Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

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By GGGI
Sep 19 2019 (IPS-Partners)

In 2019, the Ethiopia government, led by Prime Minster Dr. Abiy Ahmed, launched the ambitious Green Legacy campaign that set a milestone to plant 200 million tree seedlings within 12 hours as integral part of an annual target to plant 4 billion tree seedlings.

July 29, 2019 was declared to be Green Legacy day, which aimed to plant 200 million seedlings in a day countrywide by all stakeholders based on the Prime Minister declaration to all Ethiopian citizens, governmental and Non-governmental institutions, Civil and Private organizations, Embassies, Agencies and others. Subsequently, the GGGI Ethiopia country office joined the campaign, with Environment, Forest and Climate Change Commission (EFCCC) as a key partner on the country’s green growth initiatives, to be part of this historic event.

This campaign has shown substantial government dedications towards green development actions, mobilizing stakeholders and forest development initiatives as a country.

Following the Prime Minster national call, a core national technical committee was established and led this campaign to coordinate and ensure tree planting activities across different parts of the country properly and effectively at respective planting sites.

Moreover, a national archive and communication center was established to record and communicate planting tallies as they happen on the site through the application of GPS and modern communication technology. National and international medias have recorded and broadcasted the events, which enabled global outreach to demonstrate Ethiopia’s efforts and achievements on tree planting.

 

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The core technical team disclosed the outcome that both targets have been met, in which annual achievement has reached more than 4 billion seedlings. It’s also reported that more than 350 million seedlings have been plated on a single day, which was recorded to be the world’s highest tree seedling planting event ever.

This is a significant measure for Ethiopia to address forest problems, especially to reduce deforestation and enhance forest development, and thereby, improve forest goods and services that have crucial social, economic and environmental roles.

Various scholars have reported that historically, Ethiopia is said to have about 40% forest coverage, which currently has declined to less than half. A recent EFCCC report indicated that Ethiopia has about 15.5 percent forest cover. Apparently, no one would argue about the fact that Ethiopia forest resources have been declining in size and quality through time and deficit between annual forest gain and loss.

 

Credit: Fanabc

 

For Ethiopia, forest development and management is not a matter of choice, rather it’s compulsory to ensure sustainable development and to achieve overarching Climate Resilient Green Economy (CRGE) and Growth Transformation Plan (GTP) strategies.

Ethiopia’s land features are characterized by mountainous and rugged topographic landscapes that are suitable for natural resources conservation including flora and fauna, water reservoirs and multiple functions.  Therefore, landscapes and watersheds management though natural regeneration and restoration have important contributions for the country and beyond the territory. For instance, forestry development has a critical role to address climate changes effects through mitigation and adaptation measures, which have national and international significance.

 

Credit: Fanabc

 

Ethiopia hydro dams have been under serious challenges due to watershed degradations that led to soil erosion and siltation that impacts electricity generation and power supply. In turn, this has been impacting industry and manufacturing sectors due to power shortages, which have direct implications on the economy and livelihoods.

Afforestation and reforestation activities reduce wood supply and demand gaps, as Ethiopian rural communities significantly depend on the forest products for their livelihood, which includes income generation, construction materials, energy, farm tools, foods and so on, both for home consumption and commercial uses. Agroforestry practices have critical roles to improve land management and productivity, which contribute to household incomes and reducing forest pressure.

The forest sector is one of the four pillars under the CRGE strategy to promote green growth development and address climate change mitigation actions.  Generally, this forest development action has multiple contributions and effects that encompasses social, economic and environmental aspects at local, national and global scales.

 

Credit: Fanabc

 

This event is the beginning of long journey, which requires building on this momentum and transforming it into an institutional and strategic approach to realize the intended objectives. It’s believed that the ultimate goal of tree planting is to enhance forest resources to provide improved goods and services sustainably.

Hence, it needs silvicultural and management interventions, scientific knowledge and technology to devise a sustainable management system, demonstrate economic contributions and impacts, forest products value addition and benefit sharing mechanisms, technical supports and law enforcement, knowledge management and sharing on best practices and lessons.

Finally, beyond the accomplishment, this is a lesson that demonstrates how leadership, coordination and joint efforts can make a difference on a pertinent issue. Furthermore, it’s good to reiterate that many individuals, organizations and countries have witnessed how the Ethiopia Green Legacy action has been landmark and exemplary. With this, GGGI commends and is honored to be part of this event and looks forward to further supporting the country’s inclusive green growth efforts.

 

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By Geneva Centre
GENEVA, Sep 18 2019 (IPS-Partners)

A panel debate was organized by the Geneva Centre for Human Rights Advancement and Global Dialogue (The Geneva Centre) and the Permanent Mission of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to the UN in Geneva on the enhancement of access to justice for children in the UAE and the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). It was held on the margins of the 42nd regular session of the Human Rights Council.

The purpose of the panel was to raise awareness about the need to protect the rights of children in vulnerable situations, in particular to seek redress for injustices, to gain a deeper understanding of the root causes and risk factors of child abuse and neglect, and to identify best practices in this domain.

In this connection, the panel took stock of the progress achieved in the UAE to enhance the legal empowerment of children, and identify areas of improvement in line with the provisions set forth in the CRC and other relevant international legal frameworks. It included the participation of Safety Ambassadors, created under the precept of the Wadeema Law.

The Executive Director a.i. of the Geneva Centre Dr Umesh Palwankar served as the panel moderator. The panel was opened by introductory remarks made by HE Obaid Salam Al Zaabi, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of the UAE to the UN in Geneva.

This was followed by panel statements by the following panellists:

– (1) Professor Velina Todorova – Vice-Chairperson and Member of the Committee on the Rights of the Child;

– (2) Ms Fatma Ghulam Murad Albooshi – Head of Section of the Department of Child and Woman Protection. General Department of Human Rights, Dubai Police;

– (3) Ms Beate Andrees – Chief, Fundamental Principals and Rights at Work Branch, ILO;

– (4) Mr Phenny Kakama – Child Protection Specialist, UNICEF Regional Office for Europe and Central Asia.

Professor Velina Todorova stressed the need for actions to be taken for prevention, protection and support to child victims. She referred to target 3 of SDG 16: “Promote the rule of law at the national and international levels and ensure equal access to justice for all” as the standard bearer with regard to enhancing access to justice for children.

Ms Murad Albooshi presented the endeavours made by the Dubai Police and the UAE to promote access to justice for children, in particular through the adoption of Wadeema Law and to spread the culture of child rights, enhance child security, monitor and report violations of their rights and seek redress through appropriate mechanism and institutions. In this regard, she explained the innovative role of the Safety Ambassadors who are in fact schoolchildren themselves.

Ms Andrees commended the endeavours made by the UAE to end the worst forms of child labour and for having been one of the first countries to have ratified the Child Labour Convention 182 of 1998. She echoed the recommendations made by ILO to the Government of UAE to continue to provide any information relating to the nature, extent and trends of the worst forms of child labour, and in particular statistical data on the number of children covered by the measures giving effect to the Convention.

Mr Kakama highlighted amongst others that access to justice means more than just the procedural process and that access to justice is the gateway to other rights. He stressed that it is of utmost importance to strengthen accountability mechanisms, enhance transparency and collaboration across sectors that will ensure the full realisation of all the rights of children.

In the panel discussion that followed, the Safety Ambassadors presented their activities and objectives and the positive results obtained in terms of addressing violations of child rights and in providing remedies to address such injustices.

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Credit: United Nations

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 18 2019 (IPS)

The two key goals in the UN’s development agenda are the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger by 2030.

But most of the world’s developing nations, currently fighting a losing battle against rising poverty and hunger –and suffering from the devastating impact of climate change– are likely to miss the deadline for most of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), according to the latest report by Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

Jens Martens, executive director of Global Policy Forum (New York/Bonn), told IPS that four years after the adoption of the 2030 Agenda, most governments are off-track to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.

He said recent reports of the UN, including the Global Sustainable Development Report and the Spotlight Report 2019 show that in many areas there is no progress at all, and in some even regression.

“Destructive production and consumption patterns have further accelerated global warming, increased the number of extreme weather events, created plastic waste dumps even in the most isolated places of the planet, and dramatically increased the loss of biodiversity,” said Martens, who has coordinated the international Civil Society Reflection Group on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

He pointed out that most governments have failed to turn the proclaimed transformational vision of the 2030 Agenda into policies that bring about real change.

“Even worse, national chauvinism and authoritarianism are on the rise in a growing number of countries, seriously undermining the social fabric, and the spirit and goals of the 2030 Agenda,” he noted.

And on the eve of a high-level summit meeting on SDGs on September 24-25, the UK based Overseas Development Institute (ODI) has released a new report predicting that at least 430 million people are expected to live in extreme poverty by 2030, – an increase of 7.5% on previous projections.

In a worrying sign that global efforts to reduce extreme poverty are failing, new ODI calculations find that, compared to figures released last year, an additional 30 million people will be living on less than $1.90 a day by the end of the next decade.

Credit: United Nations

Asked if poverty figures have declined in the world’s two most populous nations, namely China and India, Jesse Griffiths, head of the Development Strategy and Finance programme at ODI, told IPS that while many emerging market economies like China and India have been rapidly reducing poverty, in many of the world’s poorest countries the situation has been getting worse.

He said ODI research suggests that 430 million people will be living in poverty by 2030, and poverty will be increasingly concentrated in the poorest countries.

In the report titled Financing the end of extreme poverty: 2019 ODI, researchers say extreme poverty could be eradicated if governments in poor countries increased their tax revenues by a quarter and all donors met the UN 0.7 aid spending target.

Lead author Marcus Manuel, senior research associate at ODI, said: ‘We know that extreme poverty could be eliminated but this research shows that without major change hundreds of millions of people will remain living on less than $1.90 a day by 2030.

‘While economic growth will continue to help lift millions of people out of extreme poverty, many are being left behind. This does not have to be the case”.

The key challenge for countries and donors is whether they are willing to increase their financial effort and better target their spending in order to meet their commitment of ensuring nobody has to live in extreme poverty.

Martens told IPS that the implementation of the 2030 Agenda is not just a matter of better policies. The current problems of growing inequalities and unsustainable production and consumption patterns are deeply connected with power hierarchies, institutions, culture and politics.

Hence, policy reform is necessary but not sufficient. “What we need are fundamental governance reforms at all levels, including at the United Nations,” he noted.

Martens said Governments established the High-level Political Forum (HLPF) as the central UN body in overseeing SDG follow-up and review processes at the global level.

But compared to other policy arenas, such as the Security Council or the Human Rights Council, the HLPF remained weak, he argued.

“With an agenda of equal importance, the HLPF should be transformed to a Sustainable Development Council, supported with complementary machinery at regional and thematic levels”.

Unfortunately, he noted, the SDG Summit on September 24-25, is not expected to make this kind of necessary fundamental decisions. The official result is already clear: a political declaration with the ambitious title “Gearing up for a Decade of Action and Delivery for Sustainable Development”.

The governments promise a “higher level of ambition” in the further implementation of the SDGs and stress the “urgent need for accelerated action at all levels”.

“The fact that governments have left it at this level of abstraction and vagueness was the price of being able to agree a consensus declaration with Trump, Bolsonaro & Co. at all,” he added.

But there is a rapidly growing global movement for change, a movement that takes the commitment of the 2030 Agenda to “work in a spirit of global solidarity” seriously.

“Let’s hope that the year 2020 with its official occasions, particularly the 75th anniversary of the UN, will provide an opportunity to translate the calls of this movement for social and environmental justice into political steps towards a new democratic multilateralism,” he declared.

Meanwhile, asked how far behind donor nations are from the 0.7 aid targets, ODI’s Griffiths, said: ‘While ODI’s report reveals that if donors met their 0.7% aid commitment and channelled half their aid to the poorest countries, all countries could have enough resources to end poverty, sadly donors are collectively less than half way there, giving just 0.31% of their GNI in 2018.’

