Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

The COVID-19 crisis has unleashed a plastic pandemic, reversing the achievement of a decade of activism against single-use plastic worldwide, including Nepal. Credit: BIKRAM RAI

By Sonia Awale and Ramesh Kumar
KATHMANDU, Aug 3 2020 (IPS)

The coronavirus pandemic was a respite for nature everywhere. The air was cleaner, trekking trails were pristine, the summit of Mt Everest was deserted, and worldwide carbon emission dipped by -26%.

However, there are dark clouds in that silver lining. The COVID-19 crisis has unleashed a plastic pandemic, reversing the achievement of a decade of activism against single-use plastic worldwide, including Nepal.

Personal protective gear (PPE) like disposable gowns are made from polyester or polyethalene. Surgical masks and N95 respirators are made from non-woven polypropylene fibre. Face shields and visors use polycarbonate or polyvinyl choloride. Coveralls are made with high-density polyethylene (HDPE). Most of these are single-use plastic.

The United States is projected to generate an entire year’s worth of medical waste in just two months dealing with COVID-19

During the peak of the outbreak, hospitals in Wuhan produced more than 240 tons of waste per day against 40 tons normally – with most of the waste being plastic PPEs. The United States is projected to generate an entire year’s worth of medical waste in just two months dealing with COVID-19, according to Frost & Sullivan.  The Thai government has reported an increase in plastic and styrofoam waste from 1,500 tons a day to 6,300 tons daily due to soaring home deliveries of food.

In Nepal, there are no exact figures but evidence suggests there has been a big increase in plastic waste from provision stores, relief distribution to the destitute during the lockdown, and quarantine centres. For lack of better alternatives, aid workers use plastic plates and utensils for meal distribution and well as polythene bags and thin single-use plastic for relief packaging.

“From a humanitarian angle the use of plastic for medical purposes and in relief is important, but it has long term environmental impact. Which is why we need a replacement for cheap and easily accessible single-use plastic,” says Shilshila Acharya of the Himalayan Climate Initiative.

She adds, “Another emerging problem is the improper disposal of face masks. These are made of polypropylene and are even worse than plastic because they are even more difficult to recycle and reuse.”

Across South Asia, cities are experiencing worse floods because of waterways choked by plastic waste. Plastic pollution in Nepal has been known to worsen the impact of floods during the monsoon by clogging up drains and rivers, as happened in Bhaktapur and Thimi in 2018 after a sudden squall.

Bhaktapur Mayor Sunil Prajapati says Hanumante River in his municipality invariably bursts its banks even through it is not a big river because of blocked drainage.  He told Nepali Times: “The river is like a gutter. It gets flooded every year because waste materials block the outlets and drainage.”

A three-year regional study by ICIMOD (International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development)’s  SANDEE (South Asian Network for Development and Environmental Economics) shows that 12.7% Bharatpur and 22.3% of Sylhet in Bangladesh cities are at the risk of flooding in lack of proper solid waste management system. Unblocking drains would limit flooding to 5.5% in Bharatpur, the report says.

Mani Nepal, who worked on the study says: “Solid waste, including plastic, must be properly managed to reduce the risk of long-term flooding in cities. Just building sewers will not solve the problem. Plastic pollution is already a major cause of floods, it can be disastrous in future.”

More than a million plastic bags are used once and thrown away in Kathmandu Valley every day, and it now forms more than 16% of the city’s garbage. Of the 204 tons of plastic waste generated in Nepal every day, 131 tons end up in the streets, drains, rivers and some of it makes it to landfill sites.

Plastics, being petroleum based, take at least 500 years to biodegrade, killing aquatic and land animals, and microplastics have found their way into the human food chain. Harmful chemicals can alter hormones and chromosomes in the human body, leading to cancer and damage to the reproductive system.

The Nepal government has repeatedly tried to enforce a ban on single-use plastics, but industrialists enjoying political protection have sabotaged all previous attempts.

Former Environment Minister Ganesh Shah tried but failed to implement a plastic ban he introduced in 2008. Plastic Bag Regulation and Control Guideline introduced in 2011 was not effective either in discouraging plastic use. A Gazette notice on 14 April 2015 announced a ban on bags thinner than 30 microns, but it was overshadowed by the earthquake only 10 days later.

The ICIMOD study also revealed that the state of garbage disposal significantly affects real estate prices which are on an average 25% higher and up to 57% higher in areas with proper solid waste management system. Similarly, the price of a house with a blocked sewer is at least 11% lower.

An estimated 70% of the daily domestic waste in Nepal’s cities are biodegradable, but it is not customary to segregate garbage. Often, organic and non-perishable waste are disposed together in plastic bags. Garbage collectors also do not sort the waste, which is why they end up directly at the landfill in Sisdole which is fast becoming a plastic mountain.

Sorting garbage at home has been shown to significantly reduce the volume of waste, allowing households to make their own compost, recycle and reduce as well as reduce the cost of garbage collection. Pre-determining time and day and placing for communal garbage collection and placing trash cans for pedestrians are other ways to prevent haphazard disposal of solid waste.

Bharatpur residents pay Rs30-100 a month for garbage collection and say they are willing to pay up to 30% more for proper waste management. This is an additional Rs5 million more than what the municipality has been charging for waste management. “This means local governments could better manage the problem of solid waste without too much effort, this requires only the will to implement,” says Mani Nepal.

Ward 10 of Bharatpur has been trying to reduce waste at source by buying plastic waste from households at Rs9 per kg, which it then sells to plastic recycling industries. The municipality also provides subsidy to those who want to turn their organic waste into biogas.

Bharatpur has shown that if there is political will, plastic waste can be reduced. And by not dumping plastic in drains and rivers, it is also protecting wildlife along the Narayani River in Chitwan National Park directly downstream.

The good news is that the global movement against the use of plastic is also having an effect in parts of Kathmandu. Polythene are being replaced by re-usable bags in shopping malls, restaurants and hotels discourage straws and plastic wrappings, and paper plates have replaced Styrofoam at some party venues.

While plastic-based PPEs have been vital in preventing the spread of the COVID-19 and are life savers for frontline health workers, if the SARS-CoV-2 persists longer there may have to be a move towards paper packaging and materials.

Says Shilshila Acharya: “The prolonged lockdown has meant that people are purchasing less, and are using fewer plastic items. We can build on this momentum to reduce plastic pollution in future.”

 

This story was originally published by The Nepali Times

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A bigger free trade area will not only boost intra-regional trade, it will also hasten the development of regional supply chains. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS.

By External Source
Aug 2 2020 (IPS)

Most economists see structural transformation as one of the main routes to Africa’s sustainable development. What it means is changing the share of agriculture, manufacturing and services in an economy. It is a central aim of the African Union’s Agenda 2063.

With this aim in mind, economists and policymakers need to know what determines structural transformation. They have flagged factors like demand for goods and services, trade policies, financial development, institutional quality and economic integration.

But researchers haven’t closely examined the way economic integration through trade and finance influences structural transformation.

Balancing the potential benefits and dangers of integration is a pressing policy issue now that African countries have signed the African Continental Free Trade Area agreement, which aims to foster integration

I therefore set out to study African countries’ integration with the rest of the world and the effect of that integration on their structural transformation. This study provides fresh evidence about whether integration is good for Africa. It also unearths the right levels of integration necessary to increase structural transformation.

Trade and financial integration are both about countries exporting to and importing from each other. The two are often referred to as economic integration. Opening national borders to trade has a number of potential benefits which can promote development.

For example it creates comparative advantage, access to external finance and opportunities for risk sharing. It also enables technology transfer. Local firms serving larger foreign and domestic corporations can acquire knowledge and skills and transfer them to the rest of the economy.

All these benefits are essential for structural transformation. But excessive openness and integration may also come at a cost, largely from distortions around trade policy.

For instance, if certain local industries have been protected, local firms may not be fit enough to compete with foreign counterparts. Opening these industries to competition may harm them.

Balancing the potential benefits and dangers of integration is a pressing policy issue now that African countries have signed the African Continental Free Trade Area agreement, which aims to foster integration.

Policy makers need to know whether there is an ideal level of trade and financial integration that will
change economies in the desired ways.

 

The study: findings and implications

With this background, I examined the effects of economic integration on structural transformation in 32 African countries from 1985 to 2015. The time period and choice of countries were based on data availability.

I created an index of structural transformation that incorporates changes in sectoral value addition and demographic characteristics. The index ranges between 0 (low transformation) and 1 (high transformation). I found that structural transformation on the continent was low, with an average value of 0.419, but varied across countries.

The majority of the countries’ indices were lower, suggesting that structural transformation is only just beginning.

I also found that African countries were less integrated in terms of trade and finance than other developing economies.

I measured trade integration as the ratio of countries’ imports and exports to GDP. This shows the degree of openness. I found that the optimal level for trade integration was 73.29% of GDP. By this I mean the level of trade integration that produces an improved effect on structural transformation.

The data suggested that trade integration encourages the reallocation of resources to more productive sectors.

To measure financial integration, I used the ratio of countries’ total foreign liabilities and assets to GDP. This shows the degree of restriction of capital flows. The optimal level for financial integration was 137.5% of GDP. Ten African countries were above these levels and 22 were below.

The 10 countries that are above this financial integration threshold are Botswana, Congo Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Mauritania, Mauritius, Seychelles, Sudan and Togo. Similarly, the 10 countries above the trade integration threshold are Botswana, Congo Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Mauritania, Mauritius, Seychelles, Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), Togo and Tunisia.

I observed that structural transformation increases more in countries that are below these levels of integration compared to countries that are above the thresholds. Integration increases structural transformation, but too much integration slows that process, producing undesired effects.

The positive effect of integration on transformation occurs through enhanced efficiency, comparative advantage, external finance and risk diversification. Countries can have these features despite being less integrated and operating below the thresholds. The benefits of integration come from efficiency of integration rather than unbridled integration.

A key implication is that efficiency in both trade and financial integration is critical to driving structural transformation in Africa. This explains the urgent need for African countries to simultaneously deepen trade and financial integration. Economies that embark on economic integration along both lines can expect to have improved transformation for sustainable development.

 

The role of the free trade area

The study shows that Africa has opportunities to integrate further. The African free trade area has the potential to defragment the continent and bring its economies into the global economy.

