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The Amadiyya community centre in Pasyala hosts refugees and asylum seekers forced to leave their homes since the April 21 attacks in Sri Lanka. Credit: UNHCR/Caroline Gluck

By Caroline Gluck
NEGOMBO, Sri Lanka, May 31 2019 (IPS)

Thirteen-year-old Bariea, a Pakistani asylum seeker in Sri Lanka, is taking shelter at a mosque in the city of Negombo, where an uneasy mix of high anxiety and extreme boredom hover over the room.

“We just have a few small bags, mostly clothes,” said Bariea. “We thought we would only be here for a few days. But now it’s been weeks.”

“We want to leave. We don’t feel safe. Pakistan wasn’t safe either …. I know many people were killed and injured. But it was not our fault.”

Around 1,000 refugees and asylum seekers like Bariea, most from Pakistan, some from Afghanistan, have sought shelter in mosques and police stations in Negombo and Pasyala, near the capital Colombo, for the past month.

While many from the local community stepped in to try and help, they were driven out of their rented homes by others who accused them of being connected to bomb attacks on churches and hotels around the country on April 21 that killed 250 people and injured many more.

As they shelter in the city, which was the site of one of the church attacks, UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, is working closely with Sri Lankan authorities to find more suitable, temporary places to move the families so they can live in dignity and safety during this difficult time. But in the climate of fear following the attacks, it has not been easy.

Some of the people displaced from their homes in Negombo have already moved to safer areas. More will be relocated in the coming days.

Family’s like Bariea’s, who sought safety in Sri Lanka after fleeing violence, persecution, and extremism in their own countries, say they were made scapegoats. Bariea has not only had to leave her home with her family to shelter in the crowded mosque but, with her two brothers, forced to drop out of class.

“I really miss school; I worry about getting behind in class. Education is my future. I don’t think I can go to school now,” she says.

Afghan mother Anisa and family shelter with over 100 other refugees and asylum seekers at the police station in Negombo, Sri Lanka. Credit: UNHCR/Caroline Gluck

Her mother, Sehrish, 34, has many other worries. Her children have all been sick with coughs and fevers, and she is six months’ pregnant, like several women in the mosque and she is unable to sleep properly in the confined space.

She said she was grateful for the help they have received from UNHCR, its partners and local Sri Lankan groups, but also worried about what will happen next. “We are getting assistance but we cannot live here for much longer,” she says.

“People have been generous. Some groups have come and provided us with food and clothes.”

UNHCR’s head of office in Sri Lanka, Menique Amarasinghe, said: “Our top priority is to make sure these people are safe and well-protected, and to ensure they can access basic services.

“We’ve been extremely grateful to the Sri Lankan government who have acknowledged their responsibility to care for these people and have been doing everything they can in really very difficult circumstances.”

UNHCR has reinforced its staffing in Sri Lanka to respond to the emergency. It is working with the authorities and partner agencies to provide food, medicine, hygiene material, water and sanitation, and other basic support to refugees and asylum-seekers.

A short drive away from the Amadiyya mosque, around 100 Pakistanis and Afghans are sheltering in the semi open-air car park at Negombo’s police station. The police have provided security and assistance, but facilities are inadequate, with just a handful of toilets shared by the police and new arrivals.

It is so hot, that most people have broken out in skin rashes and their arms and legs covered in infected mosquito bites.

While some in the local community reacted in anger after the attacks, other Sri Lankans have rallied round the refugees and asylum seekers who they counted as neighbours.

“People have been generous. Some groups have come and provided us with food and clothes. Sri Lankan people have helped us,” said Anisa, an ethnic Hazara from Afghanistan, nursing her six month old daughter.

She has lived in Sri Lanka for four years and says people were friendly – but the attacks changed everything. “The owner of our house told us we could stay, but the neighbours said no. He said he wouldn’t be able to protect us, so we came here, a safe place.” Her niece, a confident English-speaker, 12-year-old Sadaf, chimes in.

“After the blast, people blamed us and hated us. It made us really upset.”

Sadaf used to study at a school supported by UNHCR. But right now she cannot go back to class. “I learnt lots of things. I need school for a better future and now I can’t go … it makes me sad. I think I won’t have a good future. Children like me are worried.”

The post Pakistani and Afghan Refugees Seek Safe Haven in Sri Lanka appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Caroline Gluck is Senior Regional Public Information Officer, UNHCR, the UN refugee agency. She is based in Bangkok, Thailand

The post Pakistani and Afghan Refugees Seek Safe Haven in Sri Lanka appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Rana Javadi, Never-Ending Chaos, 2013.

By Vijay Prashad
May 31 2019 (IPS-Partners)

(Tricontinental) – Word comes from friends in Iran of foreboding, a general sense of fear that the United States might bomb the country at any time.

A friend in Tehran asks me to read Simin Behbahani’s The World is Shaped Like a Sphere, a poem for our times. Behbahani (1927-2014), a superb lyricist, wrote this poem in 1981 (translated by Farzaneh Milani and Kaveh Safa):

It was our agreement to call this the East,
though we could push it westwards, with ease.
Don’t speak to me of the West, where the sun sets,
if you always run after the sun,
you will never see a sunset.

The world divided by a line is a dead body cut in two
on which the vulture and the hyena are feasting.

Iraq – at the behest of the Arab Gulf and the United States – had attacked Iran in 1980, inaugurating a futile war that would go on till 1988. Angry that the Gulf Arabs had not properly financed the war nor honoured the sovereignty of Iraq’s oil fields, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein attacked Kuwait in August 1990. It is worth recalling that in the summer of 1990, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – set up out of anxiety for the Iranian Revolution of 1979 – hastened to normalize relations with Iran. Kuwait resumed flights to Iran and linked investment and shipping deals with Iran. The GCC, which had egged Saddam to attack Iran, now seemed to curry favour with Iran against Iraq. The blood of Iraqis and Iranians stained the long border between those two countries; the people of both countries had been treated as pliable marionettes by the Gulf Arabs and the West. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait started the Gulf War, which does not seem to have ended. Today, the Gulf War manifests itself in the fierce siege against Iran.

Gohar Dashti, Today’s Life and War, 2008.

Iran sits at the precipice of disaster. US President Donald Trump’s harsh sanctions and his threats of war send shockwaves through the region. Buyers of Iranian oil have decided to wait and see how the situation unfolds. The key player here is China. How China will react defines the next stage, as I write in my column. All is tense. Shahram Khosravi, an anthropologist, wrote a moving account of a conversation with his friend Hamid – a veteran of the Iran-Iraq War. Our newsletter this week features Shahram’s account, a window into the life of one Iranian rattled by the sanctions and by the premonition of war. It is below:

Shahram Khosravi, Hamid, 2018.

In Iran, the term ‘war’ is often used in reference to the US sanctions. ‘Why don’t they [the US] leave us in peace?’, asked my friend Hamid late last year.

Hamid and I were both born in 1966 in the same village along the Zagros mountains in the Bakhtiari region of southwestern Iran. At nineteen, Hamid was sent do to two years of compulsory military service. The Iran-Iraq War was in its fourth year. Hundreds of thousands of young men, many teenagers, had already been killed. After ten days of training, Hamid went – Kalashnikov in hand – to the front. On a cold February day in 1986, the gates of hell opened. Saddam Hussein’s forces unleashed mustard gas on the Iranian troops. Twenty thousand died immediately, while an additional 80,000 survivors suffered—and many continue to suffer— the impact. Hamid’s lungs were badly damaged; he cannot talk without coughing. His skin is burnt in many places. He suffers from depression.

Hamid blames the US and the Iraqi government for his injuries. He is right. Recent CIA documents confirm US complicity in the use of mustard gas on young people like Hamid. Now the US sanctions have become harsher. As a temporary labourer, Hamid can barely tolerate the unbearable economic pressure of the sanctions on his weak shoulders.

Trump withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018. Three months later, the first shockwave hit Iranians. Iran’s currency collapsed by 70%, causing high inflation. The cost of basic needs went up. Workers’ purchasing power dropped by 53%. A kilogramme of meat costs more than the entire day’s wage of a worker.

Sanctions have shrunk the official corridors of trade, opening up space for informal trade networks and various forms of smuggling. The weak Iranian currency has meant the widening the price of goods inside and outside of Iran. Livestock is increasingly being smuggled into Iraq, which is a key factor in the rising price of meat. As sanctions increased, so did cross-border smuggling. One study suggests that this smuggling has increased by thirty-seven times its pre-sanctions frequency.

Medicines are exempt from the sanctions, but they are nonetheless scarce and expensive. Companies that sell medicines to Iran shy away from the unstable economic situation and fear retribution from the United States. Sanctions target shipping and banking, making it hard to get the medicines to the country and pay for them. Insecure markets are a good business environment for speculators, who buy and hoard medicines, forcing prices upwards.

Foreign investments collapsed, and capital fled the country. An official source says that since the summer of 2017, about US $20 billion has left Iran. Companies have also fled, which means that parts for machinery and cars cannot be easily sourced. Production of vehicles has fallen by 72%.

Unemployment has increased. Workers are often told by their employers that they cannot get paid because ‘there is no money anywhere’. The informal sector has grown, with precarious jobs without health and unemployment insurance becoming the norm.

Hamid has been in the informal sector for decades. He rarely gets paid in time. Not getting paid on time is now normal – often with six months of salary in arrears. Each week, workers somewhere in Iran go on strike to demand their salaries. Delayed salaries mean workers have to take out loans to meet their basic needs. Less fortunate people turn to usurious moneylenders (who charge interest rates at 70%). The interest eats into their unpaid salaries. The US sanctions have cut their lifeline. They are drowning.

While Hamid – in a small village – struggles to survive, middle-class Iranians seek a way to flee the country. I have never seen such widespread desire to leave the country. People from the middle-class do not see any future in Iran. Lines outside European embassies are getting longer and longer, as announcements of property auctions ‘due to emigration’ are getting more common. Buyers are few. The ‘bazaar is sleeping’, people say. ‘Nothing happens now. No one sells, no one buys’.

Hamid says, ‘When the dollar’s price goes up, the price of everything goes up: tomato, rice, meat, medicine– everything. They never come down, even if the dollar’s price goes down’.

‘Iranians’, it is said, ‘have become like calculators’. Life is filled with numbers. Following the exchange rate of the dollar has become an obsession. Everyone waits to find out where the Rial – Iran’s currency – will settle. The structure of social life is suspended. Hamid checks the dollar’s price each day. Far from his village, Donald Trump tweets about the war against Iran. On 19 May, Trump threatened Iranians with an ‘official end’ – a threat of extermination. When he does so, the Rial responds and Hamid sees and feels the impact. Sanctions and Trump’s threats cast a shadow of death, even as no gun has yet been fired. Premature death is so frequent that it is now seen as normal. Iran has become preoccupied with death due to the sanctions and the rhetoric of war. Shortages of medicines have already killed people.

So have plane crashes. In 1995, US President Bill Clinton put sanctions against Iran’s civilian aviation industry. This prevented Iran from buying new aircraft and spare parts. Iran’s dozen airlines have the oldest fleets in the world. In February 2018, an Aseman Airlines flight with 66 on board crashed in the Zagros mountains – not far from Hamid’s village.

Hamid worries for his son, Omid, now age 19. ‘If they start a new war….’, he says, and then stops, his eyes down, coughs overcoming him. He has seen how wars break bodies and souls. If the US felt no compunction in providing Iraq with chemical weapons to use against Iran in the 1980s, why would they not allow Saudi Arabia and Israel to do the same now? Our generation was gassed by the US-backed Saddam Hussein. Is it now Omid’s generation turn to break down under the harsh sanctions and the shadow of American bombers?

Kiarash Eghbali, Old woman at Shariati Hospital, Tehran, 2016.

A war against Iran – as Hamid says – will be catastrophic, not only for Iran but for Eurasia. It would divide the world into two, vultures and hyenas feasting on both halves.

The post The World Divided by a Line Is a Dead Body Cut in Two appeared first on Inter Press Service.

A fisherman of the Abume community, Lake Volta, Ghana. Credit: Nana Kofi Acquah/International Water Management Institute

By Claudia Sadoff
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, May 31 2019 (IPS)

Global biodiversity loss has reached critical levels. One million species of plants and animals are now estimated to be at risk of extinction. The window for action is closing, and the world needs to urgently take note.

Countries would do well to consider this: our ability to preserve species hinges to a great extent on the actions we take to protect freshwater ecosystems. Safeguarding water for the environment is critical for biodiversity and for people.