In 2018 five OECD DAC (Development assistance committee, that sets the rule for what counts as aid) members met the 0.7 target: UK, Sweden, Norway, Luxembourg, Denmark. (Owing to its small size, Luxembourg might not be counted as a ‘major’ donor. Netherlands used to but not recently.

The ODI report makes key recommendations for governments and donors to end extreme poverty by 2030.

Governments in the poorest countries should:

Increase their tax revenues by a quarter, to the maximum level that is economically feasible

Allocate half of their public spending to health, education and social protection, as Ethiopia and Tanzania have come close to doing

Donors should:

Ensure all donors meeting the UN target for ODA, following the example of other major donors the UK, Sweden, Norway and Denmark

Double the share of collective aid given to the poorest countries from one quarter to a half, following the example of Ireland

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@ips.org

The post As Climate Crisis Worsens & Poverty Rises, UN Appears Off-Track on Development Agenda appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Karim Hussein
ACCRA, Sep 18 2019 (IPS)

Transformations in international agricultural and rural development issues

Some major changes in international agricultural and rural development over the last 30-40 years need to be taken into account in efforts to promote sustainable development and an inclusive rural transformation (IFAD 2016) as we approach the third decade of the millennium. This opinion piece, drawing on a longer article published in Agriculture for Development Journal (Summer 2019 Issue), seeks to stimulate reflection and debate on how work to support agricultural and rural development can evolve to address key challenges and opportunities related to migration, sustainable urbanization and youth in a changing global policy context.

Karim Hussein

Current issues and challenges

While key themes have remained on the agenda such as enhancing productivity, environmental sustainability, inclusion and participation, availability and access to food and addressing trade issues, since the 1980s the global development landscape has evolved. The transformations occurring in the global economy and society are moving at a rapid pace, particularly in the context of the application of new technologies and innovations, information and communications technologies (ICTs) and digital approaches in agriculture or ‘digitalisation’ (Dahlberg Advisers and CTA 2019), all in an increasingly complex and globalised development context. A key question has become how do agricultural and rural development adapt in a world of rapid globalisation and urbanization to reduce hunger, food insecurity and contribute to eliminating poverty FAO 2019 and Jacquet et al, 2011)?

The roles of partnerships among all stakeholders to address food systems challenges and build resilience to shocks among smallholders are key. Smallholders constitute the majority of the world’s rural producers, and among these special attention is needed to empower women and youth and to address the challenges faced by vulnerable groups, including migrants, in the context of rapid transformations in the global economy and food systems.

Major challenges to an inclusive and sustainable rural transformation in the 21st Century are reviewed in more detail in the paper published in Agriculture for Development cited above. Clearly, the pace of innovation has to increase to address these challenges. Here, I will highlight just three areas: migration; rapid urbanization; and youth (https://taa.org.uk/publications/journals/).

Migration is a dramatic global and regional phenomenon shaping the policies and decisions of governments and populations around the world. The roles of mobility in agriculture and rural development require more attention than they have received to date. They are increasingly significant given rapid growth in youth populations in developing countries, along with dynamic rural-urban connectivity, and the impacts of climate change and spread of conflict (Suttie 2018, ‘Migration and rural advisory services’, GFRAS Issues Paper 2). Tailored, context-specific approaches to promoting agriculture and access to advisory services for young people and women is critical to the 2030 Agenda, especially SDGs 1, 2, 5, 8 and 11. There is a need to work on how to adapt technical agricultural analysis, advice and rural advisory services to respond to the needs of mobile populations in both rural and urban areas.

Rapid urbanisation. A rapid rate of urbanization has occurred and will likely accelerate in the coming years such that in 2050 some 66% of the world’s population is expected to live in urban areas (see FAO 2019 cited above). In 2013, over 58 % of the total population in developing countries was considered to live in rural areas with most involved in agriculture, mainly smallholder farming (Hussein and Suttie, 2016). Given the major transitions related to the global trend of urbanization, the roles that rural economies and societies will have to play in creating sustainable and inclusive food systems require more attention in the years ahead. Rural-based populations are increasingly connected to urban areas and markets, but many are primarily engaged in informal sector economic activities and low productivity agriculture and lacking access to basic services. The incentives for people in rural areas and for those engaged in agriculture to migrate to towns, cities and abroad in search of better jobs and income earning opportunities are very powerful, particularly for young people.

Youth. In many developing countries, the population of young people is growing and youth have become the centre of attention for development practitioners and decision makers. Addressing the challenges related to a bulging population of young people seeking better work and incomes in developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, will be vital in the years ahead. This is critical to work to strengthen rural-urban linkages and food systems to facilitate youth migration for real job opportunities but also to ensure they have attractive economic opportunities in agriculture and rural areas.

Suttie argued that higher incomes, urban growth, increasing demand for food, the spread of technologies and greater rural-urban connectivity have created new opportunities for skilled remunerative work in agri-food systems (Suttie 2018). In this context, skills development tailored to opportunities for young people (particularly smallholder family farmers, rural workers and rural women) in agriculture – whether in urban or rural contexts – is strategically important for making progress towards achieving the SDGs.

Concluding remarks

Hunger, poverty, environmental crises and sustainability remain as important if not more important than they were 40 years ago. While the issues have perhaps not changed so much over this period, the context has in this rapidly changing, fluid and globalised world where technology and innovation are leaping ahead. In order to achieve the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and an inclusive and sustainable agricultural and rural transformation, special attention needs to be paid by development actors to addressing issues related to migration, rapid urbanization and youth.

This opinion piece is drawn from a longer article published in Agriculture for Development journal, No. 37, Summer 2019 (see: https://taa.org.uk/publications/journals/)

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Rescuing a sex worker and institutionalising or criminalising them is not a solution | Picture courtesy: Sanjog.

By Uma Chatterjee
KOLKATA, India, Sep 18 2019 (IPS)

Human trafficking is perhaps one of the most well-organised crimes being committed in India. How else do we explain the phenomenon of adolescent girls and young women from remote villages across India being found in brothels in our cities?

This trend has sustained itself, despite laws that criminalise child sexual exploitation and trafficking, because of the demand for adolescents in the sex trade and the steady supply of girls from rural India, made vulnerable by poverty. Unforgivably, those who profit from trafficking the vulnerable enjoy impunity.

 

Where are the gaps in the fight against human trafficking?

Disorganised response to an organised crime

While the criminal network of trafficking is very well organised, the response of the police, the state, and nonprofits, is disorganised. The investigators entrusted with trafficking cases are from local police stations, which are essentially meant to maintain law and order and address issues of the precinct in which they are located. They are not meant to investigate crimes that are transborder. And so, the police investigate cases either at destination or source, but hardly ever in conjunction.

State governments also have no coordinated systems and work in silos. Over a decade ago, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) issued directives to state governments to create specialised investigation units, called the Anti Human Trafficking Units (AHTUs). On paper, there are more than 220 AHTUs across the country, but less than five percent of them are notified.

This means that existing police officers have been given additional responsibility to man AHTUs, but do not have the time, resources, or infrastructure to investigate these cases. Bad investigations lead to low conviction rates, which break the morale of the police, who then avoid filing FIRs, because they believe it is a waste of their effort.

 

Failure to look at the lifecycle of trafficking

We often find that a child or a young person who gets victimised today may become part of the criminal network for her or his own survival tomorrow. For instance, brothel managers or madams, as they are known, have shared that they too were once trafficked, and recruited girls and women to work for them when they got older.

The investigators entrusted with trafficking cases are from local police stations, which are essentially meant to maintain law and order and address issues of the precinct in which they are located. They are not meant to investigate crimes that are transborder. And so, the police investigate cases either at destination or source, but hardly ever in conjunction.

Because this is stigmatised labour, there is no easy supply of younger women. Consequently, brothel managers rely on traffickers to supply young girls, which is where the demand lies.

When the state does manage to rescue girls and young women from sexual exploitation, they put them up in closed institutions that are referred to as shelter homes.

Shelter homes have however failed to rehabilitate survivors. They are unable to provide skills and training that make survivors employable with reasonable incomes, but instead make them feel punished and incarcerated.

In addition, sex workers are often in debt bondage. They cannot open bank accounts due to lack of proof of residence and are therefore unable to save and borrow through financial institutions.

This makes them dependent on moneylenders who operate in these communities and borrow at high interest rates of 25-50 percent. This keeps them in perpetual debt.

We need to invest in the financial and social inclusion of survivors. Rescuing a sex worker of 35 or 40 years of age and institutionalising or criminalising them is not a solution.

 

Gaps in law and its implementation

Laws on human trafficking—the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act, the Bonded Labour Act, and even certain sections of the Indian Penal Code—have not been very successful in securing convictions or increasing rehabilitation for survivors of trafficking.

These laws criminalise brothel managers and employers, but not traffickers. They try to fight the crime at one end (the destination) while allowing impunity at the other (the source).

 

What is the role of civil society in the anti-trafficking sector?

Most nonprofits working on human trafficking have taken over responsibilities of service delivery, such as running shelters, but do so amidst many challenges. They are dependent on either foreign funding or state budgets. With foreign funding many have created large facilities with a sizeable workforce, who are not always trained for the job.

Government funding for service delivery remains frugal and inefficiently disbursed. This leads to poor quality of services resulting in poor benefits to survivors. There needs to be a shift in the role of civil society organisations (CSOs) from being service providers to becoming facilitators. Five approaches that we advocate for are:

 

Build survivor leadership

There is a tendency in the anti-trafficking sector to label survivors of trafficking as ‘victims’, who need to be protected and spoken for. Nonprofits must transition out of being ‘saviours’ and focus on building leadership among survivors, encouraging them to fight for their rights and services from panchayats and governments.

There is an assumption that survivors do not want to come to the fore or show their faces. In my experience, survivors seldom feel the shame that our society associates with them. When CSOs help them to resist and challenge stigma, they reject that shaming and are able to fight for their own justice.

Instead of being the voice for survivors, nonprofits must assist them to speak for themselves. Often, nonprofits themselves treat sex work as a sin or a reason to feel shame. However, when trafficking gets treated as a crime, the strategies to fight it will be different.

The focus will shift from saving survivors, to empowering them to fight through robust legal aid, training, sharing information, collectivising, collaborating, and so on. As leadership gets built among survivors’ groups, they will take the lead in this effort.

 

Secure compensation

India has a strong provision for compensating survivors, but it is poorly implemented. According to the State Legal Services Authority, no compensation has been awarded to survivors of trafficking in many states, because there were no applications.

This happens because survivors do not know that they are entitled to compensation and are unable to secure legal aid to access these funds. The Nirbhaya Fund of the central government, which pays for this, has been poorly used by many state governments and nonprofits.

But some lawyers like Kaushik Gupta and Anirban Tarafdar have managed to secure compensation amounting to INR 4 to 6 lakhs. This enables survivors to pay for their own rehabilitation rather than having to depend on CSOs.

 

Make rehabilitation community-based rather than institutional

The focus of rehabilitation for governments and nonprofits has been on shelter homes. But it needs to shift to helping survivors return to their families, and then helping the families combat stigma and poverty, and claim services from panchayats, police, and healthcare providers. Working in groups and collectives helps to fight stigma and challenge traffickers.

 

Facilitate work that is already happening

To effectively counter human trafficking, nonprofits working separately in source and destination areas must come together. This is an opportunity for larger organisations to play the role of the facilitator—bring together organisations from the villages as well as those working in red-light areas in cities, so that they can communicate with each other and coordinate their efforts.

There will be barriers to this, such as language and mobility, and nonprofits can work to remove them. Nonprofits can also facilitate dialogue between survivor leaders and the state. Instead of speaking on behalf of survivors, nonprofits can bring survivor leaders to the same platform as parliamentarians, so that they can speak for themselves, and present their concerns using their own voice.