The free trade area aims to progressively eliminate tariffs and non-tariff barriers to trade in goods and to liberalise trade in services. It will establish a single continental market for goods and services: a bigger and more competitive market.

A bigger free trade area will not only boost intra-regional trade, it will also hasten the development of regional supply chains. These have driven structural transformation in other regions, for example Asia. It is also necessary for policy to address the non-tariff barriers to trade. Among these are poor logistics and infrastructure (such as roads, rail, ports, power and digital connectivity).

Countries should be focusing on removing such bottlenecks. The African Union, United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and the African Development Bank should get the free trade area working as soon as possible.

It has the potential to make a big difference to structural transformation and could be the game-changer for Africa.

 

Muazu Ibrahim, Lecturer, Department of Banking and Finance, University for Development Studies

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

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By Joaquín Roy
MIAMI, Jul 31 2020 (IPS)

In the cinematic context of the death of the Italian and universal composer, Ennio Morricone, author of the background music of more than four hundred films, as an indirect tribute, Europe took a solid step.

The European Union’s (EU) forceful ban on accepting travelers from the rest of the world has been decided simultaneously with a collective option: an internal opening that covers the entire territory of the Schengen Agreement, an enlarged EU that includes some special non-members (Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein and the microstates).

Furthermore, the EU seems to favor some countries that belong to its protection ring of its immediate neighborhood: Algeria, Georgia, Tunisia and Morocco. It also gives a vote of confidence to the candidates for the immediate enlargement: Serbia and Montenegro.

In Asia and Africa, Europe recognizes the goodness of Rwanda and Thailand. The EU is pleased, once again, to show a solid portrait.

Joaquín Roy

The novelty of the ban is that the EU, replicating the title of a Sergio Leone film, among the most famous works with Morriconi’s musical dressing, sent an unwelcome message to the “ugly”, some heavyweights (Russia, Brazil ).

But the EU flatly pointed out to the “ugly” classic, the United States, that has earned that aesthetic distinction thanks to the showcase appearance of Donald Trump. As a further ignominy, Brussels admits important mutual allies and peers of the United States: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan and South Korea.

In the Latin American subcontinent, Europe reserved to award an impressive individual medal, as if it were a Nobel Prize, to the new “good”: the small Uruguay.

Even protected in the hope of his hasty visit to Trump, Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) could not escape being labeled “bad.” Noticeable is the everlasting contrast with Canada: Mexico is still “so far from God and so close to the United States”, just as Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz cursed more than a century ago. Ottawa is just as close to Washington, but it’s not affected by the neighborhood.

On this occasion, the EU leadership did not miss a golden opportunity to show a solid collective face, very often absent, becoming the object of internal criticism and external disdain

Observers from the Latin American scene have been quick to give some explanation to this seemingly shocking global decision. The key for the contrastive assessment, on the one hand, recognition and reaction, on the other, is very simple and, at the same time, complex.

On the one hand, the internal framework of the EU itself must be considered. On this occasion, the EU leadership did not miss a golden opportunity to show a solid collective face, very often absent, becoming the object of internal criticism and external disdain. It is always very difficult to find where the “phone” for Europe resides, as Henry Kissinger once claimed.

Therefore, Europe closes its doors to the most prominent competitors. But, hypocritically, gives a conditioned welcome to none other than China. There is no question of making the Asian giant uncomfortable, leaving the door ajar. Europe notes that Wuhan is the source of the virus (but not as blatantly as Trump repeats), but Brussels acknowledges Beijing’s dictatorial power in controlling the effects.

The result of Washington’s treatment will be that Brussels will become a new renewed object of irritation by Trump, if that tantrum is already something new. Meanwhile, the US Democrats led by Biden will certainly be happy to remind the President of his failed strategy against Covid 19. At the same time, the selection of little Uruguay, champion of the “good”, can boast of the successful control of the pandemic.

In contrast, the awarding of diplomas will highlight the ridicule of ominous giant Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro, the tropical Trump. Even Chile, the country that, led by Sebastián Piñera, initially seemed to show a positive strategy, has remained in the “bad” group.

Without needing to say it explicitly, two “bad guys” are equally qualified by Europe and the United States: Cuba and Venezuela. They have no hope. President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela is already controlled by Colombia. Cuba excludes itself for its insularity, geographical and political.

Despite all this panorama, the European Union, always so stingy and sinuous, has reserved a special “right of admission”.

Fulfilling its privilege of being fundamentally intergovernmental in its external relations, while border control is a taboo subject, it will review every 14 days (as if it were a quarantine) the composition of the distribution of prizes and sticks. It would not be surprising if some “bad” ones reappear as “good”. But the “ugly” par excellence should put on the mask.

It remains open, finally, to ask about the scenario of winners and losers due to the application of this measure, especially shocking in the American continent.

Firstly, Europe may be harmed by the closure to North American travelers, so much in need of tourism. Export businesses and airlines will take the hit, if the ban is upheld.

In Latin America the losers will be “the underdogs”, to continue remembering the novel by Mariano Azuela. They will see their traditional escapes in emigration diminished and the consequent benefit of remittances.

Argentina, Brazil and Mexico will recall their weak position in a global network that only recognizes them as giants with feet of clay.

But the EU has self-imposed an expansion of the “bad” ones: the United Kingdom, France and Germany have restricted travel to Spain, causing the collapse of tourism.

Joaquín Roy is Professor Jean Monnet and Director of the European Union Center at the University of Miami jroy@miami.edu

 

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Nicolas de Rivière, Permanent Representative of France to the United Nations, addresses the Security Council meeting on the situation in the Great Lakes region. New York, 3 October 2019. Credit: UN Photo/Laura Jarriel

By Nicolas de Rivière
NEW YORK, Jul 31 2020 (IPS)

“Reconciling the requirements of the ideal with the possibilities of the real”: this is how Georges Bidault, Minister for Foreign Affairs and head of the French delegation to the San Francisco Conference, summed up the objective pursued by the drafters of the Charter of the United Nations. On the still living ashes of the Second World War, the fathers of an Organization charged with developing friendly relations between nations, promoting human rights and economic and social progress were less utopian than visionary. They understood that the community of States should have a common constitution. It has been tested by conflict, crisis and upheaval, but its resilience and strength have shaped the very structure of contemporary international relations.

The Charter brings us together. It defines the United Nations as “a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations”, where each member is treated as an equal across social, economic or political differences. With the quadrupling of the number of contracting parties since its inception, the Charter, which has become universal, truly expresses the values and aspirations of humanity. That is why France attaches so much importance to ensuring that diversity—cultural, legal and linguistic—is duly reflected within the Organization, in its staff and in the way it operates: the United Nations has the heavy but noble task of ensuring the participation of all peoples in international discussion. As revealed by the major consultation under way in the context of the commemoration of the seventy-fifth anniversary, 95 per cent of our contemporaries believe that only international cooperation will make it possible to respond to the challenges of today and tomorrow. But it must also reflect their voice.

The Charter is the summit of an international order based on law: Article 103 gives it primacy over other international legal instruments. In the most difficult negotiations, it remains the frame of reference, and the precious Blue Booklet is never far away. It binds States as well as the principal organs of the United Nations. The Security Council thus exercises its responsibility as guarantor of the maintenance of international peace and security within the strict framework of the Charter, when deciding on measures to combat arms proliferation, establishing peacekeeping operations, authorizing the delivery of cross-border humanitarian aid to Syria or referring situations to the International Criminal Court. These decisions must be respected by all Member States in accordance with Article 25 of the Charter.

The Charter protects us. The COVID-19 pandemic is a wake-up call for multilateralism, because the virus knows no borders, and no one is spared. The global and cross-cutting nature of the health crisis logically points to the United Nations as the only truly universal and multisector forum for responding to it.

It is France’s profound conviction that whenever we accept that the resolution of international crises takes place outside the multilateral framework, chaos threatens to prevail. That is particularly true today in the Middle East, where the risk of conflagration has never been greater. At a time when civilian populations have already suffered too much from the scourge of war and terrorism, we need more than ever to prevent a military spiral and to put an end to the serious human rights violations and humanitarian disasters that continue to take place, in this region as in other parts of the world.

Joseph Paul-Boncour, former Prime Minister and member of the delegation from France, signing the UN Charter at the Veterans’ War Memorial Building, San Francisco, United States, 26 June 1945. Credit: UN Photo/McCreary

As President Macron said in his address to the General Assembly on 24 September 2019, in a world that has become multipolar, we must reinvent “strong multilateralism”, as opposed to the temptation of national withdrawal. It was on the basis of that conviction that last year France, together with Germany, launched an Alliance for Multilateralism, a flexible framework bringing together countries of good will that wish to promote both the multilateral method and concrete initiatives in various areas that illustrate its importance.

To be strong, the multilateralism that we embody here in New York must be effective. It must address without delay the greatest challenges of our time, all of which are global: climate change, health and food security, the protection of biodiversity, terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, inequalities, migration, massive violations of international humanitarian law and human rights, and the new challenges posed by technology. The Charter, in its profound modernity, set the goal, 75 years ago, of achieving international cooperation in solving international problems in all these areas. France has taken the initiative to mobilize the international community on these issues, whether by launching the One Planet Summit with the United Nations and the World Bank, or by co-organizing the Generation Equality Forum in the near future, 25 years after the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995. In the face of global challenges, international cooperation is the only possible way forward; if we do not move forward, we will retreat.

The Charter is the foundation of our collective action. It offers a method, rules and tools. It enshrines negotiation as the main way forward. The principles it lays down, and in particular the universality of human rights, are non-negotiable. It provides several means of action, including peacekeeping operations and international sanctions. The specific prerogatives that it confers on certain members should not be received as licenses but as responsibilities. That is why France, together with Mexico, has, since 2013, called for the suspension of the veto in the event of mass atrocities in the form of a political, voluntary and collective commitment by the five permanent members of the Security Council. To date, 105 Member States have joined this initiative.

The Charter in no way prevents the necessary modernization of the Organization, which, on the contrary, has been constantly reinventing itself. The decompartmentalization of the various pillars and components of the United Nations galaxy, as reflected in the vision of “Delivering as One”, is necessary for the pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda. The efforts undertaken in that regard, in particular the triple reform undertaken by the Secretary-General (reform of the peace and security architecture, development reform and management reform), must be supported. Each of the principal organs must play its part by optimizing its work.