Freshwater ecosystems are major biodiversity hotspots. We derive much value from them, even though we may not realise it. Wetlands purify drinking water; fish is one of the most traded food commodities on the planet; and floodplains can provide vital buffers that lessen the impacts of flooding.

The people who depend most on the services provided by aquatic ecosystems are generally the poorest and most marginalized in developing countries and consequently those hardest hit by biodiversity loss.

However, all of us, both rich and poor, depend on healthy ecosystems, so degradation of ecosystems and loss of biodiversity pose an enormous threat for everyone.

About 35 per cent of the world’s biodiversity-rich wetlands, for example, have been lost or seriously degraded since 1970. The annual value of the benefits these wetlands (freshwater and coastal) provide is estimated at a staggering USD 36.2 trillion; nearly double the benefits derived from all the world’s forests.

Sustainable management of aquatic ecosystems (and of water resources in general) must aim to ensure that ecosystems continue providing these services.

A key approach for reversing this trend centres on ensuring that water continues to flow in a way that will sustain aquatic ecosystems, thereby supporting populations, economies, sustainable livelihoods, and well-being.

Pumping water by hand in mid-Western Nepal. Credit: Satyam Joshi/USAID

This means maintaining the right quality, quantity and timing of water flows – which scientists call “environmental flows”, or “E-flows” for short.

Managing tradeoffs

Water, through contributions to economic growth, environmental health and human well-being, plays a critical role in many of our broader sustainable development goals. It will therefore be necessary to consider some inevitable tradeoffs when planning for the sustainable management of water.

Take the expansion of irrigation for more intensive crop production, for example, which is essential for ending hunger. The alternative to increasing irrigation would be massive encroachment of agriculture on forests and other fragile ecosystems, thus undermining the protection of biodiversity.

At the same time, increased irrigation will, by removing water from rivers and aquifers, inevitably have some negative impacts on aquatic ecosystems.

The challenge is to maximize synergies and minimize tradeoffs, and to do so in ways that are transparent and equitable, based on scientific evidence. Undertaking detailed assessments of E-flows helps make the tradeoffs explicit.
The information derived from E-flow assessments can contribute to important discussions between different sectors and actors, helping to determine which outcomes are acceptable to society and likely to be sustainable.

E-flows assessment in action

For more than a decade, the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) has been devising and steadily improving methods for E-flow assessment. In a 2007 project, IWMI partnered with World Wide Fund for Nature-India (WWF-India) to carry out the country’s first-ever holistic environmental flow assessment, focused on the iconic Ganges River.

The Indian government subsequently incorporated the concept of E-flows into the aims and objectives of the National Mission for Clean Ganga, the implementation arm of the National Ganga River Basin Authority.

Working with partners, IWMI researchers have now developed E-flow calculators, a family of software formaking rapid, assessments anywhere in the world from a computer.

More recently, IWMI researchers have further adapted their E-flow calculator for specific river basins, such as those in western Nepal. As a result of those developments, E-flow assessment is now poised for wider application in diverse settings.

In support of national efforts to better manage tradeoffs in water management, information provided by E-flow calculators can also contribute to tracking “water stress”.

For instance, how much freshwater economic activities withdraw compared to the total renewable supply, and how much water should be left in rivers to maintain basic ecological functions and ecosystem services.

Too much of our biodiversity depends on water for us to overlook sustainable water management as a key part of the solution to species extinction. The time has come for a more concerted effort to stem the loss of aquatic ecosystems and of the myriad species that inhabit them.

The post We Can’t Halt Extinctions Unless We Protect Water appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Claudia Sadoff is Director General, International Water Management Institute (IWMI)

The post We Can’t Halt Extinctions Unless We Protect Water appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Credit: Artem Beliaikin_Unsplash

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, May 31 2019 (IPS)

Do not panic! This is not about telling you how bank accounts and pension funds have been used to finance the production of nuclear bombs (they call it ‘investment’).

Nor is it about the four dozens of major and minor wars that the so-called “traditional weapons,” which are being manufactured and exported by civilised, democratic countries, continue to systematically fuel.

It is not about the irrational depletion of natural resources, the destruction of forests, the massive provision of arms to “rebel groups’ to burn entire villages, rape girls and women, and recruit child soldiers in more than one African country, for the sake of ‘cleaning’ the mines area for big multinationals to continue extracting precious minerals which serve to produce more (and more expensive) smartphones.

Not even it is about how today’s youth will see more plastic than fish in all seas.

More: this article will not focus on the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of so many mediocre apprentices of self-called ‘politicians’, who embrace dangerous fanaticisms while, in some ‘very democratic’ countries, calling their own selves “centre-right” (some dare saying they are simply “centre”), slipping further into ‘dictato-cracy.’

The term "globalisation" has been systematically given positive connotations, while it could be rightfully interpreted as a process of gradual “monetisation” and even “dollarisation” of livelihoods, and soon became an aggressive ‘massification’ of imported habits, blind consumption, hysterical greed, irrational imitation, the death of what used to be considered ‘truth’ (the post-truth era), the dominance of disinformation and misinformation (the ‘fake news’).

Nor it is about those so many States which were once net exporters of emigrants (Italy, Spain, Greece, etc), but which now stand as die-hard enemies of immigrants… all under the pretext of the “crisis” they have created and the resulting high unemployment rates, and “national security,” post-truth arguments.

Let alone big powers such as the United States, which have been entirely built up by migrants at the easy cost of exterminating the original, native populations. What to say about Canada? And Australia…?

Now those migrants who are forced to flee created armed conflicts, impoverishment, climate change (which they did not contribute to generate), are easy prey to arbitrary measures – walls, fences, and shame pacts to send them to detention centres and slavery markets in countries like Libya.

 

So What?

So, what the hell is this article all about? Well, it is about a scarce handful of examples on the biggest damages the so-called globalisation has caused to human species.

Let’s begin with the term globalisation itself, a process that was somehow formalised in the beginning of the 80’s with the performance on power stage of British “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher and US actor who became President, Ronald Reagan.

The Iron Lady-Premier and the Actor-President represented the visible face of the also so-called ‘neo-liberalism’, which in poor, simple words has led to the steady dismantlement of all aspects of painfully gained social welfare services – from public healthcare, to retirement pensions, through the suppression of workers rights, labour unions, public education and a very long etcetera.

Instead, neo-liberalism rapidly paved the way to a wild wave of privatisation, the supremacy of the uncontrolled marked rules, record-high youth unemployment rates, abysmal inequalities…

Let alone infinite greed, including the unleashing of endless wars, for the sake of keeping happy gigantic weapons industry and the business of ‘reconstruction’ of destroyed countries, all in exchange of their generous funding for electoral campaigns.

This Anglo-saxon neo-liberal hegemony soon spreat through European States, which rapidly adapted their ‘values’ to those new ones coming from Washington and London. Business as usual for Europeans, some would say.

Rather than providing a longish list of documented, figure-supported examples of what such process has meant at the macro and micro-economic levels, this quick, chaotic tale modestly pretends to focus on some of its biggest impacts on human beings. Human beings that are now considered as mere numbers of ‘voters’ (mind you not any more ‘electors’).

 

Voracity

One point is that the term “globalisation” has been systematically given positive connotations, while it could be rightfully interpreted as a process of gradual “monetisation” and even “dollarisation” of livelihoods, and soon became an aggressive ‘massification’ of imported habits, blind consumption, hysterical greed, irrational imitation, the death of what used to be considered ‘truth’ (the post-truth era), the dominance of disinformation and misinformation (the ‘fake news’).

In the course of this process, the so-called “low classes” have been provided with easy bank credits to purchase houses, latest model of cars, travel across the world… Psychologically, this led them to believe that they had become “middle class” and later on “high middle class”, thus approaching the enviable status of “high class.”

Then came the crisis. With it, the most vulnerable groups, falsely transformed in privileged groups, lost everything—the loans, the houses, the cars, travelling, etc.

 

The result

One of the most dramatic consequences is the loss of identity—both individual and collective identity. Simply, identity has become ‘virtual.’

Such a dangerous consequence is now being rapidly aggravated by the arrival of hi-tech products—robots replacing humans.

Sorry for this quick, chaotic tale about some of the most perilous impacts of the globalisation process that, according to some interpretations, would be now dismantled. The fact is such massification appears to have no end.

In exchange, the ‘voters’ hare now being told that they will receive, sooner or later, a basic income (also called unconditional basic income, citizen’s income, basic income guarantee, universal basic income or universal demo-grant), which implies that all citizens or residents of a country will regularly receive an unconditional sum of money, in addition to any income received from elsewhere.

According to its defenders, this would be financed by the profits of publicly owned enterprises. A difficult exercise given that the private sector has been taking over the roles of the states, which have been gradually dismantled.

This way, the citizens will be kept alive, will complain less about the evident failure of governments to create job opportunities, while doing what they are expected to do: that’s to consume all what industries produce and, by the way, continue playing their role as ‘voters’ (not electors, mind you again!).

 

Baher Kamal is Director and Editor of Human Wrongs Watch, where this article was originally published.

The post Lost in Globalisation appeared first on Inter Press Service.

There are 1.8 billion people between the ages of 10 to 24 and it has become more essential than ever for young people to mobilise in order to achieve the change they want and need in their communities and the world. Thousands of youth gathered in Rome on Friday, Mar. 15, to join the climate strike, a global movement that aims to make governments and institutions aware of taking serious steps to implement the Paris Agreements and save the planet. Credit: Maged Srour/IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, May 30 2019 (IPS)

Rather than waiting for adults to act, more young girls and boys are standing up and speaking out on the world’s pressing issues.

In recent years, the international community has seen a rise in youth engagement from education activist Malala Yousafzai to climate change warrior Xiuhtezcatl Roske-Martinez.

“More often than not, young people in our world today are a lightning rod for change. You show the courage and persistence that is often lacking among older generations,” said United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres during the recent Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Youth Forum.

“Because it is your future, your livelihoods, your freedom, your security, your environment, you do not and you must not take no for an answer.…engaging youth globally is essential for the well-being of the entire world,” he added.

According to the UN, there are 1.8 billion people between the ages of 10-24, 90 percent of whom live in developing countries. These figures are only expected to grow as closer to 2 billion young people are projected to turn 15 between 2015 and 2030.

It is therefore more essential than ever for young people to mobilise in order to achieve the change they want and need in their communities and the world.

Most recently, youth walked out of classrooms and onto the streets, demanding political action on climate change. On May 24, there were over 2,300 school strikes in more than 130 countries.

Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish student who sparked the global youth climate movement stated: “We proved that it does matter what you do and that no one is too small to make a difference.”

“Your voices give me hope,” said Guterres in response to the climate strikes.

In Northern Bangladesh, Kumar Bishwajit Barman has also worked to improve his community and those who live there.

At just 18 years old, Barman and his friends established the Ashar Allo Pathshala school to help stop child marriage and drug abuse.

According to the UN Children’s Fund, Bangladesh has the fourth-highest prevalence rate of child marriage in the world and the second-highest number of absolute child brides.

Approximately 59 percent of girls in the South Asian country are married before their 18th birthday ad 22 percent are married before the age of 15.

In 2010, Barman saw that an 11-year-old student was going to drop out of school to be married off and decided to act.

“She is one of many such girls who are made to tie the knot before getting done with primary education…one can only imagine how ruthless I had to be at that time to stop the marriage and get her back to education,” said Bishwajit.

“We went to her house and promised to bear all the expenditure required for her study. That was the beginning of our movement against child marriage,” he added.

Since then, Bishwajit has helped save at least 1,000 girls from child marriage and provides free education, helping girls pursue higher education.

But such feats were not easy. Barman often received threats whenever he tried to stop an early marriage and struggled financially to sustain operations.

“While we had to survive on tuition jobs, we provided all financial supports for their study…now we have 1,800 volunteers in the entire district to oversee the issues of education and stopping child marriage,” he said.

The Ashar Allo Pathshala school also provides education and vocational training to adults, including more than 450 women.

Earlier this year, Bishwajit established a mini-garment factory for women to help create employment.

In 2015, Bishwajit received the Joy Bangla Youth Award for his work in community development and was recently awarded Zonta Club’s Centennial Anniversary Award for contributions to women’s empowerment.

“All my vision and efforts now center around students,” Bishwajit said, who turned down university to continue his work.

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The post The New Face of Activism: Youth appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Colin Mayfield and Hamid Mehmood
HAMILTON, Canada, May 30 2019 (IPS)

Post-secondary education relevant to the global water crisis is concentrated in wealthy countries rather than the poorer, developing places where it is needed most.