 

Gather and disseminate information

For any kind of policy advocacy or activism against a social issue, evidence is key. Here, nonprofits can play the role of researcher, evidence builder, and synthesiser of information. They can then arm survivors’ groups with this information.

For instance, government departments often release legal and policy documents, which have a direct bearing on the lives of survivors, but which could be difficult for them to understand.

We, at Sanjog, took one such document, translated it to Bengali, because the survivors’ groups that we were working with were from West Bengal. We took each clause of that document, and explained its implications through the use of examples, over a 3-day workshop. As a result, they are now better equipped to negotiate with the government for their rights and justice and can respond to questions that are thrown at them.

 

What lies ahead?

The MHA has introduced a National Investigation Agency (Amendment) Bill (NIA), which, despite being controversial, promises to investigate human trafficking cases and improve infrastructure in the judiciary for prosecution. We wait to see how these cases will be referred to the NIA, how the NIA will engage with the AHTUs, the role boundaries and convergence issues, etc.

The previous government tried to reform the law in human trafficking, but the Trafficking of Persons (Prevention, Protection and Rehabilitation) Bill, 2018 lapsed, and it is yet to be seen whether the present government will revive it. Perhaps there will be changes made based on earlier objections, particularly on issues of shelter homes and lack of community-based rehabilitation.

Meanwhile, there are organisations that help survivors of human trafficking form their own collectives and create SHGs and federations; and leadership is emerging from these groups. The volume of discussion on trafficking in the past two years is unprecedented.

The media and the parliamentarians are talking about it, and while it hasn’t yet become a mass issue, it is no more just a social sector issue. These are all positive developments, and herein lies the dream of making our societies free of human trafficking.

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

The post Human trafficking: A Disorganised Response to an Organised Crime appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Uma Chatterjee is the co-founder and executive director of Sanjog, a technical resource organisation based in Kolkata

The post Human trafficking: A Disorganised Response to an Organised Crime appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Kathmandu at night

By GGGI
Sep 18 2019 (IPS-Partners)

Sonika Manandhar, Aeloi Technologies’ co-founder, knows the Kathmandu public transportation system inside out. Her family has been running micros (vans that operate as buses) as a business for over twenty years. She also insists on taking public transportation every day, although most of her peers in the technology industry rather save up and buy a motorbike. “Buses are just safer and more environmentally friendly,” says Sonika. “Unfortunately, all the buses, micros, and tempos stop after 8 pm. Then taxis or motorcycle hailing apps are the only options. I don’t feel safe with either, so I often miss out on networking opportunities or professional meetings over dinner,” she adds.

Sonika trying to negotiate with a taxi driver

Sonika’s frustrations inspired our team to dig deeper into the public transportation industry. We found out that Kathmandu is actually a green city pioneer, with over 700 electric minibuses, locally called safa tempos, that have been steadily servicing the city for 20 years. This industry is uniquely suited to Nepal because of Nepal’s immense hydropower potential, which is predicted to be sufficient for all electricity and fossil fuel use in the country by 2020. In particular, safa tempos are majority owned and operated by women, even though the rest of the public transportation sector is dominated by men. Aeloi’s team thought: what a perfect industry for us to start in!

A typical safa tempo which is an electric minibus that seats 11

Sachita is the owner and driver of her safa tempo

Aeloi Technologies – token powered finance

Aeloi is a fintech social enterprise in Nepal. We are making micro-impact investments accountable and accessible for green microentrepreneurs using digital tokens. Digital tokens are a flexible form of shop credit only usable at pre-vetted vendors. Our SMS platform doesn’t require smart phones or mobile data and is specifically designed for first time digital financial services users. We digitally link impact investors, local microfinance institutions, entrepreneurs, and vendors in real time, ensuring each dollar of investment is used productively.

Investments with an impact focus – such as subsidized loans, social impact bonds, or carbon offsets – are usually not “user-friendly” for microenterprises in emerging markets. Stringent reporting requirements means layers of management and high administration costs, rendering small investments unfeasible. Therefore entrepreneurs in the grassroots green economy are left behind in the move towards a sustainable future, as indicated by the US$2 trillion credit gap for 65 million emerging market microenterprises.

A problem of trust between lenders and borrowers, we believe, is the fundamental reason for the continued lack of affordable financing at the grassroots level. Aeloi’s digital token platform helps increase trust between lenders, borrowers, impact investors, vendors, and other stakeholders.

For example, an impact investor invests US$1 million into a microfinance cooperative in Nepal as a fixed deposit. The deposit generally earns about 12% interest per annum at such microfinance institutions. Then, 4% is returned to the investor, 4% is used to subsidize loans for microentrepreneurs, and 4% is Aeloi’s operations fee. The subsidized loan is issued in digital tokens, therefore ensuring the investment is spent on business expenses. A transparent record is automatically generated in real-time.

Green Energy Mobility (GEM)

Initial online research showed us that the number of safa tempos had not increased since the mid-2000s. Curious about the reason, we started interviewing a lot of safa tempo drivers and owners to understand their challenges. We found out that actually there are an estimated 100 safa tempos just sitting and slowly rusting in garages. It was a sad sight to behold.

Some garages had many safa tempos that sat rusting because of a lack of financing to buy batteries

The reason behind this is that one of the main challenges for safa tempo owners and drivers is to upgrade their battery and engine technology. For example, the owners often buy a pair of lead acid batteries that last only 1 to 1.5 years. This costs about US$4500. Lithium ion batteries that last 5-8 years are available and the technology is quite mature, but they cost almost US$10,000, which is completely out of reach for most women employed in the informal sector. So if an owner cannot afford a new set of batteries, they tend to leave the safa tempo at a garage because it is not worth the loan amount and interest rates. The interest rates can go as high as 26% p.a., depending on if the borrower has any collateral or credit history. If the owners have to take credit from loan sharks, then the interest rates are unpredictable and can go as high as 120% p.a. Often, they can’t access any loan, even with very high interest rates.

We believe our technology platform can help safa tempo owners and drivers. We envision a way to directly connect impact investors and customers to safa tempo owners and drivers through digital tokens. Not only will we help them access more affordable loans, we’ll also be able to help with the savings and repayment process. In addition, we’ll be able to use these digital footprints to create alternative credit scores for access to future loans if they want to expand their business.

With all of this information brewing in our minds, we reached out to the Electric Vehicle Association of Nepal and a safa tempo union to learn more about potential for partnership. We also started doing more customer market research, seeking companies that wanted to provide daily commute support for their employees, events that wanted to provide pooled transportation options for their attendees after 8 pm, and gated communities that wanted to provide transportation options to their elderly and children. We are continuing our customer interviewing process to make sure we can discover and target specific segments that will become our early adopters.

We are also engaging microfinance institutions and banks to see who would be interested in piloting digital token loans for safa tempo owners and drivers. The loans will be small at first to help with daily operations costs, which provides us data to construct an alternative credit score to ultimately access a loan for lithium ion batteries.

As a startup, we are continuously iterating to make sure our product truly addresses our stakeholders’ pain points. The Greenpreneurs program has been tremendously helpful in helping us carve out time to look at each part of our business from a holistic point of view. We also iterated on our business model to make our value proposition for each stakeholder stronger. We will continue to use the knowledge and skills we learnt from Greenpreneurs to move forward with our pilots.

Our vision is for detailed behavioural data from thousands of microfinance products to feed into our big data platform. In fact, we launched our agriculture product pilot, named ReGrow, two months ago and we are receiving very encouraging data. We will be launching our GEM pilot in October this year.

We are actively seeking impact investors who are interested in our model for partnership. Please reach us at hello@aeloi.com.

The global impact investing market was US$502 billion in 2018. Join us in helping grassroots green entrepreneurs directly access such financing!

 

Biography

Tiffany Tong (CEO) and Sonika Manandhar (CTO) are co-founders of Aeloi Technologies. They bring a combined 20 years of experience in fintech, international development, and computer engineering. While working with the World Bank and the Microsoft Innovation Center, they both graduated from the Singularity University based in Silicon Valley. Passion for using exponential technologies to improve livelihoods fuels their partnership. Aeloi’s mentors include advisors and staff from the Greenpreneurs program, Civil Society Academy (Welthungerhilfe), the UN Capital Development Fund, and the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific.

The post Driving the grassroots green economy appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By GGGI
Sep 18 2019 (IPS-Partners)

Environment always becomes my first concern. Plastic wastes and deforestations are the major issues that I have involved with. The story behind the business concept occurred when I was running a small construction project to build a room in the apartment which I needed to buy plywood to build that room. At that time, I realized that the plywood is totally made from woodchips. I then got an idea of ply-plastic by crunching the plastic into pieces and transforming them to ply-plastic. 

Plastic consumption and waste are in the positive growth, especially in the developing countries. The amount of 300 million tons of plastic has been produced every year. There are 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic that has been produced, 6.3 billion metric tons has become plastic waste. In Cambodia, according to the ACRA Foundation, around 10 million plastic bags are used in Phnom Penh every day. Urban Cambodians use more than 2,000 plastic bags every year.

Besides, deforestation is also the tough issue harmfully affecting the climate change. The total world forest loss till date is 7.3 million hectares per year. Amazon forest is also under threat. On the other hand, we are dealing with the current production in Cambodia that lack of sustainable association which creates lot of negative impact to social and environment, using more than 900,000 cubic meters of forests and producing more than 100 million tons of CO2 emission in last 5 year.

To solve this problem, we design the leading quality of eco-friendly and sustainable product with affordable price while proving the social and environmental impact through developing new product using plastic waste- called ply-plastic.

Plaswood specializes in the design and manufacture of plastic plywood that uses plastic waste recycling into ply-plastic, normally made from wood chips. It can be used in any kind of activities as the substitute product in the construction industry. Focused primarily on environmental issues, the company sees that plastic waste keeps increasing and forests are being cut down. Our facility was designed and built to create a production setting that minimizes environmental variables. The company aims at:

• Using plastic waste in production to create ply-plastic product;
• Reducing the consumption of trees; and
• Providing longer product durability than the existing alternatives.

For the initial process of the business, the company’s strategic operation is to make strong corporation with local waste collecting company by selecting valuable plastic wastes. The manufacturing process will start by using hi-tech machine as its operation.

In 2018, Plaswood made a chance to participate in competition – Asean Virtual Business Plan Competition – which was organized by Australian government which took place at Thailand. Unfortunately, the project got 4th place among 82 teams, comprising 232 individuals from 6 countries.

In mid-2018, this project has been applied the competition in England under the Worldlabs organization. Unfortunately, it’s been awarded as the top 100 shortlist projects among the hundreds of high-quality candidates. In mid-2019, Plaswood have been brought to another competition, organized by Canadian organization, under the Greenpreneur program and the idea is selected among 200 applications.

Currently, we’re working with Greenpreneur program to develop product to the real market. We have been working on this business idea with this program for around 3 months by having the virtual training with the Canadian teams to write the business plan in this acceleration program.

We are also given the weekly tasks to complete and the mentor to help our team working on the idea which we aim to make this idea to the real market in Cambodia.

Greenprenuer has given more insight about social lean business plan while the impact modelling is the key point to make the business more realistic. Guest speakers are invited to share their experiences regarding their stories of successes and failures. It has been an amazing experience to have been working virtually with the program. We gratefully thank the organizing teams for hardworking and feedback to improve our project.

The post Plaswood: Plastic waste crunched into pieces becomes ply-plastic appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Zubedah Nakitende was trafficked as salve labour to a family in Jordon. Her employer gave her a cream for her injured fingers that was actually turned out to be acid. Nakitende’s fingers were so badly injured they had to be amputated. Credit: Wambi Michael/IPS

By Wambi Michael
KAMPALA, Sep 18 2019 (IPS)

In 2017, Zubedah Nakitende’s electronics shop was robbed with thieves taking her entire stock. But she had heard from a colleague about lucrative jobs in Jordan and decided to take on work as a domestic helper, earning an income of 740 dollars a month.