Like a robust building that has stood the test of time, the Charter can be amended to better reflect the realities of the contemporary world. In that regard, France would like the Security Council to be expanded, as it was for the first time in 1963, to take into account the emergence of new Powers and to allow for a stronger presence on the African continent.

For 75 years, the Charter has been our highest common denominator. Its relevance remains unaltered. Sometimes a home, sometimes a bulwark, it allows the pursuit of an ideal of peace and prosperity towards which we must strive, with modesty but also with courage. It is incumbent upon us to pass on its values and promises to future generations.

This article was first published by the UN Chronicle on 26 June 2020.

 

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The post The Charter of the United Nations: Ideals for Shaping Our Reality appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Nicolas de Rivière is President of the Security Council for the month of June 2020 and Permanent Representative of France to the United Nations.

The post The Charter of the United Nations: Ideals for Shaping Our Reality appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. Credit: V.V. Krishnan, the Hindu

By Prasad Kariyawasam
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, Jul 31 2020 (IPS)

The unique India-Sri Lanka relationship, de jure, is between equals as sovereign nations. But it’s asymmetric in terms of geographic size, population, military and economic power, on the one hand, and social indicators and geographical location, on the other. It is steeped in myth and legend, and influenced by religious, cultural and social affinities.

This is an opportune time for Sri Lanka and India to nourish the roots of the relationship using modern toolkits, but leveraging age-old wisdom and experience.

Historical ties

History reveals that the advent of Buddhism to Sri Lanka during the time of Emperor Ashoka was the result of cross-border discourse. For many centuries in the first millennia, the ancient capital city of Anuradhapura housed an international community which included traders from India, China, Rome, Arabia and Persia.

Later, Buddhist monks from Sri Lanka travelled to India, China, Cambodia and Java leaving behind inscriptions. Buddhist temples in Sri Lanka, to this day, contain shrines for Hindu deities. The colonial expansion of European maritime nations reshaped the Sri Lankan economy. Labour from south India was brought to Sri Lanka to work in plantations.

The Indian freedom struggle had its influence on Sri Lanka as well. There was cross-border support for the revival of culture, tradition, local languages, spiritual practices and philosophies, and education. Both countries transformed into modern nations with constitutional and institutionalised governance under colonial rule.

Most aspects of today’s globalisation existed in a different form in the pre-colonial era with free exchange of ideas, trade and intellectual discourse. However, process engineering by colonial powers for identification and categorisation of people was a factor in the emergence of separatist ideologies based on ethnicity, language and religion.

This mindset is now ingrained and accentuated in politics. Episodic instances of communal hostility are referenced often to suit tactical political gain. Around the world today, and not just in South Asia, policies and thinking are becoming communally exclusive, localised and inward-looking.

The COVID-19 pandemic hit the world against this backdrop, allowing some leaders an opportunity to double down on insular thinking, ostensibly for providing local communities with better economic and social prospects, and security.

Meanwhile, governance models favoured by nations keep vacillating between fundamental freedoms-based democratic systems and quasi democratic, socialist authoritarian systems.

In this regard, the people of Sri Lanka and India have been served well by long years of uninterrupted democratic governance. This has provided long-term stability for both countries and must not be vitiated.

Sri Lanka’s strategic location makes it apparent that not only economic fortunes but the security of both countries are inextricably linked. Therefore, it is heartening that India and Sri Lanka constantly strive for excellence in neighbourly relations, recognising that a calamity in one country can adversely impact the other.

Though robust partnerships with other countries must be sought in line with the non-alliance foreign policies of both countries, such efforts must be bounded by an atmosphere needed for peace, prosperity and stability.

Among others, freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific together with a rules-based international order and peaceful settlement of disputes are of common interest. While avoiding advocacy of zero-sum solutions on crucial issues, both countries must seek to harmonise strategic and other interests in line with common values and socioeconomic compulsions.

Addressing issues and imbalances

The socioeconomic development of Sri Lanka has remained linked to India. But there are many options available to address issues of imbalance and asymmetries. For instance, Sri Lanka can encourage Indian entrepreneurs to make Colombo another business hub for them, as logistical capacities and facilities for rest and recreation keep improving in Sri Lanka.

Integrating the two economies but with special and differential treatment for Sri Lanka due to economic asymmetries can be fast-tracked for this purpose. There is immense potential to accentuate or create complementariness, using locational and human resource potential, for harnessing benefits in the modern value chains.

Robust partnerships across the economic and social spectrum can promote people-to-people bonhomie. And engagement of legislatures is essential for promoting multiparty support.

With many countries receding into cocoons due to the pandemic, this is an opportunity for both countries to focus on the renewal and revitalisation of partnerships.

This article was originally published in the Hindu, the English-language daily owned by The Hindu Group and headquartered in Chennai, Tamil Nadu
https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/modern-tools-age-old-wisdom/article32206425.ece

 

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The post Modern Tools, Age-old Wisdom: on India-Sri Lanka Relations appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Prasad Kariyawasam was Sri Lanka's one-time Foreign Secretary and High Commissioner to India

The post Modern Tools, Age-old Wisdom: on India-Sri Lanka Relations appeared first on Inter Press Service.

A boat on Pasig River in the Philippines. The Philippines has the highest mortality rate from the coronavirus in Southeast Asia. Credit:Kara Santos/IPS

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 31 2020 (IPS)

Southeast Asia’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has been efficient, but some areas such as data privacy, measures to go back to normalcy after lockdown is lifted, and resources for migrant or transient populations will need addressing. 

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said while the pandemic has introduced new challenges in the region, including threats to peace and security, “containment measures have spared Southeast Asia the degree of suffering and upheaval seen elsewhere”. 

Speaking at the launch of a U.N. policy brief exploring the impact of COVID-19 in Southeast Asia on Thursday, Jul. 30, Guterres lauded the efficient methods adapted by leaders in the region, while highlighting the ways in which the region has fallen short in its response to the pandemic. 

“Already, hate speech has increased and political processes have stalled, leaving several long-running conflicts to stagnate and fester,” Guterres said during a video call marking the launch. He noted that while governments in Southeast Asia had supported his appeal for a global ceasefire, the region had much work to do, “but has formidable capacities at its disposal”.

• According to the think-tank Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Philippines has the highest mortality rate from the coronavirus in the region, followed closely by Indonesia.   
• The U.N. policy brief noted that Cambodia, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Timor Leste and Vietnam had recorded zero fatalities at the time of its publication.

COVID-19 worsening weak systems

As in most regions, COVID-19 has affected the most vulnerable communities and worsened pre-existing concerns. In Southeast Asia, the report identified some of the most pressing issues: weak healthcare systems, conflict in areas such as Myanmar, as well as the plight of migrant workers. 

The Asia and Pacific region hosts about 20 percent of the world’s 163.8 million migrant workers globally, according to a 2017 report by the International Labour Organisation. 

The U.N. policy brief raises alarms that migrant and transient workers in some Southeast Asian countries have been left out of the host country’s pandemic response. For many migrant workers, living in close quarters leaves them little option to maintain social distancing or other protective measures. With concerns over the spread of the virus, some governments have also capitalised on this fear to deny entry to asylum seekers, according to the U.N. brief. 

“Non-nationals are at particular risk of exclusion from public health responses due to legal or practical barriers. This creates a systemic vulnerability for disease control in the subregion,” the brief notes.

The pandemic, as in all other regions, is disproportionately affecting women, in part because of limited access to sexual and reproductive health services as well as due to increased hours of domestic labour — the burden of which falls on women in the region. This is especially prevalent in the Philippines and Thailand, says the policy brief, claiming that women in these countries “are more likely to face increased unpaid domestic and unpaid care work because of COVID-19, exacerbating mental and emotional health concerns”. 

Meanwhile, illegal drug smuggling has not decreased in the region despite the pandemic and the subsequent lockdown, while human smuggling has actually increased at the Bay of Bengal, the policy brief claims. 

The pandemic response, while prompt, was further exacerbated by an already weak healthcare system in the region. 

“More than half of the subregion’s countries are vulnerable because of weak health systems, including Myanmar, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, the Philippines and Timor Leste,” says the brief. This, added with other social issues; such as temporarily stopping measles vaccination campaigns in the Philippines, as well as other limited humanitarian assistance due to the lockdown, has only added to the layers of the crisis. 

Challenges brought upon by measures

There are also concerns raised by the measures introduced by governments in the region to contain the virus. 

“Vaguely worded provisions without necessary safeguards and limitations have the potential to restrict the rights to information, privacy, and freedom of movement, expression, association, peaceful assembly and asylum,” the policy brief claims. 

At the core of these concerns is the issue of personal freedom, and experts are already raising alarms that some of the responses have the hallmarks of authoritarianism.

A June analysis by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) claims there are concerns of Southeast Asian countries inching towards authoritarianism as governments use the pandemic as an excuse to enforce strict measures and to attack opponents.

The analysis also points out some might be associating the success of containing the virus with authoritarian ruling. 

“There is a perception that authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia have better managed the pandemic than the region’s democracies, a narrative buoyed by China’s diplomatic efforts to propagate its own accomplishments despite even greater success stories in South Korea and Taiwan,” says the analysis. 

Regional cooperation

Despite some of the challenges, the countries within the region have supported each other. According to CSIS, many of the Southeast Asian countries have exchanged, provided and accepted donations from and to each other. China has faced criticism from countries outside the region for attempts to start a “mask diplomacy” which caused countries in Europe to be cynical of her donation offers, but her neighbours accepted them. 

The Chinese government, as well as private entities such as Alibaba and Jack Ma foundations, has provided neighbouring countries between 75,000 to two million masks, among other services such as test kits, according to CSIS. 

The Secretary-General applauded the regional cooperation during this time of crisis. 

Related Articles

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• Only Governments Can Prevent Covid-19 Recessions Becoming Depressions

The post Southeast Asia Has a Chance to Build Back Better Post-Pandemic appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Batara slum in a Dhaka suburb. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Sabine Saliba
BEIRUT, Jul 31 2020 (IPS)

The Covid-19 pandemic seems to have spared children from the direct health effects of the virus but the crisis has affected their social and economic rights directly and indirectly beyond what we could have foreseen. And there’s no doubt that children who come from more vulnerable backgrounds will feel the long-term impact of the pandemic and the measures taken to prevent its spread the hardest.

