Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Apr 13 2021 (IPS)

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has urged all governments to support a global minimum corporate tax rate of at least 21%. The US is working with other G20 nations to get other countries to end the “thirty-year race to the bottom on corporate tax rates”.

Anis Chowdhury

Corporate tax vital
For Yellen, “governments [should] have stable tax systems that raise sufficient revenue to invest in essential public goods and respond to crises, and that all citizens fairly share the burden of financing government”.

The Biden administration has unveiled a plan to reverse Trump’s tax cuts and raise US corporate tax rates from 21% to 28%. Crucially, it wants to increase tax rates on US firms’ overseas profits – global intangible low-tax income (GILTI) – from 10.5% to at least 21%. This should be calculated on a country-by-country basis including all tax havens, i.e., low- or no-tax locations, to minimise evasion.

The US Treasury is also keen to reach international agreement over a digital tax for online giants such as Amazon and Facebook. This sharply contrasts with Trump’s threat of retaliation against countries attempting to tax US-based tech giants.

The Economist estimates that in the past decade, the ‘big five’ – Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google – paid only 16% of their profits in tax.

Race to the bottom
The Bretton Woods institutions (BWIs) – the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank – promoted Reaganite ‘supply side economics’ from the 1980s, claiming excessive tax rates discourage labour supply and entrepreneurship.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

However, contrary to proponents’ claims, most tax cuts have resulted in net revenue losses, with Trump’s cuts resulting in a shortfall of US$275 billion, or 7.6% of previously expected revenue.

As countries raced to the bottom, offering increasingly generous tax incentives to attract investments by transnational corporations (TNCs), the average worldwide statutory corporate tax rate fell from 40% in 1980 to 24% in 2020.

Countries also lose revenue as TNCs use legal loopholes to minimise tax payments, e.g., by abusing differences between national tax rules and bilateral double taxation agreements. They strive for ‘double non-taxation’ to avoid paying tax in all jurisdictions.

Thus, US$500–600bn, or around 10–15% of annual global corporate tax revenue, is lost yearly to TNCs shifting profits to tax havens, using base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) book-keeping.

Harming developing countries
Corporate income taxation is much more important for developing countries, e.g., comprising 18.6% of tax revenue in Africa, 15.5% in Latin America and Caribbean, and 9.3% in OECD countries in 2017. Clearly, tax competition and TNC tax avoidance hurt developing countries more. As share of GDP, Sub‐Saharan Africa has lost most, followed by Latin America and the Caribbean, and South Asia.

Tax reforms
Developing country governments undertook reforms reducing often progressive direct income tax systems in favour of supposedly neutral, but actually regressive indirect taxation on consumption.

Senior IMF Fiscal Affairs Department staff recommended taxing labour instead of capital, considered too mobile to tax. An IMF paper even endorsed complete abolition of corporate income tax!

Encouraged by the World Bank’s now discredited Doing Business Report, developing countries competed to cut corporate tax rates, falling by a fifth from 1980. Consequently, low and middle-income countries have lost US$167–200bn annually, around 1–1.5% of GDP.

The Economist observed weak links between tax rates and investment as well as growth rates. OECD research showed that tax incentives hardly attracted foreign direct investment, while IMF research found ‘beggar-thy-neighbour’ tax competition cost unnecessary revenue losses to many developing countries.

A G20 report found the fiscal cost of tax incentives in low-income countries “can be high, reducing opportunities for much-needed public spending …, or requiring higher taxes on other activities”.

Tax avoidance
Estimated annual revenue losses to rich OECD countries due to tax havens range from 0.15% to 0.7% of GDP. Low-income countries (LICs) and even lower middle-income countries lose relatively more corporate tax revenue than high-income countries (HICs).

LICs account for some US$200bn of such lost revenue, typically a higher GDP share than for HICs. This is much more than the US$150bn or so that LICs receive annually in official development assistance.

Digitisation
Digitisation and changing business models are making it more difficult to determine the actual location of economic activities. Thus, digitisation enables BEPS, reducing revenue due to under-reported taxable income.

Consequently, in 2017, developing countries lost US$10bn in revenue from e-commerce compared to HICs’ US$289 million loss. Least developed countries lost US$1.5bn while sub-Saharan African countries lost US$2.6bn.

UNCTAD’s Trade and Development Report 2019 noted, “Foregone fiscal revenues from digitisation are particularly high for developing countries because they are less likely to host digital businesses but tend to be net importers of digital goods and services”.

Developing countries’ voice
Supported by the G20, the OECD has been working on BEPS since 2013. The OECD BEPS initiative seeks to check tax base erosion by setting a global minimum corporate income tax rate and taxing TNCs selling cross-border digital services. OECD and G20 countries now aim to reach consensus on both by mid-2021.

However, despite being hurt more, developing countries have long been shut out from discussions of international tax norms, policy and regulatory design. The OECD BEPS Inclusive Framework (IF) now includes developing countries which agree to enforce it despite being excluded from its design.

Thus, while IF developing country associates supposedly participate on an ‘equal footing’, they have no decision-making role, reminiscent of their earlier colonial status! Apparently, ‘equal footing’ only refers to BEPS 4 Minimum Standards enforcement.

Unsurprisingly, although raised during IF consultations, developing country concerns – such as allocating tax rights between ‘source’ and ‘residence’ states, taxing the informal economy and taking account of their different needs and circumstances – remain largely unaddressed and unresolved.

With such failures implying legitimacy deficits, BEPS measures are unlikely to benefit developing countries very much. It is increasingly clear that the BEPS project and IF were never intended to help developing countries.

UN must act now
So far, the European Commission (EC) and other powerful countries have responded positively to Yellen. Her proposal has also been endorsed by the IMF and the UN High-Level Panel for International Financial Accountability, Transparency and Integrity for Achieving the 2030 Agenda (FACTI).

Corporate tax rules currently favour rich countries where most TNCs are based, regardless of domicile for tax purposes. Countries must work together to accelerate more inclusive, equitable and progressive multilateral tax coordination.

The OECD’s tenuous monopoly on international tax cooperation discussions has so far failed the world. Creating fairer international tax arrangements requires inclusive multilateral consultations well beyond current processes. These should be led by the UN, the only forum where all countries are represented fairly.

A UN Tax Convention, with universal participation and IMF technical support, can help countries come together to find lasting comprehensive solutions. This must happen soon to pre-empt the OECD from further abusing its exclusive approach, inadvertently jeopardising lasting progress.

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• ‘Beggar Thy Neighbour’ Policy Advice

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The Barilla Foundation New Double Pyramid includes seven cultural pyramids including ones for specific regions like South Asia where these rice workers come from. Other cultural regions include Latin America, East Asia, Nordic and Canada, USA, Mediterranean and Africa. Credit: Deepak Kumar / Unsplash

By Alison Kentish
NEW YORK, Apr 12 2021 (IPS)

Following an extensive scientific review, the Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition Foundation (BCFN) is preparing to launch a new food systems model which incorporates nutrition and climate.

Researchers from the Foundation teamed up with counterparts from the Frederico II University of Naples to produce the New Double Pyramid, to be unveiled at a virtual event on April 14. It builds on the Foundation’s previous model, which consisted of the traditional food pyramid, promoting the nutritional value of food and an environmental pyramid, exploring the impact of food production on the environment.

According to the researchers, the new model will consist of a health and a climate pyramid. The health pyramid has the most common foods globally, clustered in 18 groups of items that are similar in their nutritional features and impact on health. Researchers conducted a comprehensive search of scientific data linking the consumption of each food group to health outcomes. They paid particular attention to the risk of cardiovascular diseases such as heart attack and stroke, which are the leading causes of death and disability globally.

The climate pyramid traces the connection between animal-based products and climate change. It also lists foods, including plant-based products, which have a low climate impact.

“The implementation of healthy diets within sustainable food systems is one of the most powerful tools to achieve the so-called “planetary health,” the understanding that human health depends on natural systems and can no longer be conceived independently from its impact on the planet’s condition,” Endocrinology and Metabolic Disease Professor at the Frederico II University of Naples, Gabriele Riccardi told IPS.

Riccardi, who is a member of the BCFN Foundation’s Advisory Board and a former President of the Italian Society of Diabetology, told IPS that in the past, the concept of health was applied to individuals, without adequate consideration for the impact of personal behaviours on the health of the general population. He said the COVID-19 pandemic was bringing a shift in perspective.

“Most people are now aware that wearing a face mask or undergoing vaccination is important not only to protect themselves but also to preserve the health of the general population. Within this context, health gains at the personal level cannot be achieved at the cost of depriving other people of some of their chances of being in good health,” he said.

“This is likely to occur if the health of a population group is based on an unsustainable lifestyle eroding the Earth’s natural systems that provide essential benefits like food, water and shelter on which all human beings depend.”

The new Double Pyramid launch collaborates with the non-profit organisation Food Tank, which promotes sustainable means of hunger, obesity, and poverty alleviation.

Food Tank President and Founder Danielle Nierenberg said that along with the health and climate pyramids, the Foundation had developed seven cultural double pyramids that investigate how people can eat healthily in different regions of the world.

“For example, the Mediterranean Diet is often lauded as sort of this perfect diet, but many cultures – indigenous cultures like those of Southern Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa have diets that include pulses, legumes and healthy fats and oils. They are more culturally appropriate and can help farmers and eaters alike not only live better lives but make better incomes,” Nierenberg told IPS.

The seven cultural pyramids are Latin America, South Asia, East Asia, Nordic and Canada, USA, Mediterranean and Africa. The Foundation’s model is adapted to these food cultures, and the intention is to promote a balanced diet for health and longevity while reducing the carbon footprint to the world.

“We’re really excited to partner on another virtual event. Our first one was in December. This will kick off the sessions that will take place this year in the lead-up to the United Nation’s Food Systems Summit.”

The research findings bring a new angle to the issue of dairy product consumption. Riccardi says recent evidence “does not support different attitudes to the consumption of these products based on their fat content.” For example, comparing full-fat to reduced-fat dairy products. He says instead, the new pyramid concludes that overall moderate consumption does not increase cardiovascular diseases.

The new pyramid shows that fermented products, such as cheese and yoghurt, are associated with a reduced risk of those diseases in the dairy category. They should be the preferred option for consumers.

Riccardi told IPS that through the Double Pyramid, the research team would also present a major new finding of how different types of meat vary in their relationships with health.

Barilla Foundation Chairman Guido Barilla, President of the World Wide Fund for Nature Pavan Sukhdev, and Michelin Star Chef Chiara Pavan are among speakers scheduled for the April 14 event.

• The Double Pyramid will be launched on April 14. It promotes a one health approach to food by connecting food culture, health, and climate

 

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Claudete Volkswey and her husband smile together on their poultry farm in the municipality of Toledo, in the southwest Brazilian state of Paraná. The poultry shed is now heated using biogas instead of the wood-burning stove that used to keep her up at night, stoking it every two hours to keep the chicks warm in their first few weeks of life, as she explained at the South Brazilian Biogas and Methane Forum seminar, in her participation via videoconference. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RÍO DE JANEIRO, Apr 12 2021 (IPS)

“Biogas is worth gold to us, we can no longer live without it,” Claudete Volkswey, a poultry farmer in the municipality of Toledo, in the southwestern state of Paraná, Brazil, said enthusiastically about the new source of energy that has allowed her to get a good night’s sleep again, because she no longer has to get up to stoke the fire every two hours.

Ademar Luiz and his wife, Zenilde Nunes Luiz, also celebrate the alternative energy source that has freed them from the complications of firewood and has made it possible to have hot water round the clock, a blessing in the cold winters of Laurentino, a municipality in the southern state of Santa Catarina.

In the Northeast, Brazil’s poorest region, biogas forms part of the movement that is helping to overcome rural poverty in that semiarid ecoregion by disseminating so-called social technologies, the best known of which is rainwater harvesting tanks for human consumption and irrigation in family agriculture.

Spreading the use of biodigesters, the same way the rainwater tanks have been widely adopted, totaling more than 1.3 million today, is the dream of Ita Porto, coordinator of Diaconia in the Sertão do Pajeú, an area comprised of 20 municipalities in the interior of the northeastern state of Pernambuco.

“For this to happen, they have to become a public policy, as the rainwater tanks are. This would add energy security to the water and food security that are already taken into account by the government,” Porto told IPS by telephone from Afogados da Ingazeira, where one of Diaconia´s main offices is located.

Her ecumenical Christian-inspired social organisation is an active participant in the Articulação Semiárido do Brasil (ASA), a network of 3,000 diverse associations aimed at development in the semiarid Northeast based on coexistence with the ecosystem, in contrast to earlier failed official strategies to “combat drought”.

There are about 800 units of the Sertanejo Biodigester, a model designed by Diaconia, built in Brazil, most of them in the semiarid Northeast. The initiative won a mention in the third edition of the Biodigester Network for Latin America and the Caribbean’s RedBioLAC magazine, in 2019.

Biogas is becoming an important energy source in this South American country of 212 million inhabitants, both for electricity and heat generation and for the production of biomethane to replace fossil fuels.

The enormous amount of agricultural, industrial and urban waste represents a potential of which only two percent is currently used, according to Alessandro Gardemann, president of the Brazilian Biogas Association, which groups companies and producers in the sector.

The advance of commercial production is made in sanitary landfills, in large agricultural and industrial units. In the south of Brazil, the expansion of pig and poultry farming is driving the biodigestion of their excrement, to boost profits, reduce costs and meet growing environmental demands.

They can play an important role in the energy system, providing power and balance, in the face of the major growth of intermittent sources, wind and solar, in addition to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

But it is the family biodigesters, noted for their proliferation rather than their size, that generate the most visible social and environmental benefits.

For Claudete Volkswey and her family, biogas meant keeping the poultry shed housing about 19,000 chickens and chicks on their farm warm without having to wake up “two or three times” in the middle of the night, sometimes in sub-zero temperatures, to stoke the wood-fired oven that was the previous source of heat.

This biodigester is on a small farm in the semi-arid region of the state of Pernambuco in Northeast Brazil. In general, local families now use biogas for cooking, replacing cooking gas cylinders, which are expensive in comparison to the income levels in this part of the country. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

“Our health is at stake,” Volkswey said in her presentation via videoconference at the South Brazilian Biogas and Biomethane Forum, which took place from Mar. 29 to Apr. 1, virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The manure, which is like gold for biogas production, comes from the 9,000 “nursery” piglets that Volkswey’s son is raising on the family farm in Toledo, a municipality that concentrates the largest number of pigs in Brazil: around 1.2 million.

The cost of firewood used to be as high as 2,800 reals (about 500 dollars) a month. The biodigester that has heated the poultry shed for the past nine years was costly, as it was one of the first in the western part of the state of Paraná, “but it was worth it,” said Volkswey.

Not having to forage for or buy firewood is another advantage cited by Ademar Luiz, also a pioneer in biogas in his municipality, Laurentino, 120 kilometres from the coast of Santa Catarina.

He built a small biodigester in 2008, to try it out. Six years later he built a larger one that allowed him to fuel the stove and heat water for the household round the clock. He no longer uses firewood or the electric shower heater, which saves the family 90 dollars a month.

Farmers Ademar Luiz and Zenilde Nunes Luiz decided to produce biogas to cook and heat water in their house in Laurentino, a municipality where winters are cold in the southern state of Santa Catarina, saving on firewood and electricity. This screenshot was taken from their presentation at the South Brazilian Biogas and Biomethane Forum, held in late March in Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Luiz only uses the manure from his four dairy cows. He used to have 30 and produced 600 litres of milk a day, in addition to raising other cattle, but he sold almost all of them two years ago, when he was 56. It became difficult for him to care for so many animals because of his back trouble.