“I was desperate, I had debts. So I said let me go and work to pay those debts,” Nakitende told IPS.

She made contact with a trafficker, known by the pseudonym Abu Ahmad, with whom she communicated by phone. On his advice she travelled by road to Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, where she was given an illegal visa and flown to Jordan.

But she ended up placing her life in the hands of a criminal network that sold her as slave domestic labour. And in the end she lost four of her fingers and never earned the money she had hoped to to pay off her debts.

East Africa’s trafficking transit point

• According to the United Nations Refugee Agency’s Refworld, Kenya has been identified as a transit point for Ethiopians and other East Africans seeking work in South Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
• The Ugandan government, despite criticism, has encouraged externalisation of labour in order to attract foreign exchange in the form of remittances. Remittances from Ugandans abroad, according to the Uganda Parliamentary Forum on Youth Affairs (UPFYA), increased from 1.6 billion dollars in 2016, to 2.0 billion dollars in 2017. 
• In 2017, the government lifted a ban on Ugandans travelling abroad for domestic work, despite reports of abuse and trafficking.
• Since then there has been a surge in labour recruitment agencies targeting the export of labour to countries like Oman, Jordan, UAE, Malaysia and China. As of 2018, over 105 private companies were licensed by Uganda’s Gender and Labour Ministry to recruit workers for external employment.
• Nairobi-based labour recruiters recruit Ethiopian, Rwandan, and Ugandan workers through fraudulent offers of employment in the Middle East and Asia. But women recruited through these agencies end up in sex slavery or forced labour in the Middle East and China, among others.

She was forced to work through the pain

Nakitende was herself forced into salve labour. Her passport was taken by the domestic recruitment agency in Jordan and she was taken to a home in the city to work.

One day she told her employer that her hands ached. Her boss gave her a liquid, which Nakitende thought would ease the pain. Instead it turned out to be an acid that burnt her fingers.

She was in deep pain but her employer forced her to work saying, she “had been bought for that purpose”.

Eventually she was sent back to the recruitment company that facilitated her employment so she could receive treatment. But the medication could not relieve the pain. “It instead worsened the situation as the palms turned black and swollen,” Nakitende said.

In the end she was taken to a specialist who recommended she return to Uganda “because I would no longer be able to work”.

Upon return home she went to hospital for treatment. But her fingers were so severely damaged that the only course for her was amputation.

“I went to Jordan knowing that I was going to work but I returned with a permanent injury. I did not get any money. The trafficker even took the money that had received to facilitate my treatment,” she recalls.

Healing the psychological wounds 

Nakitende has just completed psychosocial support and rehabilitation by Willow International — a nonprofit organisation with an office in Uganda’s capital that provides rescue and restoration support to survivors of trafficking.

Flavia Amaro, a programme officer with Willow International, told IPS that some of the victims have been referred to the Butabika National Referral Mental Hospital in Kampala for treatment for a range of mental issues that mainly related to depression.

She said 15 women were receiving counselling and treatment at the time of the interview. One woman, she said, would always stand still, without moving. “From our assessment, we realised that she was locked up in a very cold room for a longtime,” said Amaro.

Uganda’s efforts not enough to end trafficking

• Uganda is one of the countries battling to end trafficking. It has been also identified as the destination for persons trafficked for sexual exploitation, with women originating from countries like conflict-ridden Burundi, among others.
• In its 2019 Trafficking in Persons Report, the U.S. State Department said Uganda does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking; however, it was making significant efforts.
• According to the Ugandan government, authorities intercepted a total of 599 Ugandans, 477 females and 122 males, attempting to depart to countries that officials assessed as high risk for trafficking and where travellers were unable to adequately explain the purpose of their travel.
• According to the U.S. Trafficking in Person Report, Uganda reported that of 145 trafficking investigations, there were prosecutions of 52 defendants in 50 cases, and convictions of 24 traffickers in 2017 under the country’s 2009 anti-trafficking act. This is compared to 114 investigations, 32 prosecutions, and 16 convictions in 2016.
• The report observed that corruption and official complicity in trafficking crimes remained significant concerns, inhibiting law enforcement action.

Airport and immigration officials implicated in trafficking crime

Security officers at Uganda’s border with Kenya, at Uganda’s Entebbe Airport and officials from the Civil Aviation Authority and immigration departments have been accused of colluding with traffickers to facilitate the travel of trafficked persons.

Jessica (not her real name), a survivor of trafficking, told IPS that her travel to Jordan was facilitated by ground staff and immigration officials at Entebbe Airport. She said the trafficker who helped her leave Uganda for a job as a domestic worker in Jordan had been in contact with them.

Jessica, who worked as slave labour and was beaten on several occasions, was eventually rescued by her member of parliament. She posted a video explaining her ordeal on social media and reached out to Ugandan legislator, Louis Gaffa Mbwatekamwa. Mbwstekamwa travelled to Jordan, with permission from parliament, and brought her home.

Uganda’s Directorate of Citizenship and Immigration Control spokesperson Jacob Siminyu did not rule out the fact that some immigration officials were working with traffickers for personal gain. He said the directorate worked with the police and other agencies to ensure that trafficked persons were not allowed to exit Entebbe Airport.

Not enough money to bring trafficked survivors home

• The U.S. trafficking report also suggests the need to fully implement the protection and prevention provisions of Uganda’s 2009 Prevention of Trafficking in Persons Act.
• Among the recommendations was the need to allocate funds for victim protection, the track and refer how victims for appropriate care or assistance and expansion of protective services for victims through partnerships with NGOs
• It suggested the need to implement strong regulations and oversight of recruitment companies, and improve enforcement, including by continuing to prosecute those involved in fraudulent labor recruitment.

The Commissioner of Police Anti-Human Trafficking National Task Force, Moses Binoga admitted that there were intuitional challenges in the implementation of the trafficking law but noted the level of awareness about trafficking persons has increased since the law was enacted.

He revealed that a number of convictions of the traffickers after a number of judges were trained about the crime of trafficking. But there remain challenges.

“The existing processes and systems of assisting victims are not sufficient enough. For instance, [there aren’t] sufficient funds for paying fines and return air tickets for all the reported stranded victims in foreign countries,” Binoga told IPS

Damon Wamara is the country director of Dwelling Places, a non-government organisation dedicated to the rescue and rehabilitation of internally trafficked women, agreed that Uganda has a good law against trafficking in persons but implementation was a big challenge.

He said the Anti-Human Trafficking Task Force was poorly staffed yet it has to handle over 11,000 victims that either need rehabilitation or repatriation annually.

Special courts needed for safe testimony and convictions

Uganda’s High Court judge Margret Mutonyi recently told IPS that there is need for Uganda to establish a special court to handle issues related to trafficking in persons. She said the current court system was too adversarial and tended to leave the victims more traumatised.

“The ordeal they go through affects them mentally, physically and psychologically. Some think there is nothing to protect or defend. Their dignity and integrity is affected profoundly. They don’t think there is any punishment that can atone their hearts,” she said.

Mutonyi agreed with other activist groups pushing for a victim-witness protection legislation in Uganda.

Civil society groups in Uganda have argued that the absence of such a law has hindered investigations and prosecutions because perpetrators can threaten and blackmail victims and witnesses, discouraging their participation in trials.

—————————————–The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN ) is pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 8 with a special emphasis on Goal 8.7 which ‘takes immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms’.

The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths, gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalisation of indifference, such us exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking” and so forth.

Related Articles

• Why Prosecuting Human Traffickers in Nigeria is Nothing More than a Mirage
• Hidden in Plain Sight: Sex Trafficking in Canada
• As Fathers Die, Kashmir’s Children Become Breadwinners

The post When the Search for Jobs Ends in Slavery appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

This is part of a series of features from across the globe on human trafficking. IPS coverage is supported by the Riana Group.

The post When the Search for Jobs Ends in Slavery appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By GGGI
Sep 18 2019 (IPS-Partners)

Shiva, 38 years, staying in a pent-house facing the Bellandur lake paid a bomb for this view 10 years back. But in 2019, often he wakes up to snow-flaked froth and smog and even shockingly fire over the lake. It has become a regular sight for him to watch water tankers filling the underground sump. 

Wondering how the beautiful water rich city is approaching its doom’s day?

 

Water disequilibrium in Bangalore

The city of lakes, Bangalore, that once had 900 lakes has now reduced to 189 lakes, due to unplanned and irrational urbanisation. Indiscriminate disposal of untreated industrial effluents, small scale defunct sewage treatment plants, over drawing of underground water, illegal water pumping; has put lot of stress on potable water. This has resulted in expensive and scarcity of freshwater.

The silicon-valley of India is forecasted to urbanise from 8 million people today to 20.3 million in 2031. With the expansion of the city there will be an exponential increase in water demand by 30 % in within the next three years creating a shortage of 330 MLD by 2021.

Bangalore is sourced by Cauvery river, urban and rural borewells. The Bangalore Water Supply and Sewage Board (BWSSB), civil body in Bangalore supplies 356 Million Gallon per day through pipelines and 45 Million Gallons per day through water-tankers. The water supplied through tankers by government is sold at a fixed rate of INR 100/Kilo litre. Over and above this, there are private tankers catering to increasing water demand. There is no publicly reliable data on total water supplied by private tankers. The price of private tankers is unregulated and varies from INR 58 /Kilo Litre to INR 330/ Kilo Litre.

Let’s Close the loop

In Bangalore around 190 Million Gallon water per day is treated by centralised sewage treatment plants set up by civil body in Bangalore. Less than 30% wastewater water is used for aquafer and public landscapes. The remaining treated recycled water is discharged in rivers and lakes. However, this can be very well utilised for various other purposes to reduce freshwater intake. The non-consumptive across these sectors is more than 70% of the freshwater consumption which is predominantly sourced from ground water or private water tanker. So, what’s the solution to economically reduce our water footprint?

There are lot of options to conserve and judiciously use water – monitoring, conservation, reusing the treated wastewater, etc. Water management and monitoring are definite solutions but not long-term answers for rapid urbanisation. Using recycled water is a sustainable solution, which non-consummative purposes across different sectors; Industries, Residential, Commercial, etc.

In 2017, Bangalore Municipal Authority announced the mandatory installation of Sewage treatment plant in residential gated apartments with more than 50 flats. But this notification faced major pushback from Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs) due to high initial cost, regular maintenance cost, space constraint to install sewage treatment plant and existing infrastructures constrains. Facilities with sewage treatment plant, uses only 20% of the recycled water and remaining is flushed into underground discharge line.

Also, centralised wastewater sector is highly unorganised, and the excess treated wastewater is unscientifically discharge into freshwater bodies. Lack of an unplanned supply chain model leads to wastage of a precious resource. Recycled water is 60% cheaper than potable water. The 19 Million Gallon of water per day is treated to Grade III water (tertiary level) which government is willing to sell at INR 60/ Kilo Litre.

 

Rent-On-Recycle Water

This brings the opportunity for Rent-O-ReWa (RoR) to close the loop with a sustainable long-term solution. The solution intents to strengthen the water supply chain and reduce the freshwater demand. It is an online platform for recycled water trading. The platform would link the excess water suppliers with the buyers through:

• On demand availability of Recycled Water.
• Pre-booking services: This service will assure availability of desired quantity of water to a certain limit.
• Water Quality Test report: With every tanker of water, RoR will provide a water quality test report certifying the grade of water to ensure that the water quantity meets the desired quality.
• Hassle Free Payments:  Provide purchase orders, bills and receipts to organize expenditure for water consumption.

The platform gives multiple benefits to the buyers and sellers of recycle water:

• for sellers recycled water is a waste, and they can earn money,
• buyers can save up to 60% of money by using recycled water.