Social and economic rights are crucial to ensure the fulfilment of basic rights like sustenance, housing, food, education, health, employment and freedom from discrimination. The enforcement of these rights is instrumental to properly respond to any economic crisis. But what are the challenges today to the fulfilment of these rights for children, and how can they be met during and after a pandemic?

 

Looking at the long-term risk

Masses of funding have been made available at national and international levels to recover from the economic crisis the Covid-19 pandemic has created, but how can they be allocated so that we don’t repeat the failures of past crises?

The Covid-19 pandemic has already exposed how things like unemployment, poverty and missing education can all give rise to other problems. For instance, recent estimates show that millions of children under 5 years of age risk suffering from wasting as a result of the socio-economic impact of the pandemic.

Migrant and displaced children are also a particularly vulnerable group during this crisis as they live in deprived urban areas or slums, overcrowded camps, settlements, makeshift shelters or reception centres, where they lack adequate access to health services, clean water, sanitation and access to nutrition.

According to UNICEF, 91 percent of the world’s children are also seeing their education interrupted, with girls and those relying on school-based nutrition programmes less likely to return when classrooms reopen.

Explaining why, Human Rights Watch says that “widespread job and income loss and economic insecurity among families are likely to increase rates of child labour, sexual exploitation, teenage pregnancy, and child marriage. […] As the global death toll from Covid-19 increases, large numbers of children will be orphaned and vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.”

The impact of unemployment should not be underestimated. Millions of parents are already struggling to maintain their livelihoods, with the International Labour Organization estimating that 25 million people may lose their jobs and that youth, older workers, women and migrants will bear a disproportionate burden of the job crisis.

We’ve seen these issues before in the aftermath of events that led to higher unemployment and poverty, but the fact that they’re happening again this time around raises the question of whether structural reform can help.

Today more than ever, any action to end child poverty should look at the structures that create poverty. Masses of funding have been made available at national and international levels to recover from the economic crisis the Covid-19 pandemic has created, but how can they be allocated so that we don’t repeat the failures of past crises?

 

Bailouts: saving the economy through corporations

Government and corporation bailouts seem to be the go-to solution for the crisis, with the focus being on saving the economy instead of finding solutions to poverty and financial hardship.

Countries around the world have approved more than US$11 trillion worth of emergency measures, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and big businesses and multinational corporations are receiving the largest share of the bailouts.

Human rights groups say that this approach has put concerns for human rights in the shadows and replicated the responses to the 2008 financial crisis, weakening “labour protections…buil[ding] regressive tax systems and impos[ing] austerity on the majority while providing subsidised prosperity for the elite few.”

The Center for Economic and Social Rights has also highlighted that, as many governments are focusing on bailing out for-profit corporations, there’s a major risk that the crisis will even be used by commercial companies as an opportunity to expand their markets and profits, including in sectors like education, where major global IT players are positioning themselves.

In fact, we’re already seeing how privatisation and commercialisation of education have increased during the 2020 pandemic. With mass school closures, commercial online educational tools have sprung up as “emergency respondents”.

So what kind of bailout could have social justice and human rights at its core? And is there room for children and young people in it?

 

Cash transfers: a people’s bailout

From a human rights perspective, the ultimate measure of any economic system or policy is its impact on people, particularly the most vulnerable. The rising critics of corporate bailouts have brought an old debate back to the table: Universal Basic Income (UBI).

UBI is a regular government payment that each member of society receives equally, to guarantee basic costs of living and financial security for everyone. The supporters of this model go way back; for instance in 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. supported “a guaranteed income” as a means of abolishing poverty.

A similar model has also been brought to the table: Universal Basic Services (UBS). Under this approach everyone receives free and unconditional access to basic services such as health care, education and transport, while other services like basic housing and nutritional programmes would only be accessible through an application process and restricted to those who need it the most.

But rather than being substitutes for one another, experts argue that UBS and UBI are both beneficial as “there is no contradiction between having some public quasi-universal basic services and a basic income”.

But these systems still face much opposition, especially towards UBI, on the basis that it would be too costly. In response to those who oppose UBI for this reason, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) explains that “the alternative will result in a greater surge in inequality, increasing social tensions that would cost governments even more and open countries to heightened risk of societal conflict”.

The UN agency also adds that “a new social contract needs to emerge from this [Covid-19] crisis that rebalances deep inequalities that are prevalent across societies [and] UBI promises to be a useful element of such a framework.”

 

Cash transfers for under-18s

Even though the UBI model is based on the individual rather than the household, children are rarely expected to be beneficiaries of a regular payment. Almaz Zelleke, a political science professor at NYU Shanghai, believes in including children as recipients because “only basic income that goes to children, as well as adults, can actually eliminate the poverty of families with only a single parent, or a single earner.”

In other words, if more members of a family beyond just the breadwinner receive a regular income, it can make the family more resilient to economic crises and the threat of job loss.

Similarly in a discussion with CRIN, Argentinian sociologist and teacher Santiago Morales explained the importance of giving children an income and the “recognition of the social contribution children make […] by having an income they can manage themselves”.

However, adults rarely give children’s capacities enough credit and the first argument against giving an income to children would probably be that they would waste it. According to Morales, this is a “typical adultist argument” because it’s based on the presumption that children lack capacity.

But, he explains, “we need to distinguish between capacity and know-how… If children don’t know how to manage money, it’s because they haven’t been taught.”

The post Corporate Bailout or Cash Transfers for All, including Children? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Sabine Saliba is Regional Advisor for the Middle East and North Africa at the Child Rights International Network (CRIN)

The post Corporate Bailout or Cash Transfers for All, including Children? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By External Source
Jul 30 2020 (IPS-Partners)

In the IPBES Global Assessment report, we learnt that to safeguard all life on Earth, we need transformative change. So what does that mean? How can we make it happen? This week’s guest is Kai Chan. He is a professor at the University of British Columbia and one of the Coordinating Lead Authors of the Global Assessment. To find out more about IPBES, head to www.ipbes.net or follow us on social media @IPBES.

 

Episode 3

The post Prof. Kai Chan: Choose Your Own Adventure appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Unless diversity is accepted and inclusion becomes everyone’s business, it will be impossible to achieve the goal of universal health coverage because 15% of the global population who have some form of disability will be left behind. Credit: Bigstock.

By Shubha Nagesh and Ifeanyi Nsofor
Jul 30 2020 (IPS)

Over the next seven years, Google will invest a whopping $10 billion in India to improve technology, health and education, according to CEO Sundar Pichai. This is unprecedented and could be a game changer that could improve health, education and economic empowerment. 

While Google should be commended for such foresight, it is also pertinent to note that there was no mention of how this investment would benefit India’s 26 million persons living with disabilities. Without a doubt, investments in the Indian economy must be all-inclusive. This means including persons living with disabilities, particularly women and children.

For long, disability has been neglected to the detriment of millions of Indians who live with various forms of it. The plight of persons living with disabilities in India is not unique. In the global south, efforts to improve the health and wellbeing of persons with disabilities are usually led by individuals with disabilities, civil society and disabled persons organisations.

In the global south, efforts to improve the health and wellbeing of persons with disabilities are usually led by individuals with disabilities, civil society and disabled persons organisations

Unless diversity is accepted and inclusion becomes everyone’s business, it will be impossible to achieve the goal of universal health coverage because 15% of the global population who have some form of disability will be left behind.

Indeed,  inequities faced by persons living with disabilities have been magnified at this time of COVID-19. These challenges include unprecedented number of deaths, lack of access to finances, people-centered healthcare, home–based caregivers etc. Furthermore, closure of intervention centres and special schools, have postponed assessments and therapy sessions for children with developmental disabilities.

Education is also a major challenge as most schools turned online, without working on accessibility and barriers to inclusion, and so left out thousands of children.

There are many non-profits and government organisations in India that provide services to persons with disabilities, and most have been closed since April 2020, but staff are working overtime to provide the best services through online mediums thereby avoiding disruption of services and ensuring continued developmental progress in children.

So far, feedback from families are varied: from increased involvement of parents to no progress because such parents do not have access to digital technology.

This is the time to build a new era with accessibility as its key feature in India. However, to realise this, the private sector must play a key role as a funder and incubator of ideas.

These are five ways Google could ensure that its $10 billion investment in India is inclusive of persons living with disabilities.

First, involve persons living with disabilities in any plans to discuss the investment. This involvement must be from the beginning when plans are developed to when impact is evaluated. New initiatives must actively seek inputs from persons living with disabilities with different kinds of impairment. If this diverse representation is pursued, the inputs would be inclusive and could mitigate some challenges that may arise.

Second, ensure at least 20% of all roles are reserved for persons living with disabilities, to be well distributed along gender and age groups. Women are needed in leadership positions as the impact they make are phenomenal, with valuable indices like empathy, wellbeing and happiness. Also, children living with disabilities should not be left out.

Third, improve healthcare delivery by training health workers on providing care that is respectful and meets the needs of persons living with disabilities. Health facilities must be obligated to provide services without discrimination.

To achieve this, the investment should include partnerships with schools where health workers are trained to make the curriculum disability-friendly. Health workers already in service should also be trained and retrained on disability-centered care. Disability competencies for health professionals adopted by medical schools in India, should be used to train students, as well as train and retrain health professionals.

Fourth, ensure provision of social determinants of health such access to education, economic empowerment, access to clean water and sanitation for persons living with disabilities. For instance, access to clean water and sanitation helps reduce the incidence of infectious diseases.

Indeed, one of the most important public health interventions to reduce the spread of COVID-19 is frequent hand washing with soap under running water. Moreover, the more educated people are, the better their health-seeking behaviours.

Also, providing economic empowerment interventions would empower persons living with disabilities to pay for their healthcare themselves when the need arises.

Lastly, such a huge investment requires regular monitoring and evaluation. Persons living with disabilities should be included in monitoring teams. No one better than persons living with disabilities can evaluate the impact and the influence of programs that create change and transformation to improve the quality of life of members of the community. Also, lessons learnt can help others know how to cater for the needs of persons living with disabilities.

To be sure, Google is a private business and is entitled to deploy its corporate social responsibility however it deems fit. However, as one of its biggest markets, India is deserving of this investment.

It would amount to perpetuating gross inequities in India if persons living with disabilities are left behind again.

