Lower economic mobility in the past is associated with higher vaccination rates – reflecting greater impact of the Covid-19 on livelihoods as well as lower tolerance of health risks reflected in lower mobility of people during the pandemic.

Both on the demand and on the supply side, economies with higher income per capita and better economic institutions tend to have higher vaccination rates, owing to better administrative capacity to roll out vaccination campaigns and higher levels of trust (which tend to be highly correlated with income and institutions).

The measure of economic institutions averages Worldwide Governance Indicators of control of corruption, rule of law, government effectiveness and regulatory quality.

These factors together account for almost 80 per cent of the variation in vaccination rates observed across more than 100 economies. Once various country characteristics are taken into account, vaccination rates in the EBRD regions are somewhat lower than in other economies but the difference (of around 4 percentage points) is not statistically significant.

Favourable attitudes to vaccines, in turn, are higher among individuals who trust their governments. This conclusion emerges from the 2018 Wellcome Global Monitor, a representative survey of over 100,000 individuals in 138 economies.

Indeed, a recent EBRD working paper shows that governments face the challenge of convincing the public that vaccines can be trusted and effectiveness of such communication, in turn, depends on trust in governments themselves.

Respondents were asked whether they viewed vaccines as safe and, separately, effective. The analysis links responses to these questions to individuals’ stated trust in government while taking into account various individual characteristics: residing in an urban area, having a child under 15, gender, employment status, religion, level of education, income quintile, age cohort and the country of residence.

Individuals who trust in their government are around 8 percentage points more likely to have positive attitudes towards vaccination. Further analysis reveals that these relationships are similar among people of different gender, education and age.

The EBRD was created in April 1991 to ‘foster the transition towards open market-oriented economies and to promote private and entrepreneurial initiative’.

Alexander Plekhanov is Director, Transition Impact and Global Economics; Cevat Giray Aksoy is Principal Economist; Zsoka Koczan is Associate Director, Senior Economist; and Maxim Chupilkin is Macroeconomic Analyst.

Source: EBRD

 

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');