Meanwhile, water research is largely assessed by counting the number of papers published and their citation by other researchers rather than whether the work actually leads to successful, practical solutions.

Twin papers from UN University’s Canadian-based Institute for Water, Environment and Health highlight and document these weaknesses in the global effort to address inadequate water supply and sanitation, problems that rank among the top-10 global risks.

There’s no global source of information on water-related academic activities. To uncover trends in water-related publications, therefore, we had to devise indirect measures using several databases, including one that indexes 22,800 journals, magazines and reports from more than 5,000 publishers.

Nor is there a list of water resource-related post-secondary programs. Similar detective work was required, therefore, to locate the world’s 28,000 or so universities that offer degrees in water-related programs.

Our most troubling finding at the end of the day: altogether too little training and research takes place where water problems are most acute. Instead, global water research relies on Western – particularly US – scientific outputs.

Globally, we found, water-related research is published in 88 countries but just two of them — the United States and China — accounted for 33% of the 1.2 million papers published between 2012 and 2017.

About 70% of the academic journals that publish water research are based in just four countries — the United States, Britain, Germany and the Netherlands; 2% are in China.

All 15 countries leading in publications per million population are among the world’s wealthiest, suggesting water research does not emerge as a reaction to water scarcity but, instead, to some economic value in a supply and sanitation industry expected to be worth $1 trillion (US) in 2020.

The average number of citations for any given paper dropped precipitously, from 22 in 2012 to just three in 2017. This suggests, at least in part, that lower quality papers are being written to conform with government sponsored policies on publication, or reflects increasing pressure in academia to produce research — publish or perish.

This pressure might be critical for researchers to survive, but it is hardly conducive from a development perspective.

Meanwhile, most universities offering water-related courses are in North America, Europe and parts of Asia. In Sub-Saharan Africa, which faces severe water shortages, very few postgraduate institutions offer recognised programs on water.

And many students from water-stressed countries who attend university in North America or Europe don’t return home after graduation, depriving their countries of badly needed expertise.

Any incentive, process or practice that encourages the return of these highly-qualified students to jobs in the water sector could benefit the home country.

Given the highly autonomous nature of universities and their faculty members, it’s unreasonable to expect widespread cooperation in curriculum design and delivery but some sharing of materials would be very beneficial.

We suggest that a consortium of universities offer large-scale water studies, courses or programs using the specific expertise of their combined faculty members.

Other recommendations: encourage more women to enter the water-resources field. And find better ways to convey in a practical way the research findings, learning and knowledge in research publications to actual users in need of the knowledge.

Teacher and teaching ratings should likewise be based on outcomes — including assessments by previous students at different intervals since graduation about the quality, content and relevance of their programs.

The bottom line: When it comes to water research, the publish or perish philosophy that drives many researchers must take second place to the goal of on-the-ground results, especially in the developing world, where there also must be a more structured focus on water education.

The UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) sets ambitious targets for improvement in water supply and sanitation. To achieve the water-related SDGs, however, we need to use insights into academic shortcomings to make reforms, and soon.

*Their papers, “Higher Education in the Water Sector: A Global Overview” and “Bibliometrics of Water Research: A Global Snapshot,” are available at www.inweh.unu.edu. UNU-INWEH is supported by the Government of Canada through Global Affairs Canada and hosted by McMaster University.

The post Water Research & Education Needs to Flow Towards Developing World appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Colin Mayfield, is Senior Advisor, Water Education and Knowledge Management at United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), and Hamid Mehmood is a Senior Researcher*.

The post Water Research & Education Needs to Flow Towards Developing World appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Princess Sarah Zeid
AMMAN, May 29 2019 (IPS)

On the eve of the Women Deliver conference in Vancouver June 3-6, Princess Sarah Zeid of Jordan interviewed Dr. Olfat Mahmoud, a Palestinian refugee and women’s rights advocate.

Princess Sarah spoke with Dr. Olfat about what the humanitarian system would look like if organizations like hers could help shape it, and the messages she hopes to bring to Women Deliver.

Excerpts from the interview:

Princess Sarah: Tell me a little about yourself. What drew you to your work and why does it matter?

Dr. Olfat: I was born a Palestinian refugee, so witnessed injustice all my life. Yet what defines me is not that I grew up in a refugee camp in Lebanon, or that I spent most of my life in a war zone, but that I am a nurse and advocate in my community.

Even amid crisis, my parents were open-minded and encouraged me to be independent, so that is exactly what I set out to do. I studied and practiced nursing during the Lebanese civil war, and through that work witnessed the overlooked hardships faced by refugee women and children.

As a medical practitioner, I saw how essential services for girls and women of all ages – such as psychosocial support and sexual and reproductive health care– were chronically overlooked. And as an advocate in my community, I found that supporting women empowered me as well.

I established the Palestinian Women’s Humanitarian Organization (PWHO) to fill these gaps and fulfill the needs of refugee girls and women so they can lead better futures. Not a single international organization stepped up to do this important work – so I knew that change had to come from those of us within the community.

Princess Sarah: What are the main challenges girls and women face in your community? What makes women-focused civil society organizations (CSOs) like yours most well-equipped to respond to these challenges?

Dr. Olfat: For girls and women, life in refugee settings require superhuman strength. We are particularly vulnerable when it comes to access to essential health services, information, and education, and disproportionately suffer from gender-based violence.

Women-focused civil society organizations are most well-equipped to respond to these challenges because women are the best experts on our lives. Our lived experiences make us better advocates for ourselves and for others in similar situations.
For example, the PWHO women’s centers – staffed by refugee women themselves– have gained unparalleled trust from the community, and become a second home for many.

With that trust, we can more easily identify what women want and need – like access to non-discriminatory health services, psychosocial support, rights-based education, and leadership skills – and design programs that are tailored for them. We can also negotiate with local leaders to push for a more supportive environment for women’s rights – a key ingredient to driving lasting change in conservative contexts.

UNHCR Patron, HRH Sarah Zeid of Jordan, meets with a women’s group at Doro refugee camp in South Sudan. Credit: UNHCR/Jan Møller Hansen

Princess Sarah: What could the international community – including donors, decision-makers, and practitioners – do more or less of to maximize sustainable positive impact for the populations you serve?

Dr. Olfat: The international community wields a lot of power – especially the power of money and the power of influence. To drive real change in my community, international actors must use those powers more efficiently.

First, there is a critical need to fill funding gaps for programs that are specifically designed for refugee girls and women. With more girls and women displaced today than ever before in global history, their needs are rising – yet funding for them is decreasing.

We need smarter investments in programs that enable refugee girls and women to lead better futures, including through education and quality vocational and life skills training, as well as access to sexual and reproductive health care.

Yet money alone is not enough. The international community must also use their influence to challenge national and regional political barriers that hold us back.

This includes respecting and upholding international agreements, including UN resolutions, which support and protect refugees. It also means addressing legal restrictions that keep refugee women from working, obtaining formal education, and exercising other basic human rights in their host countries.

Princess Sarah: Currently only 3% of humanitarian aid goes to local and national organizations – and even less to those focused on girls and women. What types of concrete investments does your organization need to extend your impact and plan for the future?

Dr. Olfat: Right now, the needs we see are greater than the resources we have. To meet those needs, we don’t just need more funding – but more of the right kinds of funding.

Too often, grants and funding opportunities for women-focused CSOs are designed without consulting us on the types of investments we know girls and women in our communities need the most.

Other times, we aren’t able to access grants because of unrealistic reporting requirements that are either unsuitable or unmanageable for a small grassroots organization like ours.

For example, many grants for vocational programs in Lebanon require organizations to report success by the number of jobs their beneficiaries gain as a result – which isn’t possible in a context where refugees aren’t legally allowed to work. To support women-focused CSOs and the communities they serve, we must be more meaningfully engaged in setting investment agendas at the start.

We also need access to more flexible and sustainable funding opportunities, including core funding. It’s impossible to plan for the future when we rely on six- to twelve- month grants. We’re committed to supporting refugee girls and women in our community for as long as we’re needed – but require the right resources to fulfill that goal.

Princess Sarah: You have also been advocating for the international community to more meaningfully engage women-focused CSOs in humanitarian decision-making. In your view, what concrete steps can the international community take to put more power and influence in the hands of women-focused CSOs like yours, and why should this be an urgent priority?

Dr. Olfat: Women-focused CSOs must be heard in humanitarian policy meetings to ensure decisions reflect realities on the ground. This requires inviting us to important discussions held in New York and Geneva, but it also means making sure we can get there through travel and logistics support. And when we are there, it means carving out spaces for us to safely and honestly share the solutions we need with the assurance that we will be heard.

The alternative – excluding refugee women from decisions that affect their work and lives – isn’t acceptable and isn’t working. When we are engaged, we make humanitarian policy and practice stronger and more effective.

Princess Sarah: What do you hope to achieve at the Women Deliver Conference in Vancouver, Canada? What advocacy asks do you hope to bring forward at this meeting?

I hope to raise awareness to the needs of Palestinian refugee girls and women in Lebanon, to ensure that they are not forgotten. And I want to highlight solutions women-focused CSOs like PWHO need – money, influence, and power – to push for the change I’ve wanted to see all my life.

At the same time, I hope to learn from other advocates around the world, and build networks so we can collectively push for a humanitarian system that puts girls and women at the center. Solidarity is our strength and our power – and we need to be stronger together to achieve a better world for all of us.

The post A Call for Concrete Changes to Achieve a More Gender Equal World appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Princess Sarah Zeid is a member of UNHCR’s Advisory Group on Gender, Forced Displacement, and Protection, a Special Advisor to the World Food Programme on Maternal and Child Health and Nutrition, and Chair of the Newborn Health in Humanitarian Settings Initiative.

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Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, May 29 2019 (IPS)

No, no, no. Nothing to do with what US and Europe’s far-right fanatics now use to vociferate, saying once and again that “migrants come here to destroy our democracy, our civilisation, and our life-style”.

Rather the complete opposite—this is about a major damage that precisely “our civilisation” and “our lifestyle” have been causing: invasive alien species crossing the world chiefly on board of ships, and harming human health, biodiversity and the whole ecosystem.

 

Who are they?

“Invasive alien species are plants, animals, pathogens and other organisms that are non-native to an ecosystem, and which may cause economic or environmental harm or adversely affect human health…

For a species to become invasive, it must successfully out-compete native organisms for food and habitat, spread through its new environment, increase its population and harm ecosystems in its introduced range.

“In particular, they impact adversely upon biodiversity, including decline or elimination of native species -through competition, predation, or transmission of pathogens- and the disruption of local ecosystems and ecosystem functions…

“Invasive alien species, introduced and/or spread outside their natural habitats, have affected native biodiversity in almost every ecosystem type on earth and are one of the greatest threats to biodiversity. Since the 17th century, invasive alien species have contributed to nearly 40 percent of all animal extinctions for which the cause is known.” [2006 data]

This is how the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) defines the alien invasive species.

It warns that this problem continues to grow “at great socio-economic, health and ecological cost” around the world.

“Invasive alien species exacerbate poverty and threaten development through their impact on agriculture, forestry, fisheries and natural systems, which are an important basis of peoples’ livelihoods in developing countries. This damage is aggravated by climate change, pollution, habitat loss and human-induced disturbance.”

 

A ship crosses the Paraná River on its way to the port of Rosario, Argentina. Credit: Marcela Valente/IPS

 

Where do they come from?

Globalisation has resulted in greater trade, transport, travel and tourism, all of which can facilitate the introduction and spread of species that are not native to an area, CBD experts the Convention on Biological Diversity explain.

For a species to become invasive, it must successfully out-compete native organisms for food and habitat, spread through its new environment, increase its population and harm ecosystems in its introduced range.

Most countries are grappling with complex and costly invasive species problems. For example, the annual environmental losses caused by introduced pests in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, India and Brazil have been calculated at over 100 billion dollars (CBD, 2006).

The Convention also warns that addressing the problem of invasive alien species is “urgent” because “the threat is growing daily, and the economic and environmental impacts are severe.”

 

Ballast water

Cargo ship de-ballasting | CSIRO | Permission | Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

In poor words, ships transporting merchandise from one extreme of the world to another, once they discharged their cargo, they once upon a time used to load heavy stones and rocks to ensure more stability to the vessels in their new maritime crossing. Later on, they started to load sea water instead of stones. This is the ballast water.

Then, upon their arrival to a new port, and before loading another cargo, they would discharge the water (ballast water) they loaded in another sea.