The platform will reduce 15 Million Gallon per day in our first third year, saving above INR 3 crores for Bangalore government and private users.

The idea of Rent-o-Rent was originated in April’19. The Greenpreneurs program is informative, captivating and well structured. The program is perfect for those who want to start a business, and even for anyone who wants to formulate an idea into a business plan. The mentorship and critical reviewing from Ryan Brown and Shantanu Gotmare helped us develop and improve our business plan. The skills that we gained through this workshop will help the team succeed in all aspects of our start up journey. GGGI have inspired us to be social innovators in our globalized society.

The post Before Bangalore city goes dry – Let’s close the loop appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The post How a Bangladesh Non Profit for Leprosy Made its Members Completely Self-Sufficient appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

In this interview with IPS Voices from the Global South, Jorge Biswas of The Leprosy Mission International Bangladesh (TLMIB) explains to Stella Paul how his organisation has been creating self-help groups and help those affected by the disease create livelihoods and businesses through micro-financing.

The post How a Bangladesh Non Profit for Leprosy Made its Members Completely Self-Sufficient appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Jamal Kahshoggi, a US-based journalist who frequently criticised the Saudi government, was killed while visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where he was collecting papers for his wedding. Courtesy: POMED/CC by 2.0

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 18 2019 (IPS)

The United Nations faces growing public opposition to an event it is co-hosting with a Saudi Arabian charity only days before the anniversary of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

On Tuesday, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a watchdog, joined the campaign to scrap the Sept. 23 Misk-OSGEY Youth Forum — a tie-up between the U.N. and Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman’s Misk Foundation.

Meanwhile, some 5,000 people have signed a petition against the event, which campaigners say whitewashes the image of bin Salman, who reportedly ordered the murder of Khashoggi inside the country’s consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, on Oct. 2 last year.

“On the anniversary, I expected a message from the U.N. to elevate the case and to seek more punitive measures against Saudi Arabia and those who participated in the killing of Khashoggi,” the CPJ’s Middle East coordinator Sherif Mansour told IPS. 

“Perhaps people at the U.N. had not heard or seen the outrage that has circulated around the world since Khashoggi’s death. It’s offensive and insulting to have such a conference around the time when people are remembering his brutal murder.”

The forum is part of a scheme between the U.N.’s youth envoy Jayathma Wickramanayake and bin Salman’s foundation and is aimed at inspiring ethical business practices.

The event will take place at the New York Public Library and see some 300 budding entrepreneurs learn about green themes, corporate responsibility and other parts of the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) agenda.

Sunjeev Bery, director of Freedom Forward, which launched the petition, said bin Salman should be blackballed over Khashoggi’s killing, Saudi-led military operations in Yemen’s civil war and other human rights abuses. 

“The trustees of the New York Public Library should not allow a brutal Saudi dictator to use their space for a propaganda event. Thousands of people are now demanding that this bogus Saudi event be canceled,” Bery told IPS.

“Many Saudi citizens are imprisoned or executed for saying the very things that are written in thousands of New York Public Library books. How can the NYPL trustees possibly justify allowing a  Saudi dictator to use their space?”

The U.N. youth envoy’s office, Saudi Arabia’s mission to the U.N. and the Misk Foundation declined to comment on the controversy. U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the forum was part of a “work plan” between the youth envoy and bin Salman’s foundation.

“We’ve seen the petition and I think its good that people express themselves and I think the [youth envoy’s] office is always ready to engage with civil society groups in order to answer what questions or concerns they have,” said Dujarric.

“The forum is designed to bring together young leaders, creators, and thinkers to think about ways of engaging and encouraging youth to transform the world.”

Two speakers — Ann Rosenberg, a technology executive, and Bart Houlahan, a business consultant — have already pulled out of the event, which has also been criticised by Human Rights Watch, Civicus, and other groups.

 

I’m not going to help the Saudi crown prince whitewash his abysmal human rights record by attending his big event on Sept 23 at the New York Public Library during the opening of the UN General Assembly. RT if you agree. https://t.co/TLUruJMI7P pic.twitter.com/9yhrl6Dibc

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) 11 September 2019

The remaining speakers include Alexandra Cousteau, a conservationist and granddaughter of French adventurer Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Paul Polman, the former CEO of consumer goods firm Unilever, and Andrew Corbett, an academic at Babson College.

Khashoggi, a United States-based journalist who frequently bashed the Saudi government, was killed and dismembered after visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where he was collecting papers for his planned wedding.

The CIA concluded that bin Salman ordered Khashoggi’s murder. U.N. expert Agnes Callamard has described the killing as a “deliberate, premeditated execution,” and called for bin Salman and other Saudi officials to be probed.

Saudi officials, who initially said Khashoggi had left the consulate unharmed, now say the writer was killed in a rogue scheme that did not involve bin Salman. Rights groups have pushed for accountability in the journalist’s killing.

Related Articles

• U.N. Criticised for Link-up with Saudi Prince MBS
• Beyond Saudi Arabia: The World Is Failing Journalists
• Don’t “Whitewash” Khashoggi’s Murder

The post Petition and Critics of Khashoggi Killing Heap Pressure on U.N.-Saudi Event appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Michael Lim Mah Hui
KUALA LUMPUR and PENANG, Sep 17 2019 (IPS)

Rapid financial globalization is due not only to financial innovations, but also to choices made by national policymakers, often with naïve expectations, trusting promoters’ promises of steady net inflows of financial resources.

Rapid financialization has involved fund or asset investment managers operating internationally, managing assets for transnational institutional and retail investors and investing a growing share of transnational financial assets. Even retail investors are attracted by such fund managers offering attractive alternatives for investing in various asset markets, including index funds.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram. Credit: FAO

To attract foreign institutional investments interested in capturing more rents, they demand more favourable terms and conditions, thus changing national financial systems. Successfully attracting transnational finance thus limits ‘emerging market’ economies’ ‘policy space’ to develop their economies.

Facilitating financialization
The enabling environment to attract capital inflows typically allows them to circumvent regulations and other institutional constraints. Deepening national capital markets by relying on transnational finance typically involves ‘subordinate’ or ‘dependent’ financialization.

This typically requires modifying national financial systems to better serve transnational finance and transitioning from traditional banking to financial asset markets. Thus, developing countries, that open their capital accounts or encourage transnational portfolio investments, become especially vulnerable.

In the early 2000s, after the 1997-1998 Asian financial crises, the Group of 8 (G8) major economies, supported by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Germany’s Bundesbank, promoted local currency bond markets. Soon, local currency bond markets in Asia (ex-Japan) rose ten-fold from US$836 billion in 2000 to US$8.3 trillion in 2015.

Subordinate securitization
It was claimed that deeper national securities markets, especially local currency bond markets, would redress both currency and maturity mismatches of short-term foreign currency borrowings by local banks and corporations. Such markets were expected to reduce global imbalances as countries with surpluses would no longer need to recycle savings in US financial markets.

Michael Lim Mah Hui

However, an UNCTAD-South Centre study argued that local currency bond markets are ‘double-edged’, addressing the risks of currency mismatches for individual borrowers, while exacerbating the systemic risks associated with the nation’s currency. When developing economies’ equity and bonds are largely foreign-held, their currencies are more vulnerable.

New vulnerabilities
Increasing transnational integration of national currency, financial and other asset markets has transformed global finance and its dynamics, including the roles, relations and room for manoeuvre for emerging market and other developing economies:

• currency markets are now less influenced by international trade flows, but increasingly by capital flows, and when substantial enough, by the ‘carry trade’ of those borrowing in low-interest rate currencies to invest in high-interest rate currency assets, taking on exchange rate risk to gain from interest rate arbitrage;
• inter-bank money markets no longer only reflect the demand for and supply of central bank reserves, but also the effects of central bank interventions in currency markets to prevent excessive appreciation or depreciation of national currencies due to market perceptions of erratic capital flows;
• with domestic financial conditions linked to the vagaries of global finance and US interest rate decisions, subordinate financialization constrains governments’ capacities to provide macroeconomic stability by trying to stabilize aggregate demand, let alone undertake countercyclical policy;
• subordinate financialization tends to promote the privatization of public services by legitimizing the notion that public goods – education, health, infrastructure – can be better provided by the private sector with finance from capital markets. Development finance is thus redeployed to ensure profits for private finance, investors and companies.

International financial anarchy unchecked
Efforts to deepen national capital markets have been backed by powerful financial interests, domestic and foreign, especially the major international financial institutions. Multilateral development banks have been urging developing country governments to get private finance to fund development, social and environmental initiatives.

Their message has shifted from ‘working on finance’, to try to ensure more resilient and robust development despite international financial volatility and instability, to thus ‘working with finance’. Meanwhile, institutional investment managers are expected to turn to ‘impact investing’ with supposedly beneficial effects, such as green bonds, development impact bonds and infrastructure bonds.

To make matters worse, there is no international financial regulator, as all regulation and regulators are national, even in implementing Bank of International Settlements (BIS) standards. Both the BIS and the IMF acknowledge cross-border transmission of risks, but national regulators focus on their national economies, leaving others more vulnerable than ever.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram, a former economics professor, was United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development, and received the Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought.
Dr Michael LIM Mah Hui has been a university professor and banker, in the private sector and with the Asian Development Bank.

The post Developing Economies’ Subordinate Financialization appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Info Nile
Sep 17 2019 (IPS)

The damming of Kenya’s River Tana and the environmental degradation upstream, has reduced the amount of silt and water reaching the Tana River Delta over time. Hence the sea has been pushing further and further inland unhindered, jeopardising livelihoods.

 

The post Tana River Bears the Cost of Development appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Geoffrey Kamadi reports for InfoNile on the Tana River. InfoNile is a geojournalism platform mapping data on water issues in the Nile River basin of Africa with journalism stories to promote transboundary peace.

The post Tana River Bears the Cost of Development appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Credit: United Nations

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 17 2019 (IPS)

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has offered an unsolicited piece of advice to the 190-plus speakers, including heads of state and heads of government, who will address an unprecedented six high level plenary meetings during the General Assembly sessions September 23-27.

“I am asking leaders to come to the September summits, not with beautiful speeches, but with concrete actions, plans and commitments to accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda and the Paris agreement on climate change,” he implored.

The people of the world, he pointed out, do not want “half measures and empty promises”.

They are demanding transformative change that is fair and sustainable, he said, referring to two key upcoming summits, one on climate action (on September 23) and the other on Sustainable Development Goals (September 24-25).

But how many leaders will respond positively?

Harjeet Singh, global lead on climate change for ActionAid told IPS: “Let’s be clear, this is not another run-of-the-mill Summit. World leaders must decide that they need to either lead or step back”.

The time for speeches and lip service is long gone, he said. “Young people have taken the matter into their own hands. They will keep marching ahead, showing us the way”.

“Rich countries have benefited from over a century of the industrialisation that has caused climate change. They now have an outsized obligation to help developing nations cope with climate disasters and transition to greener economies.”

Asked what the yardstick should be to measure the success of the summits, specifically the climate action summit, Jennifer Morgan, Executive Director, Greenpeace International, told IPS: “The UN Secretary-General’s asks are clear and specific, and he has set the bar where it has to be at this moment in time — high.”

“The yardstick for success is if countries deliver what Guterres has asked for: a stop to fossil fuel subsidies, a concrete pathway to net zero by 2050 and no new coal. We don’t need any more speeches, we need real plans from world leaders and high emitters that are ambitious, tangible and achievable,” she added.

But will these summits be a mega talk-fest in futility?

Multilateralism is never futile, said Morgan, “to fix the climate crisis, we need everyone. We cannot turn the clock back and halt climate change, but we can force governments to recognise their responsibility and support an environmentally and socially just re-shaping of our economies.”

Kul Chandra Gautam, a former UN Assistant-Secretary-General, told IPS; “I commend UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for his tenacious efforts to galvanize world leaders to take decisive action on the world’s most pressing issues, despite unfavourable political leadership in many powerful countries.”

“We may not achieve decisive breakthroughs this year but we can build momentum for the future. In the long sweep of history and march of human civilization, there are many ups and downs, and progress is not linear. But I am inspired by the incredible energy, creativity and activism of the younger generation across the world”.

“I am convinced most of today’s populist but nativist leaders will eventually be swept away by the wave of their young citizens committed to building a more peaceful, prosperous and equitable world of mutual interdependence, as envisaged in the UN Charter,” said Gautam, a former Deputy Executive Director of the UN children’s agency, UNICEF.

As of last week, according to UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric, a total of 196 speakers, are scheduled to speak at the General Assembly high level segment, including 97 Heads of State; five Vice-Presidents; 46 Heads of Government; five Deputy Prime Ministers; 38 Ministers; two Chairs of Delegation; and three observers.

A total of 560 official meetings have so far been requested, he said, and this does not include bilateral meetings between representatives of Member States—with last year’s staggering total of 1,676 bilateral meetings held in the UN precincts.

Scheduled to take place September 23-27, the meetings will cover a wide range of political and socio-economic issues on the UN agenda, including climate change, universal health care, sustainable development goals (SDGs), financing for development (FfD), elimination of nuclear weapons and the survival of small island developing states (SIDS) facing extinction from rising sea levels.

http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/09/uns-upcoming-summits-may-foreshadow-revival-multilateralism-obituary-world-order/

In an assessment of the state of play, since the adoption of the 2030 Development Agenda and the Paris climate change agreement, the United Nations says four years after breakthrough international agreements on climate change and sustainable development, the stakes are high.

“But we are not yet on track to end poverty by 2030 and world hunger is on the rise, with some 821 million people experiencing undernutrition in 2017.”

“Green-house gases continue to climb. Every bit of warming matters and every day we delay action will make it more difficult to limit global warming to 1.5°C and avert the worst impacts of climate change.”

And most importantly, the world’s most vulnerable are bearing the brunt of conflict, inequality, injustice and environmental degradation – 70 million people fled war, persecution and conflict in 2018; at least half the world’s population do not have access to essential health services; and some 29.3% of the population of small island states live at less than five meters above rising sea-levels.

Gautam told IPS that despite the urgency of all the issues to be debated in the upcoming six UN summits, real progress is likely to be incremental and uneven.

“Given the current line-up of the world’s leadership, I fear it is unlikely that we will see great progress on climate change and the elimination of nuclear weapons which requires a very strong commitment of the world’s most powerful countries”.

On the other hand, he argued, “I am more optimistic for significant progress on Universal Health Coverage and some of the other SDG-related issues where progress depends largely on action at the national level in all member states.”

On many of the most pressing issues before the UN Summits, ordinary people, particularly the youth and civil society organizations are way ahead of national political leaders in their understanding of and commitment to address the most pressing issues facing humanity, said Gautam, author of the recently-released book “Global Citizen from Gulmi: My Journey from the Hills of Nepal to the Halls of the United Nations’.

Ultimately, political leadership has to respond to popular will. As Mahatma Gandhi once said, “There go my people, and I must follow them because I am their leader”.

Asked if Greenpeace is expecting anything positive to come out of the climate summit, Morgan told IPS: “Unfortunately, we’re not expecting the Climate Action Summit to deliver what is needed, because there are some countries that are actively trying to slow down progress and lead negotiations in the wrong direction”.

She also pointed out that some countries are claiming to be climate leaders, but not showing any signs of following through. There are a small number proving to others that true 1.5 alignment can be done, but they are outnumbered.

“What is becoming obvious is that we’re entering a new era of climate activism. The people and youth are increasingly showing the unity and positivity missing at the negotiating table. If countries fail to deliver at the Summit, they will have to answer to the tens of thousands of youth in the streets,” Morgan declared.

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@ips.org

The post UN Chief Calls for Action, Not “Beautiful Speeches” appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Women rice farmers in a field, Accra, Ghana. Through the African Development Bank’s Feed Africa project, 19 million people were provided with improved agricultural technologies, and almost 1.54 billion dollars was approved in 2018 to transform agriculture on the continent. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Nalisha Adams and Busani Bafana
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa/BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Sep 16 2019 (IPS)

Arama Sire Camara, a fruit and vegetable seller in the province of Kindia, some 135 km from the Guinean capital of Conakry, feels safer trading well into the night thanks to the Rural Electrification Project, financed by 21-million-dollar investment by the African Development Bank.

“With lighting on the road at night and illuminating our goods, it means we are safer, especially with all the cars on the road. You can work for longer after nightfall, and so we can make more of our products,” she says.

Shuaibu Yusuf, a farmer from Nigeria, can now not only afford to pay for the food for his family thanks to his high yields that are resultant of the high-quality fertiliser he is able to access through the AfDB programme, Feed Africa, but he can also pay his children’s educational costs and his family’s medical bills.

In South Africa’s Limpopo province, Sarina Malatji, now a 39-year-old mother of three, grew up in an area where access to education was limited. But thanks to investment from AfDB in the state power utility Eskom’s Medupi Leadership Initiative and the Eskom Contractors Academy, her life now is a far cry from her childhood. She is now the owner of her own cleaning business – Green Dot – which currently employs 115 people at the Medupi power plant, one of the largest energy projects in the country. She says the skills she learned through the leadership initiative helped her grown her business.

These are just the stories of a few people who have been the beneficiaries of investments made by the AfDB across the continent.

From supporting the construction of a 563 km power transmission line in Mozambique as part of a commitment to aid post cyclone Idai recovery through restoration of livelihoods and infrastructure; to singing a 28.8-million-dollar grant deal with Somalia for road and water projects; to signing a 4.8-million-dollar grant with the African Union for a continental free trade secretariat; and to committing to pool its resources with other stakeholders to counter food insecurity on the continent. This year has already seen the AfDB make a huge footprint in terms of development.

Last year, the bank’s Global Benchmark programme successfully launched two large global benchmark issuances in the dollar market of two billion dollars each and a 1.25 billion euro 10-year bond.

“Africa will develop not through aid but through the discipline of investments,” AfDB President Akinwumi Adesina said, noting that the bank and partners had launched the Africa Investment Forum in 2018, which raised 38.7 billion dollars in investment deals.

But as the AfDB wrapped up the 20th annual meeting of world’s leading financial institutions last week at the bank’s headquarters in Abidjan, Cote D’Ivoire, plans are underway for a renewed push for Africa’s development as the bank lobbies for a general capital increase from shareholders.

The bank is committed to assisting Africa tap into its potential to be a competitive global investment destination with Charles Boamah, senior Vice President of the bank, citing talks around the general capital increase, stating that “this is a pivotal year, a year in which very, very important decisions are being made about what kind of bank we want to have for the next 20 years.”

Earlier this year, Canada committed 1.1 billion dollars in temporary callable capital to support AfDB. Canada also urged other AAA-rated member countries to join Canada in providing support to the bank.

At the time Adesina welcomed the announcement saying it was a “huge boost”. He said that it would allow the bank to “strengthen its Triple A rating and increase lending to member countries while discussions are ongoing among all shareholders for a general capital increase.” Canada has been a member of the AfDB since 1983 and is the 4th-largest shareholder among the bank’s non-regional member countries.

Adesina was in Japan at the end of August to attend the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) where he told Japanese companies, “Africa presents a compelling return for investors”.

The AfDB is upbeat about Africa’s economic growth, which it has supported through various funding services availed to its 54 regional member countries.

In 2018, Africa recorded real GDP growth of 3.5 percent, the bank said in its 2018 annual report. This is a positive development for harnessing new investment on the continent.

The bank said 17 African countries achieved real GDP growth higher than 5 percent in 2018, and 21 countries showed growth between 3 and 5 percent. Only five African countries recorded a recession in 2018, down from eight in the two previous years. Six of the world’s 10-fastest growing economies are African nations, which include Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Libya, Rwanda, and Senegal.

According to the bank, some non-resource-rich countries had high growth rates in 2018, including Côte d’Ivoire (7.4 percent), Rwanda (7.2 percent), and Senegal (7 percent), supported by agricultural production, consumer demand, and public investment.

Economic fundamentals in most African countries continued to improve, the bank said, attributing this to fiscal consolidation and massive investments in infrastructure, major inroads in financial innovation, increased domestic demand, and substantial improvements in the investment climate.

Developing Africa

Convinced of Africa’s strong economic growth potential, the bank has continued to invest in various sectors. In 2018, the bank approved lending worth 9.95 billion dollars under its High 5s programmes — five programmes that focus on key sectors:

• Light Up and Power Africa, approvals amounted to 1.9 billion dollars, 23 percent more than in  2017, with 447 MW in new total power capacity being installed—197 MW of it renewable. Close to 90 percent of bank lending was focused on investment in infrastructure.
• Feed Africa, saw 19 million people provided with improved agricultural technologies, with 1,700 tons of agricultural inputs (fertilisers, seeds, etc) provided. Almost 1.54 billion dollars was approved in 2018 to transform agriculture on the continent.
• Industrialise Africa saw 154,000 owner-operators and micro, small, and medium enterprises provided with access to financial services. Additional loans  supported  activities  across  a  wide  range of manufacturing and services in the private sector. 
• Integrate Africa has seen about 14 million people gaining access to better transport services. The bank approved investments to the value of over one billion dollars, and to invested more than 20  million dollars over the past five years in trade agreement support and in cross-border transport, and energy soft infrastructure.
• Improve the Quality of Life for the People of Africa, project saw 8 million people benefit from improved access to water and sanitation.

“By any measure, these numbers and impacts are impressive,” said Adesina. “But the needs in Africa are enormous. That is why the bank is engaged in discussions with its shareholders for a General Capital Increase to do much more for Africa—toward Agenda 2063.”

Risks remain

Despite Africa’s GDP growing by an estimated 3.5 percent in 2018, the continent’s economic growth is threatened by domestic risks such as climate change, security and migration concerns, increasing vulnerability to debt distress in some countries, and uncertainties associated with elections and political transitions, the bank said, recommending significant private sector investment and external funding  in regional infrastructure and financing.

On average, Africa’s fiscal deficit declined from 5.8 percent in 2017 to an estimated 4.5 percent in 2018, while inflation fell from 12.6 percent in 2017 to 10.9 percent in 2018. However, the bank lamented that these growth rates remained insufficient to address the persistent challenges of high unemployment, low agricultural productivity, inadequate infrastructure, and fiscal and current deficits as well as debt vulnerabilities.

Although tax revenues and spending efficiency have improved, domestic resource mobilisation has generally remained well short of potential, said the bank, noting that 16 African countries were classified as being in debt distress or at high risk of debt distress at the end of 2018. The bank urged the strengthening of the debt-investment links to ensure a high social return on debt-financed public investments.

“I am optimistic about Africa’s future. I am confident in our capacity as a Bank to make a greater impact on the lives of millions of people across this beloved continent we have been called to serve,” Adesina said, adding that, “We need universal access to electricity. We must help make Africa self-sufficient in food. We must fully integrate the continent. We must industrialise the continent. And we must improve the quality of life for the people of Africa.”

Related Articles

• AfDB ‘s Solar Project Aims at Making Africa a Renewable Power House
• How the African Development Bank Plans to Mobilise Funds for Climate Adaptation

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Dr Palitha Kohona is former Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the United Nations and Co-Chair, UN Working Group on Biological Diversity Beyond National Jurisdiction

By Dr Palitha Kohona
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, Sep 16 2019 (IPS)

Sri Lanka is endowed with an impressive and large concentration of whales off its shores and it is believed they are not a population that migrates seasonally. 26 species have been spotted in Sri Lankan waters, including the massive blue whales.

Large numbers, with their young, frolic off Galle and Mirissa along the southern coast, off Kalpitiya along the North Western coast and off Sri Lanka’s magnificent deep water natural habour, Trincomalee. One could almost guarantee multiple sightings of these whales, off Sri Lanka.

The Sri Lankan whale population may feed and produce offspring in the same area unlike all other baleen whale populations of the world. Strong upwelling ocean currents off the narrow continental shelf, the furious south west monsoon, and dozens of tropical rivers pouring nutriment rich fresh water in to the ocean, may produce adequate food for small fish to flourish for the whale population to sustain itself.

Today, the greatest threat to whales off Sri Lanka’s coast may arise from ship strikes. Ships traversing the busy east-west shipping lane just about 20 km to the south of Sri Lanka and those entering the new Hambanthota harbour which is a massive economic asset to the country are likely posing a threat to the giants of the deep.

HUMANS AND WHALES

Although whale numbers around the world appear to be recovering from the carnage that the European and American whalers and sealers inflicted on them, serious concerns remain. Mercilessly hunted for their blubber and other products, the population of these giants of the oceans declined precipitately for almost two centuries and extinction threatened.

Whales also beach themselves and die for reasons still not fully understood. And today, with the oceans crowded with large ships, ship strikes take their toll on these giants of the deep.

The biggest animal on earth, the blue whale, balaenoptera musculus, was a valuable commodity and a slow moving and easy target. The blubber of whales was a prized item then.

A single blue whale could provide about 50 tons of blubber that was used to produce cosmetics, soap, cooking oil and oil for lamps and wax for candles while the skin was converted to fine leather for corsets and umbrellas.

The blue whale population is estimated to have declined from 350,000 to roughly 7,000-15,000 before whale hunting was banned in 1986 by the International Whaling Commission established under the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, 1946.

The humpback population was reduced by 98 percent during the same period. Australia banned whaling in 1978.

Credit: Dr Palitha Kohona

Sri Lanka, especially before independence, became an indirect accessory to the slaughter of whales as whaling ships called at Sri Lankan ports for water and supplies. An American consulate was established in Galle, Sri Lanka in 1857 mainly to serve the interests of U.S. whalers.

The belated awakening of the conscience and of the need to conserve nature for our own benefit forced the industrialised nations to put in place measures to protect these species. Like in many other instances, it was an afterthought and perhaps too late.

Once the damage had been done and the conscience pricked, as has happened time and time again in the all-conquering West, whaling nations met and concluded the International Whaling Convention 1946. Today whaling is banned except for scientific purposes.

Japan, Iceland and Norway continue to hunt whales under this exception despite the noisy protests of environmental NGOs, such as Greenpeace, Campaign Whale, Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society and Sea Shepherd.

Since 1978, it is likely that over 50,000 whales have been killed by these three nations, Norway may have taken 14,344 since 1986. Japan over 21,842. The total number of whales has increased very slowly since the ban.

DISTRIBUTION

Whales have not been known to harm humans, especially the mammoth blue whales. This is quite remarkable considering the immense size of these animals as well as the fairly recent history of humans engaging in a massive slaughter of this species wiping roughly 98%-99% of them off the face of the earth.

Still after what we humans have done to them, what remains today are “Remnant Island” sub-populations of blue whales scattered here and there across the globe, with each group mostly or totally separate genetically from all the others.

In Antarctica. Credit: Dr Palitha Kohona

The majority of pre-whaling blue whales lived in the Southern Ocean, with the extremely productive Antarctic waters and waters off sub Antarctic islands being the primary feeding grounds for most of them.

It is believed that whales live for 70-90 years, give birth to 22-25 foot calves weighing 3 – 5 tons each about once every 3-5 years, fatten those calves to the tune of 220 pounds each and every day with the world’s richest milk, nurse these calves for about seven months, feed year round, and most importantly enrich the oceanic waters they inhabit by stimulating oceanic primary production (phytoplankton) with their mineral rich large fecal plumes.

Blue whales are very adept at finding and gorging krill by the millions. They make the loudest sounds in the animal kingdom and communicate with one another over distances that defy belief, likely to be 1000 miles or greater!

The brains of whales, about 9 kg in weight, may be more complex than human brains in certain areas. Observing their behaviour and reading about them, one begins to wonder whether they are much more advanced than we think with our imagination crowded with religious and social indoctrination.

The southern right whale’s testes weigh a mind boggling one ton. Sadly, blue whales have not shown signs of major recovery since the era of whaling ended about a half century ago.

The primary reason for this is likely to be their propensity to be struck by transiting ships in their feeding grounds, which in most but not all parts of their range is a seasonal issue. They evolved for millions of years without a predator, being too big and fast for orcas to hunt.

This separates them evolutionarily from almost all the other large whale species. In some of the regions where ship strikes are halting their ability to recover from the era of whaling, geographical constraints (California and Chile) make it almost impossible to move the shipping lanes out of the way for the safety of the whales.

In these regions, if we alter the time of day the majority of ships transit to avoid the night time when sleeping blue whales are most vulnerable, we may be able to greatly minimize the number of ship strikes.

In other regions there are no geographical barriers (Sri Lanka, Australia), and the lanes and transiting ships can in theory be moved a bit further from the coasts out of the feeding grounds of the whales.

In these regions the blue whale ship strike problem may be more easily reduced or even eliminated. We need to study the economic impact of the shifting of the sea lanes carefully before taking any action.

In order for global shipping lanes or routes to be formally regulated or adjusted the country most concerned must be a member of the International Maritime Organisation based in London and formally request assistance from the Organisation. Sri Lanka is a member of the IMO.

If a shift in the timing of transiting ships or slowing them down is the goal, in order to minimize ship strikes of whales, this then involves the industry and the port, and becomes a safety issue for those whose role it is to ensure that there are no collisions near ports and arrivals and departures occur in a safe manner.

All these aspects need to be examined carefully, keeping in mind both conservation and economic imperatives, before a regulatory mechanism is formulated.

ECO TOURISM

In Sri Lanka, however, there are major constraints to regulating human activity affecting whales. While moving shipping lanes need to be assessed against the urgent need of the island nation to attract ships, especially to its new port of Hambantota which lies barely 20 km from the busy east-west shipping route, the needs of cargo shipping must be kept in focus.

Sri Lanka is dependent on its export and import trade and trans-shipment is becoming a major income earner. Adjusting shipping routes need to be examined cautiously. Similarly, a large fleet of fishing boats, providing employment to thousands, operates from a number of harbours along the coast and, given sufficient incentive, a fisherman will become a guide, albeit a poorly informed one, to tourists.

One sees the cowboy approach of certain fishermen on a regular basis and education and training becomes a high priority. With tourism, becoming a major component of the island’s economy any regulatory measures must of necessity be a compromise between economic demands and conservation.

Whales, blue whales in particular, are an asset for any nation to have in their coastal waters. They are the biggest animal on earth and this alone makes them a major tourist attraction.

WHALE WATCHING

The whale watching season in the south of Sri Lanka runs from November to April / May. In the North West, the best time is from July to September. During the rest of the year, the waters become too rough due to the Monsoon.

The best place to spot whales is in Mirissa, a small town on Sri Lanka’s south coast, popular for surfing and known for whale watching and also for observing thousands of dolphins.

At Kalpitiya, several whale species including, blue whales and minke whales can be seen. In the north east, off Trincomalee Bay, more whales can be observed. An official permit is required to get into the water to swim with the whales.

Whale watching in Sri Lanka could be a success story for Eco-tourism, if the government regulatory organs, along with the tourism industry, organize themselves to ensure the safety of whale watchers as well as the whales and to educate tourists of the amazing eco-system that surrounds Sri Lanka

The post World’s Whale Population Struggles to Recover from Carnage Amid Serious Concerns appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Dr Palitha Kohona is former Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the United Nations and Co-Chair, UN Working Group on Biological Diversity Beyond National Jurisdiction

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By Fekitamoeloa Katoa ‘Utoikamanu, El Iza Mohamedou and Koffi Zougbede
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 16 2019 (IPS)

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development was adopted in 2015. At its core are 17 Sustainable Development Goals and 169 targets, all meant to guide efforts by all countries towards a more sustainable, prosperous and equal future.

Today, nearly a third of the way towards 2030, progress has been made by several countries in assessing and reporting on whether they are on track to meet those goals. But this stocktaking has uncovered another uncomfortable truth: for many countries, especially the most vulnerable, we simply do not know.

No least-developed country has a complete set of national statistics. The poorer a country is, the spottier its data is. If 22 least-developed countries in Sub-Saharan Africa cannot even measure their own poverty rates, how can we expect them to report on, say, disaggregated indicators such as SDG indicator 11.2.1—proportion of population that has convenient access to public transport, by sex, age and persons with disabilities if they could not generate an aggregated poverty headcount ratio?

Assessments of SDG progress are based on models, or on methodologies and data developed and maintained by dozens of different development agencies working in each country.

Created to support monitoring and evaluation of development interventions, these data are fragmented and limited in scope, painting only enough of the picture to show whether project goals have been met and the spending of donor funds justified.

As a result, there are thousands of different datasets, perhaps overlapping or conflicting, for each country, with no mechanism to collect or process them into an aggregate picture.

Moreover, by focusing on project-based data and working in silos, we compete with national statistical offices for scarce financial resources and other support and therefore limit their ability to develop robust national statistics to advance sustainable development.

This means governments often struggle to use data for the decisions where they are most needed. Poor national epidemiological surveillance systems, instigated in part by the lack of timely and accurate information, is one of the factors that contributed to the spread of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia as well as its heavy human, social and economic costs.

In May 2018, the Review of Partnerships for Small Island Developing States (SIDS) pointed out that a lack of reliable data baselines, monitoring and documentation is hampering progress towards sustainable development in SIDS.

And, at the most recent High-Level Political Forum in July, African countries called for the creation of a solidarity fund for stronger statistics to strengthen their capacity to design and implement fact-based policies and better monitor their implementation.

Yes, data is central for policymaking and its value for sustainable development goes far beyond its current piecemeal implementation and low priority. It is multidisciplinary in nature, able to tell us many different stories about given economic, social and environment situations.

Take healthcare for example. Without an accurate population count, it is difficult to decide whether a hospital is needed in a given area. But what about transportation data, for instance? How easy is the hospital to access?

Moreover, what effect will seasonal weather have on demand (or illness rates, for that matter)? Then, if a new hospital does get built, the impact on health outcomes needs to be assessed and the investment evaluated. But how will this impact poverty or education rates in the surrounding area, for instance?

None of these questions can be answered with a limited set of project-level data. But by robbing poor countries of the ability to develop strong national statistical capacity and datasets, we deprive them of the tools and resources that they need to gain insights into their own development needs and make informed decisions.

It is not hard to see why national data and statistics have not gained the attention that they deserve. After all, building stable and robust national statistical systems which inform better governance, policymaking and development, is less tangible and visible than, say, physically building a school.

Yet data are an essential prerequisite to ensuring that other development interventions are appropriate. In this example, perhaps high poverty rates will tell us that prospective students are more likely to be working in the fields rather than attending classes and therefore other measures are required.

In 2017, only 0.35% (or USD 689 million) of official development assistance (ODA) went to creating the data required for sustainable development. Although this percentage has been increasing over the years, it is still around USD 200 million short of what is required.

It is time for a change, and the adoption of a global and integrated strategy for data is a good start. The 2017 Cape Town Global Action Plan for Sustainable Development Data focuses on making sure that data production is co-ordinated across a range of disciplines and emphasizes the significant role of official data to policymaking and setting development priorities.

A new global alliance for more and better financing for development data, as has been proposed by the Bern Network on Financing Data for Development, is another welcome measure. Recipient countries, donors and development agencies should come together and make the necessary investments in data.

Data is central precisely because it is multidisciplinary, but that, it seems, makes us forget its centrality.

The opinions expressed and arguments employed herein are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official views of the UN, PARIS21 or the OECD.

The post Time to Put Data at the Heart of UN’s 2030 Agenda appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Fekitamoeloa Katoa ‘Utoikamanu is the UN High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States; El Iza Mohamedou is the Deputy Manager of the Partnership in Statistics for Development in the 21st Century, PARIS21; Koffi Zougbede is an Economist at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

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By Razeena Raheem
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 16 2019 (IPS)

Over the years, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) has worked in tandem with legislators and parliamentarians to help implement the historic Programme of Action (PoA) adopted unanimously by over 20,000 UN delegates at a landmark International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo back in 1994.

The PoA included a commitment to reduce maternal and infant mortality, promote reproductive health and family planning, halt the spread of HIV/AIDS among women and children, and strengthen women’s empowerment and gender equality, among others.

But the successful implementation of the PoA was left primarily in the hands of parliamentarians, who were expected to initiate and pass legislation in their home countries, while their governments were mandated to fund and execute the proposed plans and laws.

Pointedly addressing legislators, UNFPA Executive Director Dr. Natalia Kanem says: “As parliamentarians, you have the power to transform the voices of your people into concrete action. You have the power to make a real difference. I appeal to you to protect the precious mandate that you share with UNFPA. Our women, girls and young people deserve no less.”

As UNFPA plans to commemorate the 25th anniversary of ICPD at an international conference (ICPD25) in Nairobi in November, the Asian Parliamentarians for Population and Development (APDA) will hold a meeting in Rabat, Morocco 18-20 September to review and assess ICPD25.

The subject: “Moving Forward the Unfinished Business of the ICPD”

The APDA, which is based in Japan, says the planned parliamentarian meeting aims to update and contribute to the realignment of Arab and Asian Parliamentarians with UNFPA’s strategic objectives of the ICPD25.

Additionally, it plans to promote synergetic partnership among parliamentarians, UNFPA, and other stakeholders and to help formulate Action Plans for parliamentarians to respond to the unique regional contexts to accelerate implementation of the ICPD PoA.

The Rabat meeting is organized by APDA. hosted by the House of Councilors of Morocco and The Forum of Arab Parliamentarians on Population and Development (FAPPD) and supported by the Japan Trust Fund (JTF), and the UNFPA in cooperation with the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF).

A quarter of a century after ICPD, the UNFPA points out that the world has seen “remarkable progress”, with a 25 per cent increase in global contraceptive prevalence rate around the world.

Adolescent births have declined steeply, and the global maternal mortality ratio has fallen.

“But progress has been slow and uneven, since hundreds of millions of women around the world are still not using modern contraceptives to prevent unwanted pregnancies, and global targets on reducing maternal deaths have not been met.”

In an appeal to parliamentarians, Dr Kanem said: “You have pushed your governments towards ambitious goals for the future, and you have held them accountable for promises made in the past. In the coming months we will need you to hold steadfast and ensure that the rights of women and girls, especially in the most vulnerable regions of the world, do not get swallowed up in the political turmoil that threatens to roll back the progress we have made.”

“Although much has been accomplished since the ICPD in 1994, much more has yet to be done. The achievement of the ICPD goals will depend on the political will to fill the gaps in laws, policies and funding. Only with the support of parliamentarians can we build this political will,” she declared.

In a concept note to delegates, APDA says the year 2019 is a milestone marking the 25th anniversary of both the ICPD and the International Conference of Parliamentarians on Population and Development (ICPPD), both organized in Cairo, Egypt.

The ICPPD, which was convened ahead of the ICPD and attended by approximately 300 parliamentarians from 117 countries had a profound influence and contributed to the ICPD Programme of Action.

Driven by the consensus of parliamentarians, the ICPPD merits positioning population issues at the center of sustainable development as reflected in the Preamble and Principles of the ICPD’s Programme of Action. This provided solid grounds for mutual reinforcement between ICPD and ICPPD.

The endorsement of the ICPD Programme of Action 25 years ago, came with reservations from some countries, due to cultural and religious reasons, the concept note said.

“This was basically on sexuality issues and empowerment of women. Nevertheless, one of its major outcomes was the universal access to Sexual and Reproductive Health and Reproductive Rights (RR), including determination of the number, timing and spacing of children; and the right to have access to SRH information and services, as a cornerstone of sustainable, inclusive, and equitable development where no one is left behind.”

The Rabat meeting is also aimed at updating and contributing to the realignment of Arab and Asian Parliamentarians with UNFPA’s strategic objectives of the ICPD25 and promote synergetic partnership among parliamentarians, UNFPA, and other stakeholders and to help formulate Action Plans for parliamentarians to respond to the unique regional contexts to accelerate the implementation of the ICPD Programme of Action.

Given the centrality of the ICPD Programme of Action to achieving the SDGs, and based on progress and achievements made by the Kingdom of Morocco with regard to SDGs, ranking highest among African countries with an implementation rate of 66.1%, a case study of Morocco will be presented at the meeting.

The study will address experience and lessons learned on how parliamentarians can create an enabling environment for achieving of the SDGs in their respective countries.

It is also hoped, says the concept note, that this project will play a catalyst role for promoting parliamentarians’ networking, which should serve the purpose of the JTF (Japan Trust Fund), and enhance sustained multi-stakeholder dialogue for generating synergies among parliamentarians to achieve optimal results.

The meeting in Morocco is also expected to adopt a set of Parliamentarians’ Recommendations for the ICPD+25

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By African Development Bank
Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, Sep 13 2019 (IPS-Partners)

Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, president of the African Development Bank, has arrived in Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso, ahead of the G5 Sahel Summit, and was received by Burkina Faso’s president, Mark Roch Christian Kaboré.

The Burkinabe president applauded the Bank’s Desert to Power initiative, and also highlighted his country’s
excellent relationship with the Bank, expressing his thanks for the portfolio of projects implemented. The Bank president is an invited guest at the G5 Sahel Summit of heads of state and government on 13 September.

President Adesina praised President Kaboré’s commitment, vision and leadership in agreeing to host the
summit. He stressed the importance of political will in the success of the “Desert to Power” initiative, whose
goal is to guarantee universal access to electricity for over 60 million people through solar energy. It will also provide an opportunity to strengthen the south-south partnership as well as stimulate worldwide involvement in the initiative beyond the G5 Sahel countries. At least $20bn must be raised from development partners.

The two presidents also discussed issues relating to the cotton sector, and agreed on a policy of strengthening the domestic cotton industry, so important for the economy of Burkina Faso. The African Development Bank’s president also expressed his sympathies for the terrorist acts that Burkina Faso has recently suffered and reaffirmed the Bank’s support to the country.

During the summit, the Bank will present its Desert to Power initiative to heads of state and government.
President Adesina has drawn attention to the paradox that one of the world’s sunniest regions lacks access to electricity: “Now, more than ever, cooperation and cross-border trade in energy are essential to maintaining a secure supply over the long term given the challenges of climate change,” he said, adding that “in Burkina Faso, significant steps have been taken with the Bank-supported Yeleen rural electrification project.”

As part of its electrification strategy for Africa, the Bank is firmly committed to accelerating access to high
quality, low cost energy for the continent’s people. Critical network connections have been approved by the
Bank’s Board: Mali-Guinea, Nigeria-Niger-Benin-Burkina Faso and Chad-Cameroon.

The “Desert to Power” initiative spans 11 countries: Burkina Faso, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Sudan, Djibouti, Senegal and Chad. It will have a significant impact on the standard of living of 250 million people. The goal is to install 10 gigawatts of solar capacity between now and 2030, which will take a big step towards the achievement of the Bank’s High 5 goals, since access to energy cuts across all Africa’s development needs. It is also in line with the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement on climate change and the Africa Renewable Energy Initiative.

The G5 Sahel is a strategic framework for regional cooperation created in 2014. It includes Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Chad. The G5 Sahel countries are convinced of the interdependence between security and development, particularly in the service sector (energy, transport, telecommunications, and hydraulics).

Contact: Aristide Ahouassou, Communication and External Relations Department, African Development Bank, email: a.ahouassou@afdb.org

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By African Development Bank
Sep 13 2019 (IPS-Partners)

The Desert to Power initiative is an ambitious and innovative partnership-driven initiative of the African Development Bank to transform the Sahel and Sahara region through the deployment of solar technologies, at scale, in eleven countries: Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sudan.

Bank Achievements in Energy:

78% of Bank financing is focused on infrastructure. Of the $1.05 billion investments in support of power generation projects, 95% is for renewable energy. Between otal Bank energy commitments reached $4.6 billion, over $1.5 billion per year.

In 2018, 90% of Bank projects were based on climate-informed designs, and $306 million was raised from climate finance funds (GCF, GEF, CIF and other bilateral sources)

More than $76 million has been committed by the Sustainable Energy Fund for Africa(SEFA) to provide access to over 1.6 million people and generate 690 megawatts of renewable energy. SEFA is currently changing to a Special Fund to be able provide concessional finance and technical assistance to support the penetration and scale-up of renewable energy.

A $500 million Facility for Energy Inclusion designed to close funding gaps in the small-scale energy infrastructure sector, mitigate key credit and local currency risks, and catalyze growth in last-mile energy access solutions.

Launch of the Africa Energy Portal (https://africa-energy-portal.org/), a new website designed to become a one-stop-shop for all data, news and information on the African energy sector by providing up-to-date data and statistics to investors, policymakers, and researchers in order to address the data-gap issue in the African energy sector.

Launch of the Africa Energy Marketplace, a live platform created and hosted by the Bank that brings governments, private Sector, and development partners together to drive policy dialogue, accelerate reforms and attract private investments in the African energy sector.
Desert to Power proposes to deliver access to electricity to about 250 million people and to develop up to 10 GW of solar generation capacity through a combination of on-grid and off-grid projects.  The initiative is critical in the Bank’s efforts to contribute to the realization of the High 5s, the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Climate Agreement, and the Africa Renewable Energy Initiative.

Desert to Power is implemented in partnership with various financial and technical partners, such as the Agence Française de Développement, Africa 50, the Green Climate Fund, MASEN and GOGLA, among others.

 

What is the focus of the Desert to Power initiative in the G5 Sahel?

The Bank has placed an initial focus on the G5 Sahel countries (Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger), targeting a 1.1 GW increase in generation capacity and the 60 million people who currently lack access to electricity in the region.

The Bank has identified five priority action areas for the G5 Sahel. One, expand utility-scale solar generation capacity, two, extend and strengthen the power transmission network, three, accelerate electrification through decentralized energy solutions, four, revitalize national power utilities; and five, improve the business climate for increased private sector investments. Capacity building is a cross-cutting component of this initiative, in order to reinforce the impact of mobilized resources. At the G5 Summit, the Bank will request the support of the G5 Sahel leaders and partners to progress with realization of these priorities.

I am delighted that this G5 summit is taking place in Burkina Faso, which is home to the first project developed under the Desert to Power initiative:  the Yeleen Rural Electrification Project, which is a multi-million-dollar investment by the African Development Bank, in partnership with the European Union and the Green Climate Fund.

 

What is unique and transformative about the Desert to Power initiative? What are its expected impacts?

The Desert to Power initiative presents tremendous potential for transformative impact.  By enabling the region to harness its solar potential – which is the highest in the world – for sustainable social and economic development, the Desert to Power initiative would ultimately create the largest solar zone in the world.

That said,  Desert to Power is not just about energy: it is also about the impact that energy has on the social and economic development of the region, from enhanced agricultural practices for productive use and food security, to upgraded manufacturing value chains, more opportunities for youth employment, and sustainable mitigation actions to combat desertification.

For example, the Yeleen project will use decentralized photovoltaic solar systems to generate 22.6MW through a network of 100 mini power plants, or mini-grids, and turnkey units. In addition to supplying electricity to 100,000 households for 16 hours a day, the project will create over 700 jobs and impact agriculture, entrepreneurship, and industry.

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