Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

By Saul Escobar Toledo
MEXICO CITY, Sep 11 2020 (IPS)

The national occupation and employment survey prepared by INEGI, with figures updated to July 2020, shows an improvement that has occurred in the last two months. However, the employment situation, compared with the data existing before the pandemic still shows serious problems:

Saul Escobar Toledo

Of the 12 million who left the labor market since the beginning of April, 7.2 have already returned; the other 4,800,000 declared they needed a job, but they are not looking for one. In addition, another important portion of the workforce became part of the people characterized as ” absent with a labor link “, that is, those workers who did not attend their work centers but were not fired. It is not known if all of them have been paid their full wages and benefits and, above all, if these millions of absent will someday return to labor or will be laid off permanently.

INEGI registered an employed population of almost 50 million people (49.8) ; It should be noted, however, that the increase between June and July corresponded to the male gender, with an increase of 2.2 million people at the same time as there was a reduction of 750 thousand women .

Throughout these months, one of the sectors hardest hit has been that of the self – employed: 20% of them remained inactive in April; 16% in May; 10% in June and only 2% in July. Unpaid employees (which only receive tips or payments in kind) were also severely affected: 21% did not work in April, but in July were almost all toiling.

If we measure the phenomenon taking into account the informal workers ( who work on their own account or in the service of an employer), the figures are more dramatic: in April 10 million stopped working, in May 8, in June 5, in July still 3 million . If we accumulate all these figures, it gives us a total of 26 million, which would give an idea of the days / worker lost in recent months and the income that was not received. Some lost only a month, others two or three, and still in July many did not receive any income at all. The paralysis has affected mainly the female gender, but the number of victims is impressive.

Meanwhile, the rate of open unemployment was 5.4% in July, which yields a figure of 2.8 million persons. Here again, the rate is higher in women than in men (6.3% vs. 4.8%). By age, those most affected have been those between 24 and 44 years old, which represent more than 50% of the total. It must be emphasized that this rate has increased, not decreased, as it accounted for 4.7% in April.

Even more serious, the underemployment rate, although it fell in July compared to the previous month, is still 18.4%. This represents an increase of 3.21 times in April; 3.78 in May; 2.75 in June and 2.45 in July compared to the historical average prior to the pandemic. This means that new occupations have become more precarious, insecure s, worse paid and surely very poorly protected.

In short, we have several problems. The damage caused by economic paralysis and the pandemic : 1) affected formal workers who were laid off and have not found another job; or have not attended to their workplace and are living in uncertainty; or they have sought refuge in underemployment (and have lost income and benefits) . And 2) self – employed and informal workers who have had no income during several or all these months.

All this damage is a fact, has already happened but so far nothing has been done to restore it. As anyone can see, it is a large social debt. The repair of this immense gap in the economy of Mexican families cannot be solved with the social programs that were already planned. It is not possible to support an entire family with the elderly pension, or with student grants.

For example, the pension program for the elderly, which has the more substantial budget and covers a larger number of people. The amount of money delivered is not only insufficient today (around 600 dollars per older adult between January and June 2020, that is 100 dollars per month according to the Second Presidential Report).

Undoubtedly, the damage caused, the income that has not been replaced, will lead to an increase in poverty (between March and May the number of poor increased from 36 to 55% according to CONEVAL). The inequality also has increased. According to some studies, the wage bill suffered a drop of between 6.6 and 13.8% in the second quarter of the year calculated annually. This has resulted, naturally, in a reduction of consumption of around 20% (annually comparison, even with the rise in June and July).

A country with greater poverty and more inequality cannot be a desirable outcome for a government that has set out exactly the opposite. Above all, because in the face of these phenomena, the government has not proposed any special action.

On the other hand, the decrease in the family´s income points to a slower economic recovery due to the fall in purchasing power. The increase in minimum and contractual wages have not been able to remedy these losses and surely will not do so in the remainder of the year due to the magnitude of the economic slowdown.

The 2021 budget represents an opportunity to make up for something that Mexican families have lost; to prevent further impoverishment and to stimulate faster economic recovery. It has been argued, by the president of the republic, that a growth in government debt may be detrimental to an indeterminate tomorrow. However, the government do not want to recognize that the Mexican state has already contracted a huge debt with millions of families who have lost their income since March. Finding a formula to pay this social debt and at the same time avoid a financial crisis in the future is not impossible, nor is it a dead-end dilemma.

At the same time, the possibility of a progressive fiscal reform that serves to pay off this social debt and for a more vigorous economic reactivation cannot be ruled out for political reasons (the 2021 elections or the fear of a negative reaction from a privileged sector ) . The most surprising is that the government announced a reform of the pension system that precisely proposes an increase in employer contributions and requires increased public spending. This equates to an increase in taxes and an increase in the federal government debt. How, then, do you refuse to charge a greater tribute to the richest and most prosperous, and at the same time propose a scheme to favor big business (the companies that manage the pensions)?

A further reduction in public spending and investment (what they now call austerity) can only have the result that, once again, the cost of the crisis will be borne by the vast majority of the population. Its consequences would be equally negative for recovery of production, consumption, and prosperity of the country.

The government must face the most important question of all: give Mexicans the opportunity to overcome this crisis with the least possible losses. If they do not, all the architecture of the promised change will become fragile and maybe a mere rhetorical exercise.

 

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Degraded farmland is being restored in Mahbubnagar district of Telangana state in India. Investing in sustainable land management and reversing land degradation will help build economies post-COVID-19 and help poor people increase their incomes. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
HYDERABAD, India , Sep 11 2020 (IPS)

Investing in sustainable land management and land restoration will help build economies post-COVID-19 and help poor people increase their incomes as the destruction of global food chains by the pandemic provides a chance for ensuring diversity in production through ensuring the inclusion of local producers.

It also provides an opportunity to repurpose incentives for subsidies so that they deliver more common benefits for everybody without impacting the bottom line for the farmers, says Louise Baker the Managing Director of the Global Mechanism of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). Baker is the first woman to hold the position in the U.N. agency and was appointed by UNCCD’s Executive Secretary Ibrahim Thiaw in June.

Originally from England,. Baker joined the UNCCD secretariat in 2011 and had been serving as Chief of the External Relations, Policy and Advocacy unit since 2014.

In an interview with IPS, Baker talks about the current global status of land restoration and identifies the areas where more work is needed. She also candidly shares her own vision of a future where sustainable land management is considered a new normal and used widely by nations across the world to create employment and gender equity and to improve the quality of life of the poor. Excerpts of the interview follow.

Louise Baker Managing Director of the Global Mechanism of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).

IPS:  How does it feel to be the first woman MD of Global Mechanism and what excites you about your new role?

Louise Baker (LB): It is exciting for me to move over to Global Mechanism.

I think, what’s interesting about my role is putting policy into action. If the countries use the policy, start writing projects, start doing it on the ground – kind of making it happen, then it feels like there is a momentum behind the work of UNCCD now and there is a sense of direction. So, I am excited that all the work I have been doing in policy, now I can see it on the ground, transforming people’s lives.

IPS: In the next 10 years, what would you like to change or like to see changed?

LB: I would see the cross-sectoral nature of land being taken seriously, not just in silos that says “this is an environmental issue or agricultural issue”, because it’s not. Its culture, agriculture, its land, its water, urban development, rural development, women …so I think it should find its place like climate does – find its place in multiple sectors. People need a more holistic approach. So, I would like to see that.

I would like a conversation around what we spend on issues that impact the land. We spend a lot, globally, on incentives in agricultural sector. We sponsor fertilisers, we sponsor pesticide, we provide inputs in the agriculture.  I think there is an opportunity to repurpose those incentives, those subsides so that they deliver more common benefits for everybody without impacting the bottom line for the farmers.

I would like to see – flagships. I would like to see things like the Great Green Wall of Africa. I would like to see the Ganges rehabilitated, I would like to see things that rub people’s imagination, I would like to see people inspired to do something about this.

I would also like to see, in terms of access to financing, the least developed countries getting a bigger share of the financing.

IPS: How can least-developed countries get enough financing?

LB: You quite often see the big financing processes – the countries that are able to write fabulous proposals, get the lion’s share of the money from the international processes. And those countries that are without the in-house capacity to wade through the difficult proposal writing processes, often don’t get the money they need. So, the people who are the least able to write the proposals are the ones who need it. An international effort to start the pipeline of bankable projects for countries who need it the most would be important and I think that goes across the private sector.

The public sector has got quite a high standard in terms of what it demands for financing – all these requirements and then you need to make a profit. So, it gets even more complicated to get incentivise, de-risk and get a pipeline of projects particularly in vulnerable communities for the private sector to take a risk on. So, I think ensuring the quality of those proposals and building the capacity of people to get those proposals in would be really important.

IPS: What is reverse land degradation and build back better? How can this help restore the economy impacted by the pandemic?

LB: In terms of the post-COVID-19 world, I think its critical that we do build back better. People who are most affected by COVID-19 – people who are in most precarious situations, people who don’t have fixed term jobs, don’t get a salary at the end of the month to get what they need and rely on natural resources to pay for what they need. There’s an opportunity I think for the first time in  terms of the incentives plans to build the economy back, to invest in these natural resource base, to invest in many countries for the survival of the poor people so they can increase incrementally their incomes.

It means things like value chains which were destructed during COVID-19 are shorter. You can work with local producers. Global value chains often cut out local producers, so you want to ensure diversity in your production, you want to ensure, for example, it’s not a value chain that is just producing food for export and there is no local production of food.

Q: What kind of returns can come from investing in sustainable land management and reverse land degradation?

LB: It’s very site-specific. In general, if you invest a dollar, the economic return is between $5 to $10 in the restoration economy. And that’s across the board, so it’s an average number.

But actually there are economic benefits in terms of the eco-system services provided: if you sustainably manage the land in a dryland area, you will get more water and therefore your crops will grow better and therefore you will not suffer from dried crops so much.

There is an economic benefit in terms of new value chains, that you can now grow crops in certain areas where you couldn’t before. And if you are smart about it then there are green products that you can sell to new value chains, local or international. For example, food like Moringa and Baobab are now considered “super foods” in many countries. And so, you can create a market and high-income jobs as you go down the chain. So, there’s marketing, packaging, design, production – it’s all tied onto the natural base. So, there is a return in the investment into the eco-system services. The big win is if you can leverage that into an economic opportunity that creates more jobs, creates different types of jobs.

IPS: How can land restoration empower the youth or contribute to gender equity?

LB: Young people are really enthusiastic about changing the world and they have got brilliant ideas to change the world but they need to be given the space to do it and the space isn’t necessarily being a farmer or what their grandparents did. They need to have their creativity, they need to bring in new technologies, new innovations like drip irrigation, drone technology, planting by drones, designs for groundwater recharge. new ways to working their new models. And I think that needs to be encouraged as well. In terms of gender, women hold valuable knowledge on land use and management, especially in the rural areas.

Therefore, using gender‐specific ways of documenting and preserving women’s knowledge should be central to sustainable management and restoration efforts. Increasing women’s presence in decision-making will play a pivotal role in closing the gender gap in land ownership and management and help create a land degradation neutral world that is gender responsive.

IPS: What is the global status of the promises made by the nations in the last UNCCD COP on land neutrality?

LB: Numbers or countries committing are still quite high. Barbados joined last week. And so, Barbados is committed to set up its target. Globally if you add up the other programmes’ voluntary contributions it’s a lot of land the countries have committed to move into sustainable management.  I think there’s still some work to do on the targets to identify geographically where the work will happen, and there’s quite a lot to do to ensure the benefits of land restoration is enjoyed by all segments of  society.

We are quite excited to work around gender. We have seen some very generous funding from the Canadians to work on mainstreaming gender into our work. So, I think there’s progress definitely, but there’s still a way to go.

The big challenge is – and we have spoken about capacity building in proposal writing – translating the targets into bankable projects. It’s a work that’s ongoing. A couple of countries -Armenia and Turkey – have actually gone through the process for some adaptation funding by GEF.

IPS: Women are disproportionately affected by climate change yet underrepresented at the decision-making table. Can your appointment be looked at a part of the growing trend of change the picture?

LB: The credit of my appointment goes to Ibrahim Thiaw – the Executive Secretary of UNCCD who has also recently appointed Tina Birmpili of Greece as the next Deputy Executive Secretary of UNCCD. I don’t think we are appointed because we are female, but of course I see this as an opportunity to do more work and contribute more to building of the momentum that UNCCD now has.

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A 2009 study found that almost 250,000 children worked in auto repair stores, brick klins, as domestic labourers, and as carpet weavers and sozni embroiderers in Jammu and Kashmir. Laureates and global human rights activists have renewed their call for world leaders to double their efforts in protecting children from child labour and child trafficking during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. Credit: Umer Asif/IPS

By Mantoe Phakathi
MBABANE, Sep 11 2020 (IPS)

Addressing delegates at the end of the virtual 3rd Fair Share for Children Summit, 2014 Nobel Peace Laureate Kailash Satyarthi told global citizens that “business as usual” in dealing with COVID-19 is not going to be tolerated.

“We’re not going to accept the miseries of child labour and trafficking to continue to be normal,” he said.

The two-day summit, which concluded yesterday Sep. 10, saw laureates and global human rights activists renew their call for world leaders to double their efforts in protecting children during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

Several Nobel laureates and heads states and government as well as heads of United Nations agencies spoke, including the Dalai Lama, Professor Muhammad Yunus, Dr. Rigoberta Menchú Tum, Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkol Karman, and Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven, among others.

“My dear children, we’re here to tell you one thing; we’re not going to fail you,” Satyarthi said, assuring the children of the world of their commitment.

“We’re not going to leave you. We’ll stand by you and fight for you,” he said during his concluding remarks. He demanded that the fair share for children must become the new normal.

Satyarthi, who is the founder of Laureates and Leaders for Children which hosted the summit,  further demanded that governments should establish social safety nets for the poor because they are the ones most impacted by the pandemic and that, once the COVID-19 vaccine is available, it should be accessible to everyone in the world.

Satyarthi pinned his hope on the youth whom he applauded for showing leadership during the Summit through their participation and speaking in support of children’s rights.

“Your authority, energy, vision and leadership are definitely a ray of hope in these difficult times,” she said.

He further called on the youth to continue campaigning for children should because the world cannot afford to lose an entire generation.

“Protection of children is not only affordable, but it is also achievable,” concluded Satyarthi.

1996 Nobel Peace Laureate and former president of Timor-Leste José Ramos-Horta called on global leaders to “unite and act now” against child labour and slavery.

“If we fail, we’re accomplices, we’re guilty of betraying children,” he said.

Ramos-Horta said destitute children are the most impacted by COVID-19 because they do not have access to clean water, three meals a day and no longer go to school.

Rula Ghani, the First Lady of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, called upon adults to be responsible not only for their own children but for every child throughout the world. She said it is everyone’s responsibility to nurture every child they can reach because each one has a potential for greatness and distinction.

Ghani decried the fact that wars and conflicts are tearing apart the very fabric of society in such a way that the sense of security, the comfort of belonging to a caring group and certainty of a bright future are fast becoming a luxury of a few.

“In a world where the social compact between society and its members no longer carries any meaning, where even medical emergencies such as COVID-19 can wreak havoc because of the absence of thoughtful coordination and prevalence of political interest, it is high time to stop and reflect,” she said.

While the world is battling with the worst global crisis since World War II and the most significant economic challenge since the great depression, it is also facing the biggest political crisis where presidents do not know how to tell the truth, observed Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, Professor at Columbia University. Sachs, who is also the director of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, said the world is also dealing with the abuses by political leaders who do not care and are not transparent.

“The humanitarian crisis is deepening dramatically, and we don’t even know the extent of it because it is moving faster than our data can keep up,” he said. “We know that hunger is rising, destitution is rising, and desperation is rising.”

Sachs recommended turning to the multi-level institutions in the short term, especially the International Monetary Fund (IMF) which he said has done an excellent job of providing emergency assistance.

He called on the IMF, World Bank and other international financial institutions to provide far more resources, without the usual conditionalities. This will help avert a hunger crisis, the massive rise of deaths because of the diversion of health and medical personnel and greater levels of deprivation.

“The IMF has emergency financing facilities that have provided more than US$ 80 billion since the start of the crisis, but we need vastly more than that,” said Sachs.

Peter Kwasi Kodjie, secretary-general of the All-Africa Students Union, also called for more financial resources to be directed to children. While pleading with leaders to accept the reality of COVID-19 as the new normal, he said it cannot be the new normal for the many children who go to bed hungry because they no longer go to school. He noted that many children face the risk of not returning to school.

“Young people of the world are asking for a fair share of the money to be allocated to children who are marginalised to avoid disaster,” said Kodjie.

José Ángel Gurría, secretary-general of the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), also called on countries to ensure that children get a fair share of the global response to the pandemic.

“You can count on the OECD to help countries to put children at the centre of their social policies,” said Gurria. 

This was the first Laureates and Leaders for Children Summit to be held virtually owing to the pandemic.

 

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Intercultural bilingual school at Andahuaylas province, Peru. Photo courtesy Sergio Chaparro Hernández (CESR)

By Laura Adriaensens and Sergio Chaparro Hernández
ANTWERP, Belgium / BOGOTA, Colombia, Sep 11 2020 (IPS)

“It’s a major paradox, no?” asks Hugo Ñopo, a researcher at the Peruvian think tank Group for the Analysis of Development (GRADE). Since the beginning of the pandemic, Peru has presented itself as an example for the region: it quickly implemented drastic prevention measures, followed scientific recommendations and prepared an economic support plan for the most vulnerable segments of the population.

Nevertheless, the country has become a hotspot for cases of Covid-19, which has led to desperate situations in many cities and regions. Peru has confirmed 28,000 deaths and more than 600,000 infections from Covid-19 by the end of August. With these numbers, the country has the largest number of registered deaths per million residents in the entire world.

Furthermore, according to other data, the official numbers might even understate the true extent of the pandemic. “Peru had an early start, but getting into the game first is no guarantee for success,” states Ñopo. “You have to run the race, and this is a marathon.”

The metaphor of a marathon is a good starting point to understand why Peru has had such difficulty addressing the current public health crisis, despite the efforts made by its government. Behind a facade of economic success, the country is still plagued by extremely high levels of inequality.

For decades, Peru has been one of the Latin American countries with the lowest investment in social policies. This has led to deep disparities in the realization of social rights, including the rights to health and education. Today, the enjoyment of these rights is characterized by structural deprivations for many in the midst of enormous privileges for a small elite.

In particular, Peru has faced a critical social fracture in relation to its many Indigenous peoples, whose enjoyment of rights and social services remains abysmally low. In 2019, poverty rates among the population with an Indigenous first language nearly doubled the poverty rate of those who speak Spanish as their first language. In rural areas, the poverty rates of Indigenous language speakers are even higher.

The measures taken by President Martín Vizcarra in response to the pandemic are not enough to remedy these structural inequalities, which have existed for decades. Rather than a short sprint, reforms in the long term are needed.

Health finances require intensive care

A 2019 study undertaken by the Center for Economic and Social Rights examines the role of tax policy in guaranteeing socioeconomic equality and human rights. The report finds that the persistence of high levels of inequality in Peru is explained, to a large extent, by the absence of fiscal policies that allow for adequate financing of programs such as health and education programs that are crucial to the guarantee of social rights.

As the economic expansion fueled by the commodities boom grinds to a halt, serious questions arise about the sustainability of the Peruvian economic model and the sufficiency of its investment in rights and services.

Peru has one of the lowest tax revenue collection rates in Latin America, and the State has taken little action in confronting tax evasion and avoidance, which has caused an estimated loss of 7.5% of GDP. This has reinforced the privileged position of wealthy people with greater contributive capacity while displacing the tax burden on to the rest of the population. In addition, the lack of transparency, participation, and accountability has eroded tax morale and citizen trust in state institutions.

The Peruvian health system was already marked by serious deficiencies long before the pandemic started. The State’s policy regarding cancer care illustrates this. Cancer has become the leading cause of death by disease in Peru, with 90 persons dying from this disease every day.

Although the cancer incidence rate in Peru remains comparatively low in the international context, the risk of dying from cancer before age 75 is higher than the global average, despite Peru being an upper-middle income country.

This shows that the health system does not effectively reduce these risks, particularly for the most disadvantaged populations. The divergent experiences of patients with cancer dramatically reflect the costs of inequality and illustrate how funding decisions have life or death consequences for some.

Teresa Rodríguez, a survivor of cervical cancer from Chimbote, calls out the lack of oncologists in her region: “Other women in the same situation should not have go through this. If my illness had been detected in time, it would not have reached this severity.”

As with Teresa, the poorest people tend to be diagnosed in more advanced stages of illness and face greater barriers to accessing adequate and prompt treatment. This is a consequence of Peru’s fragmented system of health insurance, as well as the absence of specialized health services to diagnose and treat cancer in the more rural and remote departments of the country.

Although Peru established Plan Esperanza in 2012, a public program for the prevention and treatment of cancer with notable achievements, this effort was compromised when the total budget for cancer care was cut down by a sixth in 2019. If this trend continues, it is likely that the achievements of the program will be reversed.

However, the money necessary to finance the effort properly is within reach – as long as the government is willing to rethink its priorities. Eliminating unnecessary tax incentives, for example, would allow the State to increase by 12 times the resources which it dedicates each year to fight cancer.

The regional differences in the healthcare system throughout Peru have become even more pronounced during the pandemic. Many remote communities have been affected by the virus after contact with state officials or tourists visiting the Amazon region. Indigenous communities have asked the government for help, complaining that they have nothing to protect themselves but banana leaves as facemasks and self-imposed quarantines.

“Despite the fact that we live in a region with dengue, with malaria, with endemic diseases that also take lives, I do not remember any comparable situation to the current one,” states Jorge Carillo. He works as a journalist in Iquitos, a large city in the Peruvian Amazon region, which has been heavily affected by the virus and suffers from a lack of ICU beds, medical material, and personnel.

“Post pandemic there’s a lot to do. And if we don’t changeit may sound a little uglyit doesn’t make sense to even survive the pandemic. After all we’ve seen, staying the same or worse would be unthinkable, wouldn’t it?”

Commitment to intercultural education is proven in the allocation of resources

Notably, the pandemic also risks exacerbating disparities in access to other social services, like education. Peru has long failed to guarantee Indigenous peoples culturally appropriate education, which has reinforced racial segregation and gender inequality.

Over the past several years, policies were adopted supporting bilingual, intercultural education for Indigenous children, as a promising step to ensure their access to education. However, the money dedicated to translating these policies into reality is still far from adequate: in 2017, the budget for intercultural education took up only 0.6 per cent of the education allocation, and a mere 0.1 per cent of total public spending.

“I really would like more budget to be allocated for intercultural education. Education should be more important, because without education there is no progress,” said Maruja Pérez, a teacher from an intercultural bilingual school in the Andahuaylas province.

The COVID-19 pandemic will likely further widen the gaps across ethnicities in access to and quality of education, mainly because of the lack of internet connectivity and adequate alternatives to in-person classes in Indigenous communities. In 2018, only 15.9% of Indigenous women and 24.3% of men had internet access, compared to 56.7% of non-Indigenous women and 61.2% men.

While the Peruvian government has provided rural households with access to tablets and launched the “Learning from Home” strategy (Aprendo en Casa) aiming to reach Indigenous children through TV and radio lessons in Indigenous languages, the accessibility and quality standards of this strategy are far from those that non-Indigenous households in urban areas enjoy.

The current situation in Peru might seem grim, but there is hope for the future. The Peruvian state could take steps to more proactively mobilize resources sufficient to providing quality public services to all, as there are certainly options available to finance key social policies.

Multinational corporations and international financial institutions also have an important role to play in expanding fiscal policy space and preventing tax abuse and other practices that reduce State revenue. With eliminating unnecessary tax expenditures, for example, the State could increase by 12 times the resources it dedicates each year to fighting cancer, the primary cause of mortality in Peru.

A higher tax revenue, collected from those most able to pay, such as wealthy individuals and powerful corporations, could help to address the impact of Covid-19, achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, and reduce the territorial, racial, ethnic, and gender disparities that have afflicted Peru for decades.

*The Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR) is an international nongovernmental organization that fights poverty and inequality by advancing human rights as guiding principles of social and economic justice. Working in collaboration with partners around the world, CESR uses international human rights law as a tool to challenge unjust economic policies that systematically undermine rights enjoyment and thereby fuel inequalities. Its international and interdisciplinary staff team is based in New York and Johannesburg comes from the human rights, development and social justice movements in different parts of the world.

 

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Excerpt:

Laura Adriaensens,LL.M. in International Legal Studies at New York University (NYU) School of Law, Fulbright and BAEF Fellow, M. A. Schwind Scholar. Sergio Chaparro Hernández is Program Officer at the Center for Economic and Social Rights* (www.cesr.org)

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At least 50 million children are on the move in the world today and millions more are affected by migration. Now more than ever, a rescue package is needed for these refugee children. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

By Miriam Gathigah
NAIROBI, Sep 10 2020 (IPS)

Forced to flee wars and disasters, sometimes without family, and struggling to survive in the worst of circumstances, children on the move have long led very precarious lives. Be they refugees, internally displaced or asylum seekers, vulnerable and marginalised, they lose years of childhood. They are exposed to the worst forms of abuse, such as commercial exploitation and violence. Today, their situation is dire as they remain at the very bottom of the list to receive emergency measures to protect them from the impacts of COVID-19. 

Still, there is a deafening silence on the nature of a rescue package for the ultra-vulnerable child population.

Speaking on the second and final day of the Fair Share of Children Summit held virtually, Nobel laureates, leading international figures and heads of the United Nations agencies, who include the Dalai Lama, 2014 Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi, Dr. Rigoberta Menchú Tum, Leymah Gbowee,  and Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven have dispelled all doubt that without this package, the fallout of COVID-19 will be borne by the world’s most marginalised children.

Seme Ludanga Faustino has lived experiences of being a refugee. The co-founder of I CAN South Sudan, a registered refugee-led organisation, stated that the closure of schools and many other child-friendly spaces would be most devastating for displaced children as this is where they learn to cope and heal from traumatic experiences.

“These are children who need structured engagement the most. Even worse, many of them are now separated from their caregivers, who are often fellow refugees. One way to help these children is to support their caregivers to support this child population,” he advised.                                                  

With U.N Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates indicating that 50 million children are on the move in the world today and millions more affected by migration, now more than ever, a rescue package is needed for the world’s most marginalised and impoverished children.

Similarly, a newly launched report by the Kailash Satyarthi Children’s Foundation titled “A Fair Share For Children: Preventing the loss of a generation to COVID-19” paints a disturbing picture of the harms and vulnerabilities facing children on the move. The number of children on the move has increased every year for at least a decade, and it is more likely now that the numbers will only grow during and post COVID-19.

The report further indicates that as of the end of March this year, the G20 countries alone had already committed over $5 trillion towards protecting the global economy. Since additional commitments from high-income countries have brought the figure to $8 trillion – a large chunk of this money will be used to protect businesses.

Jody Williams, 1997 Nobel Peace Laureate, stated that real change would begin when resources are directed where they are most needed.

Notably, there is still minimal movement at the national and international levels to address the non-health impacts of COVID-19 on the most marginalised citizens. The report further states that to date, “little is being actively spent on targeted interventions to support the almost 20 percent of children living on two dollars or less per day.”

Against this backdrop, a session, dubbed “Increased Vulnerability of Children on the Move”, examined the increased challenges and risks faced by children on the move due to COVID-19 such as the impact of new legislation imposed due to the pandemic, and explore ways to protect this deeply marginalised child population.

Session moderator Kerry Kennedy, president of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, emphasised on the need to explore solutions.

Josie Naughton, CEO, Help Refugees, spoke of the need for political will as it is a sure way to the change that is needed for vulnerable child population.

Abraham Keita, a youth activist and 2015 International Children’s Peace Prize Winner, was born during Liberia’s brutal civil war and his father, a driver for a humanitarian organisation was killed in an ambush when he was only five years old.

He grew up in the densely populated informal settlements of West Point, Liberia in extreme poverty and great difficulties. But as those closest to the numbers are often the ones closest to the solutions, he said that beyond statistics are real lives. Keita emphasised that appealing for political will is not enough and that people must appeal to the moral conscience.

The “A Fair Share for Children” report reveals that by mid-April, 167 countries had closed their borders, and at least 57 states made no exception for people seeking asylum.

This is despite ongoing “168 armed conflicts, 15 wars and 23 limited wars. One in 10 children are living in zones of conflict,” said Philip Jennings, co-president, International Peace Bureau, 1910 Nobel Peace Prize-winning organisation.

“We have this peace deficit which COVID-19 only makes worse the conditions of children on the move. I want world leaders and laureates to talk about peace. We need a global ceasefire. Sustainable peace has to be the message from us to the children,” he said.

The U.N. Refugee Agency’s most recent Global Trends report indicates that as of the of 2019, the number of refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs) and asylum-seekers was at an all-time high with an estimated 79.5 million people, of which 13 million children were refugees.

Equally alarming, 400,000 asylum applications were made by children unaccompanied by any family member. Overall, at least 18 million children were internally displaced by conflicts or disasters.

The “A Fair Share for Children” report warns that as refugee camps are neither designed nor equipped for pandemics such as COVID-19, simple protective measures such as hand washing and social distancing are next to impossible to achieve. The report states that the maximum standards for a typical camp “call for a maximum of 120 people to one water tap and 3.5 square meters of living space per person. Most, if not all, refugee camps are operating beyond this capacity.”

Child rights experts now say that the world is sitting on a catastrophe, as these children will experience even deeper exclusion from any kind of social protection measures or safety nets.

Speakers at the summit, including Prince Ali Bin Al Hussein of Jordan, decried the fact that even before the pandemic, fundamental public services including education, healthcare, hygiene and sanitation, nutrition and child protection not to mention resettlement and asylum services, were already lacking for this extremely vulnerable child population.

He said that poverty had gotten even worse, there is a decline in migrant remittances and that many refugees who had temporary jobs, lost them.

“Extreme poverty is considered an act of violence, so right now, there is violence and injustice committed against children on the move in particular. More government support is needed and direct financial support not just for NGOs but for small businesses, including those owned by refugees. Countries must stop separating families and turning down asylum seekers,” he said today.

Marianna Vardinoyannis, U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation Goodwill Ambassador and 2020 U.N. Nelson Mandela Prize Laureate urged participants and governments to open their eyes to the suffering of children on the move.

“There is so much that we do not see that defines the traumatic lives of these children. As we built better post COVID, education must be a priority for displaced children. Without an education, the children will lack the tools they need to rebuild their lives,” she cautioned.

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Before the COVID-19 pandemic in 2018, 400 million primary school-age children were already facing poor access to quality education leading to a lack of basic reading skills. Young people have added their voice in calling on world leaders to allocate at least 20 percent of the COVID-19 stimulus package to the marginalised children and youth. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Mantoe Phakathi
MBABANE, Sep 10 2020 (IPS)

Young people have added their voice in calling on world leaders to allocate at least 20 percent of the COVID-19 stimulus package to the marginalised children and youth.

Addressing delegates at the on the final day of the third Fair Share for Children Summit chairperson of the Commonwealth Students’ Association, Dr. Maisha Reza said if 20 percent of the $5 trillion announced by G20 countries in March were allocated to children, it would fully fund the United Nation COVID-19 appeals and save over 70 million lives.

“How humanity responds collectively to the crisis today will determine the future that we build for our children and the future of our people and planet,” said Reza.

The summit, facilitated by the Laureates for Leaders and Kailash Satyarthi Children’s Foundation – both of which were founded by 2014 Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi – brought together several laureates, including the Dalai Lama, Tawakkol Karman, Professor Jody Williams, international leaders and heads of United Nations agencies.

Reza challenged world leaders to take responsibility for their actions. They should not blame the pandemic for the global challenges of unemployment, hunger, crime and violence, among others. Instead, she said, COVID-19 amplified the already existing gaps and cracks that were already unresolved and overlooked.

Quoting from recently released A Fair Share for Children Report, Reza said before the pandemic in 2018, 400 million primary school-age children were already facing poor access to quality education leading to a lack of basic reading skills. Moreover, 258 children out-of-school in 2018.

The report further states that as a direct consequence of national lockdowns, school closures were implemented in more than 190 countries.

To date, more than 160 countries have continued to lock children out of school. At the peak of the pandemic 1.6 billion – about 91.3 percent of all enrolled students – were out of school or university, with the vast majority being under 18.

“It is not just COVID-19 that is exacerbated global inequality, but the world’s unjust response to COVID-19 will deepen inequality for a generation,” she said.

Dr. Maisha Reza said if 20 percent of the $5 trillion announced by G20 countries in March were allocated to children, it would fully fund the United Nations COVID-19 appeals and save over 70 million lives.

Reza criticised leaders for focusing more on multinational companies while leaving the marginalised and vulnerable to fend for themselves, adding that millions of children will pay the price with their lives unless action is taken.

She said the youth and students have to choose between fulfilling their economic potential and between contributing to their families’ sustenance.

“This is an extremely unfair choice that they have to make for the poor decisions of world leaders,” she said.

She further invited the youth to make use of alliances through student organisations, NGOs and international platforms such as the summit while using social media to hold their leaders accountable.

While urging governments to invest in education and children, Ulrich Knudsen, Deputy Secretary-General, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), warned that it would be a mistake not to give companies life support during the pandemic.

“It’s in the interest of everyone in society that we also give life support to companies,” he said in response to a question that governments seem to be prioritising corporates over marginalised citizens.

“If we don’t do that, the economy will break, and we’ll have even more inequality that hurts the vulnerable, be they youth, children women.”

He said after this crisis, there would be competing pressures on government budgets. Because they are spending so much now and that the funds have to be paid back governments will be faced with competing priorities such as the elderly, climate change and paying back loans.

“But there are unquestionable benefits of keeping schools open,” he said.

While applauding the youth in taking the lead to ensure that their voices are heard, Knudsen urged governments to create a conducive political environment for these issues.

“At OECD, we have youth- and child-sensitive policymaking. We need governments’ approach to issues that affect children and youth differently than others. We cannot expect that policies made for adults will not have adverse side effects for children and youth,” he said. 

The digital divide and economic inequalities came under sharp focus during the discussion. Knudsen said the significant disparities when it comes to access to technology had resulted in the vulnerable being left behind when doing e-learning or remote learning.

“If you don’t have access to a computer, you’re completely lost during a crisis like this one. There’s the economic inequality, and then there’s the digital divide, we need to address both,” he said.

Adding his voice about the digital divide was Edvardas Vabuolas from the Organising Bureau of European School Student Unions (OBESSU). He said it is a well-established fact that many children are not accessing education during the pandemic because of lack of access to the internet and gadgets such as computers.

Dr Rigoberta Menchú Tum, 1992 Nobel Peace Laureate agreed, adding that it was time to talk about technology because, during the pandemic, fewer children had access to education. She further called for an education system that is multi- and bilingual.

“Budgets have to be devoted to education,” she said, through an interpreter.

She noted that some countries used the curfews as an excuse to become dictatorial states. 

Tum further called people in public office to use the lens of diversity during the post-COVID era so not to leave anyone behind in the future.

Related Articles

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• COVID-19 Pandemic an Opportunity to Re-evaluate How we Treat World’s Starving Children
• Exclusive: Kailash Satyarthi Warns over a Million Children Could Die Because of COVID-19 Economic Crisis

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By External Source
Sep 10 2020 (IPS-Partners)

It is important to understand the needs of the Vanua, the culture, tradition and its’ protocols: This video is the first in a 3 part series hearing directly from Monitoring Evaluation and Learning practitioners within the Pacific region and their experience of using Pacific approaches in their work. In this video we hear from Mr. Eroni Wavu, the MEL Officer with the Ministry of i-Taukei Affairs in Fiji who are responsible for developing, implementing and monitoring government programs focussed on the governance and wellbeing of the iTaukei people.

We asked Eroni to share his experience in applying Pacific approaches and what advice he would give to new or existing development partners working across the Pacific region. Eroni was one of the stakeholders involved in a 12 month journey of talanoa to explore, assess and report on MEL capacity in the Pacific. The Pacific approaches used and he findings are found in the final report: The Pacific MEL Capacity Strengthening Rebbilib http://purl.org/spc/digilib/doc/vpukq

Source: The Pacific Community (SPC)

 

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By External Source
Sep 10 2020 (IPS-Partners)

Biodiversity is declining faster than at any time in human history. Tourism and biodiversity have a symbiotic relationship – positive and negative.

The post The science behind the #Biodiversity and #Tourism relationship – #wtflucerne in conversation with IPBES Chair Ana Maria Hernandez Salgar (Colombia) appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Africa’s rapidly-growing cities and food markets with a turnover of up to $250 billion per year offer the largest and fastest growing market opportunity to the continent’s 60 million farms. But getting the food to market from rural areas remains a challenge. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Isaiah Esipisu
NAIROBI, Kenya/TORIT STATE, South Sudan, Sep 10 2020 (IPS)

In Torit State, southern South Sudan, Margaret Itto is one of the farmers in Africa’s youngest country who have invested heavily in agriculture. But she is not able to access the lucrative market for her produce in the capital Juba simply because of poor roads.

“Road infrastructure in this country is a big hindrance,” said Itto. “Getting the produce from the farms to the stores, then to the market is very challenging. Many times, my workers have had to sleep in the bush because their vehicle got stuck,” she told IPS.

Itto, who grows groundnuts, sunflower, maize, beans and sesame, among other crops, has had to endure huge post harvest losses, especially when it rains as this makes roads impassable.

Margaret Itto (right) on her groundnut farm in Torit, South Sudan. She has had to endure huge post harvest losses especially whenever it rains during the harvesting season because the inadequate roads means its difficult to get the food to market. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

In sub-Saharan Africa 40 precent of staple foods fail to reach markets because of poor roads and market access limitations, according to the Food Sustainability Index (FSI) developed by the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Barilla Centre for Food and Nutrition (BCFN).

To this end, importers have taken advantage of the demand by supplying low quality food products to Africa’s cities. “Given our high cost of production, many urban dwellers end up consuming imported low quality food because they are far cheaper than locally produced food,” observed Dr James Nyoro, the Governor for Kiambu County in Central Kenya.

Africa’s rapidly-growing cities and food markets with a turnover of up to $250 billion per year offer the largest and fastest-growing market opportunity to the continent’s 60 million farms, according to a new report released alongside the ongoing virtual Africa Green Revolution Forum. But for African farmers to take advantage of the huge market opportunity there is a need for investment in non-urban road infrastructure, small and intermediary cities, improved urban food systems governance, and food safety regulations and enforcement, among other things.

The Africa Agriculture Status Report (AASR) — an annual findings of the state of agriculture on the continent which is authored by experts from the United Nations, various universities and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), among other institutions — highlights five key priority areas that must be taken care of.

“There will be need for improved urban food system governance, efficient urban wholesale markets, food safety regulation and enforcement, regional free trade and agricultural policy harmonisation, and agricultural research focused on high-growth, high-value food commodities,” said Prof. Rudy Rabbinge, a Professor Emeritus in Sustainable Development and Food Security at Wageningen University, and one of the lead authors of the report.

Rabbinge’s sentiments resonate with findings of an earlier report by the BCFN, that the most critical challenge are weak governance structures, insufficient or low resources and capacity, lack of professional training, and persistent conflict and lack of coherence between sectors, actors and jurisdictions.

These challenges, according to the BCFN report, are recognised in the new normative global sustainable development agendas agreed to by national governments, but they will have to be contextually relevant, locally adapted, better supported implementation efforts in food governance.

Daniele Fattibene, research scientist at the BCFN, told IPS that it is crucial to launch policies and initiatives to preserve food security in African urban areas. “COVID-19 has exposed many people in African urban areas to poverty and hunger. Most of them who were employed in casual labours lost their jobs during lockdown. While some have returned to rural areas where access to food was easier, others cannot go for this option, as they already escaped from violence or hunger,” he said.

According to Andrew Cox, the chief of staff and strategy at AGRA, a cohort of new, non-traditional actors – including city planners, mayors, district councils, trader organisations and public health professionals – are becoming key players in the implementation of agricultural policy at a time when Africa’s agri-food systems are shifting increasingly towards urban areas.

This was echoed by Fattibene, who believes that African mayors should invest in urban agriculture, as a way to shorten food chains and preserve them from sudden external shocks as a medium and long-term intervention.

“In this sense, local authorities should support smallholders producers and SMEs to form cooperatives and encourage supermarkets and other grocers to source their products locally instead of importing products,” he said, adding that they should develop tailored strategies to effectively map their food systems, taking as a reference other cities in the Global South such as Quito in Ecuador, which has developed effective urban food resilience plans.

“This may allow develop[ment] of early warning tools to avoid food emergencies in urban areas,” he told IPS.

The main road linking Magwi town to Lobone town at the border of South Sudan and Uganda. In sub-Saharan Africa 40 precent of staple food fails to reach markets because of transport infrastructure and market access limitations. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

The AASR report also gives an example of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where access to markets is the weakest in Africa, raising farm production costs and reducing the scope for profitable trade and non-farm investments.

Another challenge is to do with cross border trade policies. This was heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic, when countries across the globe decided to restrict food exports due to the pandemic, thereby exacerbating food insecurity, especially in Africa’s urban areas.

Locally, restrictions at the border between Kenya and Tanzania for example saw perishable foodstuff go to waste during the height of the pandemic as truck drivers waited to clear with authorities on both sides.

However, the AASR authors are optimistic that the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) is moving forward and could mark a milestone in improved policy that allows scaling of investment in production, processing, and trade and much lower costs of operation.

As cities continue to battle the COVID-19 pandemic, Fattibene says that authorities should launch measures to protect those employed in informal sectors such as street food vendors in open air markets, who were seriously affected by the crisis, and as well support those children who rely on school meals as their main daily source of safe and nutritious food as an immediate short term measure.

“To implement all these measures, additional funding for local authorities will be required,” he said.

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By External Source
Sep 10 2020 (IPS-Partners)

His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s message for “Fair Share for Children – Laureates and Leaders Summit 2020”, held online September 9, 2020.

 

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A girl in Bhubaneswar slums, India checks her e-learning assignments on a computer tablet. Courtesy: John Marshall/Aveti Learning

By Doug Johnson and Suvojit Chattopadhyay
Sep 10 2020 (IPS)

The National Education Policy 2020 (NEP) lays out a compelling, ambitious agenda for education reform in India. Yet, as others have noted, without concerted action the NEP’s promise will remain unfulfilled.

The new policy is a wide-ranging document and therefore priority-setting is key. To realise the NEP’s vision, the centre should prioritise certain critical elements of the policy: expanding access to early childhood care and education (ECCE), raising foundational literacy and numeracy in primary school, and creating a regular, national sample-based survey of learning outcomes.

An overarching point we also make is that as education is a concurrent subject, the centre should provide guidance and funding but leave details to the states.

In this article, we provide recommendations that can not only help governments prioritise, but also work together to tackle one of India’s most urgent priorities—helping its people realise their full potential.

 

Prioritise

Taking on too many recommendations could overload teachers, headmasters, and officials at a time when they have their hands full. Instead, the government should start with the most pressing and urgent objectives: expanding ECCE and raising foundational literacy.

Research shows that teacher qualifications and improved school infrastructure on their own have relatively little effect on student learning outcomes. By contrast, additional contract workers, who are more accountable to their supervisors and may deviate from the official curriculum, can have huge effects

A large body of research shows that improvements in early childhood education and primary school pay off far more, in terms of later life outcomes than improvements in secondary school or higher education. In addition, as the NEP itself points out, reforms to secondary school and higher education rest on getting these fundamentals right first.

According to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), in 2018, nearly half of all rural students in Grade 5 couldn’t read a Grade 2 text and two thirds couldn’t perform simple division.

There is little point in having all students complete secondary school (as the NEP recommends) if many of them cannot even read a basic text. Further, hasty changes to secondary school or higher education would only make current secondary school students more stressed.

The government should also prioritise assessing learning outcomes as a means to measure the efficacy of its education system. Measuring progress on ECCE and foundational learning will require high-quality data.

The ASER survey, cited above, is an invaluable data source but is only available for rural areas. The central government’s National Achievement Survey (NAS) covers urban areas but does not include private school students and, as recent research by one of the authors and Andres Parrado shows, is likely inaccurate.

The NEP recommends implementing census-based exams (tests administered on every child in school) in Grades 3, 5, and 8. If implemented well, these exams may be a great source of data. But because they are administratively cumbersome to implement, it may be several years before data from these exams can be fully trusted.

To fill the gap, the central government should implement a sample-based survey—where a random sample of students is selected—of learning outcomes which includes urban areas and private school students. In implementing this survey, the central government should learn from the experience of the NAS to ensure that the data is of sufficiently high quality to track progress at the state level.

 

Use evidence to guide decision-making

Whatever its faults, the NEP cannot be criticised for lack of ideas. The document is full of detailed guidance on everything from book clubs to classroom activities. As a source of inspiration, this level of detail is admirable but as policy guidance, it is overbearing.

State governments need to develop detailed implementation plans customised to the nature of gaps in their respective education systems, the resources available to them, and considering the latest knowledge and evidence in the sector.

In addition, many of the NEP’s detailed recommendations go against existing evidence. The NEP recommends a pupil-teacher ratio (PTR) of under 30:1. And in order to increase access to ECCE and improve foundational learning, it recommends hiring more teachers in primary schools, introducing a new cadre of ECCE teachers with rigorous qualifications, and investing in infrastructure in anganwadis and primary schools. Yet official figures show that in most states, the majority of government primary schools comply with these PTR guidelines already.

While in a few states such as Bihar, Jharkhand, and Uttar Pradesh, a substantial share of government primary schools do not comply with PTR guidelines, the problem, for the most part, is one of teacher assignment rather than the overall number of teachers.

For example, the overall PTR in Jharkhand government primary schools is 25, which is better than the recommended guidelines. Yet 50 percent of Jharkhand’s primary schools do not comply with the PTR guideline. This tells us that we need to ensure a more even distribution of teachers across schools.

Research also shows that teacher qualifications and improved school infrastructure on their own have relatively little effect on student learning outcomes. By contrast, additional contract workers, who are more accountable to their supervisors and may deviate from the official curriculum, can have huge effects.

Pratham’s Read India program, which relies on relatively low-paid staff who undergo only a short training, has been shown to dramatically increase foundational literacy in a short timeframe. Similarly, a government programme in Tamil Nadu in which anganwadis were provided with an additional assistant who received only a short training resulted in large increases in both learning and nutrition.

Similarly, to implement the sample-based survey, the central government should seek outside help rather than do it on its own. For the past 15 years, the ASER Centre has collected regular, accurate data on basic literacy and numeracy on a shoestring budget.

In addition to the ASER Centre, organisations such as the Centre for Science of Student Learning and Educational Initiatives have deep experience in developing and carrying out student assessments. By contrast, the government’s own effort to collect learning outcomes data has been marred by errors. One of the authors of the article, along with Andres Parrado, recently showed how the 2017 NAS data contains little information on actual student learning.

We compared NAS to a variety of other datasets including ASER, India Human Development Survey (IHDS) learning outcomes data, and Reserve Bank of India (RBI) data on state income and find little correlation between NAS state rankings and rankings based on these other datasets.

The fact that the NEP provides little guidance on assessments—only stating that NAS will continue until the National Assessment Centre is established—is worrying, particularly because assessment is an area where the centre ought to provide detailed guidance.

 

Turn crisis into opportunity

Bold experiments are the need of the hour to improve learning outcomes in India. In the past, efforts to improve foundational learning were often hampered by the requirement that teachers complete an over-ambitious curriculum which leaves most kids behind.

With so many students way behind the official curriculum, attempt to ‘catch up’ is nearly impossible. And since the NEP has recommended fundamental changes to board exams, the fear that deviating from the curriculum will leave students ill-prepared for the boards is muted.

States should seize this opportunity by suspending the requirement that teachers complete the official curriculum, and take bold steps to refocus teaching on foundational learning. One such step could be to integrate Pratham’s tried and tested ‘teaching at the right level’ approach into the syllabus.

We see NEP 2020 as a policy document that has several laudable goals. And while it has generated some political heat, much of the document is ambitious and forward-looking. However, to go beyond nice-sounding policy prescriptions and achieve tangible gains on the ground, it will require the centre and states to work together.

 

Doug Johnson is an independent researcher based in Bangkok, Thailand.

Suvojit Chattopadhyay works on issues of governance and development in East Africa and South Asia.

This story was originally published by India Development Review (IDR)

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Sabina Rimal is the Program Officer at Women's Rehabilitation Centre (WOREC) Nepal, an organization working for the protection and promotion of women’s human rights. In her role, Rimal counsels survivors of gender-based violence (GBV) and manages supervision of psycho-social counseling sessions and coordination of safe houses across WOREC‘s network in Nepal. Currently, WOREC is working in 16 communities in Nepal and has catered to over 800 survivors of GBV during three-months-long COVID-19 lockdown in Nepal. Credit: UN Women

By Sanju G.C. and Simone Galimberti
KATHMANDU, Nepal, Sep 10 2020 (IPS)

The recent attack on 22 year old Pavitra Karki has yet again stoked the discourse on acid attacks and gender based violence in Nepal. Pavitra is one of the many young women in Nepal who were targeted by young males, a tragic but more and more common occurrence in the country and elsewhere in South Asia.

Within the last 6 years, there have been at least 4 incidents of acid attacks every year and a total of 20 reported incidents from 2014 to 2020 in Nepal.

It is not surprising that the majority of these victims are women with rare instances of males being victims too.

The recently imposed lockdowns have further proved how such violence against women are part of the normal.

While the motives behind most acid attacks are rejection, unrequited love, and ending of romantic relationships by females, the recurring theme from the incidents point to a larger problem of toxic masculinity, patriarchy, and misogyny that is embedded within our social culture where men feel the need to ‘react’ when they are denied the things they want by women.

The inability to handle and cope with rejection and the troublesome need for retribution points to the fragile male ego that has been condoned for so long and goes unchecked in our society.

Our social norms tolerate and perpetuate patriarchal values where the sense of ‘male privilege’ and ‘male entitlement’ bears a strong foothold in our daily interactions, whereas women have no agency in the matters of love, sex, relationship, marriage, and money among other things.

The message is clear that any form of transgression within the existing gendered norms and power dynamic is not welcome and if challenged, the consequences for women can be lethal.

The ongoing gender dynamics should be understood within the broader and intersecting patterns of oppression and marginalization recurrent in the country.

Just as with the case of caste and race discrimination where we cannot achieve equality unless those in the upper castes understand that the problem as well as a big part of the solution lies within them, it is important for our men and young boys to awaken that gender issues and violence is their issue too and they are a part of the solution.

Acid burn victim Ponleu with wedding photo. Credit: UN Women/ Phil Borges

What is needed is male reckoning, an allyship where men are not passive bystanders to gender norms, discrimination, and violence but partners who actively participate in daily discourse against all forms of social injustice including gender inequality.

Some positive developments are happening.

A new Criminal Code Act entered into effect in August 2018 which criminalizes acid attacks with perpetrators facing up to eight years jail time and a fine.

While human rights activists and organizations are lobbying to formulate a specific legislation against acid and burns related violence, debates on regulating the access, supply, and control of toxic acidic chemicals are ongoing.

No matter how stringent the rules and regulations are, they alone are not the solution and cannot curb gender based violence.

A cultural shift in the way we think about and do gender needs to happen at a structural level.

It is granted that education should play an important role in changing young males’ perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors but families, schools, teachers and the entire learning process are deeply entrenched in the same beliefs that allow the popular culture to breed gender discrimination and violence.

Forward, progressive thinking and a different, more open perception towards sexuality does not happen overnight.

Activism with grassroots campaigning can also play an important role but we need to think in a more structural and systemic way at solving gender violence for good.

In the short run, bodies like Nepal Women Commission should be strengthened in its role as an advocate and protector of women’s rights.

A better referral system for victims of gender violence is needed as advocated by the World Bank that is already supporting a national helpline.

Acid attacks victims should be encouraged to attain a dignified and productive role in the society even through scholarships and job reservations where the government of Nepal assumes an active role in the rehabilitation process.

On the one hand, efforts must continue in supporting young women to think and act as if only the sky were the limit to their prowess and ambition.

Leadership training, volunteering opportunities are all tools for young women’s self-empowerment equipping them with tools to defy gender norms which are stacked against them.

Now mostly available to girls from middle and upper class families, such programs should be extended and scaled up in order to reach the most vulnerable girls and young women in the most conservative regions.

On the other hand, we have the challenge of finding effective ways to include boys and young male adults in rethinking women’s role in society.

Engaging boys and young males in understanding and fully accepting their female counterparts as equal partners will require a multi-dimensional effort that should start from an education sector emboldened and mandated to re-imagine a society where women have freedoms and lead.

A new generation of educators could make the difference if be equipped to shape the classroom as a space for a new narrative on gender dynamics and power relations.

More meaningful extracurricular activities and volunteering, including mentoring and peer to peer opportunities in partnership with local youth groups could offer pathways to self-growth for both sexes.

Such partnerships would help generate new attitudes and behaviors that will lay the ground for a more just and equitable society where women can thrive.

Ending acid attacks against women and overall stopping the perpetration of violence and abuse towards them will require a mix of short and long term actions by multiple actors working together.

It is in the society’s interest to find ways to muster the necessary willpower and ingenuity to change the status quo, allowing women to develop their potential, gaining the freedom to make decisions on their own without risking their lives.

 

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Excerpt:

Sanju G.C. is graduate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Oregon State University, USA and Simone Galimberti is Co-Founder of ENGAGE

The post Acidic Masculinity appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) says 99 percent of the 4.8 million victims of commercial sexual exploitation in 2016 were women and girls, with one in five being children. This young girl pictured here from Nigeria has never been to school and has marks from flogging over her hand. She lives with the person for whom she sells rice for and does not know her age. Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi said today that considering that most of the $ 8 trillion raised for the COVID-19 Response Fund went to bail out big companies, governments should seize the opportunity to hold them accountable and make sure that no child labour is involved in the supply chain. Credit: Tobore Ovuorie and Yemisi Onadipe/IPS

By Mantoe Phakathi
MBABANE, Sep 9 2020 (IPS)

The COVID-19 pandemic should give governments across the world an opportunity to hold corporates accountable against child labour. Kailash Satyarthi, the 2014 Nobel Peace Laureate, made this submission at the virtual 3rd Fair Share for Children Summit.

The two-day summit which started today and was facilitated by the Laureates for Leaders and Kailash Satyarthi Children’s Foundation – both of which were founded by Satyarthi – brought together several laureates and child rights leaders.

Satyarthi said considering that most of the $ 8 trillion raised for the COVID-19 Response Fund went to bail out big companies, governments should seize the opportunity to hold them accountable and make sure that no child labour is involved in the supply chain.

“That should be the responsibility of the governments who have put a lot of money in bailing out those companies,” said Satyarthi, adding that 20 percent of the COVID-19 funds should go to the marginalised. Earlier in the day, he said it was unacceptable that a mere 0.013 percent of COVID response money had been allocated to the most vulnerable.

He said it is also the responsibility of the companies to ensure that no child labour is involved in the supply chain. As a result, he called for laws at national and international levels to ensure that due diligence is made in the supply chain by the companies.

Satyarthi further urged the youth to take the lead in championing the eradication of child labour in the world.

“I’m happy that in many places in the world through the 100 Million Campaign, young people are raising their voices and ready to fight the menace of child labour, illiteracy and poverty of children,” he said.

Kailash Satyarthi, the 2014 Nobel Peace Laureate, said that 20 percent of the COVID-19 funds should go to the marginalised. Earlier in the day, he said it was unacceptable that a mere 0.013 percent of COVID response money had been allocated to the most vulnerable. Courtesy: Laureates for Leaders

One such young person is Lalita, a youth parliamentarian and former child labourer from India, who demonstrated how she and her friends have been leading the way in convincing parents to withdraw their children from work. Through their door-to-door activism in her community, the youth was also spreading awareness about the importance of education.

“A lot has changed since then in the village,” the teenager told delegates through an interpreter.

She said authorities supported all out-of-school children and those withdrawn from work to return to school. As representatives of the youth in her village, she said they raised their concerns about child labour and discrimination against poor children to authorities. 

“We fought against this, and we won,” she told delegates.

During the pandemic, Lalita and her peers wrote letters to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Education Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal seeking support to mount a big TV screen for underprivileged children who had no access to online learning. They also made and distributed masks to children and adults of her village while creating awareness about COVID-19 to protect them from the virus.

“I’m a 16-year-old from an underprivileged community, and I’ve been working relentlessly towards the protection of children towards the pandemic,” she told delegates, adding: “But despite being a part of the government and the private sector, you’re all not using your privilege and power to the advantage of marginalised children.” 

Lalita, a youth parliamentarian and former child labourer from India, demonstrated how she and her friends have been leading the way in convincing parents to withdraw their children from work. Courtesy: Laureates for Leaders

Lalita was not only speaking on behalf of the children in her village, but she was raising her voice in support of the 152 million child labourers, of which 73 million are in the worst forms of child labour, across the world. In fact, with COVID-19, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) projects that the situation will worsen although child labour has been reduced by a third since the beginning of the century.

According to ILO director-general Guy Ryder, COVID-19 will, in all likelihood, lead to an increase in the numbers of child labour in the world 

“It’s not difficult to understand why this is happening,” said Ryder. “We know that with the loss of jobs and livelihoods, extreme poverty is spreading around different parts of the world.”

He said with 2 billion workers in the informal economy and 1.6 billion of them facing a destruction of their livelihoods, inadequate social protection and closing of schools, more children could be driven into child labour. 

“But this is not a situation that we should regard as a fatality; something that we can do nothing about,” he said, adding: “What we do now in rebuilding from COVID-19 will have a long-lasting effect on the future trajectory of child labour.”

This is a possibility because the private sector has also come to the party. Roberto Suarez Santos, the secretary-general of the International Organization of Employers, said, despite the devastating impact COVID-19 has had on the private sector, the people on the margins of society have suffered immensely.

While he said it is worrying that more children could be forced to labour as a result of the pandemic, he called on delegates to ensure that progress is not reversed.

“The ratification of the ILO Convention 182 is not a minor thing,” said Santos. “It’s a historic moment, but implementation is important despite the promise.”

He accepted that due diligence on supply chains should be strengthened, but he was quick to add that the focus should be on the entire economy because child labour also takes place in domestic contexts.

“The vast majority of child labour are not in the supply chain, which I want to insist are critical, but are also domestic. In North Africa, for instance, most of the child labour takes place in domestic contexts,” he said.

The Indian Minister of Women and Child Development Smriti Irani, spoke about how her government provided a safety net for children and their families during the pandemic.

Martin Chungong, the secretary-general of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), called on parliamentarians across the world to effectively play their role in ratifying international laws and robust budgetary functions.

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Governments have been urged to take urgent action to prevent devastating nutrition and health outcomes for the 370 million children missing out on school meals amid COVID-19 school closures. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

By Miriam Gathigah
NAIROBI, Sep 9 2020 (IPS)

While COVID-19 pandemic has affected the entire world, Nobel Laureates and world leaders have today expressed concern that ongoing crisis is far from being an equaliser. The pandemic has revealed that the most vulnerable and marginalised populations, including and especially children, remain largely unprotected against the virus and its impacts.

Kailash Satyarthi, 2014 Nobel Peace Laureate, opened the plenary of the Fair Share of Children Summit, an extraordinary virtual gathering of Nobel Laureates and world leaders, with a sobering statistic. Currently, he said only 0.013 percent of the COVID-19 response had been allocated to the most vulnerable. “How can we justify this?” he asked.

The global virtual conference, hosted by Laureates and Leaders for Children, which was founded by Satyarthi, takes place from Sept. 9-10, and has brought together Nobel laureates, including the Dalai Lama, Tawakkol Karman, Professor Jody Williams, and leading international figures and heads of United Nations agencies.

The summit seeks to galvanise global action to ensure that the world’s children are not left behind and that in the absence of targeting children in international responses to the pandemic, existing responses will have failed.

Speaking today, former President of Ireland Mary Robinson stated the most marginalised children and their families must receive their fair share of COVID-19 responses, which translates to 20 percent for the poorest 20 percent of humanity.

Kinsu Kumar, a Child Rights Activist who also works with Bachpan Bachao Andolan:Save The Childhood Movement and is based in India. Courtesy: Laureates and Leaders for Children

A former child labourer and child rights activist who also works with Bachpan Bachao Andolan:Save The Childhood Movement, Kinsu Kumar, brought home the reality of the millions of children exploited or at risk of being exploited as COVID-19 wreaks havoc to existing socio-economic structures.

Kumar, who lives in Jaipur, India, worked at the age of six at a car wash to provide for his family.

“It saddens me that instead of children being a priority during this pandemic, they (children) have instead been side-lined. My morale is crushed by the slow response to the needs of millions of children across the world. How many more children have to be abused, exploited or lost for government to take action?” he asked, admitting he was angry about the situation.

Nobel Laureate, the Dalai Lama, said that unfortunately, the poor and needy are so side-lined that they have turned to seek divine intervention as the only means of assistance.

Gordon Brown, U.N. Special Envoy for Global Education and former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, explained just how important it is for the world to come together to fight for the world’s children.

This is especially considering emerging data indicating that as many as 30 million children will not return to school post-COVID and emphasised that education is still the best cover for children from all forms of abuse and exploitation.

Speaking about standing with children as they face COVID-19, he said that all efforts must be made to ensure that children stay in school.

“Hope dies when young people cannot prepare, plan or dream of future because they cannot get an education,” said Brown.

Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organisation, spoke of the need to address the most pressing problems facing children during the pandemic. For instance, he indicated that child mortality is now on the rise as the pandemic has curtailed access to health services, and further added that up to 10,000 children across the world could die every month due to increased hunger.

Henrietta Fore, executive director of the U.N. Children’s Fund, says the COVID pandemic has exposed the fault lines of the pandemic in every country but has resulted in finding solutions to these problems, with children resorting to online learning during the lockdowns. Courtesy: Laureates and Leaders for Children

Henrietta Fore, executive director of the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF), warned that a lot of work lies ahead as “even before the pandemic hit, the world was already off track in meetings SDGs. The pandemic has exposed the fault lines of the pandemic in every country.”

“But the pandemic is also showing us solutions which includes providing online infrastructure to ensure that children learn online and working with vital partners such as the private sector to develop innovative solutions,” she explained.

Speakers at the summit further indicated that as COVID-19 escalates, numerous pre-existing inequalities faced by the vulnerable and marginalised populations and especially children in the poorest parts of the world, will be worsened by disparities of the world’s responses.

Nobel laureates have particularly raised the alarm that despite trillions being announced for the wealthiest parts of the world, only a fraction has been allocated to those whose lives are most at stake from the multidimensional impacts of the pandemic.

A most pressing problem emerging due to the ongoing crisis is food insecurity and fears are rife that additional millions of children will be plunged into hunger.

According to UNICEF, undernutrition accounts for almost half of all deaths of children under the age of five. This context underscores the need for governments to take urgent action to prevent devastating nutrition and health outcomes for the 370 million children missing out on school meals amid school closure.

Through a session dubbed “Food Insecurity During COVID-19: Ending Child Hunger and Stopping the Virus for Good” more world leaders and Nobel Laureates, including Ayoade Oluwafemi Fadoju and Prof. Muhammad Yunus, highlighted how strained health and social protection systems, and fractured responses by countries are escalating child hunger.

As the pandemic unfolds, the impact of the virus on global agricultural and food markets is becoming increasingly evident.

Session moderator Lorena Castillo Garcia, the Joint U.N. Programme on HIV/AIDS special ambassador and global spokesperson for Zero Discrimination, emphasised the need to tailor responses to the crisis.

Garcia explained that current food insecurities are not necessarily driven by pre-existing food security threats such as erratic weather patterns, conflict, natural disasters and the locust invasion across East Africa but by COVID-19 driven disruptions to food production and supply.

Overall, people’s ability to purchase food has also been affected by current economic recession, and millions of children and their families could be plunged into poverty and extreme poverty.

Disruptions to the supply of agricultural inputs like fertilisers, seeds and a shortage of labour due to restricted movements as a responsive measure to curb the spread of the virus are likely to further reduce production incoming crop seasons. This, child rights experts say, spells doom for world children and more so, the vulnerable and marginalised.

“Nigeria has the second-highest number of child malnutrition in the world. More than 2.5 million children in Nigeria suffer from severe malnutrition. Undernutrition prevails among children in Africa. This is a disaster. We have to make every effort that hunger does not become deadlier than COVID-19 itself,” said Oluwafemi Fadoju.

Graca Machel, a member of The Elders, an independent group of global leaders, agrees.

“We are facing the horror of rising hunger. Globally, a child dies every three seconds due to hunger. In Africa, no country is untouched by hunger. These statistics shed light on the magnitude of child hunger. This is the sin of the collective failure of our times. Today, about 67,000 children are at risk of dying of hunger in sub-Saharan Africa alone before the end of this year,” she said today.

“Let us bring proven solutions to scale so that no child is left behind. It is in our power to ensure that no child goes to bed hungry. No child should die of hunger when there is enough food to feed us all. We have an opportunity now to fix a system that was already broken for millions of children. This pandemic is an opportunity to re-evaluate how we treat our children,” she advised.

As it is, pre-COVID-19 estimates by the World Bank show that more than 690 million people were affected by hunger and that these figures are up by 10 million people from the previous year. 

Children will be most affected as other statistics by the World Bank show that nearly one in every five children worldwide lives on less than two dollars a day. As a result of COVID-19, an estimated 6.5 million children under five worldwide are at risk of suffering stunted growth.

Summit speakers emphasised that post-COVID reconstruction efforts must build better by addressing inequalities facing the world’s most vulnerable children today. In the short term, it will involve identifying where the new hotspots of food insecurity are. This will help expand social protection programs to ensure that children and young people are adequately targeted.

Overall, summit speakers have emphasised that a failure to unite, innovate and develop new, transformative and sustainable solutions could lead to the loss of an entire generation of children.

Related Articles

• Exclusive: Kailash Satyarthi Warns over a Million Children Could Die Because of COVID-19 Economic Crisis
• World Risks Losing Entire Generation of Children, Nobel Laureates Warn
• Nobel Laureates and Global Leaders Call for Urgent Action to Prevent COVID-19 Child Rights Disaster

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Photo by cottonbro from Pexels.

By External Source
Sep 9 2020 (IPS)

Once safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines are available, tough choices will need to be made about who gets the first shots.

A committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine – at the behest of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health – has proposed an equitable way to allocate the vaccine.

They recommend first responders and health care workers take top priority. Older adults in congregate living situations would also be part of a first vaccination phase, according to the plan.

We are faculty at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Southern California who have spent decades studying health economics and epidemiology. One of us is a member of the National Academy of Medicine.

Having seen firsthand the real risks of rapid, asymptomatic spread of COVID-19 among younger adults, we disagree with some of the recommendations. Asymptomatic spread is shutting down schools and universities nationwide and threatening surrounding communities.

We argue that this pandemic requires a different model for making vaccination choices. After taking care of essential workers, vaccinations should be given to the biggest transmitters of the virus – mostly the young – and only then to the most vulnerable.

 

Lessons from 2009 flu epidemic

The textbook vaccine model goes out the window when novel viruses emerge.

Some lessons can be drawn from the 2009 H1N1 flu epidemic, which killed an estimated 500,000 people around the world. In the U.S, President Barack Obama declared the spread a national emergency.

Optimally, older people will drive down deaths by staying home in large numbers, and younger people will drive down infections by getting vaccinated in even larger numbers. It all works if the vaccine is effective and enough people take it

A vaccine was developed as early as the fall of 2009. However, only 16 million doses were initially available. The CDC was required to make some difficult decisions about allocation. Some states requested 10 times the amount they were allocated.

In the end, the CDC allocated the vaccine strictly in proportion to a state’s population – that is, on a per capita basis. States then allocated them, often with priority to infants and the elderly, along with people at high risk.

This priority – to protect the most frail – has been public policy since at least the 1957-1958 influenza pandemic.

Later studies, however, have shown that a better way to protect older people was to control spread among the young, which often has meant vaccinating school-age children early.

One of the lessons from these past pandemics is that vaccinating the likely asymptomatic spreaders early can avert multiple infections with others.

 

The superspreaders

The experience of the past few months has shown how important it is to check transmission with COVID-19. A recent study found that as few as 10% of those infected lead to 80% of the infection cases. What has made it more difficult is that up to 40% of those who carry the virus, often known as superspreaders, show no symptoms at all.

Very few of the COVID-19 superspreaders are elderly. It is the younger people who have a much greater propensity to resume social lives at schools and in other venues.

Among the young are a subset of highly social people with wide circles of friends who become the most fertile ground for the spread of COVID-19. These young people also have a much lower risk of death or even severe symptoms, which also means they are more likely to infect others.

Cases have been spiking in the 15- to 25-year-old age group, another likely sign that they are propelling the spread of the virus. A recent outbreak on the University of Southern California’s fraternity row infected at least 40 people.

The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association reports that at least 338,000 children have tested positive for the virus through July 30, with more than a quarter of that number having tested positive in just the last two weeks of that month.

More broadly, younger residents in the virus hot spot of Los Angeles County make up the majority of positive new cases. In California, young people between 18 to 34 years of age account for more than one-third of cases.

 

Young versus old

Anticipating that young people will engage in activities that spread the virus, many universities put their fall classes exclusively online. Some that decided to go in-person had to close after as little as a week on campus.

With or without a vaccine, the best strategy for older Americans, especially those with underlying medical conditions, is avoiding contact with potential carriers.

Optimally, older people will drive down deaths by staying home in large numbers, and younger people will drive down infections by getting vaccinated in even larger numbers. It all works if the vaccine is effective and enough people take it.

We predict the pressures and politics around prioritizing vaccine distribution will be intense. We argue that the key will be to take the most beneficial route, not the most obvious one. With a full-scale public health campaign behind it, that will mean prioritizing those who are driving transmission, not those who are most vulnerable.

As counterintuitive as such a strategy may appear, plenty of evidence shows this would be the right approach.

Dana Goldman, Leonard D. Schaeffer Chair and Distinguished Professor of Public Policy, Pharmacy, and Economics, University of Southern California; David Conti, Professor of Preventive Medicine and Associate Director for Data Science Integration, University of Southern California, and Matthew E. Kahn, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Economics and Business, Director of JHU’s 21st Century Cities Initiative, Johns Hopkins University

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

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The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development made a valiant effort to connect the dots and the COVID-19 tragedy has forced governments back into the driver’s seat, a role many had relinquished willingly or under pressure. Credit: United Nations

By Barbara Adams
NEW YORK, Sep 9 2020 (IPS)

Multilateral solidarity is gaining traction as the slogan for mobilizing support for international cooperation and for the UN. Is it replacing or merely renaming cross-border obligations, many of which have been enshrined over decades in UN treaties, conventions and agreements, and the principle of common but differentiated responsibility in their implementation?

Why do we seek another name at this time? It seems that reaffirmation is less attractive than invention in this time of innovation, short term thinking and results measurement and messaging via social media and 280 characters. How should it be reinvented?

Solidarity assumes trust and common responsibilities.

In the 1980s, Chase Manhattan CEO David Rockefeller said that the economics of international relations drives the politics. Certainly, the politics of international relations has failed to keep pace with globalized economics and has resulted in unfettered hyper – globalization and multi-dimensional inequality and violence.

Decades of structural adjustment, market liberalization and austerity policies, together with financialization and digitalization have propelled the rush to neo-liberal governance. This is characterized by the unwillingness and/or loss of capacity of UN Member States to govern at the national level, and by implication and logic, also at the global level.

The vacuum has been nurtured and “filled” by power centres, public and private. One prominent forum is the World Economic Forum (WEF) that defines itself as “the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation” and asserts: “The Forum engages the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.”1

In June 2019 the UN Secretary-General signed a framework agreement with the WEF, promising multiple areas of cooperation on activities the WEF describes as “shaped by a unique institutional culture founded on the stakeholder theory, which asserts that an organization is accountable to all parts of society.

The institution carefully blends and balances the best of many kinds of organizations, from both the public and private sectors, international organizations and academic institutions.”2

Is this agreement a recognition that stakeholders are replacing public sector representatives and rights holders as the primary “subjects” of multilateralism and the UN?

One of the victims of this (stakeholder) trend is the UN. The pragmatism of Secretaries-General Annan and Ban Ki Moon launched a succession of public-private partnerships and multi-stakeholder initiatives to keep the UN in the multilateral game. Are these what is meant by multilateral solidarity?

If so, how can it be expected to tackle the most serious global challenges that include climate degradation, ballooning inequalities and systemic discriminations, the COVID-19 pandemic and an unsustainable debt burden for many developing countries?

The record of the BWIs/IFIs is not encouraging. The looming debt crisis, exacerbated by COVID-19 and economic lockdowns, is not a unique phenomenon. The failure of IFIs to assess debt sustainability and related fiscal policy according to rights and social, economic and environmental justice obligations is a long-standing practice, one that treats symptoms at best.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development made a valiant effort to connect the dots and the COVID-19 tragedy has forced governments back into the driver’s seat, a role many had relinquished willingly or under pressure.

Climate change and COVID-19 are not the only crises that have exposed the abdication of achieving substantive democratic multilateralism but have been of such dimensions that Member States have to step up and govern. Has the preference of many to partner rather than govern met a dead end?

Reinventing multilateral solidarity must start with bending the arc of governance back again – from viewing people as shareholders – to stakeholders – to rights holders.

There are many global standards and benchmarks that could be developed to measure this progression. These should be at the forefront of pursuing substantive, rights-based multilateralism and distinguishing it from multilateralism for rhetoric’s sake. Just a few to get started:

• • Vaccines recognized as global public goods

 

• • Moratorium on IPRs for health, climate change and indigenous peoples’ rights while going through a review and possible recall process

 

• • Ratification and adherence to human rights treaties and conventions

 

• • Ratification and adherence to environmental and sustainability treaties

 

• • Abdication of nuclear weapons and export of small arms as commitment to peaceful and just societies

 

• • Global priority positioning of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development to support sustainable livelihoods and strategies for conflict prevention, as well as to evaluate debt sustainability and the quality of financial flows

 

• • National oversight and implementation of agreements on business and human rights

 

• • New and meaningful commitments to reducing inequalities within and between countries including policies addressing and measuring the concentration of wealth

 

• • Cross-border solidarity that is not an excuse for interference or market access

 

• Demotion of GDP as the primary measure of economic progress and prosperity

Multilateral solidarity relies on trust and requires addressing the trust deficit in the public and private spheres. Solidarity is demonstrated by a commitment to all rights for all and this cannot be achieved or aspired to without an effective duty bearer – government and the public sector. The UN should be the standard bearer at the global level, not a neutral convenor of public and private engagements.

Credible public institutions with commitment and capacity for long-term programming and non-market solutions and responses are essential at all levels.

And this requires predictable and sustainable public resources, currently undermined by tax evasion and illicit financial flows and detoured to servicing undeserved debt burdens.

The necessary but not sufficient condition for multilateral solidarity, the fuel to change direction, is a new funding compact at national level and to finance an impartial, value-based and effective UN system.

1 https://www.weforum.org/about/world-economic-forum
2 Ibid.

* Barbara Adams also served as Deputy Coordinator of the UN Non-Governmental Liaison Service (NGLS) through the period of the UN global conferences and until 2003. From 2003–2008 she worked as Chief of Strategic Partnerships and Communications for the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM).

This oped is a short chapter in the 2030 Spotlight Report to be launched on 18 September 2020. The authors will hold a side event on 18 September 9.00-10.00 am ET. Details and the report at: www.2030spotlight.org

 

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Excerpt:

Barbara Adams*, chair of the board of Global Policy Forum, was trained as an economist in the UK and served as Executive Director of the Manitoba Council for International Affairs from 1977–1979 in Canada. She also served as Associate Director of the Quaker United Nations Office in New York (1981–1988), where she worked with delegates, UN staff and NGOs on issues of economic and social justice, women, peace and human rights.

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Food systems are at threat, owing to climate change “massively interfering” with food systems around the world, leading to droughts, floods and fires. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 9 2020 (IPS)

Building inclusive and healthier food systems, and safeguarding the health of the planet will be some of the key priorities at the first-ever Food Systems Summit next year.

The United Nations is gearing up for the Food Systems Summit 2021, which will be spearheaded by Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for the Food Systems Summit Dr. Agnes Kalibata.

“Food is more than what satisfies our hunger, it’s more than what nourishes our bodies and brains,” Kalibata, former Minister of Agriculture and Animal Resources in Rwanda, said in a passionate speech in February. “Food is…economics, politics.”

In an interview with U.N. News last week, Kalibata said being born in a refugee camp in Uganda shaped her view on food sustainability in many ways. Her family was provided land by the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, which they used to start a small farm. It opened her eyes to the different ways the agricultural sector has the potential to “provide huge opportunities for smallholder communities”.

But systems are at threat, owing to climate change “massively interfering” with food systems around the world, leading to droughts, floods and fires, she said in her February speech.

“Today’s food systems do not respond to what we need as people,” she added in her interview with U.N. News. “The cause of death for one in three people around the world is related to what they eat.”

Kalibata has ambitious plans for the Food Systems Summit. She said there’s a U.N. Task Force dedicated to the summit that will be guiding existing research “so that nothing falls through the cracks”, and it will be collaborating with experts examining scientific data from around the world.

However, her leadership has been met with resistance from some watchdogs. Since 2014, Kalibata has been president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), a Gates Foundation project that aims to address food insecurity as a means to address poverty across Africa.

Since Kalibata’s leadership of the 2021 Food Systems Summit was announced in February, a petition has been circulating to revoke her status as the special envoy.

“Given the history of AGRA, the appointment of its President to lead, prepare, and design the Summit, will result in another forum that advances the interests of agribusiness at the expense of farmers and our planet,” read part of the petition.

It claims that AGRA’s core interest remains in satiating corporate interest, and funnelling public resources in that direction.

“Their finance-intensive and high input agricultural model is not sustainable beyond constant subsidy, which is drawn from increasingly scarce public resources,” read the petition, adding that there is a large imbalance in the power dynamics between the farmers and multinational grain traders, among others, who profit off the operation, while farmers “remain trapped in cycles of poverty and debt.”

It remains to be seen how it will affect her leadership, given climate change and sustainability efforts are increasingly distancing themselves from big corporates and those aligning with them.

Meanwhile, Yemen, which has been ravished by a famine for almost five years, is once again in critical need as torrential rains and floods have created an urgent need for food and safety measures.

The spokesperson for the U.N. Secretary General announced that the U.N. and their partners have distributed emergency food supplies among other resources. Yemen remains one of the most food insecure countries in the world, ranking 111 out of the lowest ranking of 113.

For the upcoming Food Systems Summit, it would also be crucial to keep an eye on how it will address the country’s famine and food insecure concerns.

 

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Image compiled by the author, public domain

By Juan Ortiz Freuler
CAMBRIDGE, United States, Sep 9 2020 (IPS)

Recent weeks have seen a dramatic escalation in the U.S.’ stance towards tech companies from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). After hounding the telecommunications company Huawei for years, the social networking app TikTok is the latest Chinese company to enter the firing line.

On 5 August U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo published a press release that could be seen as the master plan that explained the logic behind these policies: creating a parallel internet, defined as a place where companies from the PRC have no place. The text states that “the momentum of the Clean Network program is growing. More than thirty countries and territories are now clean countries…”

But what is the ultimate goal of this program? The press release, which is more than 450 words long, includes the term ‘safety’ only in its title, ‘Announcing the Expansion of the Clean Network to Safeguard America’s Assets’. It refers to security only four times, mostly included in the term ‘national security’. However, the word ‘clean’ is mentioned 14 times. Clean, as opposed to dirty. And, in Pompeo’s press release, dirty is defined as anything the People’s Republic of China or the Communist Party of China (CCP) is involved in.

Juan Ortiz Freuler

The press release does not provide any evidence to justify the drastic measures it proposes, nor does it include references to any technical analysis that could explain the decision to promote the creation of a parallel network over any of the other options available towards building trust (such as the development of industry-wide standards that could increase transparency and accountability, greater public oversight, and spot audits, among many others). It therefore seems reasonable to conclude that the U.S. statement is best understood as an expression of xenophobia.

 

A break away from tradition

For decades the community of internet experts and developers have worked collaboratively to solve pressing issues. This community has been key towards building trust in the internet, both in terms of process (open and consensus driven) as well as in terms of the substance (often technical standards and processes to increase the security of the internet). Pompeo’s press release shows disdain for technical debates and for consensus driven processes. It’s the equivalent of the U.S. banging its shoe on the table before storming out. The recent actions by the U.S. show a pattern: the U.S. is no longer willing to discuss technical issues pertaining technology on their merits. Pompeo and Trump insist on pivoting towards another factor: identity. This is evident in the way in which President Trump explains how his administration is going to force TikTok to sell its U.S. business to Microsoft. How Microsoft will offer privacy to its U.S. users is not part of the public debate, nor is how any U.S. based platform protects people’s privacy. The important thing in Trump’s view is that whoever takes control of TikTok is a very American company.

As an Argentine from a region of the world that has suffered documented cases of surveillance in the United States (even for commercial reasons), the idea of identity based trust feels unsatisfactory. If the world allowed U.S. companies like Microsoft, Facebook, and Google to continue operating within the global network even after evidence about their collaboration with U.S. espionage, it was because the international community agreed that security issues could and should be addressed by developing and implementing robust industry-wide standards and processes. We clearly failed to develop a set of institutions that would oversee compliance with these rules at a global level, and that might be part of the problem.

 

A missed opportunity to compete on transparency

Many of us expected that, in the absence of some form of global institutional oversight, we would at least be granted a market-based lookalike through competition. The hope was that disagreements between the U.S and the PRC would spark a race to the top on security, privacy and transparency. And for a brief moment it seemed like we would get something out of it, like when TikTok claimed it would open up its algorithms and challenged Facebook to follow it. But it seems that the U.S. was uninterested in such an approach. Instead, U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo extends an invitation to the world titled ‘Announcing the Expansion of the Clean Network to Safeguard America’s Assets.’ The subtext is clear: either join the clean network, or be sent to the leper colony.

 

Image: UI Here

 

The domino effect

Pompeo’s press release does not build upon the tradition of open discussion towards the implementation of security standards and protocols, nor does it promote competition between private entities on the basis of security. Instead, Trump and Pompeo propose a reductionist narrative: security depends exclusively on identity. This narrative does not provide tools or reasons for the governments of the world to trust any company, be they from the People’s Republic of China or the United States. In doing so, the U.S. has just put rocket boosters under the camp of public servants in every country in the world who have long advocated for the use of firewalls and the blocking or nationalization of any foreign apps, in the name of national security.

Does Pompeo really believe that countries around the world should nationalize all foreign applications and infrastructure providers? If the answer is yes, it does not appear to be in the interest of U.S. companies, which his office in some form is set to serve. If the answer is “no, the nationalist and protectionist measures promoted under the umbrella of America First should only be applied by the U.S.”, then Pompeo has just re-defined the U.S. as a neo-colonial power.

Many details regarding the scope and implications of this press release will be clarified over the next few weeks, but it is important to highlight three consequences.

First, the United States has burned the political and moral capital it had left to speak against internet shutdowns, and more generally in the name of the open Internet. And this is not just about the Snowden revelations. This statement can be seen as the most recent delivery in a series of regressive actions: the U.S. has recently rolled back net neutrality protections, dismantled the open technology fund, argued for the weakening end-to-end encryption, and more generally, has shown the systematic failure of its regulatory bodies to guarantee competition, and consequent re-decentralization of the network that would provide reassurance to other countries that the internet is a levelled playing field worth engaging with.

Second, the logical consequence of Pompeo’s press release is the fragmentation of the global information system as we know it. The 450 word press release, peppered with nationalism and xenophobia, will most likely go down in history as the beginning of the end of the open internet, and the utopias that were projected upon that narrative.

Third, we need to build a third way. The expectation in Pompeo’s press release is that countries will be called upon to make a “choice” and join one of these intranets. However, under the current paradigm, our options will remain restricted to the clogs section of machines that favor the centers at the expense of the peripheries in ever-accelerating processes of extraction.

The timing for the collapse of our global communications system couldn’t be worse: with health specialists warning that we are, at best, in the middle of this pandemic, and scientists claiming that climate collapse will cause a great pain to millions in the years to come, the interdependence of our future has never been so evident. We need a communication system commensurate with the scale and breadth of our problems as a planet and as a species. We need a system that acknowledges the powerful machinery that has become available, and re-aligns its energy towards helping us solve problems like Covid-19 and climate change.

Everything seems to indicate that we are entering a digital cold war. If this is so, it is time for the peripheries to start giving shape to a digital non-aligned movement. Such a movement could operate as a buffer between the PRC and the U.S. – striving to protect the value of an open Internet, helping us adapt the Internet to become the knowledge-sharing tool that our times demand, and offering the necessary cover so that no nation feels coerced into joining an intranet that does not work in the interests of its people.

It is time for the leaders of the non-aligned digital movement to step forward and commit to coordinating our fight for the future of the web, our species, and our planet.

 

This article was originally published by opendemocracy

The post TikTok, Trump and the Need for a Digital Non-Aligned Movement appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Juan Ortiz Freuler is an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society

The post TikTok, Trump and the Need for a Digital Non-Aligned Movement appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Raju, a young child who was rescued from traffickers by women child rights' activists in in Andhra Pradesh, India. There is an urgent need for fund allocations to protect the world’s most marginalised and vulnerable children gravely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
HYDERABAD, India, Sep 8 2020 (IPS)

Kerry Kennedy has a clear mission – along with Nobel laureates and leading international figures – she wishes to ensure that hard-won gains in children’s rights are not destroyed by the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kennedy is the president of Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) Human Rights, a nonprofit human rights advocacy organisation.

In an exclusive interview with IPS, held on the eve of the Fair Share for Children Summit, Kennedy speaks of the urgent need for fund allocations to protect the world’s most marginalised and vulnerable children gravely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

She also explains why protecting children is crucial for the achievement of United Nations Sustainable Goals and why the world must also engage the private sector in the effort.

Kennedy warns that because children are increasingly completing their education online, there is a need for greater controls to ensure their safety.

Kennedy started working in the field of human rights in 1981 when she investigated abuses committed by United States immigration officials against refugees from El Salvador. Since then, her life has been devoted to the pursuit of justice, promotion and protection of fundamental rights, and preservation of the rule of law.

The Fair Share for Children Summit global virtual conference takes place from Sept. 9 to 10. It brings together Nobel laureates and leading international figures to demand a fair share for the world’s most marginalised children during and beyond COVID-19. Speakers include Kennedy, the Dalai Lama, Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and chair of the Elders, 2014 Nobel Peace laureate Kailash Satyarthi, Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven, and Jordan’s Prince Ali Bin Al Hussein. 

Kerry Kennedy explains why protecting children is crucial for the achievement of United Nations Sustainable Goals and why the world must also engage the private sector in the effort. Courtesy: Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights

IPS: How long have you been associated with Kailash Satyarthi? Could you tell us about your experience of working on child rights? 

Kerry Kennedy (KK): Kailash received the RFK Human Rights Award in 1995 for his courageous work emancipating children from slavery and creating systemic change and legal reforms, which make him, arguably, the person who has freed more people from slavery than any person in history. He is not only my colleague, but I consider him one of my closest friends and an inspiration. Both his son and his daughter worked at RFK Human Rights, and my daughter Cara worked at Kailash’s ashram in India.

IPS: Do you think violations of child rights are taken as seriously as they should be?

KK: No. Worldwide there are 152 million children in slavery and other forms of exploitation. We know what the solutions are, we just need to implement them.

IPS: Sexual violence against children has been growing alarmingly. How can this be tackled, especially in a post-pandemic, economically weakened world?

KK: Sexual violence against children is a hidden pandemic we must confront, and we all must play a role in the coming months. This includes paying greater attention to warning signs that children in our communities may have been abused and strengthening reporting mechanisms. We should also help ensure that online protections are in place to keep children safer than ever, especially as their school days are increasingly virtual.

IPS: Why are the protection of child rights crucial for achieving the SDGs?

KK: None of the Sustainable Development Goals can be achieved in isolation. They are all part of the ecosystem of humanity and the protection of the earth. And they all have to be achieved together. Child rights are particularly important because the cycle of violence and exploitation against a child follows that child throughout life and creates a system in which everyone on the supply chain is harmed and lives in fear. We have the expertise and the knowledge to stop that, and we need to do so.

IPS: You have been working a lot with corporations to promote human rights in the private sector. Do you think the corporations can also be roped in to promote child rights?

KK: Of course, our work has primarily been focused on investors in major corporations. Those investors are often pension funds for union labourers or sovereign wealth funds for countries which have an inherent interest in protecting workers and promoting child rights.

Kailash has repeatedly said that child slavery is as much an economic issue as a human rights’ one. We must go further than simply having government regulations in place to eradicate the practice. As Dartmouth Professor Vijay Govindarajan notes, the rug industry has led by example here, with GoodWeave, a non-profit founded by Kailash in 1994, granting licenses to rug importers and exporters who have signed a contract agreeing to adhere to no-child-labour standards.

IPS: The theme of the summit is #FairShare4Children. What would be considered a fair share of the estimated $9 trillion set aside globally to mitigate the effects of the pandemic? Where are the most critical areas? And how should it be managed? 

KK: There are an estimated 1.9 billion children worldwide – composing roughly 27 percent of the world’s population. By setting aside a proportional share to address child-specific needs: among them, educational equity; eradicating slavery and sexual violence; ensuring adequate nutrition; medical care and the distribution of vaccines to the poorest and most underserved children is a vital component of creating a better world.

 

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The post Caring for Poorest and Most Underserved Children Vital for Creating a Better World appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

IPS senior correspondent Stella Paul interviews KERRY KENNEDY, president of Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) Human Rights, about why allocating funding for the poorest and most underserved children is a vital component of creating a better world.

The post Caring for Poorest and Most Underserved Children Vital for Creating a Better World appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Longer term investments are needed to enable the over 500 million small holder farmers in developing countries to grow more food, thus increasing their incomes and resilience. Credit: Miriam Gahtigah/IPS

By Timothy A. Wise
BOSTON, Sep 8 2020 (IPS)

African organizations are demanding answers after a recent report found that Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) strategies have failed spectacularly to meet its goals of increasing productivity and incomes for millions of small-scale farming households by 2020 while reducing food insecurity on the continent.

The theme for the tenth annual African Green Revolution Forum, a virtual weeklong event hosted by Rwanda that opens September 8, is “Feed the Cities, Grow the Continent.”

Based on the findings of a recent report on the host, AGRA, a more appropriate theme would be “Failing Africa’s Farmers, Starving the Continent.” The report, “False Promises: The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa,” found that the 14-year, billion-dollar AGRA initiative has failed spectacularly to meet its self-proclaimed objectives.

My background research, which contributed to the report, showed that yields have risen slowly, poverty remains endemic, and there has been an alarming 31% increase in the number of undernourished people in AGRA’s 13 focus countries.

After AGRA offered no substantive responses to the findings from the July 10 report, three African organizations are issuing a public letter to AGRA demanding it release internal documents on its impacts.

They demand that AGRA provide “evidence to refute the study’s findings that AGRA and the larger Green Revolution project are failing to meet its goals of doubling yields and incomes for 30 million small-scale farming households by 2020 while reducing food insecurity by half.”

As Zambian researcher Mutinta Nketani told the German outlet DW, when an organization like AGRA “fails to achieve the goals it had set itself, all alarm bells should go off — not only amid civil society, but also amid AGRA itself as well as its donors.”

Failed policies of the past

The annual Green Revolution Forum brings together (virtually this year) leaders from government, business, civil society, research institutions, and the donors who have funded the latest effort to promote commercial seeds, fertilizers, and the markets that deliver them to Africa’s millions of small-scale farmers. Since its launch in 2006, AGRA has received about $1 billion in funding to lead this productivity revolution in its target countries.

African governments, though, have provided the bulk of the Green Revolution funding. Many use significant portions of their agricultural development budgets to subsidize the purchase of these commercial inputs for farmers who otherwise would not buy them. Collectively, those subsidies have totaled as much as $1 billion per year.

The strategy promises that commercial seeds and fertilizers will dramatically increase yields, allowing small-scale farmers to sell surplus crops, increase their incomes, and improve their food security.

According to the False Promises report, none of that has happened as AGRA reaches its self-declared 2020 deadline:

• Instead of doubling yields (a 100% increase), yields have gone up only 18% over 12 years for staple crops. Even for maize, heavily promoted by AGRA and subsidized by governments, yields increased a disappointing 29%.
• All the subsidies to maize diverted land and investment from other crops, some more nutritious and climate-resilient than maize. Millet production fell 24% under AGRA with yields declining 21%.
• Not only did farmer incomes fail to rise, hunger increased dramatically in AGRA countries, rising 31% since 2006 according to United Nations estimates.
These policies, heavily funded now for 14 years, have failed.

Rwanda: “AGRA’s hungry poster child”

Not only does AGRA have a lot to answer for at this year’s forum, so does Rwanda, which now hosts these annual gatherings. According to former Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, who is now chair of AGRA’s board, Rwanda was selected to host the AGRF because “Rwanda has shown the best example in agriculture transformation.” Based on that reputation, Rwanda’s former Agriculture Minister Agnes Kalibata now leads AGRA.

According to the False Promises report, Rwanda is a very poor example for sustainable and inclusive agricultural development. Under the government’s strict mandates to increase maize production, crop diversity declined dramatically.

Kalibata may point to a 300% increase in maize production and a 66% increase in yields, but traditional and nutritious crops like sorghum and sweet potato withered from neglect.

Overall yields for a basket of staple crops increased just 24%. And according to the latest U.N. figures, the number of undernourished Rwandans increased an alarming 41% since 2006 in spite of the boom in maize production.

The report calls Rwanda “AGRA’s hungry poster child.”

A former U.N. official recently decried Rwanda’s approach under Kalibata as “replacing hunger with malnutrition.” He and others have questioned her appointment by the U.N. Director General to lead next year’s scheduled Global Food Systems Summit.

Demand for accountability

In the public letter, PELUM-Zambia, BIBA-Kenya, and HOMEF of Nigeria ask Andrew Cox, AGRA’s Chief of Staff and Strategy, to provide evidence from AGRA’s own monitoring and evaluation to address the serious concerns raised in the False Promises report.

They note that AGRA refused researchers’ requests for such data to inform the report. They pose a provocative series of concrete questions about AGRA’s impacts.

“African farmers deserve a substantive response from AGRA to the findings in the report. So do AGRA’s public sector donors, who would seem to be getting a very poor return on their investments. African governments also need to provide a clear accounting for the impacts of their own budget outlays that support Green Revolution programs.”

They conclude with a plea that could be addressed to all the esteemed stakeholders at this year’s Green Revolution Forum: “We hope this request can refocus this important discussion on AGRA’s 14-year record in increasing productivity, incomes, and food security for smallholder farmers in Africa.”

That would be a better theme for the forum to take up.

Timothy A. Wiseis a senior advisor at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and the author of Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Future of Food (New Press 2019). He provided a background paper that contributed to the report, “False Promises: The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.”

 

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