The point is that the water taken from one sea is full of living species and organisms which are natives of that specific ecosystem. The discharge of this ballast water obviously implies discharging those species and organisms to a different marine ecosystem.

Some of them would simply perish, but many more would survive at the cost of species and organisms, natives of the new habitat.

 

A major threat

“Ballast water is essential for the safe operation of ships. It provides stability and manoeuvrability during a voyage and during loading and unloading operations,” explains the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA). Management of ballast water also reduces the hull stress caused by adverse sea conditions or by changes in cargo weight as well as fuel and water.

However, EMSA also explains that the process of loading and unloading untreated ballast water poses a major threat to the environment, public health and the economy as ships become a vector for the transfer of organisms between ecosystems, from one part of the world to another.

“When ballast water is taken up in port, many microscopic organisms and sediments are introduced into the ships ballast tanks. Many of these organisms are able to survive in these tanks, and, when ballast water is discharged, they are released into new environments.”

If suitable conditions exist in this release environment, these species will survive and reproduce and become invasive species.

“In some cases, there is a high probability that the organism will become a dominant species, potentially resulting in: the extinction of native species, effects on local/regional biodiversity, effects on coastal industries that use water extraction, effects on public health and impacts on local economies based on fisheries.”

 

The Chinese mitten crab, Eriocheir sinensis. This male specimen was found ashore in 150 metres distance to the banks of the Elbe river in the German federal state of Brandenburg | Christian Fischer | Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

 

Extensive damage

The European Maritime Safety Agency further warns that “ballast water discharge typically contains a variety of biological materials, including plants, animals, viruses, and bacteria. These materials often include non-native, nuisance, exotic species that can cause extensive ecological and economic damage to aquatic ecosystems, along with serious human health issues including death.”

For its part, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) explains that ballast water is routinely taken on by ships for stability and structural integrity. It can contain thousands of aquatic microbes, algae and animals, which are then carried across the world’s oceans and released into ecosystems where they are not native.

“Untreated ballast water released at a ship’s destination could potentially introduce new invasive aquatic species. Expanded ship trade and traffic volume over the last few decades have increased the likelihood of invasive species being released. Hundreds of invasions have already taken place, sometimes “with devastating consequences for the local ecosystem, economy and infrastructure.”

 

“Take-Make-Dispose”

The dominating ‘life-style’, generated by the “Take-Make-Dispose” economic model, which is based on over-production/over-consumption/over-commercial benefits, has massively increased international transporting systems.

From big trucks using fossil fuel, to giant cargo ships over-loaded with enormous containers –let alone huge oil tankers, the fact now is that around 80 percent of global trade by volume and over 70 per cent of global trade by value are carried by sea and are handled by ports worldwide. Updated estimates situate these figures in 90 per cent and 80 per cent, respectively.

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 2016 estimated that there are more than 50,000 merchant ships trading internationally, transporting every kind of cargo. The world fleet is registered in over 150 nations and manned by more than a million seafarers of virtually every nationality.

For its part, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) also in 2016 estimated that some 1.1 trillion dollars-worth of agricultural products are traded internationally each year.

This “Take-Make-Dispose” economic model has proved to be one of the world’s main killers due to the huge pollution it causes for air, land and soil, marine and freshwater.

Moreover, this prevailing economic model implies that over one third of food is lost and/or wasted, enough to feed all hungry people.

 

Furthermore…

Invasive alien species arrive in new habitats through various channels, being shipping the main one. Though important, they are not the sole problem the voracious production-consumption model brings.

For instance: containers. According to the Floating Threat report, “shipping today means sea containers: Globally, around 527 million sea container trips are made each year – China alone deals with over 133 million sea containers annually.”

“It is not only their cargo, but the steel contraptions themselves, that can serve as vectors for the spread of exotic species capable of wreaking ecological and agricultural havoc.”

 

Credit: Bigstock

 

More floating threats

In addition to the invasive alien species, the fact that over 80 per cent of global trade is carried by sea also implies other invisible treats –while ships bring coffee, snacks and TV sets, they also carry pests and diseases.

In its ‘A Floating Threat: Sea Containers Spread Pests and Diseases’, FAO highlights that while oil spills garner much public attention and anguish, the so-called “biological spills” represent a greater long-term threat and do not have the same high public profile.

“It was an exotic fungus that wiped out billions of American chestnut trees in the early 20th century, dramatically altering the landscape and ecosystem, while today the emerald ash borer – another pest that hitch-hiked along global trade routes to new habitats – threatens to do the same with a valuable tree long used by humans to make tool handles, guitars and office furniture.”

The specialised world body also reminds that perhaps the biggest “biological spill” of all was when a fungus-like eukaryotic microorganism called Phytophthora infestans – the name of the genus comes from Greek for “plant destroyer” – sailed from the Americas to Belgium. Within months it arrived in Ireland, triggering a potato blight that led to famine, death and mass migration.

“The list goes on and on. A relative of the toxic cane toad that has run rampant in Australia recently disembarked from a container carrying freight to Madagascar, a biodiversity hotspot, and the ability of females to lay up to 40,000 eggs a year make it a catastrophic threat for local lemurs and birds, while also threatening the habitat of a host of animals and plants.”

The report A Floating Threat: Sea Containers Spread Pests and Diseases’ estimates that up to 90 percent of world trade is carried by sea today, with vast panoply of differing logistics, making agreement on an inspection method elusive.

“Moreover, many cargoes quickly move inland to enter just-in-time supply chains. That’s how the dreaded brown marmorated stink bug – which chews quickly through high-value fruit and crops – began its European tour a few years ago in Zurich.”

This animal actively prefers steel nooks and crannies for long-distance travel, and once established likes to set up winter hibernation niches inside people’s houses.

The list of dangers the current economic model –and “our civilisation” and “our life-style” pose day after day is too long to be summarised in just one report. The uncontrolled threats of the invasive alien species are just an example.

Any hope that humans wake up… perhaps by attentively listening to Greta Thunberg –and with her the already mobilised world’s youth:

“You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes… We cannot solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis…if solutions within the system are so impossible to find, then… we should change the system itself.”

 

Baher Kamal is Director and Editor of Human Wrongs Watch, where this article was originally published.

The post These Aliens Are Here to Stay (And They Are Dangerous) appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Children walk through a damaged part of downtown Craiter in Aden, Yemen. The area was badly damaged by airstrikes in 2015 as the Houthi’s were driven out of the city by coalition forces. Credit: UN OCHA/Giles Clarke

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, May 29 2019 (IPS)

When the UN Security Council met last week to discuss the deaths and devastation caused to civilians in ongoing military conflicts and civil wars, the killings in Yemen and the air attacks on hospitals, schools, mosques, and market places—whether deliberate or otherwise– were singled out as the worst ever.

But the destruction and irreparable damage to civilian infrastructure and human lives were caused by weapons provided by some of the permanent members of the Security Council, including the US, France and UK.

And last week, in defiance of US Congressional opposition to arms sales to some of the warring Middle Eastern nations, the Trump administration went one better: it justified the proposed sale of a hefty $8.1 billion dollars in American arms to Jordan, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia under a so-called “emergency notification”.

All three countries are part of a Saudi-led coalition unleashing attacks on Yemen battling Houthi insurgents backed by Iran– and the new weapons systems are expected to add more fire power to the coalition.

The “emergency notification” for arms sales was not only an act of defiance against the US Congress but also an attempt to placate American allies in the Middle East and, more importantly, the powerful arms lobby in the United States.

One of arguments adduced by the Trump administration is that increasing arms sales to Middle Eastern allies are meant to counter an “anticipated Iranian aggression”.

Stephen Zunes, Professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco and coordinator of the program in Middle Eastern Studies, told IPS this is not about deterring Iranian aggression and it is certainly not an “emergency.”

“It’s about the profits of American arms manufacturers at the expense of countless Yemeni lives.”

“This is but the most extreme manifestation, however, of a longstanding bipartisan policy of transferring deadly and sophisticated armaments to the family dictatorships in the Middle East”, said Zunes, who also serves as a senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus project of the Institute for Policy Studies.

He pointed out that It is ironic that a nation which emerged in revolution against monarchy, would be the world’s number one arms supplier of absolute monarchies today.

According to a story in the Wall Street Journal May 25, the Houthis are less ideologically aligned with Tehran, and Iran denies arming the group. But US officials disagree, saying Iran has trained them and provided them with weapons.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the Security Council May 23 that civilians continue to make up the vast majority of casualties in conflict, with more than 22,800 civilians dying or being injured in 2018 in just six countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Mali, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen.

He stressed the need for the Security Council to do more to enhance compliance with the laws of war. http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/05/un-failed-civilians/

In a statement released last week, the London-based Amnesty International was dead on target when it ridiculed the US argument that some of the weapons supplied to the Saudi-led coalition were “precision-guided” to avoid civilian casualties.

“The great military powers cynically boast about ‘precision’ warfare and ‘surgical’ strikes that distinguish between fighters and civilians. But the reality on the ground is that civilians are routinely targeted where they live, work, study, worship and seek medical care.”, the statement added.

AI said parties to armed conflict unlawfully kill, maim and forcibly displace millions of civilians while world leaders shirk their responsibility and turn their backs on war crimes and immense suffering.

Asked for his comments, Philippe Nassif, Advocacy Director – Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International, told IPS decision made by President Trump to circumvent Congress and authorize billions of dollars’ worth of arms sales to serial human rights abusers Saudi Arabia and the UAE is extremely unfortunate and reckless.

“Both these countries have used US made weapons to commit war crimes in Yemen, a country mired in conflict that has been made worse by the conduct of the UAE and Saudi led coalition,” he added.

The Trump administration has had a blank check policy when it comes to arming its Middle Eastern allies, from Egypt to Saudi Arabia.

Nassif pointed out that the atrocious human rights records of these governments, where executions, extrajudicial killings, mass incarceration, torture, and indefinite detentions are part of daily life for their citizens, is made worse by the US continuing to arm these governments.

“Now that the UAE and Saudi Arabia will receive new American weapons, we can expect a continuation of the hell that has been brought upon Yemen, where 11 million people are suffering from famine, hundreds of thousands have been displaced, and thousands killed,” he noted.

“We can also expect weapons to fall into the wrong hands, such as Al Qaeda, or be sent to other conflict zones where the Saudi’s and UAE are backing ascending autocrats, such as Haftar in Libya,” Nassif declared.

In a statement released May 24, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said “I made a determination pursuant to section 36 of the Arms Export Control Act and directed the Department to complete immediately the formal notification of 22 pending arms transfers to Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia totaling approximately $8.1 billion to deter Iranian aggression and build partner self-defense capacity”.

“These sales will support our allies, enhance Middle East stability, and help these nations to deter and defend themselves from the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he said.

Delaying this shipment, Pompeo argued, could cause degraded systems and a lack of necessary parts and maintenance that could create severe airworthiness and interoperability concerns for key partners, during a time of increasing regional volatility.

He argued that national security concerns have been exacerbated by many months of Congressional delay in addressing these critical requirements, “and have called into doubt our reliability as a provider of defense capabilities, opening opportunities for U.S. adversaries to exploit.”

The equipment to the three countries includes aircraft support maintenance; intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR); munitions; and other supplies.

“Today’s action will quickly augment our partners’ capacity to provide for their own self-defense and reinforce recent changes to U.S. posture in the region to deter Iran. I intend for this determination to be a one-time event,” Pompeo added.

He pointed out that Section 36 is a long-recognized authority and has been utilized by at least four previous administrations since 1979, including Presidents Reagan and Carter.

“This specific measure does not alter our long-standing arms transfer review process with Congress. I look forward to continuing to work with Congress to develop prudent measures to advance and protect U.S. national security interests in the region,” he declared.

The United States is, and must remain, a reliable security partner to our allies and partners around the world. These partnerships are a cornerstone of our National Security Strategy, which this decision reaffirms, Pompeo said.

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@ips.org

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By Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana
BANGKOK, Thailand, May 28 2019 (IPS)

Since this Commission first met in 1947, our countries have travelled a long journey. Our economies are expected to become larger than the rest of the world combined, measured by purchasing power parity. It is often said the Asia-Pacific region is the engine of the world economy.

With multilateralism increasingly questioned, we have yet more to offer. We can provide the global leadership to collectively achieve a transformed and resilient society in our region.

Empowered societies working in concert to respond to challenges which transcend borders and accelerate progress towards the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

With these challenges in mind, this Commission is our opportunity to reaffirm our shared responsibility and commitment to the ambition of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development – to build on past successes and shape future priorities. Let me mention five areas, which I believe are central to achieving the transformation and resilience we need.

Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana

We must put people first and build a coherent response to population dynamics which are radically altering our societies and our economies. We can learn from each other as we strengthen policies, institutions and legislation to empower people and promote equality.

This effort should be complemented by work to strengthen regional cooperation on population development and social protection – but also to promote gender equality, disability rights and safe, orderly and regular migration.

Strengthening sustainable connectivity could make us more resilient to international trade tensions and deliver huge economic benefits. When it comes to transport and infrastructure connectivity, we have achievements on which to build – guided by international standards, UN norms and values.

The same ambition is needed for energy connectivity, information and communications technology (ICT) connectivity and trade facilitation measures.

We have an opportunity to join forces to strengthen our work to combat environmental degradation, pollution and the mismanagement of natural resources. To protect our oceans there is no alternative to stepping up our multilateral cooperation.

Transformed and resilient societies can only be achieved if we stop disaster risk outpacing resilience. Intensified by climate change, disasters are five times more likely to affect a person in Asia-Pacific than a person living elsewhere.

The basis for stronger regional cooperation is well established. Let us use it to give pace to the development of national disaster risk reduction strategies.

New technologies have the potential to accelerate our journey to transformed and resilient societies on many fronts. Digital healthcare and education are providing cost effective solutions at scale.

Smart cities, energy systems and transport solutions are offering alternatives to protect the environment. Yet for digital solutions to be unleashed as a force for good, their broader implications need to be fully understood and the necessary infrastructure developed.

An enabling environment, investment and technological, individual and institutional capacity are all needed. ESCAP should be a forum for best practice exchange to harness digital technology for sustainable development.

The Regional Roadmap for Implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is a framework which will continue to guide our work. Yet we should also continuously sharpen our policy focus as the situation evolves – including to respond to these five priorities.

From an institutional perspective, ESCAP and the United Nations system are working to remain fit for purpose. You will be discussing the midterm review of this Commission’s conference structure during this session. The United Nations Development System reform is well underway. It has moved to its regional phase.

In this broader context, I have established an Eminent Persons Advisory Group and am seeking views from all interested parties. Our goal is to identify how we can better serve the needs of our member States and deepen meaningful engagement with all our partners.

I believe a reenergised approach to supporting transformed and resilient societies is coming into focus.

At subregional level, ESCAP’s partnerships with subregional organisations must be strengthened. Where common objectives exist, we must work to complement each other. Where best practice can be shared, ESCAP can facilitate such exchanges.

We are supporting the development of a Complementarities roadmap with ASEAN under the leadership of Thailand and will be a partner in its implementation. I would like to explore similar initiatives with other subregional institutions.

A coherent regional level approach is becoming increasingly important to overcome challenges which transcend borders and strengthen the means of implementation such as financing for development, data and statistics. In Asia-Pacific, least developed countries, landlocked developing countries and small island developing States must remain our priority. We should also scale up our support for middle-income countries to ensure their aspiration are met.

I am committed to working with all member States to achieve transformed and resilient societies. The evidence indicates we can be more effective if we empower citizens to support this transformation.

At this 75th session of the Commission, I am honoured by the presence of Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn who has shown great dedication to this cause in Thailand. I look forward to benefiting from her experience.

Let me also thank the Royal Thai Government for hosting ESCAP in Bangkok for the past seventy years, and all member States for their longstanding, unwavering support. I am looking forward to joining forces with all of you to accelerate progress towards sustainable development in Asia and the Pacific.

*In an address to the 75th session of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), Bangkok.

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Excerpt:

Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana * is UN Under-Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP)

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By Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Michael Lim Mah Hui
KUALA LUMPUR and PENANG, May 28 2019 (IPS)

Over recent decades, the scope, size, concentration, power and even the purpose and role of finance have changed so significantly that a new term, financialization, was coined to name this phenomenon.

Financialization refers to a process that has not only transformed finance itself, but also, the real economy and society. The transformation goes beyond the quantitative to involve qualitative change as finance becomes dominant, instead of serving the needs of the real economy.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Financialization involves the growth and transformation of finance such that with its hugely expanded size, scope and concentration, finance now overshadows, dominates and destabilizes the productive economy.

The role and purpose of finance has been qualitatively transformed. Finance used to profit from serving production and trade. Traditionally, financing production involved providing funds for manufacturers to finance production, and for traders to buy and sell.

Financialization, on the other hand, turns every imaginable product or service into financial commodities or services to be traded, often for speculation. Instead of seeking profits by financing the productive economy and trade, finance is now more focused on extracting rents from the economy.

Finance is hegemonic, dominating all of society without appearing to do so, transforming more and more things into financial products and services to be traded and sold. But financialization could not have happened on its own.

Its nature and pace have been enabled and shaped by ideological, legal, institutional and deliberate policy and regulatory changes. Regulatory authorities, both national and international, can barely keep up with its transformative consequences.

Size matters
One aspect of financialization refers to the size of finance relative to the whole economy, with the financial sector growing faster and securing more profit than other sectors. The simplest and most popular measure of finance uses national income accounts for ‘finance, insurance and real estate’ (FIRE).

Michael Lim Mah Hui

In the US, finance’s share of GDP grew from 14% to 21% between 1960 and 2017, while manufacturing’s fell from 27% to 11%, and trade’s declined from 17% to 12%. The financial sector is almost twice as large as both trade and manufacturing sectors.

The growth of shadow banking, referring to activities similar to traditional banking undertaken by non-bank financial institutions that are not regulated as banks, is a growing and significant source of credit and accounts for much of the growth of finance.

Such institutions include hedge funds, private equity funds, mortgage lenders, money market funds and insurance companies. These financial institutions, including traditional banks, have used securitization, ‘off-balance sheet’ derivative positions and leverage to create, manage and trade securities and derivatives, ballooning its business volume.

With heightened concerns about growing financial fragility, more sophisticated measures have been introduced to estimate ‘shadow banking’. Most country-level measures show shadow banking increasing rapidly before, and more worryingly, after the 2008-2009 global financial crisis!

At the same time, finance has also secured the most gains in the US, taking advantage of the sector’s ability to leverage more than non-financial corporations, engaging in financial innovations and trading complex and opaque products netting super profits.

During 1960-2017, finance almost doubled its profits, from 17% to 30% of total domestic corporate profits, while manufacturing’s share shrank by almost two thirds from 49% to 17%.

Jim Reid of Deutsche Bank estimated that that the US financial sector made around US$1.2 trillion (US$1,200 billion) in ‘excess profits’, relative to the previous mean, in the decade before the 2008 global financial crisis.

Greater concentration
There are contrasting views of whether bank concentration leads to greater or less financial stability. But size certainly does not guarantee either good banking practices or financial stability.

In fact, the global financial crisis suggests that the “too big to fail” syndrome encouraged moral hazard. Big banks take on excessive risk as they believe they have a safety net — governments will bail them out to prevent a financial system collapse.

Over the years, US banking has become more concentrated. This accelerated with the abolition of the Glass-Steagall Act and its replacement with the Graham-Leah-Bliley Act in 1999 which saw the creation of universal bank behemoths combining commercial and investment banking activities.

The top five banks in 1990 held less than 10% of total bank assets; by 2007, they had 44%. Seven years after the 2008-2009 Global Financial Crisis, the US banking industry is just as concentrated, with the top five banks – JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citibank and US Bancorp – holding US$7 trillion, or 44% of total bank assets.

Meanwhile, asset management is even more concentrated than banking. Together, the ‘Big Three’ – Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street – are the largest shareholders in four-fifths of listed US corporations, managing nearly US$11 trillion, thrice the worth of global hedge funds. Such asset management relies on banks for leveraged access to financial markets.

Undoubtedly, many regulators have replaced previously weak regulation, which failed to check spreading systemic risk before the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, with new rules. But these do not seem to have effectively checked more recent abusive practices.

Recent technological, ideological, institutional and political changes have drastically transformed finance, enabling it to penetrate and dominate all spheres of life such that financialization is the new avatar.

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 Finance’s New Avatar appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, May 28 2019 (IPS)

As it relentlessly pursues its strongly pro-Israeli policy – along with its disdain for multilateralism – the Trump administration continued to display its hostility towards the United Nations and its humanitarian agencies at a meeting of the UN Security Council focusing on the recent escalation of violence in Gaza.

The administration’s three hardline objectives were best reflected as they converged on a single political crossroad when the US Special Representative for International Negotiations Jason Greenblatt told the Security Council May 22 it was time to dismantle the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) which has supported Palestinian refugees since it began operations back in 1950.

The US has already slashed its contribution to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), from 69 million in 2016 to zero in 2017, cut 300 million dollars in funds to UNRWA and reduced 500 million dollars from the UN’s biennium peacekeeping budget

At a press conference announcing her decision to step down as US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley told reporters last October that that during her two-year tenure “we cut $1.3 billion in the UN’s budget. We’ve made it stronger. We’ve made it more efficient.”

But the reduction in funds to UNRWA has been described as the unkindest cut of all — because the UN agency has been sustaining the economic survival of Palestinian refugees for the last 69 years.

Nadia Hijab, President of the Board of Directors at Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian policy network, told IPS: “If anyone is still in doubt about the Trump Administration’s deal of the century – also known as Israel’s plan to end the conflict on its terms – Greenblatt made that very clear when he said: “We do not have to wait until a comprehensive solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict….” to transition UNRWA out of existence.

And indeed, the Administration has not waited for any kind of solution or made any reference to international law, she added.

It has simply, on behalf of Israel, imposed facts on the ground with its recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and its embassy move, and defunding UNRWA, said Hijab.

“Now it doesn’t want anyone else to fund UNRWA but rather to focus on the supposedly bright economic future to be discussed at the economic conference in Bahrain next month,” she noted.

But what is really underway is erasure of Palestinian national and political rights leaving the majority of the Palestinian people in exile with the rest forced to survive under the draconian conditions of occupation, siege, and discrimination in the land of Palestine/Israel, declared Hijab.

She pointed out it should be clear that a commitment to UNRWA goes beyond services to refugees: It is a powerful symbol of the Palestinians’ existence as a people with a right to self-determination as well as other internationally recognized rights including the right to return to their lands and homes.

Sam Husseini, Senior analyst at the Washington-based Institute for Public Accuracy (IPA), told IPS the occupying power is obligated to take care of people under occupation under the Geneva Conventions.

“Israel has done anything but… It has subjected the Palestinian people to attack after attack and siege after siege, making anything like normal economic development impossible,” he added.

Husseini also pointed out that UNRWA has fulfilled a desperately needed role for generations of Palestinians.

“The fact that it’s gone on for so long is the fault of the “international community” — the US government first and foremost, having prevented a resolution to the conflict along lines prescribed by international law,” he declared.

Now, with the Trump administration wanting to stop deferring a final settlement to the conflict in favor of wanting to impose one that deprives the Palestinians of virtually all their rights, they are targeting any support that Palestinians may have to bully them into complete submission to Israel’s military dictates. UNRWA is top on that list, he said.

At the Security Council meeting, Greenblatt thanked UNRWA Commissioner General Pierre Krähenbühl for his briefing, and for his work over the years.

“But I’m afraid it is time for him– and all of you– to face the reality that the UNRWA model has failed the Palestinian people. UNRWA’s business model, which is inherently tied to an endlessly and exponentially expanding community of beneficiaries, is in permanent crisis mode,” Greenblatt said.

That is why the United States decided that it will no longer commit to funding this irredeemably flawed operation, he added.

“We did not come to this conclusion lightly. Since UNRWA’s founding, the U.S. has donated $6 billion. Let me repeat that: $6 billion – vastly more than any other country. And yet year after year, UNRWA funding fell short.”

“UNRWA is a band-aid, and the Palestinians who use its services deserve better – much better. We do not have to wait until a comprehensive solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is in place to address that fact,” he declared.

Responding to Greenblatt’s comments, Krahenbuhl told a press conference in Gaza UNRWA’s mandate was a matter for the entire U.N. General Assembly to consider, not by “one or two individual member states”.

“Therefore, Palestinian refugees should remember that the mandate is protected by the General Assembly, and of course we will engage with member states to ensure what we hope is a safe renewal of that mandate,” Krahenbuhl said.

Currently, over half of the 2.0 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, which is under Israeli blockade, receive food aid from UNRWA.

Meanwhile, as part of its ongoing policy against multilateralism, the US has already scuttled the 2015 multilateral nuclear agreement with Iran, refused to participate in the global migration compact, pulled out of the 2015 Paris climate change agreement, abandoned the 12-nation Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, dismissed the relevance of the World Trade Organization (WTO), revoked the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia, and withdrew from both the Human Rights Council in Geneva and the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris.

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@ips.org

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Earlier this year, the Zimbabwean government announced that it would take over all under-utilised land and redistribute it to deserving farmers, irrespective of their race and colour. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
MARONDERA, Zimbabwe, May 28 2019 (IPS)

For subsistence farmer Rogers Hove—who proudly brandishes a worn out letter for his five hectare piece of land he obtained from government following the chaotic land seizures from white commercial farmers over two decades ago—what matters most to him, “is to see my piece of land in my possession”.

At the age of 78, Hove has little else to show for the land he owns.

Hove has not made much money from it. Other than three thatched huts built from plain home-made brick, there is not much else on the land, let alone cattle—the ownership of which is regarded as a symbol of wealth.

“One day things will be alright and I may be able to farm productively the same way white farmers used to do here before we stepped in to take over our land,” Hove tells IPS.

But 20 years ago, Hove was 58 when former President Robert Mugabe’s government embarked upon a violent land reform programme that saw many black Zimbabweans taking ownership of huge swathes of land once occupied by white farmers—who were loathed by the now 95-year-old former Zimbabwean president.

Despite boasting of owning one of the most fertile pieces of land in Mashonaland East Province, Hove admits that many resettled farmers like himself have fallen on hard times.

“Yes, I have this land, but since I took over, I have not produced much because I have no means to do my farming properly. Other farmers who have the means often have to assist me, but that has not changed anything either,” Hove says.

Instead of tending to the farm, Hove’s wife, Agness, 70, is busy by the roadside selling trinkets and cigarettes to passersby.

“Maybe we will have food if I do this. We have nothing from our farm. Well-wishers give us handouts,” Agness tells IPS.

All their seven children have their own families living far from their aged parents, who have fixed their hope on the piece of land they invaded during the country’s chaotic land reform programme.

In Zimbabwe, it never rains, but pours for underperforming farmers like Rogers and Agness. Under President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government, many of these farmers risk losing their land.

Earlier this year, the Zimbabwean government announced that it would take over all under-utilised land and redistribute it to deserving farmers irrespective of their race and colour. 

Briefing parliament at the time, Douglas Karoro, Zimbabwe’s deputy Minister of Lands, Agriculture, Water, Culture and Rural Development, said “in the event that the government decides to distribute the land to people, it’s our policy to make sure that the distribution exercise is done fairly.”

“’The redistribution is not going to look at the colour of the farmer, the political inclination of the farmer, or the religious affiliation of the farmer,” Karoro told Parliament earlier this year.

But before struggling resettled farmers like Rogers face the boot from their land, for now the Zimbabwean government awaits completion of a land audit in order to implement the new policy.

Dispossessing resettled farmers here is not a new phenomenon. Under Mugabe’s government, unproductive resettled farmers were threatened with eviction.

At the time the then agriculture minister Douglas Mombeshora was quoted as saying, “what we are doing now is identifying farms and plots where land is not being utilised at all or not being used to its potential with a view to distributing it to others.”

Farmers like Hove pin the blame on government for their failures to successful farm the land seized from white commercial farmers.

“Government has always promised to help us with inputs to improve our farming, but only those that support the ruling Zanu-PF party benefit from the inputs while the majority like us suffer on the land we say we now own,” says Hove.

As such, the 71,000 families who resettled on farms once owned by white commercial farmers face an uncertain future.

Consequently, hunger has not spared them either as they have become victims of the country’s incessant droughts despite owning swathes of rich agricultural land.

“I have each year depended on food from donor organisations as my land hardly gives me adequate food since I settled here in 2001,” Menford Mutimbe, a 71-year old resettled subsistence farmer from Marondera, with eight children and two wives, tells IPS.

However, Zimbabwe’s resettled farmers have no guarantee of ownership to the pieces of land they repossessed from white farmers.

So for them, according to other farmers like Mutimbe, “getting capital from banks to sustain our farming activities is hard.”

“What we have are mere offer letters which banks have not taken in as collateral although government has made efforts to have our 99 year leases used as collateral to help us get loans,” Mutimbe said.

Last year, Zimbabwe’s central bank agreed to accept 99-year leases from resettled farmers as collateral after government changed the law to allow the 99-year leases to be transferable and bankable.

Despite the move, suffering continues for struggling farmers like Hove who says “banks are rejecting my lease for no clear reasons.”

Independent economists like John Robertson know the reason for this.

Soon after the government declared the state to be the owner of all land in the country, even the 99-year leases cannot be trusted.

“Government resented the influence of commercial farmers and decided that the best way to dis-empower them was to take away their property rights. They portrayed the move as a means to redress racial imbalances that were imposed by colonisation, but government also cancelled the ownership rights of black farmers,” Robertson tells IPS.

Ben Gilpin, director of the Commercial Farmers Union (CFU), says the situation for resettled farmers is different as “former commercial farmers had property rights that enabled them to finance short-, medium- and long-term capital requirements.”

“Once these were undermined, the financial sector fled. Former farmers were responsible for the risk involved…if they failed, the lenders would have recourse,” Gilpin tells IPS.

Yet as resettled farmers like Hove cling to the hope of using their leases as collateral to get bank loans, Robertson has nevertheless painted a grim picture about this optimism.

“The collateral value of the land was cut to zero when the government declared all agricultural land in the country to be the property of the State. This meant that the farmers could not offer title deeds to the banks as security for loans; so ever since Land Reform, the farmers had no access to bank finance,” says Robertson.

Land experts like Professor Mandivamba Rukuni, a development analyst and strategist in the areas of agriculture, community development, business, finance, government, and education, blame Zimbabwe’s failing economy for the resettled farmers’ mounting woes.

“My main analysis is that Zimbabwe’s economy is in bad shape; it affects agriculture. It’s ridiculous to expect agriculture to do well when the country’s economy is choked. Financial markets are not doing well. Where can government get money to support them (resettled farmers)?” Rukuni tells IPS.

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Young girls learn to make reusable sanitary pads. Courtesy: Ida Horner/Let Them Help Themselves

By Ida Horner
SURREY, England, May 28 2019 (IPS)

The organisers of Menstrual Hygiene Day say that although there has been a lot of good work on Menstrual Hygiene Management (MHM) either currently underway or already completed, we are a long way off from achieving an even playing field for girls and women worldwide.

Menstruation stigma persists in some parts of the world due to cultural practices whilst in others hygiene products are so heavily taxed as to render them inaccessible for some girls.

In some countries, MHM is not treated as a critical component of reproductive health training for adolescents, and as such it does not feature in school lessons and, where it does, teachers do not feel empowered to teach about MHM with comfort. Yet, the ability of teachers to teach about MHM freely can contribute to the breaking down of taboos around menstruation.

There are concerns about fragmentation and its impact on menstrual hygiene education.

In this regard, fragmentation refers to the lack of common goals and joint monitoring that in turn impacts media attention, political will plus more investment in menstrual hygiene education in needed.

Ida Horner is the Chairperson of Let Them Help Themselves.

These are issues that we at Let Them Help Themselves have encountered in the Ntungamo district of SW Uganda where we have been working with schools on menstrual hygiene education since 2016.   We trained a team of local girls who serve as menstrual hygiene ambassadors and as part of their role, they go into schools to provide information about menstrual hygiene as well carry out basic research on knowledge about menstruation.  

Amongst our ambassadors’ findings are some eye-watering statistics, for instance, on average 53 percent of the girls they spoke to did not know what menstruation was before they experienced it and in one of the schools, this figure was 80 percent.

As well as gathering these statistics, the ambassadors are also confronted with questions about menstruation. The questions are, about hygiene, the prevention of infections, frequency of periods, bloating, clots, weight gain etc. A combined education programme on menstrual hygiene in this instance, would ensure accurate information and menstrual hygiene education for boys, men, teachers, health workers, politicians and other professionals. In particular, teachers need to be empowered to provide accurate information and support for pupils and in turn, break down negative social norms

It would also ensure the availability of water and sanitation facilities in schools, privacy and dignity for menstruating as well as policies that reduce the cost of menstrual absorbents.

Why isn’t this happening? Can it all be blamed on the lack of common goals or fragmentation about education on menstrual hygiene management? Whose job is it to educate girls about periods?

You would think that, it is the role of parents, however, our ambassadors report that some parents they speak to do not have the confidence to have these conversations with their children, whilst some do not have an understanding of periods. This was exemplified in a conversation our MHM ambassadors had with a schoolgirl at one of the schools they visited:

“I missed a midterm test because I didn’t have pads. I live with my father and when I asked him for money to buy pads he told me that he had no money to waste on useless things. I stayed away from school because I didn’t want to risk an accidental leak having seen one of the girls in my class be humiliated when an accidental leak left a bloodstain on a chair.”

Given such attitudes amongst some the parents, where should girls go to access information and menstruation products?

Whilst coordination of findings and good practice matters, our work demonstrates that what is needed is the mainstreaming of menstrual hygiene education into development agendas such as the Sustainable Development Goals and the Gender Mainstreaming agenda.

It is not enough to have goals that ensure increased school registration for girls who then drop out due to a lack of MHM. In the long run, this has implications for a country’s economic development due to a large number of girls who become adults that are trapped in poverty because they lack skills to create their own employment or access employment elsewhere.

Prior to rolling out the MHM programme to more schools in Ntungamo district we ran a trial in one of the schools. We wanted to find out whether providing free pads would improve school attendance amongst girls. We were surprised to learn that as well as an improvement in attendance; the school had saved money during the trial and the school environment improved. This was because, in the absence of recycling facilities for disposable pads, the school would use petrol to burn the used pads. As a consequence, this would expel noxious fumes within the school grounds.

These findings are anecdotal but paint speak to a need for nation-states to pay attention to MHM in order to achieve Sustainable Development Goals and as well as ensure that gender has been mainstreamed into their development policies.

Our fight to enable girls to access information on menstruation and hygienic absorbents continue and you can be part of it by making a donation to our campaign here.

The author can be contacted via Twitter @idahorner or email info@lethemhelpthemselves.org

The post Educating Girls about Menstruation and Menstrual Hygiene appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Ida Horner is the Chairperson of Let Them Help Themselves

The post Educating Girls about Menstruation and Menstrual Hygiene appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Mette Frederiksen is a Danish Social Democrat politician. She has been a member of the Folketing, the parliament of Denmark, since 2001, and served in Helle Thorning-Schmidt's government as Minister of Employment from 2011 to 2014.

By Mette Frederiksen
COPENHAGEN, May 27 2019 (IPS)

Immigration policy has divided the people of Denmark for many years. There are few other areas where the fronts are drawn so divisively and where arguments become attacks.

Maybe this is understandable? Immigration policy plays an important part when it comes to defining the country we want to be. There are deeply held emotions at stake. And more and more people are experiencing for themselves what happens when integration fails.

Mette Frederiksen

When it comes down to it, the Social Democrats do not believe the people of Denmark are as divided on this issue as one might think. We want to help refugees. That is our duty as a compassionate country.

We also agree that there are limits when it comes to the number of immigrants that can be integrated into our country. And it is crucial to ensure that integration is improved. Why, then, is this so very difficult?

Maybe we Danes have been too quick to judge one another? But not wishing to see your country undergo fundamental change does not make you a bad person. And wanting to help other people to improve their lives does not mean you are naive. The vast majority of us want to do both – we want to help more people, and we want to take care of our country.

This may be a difficult task, because Denmark and the world are facing a genuinely difficult situation. A new situation. Record numbers of refugees are on the move.

We are also seeing increasing numbers of people who are not fleeing war or civil unrest, but who – understandably enough – are seeking to make better lives for themselves in our part of the world. Climate change will force more people to relocate. And add to that the fact that the population of Africa is expected to double by about 2050.

In Denmark, the population has changed rapidly in a short time. In 1980, 1 per cent of the Danish population was of non-Western origin. Now, that figure stands at 8 per cent. This development has come about in just one generation.

Danish society is benefiting greatly from the contributions made by many of the people who have come here over the years. People who have learnt Danish, who have jobs, who share our values and who, quite simply, are now Danish. But unfortunately, too many people have come to Denmark without becoming part of Denmark.

It is not a temporary challenge that we face. This challenge is here to stay. It places pressure on our welfare model, our high levels of equality and our way of life.

We are facing a severe challenge. But we have dealt with severe challenges before.

We have disagreed on matters over the years, even major issues. But Denmark is at its best when we compromise and move forward together. Compulsory education. The state pension. Free access to health services for all.

None of these decisions has been forced through by a narrow majority and a divided population. That is why they still stand today. And we need the same kind of decisions when it comes to immigration.

We have to rise above the daily discussions. Shine a spotlight on what we aim to achieve. Spend more time thinking about what is both realistic and fair, rather than considering what is in the short-term interests of the parties. In short, what we need is an immigration policy to unite Denmark.

So, in 30 years’ time, we will be able to look back on our generation of citizens and decision-makers and say that we resolved the challenge of our age. That when faced with major dilemmas, we struck the right balance between taking responsibility in the world, and taking responsibility for Denmark.

Make no mistake, we cannot help everyone here in Europe and in Denmark. But equally, refugees must be helped. Conditions in the very poorest parts of the world must be improved at a fundamental level so that people do not seek happiness elsewhere. We cannot turn our backs on the world, nor do we wish to.

That is why we need a comprehensive, long-term plan.

This is the message we want to put forward with this proposal. We present what we feel is the ideal solution. Some elements cannot be implemented straight away, but everything begins with resolve and the will to do something. And we have that. Our proposal consists of three elements:

Numbers matter. Denmark must take back control. We want to impose a limit on how many non-Western immigrants are allowed into Denmark each year. So that our residential areas, schools and places of employment can keep up. So that we have a genuine opportunity to integrate the people who come here. So that they learn the language, find jobs and come to adopt our basic values.

And we have a proposal on how we can enforce such a limit in purely practical terms while also operating in compliance with international conventions. We want to change our asylum system and set up a reception centre outside Europe. In the future, it will only be possible for UN refugees to be granted asylum in Denmark.

We have to help more people. At the moment, the weakest people are being left to fend for themselves – the people who are unable to flee, or who cannot afford to. The people who are most in need of help. That is not fair.

We must never accept people drowning in the Mediterranean, or being subjected to violence and abuse as they flee. Our aim must be to ensure that fewer people have to flee, and that more people can create a future for themselves in their own countries instead of seeking a new life in Europe.

This is a problem that Denmark cannot resolve alone, but we can take the lead. By doubling our own support to adjacent areas. And, as part of the EU, by spearheading a historical boost of Africa in particular.

New fight for freedom. Social democracy is, and always has been, a freedom project. It has given more and more people the opportunity to shape their own lives. It has largely succeeded in this by providing education, high levels of employment and free access to health care for all.

We are now facing a new chapter in this fight for freedom: the new Danes. Gender equality has to apply to them as well. Rights and obligations go hand in hand. Religion is always subordinate to democracy. This requires us to deal with the norms that exist in certain parts of Denmark.

First and foremost, it requires more people to become part of the Danish community. Where we all share the same basic values. And where we meet one another in residential areas and schools. A 10-year plan must be applied to ensure that no residential areas, schools or educational institutions have more than 30 per cent non-Western immigrants and descendants in future.

And more have to contribute to Danish society. That is why we want to introduce an obligation for all immigrants on integration benefits and cash benefits to contribute 37 hours a week.

These are the main elements of our proposal. Are there elements in this that the Social Democrats have not endorsed previously? Yes. The world and society have changed. And luckily, politics is not set in stone.

We said to ourselves from the outset that we have to start from scratch, think along new lines and adopt a holistic approach. We believe we have achieved that with what we are now proposing.

We are of the opinion that Denmark needs a cohesive, long-term immigration policy. Where the fundamental direction is fixed and its individual elements are not subject to constant changes.

Our entire proposal is a presentation for discussion. We are very happy to listen to other people’s good ideas. But we will insist on one thing: there is a need for broad and binding cooperation with regard to long-term solutions.

Denmark does not need the bloc politics and divisiveness that have historically characterized immigration policy. Quite the opposite, in fact.

The Social Democrats stand by an immigration policy that is both realistic and fair. An immigration policy to unite Denmark.

The post Realistic & Fair Immigration: A Policy to Unite Denmark appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Mette Frederiksen is a Danish Social Democrat politician. She has been a member of the Folketing, the parliament of Denmark, since 2001, and served in Helle Thorning-Schmidt's government as Minister of Employment from 2011 to 2014.

The post Realistic & Fair Immigration: A Policy to Unite Denmark appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM / ROME, May 27 2019 (IPS)

Human existence includes dreams, thoughts, ideas, music, stories, religion, and other immaterial ”things”. They constitute an important part of our habitat, i.e. the dwelling place of any living organism, consisting of both organic and inorganic surroundings. I learned this when I many years ago found myself among the undulating heights of Cordillera Central, which rise diagonally across the island of Hispaniola, shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

After days of hard work in fields and garden plots, peasants of the Cordillera gathered on the porches of their bright-painted houses, or ramshackle huts, to chat and play dominoes with their neighbours. While they, around kerosene lamps, joined friends and families, stories were told about dreams and another sphere, quite different from our everyday existence. On an occasion like that, Julian Ramos, a patriarch more than a hundred years old, told me:

People from your part of the world do not understand that a man like me lives in two worlds. I move between them like someone who walks through sunshine and shadows. I work and toil in one world close to another one that consists of dreams, music and tales; things I cannot see and touch. It is the dwelling place of gods, saints, and miracles. Listen to the dog howling out there in the dark. I tell you, that is not just a dog. Oh no, it is a human being who turned himself into a dog. The butterfly you saw in your room last night, that was no butterfly, it was your beloved who dreamt about you and her dream turned her into a butterfly. The fireflies over there are no insects, they are the souls of dead ancestors. All around us are things and creatures we do not know, which we cannot see, cannot understand. Up in the air, in the earth down below us, in the springs, the caves and the trees, live the mysteries, the luas. What we assume to be our world is only a tiny fraction of something else, something much, much bigger. I know this since I am an old man. Life is a tough and hard teacher and the longer we are forced to encounter him, the more we learn.

Remembering Julian Ramos´s words I realize that a man like me and “people from my part of the world”, actually live in two worlds as well. A sphere of dreams and vodú deities was part of Julian Ramos´s and his neighbours´ habitat, a realm that actually is present in the minds of people all around the world and probably has been there ever since Homo Sapiens developed. However, ”westernized” human beings have for the last thirty years, or so, also become used to live with or even within another habitat, the artificially created, but yet real Cyberspace,1 which affects our lives to an even higher degree than Julian Ramos´s ”spiritual realm”.

Cyberspace´s enormous digital world is a dream world, an unregulated and uncontrolled domain. However, contrary to Julian Ramos´s spiritual sphere it has been created by machines. Cyberspace exists and is accessible to individuals from all over the world. A place both beyond and within everyday life. We enter Cyberspace to interact with others; exchange ideas, share information, provide social support, conduct business, gamble for money and play games, make contact with future spouses, create artistic media, discuss politics and direct, create and influence a wide range of actions in real life. Cyberspace is used and misused for money transactions, purchasing goods and product promotion. It benefits technology strategists, security professionals, entrepreneurs, government, military – and industrial leaders, as well as fanatics and criminals.

As the dream world, Cyberspace is a make-believe environment, visited by cybernauts who may appear to be real, but do not exist in reality.2 In 2017, the Scottish writer Andrew O´Hagan wrote a book in which he decribed how he created a fictive character who through the Internet gained a life of his own.3 He called him Ronald Pinn and received a Facebook account in the name of his invented character; complete with a profile, interests, and hundreds of fake friends.4 Soon Ronald Pinn gained real ”friends” as well, contacts enabling him to enter a vast market place.

O´Hagan became obsessed with his own creation – his Frankenstein monster and while being a novelist O´Hagan experienced how the character he had created began to control him. William Faulkner once said:

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.5

Tellers of tales, people who like Julian Ramos, are able to enter spiritual spheres where they do not only meet gods and angels but also encounter monsters. O’Hagan created his own Mr. Hyde, a dangerous doppelgänger. He made Ronald Pinn into a young drug addict, political extremist, and gun fetishist. In Pinn´s name, O´Hagan rented an actual apartment and through the web he purchased white heroin, arriving in vacuum packs costing £ 39. He also bought bundles of counterfeit money that was easily accepted in various London stores. For his web purchases the fake Ronald Pinn used cyber-currency, bitcoins, and as long as he paid he was welcome everywhere in Cyberspace, his real identity was never checked. Ronald Pinn could have been a mercenary, a terrorist, a psychopath – no one cared. He bought false identity documents, as well as several weapons, which arrived in parts to the apartment of a non-existent Ronald Pinn.

The so called Dark Web is a criminal´s paradise made real. O´Hagan found that it is a place governed by ”an anti-authoritarian madness. A love of disorder as long as your own possessions aren´t threatened.”6 The monsters and trolls created in the ”spiritual sphere” of traditional storytellers might not be real, though those inhabiting Cyberspace do exist. The fictitious Ronald Pinn contacted Cyberspace monsters who sold him drugs, weapons and means to contact pimps and killers. Cyberspace is a parallel universe with a potential to cause a lot of damage. We have to be careful not to fall in its traps and have to find means to check and shun the lies and deceits thriving there. We also have to try to help our friends and children to avoid being engulfed by the Dark Web.

1 The concept became common knowledge after the Canadian-US writer William Gibson 1982 introduced it in the short story Burning Crome, developing it further in his 1984 novel Neuromancer, where he described it as a “graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data,” Neuromancer (2016). New York: Penguin Classics, p. 52.
2 From October 2018 to March 2019, according to its own reports, Facebook took down more than 3 billion fake accounts. https://transparency.facebook.com/community-standards-enforcement
3 O´Hagan, Andrew (2017) The Secret Life: Three True Stories. London: Faber & Faber.
4 Fake followers and friends (bots, spam accounts, inactive users, and non-real/invented persons) are common in political propaganda and consumer surveys. For example, Twitter Audit did in 2017 find that of 31 million followers of Trump´s Twitter, 15 million were bots and fake accounts. It was also recently established that 63 percent of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro´s more than four million twitter followers were fake.
5 Fant, Joseph L. and Robert Ashley, eds. (2002) Faulkner at West Point. Oxford MS: University Press of Mississippi, p. 101.
6 The Secret Life, p. 122.

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

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A young girl whose family fled the Boko Haram insurgency stands in front of a tent in a camp for internally displaced persons in Maiduguri, Nigeria. Boko Haram has abducted thousands of girls and forced them into unwanted marriages and enslavement. According to the International Rescue Committee (IRC), less than one percent of humanitarian aid is spent on combating gender-based violence in crises. Credit: Sam Olukoya/IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, May 27 2019 (IPS)

It’s time to end sexual and gender-based violence once and for all, participants of a two-day conference said.

In Norway, United Nations agencies, governments and civil society convened for the first-ever thematic humanitarian conference to combat sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) in humanitarian crises.

The conference, which brought together representatives from 100 nations and over 200 organisations and SGBV survivors, aimed to mobilise political and financial commitments as well as strengthen effective and multi-sectoral SGBV prevention and response.

“We cannot, and must not, pretend these atrocities are not taking place. Sexual and gender-based violence tears apart the very fabric of society, and inflicts lasting wounds on individuals and whole communities,” said Norway’s Prime Minister Erna Solberg.

“Now is not the time to stand idly by. Now is the time for action,” she added.

Worldwide, more than one-third of all women have experienced physical or sexual violence in their lifetime. While boys and men are also affected, the risk is much higher among women and girls and is particularly exacerbated in humanitarian crises.

In Nigeria, while the kidnapping of the Chibok school girls gripped international headlines in 2014, Boko Haram has and continues to kidnap women and girls for the purposes of sexual slavery and forced marriage. In this dated picture, Nigerians gathered at Unity Fountain, in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, on Apr. 30, 2014 to call on the country’s government to act quickly to find the 276 schoolgirls who were kidnapped from Chibok secondary school in northeast Borno state on Apr. 14 by Islamist extremist group Boko Haram. Credit: Mohammed Lere/IPS

In Nigeria, while the kidnapping of the Chibok school girls gripped international headlines in 2014, Boko Haram has and continues to kidnap women and girls for the purposes of sexual slavery and forced marriage. A report by the Henry Jackson Society found that Boko Haram members would forcefully impregnate women in order to produce the “next generation of fighters.”

Nadia Murad, who was recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and is the UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s Goodwill Ambassador, was among thousands of Yazidi women who were kidnapped by the Islamic State.

Many are forced to be sex slaves, and reports found that IS even uses social media sites such as Facebook to sell Yazidi women as sex slaves.

While Murad was able to escape, an estimated 3,000 Yazidi women and girls are still enslaved.

While women like Murad are leading the fight against SGBV and are often the first responders in a crisis, funding is woefully inadequate.

According to the International Rescue Committee, less than one percent of humanitarian aid is spent on combating gender-based violence in crises.

However, as communities lose access to basic services and needs such as shelter, healthcare, and income, financial support and provision of services is of the utmost importance.

In 2019, an estimated 140 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance. Of these, approximately 35 million are women and girls of reproductive age.

Participants in ‘Ending Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in Humanitarian Crises’ conference reiterated the importance of listening to survivors to help guide action.

“When I meet survivors I ask them what could have been done to prevent what happened to you, and they tell me things like a stove. In South Sudan, [they said] we have to go out of the protected civilian site to go fetch wood and that’s when we get raped,” said UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict Pramila Patten.

In South Sudan, at least 175 women and girls experienced sexual and physical violence between September and December 2018 alone. Of these cases, 64 were girls, some as young as eight years old.

Researchers from the UN Mission in South Sudan and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, found that most of the victims were attacked on roads as they traveled in search of firewood, food or water, commodities which have been limited since the start of the conflict in 2013.

One woman recounted her experience after being raped on three separate occasions while walking to or from food distribution sites, stating: “We women do not have a choice…if we go by the main road, we are raped. If we go by the bush, we are raped…we avoided the road because we heard horrible stories that women and girls are grabbed while passing through and are raped, but the same happened to us. There is no escape—we are all raped.”

“We really need to listen to survivors. They have both a role to play in prevention and response,” Patten added, pointing to the need to address root causes of structural gender inequality and discrimination.

With regards to response, it is essential for survivors to receive health and psychosocial services as well as a safe space to heal, many said.

However, an increase in funding for SGBV prevention and response is sorely needed as well as support for local women’s organisations who are at the forefront of crisis response.

Recently, 350 Somali women leaders jointly called for zero tolerance for gender-based violence and the urgent passage of the Sexual Offences Bill which would be the country’s first dedicated SGBV-related legislation.

“We need to address the call for justice for survivors, we need to support women working closely with survivors,” said Somali Minister of Women and Human Rights Development Deqa Yasin Hagi Yusuf.

“We will return from this conference with even more energy to strengthen our legal and institutional framework to tackle SGBV,” she added.

The UN Population Fund’s Executive Director Natalia Kanem also stressed how crucial partnerships are and pledged to follow through with the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit’s commitment to provide 25 percent of funding to local and national responders by 2020.

“Support women and girls to rebuild their lives, to regain their dignity, and to feel safe and secure amidst crisis…Let the woman decide, let the girl decide,” Kanem said.

By the end of the conference, 21 donors committed 363 million dollars over the next two years.

“We are at a turning point. We have done something new, we thought out of the box, and I think we have all given something out of the ordinary. We all wanted this to work and we did,” said Minister of Foreign Affairs of Norway Ine Eriksen Søreide in her closing remarks.

“I am absolutely confident we will be able to sustain this momentum…we have the majority, and we can make the changes…now the hard work starts,” she added.

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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is shown here being showered with rose petals after his nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was declared winner in the country’s national elections. Source: Narendra Modi Facebook Page

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, May 25 2019 (IPS)

“We worked for the poor and they voted us back to power,” was the explanation that Prime Minister Narendra Modi made to newly-elected legislators on Saturday, May 25, on the spectacular win scored by his nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India’s just concluded general elections.

Modi’s statement appeared refreshingly simple when seen against the plethora of theories and analyses on the second electoral defeat in a row that the BJP delivered to the venerable Indian National Congress party that led India to independence from British colonial rule in 1947 and had become almost synonymous with governance in the years since.

“More than anything else the election was the victory of Modi’s political leadership,” Ajay Mehra, professor of politics and currently senior fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi, tells IPS. “Since the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 the leadership quotient has been missing in Indian politics.”

“Modi was astute enough to understand this vacuum while the Congress party singularly failed to restore the leadership quotient when it had the chance while in power during 2004—2014 under Manmohan Singh, who was more manager than political leader,” Mehra says.

Modi’s main opponent, Rahul Gandhi, the son, grandson and great-grandson of former Congress prime ministers did make a bid to fill the leadership vacuum in the run up to the elections but “it was all too little too late,” says Mehra.

According Mehra, Modi never lost an opportunity to project himself as a strong and powerful leader. And the greatest opportunity came in the form of a deadly suicide-bombing attack on an armed forces convoy in Kashmir on Feb. 14, that left 40 troops dead.

Modi, who could never be faulted for his sense of timing, waited until Feb 26, a date close to the general elections, to order Indian air force jets to carry out retaliatory bombing on a militant camp in Balakot, deep inside Pakistani territory.

The Balakot bombing added hugely to Modi’s image as a great nationalist leader ready to defend the country against internal and external threats without hesitation, says Mehra.

Throughout the long and arduous election campaign across the country that followed, Modi repeatedly harped on the Balakot bombing to audience tuned to the idea of Pakistan as a long-standing enemy country which armed and financed terrorist groups tasked with the objective of wresting Muslim-majority Kashmir from Indian control.

It appears that the Gandhi and Congress party leaders learned no lessons from the defeat in 2014 when Modi’s one-time occupation of being a tea-stall vendor in a railway station was made fun of and used as proof that he was incapable of running a large and complex country like India.

This time around Modi’s description of himself as a ‘chowkidar’ (or watchman) taking care of the country’s interests was converted by the Congress party into the slogan ‘Chowkidar chor hai’ (the watchman is a thief) in reference to accusation that a deal to buy Rafael fighter jets from France was tainted and rigged to favour crony capitalist interests.

But, like the tea vendor jibes, the chowkidar slogans backfired with the mass of desperately poor Indian voters identifying all the more with Modi than with the half-Italian Gandhi and his sister Priyanka, who lent a hand in the election campaigning and addressed political rallies.

The campaign focused on the Rafael deal also had the effect of turning the electoral battle into one that was not over issues like rising unemployment, deep agrarian distress and declining manufacture into a personality clash between Gandhi and Modi—one in which the callow Congress leader could only lose to his politically astute and seasoned opponent.

A former spokesperson for the BJP during his long political career, Modi understood the value of building a positive image for himself through carefully arranged political interviews to friendly journalists while scrupulously avoiding the glare of India’s unruly media.

In fact, the only press conference Modi ever gave as prime minister came at the end of his present tenure and that too after elections were safely over. And then he sat through it without uttering a single word but deflecting questions towards his trusted lieutenant and party boss, Amit Shah.

However, Modi was visible everywhere on social media, bear-hugging world leaders one day and sitting in a cave in the snow-clad Himalayas meditating in the saffron robes of Hindu monk the next.

While such images drew derision and mockery from India’s English-speaking elite, the aspirational crowds identified even more with one of them who had made good but was yet rooted in traditional, devoutly Hindu roots.

On Saturday, Modi was elected as leader of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), a coalition of right-leaning political parties that includes the BJP. Though the BJP won a majority of seats on its own, gaining 303 out of 542 sets while the Congress party secured just 52 seats. 

In his address to newly-elected parliamentarians of the NDA, Modi said the ‘pro-incumbency vote’ was the result of the faith that people reposed in him. He vowed to take the whole country along into the future, even his enemies. He’s revised his slogan from 2014 to include the latter part on faith: ‘Sab ka saath, sab ka vikas, sab ka vishwas’ or ‘With everyone, for everyone’s development, with everyone’s faith‘. It was regarded as his assurance that everyone, even his political opponents, could trust him.

Modi also warned the new legislators: “Do not resort to a VIP culture–the people don’t like it.”

According to Rajiv Lochan, political commentator and professor of history at Panjab University, Chandigarh, the Congress party lost mainly because it came to be associated with the worst side of traditional India.

“The Congress believes in castes, it believes in religious groups, it believes that Muslims are one single entity as are Hindus and Sikhs,” says Lochan, referring to the parties ‘vote bank’ calculations to take advantage of horizontal and vertical divisions in Indian society.

“The Congress party also represents the feudal aspect in which people are seen as supplicants. All the Congress policies in this election were designed with the presumption that people are supplicants while the scion who has no energy, no intelligence and no abilities is still the boss directing everyone.

“Think of the stories of tiger hunts by Indian princes in colonial times when a servitor would kill the tiger and insist that it was the prince who had done it,” Lochan tells IPS.

“In contrast,” he adds, “the BJP had a Narendra Modi who was full of infectious energy. He had the ability to energise his audience.”

According to Lochan the BJP also ran a “very modernist campaign that was predicated on promising to empower everyone irrespective of caste, religion and family even increasing its support among Muslims from 9 percent to 12 percent, according to the poll surveys.”

“On the whole, I would say, people voted out the bad of traditional India and voted in the good,” says Lochan.

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A mother and her infant in Kenya. Credit: @UNFPAKenya

By Monica Juma
NAIROBI, Kenya, May 24 2019 (IPS)

In 1994 the International Conference and Population and Development (ICPD) was hosted in Cairo by the Government of Egypt. Twenty-five years later, Kenya is ready to convene the ICPD “Nairobi Summit” in November 2019.

The Programme of Action endorsed and adopted at the historic Conference in Cairo has had a tremendous effect in transforming the lives of women and girls in developing countries. A quarter century later, the international community will again converge, this time in Nairobi, to renew, revitalize the commitments made at the inaugural conference.

The goal of universal sexual and reproductive health care, including family planning for all, is central to the Programme of Action. Reaching this goal is vital, not only for the health and well-being of women and girls everywhere, but also for the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, particularly the ones related to ending poverty, securing good health, realizing gender equality and achieving sustainable communities. Urgent and sustained efforts to realize sexual and reproductive health are therefore crucial.

Robust political will, backed by sustainable financial commitment, have seen Kenya record significant gains in advancing the health of women and mothers. Maternal mortality rates are down from 400 per 100,000 live births to 362 per 100,000 within the last few years. More women are giving birth under professional care; more midwives are being trained and deployed.

Monica Juma

Twenty-five years ago, only about one in four married women used a modern contraceptive. Today about two in three do. In 1994, the average Kenyan woman had close to six children; today, she has fewer than four.

The Programme of Action was supposed to have been fully implemented by all countries by 2014. Yet five years later, many women especially in Africa still face economic, social and institutional barriers to services. Gaps are particularly pronounced among the poor and in rural areas.

Every year in Kenya, more than 5,000 women and adolescents die from pregnancy and birth-related complications while nearly 200,000 suffer disabilities, including 3,000 cases of obstetric fistula. According to the World Health Organization, pregnancy and childbirth complications are the leading causes of death among 15-to-19-year-old girls globally. In Kenya, as many as one in seven women want to prevent a pregnancy but are not using a modern contraceptive.

Yet all the evidence shows strong links between deliberate family planning; the health of the mother before, during, and after birth; and the health consequences for subsequent generations. Poor maternal health is associated with diminished child health, with implications for birth weight, neonatal survival, cognitive development, child behaviour, school performance, and adult health and productivity.

Healthier women contribute to better-educated and more productive societies. Second, ensuring women’s control over their own fertility can boost the pace of economic growth and development.

These gaps must be filled. It’s not just a matter of fulfilling the commitments we made in Cairo in 1994. It’s also a matter of rights. Every woman, regardless of her income or where she lives, has the right to information and services that allow her to determine for herself whether, when or how often she becomes pregnant, starts and stops her childbearing.

The Nairobi Summit, which we are proud to convene with the Government of Denmark and UNFPA, the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency, will focus on concrete actions that governments can take to end preventable maternal death, the unmet demand for contraception, as well as gender-based violence, along with the end of harmful practices of child marriage and female genital mutilation by 2030, the target year for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

To journey from Cairo to Nairobi must be one where we reaffirm commitments that enable half of the world population to be empowered in a way that optimizes their contribution to human prosperity. On its part, the leadership of Africa must ensure that women’s health, and consequently that of the next generation, is frontloaded in all development plans.

We must maintain the upward trajectory until every woman who wants to prevent a pregnancy has access to family planning and no woman dies giving life.

The post The World Made Promises to Women and Girls, We Must Fulfil Them appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Ambassador Monica Juma is the Cabinet Secretary (Minister), of Kenya’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

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Excerpt:

Irene Lungu Chipili is Manager, Corporate Affairs at the Zambia Environmental Management Agency (ZEMA).

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