Producing milk is hard work and a dairy farm is like “a prison” as you have to be there every single day. “But I like it,” he told IPS by phone from his farm, where he also grows corn and soybeans. “With a tractor and harvesting machine, I can do it,” he added.

Luiz confessed that before he had the biodigester he used to dump the manure into the river, “for the bad luck of those who live downstream.”

There are many environmental benefits, because the biodigesters protect water, forests and the climate, as well as eliminating odors and mosquitoes.

A screenshot from Claudete Volkswey’s videoconference presentation at the South Brazilian Biogas and Biomethane Forum shows the poultry shed where she raises some 19,000 chickens. She decided to produce biogas on the family farm, using a biodigester fueled by the manure from the pigs that are also raised on her farm, and abandoned the use of the wood-burning stove, which would keep her or another family member up at night as it needed to be stoked every two hours to keep the newly hatched chicks alive on nights when temperatures sometimes drop below freezing. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

In addition, biodigestion converts the waste into fertiliser and as a result, he said, his corn harvest grew.

“That’s why I don’t understand why other farmers don’t join the move to biogas, the manure is free. I am the only one using a biodigester in this municipality,” he lamented. The necessary investments are paid off with what is saved in just a few years and are easily financed in the banks, he said.

His wife was also reluctant at first. She only approved of the novel system after discovering that the beans and chicken stew cooked on the biogas stove didn’t smell like manure, he joked.

Ita Porto emphasises that women benefit the most. In general, they are the ones in charge of fetching firewood and, because they do the cooking, their health is affected by constantly breathing smoke from burning wood or charcoal.

This biological digester was built by a regional university to supply biogas to a bakery run by a women’s cooperative in Pombal, a municipality in the semi-arid ecoregion in the Northeast Brazilian state of Paraiba. This waste-to-energy generator provides half of the electricity used by the bakery, which sells a large part of its products to the lunch programme in local schools. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

A World Bank study released in 2020 estimated that 2.75 billion people still use wood or charcoal for cooking. Many die of lung cancer, respiratory damage and heart disease as a result.

Widespread replacement of traditional stoves with safer and healthier cookstoves would have dramatic health, environmental and social effects, experts say.

Incipient and scattered actions are promoting the use of biogas in Brazil.

In the state of Ceará in Northeast Brazil, the non-governmental Centre for Labour Studies and Worker Advisory Services (CETRA) has been running a project since 2017 that envisages the construction of 1,800 biodigesters with support from several national and international institutions, Porto explained.

The route to massive dissemination of the technology could open up if one or more Brazilian states adopted this alternative as public policy, the activist asserted.

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A Security Council meeting in progress. Credit: United Nations

By James A. Paul
NEW YORK, Apr 12 2021 (IPS)

Commentators talk about a “new Cold War” between the United States and China. They sometimes conclude that the geopolitical rivalry between these two major powers has ruined the effectiveness of the UN Security Council through hostile vetoes and other barriers to Council action.

In fact, however, damaging rivalry on the Security Council is nothing new. The Council has always been hobbled by vetoes and other special privileges of the Permanent Members.

Geopolitical rivalry between the Permanent Five – the US, UK, France, China and Russia –has been a standard feature of the Council since its earliest meetings seventy-five years ago, repeatedly preventing the body from fulfilling its mandate.

Today’s US-China clash has affected the Council, of course, but not nearly as severely as Great Power rivalries in the past.

Some analysts have argued over the years that the Council’s ten Elected Members have moderated the body’s oligarchic tendencies and given it a more effective and “democratic” character. But this is a pipe dream.

Elected Members have a very secondary role, even when they are rich or very populous, like Germany or India. They have a short, two-year term in office and the Council’s rules are stacked against them. The Permanent Members act ruthlessly (if decorously) to hold onto their privileges and to gain global advantage.

Planning for the foundation of the United Nations was undertaken during World War II, by the “Big Three” – or the “Three Policemen” as President Roosevelt liked to say in private. The US, Britain and the Soviet Union sought to take control of world “security” and ensure domination over their own spheres of influence.

As the archives make clear, they wanted control over natural resources and markets for their products and other material benefits – though of course this control was presented in more palatable terms like “preserving the peace.”

Eventually, before the UN Charter was finalized, France and China were invited to join the oligarchy as junior partners. The rest of the nations had to accept the arrangement: take it or leave it.

Over the years, there have been many forms of conflict among the five. The first systemic rivalry pitted old imperial rivals – Britain and France – against more recent powers – the United States and the Soviet Union.

As independence movements challenged the colonial overlords and liberation wars erupted, “Big Three” solidarity collapsed and the Council was unable to act. Britain and France, using vetoes and other means, systematically blocked Council action that would threaten their colonial authority.

The Council could not even hold debates or discussions on most colonial conflicts, not matter how brutal and bloody. Algeria, Kenya, Vietnam, and many other wars disappeared from the Council’s purview.

From the earliest years, then, it became clear that the Security Council was not an instrument for even-handed peacemaking (as many internationalists and peace-advocates had hoped) but a scene of politely ferocious diplomatic rivalry and maneuvering for global advantage.

The colonies won their independence eventually, with help from the UN General Assembly, but not thanks to the Security Council.

Then there was the “Cold War” between the United States and the Soviet Union, flaring up in the late 1940s and continuing until the late 1980s. Each sought hegemony in the decolonizing global order.

This rivalry, too, had a great impact on the Security Council and led to many vetoes and organized inaction on wars and conflicts worldwide. The Soviets used the veto on conflicts in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and other places, while the United States and its allies similarly blocked Council action on Vietnam, Palestine, Cuba, Cyprus, Western Sahara, and many other lands.

The multiple rivalries around the globe resulted in Council gridlock that was considerably worse than what we see today. The Council in those days met infrequently and its production of resolutions and statements was sparse.

UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld of Sweden holding a press conference at UN Headquarters on 24 March 1960. Credit: UN Photo

UN military action in the Congo in the early 1960s appeared to be an exception, but the results in the end were hardly encouraging. UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld perished in a highly suspicious airplane crash in the African jungle; a military dictator soon emerged in Congo to protect Western mineral interests.

In 1989, after the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a brief period of Council cooperation and more jointly-agreed activity. Council Meetings increased in frequency, vetoes waned and resolutions increased dramatically in number.

There was brief hope that the Council would at last be effective. But this honeymoon did not last long and rivalries soon re-emerged. China, the least active member of the Council, began to extend its global ambitions and to take its Council role seriously.

Russian vetoes and blockages came to the fore again. The Western three, as always, did not hesitate to use their muscle and their blocking power –and they frequently denounced their Council rivals in heated terms. Inevitably, Council action suffered.

But the Council remained far more active than it was in its first fifty years. Wherever we look, past and present, there is no idealized period of lasting cooperation and commitment to peaceful outcomes.

Rivalry and proxy wars still prevail in the global landscape between the titans. What a tragedy that these powers are in charge of solving the very problems that – much of the time – their rivalry creates!

China’s huge economic success and its large population give it a big advantage in the geo-strategic sweepstakes today. It’s hard to remember the passive China that did so little in the Council just two decades ago.

Whatever its current self-interest in Council matters, China is not hostile and negative towards the UN as is its nemesis, the United States. China’s alliance with Russia adds to its clout in the Council and in diplomacy more broadly.

The United States, meanwhile, is hobbled by its negative approach to multilateralism. Bristling with military power and inclined to bullying other countries, the US is still the capo dei tutti capi, the boss of bosses on the world stage. But for how much longer and with what impact on the Council’s future?

The US-China rivalry has not altered the Council dramatically, but it reminds us that there is now a fifth rival that the other four must take closely into account. Council decision-making has a radically new geometry.

The US-China clash may last for years, but it certainly will not be the last major Council fault-line. As long as the oligarchy of the Permanent Five persists, there will future diplomatic battles and future barriers to constructive Council action.

We can and must hope for more. To be truly effective in the future, the Council must be substantially reformed. The Five Policemen, the Council’s oligarchs, should have no place in a democratic and peaceful institution.

But how do we successfully change this archaic structure? Certainly not by creating new Permanent Members and endorsing new national power centers. There are already five too many foxes in the global chicken coop!

Fundamental change will have to come from below, from public pressure, from campaigns that demand a real peace, not Cold Wars without end.

* As Executive Director, James Paul was a prominent figure in the NGO advocacy community at the United Nations and a well-known speaker and writer on the UN and global policy issues. He is the author of “Of Foxes and Chickens”—Oligarchy and Global Power in the UN Security Council.

 

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Excerpt:

The writer* served as Executive Director, Global Policy Forum, from its foundation in late 1993 through the end of 2012.

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Rangina Hamidi

By External Source
Apr 12 2021 (IPS-Partners)

H.E. Rangina Hamidi is the first female Minister of Education of Afghanistan in the last 30 years. Minister Hamidi was born in Kandahar, Afghanistan, fled with her family to Pakistan in 1981 during the Soviet Occupation and eventually immigrated to the United States. She attended high school in the United States and received her B.A. degree with a double major in Religion and Gender Studies at the University of Virginia.

In 2003, Minister Hamidi returned to Afghanistan to help rebuild her country. Using her leadership and management skills, she founded Kandahar Treasure in 2008, the first women-owned and women-run social enterprise in Kandahar Province. Kandahar Treasure grew to provide over 400 women sustainable income with the production of exquisite hand-embroidered textiles for apparel and home décor. The products are marketed nationally and internationally. While it is critically important to empower women financially, Minister Hamidi realized the importance of education after experiencing that foundational change in women’s lives will come through education only.

Today Minister Hamidi continues to champion the rights of girls and women, supporting new education initiatives designed to achieve goals for universal and equitable education as outlined in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. She has made it her personal mission to become the role model for many girls in Afghanistan who will one day change the future of their country.

ECW: In Afghanistan, over 3.7 million children are out of school; at least 60 per cent being girls. Yet, this represents significant progress for the country. Can you tell us more?

H.E. Rangina Hamidi: As the first female Minister of Education in the last 30 years, I take pride in the journey this ministry has made. We have come a long way since 2001 in terms of educational outcomes. The Ministry of Education has taken significant steps in rebuilding the education system to safeguard and advance children’s rights to education.

To go from approximately 800,000 students and very low numbers of girls in 2001 to more than 9 million students in 2020 – of whom 39 per cent are girls – is a major achievement. Today, most students who begin their primary school will complete their educational journey in Afghanistan. This represents progress.

Such an unprecedented expansion in access is always compounded by huge qualitative challenges which I heavily feel each day including raising primary attendance rates beyond the rate of 55 per cent. The key goals of my ministry are to introduce drastic reforms aiming at improving the quality, and increase enrolment in primary education to 100 per cent. Bringing all the out-of-school children back to school in a conducive learning environment is a major goal we have set for ourselves. As a woman minister it is my particular goal to work on increasing the enrollment and retention of girls in schools.

ECW: In 2018, together with the Ministry and our education partners, ECW rolled out a Multi-Year Resilience Programme in Afghanistan to address the education needs of such out-of-school children. How relevant and impactful has this programme been in the lives of out-of-school girls and boys, particularly those accessing education for the first time?

H.E. Rangina Hamidi: Aiming to enroll half a million out-of-school children, the ECW-financed Multi-Year Resilience Programme (MYRP) represents a significant platform to help the Ministry of Education to achieve its target of enrolling children in schools.

The focus on out-of-school children and use of community-based education as the education service provision modality aligns perfectly with the ministry’s target and policy priorities. Multi-year design and catalytic seed funding are innovative approaches as lack of funding too often disrupts our children’s continuity of learning.

Today, Afghanistan’s MYRP can boast having more than 150,000 first-time school goers with 58 per cent of girls continuing their learning and overcoming challenges, including COVID-19, which was a major setback for the whole education sector. Close to half (48 per cent) of teachers recruited through the MYRP are women.

I also welcome the comprehensive inclusive education strategy for children with disabilities in community-based education initiatives being piloted by the MYRP.

Additionally, one of the important features of the MYRP is the robust in-country governance mechanism, which is led by the Ministry of Education with active participation of donors, multilateral agencies like the World Bank, United Nations agencies like UNICEF and UNESCO, and civil society actors. This mechanism enhances the programme’s effectiveness and alignment.

ECW: The MYRP still needs to mobilize US$108 million to be fully funded and reach all 3.7 million out-of-school girls and boys. What is the government’s strategy to reduce the financing gap? Is the funding gap factored into both the Humanitarian Response Plan and the National Education Sector Plan?

H.E. Rangina Hamidi: Thank you for asking such an important question. From the bottom of my heart, I thank HE President Ashraf Ghani for allocating AFS 49.8 billion (US$646 million) towards education, which is 11.6 per cent of the national budget. This demonstrates commitment of the senior most leadership of the country even during this difficult period of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, donor support remains critical for education programmes and projects in Afghanistan. One significant source of such funding is the US$49.5 million ECW catalytic grant for the MYRP. I am grateful to all the donors contributing to the global pooled fund of ECW – particularly Sweden and Switzerland, who have earmarked US$13.5 million for the MYRP in Afghanistan.

Investment in the MYRP helps to enhance the coherence between emergency and development aid efforts, while promoting peace. We trust that additional donors will contribute generously, following the path shown by our friends from Sweden and Switzerland with earmarked funding. Similarly, I urge all donors to honour their pledge made in the donor conference, which will help us to achieve our Humanitarian Response Plan and other ambitious strategic plans.

ECW: Afghanistan has a young population with a median age of 18 years, creating a huge burden on the education system. Can you describe the challenges faced by Afghan girls and boys to access quality basic education? What are the Ministry of Education’s priorities and strategies to meet them?

H.E. Rangina Hamidi: We recently completed a sector review that shows significant educational achievements for fellow Afghan children. However, we do have substantial challenges to overcome. These include shortage of school infrastructure; insecurity, which disproportionately affects girls; lack of an adequate number of qualified teachers, especially female teachers, which impacts girls’ enrolment; and inadequate teaching and learning materials. The Ministry of Education is in the process of implementing a reform agenda which will revise the national curriculum, which will require new textbooks to be disseminated and teachers to be trained. The new reform agenda will be implemented in light of the challenges that the Ministry of Education has faced in the last two decades as the focus of the ministry is now on the quality of education.

The Ministry of Education’s Strategic Plans are forward-looking, which focus on bridging the existing gaps while aiming to expand the provision of education services. To achieve these goals, we are leveraging 21st century innovations such as the use of information and communication technology (ICT) to establish digital learning platforms, improved use of data to make evidence-based decisions, and expanded knowledge sharing platforms to connect stakeholders across the country.

The ECW-supported MYRP is an essential vehicle in rolling out the National Education Sector Plan. I firmly believe this programme will contribute toward national efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, not only in the education sector, but also in terms of ending hunger and poverty, ensuring gender equality, and leaving no one behind.

We have recognized community-based education as a formal learning pathway for the children in hard-to-reach, insecure, underinvested, marginalized and culturally sensitive areas and established a community-based education division under the direct supervision of the Deputy Minister for Education HE Dr. Attaullah Wahidyar. The community-based education policy and corresponding strategies will certainly benefit from the experiences of the MYRP in Afghanistan, such as learning assessment, tailored teachers’ training strategy, and students’ transition plans, to mention a few.

