Africa

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A family runs across a dusty street in Herat, Afghanistan. Credit: UNAMA/Fraidoon Poya

By Zarqa Yaftali
KABUL, Afghanistan, Nov 5 2020 (IPS)

Bullets, bombs, tyranny and torture. Children crying for food, civilians struggling to survive, women unable to walk out of their homes freely. When we are not under siege from bombs and landmines, ordinary Afghans suffer from hunger, natural hazards and poverty.

Every day is a war and every day people lose their lives. This is Afghanistan today – and a reality too many around the world can relate to.

The conflict in Afghanistan has taken a particular toll on women and girls. Over half the population lives below the poverty line and this has hit women the hardest. 70% of Afghan women are illiterate, 87% of Afghan women have already experienced at least one form of gender-based violence, 35% of girls are forced to marry before the age of 18, and women and girls are less likely to have access to quality health services and treatment, particularly in rural areas.

Women and children make up the majority of four million internally displaced people. All these issues have only worsened with the spread of COVID-19.

In addition, our civil society is threatened, harassed and attacked and no measures exist for their protection. In mid-September, the US Embassy in Kabul reported an increased risk for women, including human rights activists and women in government.

Despite these challenges, my people have also worked tirelessly to change this country for the better. Today, many of our girls can go to school without fear. We have heroes like Shamsia, the daughter of a coal miner, who came first in Afghanistan’s national university entrance exam.

We have a free media and a constitution that protects the rights of women and ethnic and religious minorities. Women are no longer publicly shot or stoned in Kabul stadiums, imprisoned in their homes or forced to wear burqas or shoes that make no noise, like they were 20 years ago.

Today, Afghan women are gaining respect and recognition as they begin to flourish in all walks of life, as doctors, taxi drivers and film-makers. Women in Afghanistan are also ministers, women who, under the Taliban regime, were deprived of the most basic rights to education, employment and freedom of movement. Today, they are in a position to influence policy and shape the future of our nation.

Much of this change is only due to the role women played in advocating for their rights over the past two decades. Women’s increasing participation in public and political life has changed harmful social norms and expectations around our role in Afghanistan. Afghan society today is ready to see women lead this country into the future.

Despite the great strides we have made, we know our hard-won gains can be snatched away without warning. The bitter memories of Taliban rule haunt us daily. These experiences are still a reality for many women and girls living in areas controlled by the Taliban, where few girls are allowed to attend school past puberty, access to information is limited and freedom of expression is severely curtailed.

After extensive delays to the Intra-Afghan talks, the official start in September is indeed a milestone. The presence of four women on the government’s negotiation team is a positive development, but it is not enough. Afghanistan’s track record for including women is dismal — between 2005 and 2020, women were excluded from almost 80% of peace process meetings and negotiations.

Given the deep-rooted resistance by the Taliban to women’s formal inclusion in past processes, and the recent attack targeting one of the women on the government’s negotiating team, we are deeply concerned that women’s rights will be used as a bargaining chip between the Taliban and the Government of Afghanistan. This would undermine our fundamental rights and ignore our important contributions to the future of this country.

Peace cannot come at the cost of women’s rights. All we have achieved hangs in the balance in the current negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government.

We are urging the international community, including global and regional institutions, UN Member States and donor countries, to exercise your responsibility to ensure that none of the parties involved, including the Taliban, restrict women’s human rights, civil liberties or citizenship in any way.

Political pressure from the international community can be effectively used to promote the protection of women’s rights and our formal and direct participation in the talks and the subsequent state-building processes. The widespread and meaningful participation of women in the peace process is essential both for peace and for the fate of Afghan women.

At the UN Security Council this week, I, on behalf of the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security made specific demands – for leaders to use their influence in this key decision-making space to emphasize and complement the work women leaders are doing on the frontlines around the globe.

We asked them to demand an immediate ceasefire, insist on women’s rights and participation as part of inclusive peace talks, ensure the safety of women’s rights defenders – and more.

20 years of commitments and resolutions by the Security Council have not substantially changed the reality for women in Afghanistan – or in Yemen, Syria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan — in fact, in every country on the Security Council’s agenda.

Even the modest gains over the last 20 years are under attack. We are watching as women’s rights, health, equality and inclusion are being dangerously undermined. We must hold the line – and our leaders accountable to do the same.

Just last week, civil society and defenders of women’s rights were able to avert an unnecessary and potentially dangerous Security Council resolution led by Russia. Women leaders and our allies watch closely how leaders act in these moments to see what support we can expect as we face challenges to equality and inclusion in our own countries.

We were once again forced to hope that those in positions of power will wield it for good and demonstrate they are in lock step with the women who have earned the power to lead and push for peace in their communities. Our rights shouldn’t still be up for debate, but we were relieved to see our community and the majority of Member States on the Security Council hold the line against the erosion of women’s rights, inclusion and equality.

Although women have long suffered from war, violence, and exclusion, we are not victims — we have fought back for decades for our rights, and we will not sit by and watch our achievements be thrown away. It is equally the responsibility of the international community to stand with the women of Afghanistan and around the world as we demand our seat at the table, and a future that is safe, equal, and just.

 

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The post Women in War-Ravaged Afghanistan Fight Back for Their Rights appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Zarqa Yaftali is a women’s rights advocate from Afghanistan and Executive Director of the Women and Children Legal Research Foundation. She represented the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security at the recent UN Security Council Open Debate on Women, Peace and Security.

The post Women in War-Ravaged Afghanistan Fight Back for Their Rights appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Zamalek beat Raja Casablanca 3-1 in Cairo to book a place against Egyptian rivals Al-Ahly in the African Champions League final.

Ghana striker Asamoah Gyan insists his move to Legon Cities is not a first step towards retirement.

Rita Raja, pictured here with her children, holds up photos of her 13-year-old who had allegedly been abducted and forced to covert her religion and marry her 44-year-old Muslim neighbour. Credit: Zofeen T. Ebrahim/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Pakistan, Nov 4 2020 (IPS)

October 13 began like any other day at the Lal house as Raja Lal and his wife Rita Raja left for work at 7:30 am.

“I made the usual breakfast of anda paratha (egg and flat bread) and told my eldest to lock the door from inside,” Raja, who works as an ayah in a school, told IPS. Their 13-year old daughter, the youngest of their four children, did not go to school that day as her school shoes no longer fit and her parents hadn’t bought her a new pair yet.

Little did they know that that day was the beginning of a nightmare for the Lal household. Their daughter would then allegedly be “abducted, forcefully converted and married in just one day”, Lal, a Christian, told IPS.

“My other two daughters saw [her] leave the house and thought she had taken the dog out at around 9:00 am,” narrated Raja. “But when she still hadn’t returned an hour later, they got anxious and called nearby relatives. They looked everywhere and then called us.”

Lal went to the police to report his daughter missing. According to Raja, “they did nothing” and two days later they handed Lal his daughter’s marriage certificate.

In a video shared over social media, the teenager claimed she converted to Islam of her free will and consented to marriage to her 44-year-old Muslim neighbour Azhar Ali.

Forced conversion of young girls has been going on for decades, Safina Javed, Vice President Pakistan Minority Rights Commission, Sindh chapter, told IPS. “Every year nearly a thousand young girls are forcefully coerced or lured to convert to Islam,” she said.

“The minorities feel very insecure because the religious extremists have made these conversions their business and see it as a path to heaven,” she said.

Javed wants a law that can control this practice.

An anti-conversion law was first tabled in the Sindh Assembly back in 2016 but was rejected. A second attempt of the same bill with amendments was brought forward in 2019 after a surge in conversion of Hindu girls was reported in various districts of Sindh. It was rejected again. 

Maliha Lari, a lawyer and rights activist, told IPS the bill was “scrapped” as parliamentarians started to receive threats and religious parties launched protests, pressurising the government to repeal it. They contended that the bill was against the basic principles of Islam as there could not be an age limit on converting to Islam.

Raja Lal and his wife Rita Raja say their 13-year-old daughter was abducted, forcefully converted and married in just one day to her 44-year-old neighbour. The young girl has been moved to a women’s shelter in Karachi while her age is being determined through medical investigation as documents had been reportedly submitted to court that stated her legal age was 18. Courtesy: Safina Javed

Saroop Ijaz, senior counsel for Human Rights Watch Asia, told IPS societal attitudes and institutional responses and encouragement enables this practice to continue with impunity.

“It is an unhappy mix of socio-economic marginalisation, misogyny and religious intolerance. The victims are girls belonging to poor households and the conversion in most cases is followed by a forced marriage with a man who has greater socio-economic power,” he explained.

Lal took the matter to the courts where his daughter and Azhar Ali were summoned. The judge accepted the girl’s statement that she was 18 and had consented to the marriage. Documents were submitted to show her age to be 18. The judge allowed the 13-year-old to leave with her husband.

“She is just 13 and we have given proof,” said her mother, claiming the other side had produced fake documents in court. According to the Sindh Child Marriages Restraint Act, 2013, marriage of any child under the age of eighteen is a criminal offence.

The case stirred a public outcry. Consequently, forced to review its decision, the court ordered the girl to be moved to a women’s shelter in Karachi while her age is being determined through medical investigation. A hearing is scheduled for Thursday, Nov. 5.

Ijaz was not surprised by the initial court order to allow the girl to remain with her husband. “The response of the criminal justice system at all three levels of investigation, prosecution and adjudication oscillates between indifference and complicity,” he said, adding that it was this impunity that was leading to more cases.

The Lal’s lawyer, Jibran Nasir, hoped for a more “proactive approach” from the court. “I hope the evidence of the child’s age as given in her school records and more importantly with the government’s National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) should be enough to prove her age,” he told IPS. Determining that she is a minor will declare the marriage void.

For Lari, “it’s black and white” and there are three laws under which the complainants can get relief: abduction of children below the age of 14, child marriage and rape (if there has been intercourse).

“Those involved should be charged with either abduction if she was abducted or incitement for purposes of illicit intercourse,” she told IPS, adding: “The law says the age of marriage is 18 and she is 13; everyone involved should be punished.”

“The court should declare a minor cannot be considered to have changed her religion and protection for the girl and a long-term plan for where the child should be placed should be discussed and planned out and re-visited regularly,” Lari concluded.

However, Justice Majida Rizvi, former judge of the Sindh High Court who now heads the  Sindh Human Rights Commission, told IPS that things are not so simple.

“[While] we have two parallel laws, the Shariah law and the secular law, one allows marriage at 16 for girls or when she attains puberty, the other at 18, there will always be a problem,” said Rizvi. On top of that, she added, the constitution says “all laws have to be in accordance with the Shariah”.

This is precisely why Ijaz hopes this case “results in an honest public conversation on the issue followed by a comprehensive reform of the system.”

For this, he said, the government and the state machinery have to inspire confidence for the victim to fight this battle. “In the past high profile examples, victims have had to back down because of the unequal power relations between the victims and perpetrators,” he said.    

Local rights activist Tahira Abdullah told IPS that the reason for increased incidences of forced conversions of young girls from minority communities was because the police and judiciary were “neither sensitive enough nor courageous enough to withstand the visible and invisible pressure exerted by the religio-political groups/gangs who perpetuate these crimes:.

“Thus, there is an increasing impunity from prosecution for the following multiple crimes against minority girls: abduction, forced conversion to Islam, faked documents (eg. birth certificates), forced marriage of a legal minor usually to a much older Muslim man, and, most heinous, rape – under the false guise of ‘conjugal sexual relations,'” Abdullah said.

Meanwhile, many of the experts IPS spoke to feel this case may not come to a conclusion anytime soon. For now, her father finds solace in the fact that his daughter is away from her abductor.

“At least she is safe,” said Lal, speaking to IPS inside the residential premises of the Holy Trinity Cathedral, the seat of the Church of Pakistan, where Pastor Ghazala Shafiq, the only woman ordained pastor in Karachi, has provided refuge to the Lals. “These people are powerful and we are poor but we have received much support from the church,” said Raja, looking around the new abode gratefully.

“Azhar’s side had come to us with as many as 15 to 20 women accompanied by their menfolk and asked for reconciliation,” said Raja. She added that they threatened the Lal family if they didn’t acquiesce.

“They are definitely not safe there!” concluded Shafiq, who spent a night in the Lal home. “They were continuously getting threats from the abductor’s side.”

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By External Source
Nov 4 2020 (IPS-Partners)

John Goodwin joined the LEGO Foundation as CEO in April 2017 to pursue a career where he could combine his business skills with his passion for philanthropy and driving positive social impact.

The LEGO Foundation is dedicated to influencing parents, teachers and policy makers to adopt learning through play as the most powerful means for children to acquire the broad suite of skills needed to thrive in today’s world – and to provide the evidence and advocacy to support it. The LEGO Foundation is Education Cannot Wait’s largest private sector donor. With a US$27.5 million contribution to date, it is paving the way for public-private partnerships “to promote quality learning, holistic skills, and protection of children who are the most marginalized and need support.”

Prior to being appointed CEO of the LEGO Foundation, Mr. Goodwin held a position as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of the LEGO Group with responsibilities comprising finance, corporate IT, corporate social responsibility, external relations, corporate business services, legal affairs and procurement.

Before joining the LEGO Group, John served as a President in Procter & Gamble where he was responsible for leading a variety of global businesses covering pet nutrition, electrical appliances and food snacks. Earlier in his career, he conducted a wide range of finance leadership positions in the company, including mergers and acquisitions, corporate finance, new business ventures, investor relations and strategic development.

Education Cannot Wait: The LEGO Foundation decided to invest in education for those left furthest behind in emergencies and protracted crisis. ECW’s uncompromising commitment to speed, quality and results very much resembles the attitude of private sector mentality and approach. Why did you decide to support and invest in ECW’s global movement?

John Goodwin: The LEGO Foundation forged our partnership with Education Cannot Wait (ECW) to ensure that children in conflicts and crises get psychosocial and developmental support, by securing Learning Through Play in the classrooms of refugees and their host communities. Through this partnership, we aim to promote quality learning, holistic skills, and protection of children who are the most marginalised and need support.

Through the partnership with ECW, we are investing in capacity building on learning through play pedagogies of their staff and/or grantees, inspiring other donors who are interested in prioritising quality early childhood development and primary education for children, and supporting a research agenda and knowledge sharing around learning through play.

This partnership also enables us to raise the agenda in public platforms by talking about the importance of early learning – which is currently massively underfunded in the humanitarian sector – that includes Learning through Play for broader skills development, promoting it with other actors and host country governments.

The LEGO Foundation has been supporting early childhood development programmes of governments of countries such as Colombia.

Education Cannot Wait: What is your advice to private sector or philanthropic foundations who also want to help prioritize education for the 75 million children and youth in conflicts and forced displacement? What advice would you give to private sector partners or foundations who are still concerned about how their funding can make the greatest impact?

John Goodwin: The private sector has the resources and influence to positively impact lives of children in difficult situations. My advice is to work with partners to leverage the collective power of influence, reach and knowledge. At the LEGO Foundation we believe that we are stronger together and if we can leverage each other’s resources and expertise, we can deliver a higher impact for children around the world.

I would also advise to prioritise quality learning outcomes and developing breadth of skills in children. While the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in some challenges with access to education opportunities, we should not take a step back from the current efforts to improve the quality of education that is provided to these children. We should avoid falling into the trap of pushing narrow traditional education outcomes for the sake of hitting targets, but instead to think about how we support these children’s well-being through a holistic approach that can help them deal with trauma stressors caused by crisis situations AND set them on a learning trajectory for the future.

Education Cannot Wait: The LEGO Foundation is a strong driver of early childhood education and learning through play. What do you think are the most important achievements so far in the LEGO Foundation’s relentless advocacy for early childhood education and learning through play in emergency and crisis settings?

John Goodwin: In the last few years, the LEGO Foundation has built its humanitarian portfolio, with our first humanitarian grant Play to Learn, to a consortium of partners led by Sesame Workshop. This was followed by the second grant, PlayMatters, to a consortium of partners led by International Rescue Committee (IRC). Play to Learn seeks to establish play-based, early childhood development (ECD) programming as an essential component of all humanitarian responses, and validating this through the specific contexts of the Rohingya and Syrian refugee crises in Bangladesh, and Jordan and Lebanon respectively. PlayMatters will improve education outcomes for approximately 800,000 children and reach approximately 10,000 pre-primary and primary school teachers and education personnel and 170,000 primary caregivers in Ethiopia, Uganda and Tanzania, who will receive training to engage in learning through play with children who have faced adversities. Over the course of both projects, we can see some concrete outcomes such as direct ECD interventions for parents and children in three different countries, and the initial learnings from the implementation.

The LEGO Foundation is working in close collaboration with key partners to advocate for more investments and actions towards early childhood development and education in emergencies. We have been engaging with Moving Minds Alliance, other philanthropic organisations, and governments to scale up coverage, quality and financing to support young children and families affected by crisis and displacement, where we bring the important elements of learning through play into the efforts of this alliance. We took a similar approach with our recent grant to INEE to scale up their activities. We also learn from the collaborative efforts from other programmes of the LEGO Foundation and other partners that are developing and researching quality ECD interventions in non-crisis settings.

We know that resilience building and socio-emotional learning are key for children in this world of uncertainty, and even more for those affected by conflicts and crises. We believe that learning through play is one of the answers to help them develop these skills. We are launching the Socio-Emotional Learning Massive Open Online Course with Future Learn to explore how adults can support children to cope with change, stress and anxiety. Even though its approach is broader, it is applicable to humanitarian contexts. These are some important achievements for the LEGO Foundation that certainly encourage us to deepen our efforts towards our humanitarian portfolio.

John Goodwin, CEO of the LEGO Foundation at a Play Lab in Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh, one of the many set-up through the Play to Learn partnership.

Education Cannot Wait: The COVID-19 pandemic has had a global impact on all areas of virtually everyone’s life. How does the LEGO Foundation see the long-term effect on education by the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly for crisis-affected children and youth who were already impacted by armed conflicts, forced displacement and climate-induced disasters prior to the pandemic?

John Goodwin: The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the risk of donors and governments deprioritising investment in education. Underfunded areas like early learning could be even more affected. This has the potential of severely impacting all children, but children who have been impacted by conflicts and crises are even more vulnerable. Children in crisis settings not only need quality education opportunities but also ways to address their own stress and socio-emotional wellbeing. The LEGO Foundation strongly believes that learning through play-based pedagogy can help to address these challenges.

Education Cannot Wait: The LEGO Foundation recently announced memoranda of understanding (MOUs) with both USAID and the government of Denmark. Can you explain the role of these strategic partnership in realizing the vision of the LEGO Foundation?

John Goodwin: The LEGO Foundation firmly believes that the only way to achieve significant positive impact for children at scale is to engage in strategic partnerships with NGOs, civil society, academic institutions, and more importantly partnerships with governments. We work with, and support governments who are keen on improving the delivery of child-centred play-based quality education. Partners such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark and USAID are working very closely with education systems around the world, and with our support they can reach even more children with the power of learning through play, and help strengthen local systems to deliver quality play-based education to children. Working together and leveraging each other’s networks and expertise can secure a higher impact for children around the world.

But this is not the first time the LEGO Foundation has entered into partnerships with governments, and not all our public-private partnerships are with high income/donor countries. Back in 2010, the LEGO Foundation started a collaboration with the Ukrainian Ministry of Education, with a focus on bringing learning through play to young children in kindergartens across Ukraine. By training teachers and donating play materials, practice towards early learning has shifted from a traditional chalk-and-talk approach to one where children benefit from play-based learning tapping into their innate ability to learn. At our 10th anniversary of collaboration in Ukraine, we can celebrate that learning through play is now part of everyday life for around 1 million children between 2-10 years old and 50,000 teachers in 16,000 public primary schools and 250 kindergartens.

We have similar partnerships with the Ministry of Basic Education of South Africa, Secretariat of Public Health and the Secretariat of Public Education of Education of Mexico, the Government of Colombia, and the Ministry of Education in Ghana.

Education Cannot Wait: Where do you see the LEGO Foundation’s commitment to education, especially pre-primary education, for children affected by conflicts and forced displacement in 10 years from now?

John Goodwin: In 10 years, we would like to see a better understanding by the key stakeholders of the complete “learning journey” of a child – from birth to adulthood. The investments currently being made by the LEGO Foundation are geared to make programmes scalable and sustainable. We believe that in 10 years these programmes and the learning from them, would help other governments and organisations to reach even more children who might find themselves in difficult situations with development interventions that will help the children get back on a positive learning journey. Although, we hope that in 10 years, there would be no child if a crisis situation and therefore there will not be a need for such programmes.

Education Cannot Wait: We’d love to learn a bit more about you on a personal level. Learning through play is crucial, and learning to read is also key to one’s continual growth throughout life. Could you tell us what are the three books that have influenced you the most (or that you’d recommend to others to read), and why?

John Goodwin: ‘Influence the most’ is tricky as it is somewhat time/life-stage dependent. I also read a lot. So let me go down the path of three books I would recommend in light of what I am currently doing at the LEGO Foundation

• All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.’ Robert Fulghum. Great read to remind everyone of what is most important in life and the essential nature of early childhood development. One quote that I think is really pertinent today is “It doesn’t matter what you say you believe – it only matters what you do.” In the LEGO Foundation we are nurturing a bias to doing (while constantly learning).
• ‘Range.’ David Epstein. Wonderful research into the power of diversity of thought, both at the individual and the collective level. Has been a strong influencer in my own thinking on how to make better decisions and how to not get locked into a narrow agenda.
• ‘Lean Impact.’ Ann Mei Chang. I love seeing how breakthrough approaches in one area of life can be transferred across into different areas to achieve new breakthroughs. This book has helped me think through how the LEGO Foundation can fundamentally rethink its approach to achieving more systemic impact in the areas of early childhood development and primary education. We are still working on it, and with it!

Education Cannot Wait: Any final words of advice as we work together and move forward to reach Sustainable Development Goal 4 – inclusive quality education – for those left furthest behind?

John Goodwin: There is an urgent need to rethink education, by adopting a more child-centered rather than a teacher-centered approach. And this change is possible by adopting a learning through play approach to education which addresses the individual needs of each learner, and keep our focus on life-long skills, and not just on access to education. We have to build education systems around the agency of the child and make sure we close the inequality gaps, which is unfortunately growing right now, and more so for the most difficult to reach children. I would stress again that partnerships are key to drive this change at scale.

Mr. Goodwin holds a 1St class degree in Mathematical Engineering from the University of Loughborough and is a Fellow of the Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. He resides in York, England and is married to Elizabeth Goodwin, a former primary school teacher, with whom he has three grown children.

 

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Credit: United Nations

By Mark Malloch-Brown
LONDON, Nov 4 2020 (IPS)

Kofi Annan’s Secretary-General-ship was a second honeymoon for the UN, coming six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall it was a moment of hope and alignment between the major powers of which he took ample advantage.

He saw a moment of opportunity that was largely denied to those who came before and after him to get the UN’s way on political, security and human rights matters.

Yet in the aftermath of a Security Council broken on the anvil of the US-UK invasion of Iraq a gale turned on him, too. So, for at most 10%, of the UN’s 75 years, has the wind blown strongly in the right direction. For the rest success has come despite- not because of- member state unanimity.

Bending the Sail

I want to suggest a manifesto for a re-purposed UN that is both true to its Charter; but recognises the direction the winds are blowing; does not cling to the mast of a failing western liberalism alone; but understands and responds to the dynamics that have left that liberalism, and it seems multilateralism, on the rocks.

This is a comeback strategy for the world as it is; in order to allow us later to make the world as we want it to be. It is no surprise that I don’t imagine the vehicle for it being our grandparents’ UN.

The world needs to believe the UN matters. That it is relevant. The UN still enjoys high levels of support in Pew and other surveys. Yet that support seems heavily aspirational – around what it ought to do; not what it does.

Support falls when pollsters ask about its specific performance. Churchill would see this, in a term he used in Fulton, as “Foundations built on sand”.

Without a more passionate public embrace it is hard to overcome the inter-state fault lines. Annan was possibly unique among Secretary-Generals in being able to appeal directly to people, citing the opening word of the Charter in justification: “We, the Peoples of the United Nations…..” Those before and since have been largely captives of Governments and their disagreements.

I often wish the UN’s supporters would accept a more pragmatic UN rather than the aspirational Save the World one that lights up the top line poll findings. It will always disappoint such hopes. It is of the World not above it.

Dag Hammarskjold’s words still capture it best: “The UN wasn’t created to take mankind into paradise, but rather, to save humanity from hell.”

For its 75th, as you will hear shortly from Natalie, the UN undertook a survey of a million respondents supplemented by independent polling by Pew and Edelman Intelligence as well the latter’s analysis of social and traditional media coverage in 70 countries.

What comes through clearly is that across very different national economies and circumstances there is a demand for the better delivery of basic services, notably at the moment health; protection of the environment and containing climate change; honest accountable government that delivers and protects its citizens. This is already the UN’s agenda.

The UN is not going to replace government as an agent of service delivery. It does not command the resources or the authority. But the UN must deploy its convening, campaigning and normative roles to double down on its Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) agenda.

Covid has attacked that agenda as Bill and Melinda Gates have said setting back 25 years of progress in 25 weeks; driving 115 million people back into extreme poverty this year and raising fears for economic security in almost every family elsewhere.

The current Secretary-General Antonio Guterres dedicated most of his early period in office in trying to pick off some early wins in conflict resolution – including Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Cyprus. His efforts were not blessed with any major breakthroughs.

He then embraced the SDGs and Climate. He was photographed for Time with his trousers rolled up standing in shallow water up on a beach in Fiji to illustrate a consequence of climate change – rising ocean levels. It illustrates his pivot from conflict to climate.

Probably his most noticed speech as Secretary-General was his powerful Mandela lecture delivered in July. He called for “A New Social Contract for a New Era” and spoke eloquently of how:

“The Pandemic has demonstrated the fragility of our world. It has laid bare risks we have ignored for decades: inadequate health systems; gaps in social protection; structural inequalities; environmental degradation; the climate crisis”. He went on “Inequality defines our time. More than 70% of the World’s people are living with rising…inequality”.

Secretaries-Generals have been elected to be the world’s chief diplomat; today, successful ones quickly learn they have to be the world’s chief campaigner. The UN has a unique platform to measure a country’s progress, league table it, and name and shame those whose social and economic indicators fall behind.

This began with the legendary Jim Grant at UNICEF; moved through the UNDP Human Development agenda to being picked up by Kofi Annan and those of us around him in how we established and campaigned for the Millennium Development Goals, the MDGs.

Like any Campaign start by understanding your base constituency, “We, the Peoples”. The Bennett Institute at Cambridge University has just released a study of the state of global democracy that draws on more than 3,500 country surveys.

It finds support for democracy is at a low ebb; since the data series was established in 1995 a 10% swing across all countries in the set (developed and developing) has produced a clear majority who are dissatisfied with democracy.

The deficit was worst in almost all regions among 18-34 year-olds, the millennials. Dr Robert Foa, the study leader said: “This is the first generation in living memory to have a global majority who are dissatisfied with the way democracy works while in their twenties and thirties”.

But what the report is anxious to stress is there is little evidence that it is a rejection of the theory of democracy rather it demonstrates disappointment with its results. And indeed, where governments do deliver results, notably in some Asian countries, the researchers found that the disenchantment is much less.

This is not a protest against democracy so much as against poorly performing incumbents. That was democrats but now it will be populists with even fewer answers to the structural insecurity that is blowing up politics.

People don’t feel protected; particularly in the developed world (there is more optimism remaining in developing countries); too often don’t see a better future rather they see wave after wave of threatening change driven not just by pandemics but technology, trade, environmental degradation and consequent steepening inequality.

Youth protests in Nigeria have caught our attention in recent days. Perhaps one Nigerian statistic speaks volumes: 35% youth unemployment. Covid has reinforced economic exclusion.

The protests of a generation cannot be brushed under the Covid carpet much longer. The world is an unhappy place; and made more so by Covid- at the core is a growing crisis of youth structural unemployment and exclusion and the skewed inter-generational distribution of wealth and government benefits.

There is worse to come. To pluck just one random headline from the week’s news: McKinsey released a survey of more than 2000 SMEs in Europe. More than half don’t expect to be in business this time next year. SMEs have been estimated by ILO to account for up to 70% of global employment.

Here is the UN’s great cause. Throw caution to the winds and lay out Guterres’ new social contract for the world to see. Deploy campaigning and convening to build a new global bargain. And put governments on the spot by indexing and spotlighting performance to expose which are delivering and which aren’t.

For the MDGs, I set up UN project offices outside the normal UN intergovernmental constraints to measure and create league tables and score cards of national performance that allowed citizens to hold their government to account; then under Jeff Sachs to cost out what it would take to achieve the goals; and finally a team to liaise and communicate with civil society activists that was more jeans and tee shirts than the typical UN Brooks Brothers uniform.

Build on that precedent. Push bravely on the door. If I have a mild complaint about the SDGs it is that they have lost something of the edgy outsider status of the early MDGs. The UN is too much the incumbent and not enough the insurgent and it shows in the difficulty the current UN has in breaking through in communications terms.

On such a Campaign’s coattails remake the argument for multilateralism. Argue too many of these problems cannot be fixed at the country level alone. Local results on say climate require global collaboration and action. Once the UN is reconnected to grassroot concerns it is not a hard argument to make.

If a campaign that mobilises younger citizens around this global economic and personal security agenda is to have legs it must find allies where it can and not be constrained by the foot dragging back end of the General Assembly.

When the UN has touched the stars, the lift has come from civil society not government. Civil society was active in San Francisco in 1945 pushing the level of ambition of the official conference as it was later when Eleanor Roosevelt led the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Today around each SDG clusters a network of champions. In many, corporates show greater ambition than governments; in all, the most innovative thinking comes from the many corners of the civil society mosaic – local and international NGO’s, mayors and their cities, governors and CEOs; activists and academics that harness the energy. The UN Foundation which I co-chair interfaces with many of these groups. Their commitment is bracing.

Building variegated coalition of states and non-state actors willing to be first movers on different parts of this agenda is a not a new path to action in the UN. Now it needs to be turbo-charged. The world won’t wait for the most plodding and resistant nations to sign up to action.

This same variegated approach needs to be applied to the more difficult area of human rights. The official intergovernmental body, the Human Rights Council is not fit for purpose but as one of the authors of the reform that raised it from Commission to Council, I doubt there is an institutional fix.

The UN in the person of the High Commissioner for Human Rights needs to choose her ground and pick her fights – determine a mix of individual and collective Rights on which she wishes to particularly stand and marshal the UN’s allies, a variegated coalition if ever there was one of states and NGOs, to champion Rights for which it can build support.

And where the High Commissioner cannot- and the Council won’t- raise its voice her office must still let its reporting speak for itself. Abuses of Rights must be universally reported and documented and allies in civil society and government partners must raise their voices instead.

The UN needs to be part of a Rights ecosystem where different partners can each step up where their comparative advantage lies. The current High Commissioner, Michelle Bachelet has the stature to thread this difficult needle.

UN Resident Co-ordinators that I have spoken to in recent months, and indeed the UN’s 75th research, suggests closing space around debating or criticising the performance of government service delivery, corruption and accountability. RC’s and the UN system must be critical protectors and promoters of local civil society voices.

This may seem a more unsung aspect of human rights work but it is a vital front in the UN’s wider comeback. Too many Governments see the current political climate as a license to step on their home critics. The UN needs to step in and protect its civil society partners. A Global Social Contract will be stillborn without them.

And the final step to restored effectiveness is of course in time to recover authority in the political and security space.

If there is a silver lining it is that the character of conflict continues to change opening grim new opportunity. Not only is peacekeeping less than ever the thin blue line between states it is not even in many cases policing full blown internal conflicts in a Democratic Republic of the Congo or Syria as in the past.

The more likely future of conflict, at least where the UN will have a role, is low level but persistent political violence around exclusion, suppression of minority rights and inter-generational conflict in a context of deteriorating state institutions such as policing, justice and social service delivery.

The way into these situations that may not be via the Security Council but rather via Humanitarian, Development and the Human Rights arms of the system. These will be Development and Rights breakdowns where the UN is already present.

The UN will not have to wait for the permission of the Security Council it is there already. The World Bank has estimated that by 2030, two thirds of the world extreme poor could be living in areas of conflict and violence.

What I have laid out today is not a manifesto to change the world overnight. Rather it is a call for the UN to seize the moment and take advantage of the opportunities it has at this moment of global crisis to recover relevance and to drive a new global consensus on tackling our collective weaknesses that Covid has so cruelly exposed.

There is a majority out there for a better governed and prepared, more caring and inclusive world but that same majority has grown terminally impatient with existing institutions. The UN can be part of that failed past or attach itself to an emerging future.

Let the Campaign begin.

*Mark Malloch-Brown was also Minister of State in the Foreign Office, covering Africa and Asia, and sat in Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s cabinet. He has also served as Vice-Chairman of the World Economic Forum. He began his career as a journalist at The Economist and then worked for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and was later a Vice-President of the World Bank. He has served for many years on the Board of the Open Society Foundation. He formerly chaired the Business Commission on Sustainable Development and the Royal Africa Society. He is author of The Unfinished Global Revolution: The Limits of Nations and the Pursuit of a New Politics.

The article -Part 2 — is based on an address to the annual lecture at the Helsinki-based United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) last week.

 

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The post UN at 75: Slow Death or a New Direction – Part 2 appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Lord Mark Malloch‐Brown* holds international Board and Advisory positions in the commercial and not-for-profit sectors. He currently Co-chairs The UN Foundation and the International Crisis Group and is on the advisory committees to the heads of the IMF and UNICEF. He served as Deputy Secretary‐General and earlier Chief of Staff of the UN under Kofi Annan. For six years before that he was Administrator of UNDP, leading the UN's development efforts around the world.

The post UN at 75: Slow Death or a New Direction – Part 2 appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Abiy Ahmed accuses the Tigray People's Liberation Front of launching an attack on an army base.

Somali environmentalist Ahmed Ibrahim Awale hopes it will inspire African researchers.

Police fired teargas to disperse Bobi Wine supporters who had gathered to cheer him.

The army is accused of carrying out revenge killings after three policemen and six soldiers were killed.

A herder is about to take his sheep to graze early in the morning in Mauritania, the West Sahel. Peacebuilding and stability in the region is dependent on solving the challenge of food and security, says the African Development Bank. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

By Nalisha Adams
BONN, Germany, Nov 3 2020 (IPS)

In 2013, when Jamila Ben Baba started her company, the first privately owned slaughterhouse in Mali, she did so in the midst of a civil war as Tuareg rebels grouped together in an attempt to administer a new northern state called Azawad.

Ben Baba, who is originally from Timbuktu, in northern Mali — where much of the civil war conflict took place — based the business in the country’s western region of Kayes and grew it into what is considered the largest private slaughter house in the West African nation.

She started her business with a deep desire to develop one of the country’s first rural, raw resources — livestock.  Her aim was to promote Malian meat and to “make it known both in the sub-region and internationally”.

She said that while her business created 100 jobs, the company was evolving in a very difficult political and social context.

“War and Jihadists are rampant in the centre and north of Mali, which penalises us greatly in our livestock supply. Livestock farmers are forced to move constantly for their safety and that of their animals,” she said on Monday Nov. 2.

Ben Baba was speaking at the annual meeting of the United Nations Peacebuilding Commission, during which various stakeholders met to call on member states to increase funding to the commission’s Peacebuilding Fund. The Peacebuilding Fund is used as an instrument of first resort to respond to and prevent conflict.

But the impact of an Aug. 18 coup and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic have placed the country in an unprecedented economic crisis, she said.

“Closed borders have slowed down our exports. Several purchase orders in Ghana and Guinea have been cancelled.”

Hotels that were closed during the pandemic restrictions caused her company’s turnover to drop by more than half, she said.

Ben Baba’s business success, and the success of other businesses and industries in the country and on the continent, is directly linked to peace.

While the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has “definitely already derailed Africa’s positive growth projectory and hit the poorest and most vulnerable particularly hard, especially in fragile states,” according to Khaled Sherif, the Vice-President, Regional Development, Integration and Business Delivery at the African Development Bank (AfDB), there remains “a direct link between poverty, and extreme poverty specifically, and terrorism, as is currently being witnessed in the Sahel”.

A report released by Amnesty International earlier this year noted that rife insecurity, food insecurity and more than 7.5 million people in need of humanitarian assistance had left the region in crisis. In addition, the global coronavirus pandemic was expected to worsen the situation.

“The rise in violent extremism in the Sahel is linked to the conditions that the populations face in their daily lives. Many parts of the Sahel have never seen electricity, they have no access to potable water, education is at a premium, so these connects obviously lead to a deterioration of the security situation,” Sherif said during the same meeting.

He said that it was no surprising that in regions with chronic food insecurity, especially in Africa, “become unstable sooner or later”.

“We are all aware of the devastating consequences this means for peace, stability and social cohesion,” Sherif said.

But Ben Baba is convinced that her business could impact various factors of development within the country at different levels.

“From the bridges in our countryside, to the improvement of Mali’s balance of trade, with the creation of added value of course the creation of jobs in the Kayes region, which is usually the first region of emigration, especially for young people,” Ben Baba said.

A 2018 World Bank report showed that Mali needed to diversify its exports as “gold and cotton account for over 80 percent of total exports”. The report further suggested, “ an agriculture-based light manufacturing diversification strategy can deliver structural change by creating abundant and better paying jobs for low skilled Malians”.

Sherif called on the Peacebuilding Commission to address basic needs at a community level and to prioritise this accordingly.

“If generations of farmers are unable to get out of substance agriculture, there will always be a risk of conflict,” Sherif said. He said while there were many initiatives by development partners in this area, they all failed to reach the required scale.

“The Peacebuilding Commission should therefore focus on scaling up these interventions to avoid community pockets of fragility that lead to insecurity,” Sherif said.

He said that in Africa, where more than half the population of 1.3 billion live below the poverty line of less than $2 a day, “our priority has to be to create wealth and this takes us back to the reality of how we develop value chains,” Sherif said.

He added that the AfDB looked at the African Continental Free Trade Area as an opportunity to create a level of resilience.

But Sherif pointed out that on a continent of 54 countries, 26 countries had a GDP growth of 5 percent or more but in those same countries the GDP per capita was reducing, creating inequality.

“So how are African countries getting richer but the citizens of Africa are actually getting poorer? If we don’t address this issue, we are not addressing the basic reality of stability that is going to be a persistent problem, a perennial problem, that will affect Africa, especially fragile states, for many years to come,” Sherif said.

While there were many ways to address the issues, Sherif said he felt it was important “to start with the people and the communities that the live in, as this is where conflict ultimately manifests itself”.

He said that villages, towns, communities, local governments, municipalities could undertake certain measures to mobilise the needed investment to tackle the issues at the roots. 

“Our experience shows that food security can be enhanced locally by groups of producers getting together pooling cash resources and utilising local technologies to help with basic food processes. These are investments that can be done locally to create jobs and profit-sharing opportunities that enhance income.”

Ben Baba, however, pointed to the obstacles that women faced when accessing investment in her country.

“As a woman it’s very difficult to be involved in this very masculine world where the cultural barrier is very pronounced with prejudices against the female gender.

“Obtaining financing in a high-risk country remains complex,” she said. And if financing was given, the rates were too high that it would affect the company’s results, she explained.

“Indeed women know that the cultural problem in raising funds because of a lack of confidence in the female gender,” Ben Baba said.

She said that in order to convince one bank she had to invest almost 80 percent of a project’s equity, and despite this “we were very poorly supported by the banking network”.

“Malian industries are not very developed and those invested in by women are non-existent,” she said. “Attracting and convincing investors is almost impossible,” Ben Baba added.

But Sherif stressed that it was important to “find a model that is specific to regional development, that is specific to community development, that is specific to wealth creation, so we can begin to create a level of consumption based on increasing disposable income so we can begin to break this chain of lack of availability of growth of incomes, desperation and then lack of security.”

In a recorded message U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said he saw great value in enriching the U.N.’s partnership with international monetary funds.

“Sustained support for peacebuilding cannot be delivered by any single actor. It requires a multi-layered strategy with several layers of financing; bi-lateral, multi-lateral and international financial insinuations working in concert,” he said.

Guterres urged donors to reverse a worrying trend and commit to spend at least 20 percent of official development assistance on peacebuilding priorities in conflict settings. 

“As the world seeks to recover from COVID-19, countries will require carefully designed and conflict-sensitive support to get back onto a sustainable micro-economic footing,” Guterres said.

But he said that the demands for the fund were far outpacing the resources.

“We’ve already had to scale back our target for 2020 by $30 billion,” Guterres said. Already some member states had responded to his call for unspent committed peacekeeping budget and he called on others to do so.

Guterres welcomed the work of the both the World Bank and the African Development Bank.

“It is important that these funds help tackle conflict drivers, reach marginalised areas and support key governance needs, especially those that create the conditions for private sector investment.”

Guterres said more could be done to advance innovate financing solutions for peacebuilding, including partnerships with the private sector.

But Sherif pointed out: “So long as we don’t solve the challenge of food and security, we haven’t solved the problem of fragility and we will continue to see one crisis after the other.”

Related Articles

• ‘The Sahel – a Microcosm of Cascading Global Risks Converging in One Region’
• The Sahel – ‘in Every Sense of the Word a Crisis’

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The 75th anniversary of the United Nations is marked by a ceremony in the UN General Assembly September 2020. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

By Lord Mark Malloch-Brown
LONDON, Nov 3 2020 (IPS)

Let me begin with an appeal to our venerable friend, the UN: get down on the ground with the grandchildren. Just having celebrated its 75th birthday, we can hear your knees creak! The UN, for as long as I have known it up close- since its thirties- has often seemed prematurely old.

Today a Youth Challenge is being mounted to the way we live, organise and govern ourselves that is much bigger than the UN alone. The social restrictions of Covid may disguise the scale of the gathering social protest but Covid has also accelerated it.

I would wager that my generation will have the keys seized from us. A digital revolution on the one hand and rising social and economic inequality on the other will unseat a ruling Establishment that has failed to navigate these tides. The UN has to be part of that future or pushed aside by it.

For the UN a second older vector blows with equal force. The UN has been in the grip of a transition from its founding Anglo-Saxon and Western DNA to a more globally distributed state influence almost from its beginnings.

From 48 founding members 1945 to 193 today the expansion reflects the big twentieth century shifts- decolonisation, the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the pursuit of self-determination by those overlooked by history’s cartographers.

And adaptation to new members and their aspirations has been vital to the UN’s legitimacy and universality. Most notably it has allowed it to build a staff that for the most part is a proud mirror of the world it serves.

There is a price, however, for this changing agenda: The UN Charter, imbued with the wisdom and sacrifice of the survivors of a World War, is one of the world’s most eloquent and uplifting constitutional documents.

It is also thoroughly Western, borrowing from America’s founding fathers and assuming a world order managed by the Allied victors of 1945. This is reflected in a western rights-based agenda that to this day has stressed Human Rights, in terms of individual civil and political rights, refugee protection, gender and reproductive health over collective economic rights.

There was an early opposition to western dominance notably in the General Assembly centred on the championing of the New International Economic order. Through the Non-Aligned movement and the G77, new member states sought to correct the historical and structural imbalances in the global political economy.

At the time, despite the passion brought to the debate by its champions, it seemed likely to remain a permanent backbench cause.

Now, however, it is not a simple division of East and West or North and South. Many of us have added collective social and economic rights to our own agendas – climate change, structural inequality and exclusion, injustices in the global economic system.

A western human rights NGO or a former High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson is as likely to be heard championing Climate Justice as the cause of political prisoners.

Lord Mark Malloch-Brown

China with President Xi’s remarkable pledge at September’s General Assembly to reach carbon neutrality by 2060 has put himself in a leadership role on the latter. But this is the same regime that has employed mass incarceration and extensive discrimination to suppress the political rights of its 12 million Uighur minority.

The Economist editorialised earlier this month on the desperate plight of the Uighurs observing: “China’s ruling party has no truck with this concept of individual rights. It claims legitimacy from its record of providing stability and economic growth to the many”.

China has flexed its muscles in the UN, where it is now at 12% the second largest contributor to the assessed budget; strengthening its representation across the secretariat, agencies, funds and programs. It has become a more active voice in critical policy debates from regulation of the internet to peacekeeping.

And in the wider world, a more authoritarian model of government is the new majority. It embraces leaders who come to power by the ballot box and those who didn’t but who all share a preference for a nationalist foreign policy, weakening of domestic institutions and the rule of law including the political rights of its citizens, and a casual disregard for minority and in some cases majority rights.

That’s the world today. For now, at least they are the new majority in global share of population terms. Between them China, India, Russia, Turkey, Brazil, Hungary and the United States represent a demographic majority. And many others are borrowing from their playbook.

The widespread rejection of middle-class liberalism reflects very real shifts in global public opinion that are likely to dissolve any time soon. The uneven impact of economic change, now accelerated by Covid, has produced across much of the world’s politics similar divisions of city versus town and country; young versus old; university educated versus high school or less, those employed in new services sectors versus those in failing industrial sectors.

From Trump to Brexit or Bolsonaro to Modi we have seen the rise of economic security, cultural identity and anti-immigration as the flagship issues of a new populist politics that reaches those who feel they are being left behind by unsettling change.

Freedom House in its 2020 Democracy report notes that last year was the 14th consecutive year of decline in global freedom. Sixty-four countries experienced deterioration in their political rights from the pressure in India on Muslims to a steady less noticed restrictions of freedoms elsewhere.

Its lead author observed: “The unchecked brutality of autocratic regimes and the ethical decay of democratic powers are combining to make the world increasingly hostile to fresh demands for better governance”.

The closing space for open inclusive debate does not stop at the borders of these countries rather it seeps into the UN itself. This month’s elections for membership of the UN Human Rights council gave seats to China, Cuba and Russia although Saudi Arabia another candidate fell short.

Each has served before but it marks the steady capture of this institution by those opposed to that founding western individual rights based agenda.

Inevitably, perhaps as a consequence this is an age of UN caution. My colleague at the International Crisis Group, Richard Gowan, asked in a recent paper: “What is the purpose of the Security Council in an era of worsening great power tensions? Division among its five permanent members (or P5) have repeatedly undermined the United Nations in recent years”

In a way it was ever thus. I remember in my first UN year, 1976, an older generation – indeed in a few cases the original generation, the self-named last of the Mohicans founded by those who has joined the UN Secretariat before 15 August 1946, when the original secretariat camped out in temporary space on Lake Mohauk, complaining in not dissimilar terms. The place already seemed stiff, cautiously bureaucratic and a bit rundown.

Then as now, the UN has sought to make up for that black hole at the centre of its political authority then because of Cold War stand off by swarming the humanitarian and development space with compensating activity.

It was in the 1960s to 80s that its direct operational capacities to address the refugee flows of the Cold War and Post-Colonialization grew rapidly. For UNHCR it saw the transition from a small staff of lawyers to a large staff of logisticians; it was the years of early growth for this year’s Nobel Prize Winner WFP which was spun out of FAO in 1961. It was when the technical assistance activities of the specialised Agencies marshalled by UNDP were a critical prop to newly independent governments.

In 1980 the then UN Secretary-General visited a huge UNHCR supported refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border where I was the Field officer in charge. He turned to me in bewilderment as we toured the huge encampment with its heavy UN and NGO presence and asked how this huge UN operation could have been set up without him knowing almost anything about it.

I tell this story to illustrate a simple truth. The political and security UN in New York was gridlocked but there was ample space for activism and innovation as long as you stayed well away from that graveyard, the Security Council. Operations like mine were run in the Field and from Geneva, based on a mandate derived from international law not the permission of the Security Council.

A few remarkable hold outs such as Sir Brian Urquhart ingeniously shoehorned the UN into political and peacekeeping roles in the Middle East despite Big Power dead lock but this was the exception.

As I crisscrossed the world for UNHCR from refugee hotspots in South East Asia, Pakistan and Afghanistan, Central America and the Horn of Africa, I saw that an extraordinarily committed and creative group of UNHCR leaders had managed to prise apart the Cold War gridlock and make sufficient space for an imaginative operational activism that saved countless lives and relieved huge suffering.

The politics of getting into these situations was never easy; the compromises often disappointing; and the motives of major interested powers and donors only rarely altruistic but the space was carved out and generally held.

When I arrived at UNDP as Administrator, I found a similar legacy of programs established by my independent-minded American predecessors against the prevailing political grain of the time – the first UN assistance program in “Red China”; PAPP a program begun in 1980 to support the Palestinians ; or an office in North Korea whose establishment was still being contested by the US State Department years later when I was Administrator.

And indeed, the UN of today has similarly found space – notably around the sustainable Development Goals (the SDGs) which play to the UN’s convening and standard-setting roles; Climate change where three Secretary-Generals in turn have driven this as a priority; and a tragically expanded humanitarian function as grim conflicts in Yemen, Syria and elsewhere stubbornly run on.

A UN, having to find space where it won’t be bullied by its stronger members and ignored at key moments by many others, is not new. In fact, it’s been the condition to which it has been condemned for most of its 75 years on earth.

There was a brief glorious period of conception and birth from the San Francisco conference in 1945 to Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech delivered in Fulton, Missouri in March 1946 when he warned of the coming conflict between the US and the Soviet Union.

*Mark Malloch-Brown was also Minister of State in the Foreign Office, covering Africa and Asia, and sat in Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s cabinet. He has also served as Vice-Chairman of the World Economic Forum. He began his career as a journalist at The Economist and then worked for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and was later a Vice-President of the World Bank. He has served for many years on the Board of the Open Society Foundation. He formerly chaired the Business Commission on Sustainable Development and the Royal Africa Society. He is author of The Unfinished Global Revolution: The Limits of Nations and the Pursuit of a New Politics.

The article is based on an address to the annual lecture at the Helsinki-based United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) last week.

(To be continued)

 

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The post UN at 75: Slow Death or a New Direction – Part 1 appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Mark Malloch‐Brown* holds international Board and Advisory positions in the commercial and not-for-profit sectors. He currently Co-chairs The UN Foundation and the International Crisis Group and is on the advisory committees to the heads of the IMF and UNICEF. He served as Deputy Secretary‐General and earlier Chief of Staff of the UN under Kofi Annan. For six years before that he was Administrator of UNDP, leading the UN's development efforts around the world.

 
“You cannot change the wind; but you can bend the sail”
        -    a favourite African proverb of Kofi Annan

The post UN at 75: Slow Death or a New Direction – Part 1 appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Jennifer Cynthia Nyakonga, a 24-year-old teacher in Palabek Refugee Settlement, Uganda in class. Following closure of schools due to COVID-19, many of the girls have gotten pregnant and some have repatriated back to South Sudan. Photo credits: Emmanuel Museruka/Oxfam.

By Peter Kamalingin B.L.
NAIROBI, Nov 3 2020 (IPS)

The corona virus pandemic is impacting Africa’s population in quite differentiated ways and is significantly entrenching inequality. At the greatest risk are lives and livelihoods of the poor.

Millions are being pushed further into hunger and poverty. Children have been forced out of school with many of them, particularly girls, having a slim or no chance of accessing education again.

Without access to piped water and no food reserves, women have had to bear the biggest burden of the pandemic and risked exposure to the virus to keep families going. Reversal of the gains made during the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) era, ais now more likely than ever.

Leaders must refuse to take the easier option of failed economic models that allow few rich people to build their wealth off the backs of the poor and thrive even in the middle of a pandemic. Political and business leaders must take bold steps towards building a human economy for all Africans

This crisis has clearly shown how critical publicly funded public services are to dealing with pandemics. Decades of underinvestment in public services and social protection systems have left the majority of governments woefully unprepared to tackle Covid-19, according to the Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index, an analysis published recently by Oxfam and Development Finance International. The report ranks 158 countries on labour rights, taxation, and spending on health, education and social protection.

While Africa and its people have seen its fair share of crises in the past and exhibited appreciable levels of resilience and ‘bounce back’, Africa shouldn’t forget the Covid-19 crisis, like the many crises before, and adopt a “business as usual” approach to recovery.

Leaders must refuse to take the easier option of failed economic models that allow few rich people to build their wealth off the backs of the poor and thrive even in the middle of a pandemic. Political and business leaders must take bold steps towards building a human economy for all Africans.

An economy where the size of your bank account does not dictate how long you live or how many years your children spend in school. An economy that rewards and guarantees dignity for workers, especially with the coming into force of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). An economy where big corporations and the rich pay their fair share of taxes and public resources are not used for private benefit

 

A more just and human economy is achievable!

Excitingly, a few African governments are taking steps towards building an economy that works for all, not just a few super-rich and big corporations. They agree that inequality is not inevitable but a consequence of their choice of policies.

Sierra Leone has remained true to its commitment of making secondary education free for all. To improve its tax collection, it is cracking down on unnecessary tax incentives and clamping down on tax evasion by mining companies.

Ethiopia has consistently stood out globally for spending the second-highest proportion of budget on education – the greatest equaliser in society. It has increased spending on health and social protection with tangible impact on poverty and inequality reduction.

Namibia, a country with a poisonous legacy of high inequality and colonial expropriation has been able to introduce payments to support workers in the informal sector who have lost their jobs during the pandemic. A new World Bank study has found that Namibia’s taxation and spending policies are reducing inequality significantly. These governments can do more and there is much that other African leaders can learn from them.

 

What needs to happen?

Africa should defend its tax revenues to finance a people’s recovery. Across the continent, tax collection has been on a decline with public debt stocks on a sharp rise. This trend needs to be reversed. Governments should stop taking the easy road of debt and instead put a halt to the bleeding of legitimate revenues through tax dodging and ruinous tax competition.

West Africa, a region that has lost over 2,500 lives to corona virus, for example, loses an estimated $9.6bn annually from wasteful corporate tax incentives. This lost revenue is enough to build 100 modern and well-equipped hospitals each year. Indeed, the region could have been better prepared to deal with the pandemic.

While global solidarity and action is required to truly turn things around, political will is needed now, more than ever, to implement the recommendations of the Thabo Mbeki led high level panel on illicit financial flows.

African countries can individually take action to review, renegotiate or cancel tax treaties that expose them to profit-shifting and treaty shopping, and collectively pursue a minimum effective tax rate for the profits of multinationals.

People’s lives must be put before the profits of creditors. High debt repayments are severely hurting social spending. Today, interest payments constitute the highest and rapidly growing public budget line. Before the pandemic, over thirty three African countries were already spending more on debt payments than healthcare.

At the beginning of the pandemic, African Finance ministers asked for a waiver of all interest payments for 2020, which were estimated at $44bn to allow governments more fiscal space. Sadly, the G20’s response has been underwhelming.

The much-needed resources to save lives and protect economies has continued to flow from poor African countries to foreign banks in rich countries. For example, in 2020, 69 per cent of all debt payments due in Zambia is owed to private creditors.

African governments should consolidate and raise their voice on the urgent need for global action on debt. Private lenders and multilateral institutions such as the World Bank should be compelled to join the Debt Servicing Suspension Initiative (DSSI).

Governments and their citizens must learn from the structural adjustment programme and push back on any austerity being imposed through new financing. Already, 84 per cent of the Covid-19 loans by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) encourage, and in some cases require, countries to adopt more tough austerity measures in the aftermath of the health crisis. Any cuts in social spending or increase in regressive taxes such as value added tax (VAT) on food items will be borne by the poor further widening inequality.

Developed nations should also pay their financial and moral debt. Aid is not only a means of channelling additional financing to developing countries but also a form of redistribution, especially in a global economy where inequality is alarmingly high and characterised by an extractive, colonial and racial history.

The year 2020 marks the fiftieth anniversary since rich nations committed to spend 0.7 per cent of their gross national income (GNI) on aid to low-income and middle-income countries, a majority of which are in Africa.

Fifty years later, this figure stands at a mere 0.3 per cent, on average. According to Oxfam’s calculations donor countries owe $5.7 trillion to the poorest people. With the pandemic, there must be a renewed political commitment to international aid and a move from a charity-based system to one based on justice.

To build a more human and just economy, Africa must shun economic policies that trap Africans in indignity. African political and business leaders can choose to build back a divided Africa – one where just three men have more wealth than the bottom 50% of the population.  Or they can choose the right path of building back an Africa for all, by promoting efficient and progressive tax systems, investing in free, quality and gender-responsive public services and social safety nets that reduce the burden of care on women and girls, and protecting the rights of workers to dignified work and wages.

This is not the last pandemic. A more equal Africa will cope much better with the next pandemic.

The post Africa Must not Assume a ‘Business as Usual’ Approach to COVID-19 Recovery appeared first on Inter Press Service.

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Peter Kamalingin B.L. is the Pan Africa Program Director for Oxfam International

The post Africa Must not Assume a ‘Business as Usual’ Approach to COVID-19 Recovery appeared first on Inter Press Service.

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