Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

News and Views from the Global South

Updated: 5 days 35 min ago

“Teach Us How to Become Carpenters” – South Sudanese Want to Shape Their Future

Fri, 01/22/2021 - 20:27

Likuangole in Pibor County, one of the counties that have been hardest hit in the past years due to relentless conflict and organized violence as well as catastrophic floods. Crerdit: Marwa Awad

By Marwa Awad
Likuangole, South Sudan, Jan 22 2021 (IPS)

Located in Jonglei state, one of the most underdeveloped regions of South Sudan, Likuangole is a town badly hit by floods and often battered by conflict. Despite the lack of secondary schools and industry, its residents aspire to transform their lives. But real investment is needed to spur development.

The constant threat of insecurity hangs over the town of Likuangole in South Sudan, with persistent tit-for-tat attacks over land, livestock, water that make peace in the world’s youngest country a challenging prospect in 2021.

It is one of nine towns in greater Jonglei, one of the most under-developed regions of South Sudan. Its people have very few opportunities for economic growth besides cattle and sheep herding, and subsistence farming. Chronic bouts of organized and localized violence fuel divisions between communities.

But this year brought even more suffering as devastating floods swallowed up homes, farmlands and livestock, wiping out harvests and cutting off the region from land access. Farmers see little point in cultivating in the face of such constant setbacks. With their livelihoods destroyed and access to food disrupted, people are pushed ever closer to the brink.

Aerial shot of Jonglei State, one of the most inaccessible and isolated regions of South Sudan. Credit: Marwa Awad

Martha Thiro, 29, says that she never stops worrying. “The women in Likuangole live in continuous fear. The floods may have stopped, the water is subsiding, but I don’t know whether to be happy or afraid, because the end of the floodwaters means violence will return.”

Martha prepares herself and children ahead of these looming raids, which tend to occur at set times in the year. “The children know they must run to the bush and find shelter near trees where the Gul or Lalob fruit grows,” she says. Gul is a bitter-tasting red fruit found in the wild bush. It is used as a source of food for people hiding when the violent attacks occur.

With 26,000 residents, Likuangole is one of 55 hard-to-reach areas where WFP must airdrop food to support isolated populations. Floodwaters and the damage they cause have meant doubling food assistance and extending distributions for longer periods to make up for the scarcity of food grown because of violence and climactic shocks. In the past two months, WFP reached 80,000 people in the Pibor area.

But food aid alone is not the solution for bringing peace to South Sudan. Tackling the deeply rooted isolation and inequity that often breeds conflict, poverty and hunger must go beyond immediate food needs. WFP aims to create an enabling environment for South Sudanese communities through alternative livelihoods that allow people to make a living and live in peace.

Too much time on their hands

To reach the remote town, we took a motorboat across the Pibor river. The skipper checks the fuel and soon we are gliding across smooth waters at speed. Large trees and bushes line the muddy riverbanks. As rays of sunshine glisten on the water and birds soar in the sky, you could almost forget that beneath this beguiling landscape lies long-standing conflict, deep hunger and abject poverty.

Credit: WFP/Musa Mahadi

Likuangole’s shore is lined with sinking houses, surrounded by children swimming in murky floodwater to cool off, and women washing clothes. Without any infrastructure, the town is bare, with no clearly marked roads, making movement nearly impossible. Residents use muddy pathways and skirt around puddles.

Surrounded by swamps, pasturelands contaminated with standing water from this year’s floods, and no schools or skills training, young men loiter with very little to do. Bored and restless, they pace up and down the market dirt road. With no work or any social outlet, these young men see no opportunity besides joining gangs to capture cattle from other communities. In this scarce environment, cattle raiding becomes one of few ways to become socially mobile and acquire the social status needed to afford marriage.

Secondary schools or any educational institutions are non-existent, save for one primary school. Illiteracy and the lack of learning means that children are left idle, their potential wasted. “We need schools for the children to learn and have the knowledge to live in a peaceful way,” Martha says. More than 2.2 million South Sudanese children are out-of-school.

At the end of the meagre market is a young man in his 30s who told us that his hometown needs more than airdrops of food. “Can you teach us how to become carpenters?” he asks, adding that woodworking would be a popular source of livelihood for men in Likuangole.

Another man nearby chimes in: “Your food helps us survive, but a job would give us a future.” The residents who were scattered in the quiet marketplace now joined our group and offered more ideas. To avoid the flooded areas they live in, the nearby towns of Boma and Labarab – a two to four days walk – could house the training workshops needed for carpentry. Both towns remain drier than most of their surrounding all year round.

Credit: WFP/Musa Mahadi

It was heartening to listen to the residents’ aspirations for a better life. Generating more livelihood possibilities in and around remote hotspots such as Likuangole will set the groundwork for self-reliance and stability.

In other less troubled areas across South Sudan, WFP creates alternative livelihoods for young people by training young men and women to build much community assets such as roads to connect their villages to local markets or training in constructing dykes to control flooding. These access roads bring opportunities to isolated communities by linking them to economically vibrant areas.

Investing in such training programmes that teach people the skill of building critical assets such as wells and multi-purpose ponds has helped to reduce fighting amongst communities over precious water resources. These livelihoods opportunities offer dividends. For one, it lifts villages out of isolation and the subsequent poverty that comes when livelihoods are limited or nonexistent. Beyond that, it gives local communities an opportunity to put their heads and hands together and work on a unifying project that benefits the collective, harnessing a sense of connectedness that can be an antidote to violence.

In Likuangole, there is a market for carpentry, the two young men said to me. Basic furniture is needed by families while the forests offer plenty of trees which men and women forage for firewood. A carpentry project as such would engage the idle youth and jobless men, thereby tackling inequity and isolation and giving people the independence to generate their own income. Even in times of desperate humanitarian need and catastrophic food insecurity, these critical livelihoods activities must continue operating. They go hand-in-hand with emergency food assistance in preventing the rapid deterioration of humanitarian conditions.

Credit: WFP/Musa Mahadi

For 2021, humanitarian organisations must go beyond emergency aid and gear up their livelihoods programmes in the Pibor area because of the unparalleled levels of food insecurity there as well as the scarcity of livelihoods opportunities. For South Sudan to thrive, we cannot lose sight of our contribution to peacebuilding programmes which need to grow and remain permanent across the year if we are serious about helping South Sudanese build a prosperous future for themselves.

Bottom line: If donor governments are serious about helping South Sudan, they must invest in early development projects and support WFP’s livelihoods work. Food rations alone will only serve to create dependency, and this is not a sustainable approach to the nascent country.

The writer is an official of the World Food Programme, the 2020 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

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

The post “Teach Us How to Become Carpenters” – South Sudanese Want to Shape Their Future appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

Fiji’s Presidency of the Human Rights Council Brings Opportunity and Responsibility to the Pacific

Fri, 01/22/2021 - 13:32

Fiji’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva Ambassador Nazhat Shameem Khan. Credit: Fiji Department of Information

By Miles Young and Ashley Bowe
SUVA, Fiji, Jan 22 2021 (IPS-Partners)

On Friday, 15 January, Ambassador Nazhat Shameem Khan, Fiji’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva, was elected the President of the United Nations Human Rights Council for 2021. As the first Pacific islander to hold this position, the President has a unique opportunity to enhance the protection and promotion of human rights in Fiji and the Pacific, and to amplify Pacific voices on human rights issues at the global level. The presidency reflects the Pacific’s growing presence on the international human rights stage and comes at a time of increasing marginalisation, social exclusion and poverty arising out of COVID-19; opening the door for the President (and Fiji) to promote a human rights-based and people-centred approach to ‘building back better’.

The growing influence of the Pacific

Over the past few years, the Pacific has experienced positive developments in the area of human rights. As the recent ‘Human Rights in the Pacific: A Situational Analysis’ (SPC & OHCHR, 2021) highlights, there have been 14 ratifications/accessions of the core nine human rights treaties among Pacific Island Countries (PICs) over 2016-2020. Fiji is one of the first countries in the world to become party to all nine. While impressive, the challenge for PICs, including Fiji, is to convert these commitments into actual benefits for their people, through the realisation of the rights set out in the treaties.

There have been encouraging signs. For example, the Pacific has long considered climate change through the human rights lens. In 2020, Samoa hosted the 84th Outreach Session of the Committee on the Rights of the Child (‘CRC84’), the first time any of the UN treaty bodies has held a regional session outside of Geneva or New York, despite repeated attempts for decades to do so. CRC84 showed the tangible benefits that come from a UN treaty body meeting directly with the very people they are meant to serve. In 2019, PICs agreed to the ‘Pacific Principles of National Mechanisms for Implementation, Reporting & Following-up (‘NMIRFs’). The principles ensure more effective implementation, reporting and tracking of human rights commitments and obligations, and enhance public transparency in this area (Fiji had pledged to establish such a mechanism in its bid for the presidency). Countries across the globe have expressed interest in adopting and adapting these principles for their own NMIRFs. Samoa currently has one of the most comprehensive rights and development tracking tools, and the open-source software on which it is built is being used or considered in countries across the world.

We have also seen a greater Pacific presence in Geneva, where the UN Human Rights Office is headquartered, with Fiji and the Republic of the Marshall Islands becoming members of the Human Rights in 2018 and 2020, respectively. Having assumed the presidency of the Council against this backdrop of increasing Pacific standing on the global human rights stage and growing political support and leadership for implementation, it is incumbent upon Fiji to build on this momentum.

What is the Human Rights Council?

The Human Rights Council was established by the United Nations in 2006, and consists of 47 member states, elected by secret ballot, to protect and promote human rights. The Council can investigate alleged violations of human rights and examine thematic or systemic issues. Members are elected by the UN General Assembly (all UN member states), with consideration given to equitable geographical representation as well as the human rights record of candidates and their voluntary pledges to protect and promote human rights.

While not a perfect system, the Council has significantly improved the UN’s effectiveness in respect of its human rights mandate since its establishment in 2016, not least through the creation of the Universal Periodic Review – a peer review of each country’s human rights record every five years with recommendations for improvements and the monitoring of and technical support for implementation. Unlike the UN Security Council, there is no veto and members have equal voting rights, enabling the Council to be more responsive and nimble in responding to human rights issues and contributing to its growing influence and credibility.

Role of President, Human Rights Council

The presidency of the Human Rights Council rotates on a yearly basis between the five regional groups of the UN. The President is required to set the agenda for the Council and play a role in the appointment of independent experts to the special procedures. The President is able to build consensus and make statements seeking solutions to specific problems – these are then adopted by the Council and given the same authority as regular resolutions.

Convention dictates the appointment of each new President is through informal diplomatic channels, with one agreed candidate proposed to the Council. This looked to continue for the 2021 presidency until an 11th hour bid by Bahrain (and later Uzbekistan) led to an unprecedented secret ballot, with Ambassador Khan receiving 29 of the 47 votes. The fact that the 2021 presidency was so fiercely contested demonstrates increasing recognition of the importance of this role.

What this means for the Pacific

While the context and nature of the presidency offers multiple opportunities for the Pacific, it also entails a significant degree of national and regional responsibility. Foremost, this is an opportunity to amplify Pacific voices within the Human Rights Council so as to raise awareness and stimulate action on priority human rights issues for the region, including on climate change. Prime Minister of Fiji, Honourable Josaia Voreqe Bainimarama, highlighted this when he said, “(Fiji’s) leadership comes at a critical time for humanity, as the climate emergency threatens human rights on a global and generational scale.” The proposal for a Special Rapporteur on Climate Change is likely to come before the Council during Ambassador Khan’s tenure and she will be critical to whether such a role is established. Coinciding with Fiji’s presidency will be the United States’ re-engagement in the climate change agenda and its timely return to the Paris Agreement.

The Pacific is chronically under-represented on the global stage; consequently, our voices are seldom heard and our issues rarely prioritised. The presidency can bring the Pacific experiences, issues and expertise to the fore. An area which deserves highlighting is how the Pacific’s values and diverse cultures are an enabler of human rights. In our region, human rights are often seen as a foreign import, an externally imposed system and framework. However human rights are written into the constitutions and legislation of every Pacific island nation, including one which pre-dates the UN Declaration on Human Rights. The principles underpinning the international human rights system, such as dignity, respect, protection and community, are central to Pacific communities.

Contextualising human rights enhances community understanding and ownership. The aim of contextualisation is not to find a middle ground, but to harness the vast power of traditional knowledge to communicate human rights standards, find solutions to human rights issues, and generate local understanding and ownership of implementation. Contextualisation of human rights is difficult – hard conversations are necessary around how a society wishes to move forward. Fiji’s presidency has the opportunity to open up these conversations and, in doing so, unlock the vast potential of Pacific culture to enable and uphold international human rights and further demonstrate to the world what this region can offer as a leader in this field.

Looking ahead

Naturally, the presidency will place Fiji and its human rights record under the spotlight. Membership of the Council requires a state to uphold high human rights standards (General Assembly resolution 60/251) and the presidency further elevates that responsibility. Work undertaken as President in Geneva must not distract from domestic efforts to give effect to the rights contained within the human rights treaties and the constitution to which Fiji is bound. The ‘Human Rights in the Pacific: A Situational Analysis’ (SPC & OHCHR, 2021) documents areas of concern and the public will play close attention to how Fiji addresses these domestic matters during its tenure as President of the Council.

While the presidency is an historic occasion, of greater importance is the opportunity it presents to show the world that the recent achievements and commitments in the Pacific are not anomalies but an indication of the unique role the region can play when it comes to human rights.

Miles Young and Ashley Bowe, Director and Advisor, respectively, of the Human Rights & Social Development Division of the Pacific Community (SPC). SPC is an international development organisation owned and governed by its 26 members, including 22 Pacific island countries and territories. The HRSD Division supports SPC members in the areas of human rights, gender equality and social inclusion, youth and culture.

The post Fiji’s Presidency of the Human Rights Council Brings Opportunity and Responsibility to the Pacific appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

Protecting Mental Health of Families in a Pandemic

Fri, 01/22/2021 - 11:44

Credit: Unsplash /Melanie Wasser.

By Ifeanyi Nsofor and Shubha Nagesh
ABUJA, Jan 22 2021 (IPS)

Dealing with COVID-19-related city lockdowns has been exceptionally stressful, particularly for those parents who have had to balance work, personal life, children and elderly, providing home schooling or facilitating virtual learning, managing infection control within the home, and more, all while being disconnected from support services.

Beyond all this, other mediators and moderators play a key role in outcomes for parents and children, including their function and adaptation – sociodemographic, exposure, negative events, personality traits, and the experience of death among close family and friends.

It is therefore unsurprising the results of C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health 2020 survey of child health concerns.

Clear links exist between mental health indicators and child-parent conflict and closeness, with anxious parents being particularly vigilant to responding to cues of children’s distress by encouraging them to express their opinions and providing support and acceptance of their decisions
The poll is a national sample of parents to rate the top health concerns for U.S. children and teens aged 0-18 years. A breakdown of the results shows the top ten concerns as follows: overuse of social media/screen time (72%); bullying/cyberbullying (62%); Internet safety (62%); unhealthy eating (59%); depression/suicide (54%); lack of physical activity (54%); stress/anxiety (54%); smoking/vaping (52%); drinking or using drugs (50%); and COVID-19 (48%).

The findings also show that parents’ biggest concerns for young people are associated with changes in lifestyle and mental health consequences of the pandemic.

There are fewer similar studies from the Global South; one study from China showed that the quarantine’s impact on children’s emotion and behaviour is mediated by the parents’ individual and group stress, with a stronger effect from the latter.

Parents who reported more difficulties in dealing with quarantine showed more stress, which in turn, increased the children’s problems. A study from Singapore explored work-family balance and social support and their links with parental stress. It revealed that lockdowns can be detrimental to parenting and marital harmony, especially for parents with poor work family balance and weak social support.

Previous studies have revealed that family structures who hold on their own in difficult times will best thrive and get past pandemic and other similar situations.

India’s lockdown declared without advance notice, saw many nuclear families from cities shift back to their ancestral towns for economic reasons. The lack of jobs, particularly in the informal sector, lack of resources to enroll children in online schooling and being cut off from health services and public transport made families shift back into joint family structures to support one another in times of uncertainties.

In Nigeria, the most severe impact of the pandemic on parenting is the loss of livelihoods among low-income families who earn daily within the informal economy – 65% of economic activities are within the informal sector. Most of them do not own bank accounts and may not have savings. The lockdown impacted these informal sector workers the most and consequently their ability to parent effectively.

Thus, the impact of pandemics on the mental health outcomes of children and their families must be explored as a distinct phenomenon. We suggest three ways to enable this:

Improve access to psycho-social support for families, parents and children during lockdowns in pandemic situations. Globally, there is second wave of the pandemic. In the United Kingdom, the country is in total lockdown. This implies that families continue to deal with the challenges identified by the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll.

Governments, civil society organisations, public health administrators must begin to assign social workers to visit families and help them deal with the mental health consequences of lockdowns. Conduct outreaches to provide emotional and mental health support for children and families in low-income communities with poor internet access.

An example from India is the The Mental Health Action Trust (MHAT) in Northern Kerala, that developed a unique mental health initiative that has a strong focus on empowering local communities and implementing mental health services through more than a thousand volunteers who run the community service.

Use technology to provide remote to support to parents and children. When families are informed on how lockdowns could affect them, they are better prepared to deal with such challenges. Nigeria’s leading non-profit organization providing mental health support, Mentally Aware Nigeria Initiative, has been reaching out to individuals through social media to help them deal with mental health consequences of the pandemic.

They do this via the Project COVID-19. Services provided include mental health assessment and linkage to counsellors, monthly virtual conversation café using WhatsApp to discuss coping skills and providing support to keep isolation journals. Such organisations are few in the global south and should be supported by government, international donors and the private sector to take their services to scale.

Finally, COVID-19 has changed the workplace and it is no longer business as usual. A significant amount of stress is attributed to juggling work life and home, employers should better support their employees to ease some of the pressure.

Companies should promote frequent check-ins and flexibility, more relaxed patterns of work schedules, incorporate breaks between intense work meetings, encourage recreational online family gatherings, time offs and financial incentives etc. Company health plans should include mental health care. Connecting families to mental health services is another great way to support parents, and therefore families.

COVID-19 is a reminder that countries must invest in epidemic preparedness. These investments should be family-centred to ensure that parents and caregivers are equipped to provide the best parenting possible.

Dr. Ifeanyi McWilliams Nsofor is a graduate of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. He is a Senior New Voices Fellow at the Aspen Institute and a Senior Atlantic Fellow for Health Equity at George Washington University. Ifeanyi is the Director Policy and Advocacy at Nigeria Health Watch.

Dr Shubha Nagesh works for the Latika Roy Foundation in Dehradun, India. She is a senior Atlantic Fellow for Health Equity at George Washington University. Shubha strives to make childhood disabilities a global health priority.

The post Protecting Mental Health of Families in a Pandemic appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

Q&A: Why we Must Invest in Educating Children in Crisis-Hit Burkina Faso

Fri, 01/22/2021 - 10:43

Education Cannot Wait (ECW) Director Yasmine Sherif speaks to crisis-affected children in Burkina Faso. ECW has launched a multi-year programme in the country, providing $11 million in funding, but a further $48 million is needed. Courtesy: Education Cannot Wait (ECW)

By Jamila Akweley Okertchiri
ACCRA, Jan 22 2021 (IPS)

Education Cannot Wait (ECW) – the first global fund dedicated to education in emergencies and protracted crises – was on the ground in Burkina Faso last week with its Director, Yasmine Sherif, to launch a new multi-year programme that aims to provide an education to over 800,000 children and adolescents in crisis-affected areas.

ECW is providing $11 million in seed funding now, but a further $48 million is needed from both public and private donors over the next three years. Burkina Faso, located in the Central Sahel, is experiencing, according to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), ‘the world’s fastest-growing humanitarian and protection crisis’, with more than one million people displaced.

“The Central Sahel is among the most forgotten crisis regions in the world, and Burkina Faso is one of the most forgotten country crises globally. ECW is fully engaged in investing in education across the Sahel over the past two years, particularly in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger,” Sherif told IPS in a telephone interview from Ouagadougou.

Sherif had just returned from Kaya, the fifth-largest city in Burkina Faso, northeast of the capital, where she spent time with crisis-affected children, teachers and families. She saw much suffering there. “They sit in punishing heat, trying to learn. They don’t have the tents, school buildings or school materials. Water is missing, sanitation is missing, and they have fled incredible violence. Their eyes are hollow. These children are suffering,” she said.

Stanislas Ouaro, Minister of National Education and Literacy for Burkina Faso, said education in the country is suffering from both ongoing violence and insecurity, as well as the COVID-19 crisis. While the security crisis has seen more than 2,300 schools close, the COVID-19 pandemic further resulted in a nationwide shutdown of schools during several months in 2020.

Excerpts of the interview follow:

While the security crisis in Burkina Faso has seen more than 2,300 schools close, the COVID-19 pandemic further resulted in a nationwide shutdown of schools during several months in 2020. Courtesy: Education Cannot Wait (ECW)

Inter Press Service (IPS): What has been the impact of the first ECW emergency programmes in the focused countries particularly Burkina Faso?

Yasmine Sherif (YS): What we see today is that more children and youth are now able to access schools across countries in the crisis-affected areas. We see more girls, including adolescent girls, attending school and this is through ECW investments which support a holistic package of activities, from pre-school through secondary school. Today, we have invested about $40 million in these countries and the activities that we have provided include mental health and psycho-social support, which is highly important for children and adolescents who are affected by crisis. We have also responded to the COVID-19 pandemic very fast. We were among the first responders to COVID-19, providing sanitation and water facilities and building materials, as well as support for remote learning solutions for the communities.

IPS: You are currently on mission in Burkina Faso. At the end of last year, UNHCR stated that Burkina Faso is now the world’s fastest-growing displacement and protection crisis with more than one in every 20 inhabitants displaced by surging violence inside the country. More than 2.6 million children and youth are out of school in Burkina Faso, with another 1.7 million students at risk of dropping out of school. What are you finding on the ground?

YS: UNHCR was here on a mission recently and called on the world to take action and when they called for action, we had an obligation to act. So, this is why we prioritised our mission to Burkina Faso as a direct response to the call of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

Now, what do we see on the ground? We see a high number of displaced communities. There are one million people who are internally displaced in Burkina Faso, as well as 20,000 refugees from neighboring countries and we also have the host communities where many of them live. These include children who have fled insecurity and violence; their villages have been burnt down and they have found security in government-controlled areas.

We visited the town of Kaya in Burkina Faso and we could feel there was more security there. But more resources are needed to provide these children and youth with the education that they deserve, which is challenging because an area of violence and insecurity is a barrier to education.

The government is very committed, the President, the Minister of Education – civil society organizations, NGOs, the United Nations – are all working together in strong partnership to provide resources and personnel to make education available in a secure environment for children and adolescents.

IPS: As you mentioned, you have recently returned from a field trip to Kaya. What have people, students, particularly girls, told you about the situation there?

YS: In Burkina Faso, you see that the girls are strong but they are disempowered because they do not have the tools, they are disempowered because they do not have access to education – that is what we see and that is why we need more funding. If you want to empower girls’ education, you have to contribute the resources – because the political will is there, representatives are there to run the programme to ensure a collective outcome for girls – and learning tools. How can they concentrate and study under an insecure condition and environment? So again, resources are needed and urgently.

IPS: Earlier this month ECW announced some $33 million in funding for Mali, Niger, the Central Sahel and Burkina Faso. Of this $11 million is being provided as a catalytic grant to Burkina Faso but $48 million is needed in additional funds over a few years. What does this mean in terms of the scope and scale of the task ahead?

YS: The more funding we receive and the more we are able to close the funding gap, the more we can achieve the vision and goal and take action. No one can say there is no capacity to increase, we have great capacity in civil society, in UN agencies and there is great political will of the government. Now it is up to wealthier countries to provide the funding needed, and we want them to be partners because ECW is a global fund where our donor partners sit on our governance structure. Our partners provide the funding, are part of making the decisions and help fund our shared vision of quality, inclusive education for girls, for children with disabilities, for those that fall behind.

IPS: ECW focuses on collaborating with other agencies implementing the fund’s multi-year resilience programmes. How important are these partners in the execution and ultimately the success of these programmes?

YS: Our partners are absolutely essential – civil society organisations, UN agencies, and of course the leadership of the government – they are the ones working among the people, they are doing the work on the ground, they are making the sacrifices. Our job is to facilitate and make their work easier, to mobilise resources and to bring everyone together. Our partners on the ground have the credibility and they are the sources of the solution for communities who are struggling to provide for their children and their young people. They are our heroes and they keep us going.

IPS: Stanislas Ouaro, Minister of National Education and Literacy for Burkina-Faso, said that the security crisis resulted in the closure of more than 2,300 schools and the COVID-19 pandemic further resulted in the closure of all schools in Burkina Faso for several months. Why is continuity of education so important for children in crisis situation?

YS: You know when a child does not go to school, when a girl is out of school, she is more likely to marry early, she is more likely to get pregnant early and as a result very likely to never attend school. So, the main impact of keeping her out of school is that you have disempowered her. If a boy is out of school, he is more likely to be recruited into an armed group, more likely to pick up arms and by doing that his opportunity for a proper education to be a productive citizen has been destroyed.

The longer they are out of school amidst the insecurity, the pandemic or any other crisis, the more likely that they will never come back and the vicious cycle of unintended pregnancies, trafficking, forced recruitment, extreme poverty and lack of livelihoods will continue. That is why any country affected by conflict and crisis is important to us. We have a brilliant, committed Minister of Education who was educated here in Burkina Faso. Burkina Faso was one of the most progressive country in reaching the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in education five years ago but, because of the Sahel and Burkina Faso crisis, it has dropped back. So, we need to get them back to school quickly, we need to ensure safety of schools, we have to get protective measures for COVID-19, but the key is to also end the conflict and restore stability.

IPS: ECW’s programmes have given special attention to girls’ education, can you share the impact this decision is having on the beneficiaries?

YS: ECW has made a commitment to see a minimum of 60 per cent of girls in school through affirmative action. We believe that gender equality starts by empowering the girls through education and through our investments, we have seen more girls in school and we have also seen more girls now attending secondary education. So, there is direct correlation between our affirmative action, our financial investment and the number of girls who are now enjoying quality education.

IPS: Is there anything else that you would like to add?

YS: Education is an investment in humanity, we are investing in the human mind, the human soul and spirit and it is more costly to ignore that investment than to make that investment. Investing in a human being and a human being in crisis is a moral choice and I appeal to everyone to make the moral choice, the political choice and the financial choice that will create that reward. Be human, be authentic and be called to creating a better world.

The post Q&A: Why we Must Invest in Educating Children in Crisis-Hit Burkina Faso appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

IPS Correspondent Jamila Akweley Okertchiri speaks to Education Cannot Wait (ECW) Director YASMINE SHERIF about the new multi-year programme that aims to provide education to over 800,000 children and adolescents in crisis-affected areas in Burkina Faso

The post Q&A: Why we Must Invest in Educating Children in Crisis-Hit Burkina Faso appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

Personal Testimonies, Pledges Mark the Start of the ‘Fair Share to End Child Labour’ Campaign

Fri, 01/22/2021 - 10:42

Selimatha Salifu, a former child labourer from Ghana, is now a teacher working with children and encouraging them to continue their education. Salifu is one of two former child activists who addressed United Nations officials, business, faith, union, education and youth leaders from around the world at the virtual launch of the ‘Fair Share to End Child Labour’ campaign on Jan. 21.

By Alison Kentish
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 22 2021 (IPS)

Selimatha Salifu of Ghana is a former child labourer who has vowed to do her part to bring attention to the plight of the world’s over 150 million child labourers. Raised in a fishing community, she recalls her days buying fish to sell, working from daybreak till nightfall to contribute to her family. She credits the General Agriculture Workers Union for rescuing her and ensuring she enrolled in school.

“I’m a teacher by profession now and I work with kids. I want to appeal to children going through the same thing. I was once like them. I want to tell them that they shouldn’t lose their youth and they can have hope that they’ll come out of this successfully. They won’t be on the streets forever. They will not be at the riverside day in day out to put something on the table for their families.”

Salifu is one of two former child activists who addressed United Nations officials, business, faith, union, education and youth leaders from around the world at the virtual launch of the ‘Fair Share to End Child Labour’ campaign on Jan. 21.

The initiative is organised by Nobel Peace Laureate Kailash Satyarthi, founder of the Global March to End Child Labour and decades-long child rights advocate. It demands a fair share of resources, policies and social protection for children, in order to end child labour. The campaign was launched on the same day the United Nations officially declared 2021 as the International Year for the Elimination of Child Labour.

“We have seen that the injustices, inequalities, miseries, denial of education, child labour, sexual exploitation of children, trafficking and so many other problems have been exacerbated during the pandemic, but these injustices were already there,” the Laureate said. “When we call for a fair share, we are calling for creating a new culture of justice and equality.”

The most recent report by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) stated that the challenge of ending child labour ‘remains formidable.’ While almost 100 million children have been saved in the last two decades, 64 million girls and 88 million boys are in child labour globally – almost 1 in 10 of all children. Director General Guy Ryder said the fair share campaign ‘goes to the heart’ of the ILO’s social justice mandate and complements ongoing efforts to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 8.7, which targets the elimination of child labour by 2025.

“We all know that the fight against child labour is complex, the causes of child labour are complex and through this Fair Share campaign, I am convinced that we are doing something very important.”

Director General of the World Health Organisation Dr. Tedros Adhanom reminded the partners that the social and economic shocks wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic point to 66 million children falling into extreme poverty. This is in addition to the estimated 386 million children already in that bracket. He said a campaign like this will help maintain pressure on international organisations and other partners to keep their promises to the world’s children.

“The most disadvantaged children are the most affected, with no access to social and legal protection, leaving them vulnerable to social exclusion and exploitation including child labour. We cannot allow this to happen. We must ensure that these children and their families have their fair share of resources and social protection,” he said.

The Campaign’s Nobel Laureate leader has applauded the young people from around the world who have answered the call to action and are dedicating the time to ridding the world of child labour. The Youth Voice was prominent in Satyarthi’s 2020 100 Million campaign – over 100 young people demanded that world leaders guarantee a fair share of pandemic recovery funds gets to marginalised populations. The youth leaders have confirmed their support for the new initiative.

“We are committing to use our convening power to mobilise our constituents to reach out to their members of Parliament, to their Senators, to their Prime Ministers, to their Presidents, to allocate a fair share of the national resources to end child labour. I call on everyone, especially young people and students, to join this campaign in whatever small way. We should not rest until every child is free, safe and educated,” said Peter Kwasi, Secretary General of the All-Africa Student Union.

Other partners at the campaign launch included the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). With former child workers and youth on the frontline and the backing of leaders and international institutions, the campaign is hoping that its demands will see 2021 as a turning point in the history of the movement to end child labour.

The post Personal Testimonies, Pledges Mark the Start of the ‘Fair Share to End Child Labour’ Campaign appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

152 million children are subjected to child labour. Nobel Peace Laureate Kailash Satyarthi has brought together former child workers, international organisations, global youth, business and education leaders for a global campaign to save them

The post Personal Testimonies, Pledges Mark the Start of the ‘Fair Share to End Child Labour’ Campaign appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

Biden’s Arms Control Ambitions are Welcome—but Delivering Them will not be Easy

Fri, 01/22/2021 - 08:37

Rosemary DiCarlo, Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, briefs the members of the UN Security Council. Iran and US are both accused of undermining the 2015 nuclear deal. Credit: UN Photo/Rick Bajornas

By Jan Eliasson and Dan Smith
STOCKHOLM, Jan 22 2021 (IPS)

A deadly pandemic to control. An urgent nationwide vaccination programme to roll out. An economic crisis to navigate. Political divisions and distrust deep enough to spark mob violence and terrorism.

The 46th President of the United States faces a barrage of critical domestic challenges from day one.

Nevertheless, one matter of foreign policy will need to be at the top of his agenda: there will be barely two weeks left to save the 2010 strategic nuclear arms control treaty with Russia, New START, from extinction.

New START is the last nuclear arms control treaty left standing between the USA and Russia. It sets caps on the deployment of the long-range portion of the world’s two biggest nuclear arsenals and is due to expire on 5 February.

Fortunately, both incoming president Joe Biden and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, have indicated their willingness to extend the treaty without conditions. So, it is likely to be a smooth process.

Amid the mistrust that colours today’s geopolitical landscape, far harder arms control challenges lie ahead.

The crisis in arms control

The past four years have seen major parts of the international arms control architecture weakened or dismantled. The 1987 Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles (INF Treaty) collapsed in 2019.

In 2018, the USA unilaterally pulled out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)¬—the 2015 ‘nuclear deal’ with Iran signed up to by all five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council along with Germany and the European Union.

In November last year the USA formally withdrew from the 2002 Treaty on Open Skies, which allowed countries across the Euro-Atlantic space, from Anchorage to Vladivostok, to carry out unarmed surveillance flights over each other’s territory in order to monitor military activity.

Russia has now announced it is following suit.

The 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) is also looking precarious. Much of the world is frustrated at the continued possession of nuclear weapons by the five nuclear weapon states recognized by the NPT—the USA, Russia, France, China and the United Kingdom—as well as Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea.

The 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which will enter into force on 22 January, was born of this frustration.

While the US presidency of Donald J. Trump has been particularly detrimental to arms control, problems were growing long before, and are far from being resolved.

‘Arms control for a new era’

Joe Biden brings to the presidency an impressive depth and breadth of experience in the field of arms control and international negotiation.

He made a commitment to ‘arms control for a new era’ a prominent part of his electoral platform and characterized the extension of New START as ‘a foundation for new arms control arrangements’.

New arms control arrangements are certainly needed. Without them, there is a serious risk of the further spread, and potential use, of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction.

It is also necessary to deal with an increasingly unpredictable, and expensive, arms race based on competition in technologies rather than numbers of weapons and characterized by the increasing entanglement of nuclear and non-nuclear technologies.

Several factors, such as missile defence, advanced conventional capabilities, hypersonic weapons, the accelerated militarization of outer space and the potential application of artificial intelligence to strategic weapons, are affecting the nuclear calculus and strategic stability.

It is unclear how these factors should be addressed in arms control negotiations. The task of designing a new approach to arms control is, in itself, dauntingly complex. And negotiations will take place in a far from ideal context.

Complicating factors

Delivering a new, effective arms control architecture will demand creativity, cooperation and compromise on all sides. Joe Biden has said that the USA will lead the process. But his team will face severe constraints.

The challenges around returning to the JCPOA—something Joe Biden has said he hopes to achieve—are illustrative. The JCPOA was proving a successful non-proliferation tool until the US withdrawal.

But it was only entered into by the USA in the face of strong opposition from the Republican Party, which has not weakened in the interim. In addition, there are a number of other problems and external factors that could distract attention from urgent work on the JCPOA.

Even with control of both houses of the US Congress, it will be difficult for Joe Biden to obtain the support needed to approve future arms control treaties with Russia (or other states).

Thus, the incoming president may well be restricted to executive orders, which are limited in scope and can easily be revoked by future US administrations.

Congressional approval will also be necessary to terminate certain sanctions on Iran in 2023, as is required under the terms of the JCPOA.

Recent US actions have also damaged the USA’s international reputation in many quarters—among both adversaries and allies—which will further complicate arms control diplomacy.

A collective challenge

The world faces a range of potentially destabilizing realities in the coming decades, from climate change and other environmental crises to the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Part of the big picture is that the geopolitical order is shifting, with new regional powers and new alliances in which the USA is less influential.

In arms control, as in many other areas, the international community needs to find new ways of working to secure our common interest.

We should hope that the successful extension of New START will be the prelude to a gradual resurgence of arms control, non-proliferation, disarmament and risk reduction. But, as with the other big issues of our time, success will depend on all key actors stepping up.

The post Biden’s Arms Control Ambitions are Welcome—but Delivering Them will not be Easy appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Ambassador Jan Eliasson is Chair of the Governing Board of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and Dan Smith is Director, SIPRI

The post Biden’s Arms Control Ambitions are Welcome—but Delivering Them will not be Easy appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

With a War-Mongering President Gone, is the World Safe from Nuclear Brinkmanship?

Fri, 01/22/2021 - 08:24

Launching of “Reverse the Trend” and welcoming the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Credit: Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 22 2021 (IPS)

A war-mongering president, with his finger on the nuclear trigger— and who threatened to attack North Korea and Iran– was unceremoniously drummed out of office on January 20.

And two days later, the world rejoiced the historic entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) – a landmark event greeted by peace activists and anti-nuclear campaigners worldwide

But still there are two lingering questions: Does the TPNW, along with the inglorious departure of an irrational Donald Trump from the White House, make chances of a nuclear war only a remote possibility?

Or do the 14,000 nuclear weapons in the hands of nine nuclear-armed States – the US, UK, France, China, Russia, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel– still pose an existential threat to humankind?

“Let’s be clear, there are no safe hands for these unsafe weapons of mass annihilation,” Dr Rebecca Johnson, former president of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), told IPS.

“That’s why so many governments decided to ban and eliminate nuclear weapons in 2017, along with all the activities that enable or assist anyone to possess, deploy and use them,” she pointed out.

“It’s not just about the competence of leaders and sizes of arsenals, though both are worrying. Until all nuclear weapons are eliminated, humanity will continue to face extinction level threats,” Dr Johnson added.

She said one nuclear detonation can escalate into nuclear war. That’s a terrible but feasible scenario that could be triggered by intention, miscalculation or accident.

“And let’s remember that the resources squandered on nuclear weapons mean these governments are putting less money and attention into what we need to meet our real human security needs, from Covid to Climate destruction,” she argued.

As of now, neither the United States nor the 8 other nuclear armed nations have joined the Treaty, which prohibits the development, testing, production, manufacture, acquisition, possession, deployment, along with the use or threatened use of nuclear weapons, as well as providing assistance for, or encouraging such acts.

“But just because they aren’t signed on to the Treaty doesn’t mean it won’t affect them,” said Ralph Hutchison, coordinator of the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance.

“Every nation will feel the moral force of the Treaty. All nuclear weapons, including the 3,900 in the US stockpile, have been declared unlawful by the international community.”

Addressing the UN General Assembly in September 2017, Trump warned that “the United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy (nuclear-armed) North Korea.”

And following a drone strike which killed an Iranian military general, a belligerent Trump vowed in early 2020 the U.S. would respond to any Iranian strikes on “any Americans” or “American assets” by striking 52 preselected sites in Iran, including some that have cultural importance to Iranians.

Of the nine nuclear armed states, four are in Asia and embroiled in ongoing conflicts– India vs China and Pakistan vs India while North Korea has continued its war of words with neighbouring non-nuclear South Korea.

Meanwhile, nuclear-armed Israel is in an ongoing military confrontation not only with Iran but also with Palestinians for decades.

Jonathan Granoff, President of the Global Security Institute, told IPS the existential threat of the deployed ready arsenals of nuclear weapons in the thousands in the hands of fallible human beings in nine states remains.

“By accident, miscalculation, unforeseen, unpredictable circumstances, design by fools, or even actual madness the unspeakable could be unleashed.”

Trump’s leaving the White House diminishes this hazard, but it does not end it, he noted.

“The TPNW is a clarion call to the states with these devices to fulfill their legal obligation to commence good faith negotiations to achieve their verifiable, enforceable, legal, universal elimination. There are real threats before us that weaponry cannot solve — climate change, ending poverty and pandemics,” said Granoff.

He argued the more the weapons are perfected the less security is obtained.

“The TPNW is a codification of the reality that these devices of death are deployed in an illegal manner that cannot distinguish between civilians and combatants and certainly causes immeasurable unnecessary suffering in contravention of international humanitarian law”.

The states with the weapons, for the sake of humanity, should either join the treaty with protocols they have negotiated, work on adjusting the Model Nuclear Weapons Convention to their liking, or immediately commence another process to achieve the same end — the security of a nuclear weapons-free world, he said.

“It is time for new paradigm – Human Security!”, declared Granoff, recipient of the Rutgers University School of Law’s Arthur E. Armitage Distinguished Alumni Award and a 2014 nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The TPNW reached its 50th ratification last October, fulfilling the conditions of its entry into force.

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the Treaty represents a meaningful commitment towards the total elimination of nuclear weapons, which remains the highest disarmament priority of the United Nations.

“The 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC), with 183 States Parties, has abolished biological weapons, and the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), with 193 States Parties, has abolished chemical weapons,” says Paul Walker (USA), Vice Chair of the Arms Control Association and Right Livelihood Laureate in 2013.

“It is now time to abolish the third class of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons.”

Dr Johnson told IPS there are thousands of weapons in nine nuclear arsenals, with many kept on high alert in accordance with nuclear deterrence policies that fly in the face of facts, evidence and human psychology.

“While it is to be hoped that the Biden-Harris Administration will move quickly to extend New START and ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty at last, the only way we can prevent nuclear war is by persuading all our governments to join the TPNW and contribute to its full implementation,” she said.

“I’ve been working on nuclear treaties for four decades so I know that won’t happen overnight. But they should at least engage constructively, attend TPNW meetings as observers, and contribute to collective steps to establish effective compliance, monitoring and verification capacities. That’s what we’re calling on the British government to do this year, and we hope others will too,” Dr Johnson declared.

https://www.nuclearinfo.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Acronym-UK_TPNW_-19Jan2021.pdf

The post With a War-Mongering President Gone, is the World Safe from Nuclear Brinkmanship? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

Will Biden Administration Respond to the Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, End Threat of a Nuclear War & Bring Nuclear-armed States Together to Achieve Global Nuclear Disarmament?

Thu, 01/21/2021 - 15:36

Ruins of Nagasaki about 800 metres from the hypocenter in mid-October 1945. Lessons of Nagasaki survivors should motivate the world to eliminate all nuclear weapons – UN chief. Credit: UN Photo/Shigeo Hayashi

By Alyn Ware
PRAGUE, Czech Republic, Jan 21 2021 (IPS)

Many of us around the world breathed a sigh of relief yesterday (Jan 20) as the ‘nuclear football’ (the briefcase with nuclear weapons codes and communication links for the President to launch a nuclear attack) was passed from Mr Trump to President Biden, as the new president was inaugurated.

This change of administration comes as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons enters-into-force (Jan 22) and as we commemorate the 75th anniversary of UN Resolution 1 (1) which established the global goal for the elimination of nuclear weapons.

One year ago the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock to 100 seconds to Midnight, indicating the very high risk to humanity from nuclear weapons and climate change. These recent developments give some hope for reducing the risk of nuclear war and for making progress toward nuclear disarmament.

With 4000 operational nuclear weapons in the US arsenal, over 800 of them on high alert ready to be fired in minutes, having had a somewhat irrational US Commander-in-Chief over the past 4 years, with the authority to unilaterally launch these weapons on a whim, has been nerve-wracking.

Will the new US administration end the threat of a nuclear war, undertake initial disarmament steps, and bring the nuclear-armed States together to negotiate for phased, verified and enforceable nuclear disarmament? We don’t know.

But there are some positive signs. Joe Biden was Vice-President for Barack Obama, who launched a very ambitious effort to achieve a nuclear-weapon-free world, but only achieved incremental measures to support this goal – such as the new START agreement, Iran agreement (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), some global measures on nuclear security and the start of a process to achieve a Middle East Zone free from Nuclear Weapons and other Weapons of Mass Destruction.

President Obama was unable to reign in nuclear weapons development and production due to a congress that insisted on increasing the nuclear weapons budget and supporting new nuclear weapons systems. Indeed the entire Republic Caucus in the Senate refused to ratify the new START Treaty with Russia unless the President agreed to nuclear weapons modernization and an increased budget.

In addition, President Obama was unable to significantly lower the role of nuclear weapons in US policy. He attempted to adopt a no-first-use or sole purpose policy twice in his presidency, but was beaten back by domestic opposition and by NATO allies insisting on the first use option to ‘protect’ them from Russia.

President Biden might be able to advance on both these issues. He has a Democratic majority in Congress whose leadership has indicated support for no-first-use. And there is growing support in allied countries for stepping back from the nuclear brink.

Indeed, a policy of no-first use has now been supported in declarations of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The declarations are adopted by consensus by all member parliaments including the European countries, Canada, USA, Russia and the former soviet countries.

There is also growing support publicly and in the US Congress to cut nuclear weapons budgets in order to focus more on human security issues like climate protection and the pandemic.

This includes a new Defense Spending Reduction Caucus in Congress calling for a 10% reduction in military spending to free up resources to address the pandemic. Cutting a significant portion of the nuclear weapons budget would be the easiest way to make this 10% cut. The Smarter Approach to Nuclear Expenditure (SANE) Act, introduced in the US Senate by Senator Markey and in the House by Rep Blumenauer, indicates how substantial savings on the nuclear weapons budget could be made by immediate unilateral cuts. With Democrats now controlling both houses, there is possibility for progress on these.

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons provides a renewed global call by non-nuclear states for the achievement of a nuclear-weapon-free world.

The US, other nuclear armed States and the allied states have all said that they will not join the treaty. It is unlikely that a Biden Administration will change the US position, let alone convince other nuclear armed states to join the TPNW. And if the nuclear armed and allied countries don’t join, they are not bound by it.

However, a number of civil society statements released in conjunction with the entry-into-force of the TPNW (see below for links to them) have highlighted that all countries, including the nuclear armed and allied states, are bound by existing international law that prohibits the threat or use of nuclear weapons and requires the elimination of these weapons.

The TPNW did not arise in a legal vacuum. The threat or use of nuclear weapons was already affirmed by the International Court of Justice in 1996 as generally prohibited under international humanitarian law, i.e. the laws of warfare which are binding on the nuclear armed states.

The Court also affirmed an obligation under both treaty and customary international law to achieve the elimination of nuclear weapons. And the UN Human Rights committee in both 1984 and more recently in 2018, affirmed that international human rights law, which is also binding on the nuclear armed States, established similar prohibitions and obligations.

Mr Trump did not appear to respect the law, unless it served his agenda. However, President Biden is much more committed to law, and could be persuaded by these legal developments to act in good faith and with determination to advance the objective of a nuclear-weapons-free world through a number of concrete steps.

In addition, States parties to the TPNW could make a significant impact on the nuclear armed States by banning the transit of nuclear weapons in their territorial land, sea and airspace. Or they could make an impact on the nuclear arms race by ending public investments in the nuclear weapons industry.

So far, none of the states joining the TPNW have followed up with such implementing measures (although some States had adopted such measures prior to the TPNW). The First Assembly of the States Parties to the TPNW, which will occur within the next year, provides an opening to encourage the TPNW countries to do so.

Civil society action will be necessary to move the governments to take action. If this becomes a priority, then there is a possibility that these political openings will enable humanity to finally abolish nuclear weapons to assure a sustainable future.

Civil Society statements:

Abolish nuclear weapons to assure a sustainable future

Joint statement by World Future Council members and Right Livelihood Laureates on the occasions of the Entry-into-Force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and the 75th anniversary of UN Resolution 1 (1)

It’s time to end the nuclear era!

Statement of the Abolition 2000 Coordinating Committee on the occasions of the Entry into Force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and the 75th anniversary of UN Resolution 1 (1)

Statement of Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy and Western States Legal Foundation on the Imminent Entry into Force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

The post Will Biden Administration Respond to the Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, End Threat of a Nuclear War & Bring Nuclear-armed States Together to Achieve Global Nuclear Disarmament? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Alyn Ware is Peace and Disarmament program Director for the World Future Council and Right Livelihood Laureate in 2009.

Categories: Africa

Trump Is Gone, Trumpism Lives On

Thu, 01/21/2021 - 12:14

By Anis Chowdhury
SYDNEY, Jan 21 2021 (IPS)

Impeachment or no impeachment, Trump is out of the White House. Trump goes with an approval rating of 34%, far behind his predecessor Barack Obama’s 60%. A majority, 54%, said Trump ought to be removed from office before January 20, according to a new CNN poll, for his role in the January 6 events, when Trump incited his supporters to storm the US Capitol.

Battle for America’s soul
“Has America lost its soul?”, asked Peter Singer, the famous ethics and morality philosopher. More than 70 million, or 47% of Americans voted for Trump. With 21,000 votes in three key states, Trump would have defeated Biden.

Anis Chowdhury

Trump lies shamelessly. He takes pride in gaming the system to evade paying taxes. He incites racial hatred and violence, even demeaning the families of those who gave their lives for America. He celebrates white supremacists as patriots, and shows no empathy for close to 400 thousand Americans who died of COVID-19. He ignores science, and shows no respect or tolerance for opponents.

The list goes on. But most importantly, he undermined the highest office of the country by abusing it to promote his person and business interests.

Yet, so many Americans ignored Trump’s immorality and voted for him in an election which Biden declared to be a “battle for the soul of America”. Trump not only got the highest votes ever for a sitting president, but even increased his votes by over five million from 2016.

What caused this moral or ethical divide in America? Why did Biden fail to win half its soul? America’s fault-lines run through the middle, due to decades of rising wealth and income inequality.

Wealth inequality
Between 1990 and 2020, as US billionaires increased their wealth by 1,130%, US median wealth increased by only 5.4%. As the combined net worth of America’s 614 billionaires grew by $931 billion during the pandemic, ‘turbocharging’ inequality over seven months from mid-March, a week after Trump declared a national emergency.

The US has not had decent income or wealth redistribution at least since the 1960s. From 1963 to 2016, the lowest 10% of Americans went from having no assets at all to being US$1,000 in debt. Meanwhile, families in the top 10% multiplied their wealth five-fold. Most shockingly, families in the top 1% grew their wealth seven fold between 1963 and 2016.

Earning inequality
For most US workers, real wages have barely budged in decades despite low unemployment in some periods. For example, average real wages during Trump’s final years had about the same purchasing power as 40 years ago. Average real hourly earnings in March 2019 amounted to US$23.24 in 2019 dollars, matching only the long-time peak of March 1974, and only around US$3 above the early 1960s level.

Furthermore, wage gains in recent decades have mostly flowed to the highest paid workers. Since 2000, workers’ average weekly wages in the lowest tenth of the earnings distribution have risen 3% (in real terms) while real earnings of the top tenth have risen 15.7% to US$2,112 a week – nearly five times the average of the bottom tenth (US$426). Real wages either rose less or fell at the middle and bottom of the distribution, while real wages of the 90th percentile increased for the workforce as a whole from 1979 to 2019.

Earnings disparities by race, colour, gender and ethnicity are even worse. At the 90th percentile, wage growth was much higher for White workers and lower for Black and Hispanic workers. By contrast, middle (50th percentile) and bottom (10th percentile) wages grew less (e.g., for women) or declined in real terms (e.g., for men).

Job insecurity
Such earnings and wealth inequalities cannot be explained away by skills or education levels, or by including benefits, or by looking at total compensation, or by changing the price deflator (adjustments for inflation). On the contrary, they are due to policy decisions that have reduced the leverage of most workers to achieve faster wage growth.

One is job insecurity, as admitted by Alan Greenspan in his 1997 Senate testimony: “Atypical restraint on compensation increases has been … mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity”, partly attributable to “domestic deregulation”. The situation has become worse since.

A 2016 study confirmed that the US labour market has become “more treacherous”. The rise of the ‘gig economy’ is still “too small to affect the broader workforce”. There are much deeper causes: job creation has been spotty and often inadequate, while new jobs are typically inferior to their predecessors.

The 2017-2019 three year period saw employment growth and declining unemployment. Yet, 6.3 million workers – aged 20 and over – were displaced from their jobs. Only around 65% of those who lost their long-term jobs could find similar ones after three years, with many earning less.

Deeper malaise
Rising inequality and insecurity are results of “a stubborn reliance by policymakers on markets to do the work of government, and the racism and sexism, sometimes written into law, that blind policymakers to injustice and to economic sense”, as Heather Boushey notes in her recent IMF blog. Growing monopoly power of corporations, and increasing financialization of the economy, with a concomitant rise of the rentier class, not only led to polarisation, but also fundamentally weakened the US economy.

The generous tax cuts received by corporations since the 1980s went to buy back shares, fatten obscene executive packages, and pay dividends instead of re-investing to boost productivity and create more decent jobs.

US economic problems are deep-rooted: “By early 2020 even before the pandemic reached the US, manufacturing jobs had stalled out, and factories shed workers in four of the six months through March”, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Trump’s China trade war also did not reduce overall US trade imbalances which have continued growing, soaring to a record US$84 billion in August 2019. US importers have shifted to goods from Vietnam, Mexico and other countries, but the trade deficit with China has risen amid the pandemic to where it was at the start of the Trump administration.

Trump still a hero!
But Trumpism is likely to stay, although his approval ratings just before leaving office, is among the worst since Gallup began regularly tracking presidential approval from the 1940s. Equal to Jimmy Carter, Trump still does better than Harry Truman’s 32%, George W. Bush’s 31% and Richard Nixon’s 24%.

The CNN poll is skewed along party-lines – nearly all Democrats (93%) favoured removing Trump from office before January 20, while just 10% of Republicans felt the same. Among Republicans, his approval rating has remained largely positive even after the deadly US Capitol attack; nearly nine in 10 Republicans approving Trump’s job performance.

Ending Trumpism
Thus, ending Trumpism will need more than impeaching Trump. The Bidden-Harris agenda must include Republican Theodore Roosevelt’s trust-busting as well as Democrat Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and social agenda to address America’s deep-rooted socio-economic malaises that are undermining its democracy.

Teddy Roosevelt confronted the bitter struggle between capital and labour head-on in 1901, threatening to nationalize coal mines and settle in favour of labour. He took on JP Morgan, then the most powerful financier, barely six months into his presidency. He was a hunter, yet dedicated some 200 million acres for national forests, reserves and wildlife refuges as part of his “Square Deal” of domestic programmes.

Teddy could not be bullied by corporate capital. He was a conservative, who initiated far-reaching progressive reforms and started the conservation movement. He rose above party politics and did what thought right for America as a whole.

He broke away from the Republican Party when it became more conservative, and challenged his Republican successor William Taft in the 1912 elections after Taft failed to deliver his promise of progressive reforms.

Teddy’s fifth cousin, FDR led the US economy out of the Great Depression with his ambitious New Deal, defying fiscal conservatism and pressure from Wall Street. He thus redefined the impact of the federal government on the lives of Americans.

His vision of global institutions laid the foundation for the post-WWII Golden Age lasting nearly three decades. He also stood firm against the European colonial powers to advance the decolonization agenda.

The post Trump Is Gone, Trumpism Lives On appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

As the United States Rejoins the Paris Climate Accord and Boldly Confronts Climate Change Crisis- Forget Not the Youth

Thu, 01/21/2021 - 10:43

Greta Thunberg (right), Climate Activist, speaks at the opening of the UN Climate Action Summit 2019. Credit: UN Photo/Cia Pak

By Esther Ngumbi
URBANA, Illinois, Jan 21 2021 (IPS)

On the first day, hours after inauguration of the new Biden-Harris administration, President Biden signed an Executive Order-rejoining the United States in the Paris Climate Accord.

President Joe Biden is also expected to roll out an ambitious climate change agenda and initiatives to mitigate the crisis, shrink the nations carbon emissions, convene a U.S. climate summit, and give voices to vulnerable communities impacted by climate change. He has already unveiled a very competent climate change team and appointed John Kerry as the special climate change envoy.

Already, the youth, who understand they do not have an alternative planet, have been very instrumental in climate change related activism-demanding politicians to act on climate change. Their continued activism on climate change matters including the school strike for climate

It is also clear that the new U.S. President believes in science, as seen in his recent unveiling of the science team, and his promise to elevate the Office of Science and Technology Policy into a Cabinet-level position.

These BOLD moves are commendable, especially in a time, when the science and evidence on the impact of climate change is clear. For instance, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service that tracks climate trends, reported that 2020 was tied with 2016 as the hottest year on record.

In 2020, we also experienced many climate change linked extremes – from hot and dry conditions to wild fires in Australia, Brazil, California and Siberia, to flooding in Michigan to droughts in Zimbabwe and Madagascar to locust invasions in Kenya and India.

In 2021, climate change linked extremities like flooding have already started to happen as seen in Oregon and Washington State , in Panama, Jamaica and in Paraguay. These events would have not been possible without the climate changes driven by the warming earth.

At the current rate, the Earth is on track to warm over 3 degrees Celsius by 2100.

Without a doubt, President Biden’s sense of urgency and his plans to mobilize the entire Federal Government to combat climate change are definitely going to make an impact. When you are facing such an existential crisis-bold actions matter.

Even with all these important efforts, still missing out in the ambitious climate change agenda is the role of youth.

They must be included and given a platform to showcase their ideas and solutions while meaningfully engaging with Federal and State decision makers. One way to include them is for the President to appoint a climate change youth envoy person and a council consisting of youth from all the 50 states, particularly including those from vulnerable states like the southeastern states. The United Nations already has one. The U.S. can emulate this.

Already, the youth, who understand they do not have an alternative planet, have been very instrumental in climate change related activism-demanding politicians to act on climate change. Their continued activism on climate change matters including the school strike for climate, led by Greta Thunberg and other activists around the world is commendable. Even as leaders failed, these youth voices were key to ensuring that the climate change debate did not grow cold.

Importantly, there must be training and workforce development that targets the youth so that they can acquire the skills that will be needed to tap onto the promised 10 million clean energy jobs that will be created in the process of tackling climate change. The youth will bear the full brunt of climate change, and failure to involve them now is a failure by humanity. They too have a crucial role in addressing climate change.

We also need to value youth’s message and listen to science and researchers.

Researchers across the Universities and other research institutions are hard at work understanding the impacts of climate change and generating solutions to mitigate it. There is need to increase the funding that goes to climate science and the other research that addresses the effects of climate change including its effects on agriculture and food insecurity while developing solutions that are implementable with immediate effect.

In addition, new lines of funding for climate-related research can be rolled out by agencies such as the National Science Foundation and United States Department of Agriculture.

Finally, science communication will continue to be important. Key messages emerging from research and the initiatives taken by Federal Government to mitigate climate change should be communicated clearly and consistently to all stakeholders, including the public. Doing so will continue to elevate the role of science and science advancements in generating solutions to our everyday challenges including climate change.

Tackling climate change will require strong leadership by the government. Confronting the impacts of climate change necessitates the participation of everyone including the youth. As the U.S. returns to the Paris Climate Accord, it must bring everyone with it, fund more science research and communicate messages clearly.

Dr. Esther Ngumbi is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and a Senior Food Security Fellow with the Aspen Institute, New Voices.

The post As the United States Rejoins the Paris Climate Accord and Boldly Confronts Climate Change Crisis- Forget Not the Youth appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

Measuring the Impact of COVID-19 on the World’s Forests

Thu, 01/21/2021 - 10:22

The Sierra Juárez forest, in the state of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico. The UN Forum on Forests was among the first intergovernmental processes to take steps to assess the impact of COVID-19 on forests. In Latin America and the Caribbean, closed forest-based tourist attractions has meant a significant loss of revenue for some countries. Credit: Emilio Godoy / IPS

By Alison Kentish
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 21 2021 (IPS)

The COVID-19 Pandemic has affected every sector of society and a global assessment by the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF) confirms that its shocks have extended to forests on every region on earth.

Impact severity varies across the Regions; Latin America and the Caribbean, Western Europe and other states, North America, Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia-Pacific, but they range from an increase in illegal harvesting of forest products to loss of critical funding for forest protection agencies.

“The UN Forum on Forests was among the first intergovernmental processes to take steps to assess the impact of COVID-19 on forests,” Alexander Trepelkov, Officer-in-Charge of the UN Forum’s Secretariat told IPS. “This is a critical step in determining how investing in forests can help countries to recover better from the pandemic towards an equitable and sustainable future,” he added.

Forests cover about one-third of the earth’s land area and provide livelihoods for millions of people, including members of rural communities and indigenous tribes. The assessment warns that the pandemic has exacerbated the vulnerabilities of those communities.

According to the assessment, African forests are among the hardest hit by COVID-19 and efforts to curb its spread. The report from that region stated that forest management activities have been either postponed or cancelled, illegal harvesting has increased and eco-tourism, particularly in the East and South of the continent, has ‘grounded to a halt due to movement restriction measures.’
The Asia-Pacific region, which focused on Thailand and Nepal, reported a slowdown in major areas of forestry sector operations, including reforestation.
The report on Canada and the US spoke of disrupted forest management and research, that resulted in mill closures and halts in production that impacted livelihoods.
In the Western Europe region, researchers noted that hospitality agencies that offer forest-based recreational events were severely impacted by global travel restrictions, adding that women make up the majority of employees in this area and have been disproportionately impacted by the ensuing unemployment.
Eastern European states reported delays in sustainable management programmes.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, closed forest-based tourist attractions meant a significant loss of revenue for some countries.

Jamaica’s Blue and John Crow Mountains National Park and UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation World Heritage Site was one of the sites which closed temporarily, early in the pandemic.

“The national park has places that we encourage people to visit. We initially had shut down our sites, but later on, as there was greater understanding of how the disease spreads and realising that protocols could be put in place, we followed the UN and the Health and Tourism Ministries’ guidelines,” Dr. Susan Otuokon, Executive Director of Jamaica’s Conservation and Development Trust, told IPS. Like conservation bodies the world over, the Trust, which manages the site, has been trying to fulfil its mandate amid challenges that include reduced funding and the need for distancing when many projects demand physical meet-ups.

“Some of the work that we do in terms of training for sustainable livelihoods with communities and having community meetings, it is challenging so we have had to revisit some of our outreach methods,” said Otuokon, adding that, “we’ve been lucky that some of our funding has not been affected, but some, particularly from government, has been reduced and that has impacted us, particularly our admin and support side.”

While forests are not immune to the shocks of COVID-19, a recurring theme in the global assessment is the acknowledgement by respondents that those ecosystems are critical to any plan to ‘build back better’ and respond to COVID-19. Recommendations on the way forward point to forests as pillars for sustainable job creation, food production, fuel sources and ecotourism services.

“Forests offer nature-friendly solutions for sustainable COVID-19 recovery” said the UNFF’s Trepelkov. “Healthy forests are vital to addressing many pandemic-induced challenges, including economic recession, increased poverty and widening inequalities.

Some of the assessment’s regional reports also acknowledge those who, despite the limitations, continue to strive for sustainable forest management over the pandemic period. It is something the Jamaica Conservation and Development Trust Director has seen among her staff.

“We have national park rangers who decided they were still going out in the field, they were still working, they put on their masks and went out because they really believe that their work is very important, in terms of protecting the forests, trying to reduce clearing by farmers, both large and small scale, at a time like this when our water supply is even more critical and we need to maintain our forests,” said Otuokon.

The UNFF expert group is meeting from Jan. 19 to 21, to discuss the findings of the assessment.

The post Measuring the Impact of COVID-19 on the World’s Forests appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

A global assessment commissioned by the UN Forum on Forests concluded that COVID-19 has affected forests across the globe – hurting ecotourism, impeding conservation efforts and in some parts, crippling forest management budgets. But the authors are optimistic that the role of forests in post-pandemic recovery has never been clearer

The post Measuring the Impact of COVID-19 on the World’s Forests appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

Biden: the Task of a Good Loser

Thu, 01/21/2021 - 10:12

Joe Biden takes the oath of office as the 46th President of the United States. Credit: Twitter.

By Joaquín Roy
MIAMI, Jan 21 2021 (IPS)

What for Donald Trump was an insult, for Joe Biden is an acknowledgment: the new president of the United States is the establishment in its purest form. No other similar case is remembered of having reached the presidency with a better preparation. For almost half a century he has been “inside the beltway.” It is the sector occupied by the District of Columbia, which claims to be recognized as a state, surrounded by a huge highway. Biden would be perfectly accepted as a traffic guard, without passing the exam.

But as he will settle at his desk in the Oval Office, as soon as he would open the folders smeared by the previous White House tenant, he will be horrified. The agenda that awaits him is a challenge for the innate ritualism of the perennial senator from Delaware. But he won’t be daunted by the task.

He has a paradoxical advantage over his predecessor: Biden is a good loser. A similar case of enthusiasm in betting on the presidency is not detected in recent memory. He has been rejected in previous attempts for the nomination of his party.

On the domestic agenda, Biden must try to clarify the current state of America’s everlasting and elusive identity. Never since Huntington’s suicide attempt by applying his thesis of the clash of civilizations to the core of American identity, no one has inflicted a similar wound to the American soul.

Joaquín Roy

Biden will have to correct the doubt that to be a citizen of the United States you only need to want to be. Trump dangerously questioned it. To verify this nonsense, you only have to inspect the data of the vast majority of the assailants in Congress. That impression is also replicated by a global portrait of an uncomfortable majority of Trump’s more than 70 million voters.

The United States, which is an idea, not a country, must be resurrected by Biden. Trump acted like some kind of evil prince who kissed a sleeping witch. Biden will return her to eternal sleep. In turn, he will choose to rescue from kidnapping the beautiful princess who was silent for four years.

As it will be seen through the rest of the impeachment process, Biden must ensure internal security with a balanced message of toughness against any violation of the law. Leaving a crass example of insurrection unpunished would be a fatal mistake.

To straighten the nature of the social fabric, once and for all, Biden will do well to fulfill his project of facilitating the passage to legal residency and citizenship for the millions immigrants in limbo. They are already within the country.

A different problem is how to deal with the ones who are opting for desperate marches towards the border. Biden will have to made deals with Mexico to cooperate.

Ironically, this pressure from immigration is at the same time the given certification of the strength of the United States. The minute no one would like to migrate to the heart of the country, the United States would cease to exist.

Looking at the prospects for the 2022 election, Biden will have to lead his strong electorate in order to make the current results in Congress and Senate to consolidate and grow. It will depend on the perception that the new measures that have been implemented are not lost.

Abroad, as part of the swift return to multilateralism, Biden must accelerate the recovery of sidelined officials in the State Department. At the same time, he will have to replace the multitude of directly appointed ambassadors by true professionals. In this diplomatic terrain, Europe must be given urgent priority.

The external face of the United States must send a clear message to Putin that the courtship with Trump is over. For Washington, the message should be that cooperation with the European Union and the consistency of NATO are above personal whims. Biden will also have to end the ambiguity about the relationship with the uncomfortable medieval Arab monarchies. Same about the support for the current Israeli government. China should receive a clear message.

In Latin America, Biden will have to proceed with caution. If the new wave of “pink” regimes is confirmed, driven by the disgust of the electorates in the face of government disasters, crime and corruption, Biden would do well to treat each case individually.

It is not ruled out that he will proceed to toughen the relationship with Venezuela, but he will probably choose to a subtle reestablishment of Obama’s policy towards Cuba. The hardening of attitude towards Havana generally reinforces the tough reaction of the Cuban government. The result is that the most affected continue to be the long-suffering Cuban citizens.

And if Biden does not succeed in some of those chapters of the busy schedule, as a “good loser”, he will take note and opt to correct the defects and end successfully his presidency. And then – why not? – opt for a re-election, or at least hand over the power to Kamala Harris.

The post Biden: the Task of a Good Loser appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

Change Financing Priorities to Address COVID-19, Conference Hears

Thu, 01/21/2021 - 09:58

By Cecilia Russell
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, Jan 21 2021 (IPS)

Innovative financing to resolve COVID-19 crisis was needed, a joint African and Asian parliamentarians’ webinar heard this week.

The webinar, facilitated by Asian Population and Development Association (APDA), was aimed at enhancing support for the implementation of International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD)commitments in the face of the pandemic.

Most of the delegates from Africa and Asia agreed that implementing the programme of action to provide universal access to sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) by 2030, had suffered severe setbacks.

Vulnerable and developing nations could be left behind in the programmes to implement COVID-19 prevention, containment, and treatment solutions including vaccines, should funding shortfalls continue, the conference heard.

Masaki Inaba, program director for Global Health, Africa Japan Forum, told the webinar that the coronavirus pandemic was an unprecedented event and needed innovative funding solutions.

Masaki Inaba, program director for Global Health, Africa Japan Forum

Japan had been a leading nation in the two major international initiatives – it had co-established ACT-Accelerator (ACT-A). It was once the 2nd largest donor for the partnership to support developing tools to fight the disease.

It also funded the COVAX-facility to ensure COVID-19 vaccines reach those in greatest need, whoever they are and wherever they live.

The funding for the COVID-19 health crisis had reached USD 23.7 billion, Inaba said.

“This is huge in the context of health, but not when compared to the annual USD 2 trillion spent on military across the world,” he said.

Inaba said there was a need for the full funding of ACT-A and COVAX, and he called for innovative financing ideas including “international solidarity taxes (currency/financial transaction taxes) or re-allocation of military expenses for health.”

Recent reports have noted that developing countries were competing with high- and middle-income countries for vaccine supplies. This could result in a shortage of vaccines for the COVAX project, aiming to deliver 2 billion doses by the end of the year. Earlier this month director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus expressed concern that people in the lowest-income countries might need to wait until 2022 to get their vaccines.

Inaba said there was growing support in Africa for South Africa and India’s submission to the World Trade Organization (WTO) for a waiver for intellectual property rights related to COVID-19 prevention, containment, and treatment. The waiver will come up for discussion in February.

Justine Coulson, deputy regional director, UNFPA East and Southern Africa Regional Office said it was likely that the widespread disruption of programmes would continue in 2021. The programmes include improving sexual and reproductive health rights, HIV, gender-based violence (GBV), preventing child marriages, and ending the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM).

Coulson said parliamentarians acted as a critical bridge between people and their governments and were instrumental in advocating for rights. She encouraged them to continue to play their crucial role in supporting policies, legislative and accountability frameworks of governments, to advocate and mobilise around the ICPD agenda on sexual and reproductive rights and gender equality.

Dr Ademola Olajide, country representative, UNFPA Kenya Office, gave first-hand evidence of the disruption in services and the growth of GBV during lockdowns in Kenya.

“The onset of COVID-19 pandemic affected the implementation of the ICPD 25 programme of action on several fronts. First, there was a significant diversion and stretching of limited human, material, and financial resources to respond to the pandemic,” he said.

Simultaneously, ‘mixed messaging’ resulted in communities not fully understanding the pandemic, and as a result, many avoided utilising facilities.

Curfews and lockdowns significantly impacted essential maternal and child health services, family planning, HIV and GBV wellness services. There were also livelihood challenges with people losing their jobs and income. Adequate protection measures within school systems to monitor teenage pregnancies, FGM, GBV was significantly disrupted.

Vulnerable populations began to be pushed further to the back in terms of development, he said.

Olajide shared two graphs from Kenya, indicating the pandemic’s impact on antenatal services and skilled attendants at birth. It also showed that GBV became a significant challenge because incidences spiked considerably. A helpline, which in February took about 86 calls, by June received over 700 calls, given the fact that people were now locked into circumstances where they could not escape their abusers.

Older people were disproportionately affected with regards to the pandemic. They were more vulnerable to morbidity and mortality. They also became more vulnerable in some of the African states which had locked down communities. Some of them dependent on their relatives for income, some lost their jobs, Olajide said.

Olajide added that the pandemic motivated new thinking and innovative solutions that were efficient and effective in transport, data, telemedicine, and movement of commodities security and safety.

It was time rethink national planning processes, including preparedness planning.

“It was also necessary to rethink how we fund, national, and global development objectives and policy,” he said, adding that the innovation that emerged the African continent should be explored and developed.

The post Change Financing Priorities to Address COVID-19, Conference Hears appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

A BASIC TRUTH: Facing an Existential Threat, Humanity Must Work Together

Wed, 01/20/2021 - 20:29

Scoping out development opportunities in frontier communities. UN Kenya Resident Coordinator Siddharth Chatterjee, Cabinet Secretary Eugene Wamalwa, UN heads of missions, and other development partners in Kenya. Credit: Nicholas Wilson / UNDP

By Siddharth Chatterjee
NAIROBI, Kenya, Jan 20 2021 (IPS)

COVID-19 is like a rainstorm, a thunderous and powerful rainstorm all over the world. If we didn’t know before, we certainly know now just where the holes are in our roofs, or where there are no roofs. We see ever more clearly who is getting drenched and who is dying, and who remains dry.

But ultimately, no one is untouched. This fact alone must wake us to a basic truth: Humanity will survive and thrive only if all countries work together. We must improve global governance on health and embrace multilateralism.

This is good for all people, it’s good for governments, and it’s good for business.

The United Nations is the institution best positioned to lead the way on this call. I believe with all my heart that global cooperation is possible.

I am privileged to have spent the last nearly five years serving as the UN Resident Coordinator (RC) in Kenya, and now to have been designated as the RC in China, a post which I will assume this month.

In Kenya, I learned a vital lesson that I will carry with me to China. Before I became the RC, I was the Representative of UNFPA in Kenya. At that time, in 2014, Kenya was among the ten most dangerous places on earth to become a mother. The maternal mortality rate was a shocking 500 deaths per 100,000 live births—nearly triple the target of the Millennium Development Goal of a maximum of 170 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births.

Siddharth Chatterjee. Credit: Newton Kanhema

In response, under the leadership of the government, I helped secure $15 million in 2014 to reverse this trend. Together with colleagues around the UN system, I mobilized 6 private sector companies from China, Kenya, USA, Netherlands and the UK to focus our efforts on the six counties in Kenya where maternal mortality rates were highest. Within just 2.5 years, the rates in those counties had dropped by one-third.

More recently, during my tenure as the RC in Kenya, I was privileged to meet with Kenya’s President, Uhuru Kenyatta, to discuss female genital mutilation (FGM). He said in the strongest terms that he wanted to end the practice of FGM once and for all in Kenya, and that he wanted the UN’s partnership on this effort. Thanks to his leadership, Kenya is making remarkable strides.

Time and again in Kenya, my experience showed me the importance of political will, as was the case in my previous postings in Iraq, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan (Darfur), Indonesia, and with UN Peacekeeping Operations in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Iraqi Kurdistan.

With committed political leadership, good public policy, and strong partnerships — we can achieve the impossible. With those “three P’s,” we can minimize the number of mothers who die in childbirth. We can end the practice of FGM. We can create a world where girls and boys everywhere can dream big and fulfill those dreams. And we can create a stronger UN to address challenges that cross borders freely, such as this pandemic.

I could not be happier than to take this lesson to my new post as the UN Resident Coordinator in China, a country which has the commitment and the resources to support global cooperation and development. China can share important lessons with the developing world, having lifted over 890 million people out of poverty within 30 years.

China is dedicated to multilateralism. It is the third largest donor to the UN, the second largest donor to UN Peacekeeping, and one of the biggest contributors of troops to UN Peacekeeping. It is a leader in South-South Cooperation, supporting peace and development work in other countries in the Southern Hemisphere.

China has the resources to support multilateralism. With nearly 1.4 billion people, and a powerhouse economy that has perhaps the greatest purchasing power in the world, China is making strides in development and is a major source of global wealth generation in the past 11 years. China’s Belt and Road Initiative is creating infrastructure that will benefit the people of the many countries it touches in Asia, Africa, and Europe.

We need all the countries of the world to give their best to the global community and to the UN, which works so hard to foster it.

Doing so actually serves the self-interests of countries. Many global challenges ignore national boundaries. Disease. Violent conflict. Refugees. Climate change. A country becomes safer when it helps stop these crises across a border or across an ocean. The challenges cross borders, but so, too, do the benefits of solving them.

Multilateralism is also an act of basic humanity. It is compassionate to answer the cry of suffering of other people. Don’t we all want people to get a fair shake, no matter where they are? Don’t we want children the world over to be free and safe and happy? We are enlarged and enlightened when our siblings in the human family prosper.

We have less than 10 years left now to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. We are well past the first blush of celebration of the SDGs, and we are far from the last mad dash. We are wounded by this pandemic, all of us, though some more than others.

But we cannot give up now. We cannot slow down. We must keep our vision focused. We must take heart in ourselves and each other. And we must work together.

This article was originally published by the United Nations.

The post A BASIC TRUTH: Facing an Existential Threat, Humanity Must Work Together appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Siddharth Chatterjee, is UN Resident Coordinator (RC) in Kenya, and RC designate to China

The post A BASIC TRUTH: Facing an Existential Threat, Humanity Must Work Together appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

Jamaica Failing to Cope with Plastic Waste

Wed, 01/20/2021 - 20:01

A man walks by a storm drain piled high with plastic bottles and other garbage in Kingston, Jamaica. Credit: Kate Chappell

By Kate Chappell
KINGSTON, Jamaica, Jan 20 2021 (IPS)

For decades, every time it rains heavily in Jamaica, a daunting deluge of plastic bottles and bags, styrofoam and other garbage trundles its way down a network of countless gullies and streams. If they don’t get snagged somewhere, they end up in the Kingston Harbour or close to the beaches ringing the tourist-heavy North coast.

This phenomenon is not restricted to Jamaica, occurring regularly across the Caribbean and Latin America. It represents the burden of how the world is failing to cope with so much plastic waste. Its effect on the region, however, is relatively unique and compounded by several realities: budget and infrastructure challenges, geography and the lack an effective waste management strategy. In the past several years, more than a third of Caribbean countries have banned single use plastics, which may have reduced some waste, but the plague remains.

One study found that beaches and coastal areas across the region could contain triple the amount of plastic waste compared to the rest of the world.

According to a paper summarizing waste management in the region, only 54% of single use plastic waste ends up in a sanitary landfill, with much of the remainder landing in storm drains and the ocean.

The disposal of single use plastic in this region and around the world is increasingly coming under the spotlight as countries attempt to tackle global heating and adhere to the Paris Agreement. If countries do not reduce their consumption of single use plastics, emissions from plastics are due to increase threefold by 2050, which would thwart the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, according to the global think tank ODI.

Andrea Clayton is one of four authors of a study on the Latin American and Caribbean region, and she says there are many problems surrounding the use of plastic and its disposal.

“Plastics have been deemed as carcinogenic. There are health implications. And we are an island state with very finite resources, so it’s very important that we put in place sustainable environmental practices,” she says. “We are privileged to experienced sandy beaches and water, but we want that to carry on to the younger generations. We must be preserving island from a sustainable position,” she says. Clayton is a lecturer for sustainable development and Caribbean Maritime University in Kingston, Jamaica.

On a daily basis in the Latin American and Caribbean region, 145,000 tons of waste are disposed of in open dumpsites, including 17,000 tons of plastic. In total, roughly 300,000 tons of plastic is not processed or collected, so it ends up in illegal dumps or waterways.

Part of the root of the problem can be traced to the region’s lack of manufacturing and agricultural capacity, which leads to heavy dependence on the importation of goods, which, of course, means more plastic waste.

In the region, plastic accounts for 35% of marine waste, according to Clayton’s paper, which is called “Policy responses to reduce single-use plastic in the Caribbean”. For one of the most tourism dependent regions in the world, this represents not just a threat to the environment, but to the livelihoods of its residents as well.

“Marine pollution is therefore a particular problem for the Caribbean These states are major contributors to marine pollution but are also more dependent on the environmental quality of the Caribbean Sea, which is the base for the regions ‘sand, sun, and sea’ tourism package. Tourism directly contributes 15.5% of the regions gross domestic product and employs 14% of the labour force,” according to Clayton’s paper.

Credit: Kate Chappell

In Jamaica, there is a lack of a sense of urgency amongst legislators, as well as the existence of alternative ways of disposing of garbage, says Diana McCaulay, director of the Jamaica Environment Trust. “People just don’t have alternatives. We have inculcated certain habits and attitudes that garbage is a state responsibility. If I don’t see a garbage bin within three feet of me, I can throw it on the road,” she says. Unless there is a holistic approach to overhauling the entire system that is accompanied by public education, nothing will change, she adds. “We need proper garbage collection, recycling programs, unless all of those other things go along with education, nothing will change.”

For its part, governments across the region have adopted several tactics, through legislation, policies, public education and incentive programs, to mixed results. “Across the region, we tend to have the legislative approach, and what has happened in most jurisdictions is a top down government policy with very little lead time,” says Clayton. In Jamaica, the bans on plastic bags, straws and Styrofoam were all rolled out to the surprise of a lot of citizens.

McCaulay says some of these policies have had success. Jamaica announced a series of new legislation in Sept. 2018, with a plastic bag ban implemented on Jan. 1, 2019. This has gone relatively well, with most people now toting reusable bags to do their shopping. The ban on the distribution and manufacture of Styrofoam and plastic straws, enacted a year later, however, has been less successful. For food containers, merchants have simply switched to plastic containers that claim to be recyclable, but in actuality are not, McCaulay says. Most business owners, however, have adhered to the plastic straw ban.

One of the main sources of pollution is single use plastic bottles, which account for an average 21% of the trash collected during beach and coastal clean ups in the Caribbean. This problem demands a deposit return scheme, McCaulay says.

In Jamaica, this is being spearheaded by the private sector, but has yet to translate to a widespread effort.

Ollyvia Anderson, director of public relations and corporate communications for the National Environment and Planning Agency in Jamaica, says that overall, citizens were slow to adopt the new regulations due to a lack of knowledge. “We were a little slow out of the blocks in terms of the uptakes,” she says. “For a lot of Jamaicans, they were concerned about the alternatives, and a lot of persons were not aware of alternatives, so we used public educations to bring them up to speed.

We are now seeing conversions where that has occurred with bags and straws. In terms of the foam food containers, we are seeing less and less of those on the market. People are adjusting but hasn’t been without challenges.”

With this in mind, enforcement has been by the government as a tool to encourage behavior change. To date, 41 businesses and individuals have been charged under the National Resources Conservation Act, with 27 of those convicted. The maximum fine is JMD$2 million, which is almost US$14,000.

It’s not enough, says McCaulay. If she were to assign a grade to the government’s efforts, she would give them a ‘D+.’ “It’s the usual lots of rhetoric with a very wide implementation gap.”

The post Jamaica Failing to Cope with Plastic Waste appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

COVID-19 Vaccines: How and When Will Lower-Income Countries Get Access?

Wed, 01/20/2021 - 11:46

The first two COVID-19 vaccines authorised in Europe and the United States – made by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna – aren’t well-suited to lower-income countries. Availability is also a problem, since most of these vaccines have been purchased by high-income countries. Credit: United Nations.

By External Source
Jan 20 2021 (IPS)

COVID-19 vaccination programmes are gathering pace in high-income countries, but for much of the world, the future looks bleaker. Although a number of middle-income countries have started rolling out vaccines, widespread vaccination could still be years away.

The first two COVID-19 vaccines authorised in Europe and the United States – made by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna – aren’t well-suited to lower-income countries. Pfizer’s has to be stored at -70°C, requiring costly equipment and infrastructure, and is expensive at roughly US$20 (£14.50) a dose. Moderna’s can be kept in a standard refrigerator for up to 30 days, but is even more expensive. Low- and middle-income countries have consequently struck few direct deals to buy these vaccines.

Availability is also a problem. Most of these vaccines have been purchased by high-income countries. Pfizer has offered to provide only 50 million doses of its vaccine to Africa’s 1.3 billion people between March and December 2021, while Moderna has none allocated for Africa this year. Fears abound that, for a while at least, the majority of the world will go without.

COVAX: not enough and too slow

Not wanting to wait, higher-income countries have bypassed COVAX by cutting direct deals with COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers instead. Increasingly they are being joined by middle-income countries, such as Argentina, Indonesia, South Africa and Turkey, but these nations are turning to different products: vaccines made in India, China and Russia

Backed by the World Health Organization (WHO), the COVAX initiative was created to share COVID-19 vaccines around the world, especially with lower-income countries. In 2020, $2.4 billion was raised, with agreements made to give low- and middle-income countries access to 1.3 billion vaccine doses.

However, the Pfizer vaccine is still the only one that has received WHO emergency use listing, a minimum regulatory requirement for distribution through COVAX. A third western vaccine – developed by Oxford/AstraZeneca – is substantially lower priced, more easily stored and has large-scale manufacturing partnerships in place, as well as an agreement to supply COVAX, but is still awaiting approval from the WHO.

The WHO has stated COVAX will deliver its first vaccines by the end of January at the earliest. By the end of 2021 it aims to have supplied 2 billion doses globally.

But even if this promise is met, it will be insufficient. Speaking on behalf of the African Union, South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa expressed concern that “the COVAX volumes to be released between February and June may not extend beyond the needs of frontline healthcare workers, and may thus not be enough to contain the ever-increasing toll of the pandemic in Africa”.

The total doses pledged by COVAX to Africa, he noted, will only cover 300 million people, or 20% of the continent’s population.

India, China and Russia to the rescue?

The Serum Institute of India (SII), the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, has a licence to produce the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, while Bharat Biotech has developed its own. India approved both products on January 3, and the domestic roll-out began on January 16.

India is also making its vaccine output available to other countries. Bangladesh has approved SII’s Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine and has a deal for 30 million doses, while South Africa has announced it will procure 1 million by the end of January and another half a million in February.

The SII is one of three suppliers providing the African Union with 270 million vaccine doses, with 50 million due to arrive by June 2021. It will also supply COVAX, but the SII Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is still waiting for regulatory approval from the WHO.

Following its earlier ventures in mask diplomacy, China has been extremely active in using vaccines to build political bridges as well. President Xi Jinping has promised China’s vaccines will be available as a global public good, and has also offered financial support to help Latin America and Africa acquire COVID-19 vaccines.

On December 31, China approved a vaccine developed by state-owned pharmaceutical company Sinopharm for general use. The company projects it will produce 1 billion doses in 2021, and the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco have all begun rolling out the vaccine. Egypt and Pakistan have announced deals for 10 million and 1.2 million doses respectively.

Both Turkey and Indonesia have begun vaccination programmes with another Sinovac vaccine, CoronaVac. Thailand and the Philippines will also soon start rolling out this vaccine. Further afield, the state of São Paolo in Brazil has agreed a deal for 46 million doses of CoronaVac and has administered the country’s first COVID-19 inoculations with it.

Russia, the first country in the world to approve a COVID-19 vaccine, is also active on vaccine diplomacy. Its Sputnik V jab received initial approval on August 11. Argentina began rolling out Sputnik V on December 24, and the vaccine is one of the first for COVID-19 to be administered anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa, in Guinea. Manufacturing partnerships are in place with Hetero Drugs and other Indian firms, as well as for production in Turkey. The Brazilian state of Bahia has agreed to host further trials of Sputnik V in exchange for getting priority access to 50 million doses.

When will the world be vaccinated?

Increasingly, middle-income countries are accessing and beginning COVID-19 vaccination programmes, but are doing so outside of the WHO’s procurement and regulatory mechanisms. While this is allaying fears that they would go completely without, there is some mistrust arising around the testing and reported efficacy of vaccines that haven’t yet had WHO approval.

If the world is to reach sufficient vaccine coverage to halt COVID-19, existing vaccines – including those from India, China and Russia – need to prove effective. Accessibility must also increase in low-income countries, not just in middle-income ones. Fears that the virus will mutate beyond these current vaccines must also remain unrealised.

It can’t be overstated how enormous the vaccination task is. Although possessing huge manufacturing capacity, India’s aim to vaccinate 300 million of its people by August 2021 still means less than a quarter of its population will have had the vaccine. “For everyone on this planet – or at least 90% – to get it, it’s going to be at least 2024,” says Adar Poonawalla, CEO of the SII.

Rory Horner, Senior Lecturer, Global Development Institute, University of Manchester

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

The post COVID-19 Vaccines: How and When Will Lower-Income Countries Get Access? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

Afghanistan Threatened With Rising Violence Once Again

Wed, 01/20/2021 - 10:15

Humanitarians seek $1.3 billion to help millions in war-weary Afghanistan. Homes for internally displaced persons (IDP) in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan. January 2021. Credit: OCHA Afghanistan/Fariba Housaini

By Magdalena Kirchner
NEW DELHI, India, Jan 20 2021 (IPS)

When the Doha talks were launched in September, the Afghan people’s hopes for an end of war and violence were high. So far, many have been disappointed as the negotiations have not done much to improve the security situation.

The Taliban continue to reject any ceasefire before the talks’ conclusion, and the ongoing troop withdrawals have only encouraged them to step up the military pressure. In the first four weeks after talks began, the Taliban carried out attacks in 24 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces on both security forces and civilians. In October, the United Nations counted more incidents in a month than at any time since 2007.

The increasingly confusing conflict situation is also afflicting Kabul, the capital city, as brutal and complex attacks, including those claimed by the self-proclaimed Islamic State, have occurred regularly in recent months.

Civilian targets included a Sikh shrine, a maternity clinic, Kabul University and other educational institutions. In 2020, at least 10 Afghan journalists lost their lives and reports of attacks and assassination attempts on officials, representatives of civil society, clerics, and opposition figures, many of them by unknown gunmen and assailants, surface almost daily.

Some observers compare the situation with the civil war in the 1990s; others point out that the lines between political violence and organised crime are becoming increasingly blurred.

And while the government is keen to present itself as the guarantor of the progress Afghanistan made since 2001, these developments undermine its legitimacy and weaken much-needed cohesion among critical constituents of the Republic. It appears that, for Kabul’s international partners, to prevent a total collapse of political order, there is hence no alternative to maintaining support for the Doha process.

Magdalena Kirchner

After years of heated discussions, the understanding that the Taliban’s exclusion from the Bonn negotiations on Afghanistan’s future in 2001 was a principal defect of the intervention and subsequent state-building efforts, is widely acknowledged.

Although 85 per cent of participants in the 2019 Asia Foundation Survey on Afghanistan expressed no empathy for the Taliban’s resort to violence, more than half of them supported their inclusion into the government.

A similar pragmatism can be observed amid critical regional players. Moscow, Beijing, and Teheran have publicly opened their ears and doors to the Taliban. Even in New Delhi, the previous taboo on direct communication channels is openly questioned.

Amid the current domestic climate in most contributing states and realities on the ground, military measures to pressure the Taliban to agree to a ceasefire or even into a credible commitment to democracy and equal rights are obviously exhausted.

Even though the Taliban have not yet managed to rid themselves of international sanctions, meetings with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and high-level EU, UN and NATO representatives signal entrenched normalisation and active exchange instead of isolation and cold-shoulders.

To advance the political process, US officials repeatedly risked alienating President Ashraf Ghani’s government to get the Taliban to de facto recognise Kabul as a negotiating partner.

Critics of this dynamic argue that the Taliban’s political recognition might be tantamount to selling out hopes for democracy and equal rights in Afghanistan for the sake of a graveyard peace.

Even without invoking the many setbacks on making them a permanent reality of Afghans in the past decades, the uncomfortable truth is that democracy and equality will remain out of reach also in the future if Afghanistan continues to be forced to spend ten times as much as other low-income countries on national security.

Continuing war prevents real progress in virtually every area of social and state development. At the same time, it is also true that external recognition, especially when tangible support is attached to it, represents real political power in a state so dependent on international aid.

Therefore, it will be of utmost importance how Afghanistan’s international partners will use this leverage when shaping their relations with the group.

A withdrawal in the making

After the February 2019 Doha Agreement between the Taliban and the US, then-secretary of defence Mark Esper had hinted that withdrawal might be reconsidered, if conditions weren’t met. Accelerated troop reductions repeatedly undermined the credibility of such assurances.

The US Congress has taken action to slow down further withdrawals in its National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) 2021. However, many lawmakers see the need to act to ensure enhanced transatlantic cooperation and to prevent a rerun of what happened in Iraq in 2014, where terrorist organisations exploited a breakdown of state structures to harm US-interests.

The withdrawal from Afghanistan itself is hardly called into question, especially not by the President-elect and his incoming administration. In August 2020, Joe Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan named a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan a goal for the first 100 days of Biden’s presidency.

This stance is reinforced by concerns that the Taliban could consider a politically motivated delay or reinterpretation of the Doha Agreement, for example, by maintaining a counterterrorism presence, as a breach of the deal and abandon the negotiations. Also, the much-needed support of neighbouring states such as Iran, China and Russia might falter if they got the impression that the US presence would be permanent.

Europe’s foreign and security-policy interests will remain closely linked to the country’s future, even when the military mission comes to an end.

On the other hand, experts and representatives of the same regional actors caution against ignoring dynamics on the ground and sticking rigidly to the deadlines established almost a year ago.

A hasty withdrawal could result in further escalation or even outright civil war. Amid all this uncertainty and Gordian knots ahead, a (cautious) extension or even further transformation of NATO’s Resolute Support Mission in February 2021 should not be prematurely ruled out.

Can development carrots achieve more than military sticks?

Notably, the US–Taliban agreement featured a shared interest in future economic cooperation after a military withdrawal. Over the past year, European officials, too, have begun to nurture hopes that the Taliban might agree to a ceasefire and even look more favourably on democracy and women’s and minority rights to ensure international support after a political settlement and power-sharing agreement.

In this context, even participation of Taliban representatives in the November 2020 Geneva donor conference had been discussed to familiarise them with international expectations. At the same time, a declaration by Afghanistan’s largest donors clearly addressed an Afghan government whose composition could change in the next years when making, for example, the adherence to the country’s international obligations a condition for ongoing support.

Could financial and development-policy incentives prevail where military force has failed? Can a transactional approach yield transformative results?

Bearing in mind the consequences of further destabilisation and its effects on Afghanistan’s fragile neighbourhood, would the EU take a clear stance if a return of the Taliban to power was accompanied by the systematic human rights violations?

And if the Taliban would prove unwilling to compromise, how to mitigate the risk that the Afghan people would eventually pay the price of aid cuts, isolation or even the exodus of international organisations? In turn, what promises and assurances can be given to the conflict parties amid uncertainty about the future of international engagement?

While remaining committed to the fragile but indispensable Doha process, Europe needs to develop and formulate a new strategy for its stabilisation efforts in Afghanistan that addresses these questions.

Europe’s foreign and security-policy interests will remain closely linked to the country’s future, even when the military mission comes to an end. To coherently support the process of intra-Afghan deliberations on how to achieve a peaceful future beyond 2021, European partners should use coordinating mechanisms like the recently initiated EU Strategic Compass, regional platforms shaped in Afghanistan’s neighborhood in the past years and transatlantic initiatives likely to be revived after 20 January.

The post Afghanistan Threatened With Rising Violence Once Again appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Dr Magdalena Kirchner heads the office of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Afghanistan.

The post Afghanistan Threatened With Rising Violence Once Again appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

“In Zimbabwe there is Freedom of Speech, but no Freedom After the Speech”

Tue, 01/19/2021 - 12:30

Working as a journalist in Zimbabwe has been particularly hazardous for investigative journalists in a country that makes regular appearances in global top rankings of corruption. Zimbabwe’s press freedom remains fragile. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Ignatius Banda
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Jan 19 2021 (IPS)

A long-running gag says “in Zimbabwe there is freedom of speech, but no freedom after the speech”. But for journalists and activists who have been forced to endure nights in the country’s overcrowded and filthy holding cells, this is no laughing matter as prison inmates have no personal protective equipment to guard against COVID-19.

And when government spokesperson Nick Mangwana warned ominously last year that, “No one is above the law,” it only confirmed what many here have always feared: that the ruling Zanu PF party will not hesitate to arbitrary apply the law to silence critics.

Mangwana’s comments had come after the arrest of journalist Hopewell Chin’ono, who was accused of using social media to foment public violence.

Chin’ono was back behind bars on Jan. 8 on charges of posting “fake news” on Twitter.

Soon after Chin’ono’s arrest, opposition Movement for Democratic Change – Alliance (MDC-A) spokesperson Fadzayi Mahere and Job Sikhala, an opposition legislator who also serves as a MDC-A vice chairperson, were also detained by the police for posting the same story Chin’ono had shared on social media.

The widely-shared story alleged that a police officer attempting to enforce COVID-19 restrictions had aimed his baton stick at a woman carrying a child, but fatally struck the child instead.

According to reports, the child died on the spot. Police, however, dismissed the story as fake news despite video footage of the mother wailing that the police officer had killed her child.

The arrests were immediately condemned by rights defenders with Amnesty International, which demanded their release.

“The latest arrests are part of a growing crackdown on opposition leaders, human rights defenders, activists, journalists and other critical voices,” said Muleya Mwananyanda, Amnesty International’s deputy director for southern Africa said in a statement dated Jan. 13.

“Zimbabwean authorities must immediately and unconditionally release and drop the malicious charges against them,” Mwananyanda said.

However, it is the arrest of Chin’ono – for the third time in six months – that has placed the spotlight back on Zimbabwe’s fragile press freedom, where critics say journalism has for years remained a dangerous occupation for a country not in a warzone.

It has been particularly hazardous for investigative journalists in a country that makes regular appearances in global top rankings of corruption.

“I was jailed after exposing corruption,” Chin’ono wrote last year after his first arrest, which came after the authorities criticised the media for allegedly reporting falsehoods about members of President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s family being involved in shady COVID-19 equipment procurement deals which prejudiced the country of millions of United States dollars.

Chin’ono’s exposé reportedly led to the firing of Zimbabwe’s health minister, yet it was to prove to be just the beginning of the investigative journalist’s brushes with the law for his work reporting corruption in high places.

“The onslaught on investigative journalists is part of the administration’s hostile campaign against human rights defenders,” Tawanda Majoni, an investigative journalist and National Coordinator of the Information for Development Trust, a local media NGO, told IPS.

“Media freedom campaigners have done a spirited job, but what they can achieve will always be severely limited in a repressive regime,” he told IPS.

According to Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index of 2019, Zimbabwe ranked 158 out of 180 countries making it one of the most corrupt in the world.

“In Southern Africa, journalists and others working to expose corruption face an unacceptable level of risk,” Transparency International said in a statement last year.

The international press freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders ranked Zimbabwe number 126 out of 180 countries in the 2020 World Press Freedom Index, making the southern African country one of the worst places to work as a journalist.

“Zimbabwe’s serious abuses of press freedom, free expression and the rights of government critics are worsening as the year begins,” Dewa Mavhinga, Human Rights Watch southern Africa director, told IPS.

“It seems there are some within government who wish to undermine Zimbabwe’s re-engagement efforts through their reckless abuses that entrench the pariah state image,” Dewa told IPS.

The European Union in Zimbabwe also added its condemnation of the arrest of Chin’ono, Sikhala and Mahere, posting on Twitter on Jan. 13 that “the current pre-trial detentions, delays of proceeding without serious charges are questionable”, while the Dutch Embassy in Harare reminded the country’s minister of foreign affairs Sibusiso Moyo the commitments Zimbabwe made on Dec. 9 at the World Press Freedom Conference to increase the safety of journalists.

The crackdown continues almost six years after the disappearance of journalist and activist Itai Dzamara whose whereabouts remain unknown but is widely feared dead.

“We have a government that is driven by paranoia and doesn’t want to be held accountable,” Nqaba Matshazi, of the Media Institute for Southern African (MISA) – Zimbabwe chapter, told IPS.

While police say Chin’ono faces up to 20 years in prison, his lawyers are challenging the constitutionality of the charges and the journalist remains defiant in a country where media activists say journalists are shying away from probing investigative journalism for fear of arrests.

“The persecution of investigative and other journalists routinely face has several retrogressive effects, among them fear, self-censorship and capture. When you see a journalist being brought to court in leg irons for posting a Tweet, you naturally wonder whether if your next story is worth dying for,” said Majoni.

Human rights attorneys say it has been particularly frustrating defending journalists.

“Journalists are being arrested for doing their job and our real challenge is that the arrests show an increase in the monitoring of journalists’ social media activity,” Roselyn Hanzi, executive director of the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, who are representing Chin’ono and other journalists and citizens arrested under questionable charges, told IPS.

“Despite constitutional provisions, what is required are administrative reforms to weed out bad apples in the system and also human rights training for institutions that have become very partisan,” Hanzi told IPS.

There are concerns however that there still are no critical voices emerging from regional bodies, which analysts say could be emboldening impunity and continued human rights violations in Zimbabwe.

“The silence and indifference of Zimbabwe’s neighbours like South Africa, SADC and the African Union has emboldened rogue elements with the Zimbabwe regime to go for broke,” Mavhinga told IPS.

“But tyranny has a witness and one day there will be justice and accountability for all the abuses,” Mavhinga said.

The post “In Zimbabwe there is Freedom of Speech, but no Freedom After the Speech” appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

Welcome Recognition of Bangladeshi as First-Ever ‘Pollution’ Refugee

Tue, 01/19/2021 - 12:18

French court’s landmark decision is a new milestone in fighting environmental disasters

By Kamal Ahmed
Jan 19 2021 (IPS-Partners)

The recent verdict by a French court stopping the deportation of an unnamed Bangladeshi on the grounds of deadly air pollution in Dhaka has raised eyebrows among many of us. In some of our newspapers and portals, an undertone of ridicule and aspersion against the assumed lack of patriotism in him was evident. Environmentalists, however, celebrated it as a landmark ruling as governments will now have to take tackling air pollution as a matter of urgency to prevent mass migration. For the last few decades, we have heard a lot about climate refugees, mostly as a result of forced displacements following extreme natural events or disasters caused by climate change. However, the person in question is probably the first legally recognised “pollution” refugee of the world.

This verdict also has special significance as it comes after a ruling by the United Nations Human Rights Committee from a year ago, stating that it would be unlawful for governments to return people to countries where their lives might be threatened by the climate crisis. The UN decision was largely a symbolic one as it did not have any legal binding on any country, which the French court’s ruling has on its national government. It has special significance due to the fact that the appeals court not only upheld the man’s plea on the increased risks of premature death, it further observed that the drugs that the man was receiving in France were not available in Bangladesh.

There is no question about the lethal danger in the quality of air in Dhaka. Its deterioration during winter is particularly noticeable. According to the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) BreathLife campaign, Dhaka’s air quality is 5.7 times over the safe level recommended by the World Health Organization. It is well-known that many elderly people with breathing problems, in recent years, have been forced to leave Dhaka to other parts of the country in search of fresher air. But, shockingly, air quality in many other cities are even worse, as the BreathLife data shows—Khulna and Barishal both have over eight times the safe level. It puts the number of deaths annually in Bangladesh from air pollution at 166,598 and worryingly enough, the quality of air indoors is not less harmful than outdoor air quality.

The reasons behind air pollution are not unknown—it mostly comes from brick kilns, the fumes coming out of automobiles and industrial chimneys and dust generated from the construction work of various infrastructure projects and ever expanding urbanisation. Environmentalists allege that the government response to combatting air pollution is at best a feeble one. It is true that the government has taken some actions against the polluting brick kilns. However, it has failed to take any meaningful steps to ensure setting up Air Treatment Plants at large industrial units and reduce emissions from traffic. Banning older polluting vehicles from plying the roads to restricting imports of such automobiles have been deferred repeatedly due to political pressure from some vested groups. The irony, however, is that while French automobiles are rarest of the rare on Dhaka’s streets, the largest beneficiaries of exporting the worst polluting vehicles, including diesel run and used or refurbished ones to Bangladesh, are the countries in Asia—namely India, Japan and China.

A few years ago, there was quite a global stir when it emerged that some companies were selling fresh air in bags or cans. Soaring air pollution in world cities created demands for fresh air and some innovative entrepreneurs came up with a solution that was as unthinkable as it was expensive. And the obvious market was China, which at that time had the worst ranking of urban air pollution in the world. A BBC report then quoted the price of a bottle of fresh air at USD 24, which holds around 160 breaths—15 pence or about Tk 12 for one breath. A Canadian company named Vitality used to collect air from the Canadian Rockies and compress it into containers. Later, they entered the Indian market too. A few other companies, including some British ones, also joined to exploit this opportunity, reported The Guardian a year later. I wonder whether it would shock anyone if we discover that those fresh air bottles have a market in Dhaka too.

In this context, the court victory by one of our fellow countryman in France should be welcomed. There is more than one reason to see it as a positive development. It will certainly make government leaders in Western countries look at the issue of climate migration in urgency and assist developing and vulnerable nations with more resources to tackle pollution. Until they do, rights groups will be able to explore legal recourse to help migrants with health conditions linked to pollution. Big corporations will also face closer scrutiny in relocating polluting industries to developing countries.

Besides, governments in the worst affected countries will face increased domestic pressure to act sooner and more decisively as pollution becomes an important factor in hurting the image of the country. However, there is nothing more effective than resistance from within.

Kamal Ahmed is an independent journalist based in London.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

The post Welcome Recognition of Bangladeshi as First-Ever ‘Pollution’ Refugee appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

French court’s landmark decision is a new milestone in fighting environmental disasters

The post Welcome Recognition of Bangladeshi as First-Ever ‘Pollution’ Refugee appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

Imprisoned Saudi Activist and Other Rights Defenders Seek Justice in 2021

Tue, 01/19/2021 - 11:04

By Mandeep Tiwana
NEW YORK, Jan 19 2021 (IPS)

Two events generated significant interest and global solidarity in the final days of December 2020. A court in Saudi Arabia handed down a five years and eight months sentence to activist Loujain Al-Hathloul for publicly supporting women’s right to drive. Nicholas Opiyo, Ugandan human rights lawyer and defender of persecuted members of the LGBTQI community and political opponents of the president was arbitrarily detained on trumped up charges of ‘money laundering.’ Nicholas Opiyo was granted bail on 30 December following an outpouring of global support for his activism for justice. In handing out the verdict to Loujain Al-Hathloul, the court partly suspended her sentence raising hope that she might be released from prison in a couple of months due to time already served.

As we await the release of Loujain Al-Hathloul and an end to judicial harassment of Nicholas Opiyo it’s notable that their struggles for justice are not unlike those of Sudha Bharadwaj, general secretary and voice of conscience of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties in Chhattisgarh, India or that of Teresita Naul, sixty-three year old committed advocate for health and social services in the Philippines. In Honduras, the Guapinol Water Defenders exposing harmful mining activities should have been receiving a national award. Instead, like Nicaraguan economic justice activist Maria Esperanza Sanchez Garcia and their fellow human rights defenders above, they’re languishing in prison.

It’s an anathema that in the 21st century when humanity claims to have made great progress in cultural and technological spheres that we should still have prisoners of conscience. The right to a fair trial and due process under the law are part of customary international law. Yet, around the world, thousands of rights defenders are wrongfully imprisoned following flawed trials for their peaceful efforts to create just, equal and sustainable societies. It’s no secret that public spirited work that exposes wrongdoing by the powerful or seeks justice for the excluded has become exceedingly dangerous in the past few years. This trend bears out in democracies, dictatorships and in countries with hybrid regimes.

In December last year, the CIVICUS Monitor – a participatory research platform that tracks enabling conditions for the work of human rights defenders globally – released its annual People Power Under Attack report. The findings reveal that 87 percent of the world’s population live in countries with poor civic space conditions. Civic space is the bedrock of open and democratic societies. It’s predicated on the ability of concerned individuals and civil society groups to organise, participate and communicate without hindrance to actively shape the social, political and economic structures around them.

Struggles for justice and rights hinge on the free exercise of civic freedoms of association, peaceful assembly, and expression recognised by international law and are included in the bill of rights of almost every country. Nonetheless, over a quarter of people live in countries that have completely ‘closed’ civic space where conditions are so terrible that those who express dissent and defend rights are routinely imprisoned, injured or killed. The list of such countries is long and forbidding, stretching from China to Cuba.

One might expect a momentous event like a pandemic which has caused huge amounts of suffering to open the doors for more compassionate governance. But the COVID-19 pandemic seems to have accelerated negative civic space trends. Our research shows that several governments have ramped up censorship and surveillance of human rights defenders to suppress criticism when they should have been prioritising access to information and making space for open and constructive dialogue with civil society.

In too many places, activists fighting for things as basic as equality before the law or women’s rights over their bodies or free and fair elections are being arbitrary imprisoned and subjected to the full force of the law and more for peaceful acts of civil disobedience. In the past few years, people’s mobilisations against leaders with authoritarian tendencies in places as diverse as Belarus and Uganda have been met with unusual cruelty.

Yet, people power managed to force a constitutional referendum in 2020 to make Chile an economically fairer place, and made futile a president’s attempt to unconstitutionally hold on to power in Malawi. In the United States, a historical reckoning with racist law enforcement through the Black Lives Matter protests helped bring out the vote in record numbers and defeat a delinquent president in the elections. In the final days of 2020, Argentina passed legislation to legalise abortion following years of determined activism by advocates for women’s sexual and reproductive rights.

Presently, a huge peaceful mobilisation is taking place by farmers and their supporters on the outskirts of India’s capital, Delhi against hurriedly drawn up legislation that supports big business interests and was pushed through parliament without adequate consultation and debate. Illustratively, the country’s present government which has shown scant respect for democratic norms is already trying to paint the protestors as ‘misguided’ or acting at the behest of outside forces.

In the end people power needs public support to counter vilification and criminalisation of rights defenders. The cost of repression is enormous for both the persecuted individuals and their loved ones. It took 27 years of people’s mobilisations and international pressure to secure Nelson Mandela’s release from apartheid prisons. It doesn’t have to be the same for Buzurgmeher Yoruv, a Tajik human rights lawyer who’s presently serving a 22 year sentence for defending members of the political opposition in his country.

Global solidarity did help secure the release of intrepid rights defender and advocate for the democratic rights of the Bahraini people, Nabeel Rajab in June last year. Just before Christmas, the IWACU4 Burundian journalists who were imprisoned merely for their investigative reporting on security matters following a flawed trial were granted a pardon. Nevertheless, the struggle for the release of other prisoners of conscience continues.

Even if the cascading impact of civic space restrictions seems heavy today, history shows us that another way is possible through the manifestation of people power. It’s vital not to forget the sacrifices of those who fight for our rights and are persecuted for their pursuit of justice. Let’s hope 2021 will be a better year for them. We all have a responsibility to act in the spirit of global solidarity to remove this collective blot on our humanity.

Mandeep Tiwana is chief programmes officer at CIVICUS, the global civil society alliance. To learn more about CIVICUS’s #StandAsMyWitness campaign to free imprisoned human rights defenders, click here. The People Power Under Attack 2020 report can be accessed here.

The post Imprisoned Saudi Activist and Other Rights Defenders Seek Justice in 2021 appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

Pages

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

You are here

Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

Pages