The COVID-19 pandemic has hit children disproportionately as it poses additional barriers to education. In Afghanistan, 4.1 million children between 6 and 18 years of age are expected to be deprived of schooling due to COVID-19. The pandemic has already affected an academic year for all students in cold climate provinces, while delaying the start of the new academic year in warm climate provinces. We are closely engaged with all education actors to address the possible dropout and learning loss due to COVID-19, especially in community-based education learning environments.

ECW: Our readers would like to get to know you a bit better on a personal level. Can you tell us what education means to you personally, and why? Can you also share with us three books that have influenced you the most personally and/or professionally, and why you’d recommend them to other people to read?

H.E. Rangina Hamidi: In 1987 living as a refugee Afghan child with my family in Quetta, Pakistan, my sister and I were privileged to be born in a family where education was viewed as a right and it was not an exclusive right of boys only. My parents worked hard to find money to enroll their children in private schools because refugee children were not allowed to be enrolled in Pakistan’s government schools. Unfortunately, community elders who were actively engaged in the fight against the soviet invasion did not think that it was appropriate for girls to get an education. To them there simply was no need of education for girls’ future. We were pulled out of school out of the fear of facing harsh repercussions of having our faces burned with acid – which was the punishment for not obeying rules at that time. My father made the brave decision to go to the USA in 1988 because he saw no future for his daughters if he remained where he was. Today I am the result of his decision he made in 1988. Education changes girls’ futures.

The three books that have influenced me in shaping who I am are:

• Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism:Abdulaziz Sachedina
• A Thousand Splendid Suns:Khaled Hussaini
• Ghost Wars: Steve Coll

These three books speak about my passion in life: Islam in the modern world, Afghan women’s issues and the current situation of Afghanistan. These three books among others have left a mark on me.

ECW: Finally, are there any other key points you would like to share with our readers around the world on the importance of working together with ECW and its partners to address education in emergencies, so that together, we can help get crisis-affected children and youth back to learning with the fierce urgency of now?

H.E. Rangina Hamidi: As the leader of the education sector in Afghanistan and custodian of Afghan children’s education, I commend ECW’s collaborative approach which ensures more effective and coordinated responses among all education stakeholders. The MYRP in Afghanistan is already yielding positive results and we hope the programme’s duration can be expanded to allow all of the 150,000 early-learners to at least complete the primary cycle of education. We also call on additional donor support to ensure it can be brought to scale to support more children who continue today to be deprived of a quality education.

Today, Afghanistan is on the road to recovering from decades of conflicts and multiple crises. Our government, together with partners such as ECW, is taking bold steps to put education at the center of these recovery efforts. I invite world leaders, policymakers and donors to stand with Afghanistan’s girls and boys. The time to invest in education is now, it is the steppingstone towards a brighter, more prosperous and peaceful future for our children.

 

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When the previous US administration pulled its aid, the impact was enormous on the Palestinian people. As a result, funding for hospitals in East Jerusalem dropped, which would then go on to affect Palestinians during the pandemic. Photo by Ahmed Abu Hameeda on Unsplash

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 9 2021 (IPS)

The Trump administration’s decision to cut off assistance to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) caused considerable hardship for Palestinian refugees during the coronavirus pandemic, particularly those in Gaza where a majority of the population are refugees and poverty is rampant due to Israel’s blockade, Khaled Elgindy, a Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute (MEI), told IPS.

Elgindy, also a Director of Programme on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli Affairs at MEI, shared his insight with IPS following the U.N. event “Delivering Critical Assistance for Palestine Refugees: Challenges and Opportunities in a Complex Context.”

At the panel, numerous speakers gathered to share the current situation Palestinian refugees are facing because of a combination of different issues: the COVID-19 pandemic, poverty, as well as the “protracted conflict” they were in before the pandemic hit.

The plight of the community at the intersection of a global pandemic and a massive conflict was articulated poignantly in a story shared at the panel by Philippe Lazzarini, the Commissioner-General of UNRWA.

Lazzarini said he saw “despair growing” in the refugee camps across the region and he was alarmed during his recent visits to camps in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

On one visit in south Lebanon, he met with a Palestinian refugee who said he constantly asks himself whether he would die from COVID, from hunger, or while trying to cross the Mediterranean on a dingy.

“People are struggling in their daily lives to make ends meet. People are struggling daily to ensure one meal for their family,” Lazzarini said. “No one should be made to feel so desperate.”

Gwyn Lewis, Director of UNRWA Operations in the West Bank, further highlighted the grave socio-economic issues Palestinians are facing.

“With the pandemic, we’ve seen quite a dramatic impact on the economy — 40 percent households on the West Bank kept seeing their income decline by more than half [and] unemployment increased in the camps, by as high as 23 percent. In Gaza, unemployment has hit 49 percent which is very, very dramatic,” Lewis said.

Lewis’ concerns were echoed by other experts who spoke with IPS following the event.

Yara M. Asi, a post-doctoral scholar at the University of Central Florida, said while Palestinians were already in a precarious place even before the pandemic, the economic loss from the lockdown hit them hard.

“When the pandemic hit, the economy was essentially closed for weeks,” she told IPS. “All gatherings were cancelled, including weddings, which is a huge industry in the summer months.”

Lewis of UNRWA also pointed out that the socio-economic condition is “dire”, while the community lives in parallel to the continuous issues with the occupations, including “settlement activities and demolitions.”

There was also concerns for Palestinians not getting enough vaccines and how that might continue to affect their livelihoods.

“The pandemic isn’t over yet and Palestinians do not yet have a significant vaccination campaign, so [the economic fallout] could be much greater,” Asi told IPS. “Meanwhile, Israel has neglected its duties as an occupying power during the pandemic, only providing some shipments of masks and testing kits and then a nominal number of vaccines.”

Hamada Jaber, from the Palestinian Centre for Policy & Survey Research, echoed this concern.

“The biggest challenge now is the ability of the Palestinian Authority to secure the vaccine for all citizens that are willing to take it,” Jaber, a Palestinian who was born in Jerusalem, told IPS. “For now, it seems that the Palestinian Authority failed to secure the vaccine and failed to manage the little vaccines that it has in a transparent manner.”

The panel took place on the same day that U.S. President Joe Biden restored a higher than $200 million aid package to Palestine that former president Donald Trump had revoked.

When the previous administration pulled its aid, the impact was enormous on the Palestinian people, Asi said. As a result, funding for hospitals in East Jerusalem dropped, which would then go on to affect Palestinians during the pandemic.

“Of course, during COVID, people are still getting cancer, and having high-risk pregnancies, and experiencing any other number of health ailments,” she said. “So, unfortunately these cuts have really limited the ability for these hospitals to serve these patients.”

But Elgindy of MEI doesn’t believe the funding will do enough. He said the aid is “rather modest and is unlikely to have a significant impact on the Palestinian economy.”

Going forward, Asi said the first priority is to make vaccines available to Palestinians.

She identified the importance of economic support that Palestinians will need, but said there is a long-term lesson as well.

“I hope the lesson learned from this is that occupation is not sustainable. Israel cannot choose to exercise both maximum control over Palestinian life while assuming no responsibility for it, and limiting the ability of the Palestinian Authority to handle it themselves,” she said. 

Lazzarini summed up the issue in just a few words: “During a global pandemic, no one will be safe until the most vulnerable are safe.” 

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A Rohingya girl proudly holds up her drawing at a UNICEF school at Balukhali camp, Bangladesh.As Rohingya refugee families settled in the Cox’s Bazar Kutupalong Refugee Camp, the area had one of highest rates of primary and secondary age children out of school. Education Cannot Wait (ECW), the multilateral global fund dedicated to education in emergencies and protracted crises, immediately allocated US$3million to urgently scale up learning spaces for displaced Rohingya children. In 2018, the Fund increased its support with an additional US$12 million for the continuous learning of refugee and host community children. (file photo) Credit: Farid Ahmed/IPS

By Rafiqul Islam
DHAKA , Apr 9 2021 (IPS)

Although learning centres in Cox’s Bazar Kutupalong Refugee Camp are closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mariom Akhter, a Rohingya mother of four, is grateful not only for the schooling her children have had but the training sessions she as a parent was able to attend. The skills she learnt has helped her assist her children with their education at home in a crisis.

It’s something she’s likely needed to help her children with over the last few weeks after a Mar. 22 fire spread through the camp, destroying the shelters of at least 45,000 people as well as important infrastructure, including hospitals, learning centres, aid distribution points and a registration centre. At least 15 people were reported dead and 400 missing.

“I have learnt many things from the sessions about the education assistance of the children that should be given in any crisis. The sessions played a significant role in ensuring education of the children during this crisis period when all the learning centres are closed due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic,” Akhter told IPS before the fire.

In 2017, Bangladesh became host to 1.1 million Rohingya when 750,000 people fled a brutal military crackdown in Myanmar’s Rakhine State. [Some 300,000 Rohingya had already taken refuge in the country after various insurgencies in earlier years.]

And as families settled in the Cox’s Bazar Kutupalong Refugee Camp, the area had one of highest rates of primary and secondary age children out of school.

As the crisis escalated, Education Cannot Wait (ECW), the multilateral global fund dedicated to education in emergencies and protracted crises, immediately allocated $3 million to urgently scale up learning spaces for displaced Rohingya children. In 2018, the Fund increased its support with an additional $12 million for the continuous learning of refugee and host community children. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, ECW provided partners with an additional $2.1 million to support home-based and distance learning opportunities.

“Since 2017, ECW has continued to prioritise the learning needs and well-being of Rohingya refugees and affected Bangladeshi children in the district of Cox’s Bazar. Yet, with no longer term solution in sight, we must not abandon these girls and boys to their hardship. The deadly recent blaze that ravaged parts of the camp and left 45,000 people homeless overnight is a stark reminder of the perilous and overcrowded conditions children endure in the largest refugee camp on Earth,” said Yasmine Sherif, the Director of Education Cannot Wait.

“For a girl or boy living in such difficult circumstances, education is a lifeline, it is their only hope of a better future. ECW is committed to stand with them. We are preparing an additional multi-year allocation to support continuous learning opportunities for Rohingya children in 2021 and beyond, and I call on other donors to join our efforts to fill the financial gap of over $100 million in coming years.”

A Rohingya girl goes to fetch water in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. A Mar. 22 fire spread through the camp, damaging important infrastructure including hospitals, learning centres, aid distribution points and a registration centre. While a few learning centres were burnt down, a number of them were not affected by the fire. (file photo)Credit: Umer Aiman Khan/IPS

Akhter was grateful for the diversity of the curriculum offered to her children.

“Before coming to Bangladesh, our children did not have the opportunity to study in this way. They only learnt Arabic from Maulavis (religious teachers). They did not have the opportunity to go far from home. They could [only] play around their houses,” Akhter told IPS.

Nine-year-old Jouria never thought it possible that she would continue her education after fleeing Myanmar in 2017. Now she receives a broader education and has since learnt other languages.

“We learnt Burmese and English alphabets from the learning centres. Now we can read and write (in these languages). We learnt how to take care of ourselves through healthy and safe practices,” Jouria told IPS.    

She loves school.

“We enjoy learning as these centres are equipped with educational and sports materials. The facilitators of our learning centres explain everything to us through songs and stories, writing, drawing and games.”

Ten-year-old Asoma is in Grade 2. She told IPS that apart from conventional lessons, basic life-skills are also taught.

“We have learnt lessons on how to keep clean, on food habits and hygiene, when we should go to sleep and other life-skills. I enjoy learning at my centre,” she said.    

Asma said her learning centre was very clean, well-decorated with different colours and equipped with educational materials and toys.

“We get enough time to play at the learning centres and that’s why I like my centre.”

Children are also given mental health and psychosocial support and aided with behavioural and language development, among other thing.

Seno Ara, a mother of three, told IPS: “Our children are being able to cope with mental trauma as they are busy making toys, drawing and playing at the learning centres.”

“From the parenting education sessions, we also learn about the risks to children…how to prevent drug addiction, how to take care of our children with disabilities, and how to keep the children safe in times of crisis,” Ara said. 

In 2020, piloting of the Myanmar Curriculum began and is currently being scaled up.

The implementation of the ECW-funded multi-year programme is coordinated by various United Nations implementing agencies and partners, including the UN International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). Other partners include members of Cox’s Bazar Education Sector, local administration, the Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner and the Cox’s Bazar District Primary Education Office.

UNICEF Bangladesh Cox’s Bazar Chief of Field Office, Dr. Ezatullah Majeed, said over 230,000 children were reached through UNICEF-supported learning centres that received funding from multiple donors. Of these, 27,000 children — half of whom are girls — benefitted directly from ECW funding. According to UNICEF, the recent fire damaged 141 of their learning centres.

“Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the learning centres have been the learning area for the children. The learning centres in the camps also provide a venue where the children get a sense of normalcy, joy, stability, and hope for the future. To date, the centres remain closed following the national directive on school closure in order to contain the COVID-19 pandemic,” Majeed told IPS.

UNHCR Education Officer in Cox’s Bazar, Selamawit Berhanu, said that ECW funds enabled UNHCR to reach 61,300 children and youth – both girls and boys – with home-based education during the COVID-19 pandemic. “UNHCR was able to support caregiver’s in assisting learners to continue learning at home, with the support of teachers, who were conducting shed visits on regular basis,” she said.

UNHCR also constructed a teachers’ training centre. “The centre helps to ensure a continuous supply of well trained and qualified teachers and also allows both refugee and host community teachers to come together in one place to exchange ideas and learn from each other,” she said.

UNESCO Programme Officer for Education, M. Shahidul Islam said that the agency supports parent education for community engagement and education system strengthening that benefits 88,500 children — half of whom are girls. UNESCO supports 40 learning centres in Rohingya camps and 78 host community government primary schools in the Cox’s Bazar district. Since parenting education contributes greatly to the wellbeing and education of children, it is being scaled up by 15 implementing agencies through their own arrangements.

None of the UNICEF learning centres were damaged in the fire. 

Nurul Islam, project manager of Plan International Bangladesh – the implementing partner of UNESCO – told IPS that parents were educated on how to care for their children as well as how to protect themselves and their families against COVID-19.

“About 3200 parents have already taken part in these parenting education sessions. Of them, 1,850 were mothers, while 1,450 were fathers,” he added.  

According to project officials, through educating parents, children are able to receive appropriate care from their family.

Children will continue with home-based and caregiver-based learning until COVID-19 restrictions are eased. 

“The continuity in education services through the caregiver-led home-based learning has contributed positively in providing alternative learning opportunities among the Rohingya children. In doing so, it mitigates the psychosocial impact of the conflict and disasters by providing a sense of normalcy, routine, stability, structure and hope for the future,” Majeed, told IPS.

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• Helping Make Education a Reality for the 75 million Children in Conflict Zones

The post Rohingya Children Find Refuge in Education appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Cox’s Bazar Rohingya Refugee Camp had one of highest rates of primary and secondary age children out of school. Education Cannot Wait (ECW), the multilateral global fund dedicated to education in emergencies and protracted crises, immediately allocated millions to urgently scale up learning spaces for displaced Rohingya children. ECW is preparing an additional multi-year allocation to support continuous learning opportunities for Rohingya children in 2021 and beyond

The post Rohingya Children Find Refuge in Education appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Scott Morris
WASHINGTON DC, Apr 9 2021 (IPS)

Is Chinese financing good for developing countries? This has become a provocative question, freighted with ideology, geopolitics, and commercial rivalries. That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying to answer factually and empirically.

Yet, taking stock of China’s lending activities has long been hindered by the lack of publicly available data on dimensions like loan volumes and interest rates, let alone more esoteric features like loan collateral or default contingencies.

