Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Jul 23 2020 (IPS)

Most of  the countries in the Caribbean have done a great job of containing the COVID-19 pandemic, with a few notable exceptions, namely, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. A University of Oxford study highlighted Trinidad and Tobago as being among the most successful. However, management of wildlife and illegal hunting in that country remains ineffective. 

The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists 66 endangered or vulnerable species in Trinidad and Tobago, including fish and amphibians. A few, like the Piping Guan, are listed as critically endangered because of being avidly hunted.

Could the scourge of illegal hunting in Trinidad and Tobago lead to an outbreak of another zoonotic disease?

In this Voices from the Global South podcast, IPS Caribbean correspondent Jewel Fraser talks with a University of the West Indies virologist, a wildlife conservationist and a wildlife biologist about the threats posed to both human and animal health by illegal hunting in Trinidad and Tobago.

 

The post Trinidad Skilfully Handles COVID-19 but Falls Short with Wildlife appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Could indiscriminate hunting lead to an outbreak of another zoonotic disease in Trinidad and Tobago. In this Voices from the Global South podcast our correspondent Jewel Fraser finds out.

The post Trinidad Skilfully Handles COVID-19 but Falls Short with Wildlife appeared first on Inter Press Service.

A group of women farmers ready to head out to the plots they farm on the community lands outside of Huasao, a rural town in Peru’s Andes highlands department of Cuzco. Credit: Nayda Quispe/IPS

By Nout van der Vaart
ROTTERDAM/THE HAGUE, Jul 23 2020 (IPS)

At last week’s 2020 High Level Political Forum (HLPF), UN member states discussed how to get back on track to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. They focused on a dire need for “accelerated action and transformative pathways to realize the decade of action and delivery for sustainable development.”

Given the fact we’re also entering an unprecedented climate emergency, let’s be specific about what’s needed. Responding adequately to Covid-19 and achieving the SDGs in the next ten years will need to include serious efforts to rein in and adapt to the impacts of climate change.

Agricultural biodiversity is the key to thriving, resilient food systems. So governments, agribusinesses and civil society organizations should promote food production practices that create and maintain agrobiodiversity – including indigenous foods and knowledge

Climate change is already hitting low-income and marginalized groups the hardest. If we want to realize a just and rights-based transition to climate-resilient and inclusive societies, we need to make sure of one important thing. That all those in today’s food system – especially those hit hardest – are involved in re-shaping our future food system.

 

Why transforming our food systems will be essential

Food production systems are among the largest contributors to climate change. Last year’s IPCC special report on climate change and land stated that an estimated 21 to 37 percent of greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activities come mainly from animal production and deforestation.

At the same time, the changing climate is also adversely affecting food production systems and food security worldwide.

Who is caught up in the vicious circle of climate change? Everyone. From smallholder farmers and informal food vendors to factory farms and powerful multinationals. Yet marginalized groups are impacted the most. Groups like low-income consumers, ethnic minorities, indigenous peoples, and women in particular. The problem is, the powerful – who are the most responsible – have the resources to dodge the bullet, while the marginalized need support to adjust and adapt.

What many people ignore – or don’t realize – is that these groups are vital elements of local food systems. Smallholder farmers and informal food vendors largely shape and sustain these systems. We simply cannot overlook this fact as we enter the “decade of action and delivery for sustainable development.”

 

Food Parliament in Uganda, photo courtesy of Slow Food Uganda.

 

How civil society enables marginalized groups to transform food systems

As the climate emergency advances, it’s clear that those who are least responsible for climate change suffer from it the most. In this context, the SDG mantra “leaving no one behind” is also a call to enable marginalized groups – smallholder farmers, low-income consumers, and informal vendors – to become resilient to climate change.

That will help bolster everyone’s food security and protect food systems worldwide. Hivos and our partners recognize the pivotal position of these groups. At the same time, “leaving no one behind” must go hand in hand with broader climate mitigation efforts, including structural changes to food production practices and marketing, and food consumption patterns.

Our new paper with IIED shows how our Sustainable Diets for All (SD4All) program has empowered CSOs and low-income groups to advocate for more inclusive, sustainable food system policies that integrate climate resilience. We can highlight two examples here.

In Zambia, monoculture production of maize is encouraged by national agricultural policies. This has led to soil degradation and biodiversity loss, leaving many smallholder farmers vulnerable to climate change. Our SD4All partner Civil Society for Poverty Reduction worked with the government to create an e-voucher system that helps smallholder farmers access seeds and other inputs for different crops than maize.

In Uganda, our SD4All partner Volunteer Efforts for Development Concerns (VEDCO) has trained and deployed what they call “diet champions.” They go into the field, visiting farmers and local authorities alike. Their mission is to promote the production and consumption of local vegetables among farmers. And to convince local authorities to adopt policies and pass regulations that stimulate the same behavior. The champions have special advice for both: indigenous crops are often better suited to the local climate and more resistant to climate shocks.

 

How government can multiply civil society’s efforts to change our food systems

The good work civil society does to tackle the climate crisis and transform our food system can only go so far. For truly effective global change, governments, international institutions and other relevant stakeholders must scale up these efforts. In light of upcoming international conferences like the UN 2021 Food Systems Summit and the Nutrition for Growth Summit, we urge them to prioritize three action areas:

1. Strengthen the role of citizens and CSOs in food governance. Lasting results are only possible if you include the voices normally left out of decision-making. So governments need to hold transparent and inclusive dialogues with everyone who has a vested interest in food systems. Only then will the needs and opinions of the most marginalized and underrepresented groups be included.
2. Promote and invest in diverse, climate-resilient food systems. Agricultural biodiversity is the key to thriving, resilient food systems. So governments, agribusinesses and civil society organizations should promote food production practices that create and maintain agrobiodiversity – including indigenous foods and knowledge.
3. Embrace and empower smaller, local players in food systems. Most underprivileged citizens in low-income countries buy their food at local informal markets and smaller businesses (formal and informal SMEs). At the same time, these are the main outlets smallholder farmers use to sell their produce. Governments need to acknowledge the vital role these local markets and SMEs play and encourage them. They can do this in two ways. Through policies that allow a wide range of local food producers and sellers to thrive within food systems. And by adopting legislation that prevents large companies from monopolizing the food system.

 

It’s now or never

The next “decade of action” for sustainable development and combatting climate change is here – and the time to act boldly is now. With Covid-19 amplifying the imbalances and unjust structures of our food system, the need for an inclusive and green recovery is staring us in the face.

Failing to shift towards climate-proof food systems risks collapsing the ecological and social-economical support structures our societies are based on. For the benefit of future generations, we must prevent the climate crisis from worsening any way we can. Radically transforming the food system by putting citizen’s voices and needs – so often ignored – at the center of the transformation is crucial.

 

This opinion piece was originally published here

The post Involve Marginalized Groups to Make Food Systems More Climate-Resilient appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Nout van der Vaart is Hivos' Sustainable Diets for All advocacy officer

The post Involve Marginalized Groups to Make Food Systems More Climate-Resilient appeared first on Inter Press Service.

People living in Lagos State in Nigeria, simulate sneezing into their elbows during a coronavirus prevention campaign. Credit: Africa Renewal

By Franck Kuwonu
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 23 2020 (IPS)

Re-opening economies is a tough balancing act between keeping people safe from the virus while ensuring they can still make a living.

Some four months after the first COVID-19 case in Africa was reported in Egypt, countries on the continent are beginning to ease public health and social measures, such as lockdowns and curfews, imposed to curb the spread of the pandemic.

In Côte d’Ivoire, commercial activities have resumed, and students are back in classrooms, while in South Africa, where the army enforced strict lockdown rules, the government has allowed all essential services to resume operations, and on Monday 8 June some schools reopened.

As of 29 June, the World Health Organization (WHO) in Africa reports over 380,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases – with more than 181,000 recoveries. 9,500 people have lost their lives to the disease.

Across the continent, people are still encouraged to practice social distancing, wear masks and frequently wash their hands. International borders remain closed to regular passenger travel. Nevertheless, most countries are slowly easing restrictive stay-at-home measures in the face of their most severe consequences on the livelihoods of people.

In May, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) estimated that the continent could lose up to $65.7 billion (2.5 percent of annual GDP) for every month of lockdown.

Nigeria, the top African economy, may have lost about $18 billion which represents a 38 per cent drop in GDP in just five weeks of lockdown from March to April, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), found.

However, as COVID-19 cases remain on the uptick, including in countries that have re-opened their economies, governments are having to balance containment with preserving people’s means of earning a living.

Franck Kuwonu

As a result, some countries have paused their plans to open up further, while others have extended their lockdowns indefinitely. Yet others continue to re-open their economies while ramping up testing and isolation of cases.

Rwanda, one of the first countries to impose a complete lockdown allowed people working in public and private essential services, including market vendors, to return to their workplaces at the beginning of May. A month later, authorities cancelled plans to re-open further as COVID-19 cases rose and the country registered its first coronavirus-related death.

Zimbabwe remains under an indefinite lockdown, with a fortnightly review to determine when to re-open.

At the start of the pandemic, Ghana’s president Nana Akuffo-Addo declared a lockdown in and around the capital Accra and other urban centres such as Kumasi in the south.

“We know how to bring the economy back to life. What we don’t know is how to bring people back to life,” President Akuffo-Addo said at the time.

Ghana ranks among the leading African countries in testing, and has registered a high number of cases, even as the lockdown was lifted. Since April, Ghanaians can move between urban centres that were earlier cordoned off. Internal flights have resumed. They are allowed into houses of prayer, but public gatherings remain highly restricted in size and schools remain closed.

Some countries decided against lockdowns altogether amid concerns of the socio-economic effects. Benin’s president Patrice Talon did not enforce restrictive measures that, he said, will “starve everybody” and “end up being defied and violated,” adding that the government lacked the “means of rich countries.”

“[A] one-size-fits-all approach to COVID-19 could have lethal consequences” for Africa, warned two University of Johannesburg academics in March, in The Conversation magazine, as more than half of the continent rushed to put in place very stringent transmission-curbing measures.

The easing of lockdowns appears to be an acknowledgement of those concerns. However, the accelerated increase in the number of COVID-19 cases being witnessed now suggests that previous stay-at-home orders were effective in curbing the spread of the virus.

According to WHO, the number of days for case numbers to double in a given country – increased during the lockdown period in most of the countries of the region (5 days to 41 in Cote d’Ivoire, 3 days to 14 in South Africa).

In a recent survey across 28 cities in 20 African countries, a majority of people say they supported these public health and social measures, even the most restrictive, aimed at slowing the pandemic. At the same time, some admitted to violating stay-at-home orders to look for food.

The survey was conducted between 29 March and 17 April by PERC (Partnership for Evidence- Based Response to COVID-19), a global private-public partnership on health, including the WHO, the African Centres for Disease Control (Africa CDC), and the World Economic Forum.

As COVID-19 began to spread in Africa, governments took measures early on to cushion people from the socio-economic impact of the pandemic. Namibia is offering emergency income grants to workers who have lost jobs, Cabo Verde is providing cash transfers and food assistance, while Togo is subsidizing access to water and electricity, to name a few.

Yet, the PERC warns that those targeted measures and the gradual re-opening of public spaces may not be enough to meet people’s needs in the long run as domestic and international supply chains remain disrupted.

These are concerns shared by African governments as they contend with when and how to re-open their economies while still managing the health aspects of the ongoing crisis.

*This article, originally published in UN’s Africa Renewal, has been updated to reflect the number of confirmed cases, recoveries and deaths as of 29 June.

 

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The post As COVID-19 Cases Rise, African Countries Grapple with Safely Easing Lockdowns appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Franck Kuwonu, Africa Renewal*

The post As COVID-19 Cases Rise, African Countries Grapple with Safely Easing Lockdowns appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Jul 23 2020 (IPS)

Covid-19 is expected to take a heavy human and economic toll on developing countries, not only because of contagion in the face of weak health systems, but also containment measures which have precipitated recessions, destroying and diminishing the livelihoods of many.

Limited fiscal space
Developing countries generally have limited fiscal capacities to finance relief and liquidity provision in the short-term while rebuilding economic life on a more sustainable basis in the longer-term.

Anis Chowdhury

The 2020 Financing for Sustainable Development Report shows debt vulnerability growing in many developing countries well before the pandemic. For example, public sector borrowings of commodity exporters increased substantially after prices collapsed in 2014-15. With these prices further depressed now, the pandemic will increase developing country debt.

Investors withdrew nearly US$80 billion from emerging markets in the first quarter of 2020 – the largest capital outflow in history, according to the Institute of International Finance – as remittances fell at least 20%, i.e., by over US$100 billion.

Most other developing countries do not have strong enough credit ratings to secure low-cost foreign sovereign debt despite low interest rates in the North.

Ballooning debt
According to the World Bank’s recent Global Waves of Debt, the past decade has seen the largest, fastest and most broad-based increase in emerging market and developing economies (EMDE) debt in the past half century.

Since 2010, total EMDE debt – both public and private – rose from 108.6% of GDP (88% without China) to more than 170% (108% excluding China), totalling US$57 trillion in 2019.

Private corporate debt accounted for much of this ballooning EMDE debt, rising from 77% of GDP in 2010 to 117% in 2018. But public debt (without China) has also risen from 38.6% of GDP in 2010 to 49.4% in 2018.

Following a sharp decline during 2000-10, total low-income country (LIC) debt rose from 51.5% of GDP (US$137 bn) in 2010 to 65.8% (US$268 bn) in 2018. Public debt is far more important in LICs, rising from 36.5% of GDP in 2010 to 45.7% in 2018, borrowing more from ‘non-traditional’ sources, notably China.

Dangerous borrowings
When governments can borrow on reasonable terms to invest in projects needed for sustainable development, debt may be desirable, if not necessary, especially in resource-poor countries. IMF research suggests that optimal debt levels depend on many considerations.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Nevertheless, debt can have very undesirable impacts, especially when not well used. Debt composition can also be worrisome. The recent debt build-up is particularly concerning because much of it is external.

And now, developing countries’ ability to service growing debt is constrained by falling export revenues due to pandemic-induced commodity price collapses complicated by the shift to riskier debt.

The external share of EDME government debt reached 43% in 2018, while foreign currency denominated corporate debt rose from 19% of GDP in 2010 to 26% in 2018.

Commercial credit increased over three-fold from 2010 to 2019, rising from 5.0% to 17.5% of LICs’ external public debt, while contributing to more than half of their non-concessional government debt.

Heavier burdens
Many developing countries face sovereign debt crises, unable to pay off accumulated debt or interest. An increasing share is owed to China, especially by ‘un-creditworthy’ poor countries, but European bond markets and private lenders still account for more.

African government external debt payments doubled in two years, from 5.9% of government revenue in 2015 to 11.8% in 2017. A fifth of Africa’s external debt of about US$405 bn is owed to China, 32% (US$132 bn) to bond markets and other private lenders, and 35% (US$144 bn) to multilateral institutions such as the World Bank.

Debt servicing accounts for the largest share of government spending, and remains the fastest growing expenditure item in sub-Saharan African budgets. As debt from private creditors is more expensive, 55% of interest payments go to them.

Interest payments due on private debt to African nations for the rest of 2020 are around US$3 billion. Compared to very low to negative rates in Europe, America and Japan, most African governments are paying 5~16% interest on 10-year government bonds.

African countries have been accused of borrowing too much, but the problem is that they are paying far too much interest, mainly due to rating agencies’ and bond issuers’ prejudices and practices. Thus, although Ethiopia has grown at 8~11% for over a decade, its sovereign credit rating has not improved.

Also, transparency about contingent liabilities, e.g., due to state-owned enterprise debt and public-private partnership transactions, is limited in most developing countries, especially for debt owed to commercial and non-Paris Club creditors.

Contingent liabilities may also grow during this pandemic as governments have to extend loan guarantees for the private sector to prevent total economic collapse.

Debt worsens inequality
Debt also increases inequality in at least four ways. First, debt enriches creditors and financial intermediaries, typically at the expense of borrowers. Interest and other capital gains greatly increase asset incomes, wealth and capital.

Second, government debt often enriches wealthy elites. Some of the politically well-connected profit from project financing, the burden of which is borne by the people.

A leaked World Bank study estimated that 5% of all new Bank finance to poor countries ended up in tax havens. Bank loans to 22 countries receiving aid during 1990-2010 also increased deposits in secret offshore bank accounts.

Third, fiscal arrangements involving debt typically deepen inequality. To service debt, governments often increase taxation and cut spending. While the IMF and financial interests usually insist on fiscal consolidation involving austerity, creditors may even demand ‘credible’, compliant finance ministers.

While taxes on the wealthy can be increased, the dominant trend in the last four decades has been otherwise. Instead, the IMF has urged governments for decades to increase revenue through value added and other regressive indirect taxation, usually on consumption.

Many governments have had to cut expenditure to increase revenue to service debt, usual making social spending cuts, worsening inequality and social discontent, triggering widespread protests in Kenya, Ecuador, Lebanon and elsewhere.

Relief urgently needed
The severity of current recessions, affecting most countries, and dim prospects of robust rebounds, may tip many LICs into debt distress. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development has warned of a “looming debt disaster” in developing countries, calling for US$1 trillion in debt relief.

On 15 April 2020, G20 finance ministers agreed to a “time-bound suspension of debt service payments” for 76 low-income developing countries eligible for World Bank International Development Association consideration, while the IMF has offered debt service relief to 25 of the poorest countries.

Nevertheless, the UN believes these actions will not be enough to avoid defaults as the G20 move does not effect private lenders.

The unique, but varied and changing nature of the pandemic and efforts to contain contagion, and the specific challenges of relief, revival and reorientation imply that neither ‘one size fits all’ nor other formulaic solutions, e.g., to address financial crisis, are appropriate.

Policy measures will not only need to address the specificities of the Covid-19 crises, but must also take into consideration the legacy of earlier problems, including the burdens of accumulated debt and debt-servicing.

 

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Elwyn Grainger-Jones is the Executive Director of the CGIAR System Organization.

By Elwyn Grainger-Jones
MONTPELLIER, France, Jul 22 2020 (IPS)

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the structural weaknesses of today’s food systems, showing how quickly global networks of food production, trade and supply can waver under the impact of a single disease.

By compromising access to safe, nutritious food through enforced restrictions on distribution and labour resulting in shortages and price rises, the coronavirus outbreak has shaken the foundations of global wellbeing, with repercussions for health, livelihoods, and equality.

Elwyn Grainger-Jones

But while such an interconnected system, in which food and agriculture prop up healthy economies, environments and societies, has its vulnerabilities, it also points to potential strengths.

By responding with the best available science and research on resilient, healthy and sustainable food systems, the global community can not only recover food security, but it can also build back better entire systems that support health, nutrition, incomes and climate action.

This is why CGIAR’s response to COVID-19 is underpinned by four key pillars of research that provide crucial insights into how to transform food systems with short-, medium- and long-term changes for the better ahead of the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit.

In the months leading up to the decisive summit, CGIAR will make the case for a science-based approach to response, recovery and resilience, to support a much-needed transformation of food production, distribution, consumption and disposal, which form global food systems.

The first of these four pillars is research into food systems and within this, CGIAR has prioritised the means and ways to ensure sufficient and diverse food supplies during the pandemic and its aftermath.

For example, as part of the short-term response in the next 12 months, CGIAR will gather and provide on-the-ground monitoring data and scientific evidence that will help policymakers and agencies to better understand and overcome the pressures on local and regional food systems.

The CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE) is monitoring harvests in South Asia to identify food supply shocks caused by COVID-19 while the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT will document the effects of the pandemic on the production and consumption of rice in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Meanwhile, researchers are working to improve the very starting points for food production, from improved rice germplasm to improved species of carp to produce more and better food to consume and to sell.

The second research pillar addressed the need for robust understanding of both animal and human health to support the sustainable growth of animal agriculture.

Research dedicated to “One Health” – or the concept that animal, human and environmental health is inextricable – includes the threat of disease spillover between people and livestock as well as improved disease control measures from hygiene and decontamination to vaccination and safe food storage.

The CGIAR COVID-19 Hub is carrying out research into food safety in informal value chains, for example, in Kenya’s dairy sector and the pork market in Vietnam.

Such research offers valuable insights to inform and shape government and multilateral investments that prioritise protecting the most vulnerable from the impact of the pandemic.

Under this third research pillar, scientists are studying the effects of social protection programs, identifying areas of vulnerability and mapping local food systems to understand existing and needed coping mechanisms, which are often embedded in informal and social structures.

Finally, the fourth research pillar is focused on the broader framework needed for policies and investment that support response, recovery and long-term resilience.

At a country level, this means using science and research to develop tailored policies that mitigate the impact of shocks on the most vulnerable.

In Bangladesh, CGIAR research and evidence is being used to develop interventions designed around specific crop seasons as well as household food aid distribution and wet market management.

And at a global level, CGIAR is also working with UN agencies and development partners on research including phone-based survey assessments to understand the impacts of COVID-19 on rural household livelihoods and food security.

COVID-19 may have caused devastating setbacks and instability around the world that risk undermining progress towards global development, including ending hunger, malnutrition and poverty. But for those of us working on agricultural development to serve public health, wellbeing and prosperity, the pandemic has only accelerated efforts towards our mission.

CGIAR research in four key areas can help ensure that instead of uprooting progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the pandemic is taken as an opportunity to add urgent reinforcements and bolster the structures on which global development depends.

Between now and the culmination of the UN Food Systems Summit, countries and authorities must build stronger bridges with the academic and research community to ensure that all of us can build back better.

 

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The post Research Provides the Bricks and Mortar for Our Food Systems to ‘Build Back Better’ appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Elwyn Grainger-Jones is the Executive Director of the CGIAR System Organization.

The post Research Provides the Bricks and Mortar for Our Food Systems to ‘Build Back Better’ appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Agroecological systems, which build resilience through crop/species diversity and natural synergies across the whole agro-ecosystem, are showing major potential. Credit: (C. Perodeaud, 2018)

By the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food)*
BRUSSELS , Jul 22 2020 (IPS)

While the ‘CGIAR System’ may sound like a technocratic body, few organizations have exerted as much influence on today’s food systems as this network of global agricultural research centres. Since its inception at the height of the ‘Green Revolution’ in 1971, the CGIAR has driven advances in crop breeding and agricultural mechanization and modernization across multiple continents. Its mission – to develop knowledge and innovation for agriculture in the global South – is as relevant today as ever, in light of climate change, COVID-19 and a host of additional challenges.

The process now underway to reform the CGIAR is therefore of major public interest. The ‘One CGIAR’ process seeks to merge the CGIAR’s 15 legally-independent centres, headquartered in 15 countries, into one legal entity. The impetus has come from some of its biggest funders, notably the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank, and the US and UK governments.

Reform of the CGIAR is long overdue. However, we are concerned that the current reform process, like previous versions, will fall short of the fundamental change that is required, and risks exacerbating major power imbalances in global agricultural development.

Firstly, the restructuring appears to have been advanced in a coercive manner, and without genuine buy-in from the global South. A ‘carrot and stick’ approach has been adopted: an increase in the overall CGIAR budget has been promised if the merger goes through, while centres resisting the move have allegedly been threatened with budget cuts. Insiders say that representatives from governments and agricultural institutes in the global South – the much-touted beneficiaries of the CGIAR and the Green Revolution – are generally against the merger, while the big funders and closely-affiliated scientific institutions are in favour. The two centres voting against the merger last week were the forest and agroforestry centres headquartered in Indonesia and Kenya respectively.

Secondly, there is insufficient diversity among the inner circle driving forward CGIAR reform. In the mid-1990s, when the CGIAR underwent an earlier restructuring, men from just four countries – the US, the UK, Canada and Australia – accounted for 85% of board chairs and directors. The CGIAR has subsequently made efforts to improve gender balance, and to bring on staff and board members from the global South. However, a true diversity of perspectives is still missing: many of those recruited have close associations with Northern universities and donor-led partnerships, while the voices of farmers, civil society and independent researchers in the global South are still largely absent. Only 7 of the 22 members of the CGIAR System Reference Group (SRG) – responsible for managing the transition process – are from the global South, of which two are already affiliated to CGIAR centres.

Thirdly, the proposed restructuring fails to equip CGIAR for the urgently-needed paradigm shift in food systems. Business-as-usual approaches to agricultural development are failing to address hunger and improve the livelihoods of smallholders, as shown by the shortcomings of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. Meanwhile, agroecological systems, which build resilience through crop/species diversity and natural synergies across the whole agro-ecosystem, are showing major potential – as recognized by the World Bank-led global agriculture assessment (‘IAASTD’), IPBES, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and a July 2020 statement by 366 scientists. The CGIAR has taken some steps towards systemic approaches, particularly through the work of some of its centres on participatory plant breeding, farmer-managed seed systems, varietal and species diversification for nutrition and resilience, biological control and agroforestry. But it has failed to mainstream these approaches: a 2017 study concluded that the “CGIAR environment was not conducive to implementing systems research”. Recent analysis by Biovision and IPES-Food found that, on average, CGIAR research programmes meet less than 20% of the indicators of systemic agroecological research.

While the basic shortcomings have been acknowledged in the current reform process, the CGIAR’s underlying philosophy does not appear to have shifted. The focus remains on scientific innovations being “deployed faster, at a larger scale, and at a reduced cost”, and provided to rather than developed with beneficiaries. By ushering in a single board with new agenda-setting powers, the restructuring may further reduce the autonomy of regional research agendas and reinforce the grip of the most powerful donors – many of whom have proven reluctant to diverge from the Green Revolution pathway.

Underlying all three of these problems is the disproportionate power of a handful of actors to control the purse strings and set the global agricultural development agenda. This reality risks undermining and short-circuiting the significant efforts to consult stakeholders over the past year.

It is therefore crucial to consider how these risks can be averted as the restructuring process moves forward, and to open a discussion on fundamental reform of the CGIAR. In order to rebuild its legitimacy and relevance, the CGIAR must: diversify its governance; put at centre stage the views of farmers, researchers, civil society groups, and governments in the global South; support transformative, transdisciplinary, agroecological research co-led by farmers and farmer organisations; collaborate with a broad network of regional, sub-regional and national research centres and universities to strengthen autonomous research capacity in the global South; and participate alongside the Rome-based agencies (FAO, IFAD, WFP) in the Committee on World Food Security (CFS).

Ultimately, the CGIAR system should mirror the food system we need: decentralized, context-specific, agroecological, and with more distributed and equal power relations.

*The IPES-Food expert panel: Olivier De Schutter (Co-chair), Olivia Yambi (Co-chair), Bina Agarwal, Molly Anderson, Million Belay, Nicolas Bricas, Joji Carino, Jennifer Franco, Mamadou Goïta, Emile Frison, Steve Gliessman, Hans Herren, Phil Howard, Melissa Leach, Lim Li Ching, Desmond McNeill, Pat Mooney, Raj Patel, P.V. Satheesh, Maryam Rahmanian, Cécilia Rocha, Johan Rockstrom, Ricardo Salvador, Laura Trujillo-Ortega, Paul Uys, Nettie Wiebe, Yan Hairong.

 

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The post ‘One CGIAR’ with Two Tiers of Influence? The Case for a Real Restructuring of Global Ag-Research Centres appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

This is an abridged version of an open letter by IPES-Food to the CGIAR on 21 July 2020.

The post ‘One CGIAR’ with Two Tiers of Influence? The Case for a Real Restructuring of Global Ag-Research Centres appeared first on Inter Press Service.

11-year-old Fatoumata Binta (left) and her brother Iphrahima Tall (right) collect water from a dry river bed. This summer, the family has struggled to get enough water. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
HYDERBAD, India, Jul 22 2020 (IPS)

With Tabaski (Eid al-Adha) around the corner, 11-year-old Fatoumata Binta from Terrou Mballing district in M’Bour, western Senegal, wakes up early and joins her brothers Iphrahima Tall and Ismaila to fetch water from a river several miles from home.

This summer, the family has struggled to get enough water as city taps have often run dry. But because of the coronavirus, they need extra water for maintaining cleanliness and frequent handwashing.

But there is another reason why they need additional water.

In a few weeks time, Muslim families will sacrifice a livestock animal to mark Tabaski. Binta’s family have been raising goats to sell on the market ahead of the festival, but the animals need lots of water. 

“If they don’t drink enough, the goats will lose weight and sell for less,” Binta, who has not been to school since March because of the COVID-19 pandemic, tells IPS.

Schools in Senegal, which closed on Mar. 15, were scheduled to reopen on Jun 2. However, the return was cancelled as several teachers tested positive for the coronavirus across the country, but mainly in Ziguinchor in the southern Casamence region. To date, the country has officially counted more than 8,985 coronavirus cases, including 174 deaths.

But when schools reopen in August-September, Binta might not return. The reason, she says, is that her community school doesn’t have enough water. Besides, there are no toilets for girls and Binta, who has just begun to menstruate, feels too shy to use a shared toilet.

Poor WASH Reflects Low Priority

According to the recently published United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) report on global education, only one percent of schools in Senegal have separate toilets for girls. The dismal performance has actually put the country at the bottom of a list of 45 developing countries.

Experts say that the core reason behind this is the low priority attached to girls’ education. Although the government has been focusing on girls’ enrolment at elementary level, the focus on improving their water and sanitation needs has remained a neglected subject.

Fatou Gueye Seck, programme coordinator from the Coalition of Organisations in Energy for the Defence of Public Education (COSYDEP Senegal), shares an example. 

Since 2016, the number of people enrolled in Functional Literacy Centres (CAF) has fallen by more than half, with the number of learners decreasing from 34,373 to 15,435. This underperformance is explained by the insufficiency of the overall amount of funding for CAFs.

“The funding is supposed to be one percent of [public spending] but in reality that is not happening. Unless the funding is increased, in the middle and secondary cycles, gender parity in the country’s education sector cannot be reached until 2021,” Seck tells IPS.

Seck is also the president of the education theme of the Deliver for Good Senegal campaign, an evidence-based advocacy and communication platform that promotes the health, rights and wellbeing of girls and women. The campaign is part of a larger, global campaign powered by Women Deliver.

“In Senegal, the gender index is still against girls,” Seck told IPS in an earlier interview.

Girl students at a school in the Pikine suburb of Dakar, Senegal. A recent United Nations report says, only one percent of schools have a separate toilet for girls. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Growing water crisis in urban areas

In urban Senegal, water shortages have been frequent for several years, affecting thousands of households. 

But this summer, the shortage has been more acute, as most homes have seen their taps run dry or reduced to a trickle. 

In recent weeks during the  emergency coronavirus lockdown, protests have rocked both the streets of the capital Dakar and M’Bour, a city in western Senegal. Many citizens complained that water supply has worsened since this January when the government signed over the rights of water distribution and management, for 15-years, to a private company called Sen’eau.

As the protests grew, the company made a public statement, blaming the crisis on a storm that damaged some of its infrastructure and promised to normalise distribution by next year.

The government has also assured the public that a solution will be found. On Jun. 17, following a cabinet meeting, Senegalese President Macky Sall stressed  “the imperative to mobilise technical expertise and financial resources to ensure the optimal functioning of hydraulic infrastructures”.

But in the meantime, citizens are spending extra money on purchasing water. Although the rainy season arrived in July, urban Senegal is still struggling with supply shortages of daily water.

Fatima Faye, a 23-year-old health worker in M’Bour, tells IPS that she spends $10 every week on purchasing water: “The taps only give droplets, but the water bills are quite big.”

Unsafe water affecting education

According to Global Waters, an agency supported by the USAID Center for Water Security, Sanitation, and Hygiene, 49 percent people in Senegal lack access to proper sanitation facilities while 20 percent of Senegalese don’t have access to safe drinking water.

For them the only source of water are open wells and rivulets. So they drink non-potable, unfiltered and untreated water.

Amina Diop, a fruit seller from Guediyawaye, a suburb in Dakar, has been using an open well for all her domestic water needs. Her entire family, including her two daughters, also drink from the same water source. 

Before the lockdown began, one of her girls, 10-year-old  Aminata, often missed school. “Her stomach ran, so I just let her be at home,” Diop tells IPS. Aminata was likely ill because of contaminants in the water source.

But a Women Deliver policy brief on access for girls and women to resources such as water and sanitation notes the benefits of “bringing sanitation options closer to or within the home is a critical improvement for women in the community”.

“It means they won’t have to walk long distances to find a site that is private, which decreases the risk of gender-based violence. It saves them time and energy, reduces their exposure to violence, and improves their nutritional status, which in turn has a positive impact on their reproductive health and pregnancy outcomes,” the brief notes.

It also notes a 2012 study in sub-Saharan Africa that showed a 15-minute decrease in time spent walking to a water source is associated with;

• 41 percent average reduction in diarrhoea prevalence, 
• 11 percent reduction in under-5 mortality, and
• improvements in the nutritional status of children.

Menstrual hygiene takes a hit

According to a 2017 survey done by Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC) — the United Nations-hosted organisation dedicated to advancing Sustainable Development Goal 6 of providing clean water and sanitation for all people — 56 percent of girls students in Senegal miss school due to menstruation and inadequate water, sanitation and hygiene facilities.

Some Senegalese NGOs have started to fill the knowledge gap by holding informal classes and workshops with young female students. One of these is Apiafrique, a Dakar-based social enterprise that produces environment-friendly feminine hygiene products,

Marina Gning, the CEO of Apiafrique, has held several workshops for school-going students over the last two years where she teaches them the importance of maintaining menstrual hygiene and also trains them in making sanitary pads that can be reused.

“Throughout Africa, women and girls are often thought of as impure during menstrual cycles, and face societal exclusion, as well as a lack of adequate sanitation infrastructure in schools and homes,” Gning tells IPS.

Between the fight against pandemic, which requires extra water for frequent handwashing, and the country’s water-supply crisis, maintaining menstrual hygiene has become a challenge.

“The challenge now, is keeping the sanitary pads clean. Reusable pads means something that you need to wash. But if there is not enough water, how can you do any washing? So, what use can you make of the knowledge?” Amelie Ndecky, a college student who attended one of Gning’s workshops in 2018 in Ngaparou, a suburb of M’Bour, asks IPS.

Her questions remain unanswered.  

Related Articles

• Providing an Education in Favour of Senegal’s Girls
• Non-formal Education Helps Senegalese Women Combat FGM and Harmful Practices
• How Senegal is Providing Reproductive Health Services to those Who can Least Afford it

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By Dr. Joseph Gerson
NEW YORK, Jul 22 2020 (IPS)

In the words of (ret.) Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Secretary of Defense Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff, the Trump Administration has been dangerously “poking China in the eye.”

After sending aircraft carriers and destroyers to the precincts of the Taiwan Strait, last week the Pentagon dispatched two aircraft carrier strike groups – including escort cruisers and destroyers, 120 warplanes and 12,000 troops — to South China Sea waters claimed by China. China responded by deploying fighter jets to its near-by base on Woody Island and reminding the world of its anti-aircraft carrier missile capabilities.

Such a massive U.S. fleet has not been deployed to this intensely contested region since 2014. It is only the second time in two decades that such a bellicose show of force has been provocatively displayed in the Asia-Pacific.

This comes midst President Trump’s efforts to deflect attention from his catastrophic Covid-19 failures by blaming and scapegoating China. We had Trump’s “Wuhan virus” rebranding. On July 13, Secretary of State Pompeo issued a statement which appears to lay the legal foundations for war with China.

And, Chinese students and researchers in the United States have all been labeled as spies and potential spies. Ignoring the possible consequences or an unpredictable war, Trump appears to be pushing China to the brink, seeking a military incident that can be used to rally Americans around an actual wartime president and save his failing reelection campaign.

Joseph Gerson

Two thousand five hundred years ago, the revered Greek historian Thucydides wrote his history of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. His analysis of the inevitable tensions between rising and declining powers which frequently – but not always – result in catastrophic war, became known as the Thucydides Trap.

In the South China Sea, President Trump is playing dangerously with the trap’s trigger. Even as we decry Beijing’s human rights abuses and provocative actions to create its version of the Monroe Doctrine in the South China Sea, we have an urgent responsibility to prevent war and to press for diplomatic initiatives to pull the two nuclear powers back from the brink.

COMPETING CLAIMS

The crisis has been brewing for decades. The South China Sea, portions of which are claimed by China, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei extends across 1.3 million square miles of the western Pacific.

Its sea-bed is thought to contain up to 17.7 billion tons of crude oil (making it the world’s fourth largest oil reserve), massive amounts of natural gas, and other minerals.

It also lies astride the sea lanes over which 40% of the world’s trade transits, including fossil fuels that power the Chinese, Japanese and South Korean economies. Its waves lap against China’s most vulnerable frontier – it’s coastal economic powerhouse from Shanghai to Guangzhou.

Much like the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf throughout the second half of the 20th century, the South China Sea functions as the jugular vein of the world’s most dynamic capitalist economies.

Were the Malacca Strait on the South China Sea’s western perimeter or its other sea lines of communication to be blockaded, the region’s economies would face disaster. The South China Sea can thus be understood as this century’s geostrategic center of the struggle for world power.

In 1949 both China and Taiwan first laid their claims to the U-shaped so-called “nine dot line”, consisting of roughly 80% of the entire South China Sea and its mineral-rich sea-beds.

Credit: United Nations

By the late 1990s, with the Soviet Union consigned to memory and China’s “reform and opening” well under way, geo-strategists in Washington began their obsession with managing or containing China’s rise.

Given China’s growing economic power and its proud legacy of being the world’s most advanced and powerful nation for most of recorded history, they understood that the Middle Kingdom would inevitably test and challenge U.S. regional and global hegemony.

Taiwan, seen by China as a “renegade province” was the first and most obvious flashpoint. It took decades for the Pacific Ocean, an “American Lake” since the defeat of Japan in 1945, to once again become a focal point of great power tensions.

After Chinese leaders completed national boundary negotiations with their northern and western neighbors – excepting India – the South China Sea on its eastern and southern Pacific shores remained vulnerable. In addition to providing access to sea-bed riches the coast remained military fault line.

In the mid-19th century, in two “Opium Wars” fought to enforce British (and U.S.) rights to deluge the Middle Kingdom with addictive opium and thus rectify massive balance of payment inequalities, British naval and land forces invaded China from the coast, defeated China, and precipitated the subsequent collapse of the Qing Dynasty.

Then, beginning in 1895, Japan’s invasions of China came from the sea.

Competing territorial claims lie at the ostensible core of South China Sea tensions. The oil-rich fishing waters around the Parcel Islands, claimed by China, Taiwan and Vietnam, are in the northern reaches of the South China Sea, just south of China’s Hainan Island and its new and massive naval and air force bases.

To the south are the Spratly Islands, claimed by China, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei. And, close to the Philippines, in waters named the West Philippine Sea by many Filipinos, is the Scarborough Shoal, claimed by China, Taiwan and the Philippines.

As early as 1974, when international attention focused on U.S.-Chinese triangulation against the Soviets, China seized a Vietnamese garrison on a western Parcel Island and transformed it into a Chinese military base.

To the south, Fiery Cross, built on a rock in 1988, is the most important of China’s Spratly Island bases. Its construction was followed by others at Subi and Mischief Reefs. And, with Coast Guard and naval deployments China has functionally seized the Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines.

U.S. RESPONSES

The U.S. is not a party to these territorial disputes, but the enemy of an enemy often serves as a friend. The U.S. became a colonizing Pacific power with its brutal turn of the 20th century conquests of the Philippines, Guam, Samoa, and its annexation of Hawaii – in large measure to gain privileged access to the potentially enormous China market.

Its Pacific empire was later expanded and consolidated with Japan’s defeat in World War II. To preserve this imperial domain, the U.S. has since encouraged resistance to China’s South China Sea territorial claims and has conducted provocative “freedom of navigation,” naval and air forays in close proximity to the disputed islands. A record number were held in 2019, with Trump apparently on track to set another record in 2020.

Even before the Barack Obama – Hillary Clinton “Pivot to Asia,” with its commitment to to deploy 60% of U.S. naval and airpower to the Pacific and Asia, President G.H.W. Bush began the U.S. Asia-Pacific build up to contain China’s rise. To reinforce U.S. military power, Bush, Obama and the Pentagon have since focused on reinforcing U.S. alliances, arms sales and deliveries, along with their military bases that encircle much of China.

Despite Trump’s disregard for the United States’ Japanese and South Korean allies and his withdrawal from the Transpacific Partnership, which was designed to limit China’s economic influence, the military build up continues apace.

U.S. military power still far exceeds that of China. Fueled by a military budget four time greater than Beijing’s, a campaign to increase the size of the U.S. Navy, upgrade the Air Force, restore U.S. nuclear primacy, and maximize cyber warfare capabilities, the commitment to containing China includes numerous and often provocative joint military exercises, not the least of which are the “freedom of navigation” deployments.

With the ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) claimants unable to compete with China militarily, their primary means of asserting their territorial claims have been via diplomatic forums and the court of international public opinion.

Rooting their claims in the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, they have pursued multilateral negotiations with China to create South China Sea codes of conduct, two of which have been agreed upon, but they have yet to be fully implemented. Encouraged by Washington, they also took their case to the U.N. Court of Permanent Arbitration where they prevailed.

Relying on its historical claims and the U.S. tradition of understanding international law being what those who have the power to enforce it say it is, China rejected the Arbitration Court’s findings.

Reinforcing the economic leverage Beijing exercises over ASEAN nations which are economically dependent on China, the Communist Party’s hardline newspaper The Global Times warned that those who persist in challenging China’s claim should “mentally prepare for the sounds of cannons.”

But, as the two imperial elephants struggle for geopolitical advantage, the Pacific ants remain steadfast in their claims and pursuit of diplomatic solutions.

MEETING CHINA HALFWAY

In his book Destined for War, former Assistant Secretary of Defense Graham Allison reminds us that while the Thucydides trap has often resulted in war, great power conflagrations have also been avoided. War with China is not inevitable.

A case in point was the 20th century U.S-Soviet contest for dominance. At the height of the Cold War, Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme convened elite figures from Europe, North America and the Soviet Union to prevent potentially omnicidal nuclear war.

Drawing on the truism that neither individuals nor nations can be secure unless their rivals simultaneously enjoy security they created the Common Security approach to diplomacy.

The Commission advised that we “must achieve security not against the adversary but together with him,” recognizing that when nations develop and deploy new weapons and military doctrines to counter perceived threats, their actions are seen by their rivals as escalating threats. This, in turn, leads the newly threatened nation to respond in kind, resulting in a spiraling arms race and to increased dangers of deadly miscalculations.

The Commission went on to suggest diplomatic steps that in time resulted in the INF (Intermediate Nuclear Forces) Treaty that functionally ended the Cold War.

In this tradition, Lyle J. Goldstein, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, has enumerated ten “cooperation spirals” in his landmark volume Meeting China Halfway: How to Defuse the Emerging US-China Rivalry. One of Goldstein’s spirals of mutual and sequential diplomacy focuses on reducing tensions and stabilizing relations across the South China Sea.

He acknowledges that such negotiations will be difficult, will require patience, and could likely be improved upon. Most important is creating will on both sides of the Pacific to coexist despite our differences.

Clearly, and most urgently, those with influence on President Trump must press him to reverse course in the South China Sea, as he did with his “fire and fury” threat against North Korea. His aircraft carrier fleets must be recalled. “Freedom of Navigation” provocations must be halted.

And, it is past time to signal a U.S. commitment to pursue common security diplomacy with China and the nations of the Asia-Pacific.

Goldstein concedes that there might be better ways to meet China halfway in the South China Sea, but the mutual and sequential steps that he outlines provide a pathway that begins with small trust-building steps and which lead to coexistence that should be seriously considered, debated and improved upon. He recommends:

Step 1: The U.S. invites China to join the annual CARAT (Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training) exercises in Thailand. This modest step can provide a “bridge between the two powers.” In response, China would propose a “regional antipiracy patrol”, focused on the critically important Malacca Strait. This would provide a vehicle for “building trust and confidence.”

Step 2: The U.S. proposes a Southeast Asia-Pacific Coast Guard Forum. With its Coast Guard focus, it will contribute to demilitarizing maritime security issues and improve the working relationships of U.S., Chinese and other regional leaders.

In response, China would invite ASEAN defense officials for annual tours of PLA (People Liberation Army) facilities, including Hainan Island. This would allow for greater transparency and trust building between China and its rival South China Sea claimants.

Step 3: The U.S. reduces its provocative surveillance activities along the Chinese coast and Hainan Island. The surveillance can be conducted from satellites and by other technical means, reducing the possibility of potentially dangerous military incidents as China takes military counter measures. (Serious incidents occurred in 2001, 2009 and 2014.)

In response, China would clarify its still ambiguous South China Sea territorial claims, making them consistent with the Law of the Sea. In doing so, “China’s U-shaped line may continue to exist but in ‘harmonized” form, to accord with greater peace and stability….”

Step 4: In response to China’s concession of clarifying its SCS claims, the U.S., which until Pompeo’s provocative July statement had remained neutral about the competing South China Sea claims, would “endorse’ China’s role as a claimant to the Spratley/Nansah Islands.

This would not be an endorsement of China’s claims, but it suggests that China’s claim is on a par with others’ claims. China, in response would move to finally “operationalize its policy of ‘joint development’” for South China Sea resources, with a 50-50 split serving as the basis.

Step 5: The U.S. ceases joint military operations with Vietnam, the only claimant nation that – given its long history of tensions with China – may wish to see the U.S. “embroiled in a confrontation with China.” Beijing, in response, would cease military cooperation with the Philippines and Indonesia as a way to stabilize the region.

In 1964, before the U.S. and China were economically integrated and before cyber warfare could threaten the implosion of national infrastructures, U.S. intelligence reported that China was on the verge of testing its first nuclear warhead.

In response U.S. and Soviet leaders considered the possibility of joining together in a preemptive attack to derail Beijing’ nuclear program. Wisely, President Johnson was led to reconsider and cancel what would have been a catastrophic war.

Eight years later, President Nixon was Mao Tse-Tung’s guest in Beijing. A U.S.-China war must be averted. Peace and coexistence, despite our differences, are possible.

 

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Excerpt:

Dr. Joseph Gerson is President of the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security and Vice-President of the International Peace Bureau. His books include Empire and the Bomb: How the U.S. Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World and With Hiroshima Eyes: Atomic War, Nuclear Extortion and Moral Imagination.

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Credit: Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNOHCR).

By Joseph Chamie
NEW YORK, Jul 21 2020 (IPS)

The world is in the midst of the Great Migration Clash, a bitter struggle between those who “want out” of their countries and those who want others to “keep out” of their countries. More than a billion people would like to move permanently to another country and no less than a billion people say fewer or no immigrants should be allowed to move into their countries.

The populations with the largest percentages wanting to emigrate are generally found in poor and violence ridden countries. In many of those nations, half or more of the populations say they would like to migrate permanently to another country, typically to Europe and North America. For example, more than 60 percent of the populations in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Haiti want to emigrate (Figure 1).

 

Source: Gallup Polls 2018; percent who said they would like to move permanently to another country if they had the opportunity.

 

In Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, about half of its population of more than 200 million people want out of the country and to resettle abroad, preferably in an English-speaking country. With 40 percent of the population living in poverty, many Nigerians have already left the country through immigration programs and illegal migration and many others have applied for asylum and refugee protection.

In Afghanistan nearly half of the women say they would leave the country permanently if they could. With limited educational, employment and participation opportunities, Afghani women are the least satisfied women in the world with regard to the freedom to choose what they do with their lives

Nigerians had more pending refugee protection claims in Canada in 2018 than any other country globally. The overstaying on a visitors’ visa in the United States led to a clampdown by the Administration on US visas for Nigerians. Also, the European Union has warned Nigeria about imposing restrictive visa rules on that country if it failed to co-operate in the readmission of Nigerian citizens deported from EU member countries.

In Afghanistan nearly half of the women say they would leave the country permanently if they could. With limited educational, employment and participation opportunities, Afghani women are the least satisfied women in the world with regard to the freedom to choose what they do with their lives. The difficult lives of Afghani women are likely to worsen if the Taliban, which banned girls from schools and women from public life, retakes control of the government.

The desires of hundreds of millions of men and women who want out of their countries and to settle in another are influenced by a broad range of economic, social, political and environmental factors. Those critical factors interact to produce powerful push and pull forces that operate in origin and destination countries, respectively.

Living conditions in migrant-origin countries are typically difficult and harsh, and have worsened considerably in many regions due to climate change, environmental degradation and more recently the coronavirus pandemic. Housing is typically substandard, educational opportunities are limited, health care is often lacking and many households struggle at subsistence levels.

Violence, armed conflict and human rights abuse also contribute to people’s desires to want out. Consequently, in addition to the large numbers of irregular migrants overstaying their visitors’ visa, many men, women and children lacking legal authorization to emigrate are willing to risk their lives to reach their desired destinations by any means, including crossing seas in flimsy boats, walking across deserts with limited provisions and hiding in poorly ventilated trucks, with some dying in their failed attempts.

In contrast to migrant-origin countries, life in the migrant-destination countries is a comparative dreamland, offering a wide array of opportunities, freedoms, rights, safeguards and security. Also, and increasingly important, potential migrants are convinced that emigration will greatly improve the chances for better and more secure lives for their children in the future.

Over the recent past the destination countries where potential migrants say they would like to move have generally remained the same wealthy developed nations. The most desired destination country, where one in five potential migrants would like to move, is the United States. In a distant second place is Canada, followed by Germany, France, Australia and the United Kingdom.

In general, those wanting to emigrate are located mostly in comparatively poor developing countries where the populations are struggling with poverty, violence and human rights abuse. The countries where much of the public want to keep others out are found in both developing and developed regions (Figure 2).

 

Source: Pew Research Center; percent who said fewer or no immigrants should be allowed to move to their country.

 

Countries with the largest percentages of the public wanting fewer or no immigrants to be allowed to move into their country are Greece (82 percent), Israel (73 percent), Hungary (72 percent) and Italy (71 percent). Significant percentages of the public in large migrant-sending developing countries who also want fewer or no immigrants settling in their country include Nigeria (50 percent), India (45 percent) and Mexico (44 percent).

In addition to the effects on wages, unemployment and economic opportunities as well as increased social costs, many opposing immigration are concerned that immigration will adversely affect their traditional culture, shared values and national identity. They feel that immigration and multiculturalism undermine their conventional way of life, national security and social solidarity, which needs to be protected from the detrimental effects of foreign influences.

Opposition to immigration is reflected in the rise of xenophobia, racism, hostility and violence toward immigrants. Far-right political leaders, ethnonationalists and nativists often depict migrants, refugees and asylum seekers as invaders, infiltrators, criminals, rapists and terrorists, and call for them to “go home and stay home”. More recently, some populist parties are also using the coronavirus pandemic to stoke anti-immigrant fears by labelling immigrants as disease carriers.

The Great Migration Clash is complicated by the asymmetry of migration-related human rights. While everyone has the basic human right to leave their country and return, they do not have the right to enter another country.

Anti-immigrant sentiments have also spread to include refugees and asylum seekers. Government policies to curb the tide of irregular migrants, many coming largely for economic reasons, are undermining the long established and internationally recognized rights and protections granted to refugees and asylum seekers.

The numbers of asylum claims have increased rapidly in recent years. In the United States the number who claimed asylum and had their cases reviewed jumped from 5 thousand in 2007 to 92 thousand in 2016.

Asylum applicants in the European Union increased from 255 thousand in 2008 to a high of 1.3 million in 2015. While in principle people have the right to seek asylum, in reality many governments are trying to prevent, discourage and complicate the growing attempts of men, women and children to cross into their territories and claim asylum.

Since the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees was adopted, world population has tripled from 2.6 billion to 7.8 billion, with more than 90 percent of that growth occurring in developing countries.

Over the next three decades world population is expected to add another two billion people. Virtually all of that future demographic increase will take place in developing countries, with Africa alone accounting for 60 percent of it and some twenty countries in that continent at least doubling in population size by 2050.

It is evident from even a cursory look at population trends that the supply of potential migrants in developing countries greatly exceeds the demand for migrants in developed countries. Consequently, increasing numbers of men, women and children who want out of their countries are resorting to irregular migration, with many relying on the services of smugglers and some turning to traffickers.

In response, most migrant-destination countries are resisting the entry of irregular migrants, attempting to repatriate those who are resident unlawfully, raising objections to accepting refugees and increasingly denying asylum claims. The recent political rise of right-wing populist and nativist parties and their increased representation in governments across virtually all major regions reflect the centrality of immigration issues worldwide.

Are politically feasible measures available that could effectively address the Great Migration Clash? Unfortunately, despite regional and international efforts including the recently adopted Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration and Global Compact on Refugees, the answer appears to be not at the moment.

The Great Migration Clash is intensifying, especially with the disastrous economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic, which is hitting the poorest countries the hardest. Powerful forces, including demographics, climate change, poverty, hunger, violence and armed conflict, are continuing to fuel the worldwide migration struggle.

Governments sidestepping the struggle between those who “want out” of their countries and those who want others to “keep out” of their countries is a common policy response. To have a reasonable chance at resolving the struggle, nations working together in collaboration with regional and international organizations need to increase their efforts to implement strategies, policies and programs that effectively address the powerful forces fueling the Great Migration Clash.

 

Joseph Chamie is an independent consulting demographer and a former director of the United Nations Population Division.

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Millions of school-aged children in Pakistan drop out before completing primary education. The COVID-19 pandemic has magnified the already-existing inequities for women and girls. A recent study from the Malala Fund estimates that an additional 2o million secondary school girls might never return to school after the crisis has passed.Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

By Emily Thampoe
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 21 2020 (IPS)

Catherine Bertini, former executive director of the World Food Programme, began the IPS United Nations Bureau webinar “The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Women and Girls” by reminiscing on a talk she gave in 1995 entitled “Women eat last”. She remarked that after 25 years, the phrase is still something that is relevant to the present day.

“So often in societies, it is the women who prepare the food, gather the food, grow the food and find it somewhere. Even if their families are desperately poor [they] are the ones who prepare it and serve it. And they serve it first to their husbands and boys. So some things take much longer to change than we can possibly change them,” Bertini said.

The webinar, which took place on Jul. 14, had six guest speakers, including moderator Doaa Abdel-Motaal, the advisor of the Guarini Institute for Public Affairs in Rome, Italy.

The speakers all touched upon how the pandemic will affect women’s and girls’ access to food and education and the effect it is having on their mental health, particularly in developing countries and countries of conflict and refuge.

According to Bertini, at the end of 2019 there were an estimated 80 million people in need of food and who could die if not aided.

WFP has stated that millions more have been forced closer to starvation and if no action is taken many will die as “an unprecedented 138 million people who face desperate levels of hunger as the pandemic tightens its grip on some of the most fragile countries on earth”. WFP has appealed for $5 billion in aid.

Bertini said that there are external factors that contribute to less access to food, especially during the pandemic.

“These issues come because of the physical access, economic access, transport issues, production issues and other issues related to the effects of the crisis of COVID-19. This is in addition to the other issues that the poor have to deal with in so many places,” Bertini said.

The majority of the food WFP provides is distributed through women and girls, Bertini explained, because they will most likely be the ones preparing food in households.

“With COVID-19, all of the issues that have been problematic for women and girls throughout the world and throughout time have become worse,” Bertini said.

The COVID-19 pandemic has magnified the already-existing inequities for women and girls, as caretakers, professionals and as citizens of the world. According to Yasmine Sherif, director of Education Cannot Wait, a recent study from the Malala Fund estimates that an additional 2o million secondary school girls might never return to school after the crisis has passed. This may be due to internal conflicts within the countries, natural disasters, economic strife or even forced displacement.

“In countries of conflict or refuge, education is both there to help and empower the girls and adolescent girls and it is also a protection method. It keeps them away from having early child marriages and having children when they are children themselves. It also keeps them in a protective environment from getting involved in trafficking and gender based violence that can come as a result of conflict and during crisis, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Sherif said.

Sherif said that if these young girls do not return to school, they will be affected by extreme poverty because of conflict and the consequences that come with being in a place of refuge or immense violence.

Sherif said these factors were related to the issue of food access that Bertini raised, adding that young girls and adolescents are the group most affected.

Sherif used South Sudan as an example of a country that has recently found freedom but where, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, 72 percent of primary school aged girls did not attend school.

“We are really speaking about an education crisis that was there well before we had a health crisis. If we do not invest in education, especially girls education, we are going to leave behind 50 percent of the world’s population gravely affected by conflicts and disasters. And that can only perpetrate the vicious cycle of crisis, conflict, hunger and poverty. Unless we invest in girls and women, we cannot speak about sustainable development and we cannot speak about recovery from COVID-19,” Sherif said.

Susan Papp, managing director of Policy and Advocacy at Women Deliver, a global advocacy organisation that champions gender equality and the health and rights of girls and women, told IPS that the COVID-19 crisis is demonstrating that “if we want to deliver health, well-being, and dignity for all, governments and decision-makers must apply a gender lens to response and recovery efforts. Policies that do not apply a gender lens will fall short for everyone”.

“Decision-makers across sectors must commit to rebuilding a stronger and more equal society for everyone including girls and women. This starts with governments collecting data disaggregated by age, gender, race, and other factors to better understand the needs of girls and women and ensure they respond to those needs effectively,” she said.

Along with the collection of data, Papp said that a key part of applying a gender lens to COVID-19 is to institute a gender marker to tag investments and programming that incorporate gender considerations.” 

In the absence of gender sensitive, gender responsive measures to ongoing global crisis women and girls will emerge from the pandemic even further behind than they were pre-COVID-19.

** Additional reporting by Miriam Gathigah in Nairobi.

 

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By Dr. Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury
SINGAPORE, Jul 21 2020 (IPS-Partners)

Singaporeans went to polls on Friday the 10th of July. It was a crisis election, seen as the most significant since the country’s independence in 1965, given the backdrop of the COVID 19 pandemic and its massive negative impact on the economy on this small but wealthy island republic. Out of a population of nearly 5.85 million on election day, the number of registered voters stood at 2.65 million. It was no surprise that in a nation with a reputation of unmatchable discipline, the voting was an orderly process. In conformity with rules each voter was masked, safe distancing was scrupulously maintained, and their hands were sanitized as they entered the booths. The elderly, who needed it, were provided assistance. The electorate returned what has been assessed as a sophisticated, calibrated and mature outcome. It re-elected the incumbent People’s Action Party (PAP) to power with a sufficiently strong enough mandate to help it pull the nation out of the crisis. At the same time, it also created a diversity in the legislature that would ensure that the government did not have a blank cheque for unrestricted authority.

Dr. Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury

The PAP, led by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong won 83 of the 93 seats contested, with its popular support showing 61.24 percent, 8.7 points down from its 69.9 per cent share in the 2015 elections. However, it must be remembered that 2015 was a jubilee Year for Singapore, which also saw the death of the ever-popular founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, father of Lee Hsien Loong, a fact that gave the PAP a sentimental bump in the polls. But the current result for the party was better than its showing in 2011 elections when it had only 61.1 per cent of the votes, its worst ever performance. The PAP, it must be noted, has ruled Singapore continuously for six decades, seen the country through a number of crises but most importantly, raised the island state from the third world to the level of a first world nation , one of the world’s richest. Indeed, today Singapore’s economy is generally ranked as the most open in the world, one of the least corrupt, with low tax rates, and with the third highest per capita gross domestic product the globe in terms of purchasing power parity.

One critique, that surfaced during the campaign, however, was the question of inequitable wealth distribution. This was a major thrust of the principal opposition platform, the Worker’s Party (WP), led by Pritam Singh, a bright and urbane political luminary, with impressive academic and leadership credentials. The PAP has consistently maintained that the Progressive Wage Model, currently mandatory in many sectors, works well for Singapore. The WP on the other hand has pitched for a national minimum wage, arguing that it ensures a baseline level of income for all, and signals the inherent dignity of labour in Singapore. Singh also insisted that the government becomes more responsive to people’s concerns when it loses seats. While for a variety of reasons the PAP’s return was a certainty, the key element was with what numbers. Singh’s WP contested for 21 seats, and secured 10, the best performance by any opposition party in Singapore’s electoral history. It was obvious that some of the points of the opposition had resonated with the electorate. Two other parties participated in the hustings: the Progressive Singapore Party (PSP) of the veteran opposition politician, Tan Cheng Bok, and the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP) of Dr Chee Soon Juan. They put up a nail-bitingly close fights in several constituencies, but in the end failed to win any.

The campaign itself was conducted on-line, with well -organized structured debates, and avoiding crowds in line with current public health guide- lines. There were some interesting debates. The PAP positioned itself as the best party to lead the country out of the Covid crisis, as they had done in the case of other adverse situations before. They referred to the massive governmental fiscal injections of amounts totaling S $ 92 billion across four budgets to help the recovery process, tapping the country’s war-chest of reserves. Yet due the lock-down jobs were lost, and many companies folded. The PAP might have paid some price for it. Also, the government received some flak for the large number of infections in foreign worker’s dormitories, 45, 000 cases in total, as also for the pre-existing unsatisfactory living conditions there. What went in the PAP’s favour was the low number of deaths, only 26 in all, and the medical servicing, undoubtedly one of the best in the world. An interesting debate that drew some attention was an SDP claim that Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat, Lee Hsien Loong’s successor down the line, had publicly toyed with the idea of raising the island’s population to 10 million by bringing in more foreigner. The government quickly reacted by denying it. During the campaign WP projected itself as a moderate and rational entity, and largely desisted from criticizing the government’s role in the handling of the Covid issue, which, given the complexity of the crisis, reflected a pragmatic line of thinking. The WP’s success in bagging the largest number of seats for any opposition party in Singapore’s electoral history, doubling its number of 5 from the last polls to 10 in this one, seemed to be a result of prudent politics.

Singaporeans have no doubt that their government is better able to deliver in terms of good governance than most others around the world. Yet they have some concerns that they needed to demonstrate to the government, which they did by clawing back on some support. Prime Minister Lee Hsieng Loong took note. Viewing the results as a renewal of “a clear mandate”, he nevertheless, saw them as reflecting “the pain and anxiety the Singaporeans feel in this crisis”, also resulting in” a desire for more diversity”. Lee offered Singh the official designation of ‘Leader of Opposition’ another first in Singapore politics. Singh accepted with thanks, and also displayed all intentions of helping make the Parliament a robust forum for constructive deliberations.

With the elections behind him, which was a constitutional requirement time wise, and now armed with a fresh mandate, Lee will turn to addressing issues on hand largely unimpeded. Singapore has a unique system of transferring leadership from one generation to another, priming the new- comers for the responsibilities for a period of time. His own generation is called ‘3 G’ or the third generation of leaders, and Heng Swee Keat and his team, a younger lot, ‘4 G’, or fourth generation. There would be no need for any other election for Lee to seamlessly transfer the baton to Heng, who has proved himself a sharp intellect , efficient manager and a tireless worker despite a health hiccup some time ago,, but it will not happen just yet. This came through when Lee said to at a post- polls press briefing: “I will use this mandate responsibly through the crisis to deal with Covid 19 and the economic downturn and to take us safely through this crisis and beyond”. This could mean the transition might need to wait another one and half to two years. The time will most certainly be well used.

So, politically and economically, Singapore is on a post-Covid path to recovery. It will organize itself domestically to prepare to re-engage the outside world, with which this free-economy is so interconnected, when the others begin to open up as China has. Even prior to the pandemic, Asian economies were on the rise. The manner in which Covid19 has impacted on the US and European economies, and revealed some of their structural weaknesses, with Asia ( particularly South-East and East Asia) doing a much better job handling it, the crisis is like to provide even a greater fillip to Asia in the future. There will be an obvious role for Singapore for it, notwithstanding the current technical recession. A possible scenario beyond the rim of the saucer is ‘a flying geese’ paradigm for Asian economies, with China in the lead, and others like Singapore closely following. Of course, there are existing intra-mural political and security issues among them, which will require some deft diplomatic handling.

Singapore will also look out for new partners in other regions including in neighbouring South Asia. Bangladesh has the potentials for being one such. While the Pandemic is still a huge issue which Bangladesh is grappling with at this point in time, there will still be an afterwards. The fundamentals in Bangladesh are perhaps stronger than most other countries in the region. Singapore has vast experience of China, and China has huge investments in Bangladesh, with more in the pipeline. Logically Singapore could be an effective learning and functioning conduit between the two, both between companies and governments. Singapore also has large sovereign funds looking to potential investments. Bangladeshi businesses must learn that Singapore is much more than just a medical-tourism destination. During a visit to Singapore two years ago, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina offered lands for a Special Economic Zone for Singaporean investors. It is now time to resuscitate that project.

John F Kennedy used to say that in Chinese the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters, the one representing ‘danger’ and the other ‘opportunity’. He was wrong, for it does not. But what is right is that human efforts can actually create the correlation. Properly handled, the kite does rise against the wind.

This story was originally published by Dhaka Courier.

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72-year-old Ogiek community elder, Cosmas Chemwotei Murunga, inspects one of the trees felled by foreigners in 1976. Ogiek community protests put an end to government approved logging of the indigenous red cedar trees here. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Isaiah Esipisu
CHEPKITALE, Kenya , Jul 21 2020 (IPS)

The Ogiek community, indigenous peoples from Kenya’s Chepkitale National Reserve, are in the process of implementing a modern tool to inform and guide the conservation and management of the natural forest. The community has inhabited this area for many generations, long before Kenya was a republic. Through this process, they hope to get the government to formally recognise their customary tenure in line with the Community Land Act.

In collaboration with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), community elders, civil society members and representatives from the 32 clans that form the Chepkitale Ogiek community are mapping their ancestral territory using a methodology known as Participatory 3-Dimensional Modelling (P3DM).

Technically speaking, P3DM or 3D maps brings together three elements that were previously considered impossible to integrate – local spatial and natural resource knowledge, geographic information systems (GIS) and physical modelling.

“The mapping will support the spatial planning and management of the Chepkitale National Reserve by identifying actions required to address the various challenges affecting the management and conservation of the natural resources in the targeted area,” John Owino, Programme Officer for the Water and Wetlands Programme at IUCN, told IPS.

The process, which started in 2018, involves extensive dialogue with community members in order to document their history, indigenous knowledge of forest conservation and protection of natural resources using their traditional laws and geographical territories.

According to IUCN, which is providing both technical and financial support, the exercise was projected to be completed by the end of 2020. However, this target will be delayed as a result of the prevailing coronavirus pandemic.

Some of the Ogiek’s unique traditional community laws recorded in the participatory mapping exercise state that charcoal burning is totally prohibited, poaching is strictly forbidden and commercial farming is considered illicit.

“In this community, we relate with trees and nature the same way we relate with humans. Felling a mature tree in our culture is synonymous to killing a parental figure,” Cosmas Chemwotei Murunga, a 72-year-old community elder, told IPS. “Why should you cut down a tree when you can harvest its branches and use them for whatever purpose?” he posed.

Very famously, in 1976, the Ogiek community protests put an end to government-approved logging of the indigenous red cedar trees here.

The trees, felled some 44 years ago, still lie perfectly untouched on the ground in Loboot village.

The Ogiek indigenous community who live in Kenya’s Mount Elgon forest have conserved the forest’s natural ecosystem for centuries. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

While the Ogiek are an asset to the conservation of the forested area within the park, their dispute with the government over their rights to the forested land has been a long-running one.

• There have been several attempts by the government to evict the community from the forest, following the gazetting of the entire Ogiek community land as the ‘Chepkitale National Reserve in Mount Elgon,’ which made the land they live on a protected area from the year 2000.
• Since then, police officers invaded the Ogiek community land several times, torching their houses, destroying their property and forcefully driving them away from the forest.
• But in 2008, the community, through Chepkitale Indigenous People Development Project (CIPDP) — a community based organisation that brings together all Ogiek community members — went to court for arbitration. The court issued orders to immediately halt the forceful evictions. However, the case is yet to be determined.

“In many indigenous communities, governments have always used an excuse of environmental destruction to evict residents, and that was the same thing they said about our community,” Peter Kitelo, co-founder of the CIPDP, told IPS.

“However, we have proved them wrong, and when the case is finally determined, we are very hopeful that we will emerge victorious,” he said.

The 3D mapping, according to Owino, is in line with the Whakatane Mechanism, an IUCN initiative that supports the implementation of “the new paradigm” of conservation. It focuses on situations where indigenous peoples and/or local communities are directly associated with protected areas and are involved in its development and conservation as a result of their land and resource rights, including tenure, access and use.

• The mechanism promotes and supports the respect for the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities and their free prior and informed consent in protected areas policy and practice, as required by IUCN resolutions, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

There are previous examples of P3DM mapping proving successful among another Ogiek communities — those in the Mau Forest.

• In 2006, a P3DM exercise involving 120 men and women from 21 Ogiek clans in the Mau Forest resulted in a 3D map of the Eastern Mau Forest Complex.
• According to the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation ACP-EU (CTA), the 3D map was persuasive enough to convince the Kenyan Government of the Ogiek’s right to the land, and the need to protect the area from land grabbing and resource exploitation.

The CTA further reported that a rich P3DM portfolio of outputs, including reports, papers and maps, have been used at international forums to document the value of local/indigenous knowledge in sustainable natural resource management, conflict management and climate change adaptation, and in bridging the gap between scientific and traditional knowledge systems.

In addition to the 3D map, the Ogiek community is already working with the National Land Commission of Kenya, an independent body with several mandates. Among them is the mandate to initiate investigations, on its own initiative or based on a complaint, into present or historical land injustices and to recommend appropriate redress.

“Once completed, the 3D map will be a very important tool for this community because apart from effective management of the natural resources in Chepkitale, we will use it as an instrument to prove how we have sustainably coexisted with nature for generations,” said Kitelo.

The Ogiek community want their territory officially recognised as community land provided for by Kenya’s new constitution, particularly in relation to the Community Land Act, 2016, which provides for the “recognition, protection and registration of community land rights; management and administration of community land”.

According to elderly members of the Ogiek community, the forest is their main source of livelihood.

Inside the forest, the community keeps bees for honey production, which is a major part of their diet apart from milk, blood and meat. They also gather herbs from the indigenous trees, shrubs and forest vegetation, and feed on some species found in the forest. Their diet is not limited to bamboo shoots, wild mushrooms and wild vegetables such as stinging nettle.

“Since I was born 72 years ago, this forest has always been the main source of our livelihoods,” Chemwotei Muranga told IPS.

Now, armed with traditional knowledge of forest management and conservation of natural resources, community-based rules and regulations, and provisions within the country’s new constitution and the Community Land Act— they hope to be doing so for centuries to come.

“Living in such a place is the only lifestyle I understand,” Chemwotei Muranga said.

The inclusive approach of supporting indigenous peoples and local communities in conservation will be a major focus at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Marseille, France, next January. The topic falls under one of the main themes of the Congress, “Upholding rights, ensuring effective and equitable governance” with sessions aiming to discuss and provide recommendations for how the conservation community can support the existing stewardship of indigenous peoples and local communities.

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Credit: SEATCA

By Sophapan Ratanachena-McWhortor and Dr. Hana Ross
BANGKOK, Thailand, Jul 21 2020 (IPS)

A factoid is unreliable information repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact. One such factoid repeatedly echoed across the globe by the tobacco industry is that tobacco tax increases worsen cigarette smuggling.

For governments facing challenges to curb smuggling, particularly in the global South, this factoid has scared political leaders from effectively using taxes as a public health tool.

Tax increases used as part of comprehensive tobacco control have been shown to successfully reduce smoking in many countries, including Australia, Thailand, Philippines and South Africa.

In 2016, Australia implemented annual increases in tobacco excise of 12.5% a year till 2020, raising the cost of a pack of cigarettes to about AUD 40. Australia’s current smoking prevalence at less than 13 percent is one of the lowest in the world.

According to the World Bank, taxes and prices have only a limited impact on the illicit cigarette market. In fact, another study found that lower income countries, where cigarette taxes and prices are low, have higher levels of cigarette smuggling than higher income countries with high taxes and prices.

The tobacco industry supports small tax increases but opposes large increases that effectively reduce the affordability of their products. