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Filippo Grandi, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Yasmine Sherif, Director Education Cannot Wait, UN Special Envoy for Global Education, Gordon Brown, UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore. Credit: ECW/Kent Page

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 24 2019 (IPS)

As massive protests escalated worldwide last month, millions of children walked out of schools to demonstrate against the lackadaisical response – primarily from world leaders –to the ongoing climate emergency resulting in floods, droughts, typhoons, heat waves and wildfires devastating human lives.

Gordon Brown, a former British Prime Minister and UN Special Envoy for Global Education, rightly pointed out a harsh reality: there are also millions of children who, ironically, have no schools to walk out from.

The figures are staggering: there are 260 million who don’t go to schools, mostly because there are none, while the education of an estimated 75 million children and youth have been disrupted by humanitarian crises.

One of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG4) is aimed at ensuring that everyone—”no matter who they are, or where they live” – can access quality education by the targeted date of 2030.

But achieving that formidable goal has been undertaken by Education Cannot Wait (ECW) described as the first global, multi-lateral fund dedicated to education in emergencies.

Launched in 2016, and hosted by the UN children’s agency UNICEF, ECW has provided educational opportunities, in its first two years of operation, to over1.5 million children and youth caught up in the widespread humanitarian crises.

And ECW has invested in 32 countries, including Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lebanon, Nigeria, State of Palestine, Somalia, Syria, Uganda, Yemen and Zimbabwe, providing schools and quality education in crisis settings.

But still, it has a long way to go because, at the current rate of progress, about 225 million young people will not be in school by 2030.

At a high-level UN summit meeting in September, ECW got a big boost, when world leaders pledged a record $216 million for children’s education.

Asked how confident she was that the ECW can help meet SDG4 – particularly when the UN remains skeptical of eradicating poverty and hunger by 2030, ECW Director Yasmine Sherif said: ‘I have hope that we can narrow the gap for the SDG4 target and at Education Cannot Wait, we are all highly motivated to contribute’.

However, she said, this will require increased, bold financial investments and funding in SDG4, especially for the 75 million children and youth left furthest behind in countries of conflicts, disasters and displacement.

ECW has put in place a business model that in a short period of time has proven to work and accelerate SDG4, said Sherif, a human rights lawyer with 30 years of experience in international affairs, including 20 years in management & leadership, and graduated with an LLM from Stockholm University in 1987 and joined the United Nations in 1988.

It is a model that translates the UN reform agenda and the New Way of Working into joint programming with governments, UN agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), enjoys strong strategic buy-in from donor partners who are increasingly investing in ECW as a catalytic and speedy funding mechanism, while also rolling out the Grand Bargain commitments, including the localization agenda, cash-assistance and significantly contributes to strengthened humanitarian-development coherence, she declared.

“In other words, the political will is there, organizational partners are committed to working together, and ECW’s investments are crisis-sensitive and rapid, while also focused on quality. Together with our partners, we move with humanitarian speed to achieve development depth. The determining factor will thus be financing.”

She pointed out that quality, inclusive education costs money and those costs are significantly higher in situations of armed conflicts, forced displacement and natural disasters, where the education sector is often partially or wholly destroyed, where access is a major challenge and where insecurity, the constant threat of violence and an ever-changing environment requires extraordinary precautions and measures.

“That is why these children and youth are left furthest behind in the first place, and we intend to reach them. But it largely depends on increased, urgent financing. ECW is calling on world leaders, private sector and philanthropic organizations to mobilize $1.8 billion by 2021 to reach children and youth caught in emergencies and protracted crises with education”.

Over the longer term, research from the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) in 2016 estimated that up to 2030, US$8.5 billion will be needed annually from the international aid community to provide a basic education package for the estimated 75 million children affected by crises, that is, US$113 per child, said Sherif who has served in New York, Geneva and in crisis-affected countries in Africa, Asia, Balkans and the Middle East.

Excerpts from the interview:

IPS: In terms of access to children in conflict situations, what crisis has been the most difficult? Yemen? Afghanistan? Syria? How do you monitor these situations? Or are most children in these war-ravaged countries left out of your mandate — perhaps due to security and/or lack of access reasons?

SHERIF: Education Cannot Wait was established at the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016 with a mandate to reach 75 million children and youth left behind due to emergencies and protracted crises. Our mandate is precisely that: to reach them.

The more exposed they are, the more insecurity that envelopes them, the more deprivation and injustice they suffer, the stronger is our incentive and responsibility to ensure they can claim their right to quality education. Yes, access is very difficult during an active armed conflict. Yet, we must together with partners find solutions to overcome the challenges and obstacles. The ultimate solution is of course a political one: peace.

So far, Education Cannot Wait and our in-country partners – including host-governments, UN agencies, civil society, private sector – and importantly, local organizations, communities, teachers and parents – have reached over 1.5 million girls and boys in the past 24 months and the numbers keep rising.

For a variety of reasons, not least insecurity and access, Yemen is a herculean challenge for delivering on a development sector like education. Still, we have been able to deliver partial education support to an additional 1.3 million children and youth who were consequently able to take end-of-cycle exams and receive food rations. As this type of assistance is different from the assistance provided in other countries, ECW beneficiaries in Yemen are featured separately.

IPS: Besides conflicts, forced displacement and natural disasters hindering SDG4, isn’t the lack of education also remotely linked to widespread poverty in developing nations? Is there a co-relation between the two?

SHERIF: Absolutely. In fact, it is not question of a lack of education being remotely linked to poverty, there is in fact a direct correlation. It is all interrelated: education and poverty; education of girls and gender-inequalities; education and the rule by force as opposed to the rule of law.

Indeed, quality and inclusive education – SDG4 – is the very foundation of all the other SDGs. How is it possible to build a socio-economically viable society if the citizens and refugees in that society cannot read or write, cannot think critically, have no teachers, no lawyers, no doctors.

Education is a sound economic investment: for each dollar invested in education, more that $5 is returned in additional gross earnings in low-income countries. Education empowers the most marginalized: a child whose mother can read is 50% more likely to live past the age of five.

Education is key to promoting peace, tolerance and mutual respect: it reduces the likelihood of violence and conflict by 37% when girls and boys have equal access to education.

IPS: Are Western nations the only major donors for ECW? Are there any political and economic heavy weights such as China, Saudi Arabia and India who are donors or potential donors?

SHERIF: There are currently 18 strategic financial donor partners to Education Cannot Wait and each year new partners join up with our movement. These include governments, private sector and philanthropic organizations from various regions including North America, Europe, Oceania and the Middle East.

As a vote of confidence in the progress we are achieving, several early partners have already recommitted new funding. As the global, multilateral fund for education in emergencies and protected crisis hosted by the United Nations with its 193 UN Member States, we believe that increasing investments in Education Cannot Wait will continue to encourage more strategic donor partners in the larger UN family – whether they are from the north or the south, east or west.

We are all one humanity, and we have a collective responsibility to ensure that all children and youth in conflicts, natural disasters and displacement can exercise their human right of a quality education.

IPS: On fundraising and educational goals, is there any coordination between ECW and the International Finance Facility for Education (IFFED)? if not, how different are they?

SHERIF: We have a shared understanding of the colossal needs to address the challenges of education worldwide and ECW and IFFED are very complementary. So, coordination and cooperation come very easily.

The most optimal coordination always occurs where there is a shared vision and a clear division of labor. ECW and IFFED have two different business models and each targets different sides of the same coin, which allows us to maximize collective impact in each context. The same complementarity pertains to GPE, which also has a different business model and focus.

All approaches are needed and by complementing each other’s efforts, we can achieve real results for children. No one can do it alone. In the field of service, it is all about working together, complementarity and collaboration.

IPS: Can the funds you raise be described as un-earmarked core resources, or are some of them earmarked by donors as to where you should spend them– and on which humanitarian crisis? In short, do you have a free hand or are they funds with strings attached?

SHERIF: More than half of the funding ECW has is unearmarked, though we do also have some earmarked funds. We have a shared understanding among our strategic donor partners based on a comprehensive financial analysis, humanitarian and development needs assessments.

There are no political strings that hamper the operations and we work on the basis of combined humanitarian principles (humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence) and development principles (national ownership, capacity development and sustainability).

ECW adheres to organizational standards of accountability, transparency and risk-mitigation, and our donors are proactive and strategic partners in all of this. So, from these important principles and perspectives, while we do not have a free hand to do whatever we want, thankfully, we are free to effectively and speedily serve those left furthest behind. And, that is the greatest freedom of all.

If you want to learn more about Education Cannot Wait and its efforts to get children and youth caught in armed conflicts, forced displacement, natural disasters and protracted crises, please follow ECW on Twitter at: @EduCannotWait and visit their website here: https://www.educationcannotwait.org/”

The post World’s Spreading Humanitarian Crises Leave Millions of Children Without Schools or Education appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM / ROME, Oct 24 2019 (IPS)

On October 11, the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee announced that this year´s Peace Prize is awarded to Ethiopia´s prime minister Abiy Ahmed: “For his efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation, and in particular for his decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea.”1 Let us hope that Abiy remains a worthy Peace Prize winner and that warfare and human suffering on the Horn of Africa will finally come to an end.

The decision surprised those who speculated that the Prize would be awarded to the environmental activist Greta Thunberg. However, people close to the Nobel Committee declared that the decision was unaffected by public opinion. The Committee had made an effort to follow the statutes of Alfred Nobel´s testament – that the Prize has to be awarded to “the person who has done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and the establishment and promotion of peace congresses.” –2

Irrespective of sixteen years old Greta Thunberg not been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize her huge following casts doubts about the trustworthiness of world leaders. In her opening address to leaders attending this year´s UN Climate Change Summit Greta declared that

You are failing us! This is all wrong! I shouldn’t be up here; I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope, how dare you! We will be watching you. You have stolen my dreams, my childhood with your empty words …3

It has been claimed that Greta Thunberg is being used to convey messages of her parents and various pressure groups. That such a young girl cannot make any difference on her own. Many of her detractors have rather been men than women. It has been pointed out that the “ infantilization” of Greta seems to coincide with stereotypical labels powerful men have used to silence women´s public speech – that they are over-emotional, hysterical, unable to think for themselves, or even mentally disturbed. Why do some men feel threatened by a sixteen years old girl? Can her attacks on unbound industrial capitalism be interpreted as doubts about certain men´s belief in their masculine self-worth?

It is not the first time a sixteen years old girl has provoked powerful men and triggered great changes. Most famous is probably Joan of Arc, who born in a peasant family claimed that she since she was thirteen years old had visions of saints instructing her to recover France from English domination. At the age of sixteen the charismatic, and hitherto entirely unknown girl was against all odds presented to Prince Charles of France, who decided to send her to Orleáns in an effort to end an English siege on that town. Soldiers, as well as their commanders, were enthused by Joan´s forceful personality and under her command they succeeded in crushing the English siege. Joan of Arc´s ardor and sense of righteousness turned the longstanding Anglo-French conflict into a religious war. She succeeded to lead French troops to swift victories, resulting in Charles´s consecration as French ruler. After years of humiliating defeats, which had demoralized and discredited military and civil leadership, the actions and message of an illiterate girl succeeded in boosting French morale and paved the way for a decisive French victory in the Hundred Years´s War. However, before that, Joan had in 1430 been captured by her enemies, put on trial by a pro-English bishop, declared guilty of heresy and burned at the stake, dying at nineteen years of age.4 I do not know if Joan of Arc´s far from peaceful efforts were recommendable, but she made old men listen to her and her achievements changed world history.

More unknown than Joan of Arc´s endevours is the bravery of another sixteen years old girl. In 1951, Barbara Johns convinced her schoolmates and teachers to organize a strike to protest the substandard facilities at her segregated school in Farmville, Virginia. While the school principal was away, Barbara Johns forged a memo ordering teachers to bring their classes to a special assembly. She then delivered a speech revealing her plans for a strike in protest of the unequal conditions of black and white schools. The same day, 450 students and teachers staged a protest in front of Farmville´s courthouse. Barbara´s actions attracted the attention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which took her case to court, using it as evidence that segregated schools are unconstitutional. Because she was a teenager at the time, Barbara Johns’s contribution to civil rights has generally been overlooked.

Had the student strike begun ten or fifteen years later, Barbara Johns would have become something of a phenomenon in the public media. In that era, however, the case remained muffled in the white consciousness, and the schoolchild origins of the lawsuit were lost on nearly all Negroes outside Prince Edward County. This was 1951 […] television was an infant, and the very word “teenager” had only recently entered common use. The idea that non-adults of any race might play a leading role in political events had simply failed to register on anyone.5

Barbara Johns´s struggle was far from being safe and harmless. She was harassed daily and the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in her parents´ yard, fearing for her safety they sent her to Montgomery Alabama to live with her uncle.

The force and dedication of young women, particularly those suffering from a vulnerable position, are often ignored, even mocked and in the worse cases met with violence. The fate of two young Nobel Peace Prize winners bear testimony of this. The 2014 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the then seventeen years old Malala Yousafzai for her “struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.”6 Malala was born to a Pashtun family in Pakistan, where her family ran a chain of schools in the Swat region. In early 2009, when she was eleven years old, Malala wrote a blog under a pseudonym for the BBC Urdu telling about her life during the Taliban occupation of Swat. Malala´s commentaries became known nationally, and she soon appeared on national TV. In October 2012, Malala was shot by a Taliban gunman, the bullet entered the side of her left eye, went through her neck and into her shoulder. She survived due to expert treatment at the military hospital in Pashawar.7

Nadia Murad is an Iraqi Yazidi woman who founded an organization to help “women and children victimized by genocide, mass atrocities, and human trafficking to heal and rebuild their lives and communities.”8 In 2018, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize with the motivation “for efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.”9 Nadia´s activism is a result of ISIS killing members of her family in 2014, twenty years old Nadia was after that held captive as a sex slave for three months, before she managed to escape.

On July 19 this year, Nadia met with Donald Trump. The video from that encounter can be seen as an illustration of a world leader´s disinterest in the disturbing message of a young woman.10 Behind Trump, sitting at his desk in the Oval Office, stand 27 survivors of religious persecution. Someone indicates the presence of Nadia, informing the President she is a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Trump turns to her, but appear to be uncomprehending and uninterested. Most of the time he avoids looking directly at Nadia, who tells him about the killing of her mother and six of her brothers. ”They say that ISIS is defeated, but where are the 3,000 Yazidis they abducted?” Nadia states that 95,000 Yazidis now are refugees and asks the U.S. Government for support. A distracted Trump asks where Nadia´s mother and brothers are, even if she just told him they had been killed. Trump declares: ”I know the area very well. We’ll look into it. And you had the Nobel Prize? That´s incredible. They gave it to you for what reason? Can you explain?” Nadia explains that she made it clear to everyone that ISIS raped thousands of Yazidi women and that she was the first woman who bore witness about this crime. Trump mumbles: ”Oh, really? Is that right? So you escaped?” Nadia repeats that she and many others do not know where their loved ones are, if they are dead or alive. Trump shakes her hand: ”I’ll look. We’ll look. OK, thank you very much.”

Watching the creepy spectacle of a powerful narcissist frozen in boundless self-absorption, makes you despair about today´s world leadership. It is not surprising that young and fearless women are becoming symbols of the spark of hope that in spite of everything continues to flicker in most of us. A hope that young people will be capable of following the advice of Langston Hughes:

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.11

1 https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2019/press-release/
2 https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/
3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYqtXR8iPlE
4 Warner, Marina (1981) Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism. New York: Vintage Books.
5 Branch, Taylor (1988) Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988. p. 21
6 https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2014/press-release/
7 Yousafzai, Malala and Christina Lamb (2013) I am Malala: The Story of a Girl who Stod Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
8 https://nadiasinitiative.org/
9 https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2018/press-release/
10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYUW-1Wg2xs
11 Dreams in Bontemps, Arna, ed. (1941) Golden Slippers: An Anthology of Negro Poetry for Young Readers. New York: Harper Collins.

Jan Lundius holds a PhD. on History of Religion from Lund University and has served as a development expert, researcher and advisor at SIDA, UNESCO, FAO and other international organisations.

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Hamza Idris (left), an editor with the Daily Trust newspaper, sits with colleague Hussaini Garba Mohammed in their office in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, in February 2019. The office was raided in January by the military, who seized 24 computers. Credit: CPJ / Jonathan Rozen

By Jonathan Rozen
ABUJA / NEW YORK, Oct 24 2019 (IPS)

Hamza Idris, an editor with the Nigerian Daily Trust, was at the newspaper’s central office on January 6 when the military arrived looking for him.

Soldiers with AK47s walked between the newsroom desks repeating his name, he told CPJ. It was the second raid on the paper that day; the first hit the bureau based in the northeastern city of Maiduguri, where Idris had worked for years.

The soldiers did not know what Idris looked like and his colleagues did not point him out, he said. Unable to find their target, they ordered everyone to evacuate and seized 24 of the paper’s computers. Idris simply filed out with everyone else.

In Maiduguri, however, the military arrested Uthman Abubakar, the Daily Trust northeastern regional editor, with his two phones and computer, CPJ reported at the time. He was held for two days, interrogated about his sources for a report written with Idris about a military operation in the region, and then released without charge.

“They took the devices to their computer forensics room,” Abubakar told CPJ. “They conducted some forensic search.”

The Daily Trust raids are emblematic of a global trend of law enforcement seizing journalists’ mobile phones and computers—some of their most important tools. CPJ has documented device seizures around the world, from the United States to Slovakia to Iraq.

In Benin, police copied data from the seized computer of Casimir Kpedjo, the editor of Nouvelle Economie newspaper, CPJ reported in April. And in Tanzania, during the detention of two CPJ staff in November 2018, intelligence officers took their devices and boasted about Israeli technology that could extract their information.

Forensics technology designed to extract information from phones and computers is marketed and sold to law enforcement agencies around the world. CPJ has found at least two companies that produce digital forensics tools—Israel-based Cellebrite and U.S.-based AccessData—operating in Nigeria, where CPJ research shows that security forces regularly arrest and interrogate journalists.

Recent Nigerian national budgets feature significant financial allocations to bolster surveillance and digital forensics capacities. From 2014 to 2017, the Nigerian government spent at least 127 billion naira (over US$350 million) on “surveillance/security equipment,” according to a 2018 calculation reported by Paradigm Initiative, a Nigeria-based digital rights group.

“Evidence showed that these purchases were made for political reasons, especially by the then authorities in power to monitor their adversaries and political opponents,” that report said.

One of Nigeria’s major security concerns is the years-long conflict in the northeast against Boko Haram and splinter group Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP). Hours before the raids on Daily Trust’s offices, the paper had published a report about a Nigerian military effort to retake six towns from Boko Haram.

In a statement published on Facebook the next day, a Nigerian army spokesperson said the report had divulged classified information, “undermining national security” and contravening Nigeria’s Official Secrets Act.

Privacy is enshrined in Nigeria’s constitution, and law enforcement agents must obtain a judicial warrant to search computer systems under Nigeria’s 2015 cybercrime law.

However, the 1962 Official Secrets Act gives sweeping powers for security forces to grant themselves warrants to search and seize all materials considered evidence, as well as arrest those suspected of committing offenses under the act.

On January 10, four days after the raids, Nigerian military investigators summoned Idris and Nurudeen Abdallah, the Daily Trust investigations editor, to question them about their sources for the report, which they refused to reveal, they told CPJ. Then the officers demanded their phones. “They said they want to scan it,” Idris told CPJ.

“They said [they] just want to see the contents and then maybe the numbers of the people I talk to—I said no.” The officers told them a server for scanning technology was housed at the Office of the National Security Adviser, the president’s top security aide, Abdallah told CPJ. The journalists said they had not brought their phones, and refused several follow-up requests to return with them.

CPJ reached Sagir Musa, a Nigerian military spokesperson, by phone on October 9 and asked about the Daily Trust raids. Musa said he could not hear and asked to be sent a message before the line went silent; subsequent calls and messages went unanswered. Calls to Onyema Nwachukwu, director of defense information for the Nigerian military, also went unanswered.

An individual within Nigerian law enforcement told CPJ that security forces use Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED) and Forensic Toolkit (FTK) to retrieve information from devices. UFED is sold by the Israel-based company Cellebrite, which is owned by the Japan-based SUNCORPORATION, while FTK is sold by the U.S.-based AccessData Group.

The individual agreed to speak to CPJ due to concerns about the technology’s possible misuse, but asked that their name be withheld for fear of reprisal.

Cellebrite’s website says their UFED product can “[e]xtract and decode every ounce of data within digital devices” and that their equipment is deployed “in 150 countries.” Company records stolen by hackers and reported by VICE News in 2017 suggest client relationships with Russia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. U.S. federal law enforcement has also invested in the Cellebrite technology, according to government procurement information listed online and media reports.

In Nigeria, “authorities seized [a drug lord’s] Samsung phone” during his arrest “and extracted and analyzed data from it using UFED,” according to a case study publicized on Cellebrite’s website.

Separately, Cellebrite’s UFED was used in Myanmar to “pull documents” from the phones of then jailed Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, The Washington Post reported in May 2019.

Cellebrite said it required clients to “uphold the standards of international human rights law” or it may terminate their agreements, according to the Post’s report. Cellebrite’s terms and conditions state that products, software, and services are to be used “in a manner that does not violate the rights of any third party.”

CPJ reached Christopher Bacey, Cellebrite’s director of public relations, by telephone in mid-September to request clarification about the company’s sales in Nigeria, and if the company reviews countries’ human rights records or considers the rights of journalists to protect their sources.

At his request, CPJ sent questions by email, but received no response before publication. Msao Koda, who works in Cellebrite sales for SUNCORPORATION, similarly requested questions by email in September and did not respond before publication.

Like Cellebrite, AccessData advertises FTK as a tool to identify information on “any digital device or system producing, transmitting or storing data,” including from web history, emails, instant messages, and social media. It also boasts capacity to “[d]ecrypt files, crack passwords, and build a report all with a single solution.”

In 2011, System Trust, a Nigeria-based digital security company, established a sales partnership through DRS, a South Africa-based cybersecurity company, to distribute AccessData technology, the Nigerian Vanguard newspaper reported at the time. System Trust CEO Philip Nwachukwu told CPJ by phone that the Nigerian security forces were not among his clients for their technology, but that he was not sure if AccessData had other business relationships in the country.

He also emphasized that digital forensics equipment should be deployed ethically. “I can’t be a state actor and feel like I have the power, then go and invade the privacy of an individual,” he said.

Several CPJ calls to AccessData’s corporate headquarters in the U.S. were forwarded by an operator, then rang unanswered. Interview requests sent to two email addresses provided over the phone by people at their London and Frankfurt offices also went unanswered.

CPJ’s repeated calls to DRS in early October were forwarded to cybersecurity specialist Zach Venter. On one occasion, Venter asked that CPJ call back after 30 minutes. Subsequent attempts to reach him via phone and messages were unsuccessful.

Uthman Abubakar’s devices were returned shortly after his release from detention in Maiduguri, but it was nearly seven weeks before the 24 computers confiscated during the second raid were returned, Mannir Dan-Ali, Daily Trust’s editor-in-chief told CPJ. The paper would not be using them again, he said.

For information on digital safety, consult CPJ’s Digital Safety Kit.

*Jonathan Rozen has previously worked in South Africa, Mozambique, and Canada with the Institute for Security Studies, assessing Mozambican peace-building processes. Rozen was a U.N. correspondent for IPS News and has written for Al-Jazeera English and the International Peace Institute. He speaks English and French.

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Excerpt:

Jonathan Rozen* is Senior Africa Researcher at the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)

The post Nigerian Military Targeted Journalists’ Phones, Computers with “forensic search” for Sources appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 24 2019 (IPS)

A partnership between United Nations and African Union (AU) agencies will help African economies insure themselves against the droughts and other extreme weather events that plague the continent, organisers say.

The AU’s African Risk Capacity (ARC) and the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) stuck a deal in Bonn, Germany, this week to raise money for the safeguard scheme and advance policies that help countries adapt to weather threats.

Organisers say that 45 million people across Africa cannot put enough food on their tables, especially in the south and east of the continent, where punishing dry spells have cut harvest yields and pushed up prices of staples.

“Reducing the impacts of drought and other natural disasters by helping member states improve climate resilience through innovative mitigation and risk financing instruments are key to our mandate,” Mohamed Beavogui, ARC’s director general, said in a statement on Wednesday. 

“The agreement signed today with UNCCD will create a functional synergy in our efforts to help countries better understand their risk profiles, improve knowledge and strengthen capacities for climate adaptation and food security.” 

Ibrahim Thiaw, executive secretary of the UNCCD, described a new financial vehicle called the eXtreme Climate Facility (XCF) that would raise money for AU members to access to alleviate their parched agricultural sectors.

The XCF will be “an important tool to help African countries to cope effectively with the impacts of drought”, said Thiaw, formerly a Mauritanian official and deputy chief of the U.N. Environment Programme.

Drought-ravaged countries can apply to the fund for help adapting to drought and other weather calamities, organisers said. Payouts will be corruption-proof and provided as “climate change catastrophe bonds”.

“The message is clear. We will see an increasing number of droughts with unprecedented severity, which are exacerbated by climate change. No country or region, rich or poor, is immune to the vagaries of drought,” said Thiaw.

“The UNCCD is helping 35 of Africa’s 57 countries to create the mechanisms they need to take early action to avert drought disasters. Today, Africa is ramping up pre-emptive actions as a unified front against future drought and climate-induced disasters in the region.”

The inking of an agreement between the two agencies came amid a week of growing concerns over harsh dry spells across Africa that are reducing harvests, killing wildlife and worsening security for millions of people.

On Wednesday, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a study group, released a report saying that three decades of conflict in Somalia — together with crippling droughts and flooding — were strengthening the hands of militants and weakening the government’s power. 

In the Hwange National Park in western Zimbabwe, at least 55 elephants have died from starvation since September, officials said on Monday. The locations of their carcasses — near water holes — suggested they had traveled long distances to drink.

On October 15, aid agency Concern Worldwide, which co-compiles the Global Hunger Index, said hunger levels in the turbulent Central African Republic were “extremely alarming”, while levels in Chad, Madagascar, and Zambia were “alarming”.

“Today marks the beginning of a unified front against drought and climate-induced disasters in the African region,” Thiaw said in a statement on Wednesday.

“Our key aims are to support the establishment and implementation of national drought plans and mobilise innovative financial instruments to better mitigate the risks of extreme climate situations.”

According to the UNCCD, droughts already bad and they are getting worse. By 2025, some 1.8 billion people will experience serious water shortages, and two-thirds of the world will be “water-stressed”, the UNCCD says. 

Though droughts are complex and develop slowly, they cause more deaths than other types of disasters, the UNCCD warns. By 2045, droughts will have forced as many as 135 million people from their homes.

But there is hope. By managing water sources, forests, livestock and farming, soil erosion can be reduced and degraded land can be revived, a process that can also help tackle climate change. 

Related Articles

• Displaced by the Desert: An expanding Sahara leaves Broken Families and Violence in its Wake
• Q&A: Holistic Land Management – Only a Movement can Prevent Desertification
• Money Grows on Trees–Don’t Uproot Them

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The post Bangladesh’s Climate Change Victims Safeguard the Sundarbans’ Endangered Dolphins appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

October 24 is International Freshwater Dolphin Day. Last year Bangladesh celebrated the international day for the first time, but the country has been instituting policies and programmes for years to protect the Sundarbans — home of Asia’s last two remaining freshwater dolphin species. IPS Correspondent Rafiqul Islam travelled to Khulna to file this report.

The post Bangladesh’s Climate Change Victims Safeguard the Sundarbans’ Endangered Dolphins appeared first on Inter Press Service.

David Kaye Credit: UN

By David Kaye
NEW YORK, Oct 23 2019 (IPS)

The prevalence of online hate poses challenges to everyone, first and foremost the marginalised individuals who are its principal targets. Unfortunately, States and companies are failing to prevent ‘hate speech’ from becoming the next ‘fake news’, an ambiguous and politicised term subject to governmental abuse and company discretion.

Online hate is no less harmful because it is online. To the contrary, online hate, with the speed and reach of its dissemination, can incite grave offline harm and nearly always aims to silence others. The question is not whether to address such abuse. It is how to do so in a way that respects the rights everyone enjoys.

States must meet their obligations by turning to key human rights treaties and the leading interpretations of human rights law by the Human Rights Committee and the 2013 Rabat Plan of Action.

Of particular concern is about governments that use ‘hate speech’ to restrict legitimate expression under the guise of ‘blasphemy’ or fail to define and enforce ‘hate speech’ rules according to human rights law’s rigorous standards of legality, necessity and proportionality, and legitimacy.

Governments and the public have legitimate concerns about online hate, but new laws that impose liability on companies are failing basic standards, increasing the power of those same private actors over public norms, and risk undermining free expression and public accountability.

Companies likewise are not taking seriously their responsibilities to respect human rights. It is on their platforms where hateful content spreads, spurred on by a business model and algorithmic tools that value attention and virality. They have massive impact on human rights and yet all fail to articulate policies rooted in human rights law, as the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights call upon them to do.

The report provides companies with a roadmap for tackling online hate according to basic principles of human rights law. It especially highlights the absence of human rights impact assessments at all stages of product development, the vagueness of company rules, and the lack of transparency of company processes.

https://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/FreedomOpinion/Pages/Annual.aspx

The human rights community has had a long-term conversation with social media and other companies in the Internet economy, and yet the companies remain stubbornly committed to policies that fail to articulate their actions according to basic norms of human rights law, from freedom of expression and privacy to prohibitions of discrimination, incitement to violence, and promotion of public participation.

The companies’ failure to recognise their power and impact, and to value shareholders over public interest, must end immediately. This report gives the companies the tools to change course.

The Special Rapporteurs and Working Groups are part of what is known as the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council. Special Procedures, the largest body of independent experts in the UN Human Rights system, is the general name of the Council’s independent fact-finding and monitoring mechanisms that address either specific country situations or thematic issues in all parts of the world. Special Procedures experts work on a voluntary basis; they are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work. They are independent from any government or organisation and serve in their individual capacity.

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Excerpt:

David Kaye is the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression

 
In a landmark report that reinforces legal standards to combat online hate, the UN’s monitor for freedom of expression calls on governments and companies to move away from standardless policies and inconsistent enforcement, and to align their laws and practices against ‘hate speech’ with international human rights law.

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Credit: United Nations

By Elena Zacharenko
BRUSSELS, Oct 22 2019 (IPS)

The number of newly elected Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) who oppose women’s reproductive rights, gender equality, sexuality education, same sex marriage and the Council of Europe Convention on Violence Against Women (Istanbul Convention) stands at around 30 per cent.

This European Parliament term has therefore seen a doubling of the number of MEPs who claim to fight these issues as compared to the last one, where I estimated around 15 per cent of parliamentarians fell into this category in a study for Finnish MEP Heidi Hautala.

Issues as diverse as women’s reproductive health and rights, LGBTI rights, sexuality education and preventing gender-based violence are collectively termed by their opponents as being part of a larger agenda of ‘gender ideology’.

The use of this ambiguous term has given opponents of women’s and other minority rights the ability to combine several diverging topics under one umbrella and present them as an integral package, allegedly being imposed on ‘traditional families’ by an all-powerful feminist and LGBTI lobby.

Many progressives are baffled by the rise of this phenomenon and often resort to the backlash or backsliding discourse to explain it, suggesting it is mere conservative opposition to the inevitable march towards greater gender equality and LGBTI rights.

However, this argument has limited explanatory power, as it ignores the complexities of the right-wing narratives and presents their voters as individually responsible for their rise.

Elena Zacharenko

To fully understand what is fuelling this trend, progressives must ask themselves a question that is much more self-reflective: what is the problem with the political, social and economic system in which opposition to these issues is able to capture the imaginations not only of supporters of extreme-right parties but also some of the voters traditionally belonging to the political centre?

As has already been argued, opposition to ‘gender ideology’ allows not only for the divergent causes mentioned above to be brought together under one umbrella, but to also bring together disparate actors, from centre-right to far-right and libertarian parties, as well as various religious movements and conservative grassroots organisations, for a common cause.

Indeed, the increase in opponents of ‘gender ideology’ in the European Parliament comes mainly from the strong performance by Matteo Salvini’s Lega, Nigel Farage’s Brexit party, Jarosław Kaczynski’s Law and Justice, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz and Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National – groups which have little in common in terms of their origins and programmes, aside from their opposition to these issues.

While most of these parties belong primarily to the new far-right Identity and Democracy group or the conservative and Eurosceptic European Conservatives and Reformists, Fidesz and Bulgarian GERB are opponents of ‘gender ideology’ within the centre-right EPP, while Slovakian SMER and Romanian PSD represent this trend within the S&D group.

A healthy debate within the progressive movement

While they are not unaware of the divisions in the progressive movement, conservative actors choose to present the debate within the women’s and LGBTI rights movements as homogenous and equally supported by the political mainstream.

This allows them to create a false dichotomy between themselves as proponents ‘traditional families’ and the progressives as ‘gender ideologues’ for their own political gain.

This picture however, misrepresents the progressive scene as one with a clear and unified agenda, rather than a heterogenous collection of movements, activists, NGOs, academics and public entities with distinct and often disparate opinions and calls.

While many of the objectives of these movements are indeed aligned, significant disagreements continue to exist between parts of the feminist movement and the LGBTI movement, as exemplified by the ongoing debate on defining gender as a social construct prescribing roles for men and women and that of a felt sense of identity, or that on surrogacy.

Within feminism itself, many divergent schools of thought clash, with liberal feminists opposed to radical feminists in the sex work vs. prostitution debate and Marxist and (neo)liberal feminists disagreeing on the origins and solutions to women’s oppression as being systemic/socio-economic or individual/cultural in nature.

Opposition to ‘gender ideology’, including labour market optimisation efforts, has become a new and very potent form of anti-establishment organising and protesting the neoliberal order.

Regrettably, in view of the abovementioned rise of opposition to many of the progressive movement’s causes, its reaction has been to attempt to silence these internal debates or present them as settled – to the detriment of their quality. It is often argued that the progressive movement cannot be seen to be internally squabbling in the face of the advance of the right, lest they become the ‘useful idiots’ furthering their opponents’ cause.

This results in self-censorship as movements do not want to appear to break the joint front in the face of attacks, stifling healthy debate and creating taboo topics. However, this attitude is not conducive to coming up with either a better understanding of the arguments of the other side, or with appropriate society-wide debates leading to policy-level solutions.

The EU’s proposed gender equality measures are designed to optimise the bloc’s economic outcomes and labour market performance and take little interest in promoting reproductive rights or social justice.

This lack of the EU’s normative influence is visible in the divergent and often weak approaches taken by EU member states’ in their policies on reproductive rights. That’s true not only for Poland and Malta but also Germany, where doctors have been prosecuted for providing information on abortion care, wherein describing the procedure has been labelled by anti-choice actors as ‘advertising’ it.

The case has sparked debate on the 1933 law limiting the provision of information on abortion in Germany, which has since been relaxed, but not fully overturned.

Istanbul Convention as collateral damage

Furthermore, EU governments and their state institutions still lack commitment to combatting sexual and gender-based violence as well as domestic violence (see the horrific cases of sexual violence in Spain and Ireland which were initially dismissed by local courts).

EU governments’ approaches to the sex industry are also absolutely incoherent, ranging from the Nordic model which criminalises the purchase of sex in Sweden, to decriminalisation in Denmark and the legalisation in Germany and the Netherlands.

The economic divisions between the countries of origin of prostituted women and those with a high sex industry demand, in addition to persisting gender inequalities in the EU, are laid bare though the legalisation model, which has been shown to increase demand and in turn promote both migration and trafficking of women from East Central Europe to the West of the EU.

The EU chooses not to engage on most of these issues, with the notable exception of combating violence against women. However, its efforts in this area are now being thwarted by its own member state governments, including those belonging to the moderate political centre: at the beginning of this year, both the Bulgarian (centre-right) and Slovakian (centre-left) government refused to ratify the Istanbul Convention – a text designed to increase state efforts to combat male violence against women and provide victims with better protection.

These decisions were taken in the face of popular protests against ‘gender ideology’ (and, in Bulgaria’s case, a decision by the constitutional court which ruled the Convention unconstitutional).

The protests hardly referred to the issue of violence against women but instead accused the Convention of being ideologically driven and denying the distinction between the male and female sexes – a claim that the definition of gender in the Convention (‘social roles, behaviours, activities and characteristics that a particular society considers appropriate for women and men’) clearly refutes.

These developments constituted an additional blow to the EU’s already fraught attempts to ratify the Istanbul Convention as a bloc, which came under increased scrutiny from opponents of ‘gender ideology’ in the wake of a letter from over 300 (predominantly anti-choice) NGOs.

They pointed out that the EU’s own interpretation of the Istanbul Convention appears to define ‘gender based violence’ beyond the confines of the text (i.e. male violence against women), as ‘violence that is directed against a person because of that person’s gender, gender identity or gender expression’.

The disenchantment with neoliberal globalization

Given the disagreements within and between the feminist and LGBTI movements and the EU’s lack of interest or inability to engage on a number of key gender equality questions, why are these entities facing attacks from opponents of ‘gender ideology’, and how is this movement able to gather so much popular support?

This appears to be a symptom of a disenchantment with centrist ‘politics as usual’ and the EU’s all-pervasive neoliberal policies and its member state governments, as well as the values they are perceived to support.

Opposition to ‘gender ideology’, including labour market optimisation efforts, has become a new and very potent form of anti-establishment organising and protesting the neoliberal order.

It perfectly exemplifies the rising dissatisfaction with liberal democracy and its pronounced discourse on human rights and the protection of minorities coupled with a lack of social and economic assurances for wide swathes of the population. Examples of this trend appear across the globe, from Brazil and the US, to Western European states like France and Spain.

Continuing to push forward neoliberal economic and employment policies while continuously eroding social provisions was what drove up support for opponents of equality measures in the first place.

In East-Central Europe, ‘gender ideology’ has become a means of expressing a rejection of the European East-West hierarchy and the failed promises of capitalist transformation. Indeed, despite assurances that austere economic policies and market liberalisation would allow the region to ‘catch up’ with the West, it continues to lag in economic development and standard of living when compared to ‘old’ EU member states.

What was imported instead, often with a patronising attitude, were lessons on ‘correct’ attitudes and values. Voters reject the values of gender equality and LGBTI rights not, as is often agued, because of civilizational ‘backwardness’, but because of the strongly felt disingenuity of neoliberal decision-makers’ concerns for rights, as long as these rights are not social or economic in nature.

The EU’s focus on the labour market participation of women as an indicator of gender equality or ‘emancipation’ is a perfect example. This logic fits in with the EU’s overall neoliberal model of governance, which, especially in times of demographic decline, requires both women’s participation in the paid employment and their (unpaid) reproductive capacity and reproductive labour to continue operating.

This message is primarily communicated in a value-laden or normative way: one of the main ways to achieve gender equality is ensuring women’s equal participation in the labour market.

The more a country’s employment force structure diverges from this ideal, the more ‘catching up’ it has to do to reach the developed or enlightened club of ‘old’ member states – never mind that women’s increased availability to take up paid employment in West European countries may be facilitated by the (often underpaid and unregulated) care work of East Central European women.

This workplace ‘empowerment’ model is completely at odds with many Polish women’s experience of the neoliberal labour market since the transformation. Indeed, their work experience has been far from emancipatory – they were the ones who bore the brunt of the consequences of the de-regularisation of the labour market post-1989, working in low-pay, low-status service industry jobs.

What progressives need to do

Alongside a host of other measures targeting women and families with additional social protections, the Law and Justice (PiS) government has introduced its flagship 500+ programme, which guarantees an unconditional monthly cash transfer of €120 per each child from the second one, and from the first one for families in particular financial difficulty.

This has allowed some of them to escape the harsh conditions of the labour market and helps explain the party’s popularity among women.

As I argued with Weronika Grzebalska, women’s strong support both for PiS and its social programmes stems from these programmes meeting women’s pragmatic interests in a society governed by neoliberal policies and allows to glean some insight into why the anti-‘gender ideology’ party continues to attract a significant voter base, gathering 45.4 per cent of the votes in the European election of May 2019.

If progressive political movements want to regain the electorate that is currently increasingly voting for parties espousing the war on ‘gender ideology’ (whether it be because of this position or despite of it), it must reflect on how much of this state of affairs is in fact due to the rejection of the neoliberal world order, rather than opposition to specific groups’ rights.

Continuing to push forward neoliberal economic and employment policies while continuously eroding social provisions was what drove up support for opponents of equality measures in the first place.

Moreover, voters feel a lack of recognition and representation if popular concerns are dismissed as ‘backwards’, hotly contested issues presented as settled and beyond debate and any critique of progressive positions coming from within the camp labelled as being the ‘useful idiot’ of the right.

Any political programme that wants to reverse this trend must address these issues and introduce policies which coherently address socio-economic needs in the field of gender equality and support for minorities.

*This article was originally published in International Politics and Society

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Excerpt:

policy in the area of rights through international non-profit organisations. Her areas of interest include sexual and reproductive health and rights, gender equality, women’s rights and social justice*.

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By Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Anis Chowdhury
KUALA LUMPUR and SYDNEY, Oct 22 2019 (IPS)

Public or state development banking will be vital to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, argues UNCTAD’s Trade and Development Report 2019 (TDR 2019).

Ongoing World Bank led efforts seek to leverage private finance via shadow banking by using public money to guarantee handsome returns managed by giant investment houses. Such financialization introduce new costs and risks to financing investments for sustainable development, decent work and renewable energy.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

TDR 2019 is critical of financialization, which encourages speculation at the expense of productive investments in the real economy. Instead, public banking is far more likely to promote productive investments, and should be enabled to do so.

Development banks different
Public banks are different from private banks, and more likely to serve the long-term public interest, investing in sectors and locations that private commercial banks are more likely to ignore.

Unlike other kinds of state-owned financial institutions, such as state-owned commercial banks or insurance companies, public development banks (PDBs) usually have specific mandates to be more than mere financial institutions.

Certain social and economic objectives are identified to guide their operations. Their achievements are typically due to successfully pursuing positive externalities over the medium and long-term, rather than focusing on short-term returns alone.

Thus, PDBs are supposed to generate both financial returns as well as ‘development dividends’. Sustainable development oriented investments generally involve benefits which are not only commercial, which tends to be the main, if not sole criterion of commercial banking.

PDBs also help counteract the pro-cyclical nature of private finance, which typically fails to adequately finance small enterprises, however innovative, infrastructure as well as environmental projects urgently needed to make economies more dynamic, inclusive and sustainable.

Generally successful, but underappreciated
Despite constant discouragement and many PDB closures as well as ‘commercializations’, PDBs survive in many developing countries. In recent years, Southern-led and Southern-oriented banks and funds have added hundreds of billions of dollars to such finance.

A recent book found PDBs in China, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Peru generally successful. The PDBs studied served as efficient instruments of national development strategies, helping to overcome major ‘market failures’ flexibly.

Anis Chowdhury

Researchers have also found that PDBs can be both profitable and efficient while being socially proactive and progressive in appropriate institutional settings. Others have shown that PDBs can better avoid inefficient credit allocation as commercial banks cannot fully internalize benefits from publicly desirable projects.

Potential not realized
UNCTAD notes that most public banks, especially development banks, are insufficiently capitalized to be effective in their publicly assigned roles. Nevertheless, some PDBs are very significant, e.g., the China Development Bank’s outstanding loan portfolio is over 13.4% of China’s GDP, while the Korean Development Bank’s is 10.5% of Korea’s GDP.

But PDBs in other countries — including India, Russia, South Africa, Mexico and Malaysia — have modest loan portfolios amounting to less than 2% of their countries’ GDPs.

Many PDBs’ low loan-to-equity ratios are due to imposed requirements to raise resources in capital markets, both at home and abroad. Thus, the scale of such PDB lending is limited by how markets view them, typically through the credit ratings’ lens.

Appropriate policy support crucial
TDR 2019 argues that greater policy support is necessary to enable public development banking to achieve its potential including by:

• Providing development and other public banks with more capital to scale up lending, including through direct financing;
• Supporting development banking with clear government mandates, performance indicators and accountability mechanisms valuing other criteria besides financial ones.
• Preventing PDBs from being subordinated to short-termist commercial criteria, or guaranteeing private investment returns, as recommended by the OECD and World Bank.
• Encouraging sovereign wealth funds, with assets estimated to be US$7.9 trillion, to direct resources in support of PDBs;
• Ensuring that bank regulators treat public banks, especially PDBs, more appropriately; development banks should be regulated suitably, recognizing their distinctive mandates, roles and operations;
• Reconsidering some governments’ insistence that their PDBs achieve high credit ratings; this task should be done by a credible international body of development finance institutions as credit rating agencies cannot be expected to challenge their own criteria;
• Using multilateral development banks to support green investments in developing countries as ‘green credit’ creation (including by quantitative easing’) is unlikely to be feasible in developing countries for fear of provoking exchange-rate and balance-of-payment crises;
• Freeing central banks from their typically narrow focus on price stability, usually by ‘inflation targeting’ in recent decades, to take on bolder, pro-active development roles. This should include creating and directing credit for sustaina

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By External Source
GENEVA, Oct 22 2019 (IPS)

In June 2019, the Secretary-General of the UN, António Guterres, launched the UN Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech. Respect for human rights, without any form of discrimination is one of the core fundamentals of this strategy.

In a recent interview with the UN Human Rights Office,  UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide Adama Dieng discussed how to combat the rising issue of hate speech. 

 

OHCHR: You are leading the UN’s new strategy to counter hate speech. What are some concrete measures that we will take to “tackle the whole life cycle of hate speech, from its roots causes to its impact on societies”? 

The UN Strategy and Plan of Action to address hate speech set out 13 commitments. These commitments will have to be implemented globally, but also at the national level. They include a wide range of actions, including:

• increasing understanding and monitoring of hate speech and its impact on societies
• identifying and devising programs to address the drivers and root causes of hate speech
• supporting alternative and positive narratives to counter hate speech.

There are many ways in which societies can stand up against hate speech and its impact. The most important way is by ensuring that populations are resilient against hate speech and the divisions it seeks to achieve.

This is a huge program, which will require the involvement of Member States, civil society, the media, tech companies and other relevant stakeholders. It is also the responsibility of each and every individual.

 

OHCHR: There’s a radical contestation of what constitutes hate speech today.  But is hate speech really too subjective to be defined? Can you offer a definition of hate speech? Or is it impossible without endangering freedom of expression that is under global attack?

Let me first say that there is no international legal definition of hate speech. The characterization of what is hateful is controversial and disputed. However, the United Nations, has developed a working definition, not an international legal definition.

At the UN, we understand the term “hate speech” any kind of communication in speech, writing or behaviour, that attacks or uses pejorative or discriminatory language with reference to a person or a group on the basis of who they are, in other words, based on their religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, colour, descent, gender or other identity factor.

This is often rooted in, and generates intolerance and hatred and, in certain contexts, can be demeaning and divisive.

At the UN, we also believe that freedom of opinion and expression is sacred; and that hate speech should never ever be confused with suppression of this freedom. Addressing hate speech does not mean limiting or prohibiting freedom of opinion and expression. It means keeping hate speech from turning into something more dangerous, particularly, incitement to discrimination, hostility and violence, which is prohibited in the international law, through the commitments set out in the Strategy and Plan of Action.

 

OHCHR: What are some of the most effective and powerful forms of social mobilization that you have seen against hate speech? What can we learn from them?

There are many ways in which societies can stand up against hate speech and its impact. The most important way is by ensuring that populations are resilient against hate speech and the divisions it seeks to achieve.

States are also responsible for ensuring that policies and programs of non-discrimination, inclusion and human rights are adequately applied. Other actors such as the media, religious actors, and every individual have a role and a responsibility to contribute to peaceful and inclusive societies. We need to mobilize the youth and invest in education.

We need to assert that diversity is richness, not a threat. In the 1930s, when hate speech was rising in Europe, no action was taken to tackle it. The result was the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews were killed.

We saw it also in Rwanda, where, within 100 days, nearly one million people were killed because of their ethnicity, because they were Tutsis. We saw it again in Myanmar, where over 700,000 Rohingya had to flee their country and find refuge in Bangladesh because the violence they faced. The instances of extreme violence were also preceded by hate speech.

 

OHCHR: What can every person do to combat hate speech? How can we better support everyone who is fighting it? 

We all have a role to play in countering hate speech. Today, many of us are connected through the internet. And even if we are not the targets of that hate speech, we need to get involved in addressing it, simply because we need to stand in solidarity with those who are being targeted.

We need to make sure that whoever is being subject to hate speech, feel supported. We need to come together to empower the voices of those victims.

We also need to include in the curricula in various schools around the world the emphasis on human rights and on prevention. One of the commitments of the Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech is for the the United Nations will convene an international conference on Education for Prevention with focus on addressing and countering hate speech which would involve Ministers of Education.

Watch Adama Dieng explain more about why hate speech is not protected in the video below.

 

 

 

This story was originally published by Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights

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By African Development Bank
WASHINGTON DC, Oct 21 2019 (IPS-Partners)

Rapid urbanization has provided most cities in the world with opportunities to provide more sustainable, vibrant, and prosperous centers for their citizens. But they must first address challenges such as inadequate infrastructure investments, pollution and congestion, and poor urban planning, according to a new report released today.

The report, Creating Livable Cities: Regional Perspectives, looks at urbanization trends across emerging and developing economies in Africa; Asia and the Pacific; Eastern Europe, Southern and Eastern Mediterranean; and Latin America and the Caribbean. It is a joint publication by four regional development banks (RDBs) operating in these regions—African Development Bank (AfDB), Asian Development Bank (ADB), European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), and Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

“Cities offer access to key infrastructure, institutions, and services for a good quality of life,” ADB President Takehiko Nakao said. “They can be centers of innovation for a more livable future for all. But realizing that potential requires forward thinking and flexible planning, adequate capacity at the municipal level, and good governance.”

Nakao took part in a launch event at the IDB headquarters today in Washington, D.C., with the presidents of the other three development banks: Mr. Akinwumi Adesina of the African Development Bank, Suma Chakrabarti of EBRD, and Luis Alberto Moreno of IDB.

The world’s urban population has grown from just 750 million in 1950 (or 31% of the total population) to 4.2 billion in 2018 (55% of the total population)—a number that is estimated to reach 5.2 billion in 2030 (60% of the total population). While the majority of leading economic hubs are still in advanced economies, the center of economic activity is moving toward the developing and emerging markets, the report says. Asia and Africa will account for 90% of urban population growth between 2018 and 2050, with more than a third of this growth to happen in just three countries—the People’s Republic of China (PRC), India, and Nigeria.

Although large and still dominant, megacities of more than 10 million people and national capitals are not the fastest-growing urban areas. Urban areas with fewer than 1 million residents account for 59% of the world’s urban population and are experiencing a faster growth rate across the regions, the report says.

President of the African Development Bank, Akinwumi Adesina said, “We are helping to open up rural areas to development as a means of reversing migration trends. To do this, we are investing in skill upgrades, creating jobs, providing access to SME finance for young men and women. Ultimately, we need to create livable and workable cities for the younger generation.”

Cities need large scale investments to develop and maintain infrastructure and services such as urban transport, water supply, sanitation, and solid waste management. In the face of rapid growth, overstretched services, skills shortages, and increased vulnerabilities to disasters are adding to cities’ environmental stress.

The publication examines the types of policy interventions and approaches needed to promote competitive, inclusive, equitable, and environmentally sustainable and climate-resilient cities—four factors that taken together make cities “livable.”

“RDBs play an important role in identifying, distilling, and diffusing knowledge and actions that can accelerate progress toward creating more livable cities,” the report says. Making cities more livable is one of the seven operational priorities of ADB’s Strategy 2030. ADB’s Livable Cities approach puts people and communities at the center of urban development, and promotes strengthening urban institutions through holistic and participatory urban planning and sustainable financing, and use of data and digital technologies to improve urban services to the residents.

Adesina called for increased regional development bank cooperation in information sharing, shared learning from existing diagnostic tools, and a joint action plan and collective effort to help create sustainable and livable cities.

Contact: Emeka Anuforo, Communication and External Relations Department, African Development Bank, email: a.anuforo@afdb.org

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A highly original research on poverty reduction has won the Nobel for economics.

By Raghav Gaiha
MANCHESTER, Oct 21 2019 (IPS-Partners)

I met late professor T.N. Srinivasan (popularly known as TN) a couple of months before he passed away in November 2018. Despite his original contributions to trade theory, ¬development economics, inequality and poverty, he never won the Nobel in economics. His colleague at Yale had once ¬remarked that TN would get not one but two Nobels. I was too much in awe of TN to ask this question but my friend asked him directly if he could think of an Indian economist who might win the Nobel for economics in the near future. He said, “Abhijit but not so soon”. He was right but not entirely.

After studying at University of Calcutta, Abhijit Banerjee went to Jawaharlal Nehru University and Harvard, where he completed his doctoral research. He then took up faculty positions at Princeton and in quick succession at Harvard and later at MIT, where he is the Ford Foundation inter¬national professor of economics.

He is that rare economist who moves effortlessly from abstruse aspects of information theory to applied microeconomics in different regions of the developing world. Although highly regarded in all fields that he has worked in, he (along with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer) is best known for pioneering research in formulating, refining and extending randomised control trials (RCTs) to understand and shed light on alleviation of global poverty. He and Duflo set up the Poverty Action Lab at MIT in 2003, which later became the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. This network has engaged in impact evaluation, policy outreach and capacity building in 81 countries.

They planned, refined and ¬extended ¬randomised control trials to alleviate global poverty.

What is an RCT? Borrowing an example from Abhijit’s research, take an experiment to examine the impact of textbooks on students’ test scores. The textbook is distributed to half the class randomly on a certain day. Say, six months later, a test is held and students are graded. If the score of the treatment group—the students who got the textbook—is higher than that of those who did not, it is valid to infer that the higher score is due to the textbook. Neither textbook distribution nor adding teachers improved the performance of the students. The failure of these two variables to influence the results is neither interesting nor surprising. However, scant attention is given to teacher absenteeism, which is rampant in rural schools.

Another widely cited example is the randomised evaluation of a group-lending microcredit programme in Hyderabad. A lender worked in 52 randomly selected neighbourhoods, leading to an 8.4 percentage point increase in take-up of microcredit. Small business investments and profits of pre-existing businesses increased, but consumption did not significantly grow. Two years later, after control areas had gained access to microcredit, but households in the treatment area had borrowed for longer and in larger amounts, very few significant differences persisted. But whether these findings are generalisable to other contexts is doubtful. So the verdict that microcredit is not the miracle it is claimed to be seems doubtful.

Is RCT the magic wand it is widely believed to be? Multi¬lateral agencies, governments and donors were quick to embrace it as it offered a simple tool to ¬assess policy impact. It is not uncommon to get ¬seduced by the charms of RCTs if you are not aware of their limitations.

Angus Deaton, another Nobel laureate, made a succinct appraisal of RCTs. Consider hypertension. There are two different drugs that ¬improve the condition. In clinical trials, one performs better than the other on average. However, management of hypertension may be more difficult in some cases and thus, a drug that is more effective on average may not be in those instances. So, while it is useful to know which drug is better on average, it is not so helpful where specific treatment is required.

Failure of the two educational experiments is attributed to limited learning of the students. Instead of relying on this ex-post observation, it would have been more helpful to embed these experiments in a theory of learning. There are also serious concerns about the spillover effects of an experiment in one village. By word of mouth, good practices may spread to the control group and neighbouring villages, compounding the difficulty of attribution to an intervention. Scaling up may depend on how an intervention is implemented and the context. Macro interventions (such as interest rate ¬reductions to revive the Indian economy), however, are not amenable to RCT as there is no control group.

These comments are not meant to denigrate Abhijit’s highly original and pathbreaking research. He is a worthy recipient of the Nobel. The claim, however,that RCTs have saved millions from abject poverty is exaggerated, if not misleading.

(The author is [Hon.] Professorial Research Fellow, Global Development Institute, Manchester. Views are personal.)

This story was originally published by Outlook

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Excerpt:

A highly original research on poverty reduction has won the Nobel for economics.

The post Wielding The Magic Wand appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Nigerian activists lobby African Finance ministers meeting. Credit: ActionAid

By Manuel F. Montes
NEW YORK, Oct 21 2019 (IPS)

Four years ago, UN member states proclaimed their ambitions for development in a document named “Transforming Our World”, also known as Agenda 2030.

Today, according to several assessments including of the UN’s inter-agency task force on financing for development (FfD) transformation has fallen off-track. It has received too little money, political commitment and action to change the workings of the global economy. Agenda 2030 spells out the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) needed to ‘transform our world’.

A cottage industry has arisen to produce estimates of the financial resources required, ranging from $1 trillion to $3 trillion per year. A second industry has emerged around the question of where to get the money.

By one UN estimate, global public and private investment amounts to around $22 trillion a year. It would take a redeployment of about 14% of that to meet the high-end estimate of $3 trillion. Many have questioned whether there is enough money and more have lamented that international aid flows appear insufficient. They miss two critical issues.

First is how to make sure that available resources are used for actual investments in the real world. Second is how to make sure that the investments that get funded advance goals of ending poverty, fighting climate change, and providing decent work. As things stand, vast sums are invested in ways that work against these goals.

This is especially true of private investment, much of which is directed at ‘securitization’, or the buying of other financial assets to turn a quick profit rather than supporting longer-term endeavors that boost jobs, welfare, and the environment.

Securitization is the result of decades of financial deregulation and tax cuts on capital gains and is driven by the thirst for large, instantaneous profits. To persuade the private sector to partner in long-term projects with real world benefits involves offering such enticements as a return of 10% or more.

Meeting such guarantees involves subsidies from public resources diminishing the public sector’s ability to make its own SDG investments. This unfortunate logic propels efforts at “impact investing,” “blended finance,” and “private-public partnerships”; Efforts which consume precious public-sector time and analytical resources, and where returns go to private finance, and risks are dumped on the public sector…

For the most part, the global financial system remains a part of the problem and not a partner in socially or environmentally sound development. What is to be done? The global financial system must be transformed to give priority to real investments in environmentally sound, employment-creating, long-term projects.

Private finance must be freed from the tyranny of asset price-driven financial markets. The logic of short-termism and of offloading risk onto others needs to be overturned. This kind of systemic reform once championed by academics and NGOs is now even taken on by the Financing for Sustainable Development Report, the UN’s ‘bible’ on financing.

Even as private finance begins to evolve to embrace new kinds of risk governments – for all their flaws – will retain the central role in identifying, designing, financing, and completing projects. This means that public finances need to be shored up. The best source of public money is taxation.

ActionAid research shows that where this is through an increase in value-added or other consumption taxes – it may unfairly burden poorer citizens, who spend larger portions of their incomes on buying goods and services.

What needs to be done involves multinational corporations with operations in developing countries. Capital flows need to be regulated to staunch the siphoning off of resources generated in developing countries; amounting to – according to ActionAid research for example – $147 million in Burundi in 2018.

The current investment regimes endorsed and enforced by the International Monetary Fund and others need to be upended.

Investment treaties and so-called free-trade agreements should no longer protect investors and corporations that make short-term loans (mostly searching for quick profits derived from high interest rates) to developing countries and those who gamble in international markets, using massive sums of money taken from the developing countries. How multinational companies hosted by developing countries are taxed also need to be changed to make possible the ‘reshoring’ of domestic resources.

Rules that allow or encourage companies to shift profits to rich countries or tax havens must be scrapped. Developing countries have faced significant resistance in pursuing global financial and tax reforms, not only from some of the world’s most powerful banks and companies, but also from the governments of the wealthy countries in which those enterprises are headquartered.

But rich-country governments need to become part of the solution. From climate change to widespread poverty and inequality, the problems confronting us are immense and the actions embodied in the SDGs are urgent. Systemic changes are vital to build the foundations on which to ‘transform our world’ in keeping with the vision of Agenda 2030.

*The views expressed in this article are his own.

The post Private Finance and Agenda 2030: Way Off-Track appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Manuel F. Montes is the former Permanent Observer to the UN for and Senior Advisor on Financing and Development of the South Centre

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Pauline Ades-Mevel, Head of European Union and Balkan desk at Reporters Without Borders, warns that press freedom in Europe is declining. Courtesy: Reporters Without Borders

By Ed Holt
VIENNA, Oct 21 2019 (IPS)

Rising populism, anti-media rhetoric from politicians, cyber-harassment of journalists and physical attacks are among the reasons why press freedom in Europe is on the decline, according to the global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

As it released its annual Press Freedom Index earlier this year, the group warned that Europe was “no longer a sanctuary for journalists”, pointing to the murders of three journalists in Malta, Slovakia and Bulgaria in the space of a few months  and warning that “hatred of journalists has degenerated into violence, contributing to an increase in fear… the decline in press freedom in Europe… has gone hand in hand with an erosion of the region’s institutions by increasingly authoritarian governments”.

IPS spoke to Pauline Ades-Mevel, Head of European Union & Balkan desk at RSF about why press freedom was deteriorating across the continent and how, while threats to press freedom in Central and Eastern Europe often make headlines, the situation is far from trouble free in Western Europe. Excerpts of the interview follow. 

Europe is “no longer a sanctuary for journalists”, says Reporters Without Borders, pointing to the murders of three journalists in Malta, Slovakia and Bulgaria in the space of a few months  and warning that “hatred of journalists has degenerated into violence, contributing to an increase in fear”. Pictured here is a 2018 mass protest in Slovakia in the wake of the killing of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancee Martina Kusnirova led to the resignation of the country’s Prime Minister, Interior Minister and head of police. Credit: Ed Holt/IPS

Inter Press Service (IPS): RSF’s most recent surveys and reports suggest that media freedom is on the decline generally in Europe. Is this decline specific for Europe or part of a global trend?

Pauline Ades-Meve (PAM): When working on our most recent Global Press Freedom Index, we looked to see if there was a trend of deterioration of press freedom just in Europe or elsewhere. We found that it was actually a global trend, that we could see that trend in many regions. We looked at why this was the case and, while there are some different reasons in different countries, what we saw in general was that there was a climate of fear in which many journalists were working in. This is why there is this general deteriorating trend. Fear has been causing the most problems for journalists.

In Europe specifically a number of countries have fallen down the Index. This is for a number of reasons and comes with rising populism, anti-media rhetoric from politicians, cyber-harassment of journalists, physical attacks.

IPS: Threats to media freedom in central and eastern Europe and the Balkans have made a lot of headlines in recent years, perhaps understandably due to the nature of those threats, but RSF has made clear that media freedom in western Europe is also declining. What kind of threats are media facing in western Europe today?

PAM: We have seen threats to journalists emerge in recent years in Western Europe. For instance, in Spain, during the Catalan independence protests, leaders of the movement delivered rhetoric which undermined trust in journalists. They did not think journalists were covering the situation properly, or at least not in the way they wanted, and they viewed journalists who were not supporting their cause as people who were working against it and trying to prevent independence.

We recently published a report on the pressures faced by journalists in Spain and people don’t realise that, at the moment, Spain is no longer a heaven to be a journalist when you cover politics.

And then another example is Italy where there are 20 journalists who have around the clock police protection because they are facing threats from criminal networks.

Journalists in Europe are facing cyber-harassment – journalists covering protests in Spain and in France have been attacked online.

There is also a trend we are seeing in Western Europe of journalists being attacked when covering protests themselves. This is because part of the population no longer trusts the media anymore – protest leaders have portrayed them negatively, as untrustworthy, because they are not happy with the coverage. Journalists sometimes face violence and terrible threats from protestors. We have had cases of female journalists being threatened with rape. And sometimes, when they cover demonstrations, journalists are sometimes targeted by both the protestors and the police, which makes their mission even harder. 

IPS: Are these threats growing or changing in nature?

PAM: They are growing and new threats are emerging. One of these is growing legal harassment of journalists. Governments and businessmen are chasing journalists legally, through lawyers and courts, trying to stop them reporting and doing their jobs. This is extremely worrying.

IPS: How do they differ, if at all, from the threats faced by media in central and eastern Europe and the Balkans?

PAM: In some ways the threats are the same. There is a lot of legal harassment of journalists in central and eastern Europe and the Balkans. There is also physical intimidation of journalists and cyber-harassment too, while in some countries the independence of public media is under threat as well with governments trying to interfere in editorial independence, to influence them. We tend not to see this in Western Europe.

IPS: Physical intimidation of journalists is not a new phenomenon, especially in some countries in Europe, e.g. Russia or Ukraine. Is it becoming more common in western Europe, though, and if so, who is doing the intimidation?

PAM: Western Europe is certainly not free of this. Journalists in Western European states do face physical intimidation. Places like France, Spain, Italy, fascist groups in Greece. And it is only a few months ago that a journalist, Lyra McKee, was killed in Northern Ireland. Western Europe is not without this problem, even today.

IPS: There have been cases of journalists being attacked by protestors, and sometimes police, at demonstrations in parts of Western Europe in recent years e.g. in France. While this is not a problem specific to just western Europe, or Europe as a whole, in the past press were generally seen as neutral observers at such events and as such, left alone. Is that changing, are journalists now being seen as ‘fair game’ by certain groups?

PAM: One thing we have noticed in recent years is that due to social media and some ‘media’ which frankly should not be labelled as media, people are losing trust in media in general and this has galvanised certain people in certain movements and groups to attack journalists. As an example, when asked many of the Gilets Jaunes protestors in France said that their favourite TV station for news was the Russian state-sponsored channel RT, or people’s Facebook pages where they could read stories. We could then see at protests that protestors were attacking journalists with rocks because they were not happy with them, they did not trust them, did not think they were portraying the protests the way they wanted them to. So they just attacked them and destroyed their things, like cameras.

IPS: Online hatred towards journalists, including incitement to violence against them, appears to have become more of a problem in recent years. Is this the case in Europe and if so, what do you think is driving this rise?

PAM: This is a problem across Europe, but not just Europe. It is worldwide. Being online means that the attacked can remain anonymous and that anonymity emboldens them, makes them feel stronger. Their hatred also makes them feel powerful. Cyber-harassment is one of the major problems facing journalists in a lot of countries in Europe, both in Western Europe and the rest of the continent.

Much has been reported about authoritarian governments in parts of central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans trying to crack down on critical media so they can cement their power e.g. Hungary, Poland, Serbia. Do you think public perception of western Europe with its historical traditions of democracy and freedoms, particularly freedom of speech, means that people can sometimes mistakenly assume that this could never happen in western Europe?

I am often reminded of conversations between journalists in France who remind themselves of how they work in an environment where they are protected by legislation, by institutions, and have the freedom to do their jobs. But while the West is seen as having traditionally good, strong democracies to protect journalists, the situation with press freedom is not as good as it has been. Populist movements have spread across Europe, including Western Europe. We have seen problems with, for example, independence of public media in Spain.

IPS: Would you say there are greater legal or constitutional safeguards against an erosion of media freedom in western European states than in other parts of Europe?

PAM: I think that Western European states may have a greater sense of European values and respecting those values. This includes respecting the freedom of the media and some governments in Western Europe have moved to specifically protect journalists, even giving them a special status – in Portugal, there is a legal statute protecting journalists so that if someone attacks a journalists it is actually more serious a charge than attacking a normal member of the public.

Overall the situation in Western Europe with regard for respect of the institution of press freedom is better than in other parts of the Europe. This is why we have seen an erosion of press freedom in places such as Hungary, or Bulgaria, because in those countries there is not the same tradition, or sense of, European values.

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The post Q&A: How Europe has Moved Away from Being a Sanctuary for Journalists appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

IPS Correspondent Ed Holt speaks to PAULINE ADES-MEVEL, Head of European Union & Balkan desk at RSF

The post Q&A: How Europe has Moved Away from Being a Sanctuary for Journalists appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Migrants arriving at Lampedusa, Italy. Credit: Ilaria Vechi/IPS.

By External Source
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 21 2019 (IPS)

A landmark UN migration study published on Monday shows that 93 per cent of Africans making the journey to European countries along irregular routes, would do it again, despite facing often life-threatening danger.

The UN Development Programme (UNDP) report, Scaling Fences: Voices of Irregular African Migrants to Europe, sets out to find out why those who put themselves in the hands of people smugglers, and put themselves in other vulnerable positions to cross borders, make the decision to leave home avoiding formal immigration procedures, in the first place.

The report, which interviewed 1,970 migrants from 39 African countries in 13 European nations, all of whom declared that they had arrived in Europe through irregular means and not for asylum or protection-related reasons, reaches some counter-intuitive conclusions.

 

Migrants often hold steady jobs, better educated

A gender pay gap which favours men in Africa, “resoundingly reverses in Europe, with women earning 11 per cent more, contrasting with previously earning 26 per cent less, in Africa”

It finds that getting a job was not the only motivation to move; that not all irregular migrants were ‘poor’ in Africa, nor had lower education levels. Around 58 per cent were either employed or in school at the time of their departure, with the majority of those working, earning competitive wages.

But around half of those working said they were not earning enough.

In fact, for two-thirds of those interviewed, earning, or the prospect of earning in their home countries, did not hold them back from travelling. The respondents also spent at least three years more in education than their peers.

“Scaling Fences highlights that migration is a reverberation of development progress across Africa, albeit progress that is uneven and not fast enough to meet people’s aspirations. Barriers to opportunity, or ‘choice-lessness’, emerge from this study as critical factors informing the calculation of these young people,” said Achim Steiner, UNDP Administrator.

“By shining a light on why people move through irregular channels and what they experience when they do, Scaling Fences contributes to a critical debate on the role of human mobility in fostering progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals and the best approaches to governing it,” he said.

 

Migrants, in their own words

Here’s what some of the migrants interviewed told UNDP researchers – their last names were not given to help protect their identities.

• “If you have a family, you have to ensure they have food, shelter, medicine, and education. I have a young daughter. People may ask what kind of father I am, to leave behind my wife and infant daughter. But what kind of a father would I be, if I stayed and couldn’t provide them a decent life?” – Yerima
•  “The idea to try and reduce the weight of migration is to look at the causes. It is… the governing policies that entrench people in poverty, that don’t develop anything. Schools that don’t exist, failing health and corruption, repression. That pushes people to emigrate.” – Serge
• “In five years’ time, I see myself in my home country. For a good five years, (my family) haven’t seen each other. So one day will come when we will see each other. And when I go back to my home country, I don’t think I will come back” – Mahamadou
• “It was all to earn money. Thinking of my mom and my dad. My big sister. My little sister. To help them. That was my pressure. That’s why Europe.” – Drissa

 

 ‘Shame’ of not providing, keeps African migrants in Europe

The apparent shame of failing in their “mission” to send sufficient funds back home, emerged as a major factor keeping migrants working in Europe, according to UNDP.

Around 53 per cent had received support from family and friends, in order to make the journey, and once in Europe, around 78 per cent, were sending money back.

The report also found key differences between men and women in terms of the migrant experience. A gender pay gap which favours men in Africa, “resoundingly reverses in Europe, with women earning 11 per cent more, contrasting with previously earning 26 per cent less, in Africa”, said UNDP.

A higher proportion of women were sending money back – even among those not earning.

But when it comes to crime, women are suffering more, with a higher proportion falling victim to a crime in the six months prior to being interviewed, than men, and significantly higher instances of sexual assault.

 

Opportunity and choice must expand at home

UNDP describes Scaling Fences as “a clarion call to continue to expand opportunity and choice in Africa while enhancing opportunities to move from ‘ungoverned’ to ‘governed’ migration, in line with the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration.”

It is the second in a series of UNDP reports documenting the journeys of young Africans, with the first, exploring what drives some into the arms of violent extremism.

 

This story was originally published by UN News

The post More than 90 per cent of Africa Migrants Would Make Perilous Europe Journey Again, Despite the Risks appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Female subsistence farmers, who according to the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa form more than 70 percent of farmers in Africa. Last week USAID announced $70 million of investment into research for new seeds and methods to reduce the impact of droughts and disease on crops across the developing world. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By James Reinl
DES MOINES, United States , Oct 21 2019 (IPS)

Experts vaunted new strains of seeds, drone aircraft and other technological breakthroughs as solutions-in-the-making for farmers in Africa, where hunger, drought and food price hikes are continent-wide problems.

At the gathering of nutritionists in the 2019 Borlaug Dialogue International Symposium, held annually in Des Moines, Iowa, in the United States, hopes were pinned on a new generation of so-called ‘agro-entrepreneurs’ in Africa.

At the event, USAID administrator Mark Green announced $70 million of investment into research for new seeds and methods to reduce the impact of droughts and disease on crops across the developing world.

“Humanitarian assistance, including food assistance, is treatment, not cure,” said Green. “We must develop new technologies and partnerships that will not only assist displaced families in crisis settings, but offer them livelihood opportunities wherever they can find them.”

The three-day gathering, which ended on Friday, saw some 1,200 experts, policy chiefs, executives and farmers from more than 65 countries tackle food scarcity and price hikes — blights that disproportionately hurt sub-Saharan Africa.

Jennifer Blanke, vice president for agriculture human and social development at the African Development Bank (AfDB) said Africa “missed out” on the green revolution that bumped up harvests across Asia and Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s.

But with new technologies — from unmanned “drone” aircraft to new strains of more resilient crop seeds — coming online, African farmers and policymakers have an opportunity to get agriculture back on track and boost harvests.

“You can do so many things with technology,” said Blanke.

“With drones, you can survey your fields in a minute, which would have taken hours and hours previously. You can spray pesticides. Satellite technology allows you to see what’s happening to weather systems. Basic mobile technology helps farmers in rural areas know what prices they can get for their food.”

In the coming months, Blanke aims to bring together researchers, policymakers and investors to foster helpful policies and roll out schemes to buy and spread technology as well as training farmers and officials how to use it.

Dozens of young African entrepreneurs traveled to Des Moines to network, woo investors and brainstorm ideas for addressing Africa’s worrying problem of producing enough food for a growing population.

They included Ifeoluwa Olatayo, from Nigeria, who was awarded a fellowship from the World Hunger Fighters Foundation, for building small hydroponic farms on rooftops in Ibadan, in Oyo State, for growing lettuce, cucumbers and other vegetables

“Since we’re planting in close proximity to consumers, we’re able to create fast and easy access to nutritious foods while at the same time lessening the impact of transportation on the whole agricultural value chain,” said Olatayo.

“It’s important that people have access to nutritious foods, as affordable and as fresh as possible.” 

Other agro-entrepreneurs are tackling another problem for African farmers — the fact that, thanks to bad roads, poor transport and other woes, entire harvests rot beside the fields they were grown in and never reach market.

Other start-ups involve distributing new varieties of seeds that are more resilient to insects and disease, yield bigger harvests, provide more nutrients, and in some cases taste better than the crops they are replacing.

Lourena Arone Maxwell, from Mozambique, which has been ravaged by disease and droughts since cyclones Idai and Kenneth killed more than 600 people earlier this year, is focussed on fighting crop diseases.

“Plant diseases can reduce the amount of food that farmers have and the solution is a very affordable and environmentally-friendly method to control them,” Maxwell said on the sidelines of an event to honour the first batch of fellows.

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By Kingston Reif and Shannon Bugos
WASHINGTON DC, Oct 18 2019 (IPS)

The Trump administration is reportedly on the verge of withdrawing from the 1992 Open Skies Treaty, according to lawmakers and media reports. Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, first sounded the public alarm in an Oct. 7 letter to National Security Advisor Robert C. O’Brien.

“I am deeply concerned by reports that the Trump Administration is considering withdrawing from the Open Skies Treaty and strongly urge you against such a reckless action,” Rep. Engel wrote. “American withdrawal would only benefit Russia and be harmful to our allies’ and partners’ national security interests.”

Slate columnist Fred Kaplan reported Oct. 9 that former National Security Advisor John Bolton pushed for withdrawing from the treaty before departing the administration.

Following Bolton’s departure in September, White House staff continued to advocate for withdrawal and convinced President Trump to sign a memorandum expressing his intent to exit the treaty. The Omaha World-Herald reported that the signed document directed a withdrawal by Oct. 26.

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), and Senate Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Jack Reed (D-R.I.) joined Rep. Engel in an Oct. 8 letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper denouncing a possible withdrawal.

The lawmakers wrote that “pulling out of the Open Skies Treaty, an important multilateral arms control agreement, would be yet another gift from the Trump Administration to Putin.” They also noted that the treaty “has been an essential tool for United States efforts to constrain Russian aggression in Ukraine.”

The United States and several allies in December 2018 conducted an “extraordinary flight” over eastern Ukraine under the Open Skies Treaty. The flight followed a Russian attack in late November 2018 on Ukrainian naval vessels in the Black Sea.

Republican lawmakers also expressed concern about ditching the treaty. In an Oct. 8 statement, Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) stated that he has “yet to see a compelling reason to withdraw from Open Skies” given the “valuable access to Russian airspace and military airfields” the United States gains from the treaty.

Signed in 1992, the Open Skies Treaty permits each state-party to conduct short-notice, unarmed, observation flights over the others’ entire territories in order to collect data on military forces and activities. The treaty entered into force in January 2002 and currently has 34 states-parties, including the United States and Russia.

According to the treaty, states-parties must give one another 72 hours advance notice before conducting an overflight. At least 24 hours in advance of the flight, the observing state-party will supply its flight plan, which the host state-party can only modify for safety or logistical reasons.

No territory is off-limits under the treaty. Each participating country is assigned a quota of overflights it can conduct and a quota, based on its geographic size, of overflights it must accept every year.

Since 2002, there have been nearly 200 U.S. overflights of Russia and about 70 overflights conducted by Russia over the United States. After the overflight, the information collected must be provided to all states-parties.

In recent years, disputes over implementation and concerns from some U.S. officials and lawmakers about the value of the treaty have threatened to derail the pact.

For example, Washington has raised concerns about Russian compliance with the treaty, citing, in particular, Russia’s restricting of observation flights over Kaliningrad to no more than 500 kilometers and within a 10-kilometer corridor along Russia’s border with the Georgian border-conflict regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

In response, the United States has restricted flights over the Pacific Fleet in Hawaii and the missile defense interceptor fields in Fort Greely, Alaska.

The House-passed version of the fiscal year 2020 defense authorization act included a provision that would reaffirm Congress’ commitment to the treaty and prohibit the use of funds to suspend, terminate, or withdraw from the agreement unless “certain certification requirements are made.”

The Senate version of the bill did not include a similar provision. The House and Senate continue to negotiate a final version of the bill.

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Excerpt:

KINGSTON REIF is director of disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Arms Control Association and SHANNON BUGOS, research assistant.

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By Metropolitan Emmanuel Adamakis, Moscow, Rabbi David Rosen, Jerusalem,Dr. Nayla Tabbara, Beirut, Dr. Vinu Aram, India and Rev. Kosho Niwano, Tokyo
MOSCOW, JERUSALEM/BEIRUT/NEW DELHI/TOKYO, Oct 18 2019 (IPS)

On the 8th of October, the United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned that the organisation is running out of money by the end of October – “member States have paid only 70 percent of the total amount needed for [our] regular budget”.

This is the same institution, whose Charter first took effect on October 24, 1945, after a world war where an estimated total of 70–85 million people perished (i.e. about 3% of the 1940 world population).

The United Nations was created to “reaffirm faith … in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small… and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom…”

It is often forgotten that the purposes of the United Nations, are in alignment with the values of all faith traditions. It is also forgotten that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was predicated upon the values shared by all faith traditions.

As faith leaders, we have our temples, mosques, churches, synagogues and countless related institutions – and pulpits – which, as history has proven time and again, are impossible to replace. Indeed, our religious institutions significantly predate most member states of the United Nations.

Our faiths call upon us to believe in that which is transcendental and otherworldly, and to serve every living being to live in peace and dignity. Through centuries of existence, we have learned to appreciate the value of coming together on what we agree, to serve all regardless of any, and all, differences.

And in the countless efforts to do so, we appreciate and respect the challenges of convening the diversity of Divine creation around a set of shared values and purposes.

That is why we appreciate and respect the United Nations system.

The United Nations was created, is maintained, and serves, governments (and those with observer status). Governments are critical rights’ holders of members of their respective societies. Governments themselves know that to uphold the rights and serve their peoples – even within national boundaries – requires transcending their own singular capabilities.

There is a humility – and a grandeur – of human spirit, which is impossible to capture in any institution. Yet it is precisely that humility and grandeur which is required by “we the peoples” – as stated in the UN Charter – to appreciate and honor an institution built to represent and serve 193 governments and political representations.

The World Health Organization, a specialized agency of the UN, led the charge in the eradication of smallpox; UNICEF, the UN division focused on child welfare, says it has helped save the lives of more than 90 million children since 1990.

Over the last two and a half decades, the UN has assisted in efforts to help more than 1 billion escape extreme poverty, 2.1 billion people access improved sanitation facilities, and 2.6 billion people access improved sources of drinking water. These accomplishments matter for billions of people.

As people of faith, and as pragmatists who lead respective institutions, we must ask ourselves: who else is willing and able to serve these very same responsibilities – at comparable scale? Our faith institutions have long served those needs. But the lesson learned time and again, is that our religious institutions, also, are necessary, but insufficient.

Our faiths call upon us, in different ways, essentially, “to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, and to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security…” – the very same words of the UN Charter.

Precisely because we are faith leaders, from all faiths, from different corners of the world, with the longest legacy of serving communities, we can say with utter conviction, that our world needs a United Nations.

Today, perhaps more than ever – as winds of war and countless conflicts continue to sweep our shores, as massive fires scorch or flood our ecosystem, as the largest number of displaced people ever, stand at the gates of many of our nations while multitudes perish seeking life – today, the need for this unique multilateral space, is a moral imperative.

As leaders representing the only platform of all faith institutions, from all over the world, we, members of Religions for Peace, on the eve of our own 50th year, humbly – and yet determinedly – and with one voice, call upon the governments who owe their dues, to uphold the rights of all peoples, by honoring the commitment towards the only world institution that represents – and serves – the peoples of the world.

The post Religious Leaders’ Plea to Member States: Honour Your Commitment to the UN appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

The authors represent RELIGIONS FOR PEACE—the world’s largest and most representative multi-religious coalition from several faiths, including Judaism, Orthodox Christianity; Islam; Hinduism and Buddhism

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Africa Investment Forum 2018

By Farhana Haque Rahman
ROME, Oct 18 2019 (IPS)

Headwinds are blowing amid IMF warnings of a “synchronised slowdown” in global economic growth, yet Africa’s investment drive is still gathering pace, supported by intense international competition in development finance.

Despite the global slowdown, 19 sub-Saharan countries are among nearly 40 emerging markets and developing economies forecast by the IMF to maintain GDP growth rates above 5 percent this year. Particularly encouraging for Africa is that its present growth leaders are richer in innovation than natural resources.

While Akinwumi Adesina, president of the African Development Bank, admits to sleepless nights over the “headwinds” to African growth – primarily the US-China trade war – he remains excited over the continent’s prospects as the AfDB gears up for its annual Africa Investment Forum.

The November 11-13 gathering in Johannesburg follows major milestones achieved in 2019, notably the coming into force of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement, described by Adesina as a “phenomenal development”.

In May, 54 of Africa’s 55 countries became signatories to the initiative which aims to eliminate 90 percent of tariffs on goods and significantly reduce non-tariff barriers. The free trade area means to integrate Africa into a unified market with a population of over one billion and output of $1.3 trillion.

The AfDB does not gloss over the enormous challenges ahead, however, noting that 120 million Africans remain out of work, 42 percent of the population live below the $1.25 poverty line and about one in four in sub-Saharan Africa are undernourished. Africa is also most vulnerable to the global climate crisis, although it is the world’s least contributor to carbon emissions.

Akinwumi Adesina

Under Adesina, appointed in 2015 and backed by his native Nigeria for a second term, the AfDB has responded to such challenges by scaling up investment in five priority areas dubbed the High 5s: electricity and energy; food; industrialisation; integration, and improving the quality of life.

At the UN climate crisis summit in September, Adesina announced the AfDB would double its climate financing to emerging economies to $25 billion from 2020-2025. Half would be aimed at helping governments adapt to the impacts of climate change, such as droughts and rising sea levels.

“Poor countries didn’t cause climate change, they shouldn’t be holding the short end of the stick,” the AfDB president said.

The bank will invest $20 million to help fund the Sahel’s new Desert to Power solar scheme, with Adesina seeing renewable energy as a driver of economic development and replacing all of Africa’s coal-fired power stations.

During his term the bank has increased the renewable power share of its energy portfolio to 95 percent from about 60 percent. Off-grid solar-powered energy is seen as key to connecting the 50 per cent of African households without access to electricity.

Last year’s inaugural Africa Investment Forum generated $38.7 billion in “investment interest” in infrastructure projects, and the multilateral lender is setting a target of $60 billion this year to close what it sees as Africa’s “infrastructure gap” amounting to $108 billion. As an investment marketplace which attracts heads of state, the AfDB says it will work at the Forum in conjunction with all commercial banks across Africa, as well as development finance institutions, global sovereign wealth funds and pension funds.

China’s presence at the Forum is sure to come under close scrutiny given Beijing’s focus on Africa, with President Xi Jinping’s flagship Belt and Road Initiative pledging $60 billion in financing for projects across the continent. China’s trade with Africa has soared over the past 20 years from about $10 billion to close to $200 billion. In a reflection of shifting balances of power, an analysis by Quartz found that nearly twice as many African leaders attended the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in Beijing in September than the UN General Assembly in New York two weeks later.

Not to be outdone, Russia has invited over 50 African leaders to its first Russia-Africa summit in Sochi in late October, the culmination of a strategic push that marks Moscow’s re-entry into the continent, with its focus on military deals and oil and gas contracts. With trade and investment replacing aid, US and European multilateral lenders are also directing more funds towards Africa.

The Africa Investment Forum may also enjoy the glow of more favourable headlines for the continent in recent weeks: Mozambique held relatively peaceful presidential elections in mid-October, which followed the signing in August of a peace deal between the ruling Frelimo party and former civil war rivals Renamo; and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was awarded the Nobel peace prize for his role in resolving the border conflict with Eritrea, as well as promoting peace and reconciliation in Ethiopia and the wider East African region.

Farhana Haque Rahman

Mozambique sees itself on the brink of substantial investments following its discovery of huge gas reserves while, as commentators noted, Abiy’s first official state visit outside Africa after coming to office last year was not to the traditional western capitals or even Beijing, but to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, major investors in his ambitions to transform Addis Ababa.

With foreign investors and multilateral institutions gathering at the door, the AfDB’s president is addressing fears that Africa is piling up debt and mortgaging its future.

“What’s important is that African countries get into deals that are transparent with terms of engagement that are clear,” he told Bloomberg in September.

“If there were cases where some folks got away with deals in the past because others aren’t around the table to help negotiate well — that’s changing. I don’t think any African nation should trade away its future for immediate gains. We want fair and transparent transactions.”

Farhana Haque Rahman is Senior Vice President of IPS Inter Press Service; a communications expert, she is a former senior official of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

The post Africa’s Investment Drive Gathers Pace appeared first on Inter Press Service.

An aerial view of settlements in the middle of the desert in the surrounding area of Timbuktu, North of Mali. Courtesy: UN Photo/Marco Domino

By Issa Sikiti da Silva
BAMAKO, Mali/COTONOU, Benin , Oct 18 2019 (IPS)

Abdoulaye Maiga proudly displays an album showing photos of him and his family during happier times when they all lived together in their home in northern Mali. Today, these memories seem distant and painful.

“We lived happily as a big family before the war and ate and drank as much as we could by growing crops and raising livestock,” he tells IPS.

“Then the war broke out and our lives changed forever, pushing us southwards, finally settling in the region of Mopti. Then we went back home in 2013 when the situation stabilised,” Abdoulaye explains.

In 2012, various groups of Tuareg rebels grouped together to form and administer a new northern state called Azawad. The civil strife that resulted drove many from their homes, with communities often fleeing with their livestock, only to compete for scarce natural resources in vulnerable host communities, according to the United Nations.

• In Mali, three-quarters of the population rely on agriculture for their food and income, and most are subsistence farmers, growing rainfed crops on small plots of land, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the U.N.

After the security situation began to improve in 2013, many returned home to rebuild their lives and livelihoods.

But soon it was the turn of the expanding Sahara Desert, drought and land degradation that became the next driver of their displacement.

“As time went by, the land became useless and we found ourselves having no more land to work on. Nothing would come out that could feed us, and our livestock kept dying due the lack of water and grass to eat, ” Abdoulaye recalls.

“Drought across the Sahel region, followed by conflict in northern Mali, caused a major slump in the country’s agricultural production, reducing household assets and leaving many of Mali’s poor even more vulnerable,” FAO says.

“We used to move up and down with our livestock, looking for water and grass, but most of the times we found none. Life was unliveable. The Sahara is coming down, very fast,” Abdoulaye says emotionally.

In the end, the Maiga family had to leave their home and broke up; Abdoulaye and his brother Ousmane heading to Benin’s commercial capital Cotonou in 2015, after a brief stint in Burkina Faso, as the rest of their family headed for Mali’s capital, Bamako.

Malian girls stand in the shade in Kidal, North of Mali. Photo MINUSMA/Marco Dormino

Threatened with creeping desertification …

The U.N. says nearly 98 percent of Mali is threatened with creeping desertification, as a result of nature and human activity. Besides, the Sahara Desert keeps expanding southward at a rate of 48 km a year, further degrading the land and eradicating the already scarce livelihoods of populations, Reuters reported.

The Sahara, an area of 3.5 million square miles, is the largest ‘hot’ desert in the world and home to some 70 species of mammals, 90 species of resident birds and 100 species of reptiles, according to DesertUSA. And it is expanding, its size is registered at 10 percent larger than a century ago, LiveScience reported.

The Sahel, the area between The Sahara in the north and the Sudanian Savanna in the south, is the region where temperatures are rising faster than anywhere else on Earth. 

The cost of land degradation is currently estimated at about $490bn per year, much higher than the cost of action to prevent it, according to UNCCD recent studies on the economics of land desertification, land degradation and drought.

Roughly 40 percent of the world’s degraded land is found in areas with the highest incidence of poverty and directly impacts the health and livelihoods of an estimated 1.5 billion people, according to the U.N.

In a country where six million tonnes of wood is used per year, reports say Malians are mercilessly smashing their already-fragile landscape, bringing down 4,000 square kilometres of tree cover each year in search for timber and fuel.

Lack of rain has also been making matters worse, especially for the cotton industry, of which the country remains the continent ’s largest producer, with 750,000 tonnes produced in the 2018 to 2019 agriculture season. Environmentalists believe Mali’s average rainfall has dropped by 30 percent since 1998 with droughts becoming longer and more frequent.

… and conflict for resources

Paul Melly, Chatham House Africa consultant, tells IPS that desertification reduces the scope for agriculture and pastoralism to remain viable.

“And of course, that may lead a few disenchanted members of the population, particularly young men, to be attracted by alternative livelihood options, including the money that can be offered by trafficking gangs or terrorist groups,” he says.

Ousmane echoes Melly’s sentiments, saying: “The temptation is too much when you live in desertification-hit areas because you don’t get enough food to hit and water to drink.

“That’s where the bad guys start showing up on your door[step] to tell you that if you join them, you will get plenty food, water and pocket money. The solution is to run away, as far as you can to avoid falling into that trap.”

Consequently, Ousmane and Abdoulaye sold the few remaining animals the family had so they could leave the country.

In Burkina Faso they hoped to find work in farming. 

However, they were not always welcomed.

“We could feel the resentment from locals, so I told my brother we should leave before it gets ugly because there were already some tensions between local communities over what appeared to be land resources,” he says.

Chatham House’s Melly confirms this: “There is no doubt that the overall context, of increasing pressure on fragile and sometimes degrading natural resources, is a contributory factor to the overall pressures in the region and, thus, potentially, to tension.”

 Like elsewhere on the continent, severe environmental degradation appears to be among the root causes of inter-ethnic conflicts.

Using the Darfur region as a case study, the Worldwatch Institute says: “To a considerable extent, the conflict is the result of a slow-onset disaster—creeping desertification and severe droughts that have led to food insecurity and sporadic famine, as well as growing competition for land and water.”

What is being done?

Projects such as the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification’s Land Degradation Neutrality project aimed at preventing and/or reversing land degradation are some of the interventions to stop the growing desert. 

• Another large that aims to wrestle back the land swallowed by The Sahara is the Great Green Wall (GGW), an eight-billion-dollar project launched by the African Union (AU) with the blessing of the UNCCD, and the backing of organisations such as the World Bank, the European Union and FAO.
• Since its launch in 2007, major progress has been made in restoring the fertility of Sahelian lands.
• Nearly 120 communities in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger have been involved in a green belt project that resulted in the restoration more than 2,500 hectares of degraded and drylands, according to the UNCCD.
• More than two million seeds and seedings have also been planted from 50 native species of trees.

Everyone, including terrorists are equal in the face of the expanding Sahara

But there remain gaps and many in Mali still remain affected. 

Community leader Hassan Badarou spent several years teaching Islam in rural Mali and Niger. He tells IPS Mali has a very complex situation.

“It is not easy to live in these areas. People there face double threats. It is double stress to flee from both armed conflict and desertification. And such people need to be welcomed and assisted, and not be seen as a threat to locals livelihoods.

“That is why we used to preach tolerance and solidarity wherever we went, to avoid a situation whereby local communities would feel that their meagre resources are under threat from newcomers. There should be a dialogue, an honest and frank dialogue when communities take on each other over land and water resources,” he advises.

Against the expanding Sahara, all are equal. Fadimata, an internally displaced person from northern Mali, tells IPS that climate change is affecting everyone in the Sahel, including terrorists.

“I saw with my own eyes how a group of heavily-armed young men came to a village, looking for food.

“They said they wanted to do no harm, but wanted something to eat. Of course we were very scared, but the villagers ended up putting something together for these poor young men. They sat down and ate, and drank plenty of water and left afterwards. I think it is better that way than to kill villagers and steal their food, livestock and water.”

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The post Displaced by the Desert: An expanding Sahara leaves Broken Families and Violence in its Wake appeared first on Inter Press Service.