 

Dr Shubha Nagesh is a medical doctor and works with the Latika Roy Foundation, Dehradun India

Dr. Ifeanyi M. Nsofor, is a medical doctor, a graduate of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, the CEO of EpiAFRIC and Director of Policy and Advocacy at Nigeria Health Watch. He is a Senior Atlantic Fellow for Health Equity at George Washington University, a Senior New Voices Fellow at the Aspen Institute and a 2006 International Ford Fellow. 

The post Google’s $10 Billion Investment in India Should be Inclusive of Persons with Disabilities appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By External Source
Jul 30 2020 (IPS-Partners)

In order to help captains onboard longline fishing vessels and port samplers collect data, SPC has developed two digital apps, Onboard and Offshore. Let’s travel to Nuku’alofa, capital of the Kingdom of Tonga, to see innovation in action!
For further information, please contact SPC: spc@spc.int


 

Source: Pacific Community SPC

The post The Pacific Community launches the Pacific Healthy Recipe Contest appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By External Source
Jul 30 2020 (IPS-Partners)

In order to help captains onboard longline fishing vessels and port samplers collect data, SPC has developed two digital apps, Onboard and Offshore. Let’s travel to Nuku’alofa, capital of the Kingdom of Tonga, to see innovation in action!
For further information, please contact SPC: spc@spc.int


 

Source: Pacific Community SPC

The post Pacific Tuna Fisheries: Electronic reporting in Tonga appeared first on Inter Press Service.

But critics say Sierra Leone’s new media law gives the government the powers to shut down media houses and ban individual journalists from practicing their professions. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Mohamed Fofanah
FREETOWN, Jul 30 2020 (IPS)

Last week, Sierra Leone’s parliament voted to repeal the country’s 55-year-old libel law, which criminalised the publication of information that was deemed defamatory or seditious, and which had been used by successive governments to target and imprison media practitioners and silence dissenting views. But not everyone is convinced it was in the best interest of media freedom.

On Jul. 23, in an unanimous vote, Sierra Leone’s parliament repealed Part V of the 1965 Public Order Act (POA), which criminalised  libel. It was replaced with the Independent Media Commission (IMC) Act 2020, which was also approved unanimously.

But critics say the IMC Act 2020 gives the Sierra Leone government the power to shut down media houses and ban journalists from practicing their professions.

Sylvia Blyden, who served as a minister of the main opposition All People’s Congress, and is currently editor of the local newspaper, Awareness Times, told IPS that she was against the repeal of all of the provisions in the POA.

Blyden, a prominent journalist and activist, is presently facing charges brought by the government for defamatory libel, publishing false news and seditious libel — charges that existed under the repealed Part V of the POA.
But Blyden told IPS that there are many protective caveats of that act, which made it not as bad as some people believed it to be. She added that the importance of the criminal libel laws went far beyond the practice of journalism and politics.

“It is sad for poor citizens who cannot afford the money to pay lawyers to institute civil libel litigation to protect their names and good reputations as there is no more punitive deterrent in place.
“I am not speaking of journalists, I am speaking of citizens assaulting other citizen’s reputation. We still have our laws to protect against physical assault on us but we have removed the laws that protect us against assault on our good names. Not much thinking went into this process of repeal,” she argued.

Others have noted that the IMC Act 2020 will serve only to “undermine media pluralism and completely eliminate the registration of newspapers as a ‘Sole Proprietorship’ business, and only provides for registration under the Partnership Act 1890 and the Companies Act 2009”.

Lawrence Williams, writing for the Sierra Leone Telegraph, said, “It’s important to note that many newspapers in Sierra Leone are registered under ‘Sole Proprietorship’ as one among several options provided for under the current IMC Act”.

He said the elimination of newspapers registered under sole proprietorship could lead to the closure of many independent publications, and could therefore “end media scrutiny of government institutions and public officials; and inevitably result to ending governance accountability and transparency in Sierra Leone”.

Amin Kef Sesay, writing in the Calabash Newspaper, said that the IMC Act 2020 would allow the government to “tie the hands of citizens from freely investing in the media and heading those institutions as editors, publishers, etc”.

But Sierra Leone’s information and communication minister Mohamed Rahman Swaray told IPS that the POA had been in violation of 12 international human rights instruments, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and that government had to comply with international standards.

He said that the IMC Act would enable the mitigation against sedition and libel against private citizens. He added that the Independent Media Commission, the regulatory body of the media, had been given quasi-judicial functions under the IMC Act 2020, and had powers of the high court to hear civil matters of sedition and libel.

• When the act is signed into law, the commission will be able to monitor and regulate the media, its content, ensure that a minimum wage $60 is paid to media practitioners, and to ensure that only qualified and trained media personnel are employed as editors/station managers etc.

Swaray also argued that the IMC Act 2020 was not government exercising further rights over the media. “We discussed the draft bill with the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists (SLAJ) and they all agreed to the contents of the draft which was then sent to parliament so there was endorsement of the contents of the bill by SLAJ,” he said.

Swaray told IPS that government was very concerned about improving the media landscape in this West African nation as the old law meant the country’s brightest and best brains shied away from the profession because they could face criminal charges. “Women also were refusing to practice,” he added.

He is confident that the recent decriminalisation of the libel law will now see more women taking up the profession.
“Now the best minds and women will come on board and we will make the media and journalism a professional, lucrative and serious institution in the country,” Swaray told IPS.

Speaker of parliament Dr. Abass Bundu said at the time that parliament had restored the dignity of the media and he hoped that, going forward, responsible and professional journalism would hold sway.

Hassan Samba Yarjah, a commissioner of the Human Rights Commission in Sierra Leone, told IPS that the commission had called for Part V of the POA to be repealed every year for the last 10 years in its annual ‘State of Human Rights Report in Sierra Leone’.

He said that as a commission they could not emphasise the importance of the passing of the IMC Act 2020. Yarjah told IPS that the press and citizens would now have greater freedom to express their views, speak out, challenge government on issues affecting them, constructively criticise and speak truth to power without being arrested and branded a criminal.

He said that this return of power to the people was a big development for democracy here, adding that this would change the landscape of journalism and develop the media. “The commission will, however, continue to monitor these freedoms and also ensure that the Media and everyone enjoy this freedom with greater responsibility,” Yarjah told IPS.

Both the repeal of the POA and the passing of the IMC Act 2020 have been sent to President Julius Maada Bio for his signature.

 

 

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By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
KUALA LUMPUR, Jul 30 2020 (IPS)

Covid-19 threatens economic life the world over. The most urgent and important need is for governments, businesses and families to survive. Governments must revive economies and livelihoods to prevent Covid-19 recessions from becoming protracted depressions.

The Covid-19 crisis is clearly a ‘black swan event’, threatening both public health and livelihoods. Both the pandemic and containment efforts are not due to business operations and decisions, but nonetheless have compelling consequences for them.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Covid-19 contagion contractionary, costly
In East Asia and a few other societies, successful early precautionary and preventive measures, as well as testing, tracking and treatment of the infected, plus sufficient physical distancing, isolation and quarantine measures have been enough to contain the contagion so far.

When such measures were not taken, inadequate or failed, ‘stay in shelter’ lockdowns became necessary as contagion spread. Nationwide lockdowns have been imposed in many countries. Such preventive and other precautionary measures have reduced economic activity and demand in many sectors.

But trying to maintain aggregate demand as if there is no pandemic does not make sense. No matter what governments do, some output losses are unavoidable. So, the main challenge in addressing Covid-19 recessions is to avoid protracted recessions or depressions.

Due to the continued need for physical distancing and other precautionary measures, likely to remain for some time to come, vaccine or no vaccine, some business disruptions may be more lasting than others, i.e., more likely to be medium, if not long-term.

No ‘one size fits all’
Economies are neither monolithic nor homogenous, and no single inflexible policy can possibly be suitable for all. As recessions are uneven in impact, different sectors, industries, services and businesses are affected differently. Covid-19 recessions are also unlike other past recessions.

Many businesses may not be able to survive major stoppages and demand shortfalls, however temporary. Such businesses could go bankrupt, severely affecting workers’ families, related businesses and those directly and indirectly employed.

Much has to be learnt quickly from other experiences, and from learning by doing. Some businesses and sectors may not be able to survive, and options should include business redeployment, infrastructure and facility repurposing as well as staff retraining.

Strict verification and correction can take place later, even after the lockdown is over. Conditions should be strict enough to deter abuse, but not participation. For example, government grants or subsidies, later found to be ‘excessive’, can be converted into low interest loans that governments recover later, rather than treated as criminal fraud.

Business disruptions threaten livelihoods
Business disruption has broader implications, threatening the entire economy with long-term costs. If relations — including trust among entrepreneurs, workers and customers — are disrupted, they will need to be rebuilt, requiring time and expense.

Conventional economics ignores ‘transactions costs’ incurred in recruiting workers, seeking and keeping clients and customers, obtaining credit and investing capital, building trust, and other relations, and thus is a poor guide to policy.

The adverse effects of livelihood disruption should be minimised. Income maintenance policies need to help fired workers and others whose livelihoods have been greatly diminished. Hence, extraordinary and novel social protection measures are needed.

Helping businesses survive enforced idleness or hibernation due to such measures, and protecting livelihoods are both needed. Businesses, especially smaller ones with fewer reserves, will need help to keep their workers and to avoid liquidating their businesses.

Simple payment systems help. Idle workers should immediately receive special social protection, while staying formally employed. Such measures will minimise rehiring costs when they return to work, but should not excessively burden their employers with debt.

Only governments can help
Governments may not be able to stop, let alone reverse or fully compensate for the effects of public health measures. But they can certainly help alleviate economic hardship due to the epidemic, and minimise lasting damage to the economy.

Crucially, timely government interventions can prevent unavoidable, potentially brief recessions from becoming longer lasting stagnations or depressions. Without appropriate government measures, output losses due to work disruption will cause large business losses leading to mass layoffs.

Even when no longer operating, rent, lease, infrastructure, utility and other such payments vital for business maintenance and employees’ welfare, such as health protection for employees, need to be made or absorbed. Some, mainly developed countries have acted promptly and appropriately to minimise layoffs, business destruction and worker welfare.

Governments can also act more boldly to subordinate unproductive rentier claims, based on asset ownerhip or property rights, to much more essential operating costs — not unlike how US bankruptcy law enables businesses to continue operating to work themselves out of their predicaments.

Current support often inappropriate
Many governments have provided liquidity — e.g., usually by offering low-interest or interest-free loans — to help businesses and workers survive the crisis. But such measures only ‘smoothen’ debt burdens over longer periods, ‘postponing the pain’, without reimbursing or compensating victims for their income losses.

Temporary and partial compensation for income losses enables businesses to quickly resume operations after lockdowns end, rather than having to also contend with additional debt burdens. Many businesses need help to survive, and aid can be provided conditionally, e.g., on avoiding or minimising employee retrenchments.

Postponing tax payments also helps, but tend to benefit the better-off, liable for more tax, rather than those most adversely affected or needy.

Direct payments undoubtedly help. But without some ‘easy’ targeting, especially for businesses, often, too little is available for those in greatest need, while benefiting some who are not.

Although policymakers typically insist on means-testing for anti-poverty programmes, they rarely demand targeting for businesses, reducing the efficacy of government relief.

An already existing, developed social protection system makes it easier to ‘compensate’ idle workers, but is rarely available in developing and transition economies.

Lowly-paid and casual workers and many self-employed typically have debt, more than savings. Not able to survive temporary losses, they are more likely to be displaced by lockdowns, and less likely to work from home. Government ‘unemployment benefits’ can easily be made progressive, with a higher fraction of previous earnings for the poorest.

Government ‘payer of last resort’
In March, French economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, both at Berkeley, proposed that governments help ease pain and disruption with payer-of-last-resort programmes, with adversely affected businesses reporting unavoidable monthly overhead and maintenance costs to qualify for government aid.

A government ‘payer-of-last-resort’ during lockdowns can thus help ‘suspended’ or ‘hibernating’ businesses to continue paying unavoidable maintenance bills to avoid insolvency on condition of keeping their involuntarily idle workers, instead of firing them.

Such a payer-of-last-resort programme would reduce hardship for workers and businesses. It could enable businesses to temporarily suspend or scale down operations, to limit haemorrhage and avoid insolvency, and to pick up quickly as conditions improve.

It would maintain ‘cash flow’ for families and businesses, minimising Covid-19 shocks’ adverse secondary impacts on demand (e.g., due to fired workers spending less on consumption), while enabling more rapid recovery as demand resumes.

Payer-of-last-resort programmes can be affordable if well complemented by effective contagion containment measures, enabling early resumption of business operations. While unavoidably high for lockdowns, government spending, typically financed by sovereign debt, can remain manageable.

The post Only Governments Can Prevent Covid-19 Recessions Becoming Depressions appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Emmanuel, a Luminos teacher, with his class in Loweh, Liberia (2019). Credit: Carielle Doe for the Luminos Fund

By George K. Werner and Caitlin Baron
KAMPALA, Uganda, Jul 30 2020 (IPS)

“It has gotten really tough for us,” says James, a father in rural Liberia, of COVID-19 lockdown and school closures. “My son is trying but he is missing his friends and teachers. Children want to be in school.”

“When Coronavirus passes, will your school still be there to help us with our children?” asks Fatu, a Liberian mother of six.

Around the world, over one billion children are out of school. All will face learning losses (data from World War II and other crises offer grim indications on this) and far too many will be lost to learning forever. Estimates suggest the COVID-19 pandemic will cause this generation to lose $10 trillion in future earnings.

Headlines exclaim that the global education system has never seen a moment like this and, in some sense, that is true. However, in Liberia, where we work, this is the second pandemic in six years. Our experiences in Liberia provide important lessons for COVID-19 education system recovery in low-income countries – and the uniquely important role of “last mile teachers.”

In 2014, the Ebola crisis closed schools across Liberia for six months to a year. One and a half million children were excluded from school, in addition to 500,000 children who were already excluded before Ebola roared through the country.

As Liberia’s Minister of Education, I led the country’s education response. I traveled with my team to schools across Liberia, speaking with teachers, parents, and children to assess the magnitude of the task to bring children back to learning.

I concluded that the education system was failing and bold reform was needed urgently: the Ministry of Education needed to rethink everything about its education delivery system for post-Ebola Liberia. The Luminos Fund, where Caitlin is CEO, was one of several education organizations that launched operations in Liberia as part of the recovery journey following Ebola.

A view of Loweh village (2019). Credit: Carielle Doe for the Luminos Fund

Reflecting on past school closures in Liberia and beyond, and our experience educating vulnerable children, we identify three key steps for education systems to come back strong after a crisis like COVID-19.

First, targeted outreach must be conducted to bring the most vulnerable and older students back to school. Next, each child should be assessed to understand the extent of their learning loss, and to meet students where they are in the curriculum. Finally, remediation should be provided to bring students who have fallen behind back up to grade level.

Here is the key, and challenge: all of these steps rely on the efforts and tenacity of frontline educators, but low-income countries do not have nearly enough teachers. UNESCO estimates a global shortage of nearly 69 million teachers, 70% of whom are needed in sub-Saharan Africa.

Furthermore, many countries cannot graduate teachers fast enough to fill the shortfall. South Sudan, for example, would need all of its projected graduates from higher education – twice over – to become teachers to fill its gap. Traditional teacher training alone is insufficient to meet demand, even before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are helping address the need. The Luminos Fund manages an education program in Liberia that has achieved powerful success with a different model of teacher preparation (James’s son and Fatu’s daughter are students this year).

Emmanuel with students (2019). Credit: Carielle Doe for the Luminos Fund

Luminos recruits local, motivated, high potential young people with minimal qualifications as teachers. The program has shown that, with an intensive three-week training followed by ongoing classroom-based coaching, these recruits deliver transformative learning for children who are often the first in their family to learn to read.

Luminos teachers are so successful that, in less than one year, their students advance from still learning the alphabet to reading 39 words a minute. After one year of schooling, Luminos students read at a rate that only 15% of Liberian third graders can match.

Today, school systems across Africa and beyond must think expansively about the assets they can deploy to respond to the current crisis – and take action. Status quo thinking is inadequate to respond to the moment.

Here, Liberia has another powerful lesson to share with this world. In the provision of basic healthcare, Liberia hosts perhaps the world’s most famous example of the creative extension of government delivery capacity through collaboration with civil society: Last Mile Health.

Last Mile Health has reached over 1.2 million of the poorest Liberians through a network of 3,600 community and frontline health workers. Community health workers are paid professionals, recruited from these same poor communities and empowered to provide basic healthcare in consultation with the formal system.

This model is now being scaled to reach nine million people with primary care services globally by 2030. Last Mile Health has created a model community health system in Liberia and marshalled a movement to develop the global workforce of community and frontline health workers.

The same approach could be used in education and is not dissimilar to how Luminos operates. Far too often, though, the global education sector has viewed community-based educators as a threat, unlike global health’s careful but open-minded exploration of alternative models.

The world may never see another global school closure like the one we are experiencing, but in Liberia, COVID-19 is the second pandemic in six years. Low-income countries – and countries everywhere – need to build resilient school systems that can weather periodic closures and still deliver transformative learning for students.

Building a global workforce of frontline education staff from remote communities to serve remote communities – last mile teachers – is a critical part of the formula.

 

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Excerpt:

George K. Werner served as Minister of Education in Liberia from 2015 to 2018. Caitlin Baron is CEO of the Luminos Fund, a non-profit working in Liberia and across Africa to bring a second chance at education to out-of-school children.

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A group of women of Central Africa receives training in production diversification and improvement to expand the food security of their communities. Credit: FAO

By Mario Lubetkin
ROME, Jul 29 2020 (IPS)

Recent world reports confirm that the goals set by the international community to end poverty and hunger, and create a more balanced, sustainable and fair world by 2030, are currently in danger. If effective and rapid global action is not taken, the goals will not be met and the results in just 10 years may be very negative for all of us.

In 2015, when heads of state and government, as well as other senior representatives from 190 countries, decided at the United Nations General Assembly onthat would change the profile of our world, the international community had confidence that it would reach them all.

These important goals to create a world with true peace include the elimination of poverty and hunger, guaranteeing a healthy and sustainable life, gender equality, the availability of water for all, sustainable economic growth, effective action to fight against climate change, and protecting oceans and forests. 

The International Community had such confidence because back in 2000, when 189 countries set out to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), significant progress was made. These eight goals aimed to reduce poverty and hunger, improve conditions in education, reduce infant mortality and other diseases, achieve greater gender equality, and achieve better environmental sustainability.

In 2015, it was about expanding the goals and entirely eliminating the most negative aspects that affect humanity.

Mario Lubetkin. Credit: FAO

But just five years later, in 2020, the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI), an annual report prepared by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)  and other agencies of the United Nations (UN), showed that if the negative trend that we are living consolidates, it is doubtful that the goals that the international community set out by mutual consent to solve the main problems we have before us will be achieved.

The report noted that 690 million people still suffer from hunger, 10 million more than a year ago, and 60 million more if we include the last five years.

Although Asia is the most affected, hunger is a problem in all continents: in Africa it is increasing very rapidly, and numbers also remain high in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Since 2015, the positive trend of hunger reduction began to reverse and undernourishment and malnutrition have been on the rise.

This whole situation cannot be considered “as a threat that may arise in the future. We have to do more to safeguard both the food systems and our most vulnerable populations right now”
Qu Dongyu, FAO Director-General

According to the SOFI report, 381 million Asians suffer from undernourishment, as well as 250 million Africans and 48 million Latin Americans and Caribbean people. On the other hand, if we analyze the percentage in relation to its populations, Africa is the most affected region with 19.1 percent of the undernourished population, followed by Asia with 8.3 percent and Latin America with 7.4 percent.

This analysis was made before the COVID-19 pandemic, and while it is still early to have definitive data on the effects of this new dramatic reality, experts estimate that another 83 million people, and perhaps up to 132 million people may start suffering from starvation in 2020 as a result of the ongoing economic recession.

In this regard, another recent report by FAO and the World Food Program (WFP) identified 27 countries that will be imminently affected by the food crisis resulting from COVID -19. No region will be exempt from it, from Afghanistan to Bangladesh, Haiti to Central American countries, Iraq to Lebanon and Syria, Burkina Faso to Liberia, Niger, Mozambique, Mali, Zimbabwe and others will be reaching levels of acute hunger.

Many of these countries were already affected by famine before COVID-19, due to pre-existing factors and tensions, such as economic crises, instability and insecurity, extreme weather events, plant pests, and animal diseases.

But the COVID-19 crisis compounded all of these situations with the decrease in jobs and wages, disturbances associated with preventive sanitary measures to face the pandemic, the fall in government revenues with direct effects on social security and protection, and generating political instability with the increase of different types of conflicts that are due to natural resources, such as water and grazing lands, and  migratory phenomena that affects agricultural production and markets.

Undernourishment must be permanently included in the analysis of the situation regarding hunger because its consequences (including malnutrition, micronutrient deficiency, overweight and obesity) continue to worsen, especially since for a significant amount of the population nutritious food is too costly and inaccessible. 

Remember that high-nutrient foods, such as dairy products, fruits, vegetables, and protein foods, are the most expensive food products. They cost about five times more than filling your stomach with low-nutrient and unhealthy foods. 

Although each country has its own specific way to solve this difficult situation, SOFI summarizes many of the reflections of recent years to face solutions to these problems with actions that can be implemented throughout the food supply chain and in trade policies, public spending and investment. 

Some of the actions to achieve this include reducing the costs of food production, storage, transportation, distribution and marketing, as well as reducing inefficiency, food loss and waste, supporting small local producers to produce and sell more nutritious food by accessing new markets, promoting behaviour change through education and communication, integrating nutrition into the social protection system, and implementing investment strategies at national levels.

As FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu pointed out, this whole situation cannot be considered “as a threat that may arise in the future. We have to do more to safeguard both the food systems and our most vulnerable populations right now.”

The outlook is clear, and so are the combined solutions. It is about acting to avoid being witnesses to a dangerous failure in just 10 years of the 2030 Agenda that was set by the international community to put an end to the millions of people that face the humiliation of hunger and poverty.

 

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Excerpt:

Mario Lubetkin is FAO Assistant Director-General

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By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM / ROME, Jul 29 2020 (IPS)

On Friday the 24th of June, President Trump announced he was skipping a weekend at his New Jersey golf resort to ”ensure law and order in Washington”, tweeting:

I just had the privilege of signing a very strong Executive Order protecting American Monuments, Memorials, and Statues – and combatting recent Criminal Violence. Long prison terms for these lawless acts against our Great Country!

This time, Trump acted with remarkable speed and much more decisively than he had ever done when it came to denouncing racism, or mitigating the COVID19 pandemic. What angered him was an intent to topple over an equestrian statue in Washington, on Monday 20th of June.

President Trump was already incensed by the tearing down of statues and monuments all over the country. Fuelled by the police killing of George Floyd on May 25, people expressed their anger and frustration by vandalizing and destroying monuments – so far almost two hundred have been destroyed, disifigured, or taken away. Similar incidents occur in other areas of the world, where monuments erected to honour racists, colonialists and abusers of native populations are being destroyed, or removed.

After Trump’s announcement, his White House staff added that ”monument destroyers”:

seek nothing more than to destroy anything that honors our past and to erase from the public mind any suggestion that our past may be worth honoring. President Trump will never allow violence to control our streets, rewrite our history, or harm the American way of life.

Trump labelled the monument wreckers as left-wing extremists, ”who identify themselves with ideologies – such as Marxism” and are endowed with a ”deep ignorance of our history”. Such a statement makes one wonder what history Trump is talking about. It must be some kind of home-made construction in accordance with a statement he made in his fourth of July speech in front of Mount Rushmore:

Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children.

What values? The vandalization of memorials began as a protest against homages to Confederate heroes. The American Civil War (1861-1865) was fought between northern states loyal to the Union and southern states, which in an effort to maintain slavery had broken loose to form The Confederate States of America. After the war, most supporters of the defeated Confederacy realized that it made little sense to argue that slavery and oppression of people of a darker complexion had been a just cause to die for. Instead, the war was recast as a battle over the principle of states’ rights and Southern honour. It was lamented that the children of brave soldiers instead of revering their fathers had to be ashamed of what they had done.

To unite the nation, the victorious U.S. Government was willing to appease the vanquished and allow them to continue discriminating against people with a different skin colour, while denying them their constitutional rights. Furthermore, it gave free reigns to local chapters of the United Confederate Veterans, United Daughters of the Confederacy, and Sons of Confederate Veterans to fund and erect monuments paying homage to men who had fought for the preservation of slavery and preached inequality of human beings. Their statues and monuments now embellish parks and squares all over the U.S., an honour they occasionally share with killers of the native population, from Juan de Oñatre (1550-1626) and onwards.

It is not difficult to imagine the rancor felt by ”coloured” people while being confronted with statues praising the heroism of white oppressors. They live in a society that not long ago (and often still do) characterized them on the basis of their skin colour. As Ralph Ellison wrote in his novel Invisible Man from 1952.

I am an invisible man […] I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me […] When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination – indeed, everything and anything except me.

Trump declared that the highly visible statues of white murderers and chauvinists are among ”our most sacred memorials”. When the U.S. president affirm this as a fact I wonder if he for one second has contemplated what it means to be the descendant of victims of such ”heroes” and confronted with tangible tributes to these ruffians. Trump would probably not condemn the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue by U.S. troops. He might not disapprove of the fact that hundreds of thousands of statues of Hitler and Stalin were destroyed all over Europe, since people could not stand being confronted with images of such tyrants.

I am not shedding any tears over recently destroyed, or removed, statues representing bullies and profiteers of slave trade and forced labour like Cecil Rhodes, Edward Colston, Robert Milligan, John Cass, Leopold II of Belgium, John Hamilton in New Zealand, or some offensive colonialists in India, who now join ranks with Hoxha, Marcos, Gaddafi, Lenin, and other toppled heroes.

However, statue smashing remains a thorny issue, particularly since representations of controversial, but to a great extent beneficial personalities like Winston Churchill recently have been vandalized, as well as those of generally admirable persons like Gandhi and Frederick Douglass. The right thing would probably be not to destroy any statues at all, and when it comes to the worst tyrants and murderers follow the motto of Indiana Jones, namely that they ”belong in a museum”.

Monuments dedicated to great women and men are often erected after their deaths in remembrance of good deeds and the admiration they fostered. Worse is when dictators and vainglorious men erect monuments in their own honour, like the dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo who besides having the highest mountain peak and the capital of the Dominican Republic named after himself, succeeded in entering Guinness Book of Records due to the fact that he during his lifetime had more than 2,000 statues and busts of himself erected in public places. I am somewhat sceptical to that record, assuming that Stalin and Mao Zedong were far superior champions in that particular area of self-glorification.

Another manner of glorifying a living person is to commission her/his portrait and hang it in a public space, an honour generally bestowed upon business leaders and heads of state. One example of this tradition is the official portraits of U.S. presidents, generally loaned from the National Portrait Gallery and hung in the White House. Some controversy arose when Donald J. Trump refused to bring the official portraits of his predecessor Barak Obama and his wife to the White House.

Trump has not yet decided who is going to paint his official White House portrait, though he was recently portrayed by one of USA´s highest paid portrait painters, John Howard Sanden, who painted the official portraits of George W. Bush and his wife Laura, which are ably executed but nevertheless quite bland. Sanden’s portrait of Trump was finished in August 2019 and intended as a homage to a president the artist admires:

I am grateful for the President’s strong pro-life policies, and he sees a need for Christians to defend and proclaim Biblical truth as the culture celebrates immorality in a way that would have seemed inconceivable 50 years ago. Somebody’s got to take a stand for the Lord because we’re going down the tubes.

When I quite recently saw Sanden’s portrait of Donald J. Trump I was struck by the details in the background. On his website, John Sanden describes his painting:

The President wears his signature red tie and dark suit and sits in an attitude of thoughtful determination, an expression well-known to all Americans. Just behind the President´s chair is the American flag, the honoring of which has been a central theme of his Presidential leadership.

As a matter of fact, the Stars and Stripes does not appear in any of the White House´s presidential portraits, but the most curious prop is a miniature of the bronze statue of President Andrew Jackson that occupies the center of Lafayette Park, opposite the White House. The inclusion of Jackson’s equestrian statue in a portrait of Trump now seems to be almost prophetic. As mentioned above, an effort to topple the statue was made on the 6th of June and perpetrators have been charged for attempting to ”destroy federal property”. They will thus be the first offenders charged according to Trump’s new directives and thus run the risk of being condemned to ”up to ten years of imprisonment for lawless acts against our Great Country.”

Why did they try to demolish Andrew Jackson’s statue? Probably because Jackson was a plantation owner who also owned a cotton cleaning factory, and an adjoining whiskey distillery, operated by 150 slaves. One of Jackson’s most controversial decisons was his enforcement of the Indian Removal Act, which allowed for the forced expulsion of indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands. Approximately 45,000 Native Americans were forcibly displaced during Jackson’s presidency. His policies were continued by his successor Martin Van Buren, when an already planned ”relocation” of Cherokees was initiated, about 4,000 men, women and children died during this so-called Trail of Tears. The anger against the Andrew Jackson´s memorial might thus be understandable, though in its defence it may be said that is not at all a bad piece of art. What is incomprehensible, however, is why the ”historically conscious” Donald J. Trump has chosen to have a replica of it as a background for his portrait.

Ellison, Raph (2001) Invisible Man. London: Penguin Classics. Foner, Eric (1988) Reconstruction: America´s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. New York: Harper & Row. Wallace, Anthony F.C. (1993). The long, bitter trail. Andrew Jackson and the Indians. New York. http://www.johnhowardsanden.com/president_donald_trump.asp

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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By External Source
Jul 29 2020 (IPS-Partners)

The illicit trade of human lives is happening right under our noses every day. It is primarily affecting the lives of millions of women and children.

Today, human trafficking is the second largest and fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world.

Sexual exploitation, forced labour and illegal organ trafficking are the hallmarks of an industry worth $150 billion dollars per year.

One fifth of the world’s estimated 60 million modern day slaves are children.

And even as the COVOD-19 pandemic rages on, this sinister business has begun to adapt.

Criminals are adjusting their business models to the ‘new normal’, especially through the abuse of modern technologies.

According to UN independent rights experts, travel restrictions have spawned new ways to sexually exploit and abuse children, such as attempts to establish “delivery” or “drive-thru” services.

There has also been a spike in people trying to access illegal websites featuring child pornography.

COVID-19 has impacted the ability of state authorities and non-governmental organizations to provide essential services to the victims of this crime.

To defeat Covid19, some countries have diverted resources meant for fighting crime. Services to assist trafficking victims are being reduced or even shut down.

Most importantly, the pandemic has exacerbated the entrenched economic and societal inequalities that are among the root causes of human trafficking.

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations includes goal 8.7: to take immediate and effective measures to end human trafficking, and the use of child soldiers and labour.

The Global Sustainability Network was formed to help achieve this goal. With over 1200 members it is actively working to combine efforts of individuals, governments and international organizations to combat human trafficking.

This year, World Day Against Trafficking in Persons will focus on the first responders to human trafficking.

These are the people who work on identifying, supporting, counselling and seeking justice for victims of trafficking.

During the COVID-19 crisis, the essential role of first responders has become more important, as pandemic restrictions have made their jobs even more difficult.

“As we work together to overcome the global pandemic, countries need to keep shelters and hotlines open, safeguard access to justice and prevent more vulnerable people from falling into the hands of organized crime” – Ghada Waly, Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

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Inga Rhonda King (left), Permanent Representative of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines to the United Nations and seventy-fourth President of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), hands over the gavel to Mona Juul, Permanent Representative of Norway to the United Nations and newly-elected seventy-fifth President of ECOSOC, at the opening meeting of the 2020 session of ECOSOC. New York, 25 July 2019. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

By Mona Juul
NEW YORK, Jul 29 2020 (IPS)

This year we celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Charter of the United Nations, written and signed during a period of great global change. Today, the world is again shifting beneath our feet. Yet, the Charter remains a firm foundation for our joint efforts.

These uncertain times of global disruption shine a light on the interdependences of our world. The COVID-19 pandemic, and the inequality it has exposed, are a global challenge that we must solve through global solutions. These solutions call for more, not less, cooperation across national borders.

Global cooperation is the enduring promise of the Charter of the United Nations. I am honoured to preside over the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), one of the principal organs of the United Nations, at its 75th anniversary.

In January 1946, 18 members gathered for the inaugural meeting of ECOSOC under the leadership of its first President, Sir Ramaswami Mudaliar of India. ECOSOC was vested with a powerful mandate, to promote better living for all ¬¬by fostering international cooperation on economic, social and cultural issues.

The Charter recognizes the value of social and economic development as prerequisites for stability and well-being. In a 1956 speech, Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld said that “while the Security Council exists primarily for settling conflicts […] the Economic and Social Council exists primarily to eliminate the causes of conflicts.”

For me, this is a reminder that sustainable peace and prosperity rely on global solidarity and cooperation.

Today, this unity of purpose to reach those furthest behind first is also the spirit of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The 2030 Agenda is our shared road map to transform the world as we recover better, protect our planet and leave no one behind. With ECOSOC serving as the unifying platform for integration, action, follow-up and review of the SDGs, our promise to eradicate poverty, achieve equality and stop climate change must drive our actions.

ECOSOC has the unique convening power to make this happen. It brings together valuable constituencies such as youth and the private sector to enhance our work and discussions. ECOSOC also remains the gateway for civil society engagement with the United Nations. Civil society has been central to progress on international economic, social and environmental cooperation, from the small but critical number of organizations present in San Francisco when the Charter was signed in 1945, to the 5,000-plus non-governmental organizations with ECOSOC consultative status today.

Wilhelm Munthe Morgenstierne, Ambassador to the United States, member of the delegation from Norway, signing the Charter of the United Nations at the Veterans’ War Memorial Building in San Francisco, United States, on 26 June 1945. Credit: UN Photo/McLain

The Charter also outlines that ECOSOC should promote universal respect and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all, without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion. While much has shifted in our world, this mandate remains just as important today as in 1945. After all, human rights are a part of the foundation of the United Nations, quite literally. When Trygve Lie, the first Secretary-General and fellow Norwegian, laid the cornerstone of United Nations Headquarters at Turtle Bay in October 1949, it contained, together with the Charter, a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Human rights have always been a part of the work of ECOSOC. The former United Nations Commission on Human Rights was one of the first functional commissions created within ECOSOC and was charged with drafting the Universal Declaration. Today, ECOSOC remains committed to playing its part to promote all rights: civil and political, as well as economic, social and cultural rights.

In stark contrast to the 18 men who formed the first meeting of ECOSOC in 1946, I am proud to be the third consecutive female president of ECOSOC and one of five female presidents in its 75-year history. Although slow, this is progress, especially compared to 1945, when out of the 850 international delegates that convened in San Francisco to establish the Charter of the United Nations, only eight were women, and only four of them were signatories to the Charter. Today, the Secretary-General has achieved gender parity in all senior United Nations positions, and the Commission on the Status of Women is perhaps the highest profile part of the work of ECOSOC. The Commission’s annual session is instrumental in promoting women’s rights, documenting the reality of women’s lives throughout the world and shaping global standards on gender equality and the empowerment of women.

ECOSOC must work to place gender equality at the heart of all our work. Women’s rights and gender equality are imperative to a just world. In all my endeavours, I strive to promote and advance these rights with a vision of a more prosperous, peaceful and fair world, for the benefit of women and girls—and men and boys alike.

Before the current crisis, more people around the world were living better lives compared to just a decade ago. More people have access to better health care, decent work and education than ever before. Nevertheless, inequality, climate change and the lasting negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are threatening to undo these gains. While we have technological and financial resources at our disposal, unprecedented changes will be needed to align resources with our sustainable development objectives. The United Nations must remain at the forefront of our collective efforts guided by our commitment to the Charter.

The true test of our success will be whether persons, communities and countries experience improvement in their lives and societies. The United Nations must be of value to people. To our family. To our neighbours. To our friends. Unless we achieve this, our credibility is at stake.

As we celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Charter of the United Nations, let us remind ourselves of the promise it embodies, to help the world become a more prosperous, just, equitable and peaceful place.

To me, the opening words of the Charter, “WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS”, are a humble and empowering reminder of our capability to overcome current and future challenges. Even in troubling times, there remains great hope in the power of working together. That is the founding spirit of the United Nations—and in this 75th anniversary year, as we face grave and global challenges, it is the spirit we must summon today.

This article was first published by the UN Chronicle on 26 June 2020.

 

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Excerpt:

Mona Juul is the seventy-fifth President of the Economic and Social Council and Permanent Representative of Norway to the United Nations.

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The SafeBoda ride hailing app can now be used to order essential reproductive health supplies. . © SafeBoda Credit: SafeBoda/UNFPA

By Martha Songa - Cedric Muhebwa - Rakiya Abby-Farrah*
KAMPALA, Uganda, Jul 29 2020 (IPS)

When Betty Nagadya walks through the trading centre on her way home, she sings a song in the local Luganda language: “SafeBoda, SafeBoda, who needs a helmet?” she sings. “For those who feel cold, I have a coat for you.” But her song is not about clothing – it’s about condoms.

Ms. Nagadya is a village health team volunteer. She distributes condoms in her community in partnership with the motorcycle taxi company SafeBoda, all as part of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Under Uganda’s COVID-19 lockdown, contraceptives and other reproductive health supplies – such as HIV tests, pregnancy tests and mama kits, which contain the supplies for clean, safe childbirth – have been in short supply.

But now these items can be ordered through the popular ride-hailing app SafeBoda, and they will be delivered directly to the individual’s doorstep. Ms. Nagadya’s song helps raise awareness about this new service. And her openness invites community members to ask questions. Many do, especially young people.

“Many of them are still shy to talk about using condoms,” she said. “But when I sing my song, they understand what I mean, so they come and ask questions. I teach them how to use condoms and give them to them. I also go to houses where I know there are people who might need condoms,” she said.

Ride-hailing app to the rescue

Even before the pandemic, there was a need to expand access to sexual and reproductive health services and supplies. For instance, an estimated 19 per cent of women in Uganda want to prevent or delay pregnancy but are not using a method of contraception, according to recent reports.

A SafeBoda driver delivers reproductive health commodities to a communitiy health team member. © Uplift Foundation Uganda. Credit: SafeBoda/ UNFPA

The outbreak of COVID-19 has only compounded the situation. Supply chains interruptions and transport restrictions have limited the availability of a wide range of essential reproductive health supplies.

In response, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), together with health officials, Marie Stopes and SafeBoda, with financial support from the Embassy of Sweden in Uganda, created an e-shop where individuals can order the products they need. By making the e-shop available via the widely used SafeBoda app, organizers were able to reach an extensive user base.

When a user requests an item, the app identifies the nearest pharmacy within a 7 kilometre radius where the item is in stock. A SafeBoda driver then picks up the item and delivers it to the user.

SafeBoda drivers also deliver reproductive commodities to local health centres – where health team members like Ms. Nagadya collect them for distribution – helping to fill gaps in the supply chain.

Most of the e-shop’s reproductive health items shop are subsidized and inexpensive. Free government-provided condoms can also be ordered. All delivery charges have been waived during the pandemic period. The service will continue post-COVID-19, for a nominal delivery fee.

The service is now up and running in the populous Kampala and Wakiso districts.

Re-thinking services for youth

Users of the SafeBoda app say this new service is an important development, “especially [for] things we fear to order over the counter,” said Flora Peace, from Nansana. “I am sure most people are excited about this.”

Many drivers are also happy about the development.

A SafeBoda driver delivers condoms. © AIDS Information Center Uganda. Credit: SafeBoda/ UNFPA

SafeBoda driver Moses Okanya, 25, has been delivering boxes of condoms to St Francis Hospital in Kakiri. He says this new responsibility is rewarding.

“I feel I have played a role to reach my fellow young people, because if the condoms are not in the hospital, then the young people are going to put themselves at risk. Making the condoms available to them is something I am proud of,” he said.

Mr. Okanya takes precautions to prevent the spread of COVID-19 while working, diligently wearing a mask and using hand sanitizer. At the same time, he wants to make sure the COVID-19 crisis does not lead to the neglect of people’s other health needs. “We may put more emphasis on COVID-19, and then we are losing people from other diseases which have been there before,” he said.

Now is the time to consider new solutions to longstanding problems, UNFPA’s representative in Uganda, Alain Sibenaler, said.

“We have had to rethink and become more innovative in reaching young people and women with sexual and reproductive health-related information and services,” he said.

• This article was originally published in the UNFPA website (web@unfpa.org)

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