The past year brought new worries about debt vulnerabilities exacerbated by the COVID crisis. This renewed attention in forums like the G20 and G7 has also brought some progress when it comes to publicly available information on basic lending data, with significant new data releases covering China and other major creditors by the World Bank.

This new reporting makes clear why we should care about China’s lending, as the top bilateral lender to over 50 developing countries. But much of China’s relationship with its borrowers remains outside the public view.

Scott Morris

Critically, the debt contracts themselves have rarely been made public, and as a result, have received little systematic scrutiny to date. A pathbreaking new study by researchers at AidData at William & Mary, the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Georgetown Law School, and the Center for Global Development changes that.

This three-year project examines the content of 100 Chinese debt contracts to understand the financing relationship between Chinese lenders like China Exim Bank and China Development Bank and their government borrowers in developing countries.

As a starting point, the public release of this number of contracts in a single database itself represents a step forward. In fact, a key feature of the contracts themselves is enforced secrecy—from other creditors, from the IMF, and from the citizens and taxpayers in debtor and creditor countries alike, who ultimately bear the risks of these lending relationships.

Some other striking findings from the study: prohibitions on borrowers’ honoring the terms of “comparable treatment” in cases of a Paris Club debt treatment; extensive use of escrow accounts and other forms of non-asset collateral; as well as considerable flexing of political and economic muscle with broadly written cancellation and default clauses.

Clearly, there’s a lot to learn from this sort of intensive scrutiny of public debt contracts. Which raises the question, why aren’t more of these contracts made public? And not just Chinese contracts.

The uncomfortable truth is that citizens in virtually any creditor or debtor country would have a very hard time tracking down their government’s debt contracts. This study, focused on one of the least transparent of these governments, only reinforces the universal case that public debt should be public.

All eyes these days are on the growing list of conflicts between the United States and China, and no doubt the findings of this study lend themselves to criticism of China.

But both countries could usefully commit to a new agenda aimed at contract transparency, such that US Exim Bank’s contracts could be examined alongside those of China Exim Bank. Why should that be so controversial?

Read the paper.
RELATED TOPICS:
Chinese Development Policy, Sustainable Development Finance

DISCLAIMER
CGD blog posts reflect the views of the authors, drawing on prior research and experience in their areas of expertise. CGD is a nonpartisan, independent organization and does not take institutional positions.

 

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Over the past decade anti-immigrant views, and the cultural stereotyping on which it is based, has been elevated to the primary narrative in many political contexts. Credit: UNOHCR.

By Daud Khan and Leila Yasmine Khan
AMSTERDAM/ROME, Apr 8 2021 (IPS)

The notion of “Clash of Cultures” is most frequently used as a justification for anti-immigrant prejudice and, particularly in Europe and in the USA, for islamophobia. The reasoning goes as follows: immigrants, especially Muslims, have a deeply different culture from the hosting communities and these differences create unsurmountable tensions and conflicts.

Moreover, immigrants are accused of stealing jobs from local workers, especially low skilled workers; depriving the local population of social services; and, generally, act as a drag on the economy. The only real solution is to stop, or drastically reduce immigration – particularly what is called economic migration; and, if possible, start expelling immigrants that are already there.

Culture is a mix of norms, modes, conventions, beliefs and ideologies. There are major differences in culture between regions and countries; even neighbouring towns or villages may have very different ways of living joyful and sad experiences, such as marriage and deaths, or addressing issues and conflicts.

There is decades of empirical research that show the negative side effects of migration are exaggerated.  In particular the negative impacts of immigration on the wages of low-skilled native workers in developed countries are relatively small and short-lived

And there are frictions and irritations when people of different cultures live with each other. These frictions, if poorly handled, can explode into arguments, fights and even riots.

But over the past decade anti-immigrant views, and the cultural stereotyping on which it is based, has been elevated to the primary narrative in many political contexts. In the USA, President Trump made the campaign to “stop the rapists and murderers from Mexico” a signature issue and successfully drew in millions of voters.

In the UK it was a key factor in the Brexit vote. In Europe, the birthplace of democracy and liberalism, anti-immigrant movements are taking “hate-politics” to new heights – immigrants are blamed for crime, disease, scrounging state benefits and unemployment.

The success of anti-immigrant movements among voters has shifted the political balance and made even the traditional mainstream political parties hesitant to appear soft on immigrants.

Even Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi fell into the trap of seeing action against aliens and intruders as justified. She stood by silently while the Myanmar army and vigilante Buddhist monks – often considered as icons of peace and solidarity – committed atrocities against Rohingya Muslims who have been living in Myanmar for several generations, arguing that they were illegally in Myanmar and that their ways polluted the purity of the country.

It is an interesting question to speculate why the anti-immigrant movement has to become so important; particularly as the consensus among analysts is that immigration is generally beneficial for immigrants, as well as for the countries they emigrate from and for the countries they immigrate to.

For those who emigrate, the benefits are clear. Emigration allows them to substantially increase their incomes often several-fold.

It usually also benefits their families and communities as the money they send home triggers higher investments in both physical and human capital. Generally, their countries of origin also benefit due to higher remittance, and due to the skills that they bring back should they return.

Immigration also benefits the host countries. It provides labour for the hardest and most arduous tasks, for example in agriculture and livestock; for the care of the elderly or of young children; or in running small businesses that require long hours for only low returns, such as neighbourhood convenience stores.

This keeps some of these essential services cheap and also releases natives to engage in more productive activities. In many countries immigrants are also net contributors to the tax system, paying significantly more than they draw in benefits though the extent of this depends on the factors such as the fiscal and benefits regimes in these countries, as well as the age profile, skills set and employment status of immigrants.

Immigration also brings in specific skills which may be in limited in the host country. This can range from doctors and health care workers, to highly technical know-how in ICT. In the UK and the USA, second generation immigrants are supplying the mainstream political parties with leadership and strategic thinking – clear indication that the host nations are in short supply of these rather vital skills.

But are there negative side effects? Does immigration cause harm, at least to some sections of the population, in the developed host countries? In particular, do they displace local unskilled workers and drive down their wages?

There is decades of empirical research that show the negative side effects of migration are exaggerated. In particular the negative impacts of immigration on the wages of low-skilled native workers in developed countries are relatively small and short-lived.

In the UK, unrestricted immigration from low income EU countries in Eastern Europe more than tripled and the foreign born component of the workforce increased to about 7%. Instead of creating unemployment among low wage British workers this influx has been accompanied by an expansion of jobs for locals.

Similarly getting rid, or reducing use, of low cost immigrants does little for jobs and incomes of low-skilled domestic workers. When the USA restricted use of seasonal migrant labour in agriculture, instead of hiring native workers, farmers reduced the number of employees by switching crops or investing in new, albeit more expensive technology.

So why has immigration become such an important issue with so much misinformation? One major reason is that it provides a smoke screen for other divisive changes in society, the most important of which is rising inequality.

Over the past three or four decades the world has rapidly become more globalised and interlinked. At the same time technology has drastically changed the employment landscape.

Overall productivity and incomes have increased and most people have seen living standards rise while extreme poverty had declined. But the gains have not been evenly distributed. Some people have done exceedingly well and but there have many losers – people who have lost their jobs or seen their incomes drop.

Particularly at risk are young people, especially those with limited skills and education, who have little prospect for a secure and stable job that would allow them to plan a future for themselves and their families.

These changes have created enormous social stresses and strains. Populist parties and populist leaders have been quick to exploit these feelings of unease and difficulty, and immigrants are an easy target to blame.

In fact they are so easy to blame that you actually don’t really need any. In the UK many of the Brexit voters came from areas where there are few immigrants but that were hard hit by deindustrialization.

In mainland Europe the most virulent and successful anti-immigrant rhetoric is in countries such as Poland and Hungary, despite the fact that immigrant flows are extremely small.

In the coming decades immigration will remain essential to both Europe and North America. Given their low birth rates, which is being driven down further by the COVID-19 pandemic, immigrants are needed to operate their farms and factories, maintain their living standards and, most importantly, to fund the pensions and health care for their aging populations.

It is therefore incumbent on responsible political parties in the development countries, as well as on intellectuals in both sides of the developing/developed country divide, to counter the toxic narrative on immigration, culture and conflict.

At the same time, the Governments of developing countries need to be more forceful and articulate in their defence of rights and treatment of immigrant communities.

And maybe it is time to go even further. Maybe it is time for the developing countries, especially countries from which large numbers of immigrants come – such as Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Philippines and Romania – to ask to be reimbursed for the costs incurred for educating and caring for the immigrants before they departed.

These countries should request that a part of the taxes their immigrant workers pay should be remitted to their country of origin. And if they are concerns about how the host Governments would use these funds, they could be earmarked for certain activities such as health and education. Maybe even agencies such as the World Bank or the UN could offer to manage these funds.

 

Daud Khan works as consultant and advisor for various Governments and international agencies. He has degrees in Economics from the LSE and Oxford – where he was a Rhodes Scholar; and a degree in Environmental Management from the Imperial College of Science and Technology. He lives partly in Italy and partly in Pakistan

Leila Yasmine Khan is an independent writer and editor based in the Netherlands. She has Master’s degrees in Philosophy of Cognition and one in Argumentation Theory and Rhetoric – both from the University of Amsterdam – as well as a Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy from the University of Rome (Roma Tre). She provided research and editorial support.

 

The post Clash of Cultures – Is it Real or a Smokescreen? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Indian woman bends over her wood-burning stove in her home in northern India. Credit: Athar Parzaiv/IPS

By Philippe Benoit and Jully Meriño
WASHINGTON DC, Apr 8 2021 (IPS)

As the world looks to address issues of gender equity, development and climate change, the importance of increasing the participation of women in the energy sector is gaining attention. To date, this topic has generally been framed around the underrepresentation of women in the energy workforce.

But this ignores an important reality: millions of women already participate as producers of energy – specifically of bioenergy for poor households.  To support sustainable development and gender goals, more attention needs to be given to these women energy producers who have remained largely invisible in much of the energy discourse.

Women account for only 22% of the jobs in the oil and gas industry and only 32% in the renewables sector.  When it comes to managerial and other decision-making positions, the share of women is even lower; for example, their representation in energy company boardrooms is less than 5%.

About 2.5 billion people globally rely for cooking on the traditional use of solid biomass, notably fuelwood, charcoal and dung.  This figure includes 680 million people in India and 800 million throughout Sub-Saharan Africa

In response, several programs have been launched to increase women’s participation in the energy sector. These programs are succeeding in raising awareness about the need for more women in the sector, building networks to support women practitioners, and giving visibility to the women already working in energy – albeit with a focus on the formal, professionalized segments that constitute the energy industry.

But this focus on addressing underrepresentation in the formal segments of the sector – a very important effort — can generate the misperception that women are in fact not active in producing the world’s energy. Many assume their role is largely limited to consuming energy (e.g., at home, at work, or for leisure), not supplying it.  And therein lies an overlooked reality: millions of women worldwide are producers of biomass, a form of bioenergy.

About 2.5 billion people globally rely for cooking on the traditional use of solid biomass, notably fuelwood, charcoal and dung.  This figure includes 680 million people in India and 800 million throughout Sub-Saharan Africa.

Biomass is also used by the poor for other purposes, such as heating homes in colder regions.  In many lower-income countries, biomass can constitute over 90 percent of the energy that poor households use.  It is provided through small-scale commercial ventures, but much is also generated by households for their own use.

Around the developing world, women play a central role in producing this bioenergy, notably by gathering wood and making charcoal. In fact, this is a segment of the energy sector where women are often overrepresented.

As the World Bank reported last year, “across most of Sub-Saharan Arica and in parts of China, women are the primary fuel wood collectors,” which is also the case in areas of South Asia. This is time-consuming and physically demanding work that can involve “collecting and carrying loads of wood that weigh as much as 25-50 kilogrammes” and can “take up to 20 or more hours per week.”  Unfortunately, we lack hard data about the number of women engaged in this energy production.

Biomass has already been receiving attention in development circles because of the problems associated with its use in traditional cookstoves, such as negative health impacts on notably the women who cook and the burdens of collecting firewood.

To address this issue, the United Nations has adopted as one of its Sustainable Development Goals the replacement of traditional biomass use with clean cooking technologies. This targeting of biomass and its harmful impacts does not, however, negate the role its women producers play in the energy sector (just as the climate and environmental concerns surrounding coal do not erase the role of miners).

Several actions can help to make these women producers more visible in the energy discourse.

First, recognizing the role they play in energy supply can help to shift the notion and perception of dependency: women actively participate in the production, not just the use, of household energy.

Failing to understand women’s contribution to global energy production will continue to perpetuate the myth of women as mainly (dependent) energy users, which can hamper efforts to ensure their full participation in decision-making and leadership roles within all levels of society.

Second, there is a paucity of data regarding these women producers – a situation that reflects the lack of attention they receive and also contributes to their lack of visibility.

How many women work in producing biomass (generally as unpaid labor)? How many women will be affected by changes in biomass production systems?  What will they do in a changed world?  This type of information can help address their needs and to plan for their engagement in the energy transition.  We need more data.

Third, it is important to acknowledge and properly value this work in producing household bioenergy, and to report it in energy workforce statistics. When a company produces electricity for its own use, it is called a “self-producer.”

When a woman produces biomass for use in her home, it all too often goes nameless.  The recognition of this women’s labor would also help in the effort to “achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls,” the UN’s fifth Sustainable Development Goal.

Fourth, in developing programs and initiatives to shift households from traditional biomass use to clean cooking technologies, it is important not only to consider the effect on women as consumers, but also address the impact on women as energy producers to ensure that their needs are being met.

Moreover, because these efforts to shift how households use biomass will also affect greenhouse gas emissions, the topic has entered the climate discourse. As world leaders discuss how to limit climate change at the upcoming summit convened by US President Biden or thereafter at the international COP negotiations, it is important to ensure that the situation of these women producers — their voices, concerns, and aspirations — are adequately taken into account when planning the clean energy transition (just as the concerns of coal miners and others are also considered).

Acknowledging the central role that millions of women play in producing the world’s bioenergy can lead to a greater empowerment of women across the sector.

As efforts to boost the participation of women in energy mature, it will be important to better recognize and analyze the contributions of these women producers, and to design policies that will help improve their standards of living, including as part of the clean energy transition.

 

Philippe Benoit is managing director, Energy and Sustainability at Global Infrastructure Advisory Services 2050 and adjunct senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy where he leads the energy for development research initiative.

Jully Meriño Carela is the director of the Women in Energy program at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

The views expressed are those of the authors in their personal capacities.

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High school graduation, Accra, Ghana, 2013. Credit: United Nations

By Winnie Byanyima
GENEVA, Apr 8 2021 (IPS)

Leaders at this year’s World Bank/IMF Spring Meetings (April 5-11) will determine how best to recover from one of the biggest crises the institutions have faced since their founding in 1944—COVID-19’s impact and its economic aftermath.

Given the need to fund treatment and vaccines, there is pressure to scale back funding for social provisions. But doing so would prove a catastrophic—and costly—mistake. Instead, leaders must boldly finance a more equal world.

The issue isn’t just that COVID’s impact is unequal; it’s that inequalities, especially gender inequality, hamper an effective recovery. They undermine the world’s readiness for future pandemics and shocks, and block achievement of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

It is one thing to call for these inequalities to be addressed—and another to allocate funding to rectify them. We must invest in rights for them to be actualized.

COVID-19 has dramatically widened gaps between women and men in wealth, income, access to services, the burden of unpaid care, status and power. Pre-pandemic, 132 million girls were out of school.

Twenty million more secondary school-aged girls could be out of school post-pandemic. Many will not go back, putting them at greater risk for violence, HIV, teenage pregnancy, child marriage, poor health and poverty.

Because of COVID-19, two and a half million more girls are at risk of child marriage in the next five years and rates of violence against women and girls have precipitously increased. In the pandemic, women bear the brunt of job losses and comprise the majority of frontline health workers, many of whom are under-protected and under-paid.

Gender inequality is not only wrong—it is dangerous and weakens us all. It drives the spread of COVID-19 while threatening progress against AIDS and other pandemics. It depresses economic potential too: economies and nations only flourish when women can. Recovery strategies to pandemics cannot be gender blind or gender neutral. They must overturn the inequalities that hold women back.

COVID-19 lays bare social inequality says UN chief, as COVAX doses top 36 million. Mali begins its vaccination programme against COVID-19 with Fanta Siby, Minister for Health, the first to be inoculated. Credit: UNICEF/Seyba Keïta

Prior to COVID-19, many economies and societies were weakened by insufficient investments in health, education and social protection. The COVID-19 crisis revealed the pre-existing lack of resilience in many parts of our economies and societies. Finding the financing to fight inequality in the recovery from COVID-19 is essential.

How can world leaders finance an equal economic recovery from COVID-19?

Issuing Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) will help. A range of G20, emerging and developing nations support them. An agreement to secure $500 billion in SDRs, under discussion, could allow up to $25 billion to flow to the central banks of African nations.

Preferable would be securing up to $650 billion, the cap that requires U.S. Congressional approval. Should wealthy nations share even half of their proportional issuance with developing nations, SDRs could powerfully undergird vital investments.

Cancelling debt is critical. A large share of low and middle-income countries’ budgets pays off debt. This is especially the case in Sub-Saharan Africa where government debt increased to an estimated 70 percent of GDP in 2020.

Building back better after COVID-19 requires ensuring that no debt service payments be made, or forced, until investments necessary for achieving the UN SDG on health are secured.

Countries need to increase domestic revenues. The economic impacts of COVID-19 make this challenging short term. But policy changes can lay the path to domestic resource mobilization in days to come.

Three areas requiring policy change that could increase domestic resources are: 1) protecting against international tax evasion (through the G20-OECD-led processes) by setting a global, minimum corporate tax rate affecting all geographies/all companies, including digital ones, 2) establishing emergency tax measures such as taxes on wealth or excess profits in times of crisis and 3) designing progressive tax systems at the local and regional levels for both capital and income.

These new sources of funding can help eliminate user fees and boost investments in health and education.

User fees are a grave injustice—they tax the sick and increase mortality and morbidity while exacerbating poverty and inequities. No new mother should be chained to her hospital bed for not having the money to pay for her child’s birth.

Charging for healthcare not only hurts those affected; the spillover costs of ill health drain economic potential. Health crises won’t be stopped if some people can’t afford testing or treatment. Publicly provided healthcare is the most efficient and effective form of provision—it’s not an unaffordable burden but a smart investment.

Ensuring girls’ education and empowerment is vital to recovery. The gains from girls’ schooling are multiple, proven, and profound—from helping to prevent child marriages and teenage pregnancies and reducing violence and HIV infections, to increasing future earnings and strengthening economic growth.

Crises are a reckoning: they show us what is broken—and what needs to be fixed. Achieving a more equal world is not only a moral imperative—it will make the world more resilient to pandemics and makes us all healthier, safer and more prosperous. We can’t afford not to do it.

 

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Excerpt:

The writer is Executive Director of UNAIDS and Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations.

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By Nteranya Sanginga, Aline Mugisho and Seyi Makinde
IBADAN, Nigeria, Apr 8 2021 (IPS)

From small towns to big cities, sub-Saharan Africa has the fastest urban growth rate in the world. The continent’s population is expected to double by 2050 with the youth representing 60% of the overall population.

The UN Department of Global Communication, for example, projects that for the next 15 years urban growth is set to double for several African cities: Dar es Salaam will reach over 13 million inhabitants and Kampala will exceed seven million.

Nteranya Sanginga

Alongside this explosion in urban areas, rural population growth remains strong too. The FAO’s Rural Africa in Motion Atlas sees sub-Saharan Africa’s rural numbers increasing by 63 percent by 2050 and the region remaining the only one in the world where the rural population will continue to grow after 2050.

Rural exodus in African cities is often linked to a search for greener pastures—which creates challenges such as high unemployment rates, low income, food insecurity, and persistent poverty. There is therefore a need to respond to the needs of the growing population in a sustainable manner. Tackling unemployment is thus a crucial step towards addressing these needs—especially in the current COVID-1 context.

Engaging the youth in agribusiness

The youth, despite representing the majority of the population, still feel marginalized from the economic mainstream. Their expectations are suffocated by market demands and limited opportunities. Higher education is growing faster than the economies, the job market is saturated, and skill shortage and lack of exposure to technology remain a constraint for African youth to integrate a career track. Some of those unable to find white-collar employment return demoralized to their rural homes or take up menial jobs, or worse, remain unemployed.

There is a need for a systemic change that targets Africa’s youth. Similarly, there is a need for an economic model that is youth-friendly at all levels. Such a model will potentially create a niche market that will cater for graduates, early-career takers, and to some extent non-school educated youth that remain vulnerable to political manipulation. A sustainable development agenda can only be fully realized if youths are mobilized, incentivized, energized, and equipped for transformation.

Writing on the status of youth in agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa, David Sarfo Ameyaw and Eugenie Maiga note that rapid economic growth over the past 15 years has not been ‘pro-poor’, occurring primarily in sectors generating relatively few employment opportunities for youth.

Aline Mugisho

The response to youth unemployment does not lie only in the creation of employment—they are also potential employers and entrepreneurs. As a result, growth needs to be promoted in sectors that can create viable youth-friendly opportunities. Agriculture is, among others, one of those sectors owing to its capacity to improve economic growth, food security, and income through farming. Value-chain and value addition activities open a window of opportunities for various layers of the population in a manner that is inclusive and applicable to all. Yet, agriculture is key to responding to Africa’s growing population needs.

The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) has invested several efforts to expose the population at large and the youth in particular to the advantages of agriculture through its various programs. For instance, IITA has, for the past 8 years invested in empowering youth as actors in agriculture through training, research, employment, and entrepreneurship. This approach does not only create employment for the youth but prepares them to create employment themselves. IITA is driving the creation of youth programs that will play their role in transforming agriculture to provide Africa with a food secure future.

Agriculture employs over 60 percent of the working population in sub-Saharan Africa, excluding South Africa, and contributes about 30 percent of gross domestic product in most countries. Yet evidence in this area indicates that youth’s contribution to this sector remains marginal.

As Elizabeth Ssendiwala and Akinyi Nzioki write in Youth and Agricultural Productivity, agriculture has to be profitable, competitive, and dynamic to attract youth. Youth tend to perceive farming as an occupation for the aged, illiterate, and for people living in rural areas—which sustains the negative perception about agriculture. There is a need to create an enabling environment that on the one hand demystifies agriculture and on the other hand links it to technological evolution for it to be appealing to modern youth.

Youth do not want to practice agriculture the way their fathers and mothers did, but rather in a modern way, with an appropriate image that speaks to their aspirations as natives of the digital age.

Governor Seyi Makinde. Credit: The Business Day_Businessday.com

Engaging youth successfully to increase agricultural productivity will also mean engaging them in decision-making processes. Effective integration and inclusion of young women and men in Africa’s agricultural renaissance, through well-designed public investments in agriculture and continued progress on policy reforms will definitely play a significant role in the continent’s economic growth agenda. This includes land policy reforms that enable young people to access land.

Authors of a study of perceptions of agriculture among secondary school students in three African countries suggest that courses must better cast agriculture as an economic frontier and modern farmers as pioneers rather than forgotten victims of poverty. Greater reliance upon electronic instructional tools and digital agriculture is required to stimulate students’ interests, with practicals based upon solid agribusiness models and learning experience offered in proven enterprises.

Another important aspect of youth growth is linked to Transforming livelihoods through agribusiness development–that is more likely to have success with young people. The agribusiness model enhances employment creation, social equity and inclusion, and considers the sustainability of the agrifood system as reliant on the youth. It is important to note that smallholder farmers with less than two hectares of land represent 80% of all farmers and contribute the bulk of food production in some countries. Many are women whose contribution often go unnoticed.

Agribusiness-driven studies emphasize the need for a well-developed business infrastructure, including markets, incubation, business networks, and policies within a global and regional framework favoring youth and women-led agribusinesses in local and regional trade.

Youth initiatives in agribusiness

The Youth in Agribusiness initiatives of IITA such as the IITA Youth Agripreneurs (IYA), Empowering Novel Agri-Business-Led Employment (ENABLE)-Youth, ENABLE-TAAT (Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation), Young Africa Works-IITA Project, Youth Employment in Agribusiness and Sustainable Agriculture (YEASA), Agrihub, and Start Them Early Program (STEP) are tangible proofs of the significant role youths play in the agricultural sector. For the past few years, these programs have created a platform encouraging the participation and engagement of young school children and unemployed or underemployed youth in agribusiness.

These investments in Africa’s younger generation highlight the importance of raising the ambition of primary and secondary school students to guarantee a food- and nutrition-secure continent. This is also important in developing young female leaders in agriculture so that their acquired leadership skills will enable them to help lead the COVID-19 response and recovery efforts.

IITA and partner organizations such as the African Development Bank (AfDB), Mastercard Foundation, International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and Oyo State Government, believe that poverty, hunger, and malnutrition in Africa cannot be addressed without involving women and young farmers. The youth and gender-friendly initiatives take into consideration constraints faced by women and young farmers—who in most communities provide most of the agricultural labor and are actively involved in subsistence as well commercial agriculture.

IITA will continue to significantly implement projects that respond to the needs of youth and women to develop effective agribusiness policies that give young people in sub-Saharan Africa the structure and inspiration to help them fulfil their ambitions.

Agriculture remains the only way to ensure food security and sustainable development and the primary employment growth sector for most of sub-Saharan Africa. The public and private sectors need to create viable partnerships. The dramatic growth in the region’s urban areas projected over the next decades makes it even more crucial to involve the youth and women for them to evolve as new entrepreneurs, researchers, employers, and suppliers. Africa’s young women and men are a huge asset to the continent and have the ability to create circular food markets and systems that will respond to the current socioeconomic crisis faced by the continent. The creation of a space for growth and an enabling environment at all levels is crucial to this growth.

Finally, the youth and women will need the support of society at large as consumers and active contributors to their growth. It is important to encourage local consumption of food products to sustain youth-created businesses. This is the only way to a circular economy that is key to Africa’s development.

Nteranya Sanginga, Director General, IITA; Aline Mugisho, Executive Manager, Young Africa Works; and Seyi Makinde, Governor, Oyo State, Nigeria

 

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Credit: Hishan Allam/IPS

By IPS Correspondent
NEW DELHI, India, Apr 8 2021 (IPS)

Delayed, or no, justice and perpetrators’ impunity effectively silence rape and sexual assault survivors of communal violence in India.

Activists and human rights lawyers have been speaking out about how rape and sexual violence, especially during communal conflicts, aims to humiliate religious and other minorities by turning the women into symbols of dishonour.

In one of the very few cases where the law was applied, the gang-rape survivor Bilkis Bano waited for 15 years to see the perpetrators brought to justice. At the press conference in 2017, she told journalists: “I want justice, not revenge.”

In 2002, the 19-year-old Bano was six months pregnant when she was gang-raped. She witnessed 14 members of her family killed in one of the most horrifying large-scale anti-Muslim violent riots that swept across Gujarat.

The pogrom saw 2,000 people, predominantly Muslim, killed across the state after a train fire, in which 60 Hindu pilgrims were burned alive.

Bano said she wanted to see an India where her daughters were safe. But evidence suggests that gang rape in communal protests and the lack of justice for these heinous crimes has continued in the nearly 20 years since her ordeal.

What binds Bano, gang-rape survivors of Muzaffarnagar riots, the women who allegedly faced sexual violence in the Delhi communal violence in 2020, and the rape victim of Hathras is that all the women come from marginalised communities.

Sexual violence against women has been a recurring feature of communal violence in India since independence.

The recurrent sexual violence inflicted upon women during communal violence in India bears witness to how perpetrators use rape and sexual violence as a means to “dishonour” the community or group and use rape as a tool of revenge. Women are “honour bearers” of a community, and violation of their “honour” or chastity is considered a victorious achievement because it brings shame to the community as a whole that is being targeted, say human rights lawyers and activists.

Bano’s lawyer, Shobha Gupta, told IPS in an exclusive interview that Bano’s rare victory unmasked the authorities’ efforts to cover up and frustrate the investigation.

“The incident happened in the year 2002. The final verdict in the Supreme Court’s criminal case came after 17 years in the year 2019. Compensation was awarded to her 17 years after the incident – after 17 years of sufferance,” Gupta said.

The Supreme Court took note that she and her family lived a nomadic life for these 17 years, unable to find a safe place to live.

“There is specific finding in the judicial verdict that the police personnel and doctors in Bilkis’s case were guilty of deliberately frustrating the investigation and destroying evidence,” Gupta said.

“There was the failure of law and order at two levels. Firstly, when this incident took place and secondly when the concerned officials abused their positions in deliberately frustrating the investigation, who all were finally convicted by the High Court and Supreme Court.”

Starting with the largely anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002 to the Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013, Muslim women have been targeted. Their perpetrators, mostly from the dominant communities, have enjoyed impunity.

Only in rare cases like Bano has justice been served.

In the communal violence that engulfed Muzaffarnagar in western Uttar Pradesh in 2013, seven Muslim women filed First Information Reports (FIRs) for gang rape they alleged was perpetrated by men who mostly came from the dominant Jat community.

A look into their cases shows how the legal system failed these women, who, despite their poor socio-economic backgrounds, “dared” to file complaints against their perpetrators, human rights lawyers say.

“This incident happened in September 2013, their charge sheets were filed in April-May 2014, but the trials did not begin until late 2015-2016,” says Vrinda Grover, a human rights lawyer who was counsel for the women.

“This delay was used by the accused to pressurise, coerce and induce the women to give statements saying that the accused arrested in the cases are not the men who raped them. This resulted in acquittals.”

Six of the seven FIRs registered ended in an acquittal, she said.

With the stigma attached to rape, security issues and life at stake, what recourse can one take when even the courts do not seem to adhere to the basic rules and procedures?

Grover says she believes that the Muzaffarnagar District Court was either ignorant of or deliberately disregarded all procedural mandates that apply to rape trials.

“The mandate of in-camera trial, disclosure of the identity of the rape victims, completing the trial within two months of the filing of the charge-sheet, or of prohibiting cross-examination on the past sexual conduct of the victim were disregarded until insisted upon by the women’s counsel.”

Anti-Muslim sentiment in India has been on the rise, and concepts such as Love-Jihad on the rise. Hate speech and slogans directed at women and their agency are common features preceding and during communal tensions.

Slogans of “bahu lao, beti bachao” (“bring in the daughter-in-law, save the daughter”), for instance, were heard in rallies that preceded the violence in Muzaffarnagar. These were raised to instigate men from the majority community to ensure their daughters did not marry outside the community. Instead, they brought women from other communities into their homes and converted them.

An example of impunity and support enjoyed by those spreading this terror was the presence of the present chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, who shared the stage at a meeting where his supporter called for Muslim women to be dug up from their graves and raped.

The lack of outrage at the Muzaffarnagar violence and the justice system’s failure for the rape survivors is a stark reminder that Indian society may not be as offended or as affected when the victims belong to minority groups.

Why was it that the rape of a Muslim woman or a Dalit woman had received the same moral outrage and nationwide protests as the Nirbhaya case rightly received?

Gupta says the compensation of financial help of Rs. 50 lakhs (about US $68 023), a government job with accommodation of Bano’s choice, maybe the highest compensation ever awarded by any Indian Court in a rape case. However, she believes Bano should have received much more.

“Not only in view of the peculiar facts of the case, her sufferance, the failure of the system to rehabilitate her, to heal her wounds, but also to send a very strong message to all States that they cannot fail and also to the public at large.”

While sexual violence inflicted upon women to “punish” their communities continues even with the success of Bano’s case, most rapes go unreported.

In Delhi, for example, no cases were officially reported because of fear of backlash, say lawyers and activists who heard testimonies of women who faced sexual violence in the capital. They attribute this to a lack of trust in the system and fear that their families could be harmed.

 

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Central American mother and daughter reunited at U.S. airport. Credit: Anonymous.

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE , Apr 7 2021 (IPS)

“A crime against humanity” and “a disgrace to our great country”: that’s how 99-year-old Benjamin Ferencz, the last surviving prosecutor of the Nazis at the Nuremberg war-crimes trials, characterized the Donald Trump administration’s coercive separation of thousands of immigrant children from parents seeking asylum.

Former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein cited a statement by the American Association of Pediatrics that the family-separation policy was a form of “government-sanctioned child abuse” which could cause “irreparable harm” with “lifelong consequences”. He added: “The thought that any State would seek to deter parents by inflicting such abuse on children is unconscionable.”

Now, a report from Physicians for Human Rights raises questions of criminal liability and accountability arising from the policy. And it points to potential avenues towards justice for both victims and perpetrators.

“’You Will Never See Your Child Again’ – The Persistent Psychological Effects of Family Separation” makes the case that separation of immigrant children from their parents by U.S. immigration officials constitutes torture and enforced disappearance.

“The U.S. government’s treatment of asylum seekers through its policy of family separation constitutes cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment and, in all cases evaluated by PHR experts, rises to the level of torture”

To investigate the families’ experiences, PHR clinicians performed psychological evaluations of a sample of asylum seekers from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador who had suffered an average of over 60 days of forced separation at the hands of U.S. immigration authorities.

They found that before leaving Central America, all the families had already “been exposed to trauma” due to “targeted acts of violence”, mostly due to gang activity. All parents feared for their children and believed that traveling to the U.S. would offer them protection.

When the families arrived in the U.S., however, treatment by the U.S. government compounded the pain. “Parents reported that immigration authorities forcibly removed children from their parents’ arms, removed parents while their children slept, or simply ‘disappeared’ the children while their parents were in court rooms or receiving medical care.” Nearly all parents said they were given no explanation of why their children were taken away, where they were being held, or if they would be reunited.

Mental-health diagnoses by medical experts found that nearly all the victims suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, and many also met diagnostic criteria for major depressive disorder or generalized anxiety disorder.

Citing the United Nations Convention Against Torture, PHR asserted that “the U.S. government’s treatment of asylum seekers through its policy of family separation constitutes cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment and, in all cases evaluated by PHR experts, rises to the level of torture.” It found that “the policy and practice of family separation also constitutes enforced disappearance, which occurs when state agents conceal the fate or whereabouts of a person who is deprived of liberty.”

The report concludes that the U.S. government is obligated by domestic and international standards to “provide redress to victims of torture and ill-treatment, including in the form of rehabilitative services; ensure the families of disappeared children know the truth of their family members’ whereabouts by dedicating adequate government resources to ensure timely reunification for all separated families, including deported parents; and prosecute U.S. officials who have broken the law.” The document ends with detailed recommendations to the Biden administration and Congress for policy changes to achieve these and further ends.

Physicians for Human Rights executive director Donna McKay said in a statement that families who suffered this treatment should be given “legal residency in the United States”, along with ongoing mental health care and “redress in monetary compensation” as recommended by the report. She urged the new Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, to deliver on his pledge that the family-reunification task force proposed by President Joseph Biden would explore “lawful pathways” for citizenship for separated families. And she called for “accountability for the perpetrators of the family separation policy”. PHR is a New York-based non-governmental organization that shared in the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize.

From 2017 through 2019, the PHR report said, 5,512 children were coercively separated from their families by border officials. Of the 1,556 children separated between July 1, 2017 and June 26, 2018, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, 207 or 13.3 percent were younger than 5 years old.

In 2018, the ACLU brought a successful lawsuit, Ms. L v. ICE, in which a federal court held the practice unconstitutional and required the government to reunite all separated families.

Yet even now, the damage continues. As of January 2021, more than 611 of the forcibly separated children had still not been reunited with their parents, according to the ACLU. Lee Gelernt, Deputy Director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, said that even after the ruling in Ms. L v. ICE, Trump administration officials delayed furnishing or withheld critical data, and provided stale contact information. As a result, some children have remained separated from their parents for nearly two years.

Gelernt told me in an e-mail that the organization currently has a civil class-action suit for damages pending in Arizona against individuals responsible for family separation.

 

Family values and razor wire

The full scope of family separation, though, is much broader than just those forcibly torn apart by Trump. It also encompasses the many immigrant children and parents already in the U.S. who have been separated by deportations, imprisonment, and other forms of persecution targeting immigration status during the three previous administrations. For example, many of the hundreds of thousands deported after raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement were parents whose children were left behind, sometimes without a breadwinner.

From the beginning of the Trump administration, restrictionist policies also inflicted harm on thousands more children who sought asylum alone, or who remained with their families. Many who were already accepted into the asylum process were imprisoned for long periods in poor conditions. Tens of thousands of others were forced to wait for their court dates in dangerous camps in the Mexican borderlands. Thousands more were blocked from even asking for asylum by the “metering” of asylum claims, which made asylum seekers put their names on long, unofficial lists and wait in Mexico to even approach border officials. Many others were excluded by unofficial and later official shutdowns of border crossings.

Much of this anti-immigrant blitzkrieg has been sharply criticized by international human rights officials. Michelle Bachelet Jeria, the current U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and former president of Chile, said she was “profoundly disturbed” by several Trump policies that she said had “drastically reduced protections for migrant families.” She singled out family separation, Migration Protection Protocols (Remain in Mexico), “the arbitrary privation of liberty”, and “the denial of access to humanitarian services and assistance”.

Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas director at Amnesty International, asserted: “Trump’s efforts to end asylum are an all-out assault on human rights. … The obligation to protect the rights of people seeking safety is a bedrock principle of U.S. and international law – and the U.S. is failing miserably. The ‘crisis’ at our borders is not the result of people ‘flooding our border’ – it is a crisis of xenophobic policies that masquerade as security measures and serve only to exacerbate human suffering.”

The abuse, torture, and disappearance of children and parents were not accidental or unintended. Trump, his then Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and his advisors Stephen L. Miller and Steve Bannon were ideologically fueled by what might be called white sado-nationalism.

As Jen Kirby of Vox reported, Trump complained during a meeting discussing Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries: “Why do we want these people from all these shithole countries here? We should have more people from places like Norway.” Roughly four-fifths of all immigrants to the U.S. come from Latin America, Asia and Africa. So Trump’s operatives implemented an array of deliberately cruel practices aiming to deter any form of authorized or unauthorized immigration.

Some of the ideas they reportedly considered bordered on the psychotic. According to N.Y. Times reporters Michael D. Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis, “Privately, the president had often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh.” He also reportedly suggested that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks, but his staff told him that this would be illegal. Later he proposed shooting migrants in their legs to slow them down, but was again told that this was not allowed.

Most of the hundreds of executive orders and bureaucratic snares Trump’s cadre did deploy may not be indictable. But they gratuitously inflicted harm on all kinds of immigrants, violated their human and civil rights, and attempted to demonize them. The multiple border “crises” Trump produced and directed were B-grade agitprop portraying a border overrun by “bad hombres”, and calculated to turbo-charge anti-immigrant hatred among his gullible base.

The Refugee Act of 1980 assures immigrants the right to ask for asylum, not just at ports of entry, but anywhere along the border.

To enforce Sessions’ “zero tolerance” policy, however, Customs and Border Protection constructed a Catch-22. They slow-walked reception of asylum seekers at official ports of entry with “metering”. Then, when growing numbers forced to wait weeks or months in dangerous camps began to cross the border away from ports of entry to request asylum from the Border Patrol – which was their legal right – officials castigated them as a surge of “illegal aliens” and detained them. To further impede the asylum process, Trump implemented his Remain in Mexico policy (ironically entitled the Migrant Protection Protocols), which forced some 70 thousand who had been granted asylum hearings to await their court dates in Mexico. The administration also made agreements with Central American governments to send some migrants back to the very places they had escaped from in the first place. The cumulative damages inflicted by Trump policies effectively eliminated the right to asylum.

Many of the increased numbers of children and families now requesting asylum at the border are driven by the bottled-up desperation of those tens of thousands of migrant families stranded in limbo over the past two years. These backlogs have also been exacerbated by Trump’s undermining of many programs that had previously accepted and integrated children and families, leaving staffing and infrastructure in smoking ruins.

Tragically, most of the crises and suffering could have been easily averted. All Trump had to do, rather than declaring “zero tolerance”, was to treat asylum seekers lawfully and rationally. If, instead of doubling down on his “wall” scam, sending troops to the border, and filling private immigration prisons, he had moved decisively to get asylum seekers out of Mexico, brought in more asylum agents and case managers at the border, expanded immigration courts, worked with non-profits to receive asylees, and sent well-targeted resources to Central America and Mexico, there would have been little or no border drama, and much less waste of public resources. But the manufacturing of threats and crises, the criminalization of immigrants and the militarization of the border were precisely the point.

Family separation and other forms of persecution of immigrants are not only wrong, cruel and often unlawful. They are also nonsensical. Asylum seekers, refugees and other immigrants – authorized and unauthorized – are not a threat to be repulsed. On the contrary, they are fellow humans who deserve encouragement and welcome, and fellow workers caught in the riptides of the same global economy. They are also a valuable resource for a stagnant, aging U.S.-born population: decades of evidence demonstrate that immigration’s benefits to the people and the economy of this country far outweigh any costs.

Violating immigrants’ rights also weakens U.S. national security. When other countries see the U.S. torturing children and parents while stonewalling asylum seekers and refugees, the credibility of U.S. criticism of other countries’ human rights abuses is devalued.

 

Digging out of the rubble

On January 20, a bombed-out migration landscape greeted the incoming Biden administration. His first day in office, the new president sent draft legislation to Congress to provide a path to citizenship for most of the 10.5 to 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. He also issued several executive orders to remedy injustices around immigration, including asylum and family separation. But the new administration has not yet been able to ramp up capabilities fast enough to handle the backlog of long-suffering families and unaccompanied children at the border, or to rebuild or repair much of what Trump dismantled. And some of Biden’s positive proposals seem to be stalling because of depleted reserves of political capital.

The new family-reunification task force mandated by Biden and chaired by DHS Secretary Mayorkas has gotten quickly to work. A court filing reported by Priscilla Alvarez of CNN showed that the number of children and parents still separated under “zero tolerance” had been reduced from 611 in January to 506 in late February.

Mayorkas told news media that efforts were ramping up to bring back into the U.S. in-process asylum seekers excluded under Trump’s “Remain in Mexico”, which has been cancelled by Biden. The secretary announced that admissions of those affected by the program have been expanded to three U.S. ports of entry. The administration hopes to give the separated families the choice of where to be united, he said, and if they choose to reunite in the U.S., “we will explore lawful pathways for them to remain in the United States and address the family needs.”

These compensations should also be offered to all others who were unjustly prevented from applying for asylum or wrongly rejected.

The Biden administration should also ensure that no families are being separated by its current border policies. Currently, families with children and adult individuals seeking asylum are being summarily turned back at the border in most areas under Title 42, a controversial public-health provision promulgated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under Trump. Unaccompanied children, however, are being accepted into the asylum process at the border. Because of this discrepancy, turning back families may give them an incentive to help older children escape danger by sending them on alone. The sooner those families can be allowed to cross and request asylum together, the quicker one source of children crossing alone, and consequent family separation, will be reduced.

“Transforming border reception to a humanitarian model requires many, large federal agencies to implement a wholesale shift in short-, medium-, and long-term approaches,” wrote Clara Long of Human Rights Watch. “While the administration has made important progress, kids are still stuck in border jails because the administration of former President Trump destroyed what system existed for keeping kids safe at the border. The current situation requires urgent, sustained action to address this failure. Safe, swift reunification procedures should continue to be refined, starting from the moment kids cross the border.”

Beyond the work of the Family Reunification Task Force, the Biden administration must not let bygones be bygones. It should open investigations at multiple levels into abuses by the Trump administration of all kinds of immigrants.

The president should mandate internal investigations by inspectors general in Justice, Homeland Security and other relevant departments. Any remaining Trump political appointees should be vetted and, if appropriate, fired or moved to where they can do no further harm. Those found to have violated laws or regulations should be subject to legal or administrative action.

Congress should convene a select committee, along the lines of the 1975 Church Committee, to investigate crimes and abuses by the Trump administration against immigrants and refugees, including the Muslim and African travel bans. They should recommend far-reaching reforms and investigate responsible officials.

Finally, other governments and non-governmental organizations should pursue the possibility of bringing charges against those responsible for family separation before international human rights bodies such as the International Court of Justice and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Another avenue to explore might be actions in courts of other countries, invoking universal jurisdiction for grave international crimes. This is the legal doctrine used by Spanish magistrate Baltazar Garzón Real to bring human-rights charges against Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet.

Trump, Miller and their accomplices may not end up on trial in a glass booth in Tegucigalpa. But there is some cause for hope for asylum seekers and refugees. It will require sustained pressure from the movements for immigrant justice and human rights, and responsive action at all levels of government, to untangle the wrongdoing, make all the victims whole again, and punish the perpetrators – all in the face of the violent mobs of xenophobia and racism, spurred on by Republican demagogues. Ultimately, It will require reinventing immigration law, regulations and practice to ensure that the rights to asylum and refuge, along with all the other human rights of immigrants, are fully respected in the United States.

Related Articles

• Peter Costantini. “Shelter from the Storm”. Seattle, WA: April 19, 2020.
• Peter Costantini. “In the Footsteps of the Millennium Migration”. Seattle, WA: October 4, 2017.
• PDF of the story with footnotes and references

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Ngadirejo residents have been converting their organic waste into compost and are selling this to inorganic waste to private companies. They are also planting vegetables in their backyards and on unused land as part of the community’s urban farming activity and climate change adaptation and mitigation measures. Courtesy: Serono Arief Wijaya, ProKlim Ngadirejo

By Kanis Dursin
JAKARTA, Apr 7 2021 (IPS)

Residents of Ngadirejo village in Sukaharjo regency, Central Java province, had often found themselves helpless when their wells dried up or water flooded through their homes. But thanks to a national campaign called Program Kampung Iklim, known by its acronym ProKlim, they now have solutions to this flooding that generally occurs because of a lack of adequate water catchments.

“We started planting biopore holes and erecting infiltration wells in early 2016 to harvest rainwater and wastewater. The results have been almost instantaneous – our wells have never run out of water and floods never visited us again since 2017,” Serono Arief Wijaya told IPS from Ngadirejo, which lies around one-hour flight east of Indonesia’s capital Jakarta.

As climate change hits home, Indonesia has frequently experienced drought and heavy rainfall, with reports of water scarcity, floods, landslides, and crop failures becoming common. In 2012, the government introduced Program Kampung Iklim, which literally means Climate Village Programme, to raise public awareness towards global warming and to assist people at grassroots level to draw up adaptation and mitigation plans.

While attending a seminar organised by the local office of Environment and Forestry Department in December 2015, leaders of Ngadirejo, according to Wijaya, heard the word global warming and ProKlim for the first time. The following year community leaders decided to plant biopore holes along Ngadirejo’s drainage network and build infiltration wells throughout the neighbourhood in adaptation and mitigation efforts.

“We now have around 600 biopore holes, each measuring one meter deep and eight centimetres wide, and 50 infiltration wells measuring one meter deep and three meters wide each,” said Wijaya, who heads Ngadirejo’s ProKlim campaign.

“Many residents who had access to piped water previously now harvest groundwater instead for their daily needs,” he added.

Up until 2016, only between 10 to 15 percent of Ngadirejo residents had access to piped water, with the remainder reliant on artesian wells only. According to 2020 figures, the village has some 3,000 families – slightly over 10,000 people.

Aside from harvesting rainwater, Ngadirejo residents have also been converting their organic waste into compost and are selling this to private companies. They are also planting vegetables in their backyards and on unused land as part of the community’s urban farming activity.

They also use LED light bulbs and automatic sensors to switch lights on or off when needed and have planted trees with the slogan “one-house-one-big-tree”.

“We have also designated a section of our village as a tourist destination and training centre where we explain our ProKlim actions to visitors or conduct training on how to make biopore holes, infiltration wells, fertiliser, or anything related to adaptation and mitigation actions,” Wijaya said.

Residents sell their organic and inorganic waste at a waste bank in Ngadirejo village, Sukoharjo regency, Central Java province. Courtesy Serono Arief Wijaya, ProKlim Ngadirejo

Hardi Buhairat, a 50-year-old resident of Poleonro in Bone regency, South Sulawesi province — a three hour flight east of Jakarta — expressed a similar sentiment when talking about the ProKlim programme being implemented in his village.

“ProKlim has brought the Lita River back to life and we are very happy about that. The river is our only source of water for household consumption and farming but there were times it could no longer irrigate our field. Its water debit has returned and is stable throughout the year,” Buhairat, who is head of Poleonro’s ProKlim programme, told IPS.

The village started implementing ProKlim solutions in 2015, kicking it off with series of meetings with residents where they discussed climate change and the actions community members could take to avert its adverse impacts.

“The first things we did was issuing a village ordinance banning the residents from cutting trees and harvesting woods in and around Lita River’s spring. Soon after that, we planted thousands of trees in deforested areas around the spring,” said Buhairat, who is also Poleonro’s chief.

Poleonro’s village leaders also issued two other ordinances; one banning residents from burning rice straw and farms after harvest.

The 2019 Pollution and Health Metrics: Global, Regional and Country Analysis report from the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution (GAHP) ranks Indonesia as 4th in the world in terms of annual premature pollution-related deaths, after the populous nations of India, China and Nigeria.

The second ordinance requires residents to replace any tree they cut down in customary forests.

“The latter ordinance allows them to harvest trees in their customary forests but also orders them to plant new trees to replace the ones they cut. To ensure that they comply the rule, we inspect their forests regularly,” Buhairat said.

The residents also planted biopore holes to store rainwater underground, built wells to filter household wastewater before it goes into the river, and treated waste, converting organic waste into compost.

“Since 2015, we encouraged the residents to have indoor toilets. We are glad all households now have their own toilets indoors,” Buhairat said.

Buhairat said Poleonro villagers have also begun to diversify their food crops as part of their food security action.

“Our farmers planted organic red rice for the first time in 2018. We are now looking for buyers before going on a large-scale production. We want organic red rice to be our specialty commodity,” he said.

Since ProKlim’s launch in 2012, over 2,700 villages in 33 provinces have been registered as climate villages, according to Sri Tantri Arundhati, Director of Climate Change Adaptation of the Ministry of Environment and Forestry. In 2020, six of those villages, including Ngadirejo and Poleonro, received the ProKlim Lestari Trophy, the highest accolade for a climate village programme, from the ministry.

Arundhati said the government now aims to establish 20,000 climate villages, which constitute roughly 25 percent of the country’s 83,000 villages, by 2024.

“We will cooperate with other stakeholders, including non-governmental organisations and the private sector, and improve coordination with local governments and related departments. We will also work to improve the capacity of local governments and people at the grassroots level,” she told IPS.

Arundhati said her ministry has also asked registered climate villages to promote ProKlim and help other communities design their adaptation and mitigation actions.

Wijaya confirmed Ngadirejo village has been encouraged to help other communities implement ProKlim.

“We are now helping 44 villages in Central Java where we explain about global warming and help residents there identify adaptation and mitigation actions they could take to deal with  climate change-related problems in their community,” Wijaya said.

Buhairat said Poleonro is now guiding 15 villages in South Sulawesi to become climate villages.

Rizaldi Boer of the state-owned Bogor Institute of Agriculture (IPB) said ProKlim could help the government achieve the country’s nationally determined contribution (NDCs) agreed according to the Paris Agreement.

“The programme can help a lot in dealing with climate change as it encourages active participation of people at grassroots level,” said Boer, who is also director of the Centre for Climate Risk and Opportunity Management in Southeast Asia and Pacific.

“However, the government should establish a standardised report mechanism on ProKlim actions, particularly how to calculate its contribution to greenhouse gas emission reduction,” Boer told IPS.

Under the country’s NDCs, Indonesia has committed to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 29 percent with its own initiatives and 41 percent with external financial and technical assistance by 2030.

Boer also praised the government’s ambitious target of establishing 20,000 climate villages by 2024.

“It’s a tall order but it is not impossible. However, it requires participation of governments at all levels and all stakeholders, including non-governmental organisations and the private sector,” he said.

 

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Michael, 34, a nurse at Wurm CHPS, Ghana, washes his hands. Every healthcare centre in the world’s poorest countries could have taps and toilets for just half-an-hour’s worth of COVID-19 spending. Credit: WaterAid / Apagnawen Annankra

By Helen Hamilton
LONDON, Apr 7 2021 (IPS)

This World Health Day, G20 finance ministers will meet in Rome, Italy, to discuss how they will build back from the pandemic. The global economy is and concerted effort, coordination and imagination is needed to enable not only a worldwide recovery but also to ensure that the world’s poorest people are not left behind.

The World Health Organization has today urged countries to build a fairer, healthier world post-COVID-19. But this simply will not be possible if water, sanitation and hygiene are not high on the agenda.

Globally one in four healthcare facilities has no clean water on site. Indeed,1.8 billion people are at higher risk of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases because they use or work in a healthcare facility which lacks basic water services.

Trying to create a robust pandemic preparedness and response plan without ensuring that every healthcare facility has clean water and the ability to keep its patients, frontline health workers and premises clean is like building a fortress with a gaping hole where the door should be.

But in the world’s poorest countries – half of all hospitals and clinics have no clean water. This reality leaves healthcare workers and their patients, including mothers and newborns, at risk daily from deadly diseases and infections.

It also eases the way for new strains of disease to emerge and spread without the barriers of hygiene to overcome, creating risks not only for that community but frighteningly quickly, as we have seen with COVID-19, the rest of the world.

An investment of $1.2 billion from the G20 leaders would transform this situation. This amount would be enough to ensure every healthcare facility in the world’s poorest countries had the taps, toilets and handwashing facilities they so desperately need.

This might sound like a lot of money. But since the onset of Covid-19, rich countries have mobilised such huge sums, an average of nearly 10% of their GDP1, and a total of $20.6 trillion. The $1.2 billion investment WaterAid is calling for equates to just thirty minutes-worth of the past year’s spending.

Not only has research shown that washing hands with soap helps reduces the spread of coronaviruses by one third3 , it also helps limit the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance.

Antibiotics are too often used in unclean health facilities in place of proper hygiene practices, and are losing their power to fight infections worldwide. This essential injection of finance by the G20 would prevent millions of avoidable deaths through infections and diseases.

Ernesta, Maternity Nurse, 25, treats eight-month-old Chirha at Matibane Health Centre in Mozambique. Credit: WaterAid / Eliza Powell

According to the World Health Organization, an investment of this nature would take just one year to pay for itself and produce savings for every dollar invested thereafter.4 But an ever-growing debt crisis is preventing poorer countries from being able to invest in basic water services, with some countries paying billions of dollars in international debt service each year.

Zambia, for example, paid over $2 billion in 2019, a staggering 11% of its Gross National Income and has since defaulted on its payments. Pakistan paid a huge $11 billion to service their debt in the same year – an amount which could pay for access to taps, toilets and handwashing facilities in hospitals across all of the least developed countries three times over.

A global poll of over 18,000 adults across 15 countries including the UK, Brazil, Nigeria, India, Australia and the USA,5 commissioned by WaterAid and conducted by YouGov, reveals that 75% of those surveyed believe that debt payments by the poorest countries (including to private sector creditors) should be suspended so that countries can invest more of their scarce resources into essentials like water and soap.

The poll showed that, for example, in Nigeria 87% of those polled agreed that their annual $5 billion debt servicing payments should be suspended. 80% of those polled in India agreed with the proposition.

True debt relief and restructuring, which the G20 could agree6, would radically change the economic prospects of poorer nations. With the means to invest, those countries could then make strategic economic decisions to tackle the immediate crisis whilst also protecting against future pandemics.

Debt service payments to governments are currently suspended but this suspension is due to end in June even as the global pandemic continues.

Investing in water, sanitation and hygiene is an obvious investment for governments and presents the opportunity both to save lives now and protect against future pandemics along with the devastation they cause.

It is vital that we make sure that getting universal access to soap and water to is given the same levels of drive and ambition that are accompanying the creation of vaccines, as well the finance that is being offered for stimulus packages and economic response.

The G20 leaders have an opportunity to make a difference this week. By committing to comprehensive debt relief along with new funding of at least $1.2 billion they can make sure all healthcare facilities in the poorest countries have clean water and soap before another pandemic hits.

1 9.7% according to study https://unctad.org/fr/node/31523 and Statista has Japan as largest at 20.9% of its GDP: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1107572/covid-19-value-g20-stimulus-packages-share-gdp/
3 Beale S, Johnson A, Zambon M, null n, Hayward A, Fragaszy E. Hand Hygiene Practices and the Risk of Human Coronavirus Infections: https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/5-98
4 p3 https://washmatters.wateraid.org/sites/g/files/jkxoof256/files/everyone-everywhere-achieving-universal-health-coverage-through-water-sanitation-and-hygiene-uhc-day-action-plan_0.pdf Taken from WHO 2020 Combatting Antimicrobial Resistance through water, sanitation and hygiene and infection prevention and control in health care
5 Based on polling conducted by YouGov for WaterAid: 18,635 adults surveyed across 15 countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, South Africa, UK, USA.   based on polling conducted by YouGov for WaterAid: 18,635 adults surveyed across 15 countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, den, South Africa, UK, USA.  www.washmatters.wateraid.org/publications/public-support-wash-resilience. 
6 https://www.imf.org/en/About/FAQ/sovereign-debt#g20q1

 

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The post A Post-COVID-19 Recovery will not be Possible if Water, Sanitation & Hygiene are not High on the Agenda appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

The writer is Senior Policy Analyst - Health & Hygiene, WaterAid

 

The UN is commemorating World Health Day April 7.

The post A Post-COVID-19 Recovery will not be Possible if Water, Sanitation & Hygiene are not High on the Agenda appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Family planning counselor and nurse speaks to group at clinic in Nakuru, Kenya. Credit: Sala Lewis

By Joyce Banda and Nabeeha Kazi Hutchins*
WASHINGTON DC, Apr 7 2021 (IPS)

The past year has forced many of us to address difficult truths about how we treat and take care of each other — among them is a reckoning with racism and injustice.

In the global health and development sector, this reckoning is not new. Black, Brown and Indigenous women have been at the forefront of driving efforts to end inequity, racism and paternalism for decades, but the threats remain.

As women and leaders in global health and development from lower income countries, we intimately understand the consequences of the enduring legacies of colonialism, discrimination and disinvestment across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.

The dominant, top-down and inequitable approach to health and development — coupled with underinvestment in flexible, community-based programs — can no longer continue. Nowhere is the impact more apparent and overdue than with lifesaving and life-changing sexual and reproductive health information, services and care.

We have seen people turned away from clinics due to programmatic pivots by international donors that have impacted health supplies and service delivery. We know of increases in household-level abuse and illness when community health worker networks are eroded due to funding and policy changes.

We worry about the vulnerability of girls to sexual abuse and violence when sexual and reproductive health education is banned in schools and they are fed misinformation about their own development and rights. We are pained when individuals and families have no say or control over if, when and how they will have children.

These experiences reflect those of the 4.3 billion people of reproductive age who will lack at least one essential sexual or reproductive health service during their lifetimes.

When anyone is prevented from making decisions about their health, and the services and resources for their well-being are piecemealed due to paternalism and political convenience, progress for communities is elusive.

It is time to dismantle prescriptive international controls and expand the kind of aid and philanthropy that prioritizes flexibility, mutual accountability and trust in local leaders and their decision-making.

The listening and learning mindset that a new generation of donors has displayed — and the formation of partnerships and community-led programs rooted in principles of trust and expertise of domestic partners and local grantees — works.

In Malawi, the Presidential Initiative for Safe Motherhood during the Banda administration led to the reduction of maternal mortality by 32%. International funders and the private sector invested in the needs identified by national and local leaders, such as building clean and comfortable maternity waiting homes for pregnant women at hospitals and health centers.

In addition, community members and chiefs were fully supported to drive local advocacy and change local child delivery norms and bylaws to improve the ability of women to deliver at hospitals and health facilities. Funding was highly flexible so that women and grassroots leaders could make the right decisions for their own communities.

PAI and its grantees have also been turning the tide.

In Kenya, Women Promotion Centre has advocated for the creation of youth-friendly spaces where young people can access evidence-based information and services in a supportive manner so that they can be in charge of their reproductive health futures. In Mexico, Indigenous youth have been supported by Observatorio de Mortalidad Materna to claim their right to quality, culturally relevant health care and push back against discriminatory providers and norms.

In India, efforts are underway by Sahayog Society for Participatory Rural Development to ensure access to family planning as part of the country’s universal health coverage plan.

In the spirit of World Health Day, we challenge ourselves and others working for the greater good. We challenge all global health and development donors — including private foundations and bilateral and multilateral institutions — to prioritize equity in supporting and sharing financial decision-making with community partners.

We challenge policymakers to ground their decisions in evidence and prioritize comprehensive sexual and reproductive health care in health reforms, policies and funding. We challenge civil society to continue to speak truth to power and drive expansive, inclusive health actions for everyone — not merely the fortunate few.

It is past time to correct systems that are misaligned with the aspirations of women, youth and groups vulnerable to health disparities. If we hope to reconcile our work with systems of oppression and deliver on our promises of global progress, donors and decision-makers must recognize and value the perspectives and lived experiences of the very communities they desire to serve.

*Joyce Banda is the former president of the Republic of Malawi and founder of the Joyce Banda Foundation; Nabeeha Kazi Hutchins is the president and CEO of PAI. Population Action International.

*PAI works with policymakers in Washington, D.C. along with its network of global partners, to advocate for accessible, quality health care and advance the sexual and reproductive rights of women, girls and other vulnerable groups.

 

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The post On World Health Day, a Call for Equity, Justice & the End of Paternalism appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

The United Nations is commemorating World Health Day April 7.

The post On World Health Day, a Call for Equity, Justice & the End of Paternalism appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Timothy A. Wise
CAMBRIDGE MA, Apr 6 2021 (IPS)

The battle for the future of food has grown contentious, and José Graziano da Silva has become a lightning rod for criticism. In 2014, as Director General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), he presided over the institution’s first International Agroecology Symposium, opening what he called “a new window in the Cathedral of the Green Revolution.” The FAO has since then formalized support for “Scaling Up Agroecology” while continuing to promote the kinds of chemical-intensive agriculture associated with the Green Revolution.

José Graziano da Silva

The controversies are on full display in advance of the UN Food Systems Summit, scheduled for October. The conference was called by UN Secretary General Antonio Gutierres to address the alarming failures to meet targets set by the Sustainable Development Goals, including the goal to end severe hunger by 2030. Climate change has contributed to five consecutive years of rising levels of “undernourishment,” according to FAO estimates.

I interviewed José Graziano da Silva by email about agroecology, the Food Systems Summit, and backlash against his initiatives. Since leaving the FAO, which he directed from 2012 to 2019, he founded and directs the Zero Hunger Institute in Brazil.

You presided over some significant shifts in your tenure at FAO, including the “Scaling Up Agroecology” program. Why did you think that was important?

FAO delegates voted to promote and facilitate agroecology “to transform their food and agricultural systems, to mainstream sustainable agriculture on a large scale, and to achieve Zero Hunger and multiple other Sustainable Development Goals.” We launched the “Scaling Up Agroecology Initiative” to provide technical and policy support to countries that request it. FAO initially supported agroecology transition processes in three countries: India, México and Senegal. Nowadays many other countries are testing the approach.

Agroecology is growing but not as rapidly as it should be if we are to avoid the climate disasters caused by the invasive practices of the Green Revolution.

Former U.S. representative to Rome Kip Tom accused you of allowing FAO to be transformed “from a science-based development organization into a champion of agrarian peasant movements.” How do you respond to such criticisms?

These are ideological accusations from a large-scale farmer who was given an international post during the Trump administration. This was part of the same game that took the United States out of the Paris Agreement and other multilateral organizations and mechanisms. Thanks to the American people, that game is over.

During my tenure, I reinforced FAO’s role as a technical organization with its feet on the ground. We increased FAO’s technical capacity and we mainstreamed FAO’s strategy into five concrete objectives: eradicate hunger, promote sustainable agriculture development, reduce rural poverty, ensure fair food systems, and build resilience in rural areas.

Critics portray agroecology as backward-looking and as rejecting innovation. Do you see agroecology as a rejection of innovation?

Agroecology should not be seen as a movement backwards that rejects new technologies. It is a different way of producing food that requires innovation, respecting local conditions and the participation of producers in the innovation process. There is a need for specific policies and resources on science and innovation to legitimate and improve producers’ knowledge so that agroecology can lead the transition of current agri-food systems towards sustainability. What agroecology rejects are the invasive practices of the Green Revolution, in particular the overuse of chemical inputs like pesticides.

The U.N. Secretary General called for the World Food Systems Summit, now scheduled for September 2021. Does the Summit have the potential to transform food systems in needed ways?

The UN Food Systems Summit was launched amid controversy over the appointment of Agnes Kalibata as Special Envoy to the UN Secretary-General. She leads the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). Gradually, the Secretariat of the Summit began to open up the process, with a “Champions Group” and multi-stakeholder outreach to spread dialogues at national, regional and global levels, and to produce a series of reports. While I still don’t know how those conclusions will be absorbed by the real-decision-makers of the Summit, I hope that they can serve at least to express the diversity of opinions about how to move forward.

U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Michael Fakhri, has raised concerns about the framing of the summit, arguing that it fails to integrate a rights-based framework and that it marginalizes important work, such as agroecology.

The UNFSS needs to have at its foundation the right to adequate and healthy food. During his speech at the UN Human Right Council, Michael Fakhri said the Summit is focusing discussions around scientific and market-based solutions, and he called on everyone to make human rights central to their work. I concur with his vision.

I hope that his engagement and call can create the needed shift ahead of the Summit’s main talks. The Summit needs to be clear that zero hunger and sustainable food systems cannot be achieved without healthy soils, healthy seeds, healthy diets and sustainable agriculture practices.

If we are to meet the goal of zero hunger by 2030, what are the most important changes that need to come out of the UN Food Systems Summit?

The most important thing to do is empower the hungry. What makes hunger a very complex political problem is that the hungry are not represented. I never saw a union association that represents the malnourished.

Most of the people who face hunger nowadays are not in this situation due to a lack of food produced but because they don’t have money to buy it. So, give them money or the resources to gain access to food. It is a simple formula. The best would be to increase employment and the minimum wage paid to a level that could allow workers to have access to a healthy diet. And for those who can’t be employed for different reasons, provide them a minimum subsidy through cash transfer programs, as we did in Brazil’s Zero Hunger program. It is that simple: there is no miracle!

Timothy A. Wise is a senior advisor at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and the author of Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food.

 

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The post Transforming Global Food Systems
Jose Graziano da Silva on the Path to Zero Hunger appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Shutterstock/World Bank photo

By Prasad Kariyawasam*
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, Apr 6 2021 (IPS)

It is the oceans that engendered life. The lives of humans remain connected to the seas, making the good health of the seas and the efficient management of sea-based activity essential elements for the wellbeing of people and nations.

The Indian Ocean offers tremendous opportunities and some challenges for the island, coastal, and inland nations of South Asia and beyond.

Regional cooperation is an excellent platform for leveraging opportunities and transforming challenges to promote the health of, and harmony in, this ocean space of common heritage, for common good.

Take the problem of plastic waste. Up to 15 million tons of plastic makes its way into the Indian Ocean each year, contaminating it with a trillion pieces of plastic and making it the world’s second most polluted ocean after the North Pacific.

South Asian countries have developed isolated projects to manage the ocean’s plastic waste. Fishermen in India’s southern state of Kerala were paid to recycle the plastic bags, straws, flip-flops, and other plastic detritus caught in their nets.

Once shredded, the plastic was sold to construction companies that used it to strengthen asphalt roads. With regional cooperation, lessons learned by the Kerala fishermen could benefit other countries.

The formal basis for such cooperation is being laid. All eight nations of South Asia are now coming together through a new regional project, supported by the World Bank and its partners to fund innovative ways to prevent, collect, and upcycle plastic waste into global supply chains.

The project also supports research and innovation grants to find and support alternatives to plastic. The Plastic-free Rivers and Seas for South Asia project aims to help build a circular economy for plastic that will stop plastic waste from leaking into the environment.

The Indian Ocean Rim Association, whose two dozen member states stretch from Australia to South Africa and north to Iran and the United Arab Emirates, are watching the project and may expand it across the Indian Ocean.

Ambassador Prasad Kariyawasam

Some of the busiest sea lanes in the world cross the Indian Ocean and its rich marine life. Under its surface lie state-of-the-art global communications technology.

As the world’s economic growth engine pivots toward the Indo-Pacific, activity in the Indian Ocean increases. This growth must be managed in harmony with nature and in tranquility, to ensure optimum and shared benefits, and prosperity for all.

For this purpose, it is essential for South Asian nations to work toward evolving a system where all communities that use the Indian Ocean pursue their aspirations and competing claims in accordance with international law, regional conventions, and age-old traditions.

A system with greater cooperation among states, and with differential treatment for resource and technical capacity asymmetries is needed for tackling natural disasters, promoting maritime security, and keeping sea lanes open and safe.

This system should also enhance economic connectivity within South Asia and facilitate access to markets in the region and beyond, delivering goods and services at faster speeds, greater volumes, and lower costs.

Without doubt, the Indian Ocean needs better overall management which, among other measures, requires:

• Protecting the marine environment and pollution control;
• Managing illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing;
• Protecting fish and other resources in exclusive economic zones claimed by governments in coastal waters;
• Combating trafficking of humans, drugs, and arms;
• Combating piracy and marine terrorism;
• Safeguarding energy supply chains at maritime choke points;
• Managing port security and ensuring secure cargo loading;
• Promoting ocean-based tourism and leisure activities with a connected regulatory framework for safety in territorial waters and the high seas;
• Ensuring that Indian Ocean sea lanes, which carry much of the world’s cargo, including petroleum, are safe and secure; and
• Ensuring the safety of fiber optic cables on the ocean floor that transmit internet traffic, including financial transactions, e-mail, and phone calls.

Working in partnership with countries and sharing information, expertise, and best practices is essential as no single country can meet these maritime challenges on its own.

Disputes must be settled within a rules-based system that follows international norms and transparent practices.

South Asian nations can work together, with other major maritime nations beyond the region, and with multilateral institutions to promote health and harmony in the Indian Ocean. The results will benefit South Asia now and the generations to come.

*Ambassador Prasad Kariyawasam has also served as his country’s Permanent Representative to the UN in Geneva and New York and was a member of UN panels on migrant workers and disarmament. He has been a relentless advocate of championing the cause of regional integration and cooperation in SouthAsia.

 

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The post A Healthy Indian Ocean Feeds, Protects, and Connects all South Asians appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Ambassador Prasad Kariyawasam a former Foreign Secretary, Government of Sri Lanka, has held several key diplomatic assignments, including Sri Lanka’s ambassador to the US and High Commissioner to India, Bhutan, and Afghanistan

The post A Healthy Indian Ocean Feeds, Protects, and Connects all South Asians appeared first on Inter Press Service.

UAE Minister of State for Advanced Sciences Sarah bint Yousif Al Amir speaks during an event to mark Hope Probe's entering the orbit of Mars, in Dubai. Photo-Arabian Business, July 2020

By Siddharth Chatterjee and Ali Obaid Al Dhaheri
BEIJING, Apr 6 2021 (IPS)

Women hold up half the sky.

Some years ago, Sarah al-Amiri, a young Emirati engineer, had a fixed gaze beyond the sky and towards our galaxy. “Space was a sector that we never dared to dream growing up,” she noted.

Fast forward and al-Amiri is now the United Arab Emirates first Minister of State for Advanced Science, successfully leading an ambitious project which launched a spacecraft into orbit around Mars, the first-ever Arab interplanetary mission. This has only been achieved by four other nations, including China.

Al-Amiri contends that, “the mission is called Amal, which means ‘hope’ in Arabic, because we are contributing to global understanding of a planet. We are going above and beyond the turmoil that is now defining our region and becoming positive contributors to science”.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, women in the UAE, China and elsewhere have also led ground-breaking efforts against the virus in the fields of public health, vaccines and treatments. The Hope Mission and COVID-19 pandemic highlight the potential gains to be achieved by ensuring full and equal access for women and girls in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). As UN Secretary-General António Guterres emphatically stated, “women and girls belong in science and there is a dividend to be gained for countries that acknowledge this truth.”

Greater Participation Needed in STEM Fields

According to UNESCO, women account for only 28 percent of engineering graduates and 40 percent in computer science and informatics. This gender disparity is alarming, especially as STEM careers are often referred to as the jobs of the future, driving innovation, social wellbeing, inclusive growth and sustainable development.

Women account for only one-third scientific researchers globally, holding fewer senior positions than men at top universities. Furthermore, with the growth of artificial intelligence, automation and machine learning, there are risks for reinforcing inequalities, as the needs of women are more likely to be overlooked in the design of products and projects.

Increasing women’s participation in STEM accelerates sustainable development in low and middle-income countries, offering an opportunity to close gender pay gaps and boosting women’s earnings by USD 299 billion over the next decade. Studies indicate that girls perform as well as boys in science and mathematics, and in many parts countries outperforming them. Aptitude is not the issue.

Gender equality in STEM acts as a powerful accelerator for the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Norms and stereotypes that limit girls’ expectations need to be eliminated, while educators must motivate girls to become changemakers, entrepreneurs and innovators.

Thankfully, there are already encouraging signs of change, in both the UAE and China.

Growing Equality and Empowerment in China

In China, the 14th Five-Year Plan provides new opportunities to prioritize gender equality. Central to the development agenda is a strengthening of science, technology and R&D sectors to address a transformation to a digital and innovative economy. In China, women launch more than half of all new internet companies and make up more than half of inventors filing patent applications. The recently enacted Civil Code establishes new mechanisms for addressing sexual harassment and abuse in workplaces.

Success stories of women specializing in STEM fields should be heralded in order to empower others to follow. As examples, Tu Youyou was China’s first Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine in 2015, with her discovery of a malaria therapy; whilst Hu Qiheng was a leader promoting Internet access in China, being inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2013 as a global connector.

Pictured: Tu Youyou – Vox

In the private sector there are stellar mentors and roll-models such as billionaire Zhou Qunfei, who rose from a migrant worker to being the world’s richest self-made woman. As the CEO of Lens Technology, she built an empire manufacturing glass for tech giants such as Tesla, Apple and Samsung.

In Shenzhen, the private sector is now embracing its civic responsibilities, with companies such as Alibaba, Tencent and Huawei launching initiatives to recruit and promote women in STEM fields.

Rapid Progress by the UAE

The space industry is not the only sector in which Emirati women are exemplary.

According to the World Economic Forum 2021 Global Gender Gap Report, the UAE ranked first globally in four of the report’s indicators: women in parliament; sex ratio at birth; literacy rate; and enrolment in primary education. Meanwhile, in the 2019 UNDP Human Development Report, the UAE ranks 35 of the 189 countries in the world in terms of women’s empowerment.

In terms of education, 77% of UAE women will continue to receive higher education after high school graduation, and 70% are graduates of higher education in the UAE. Female students now account for 46% of STEM subjects in UAE higher education. Two thirds of the public sector positions are held by women, with 30 per cent of which are leadership positions.

On 30 March the UAE National Action Plan for Women, Peace and Security was launched by H.H. Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak, Chairwoman of the General Women’s Union, President of the Supreme Council for Motherhood and Childhood, and Supreme Chairwoman of the Family Development Foundation. This Plan is not only a step in the right direction but also spearheads the vital role of women in the UAE.

For many years, Sheikha Fatima and the UAE have championed and presided over a group of specialised conferences in the Arab, international and Islamic worlds to empower women and enhance their stature.

The co-authors Amb Ali Obaid Al Dhaheri (Right)and Siddharth Chatterjee(left). Photo-UAE Embassy China, 03 March 2021

As the UAE approaches its 50th Jubilee since foundation, it is a matter of pride that the country is making outstanding achievements and launching initiatives to empower women, surging ahead in promoting gender equality and ensuring that women play a key role in the nation’s growth. This has earned the UAE a reputation as being among the most progressive countries in the world.

Global Gender Equality Initiatives

In March 2021, International Women’s Day was celebrated with the UN China Country Team coming together in recognizing tremendous contributions and leadership demonstrated by women and girls around the world. Joint campaigns such as #HERstory saw the UNDP and UN Women shared inspiring stories on social media from women leaders in STEM around the world. A workshop was launched to combat stereotypes and encourage women and girls across China to learn and excel in science and technology.

As part of the Generation Equality global initiative led by UN Women, governments, civil society, private sectors and change-makers from around the world are coming together to fuel a powerful and lasting coalition for gender equality.

It is 25 years since the UN Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action committed nations to the advancement of the rights of women. Now is the time to recommit to ensuring gender equality, especially for STEM in order to harness women’s full potential. Then women of China, the UAE and the world can hold up half of the sky, in principle and reality.

This article was originally published in Forbes Africa.

 

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Excerpt:

Gender Equality in STEM for a better tomorrow

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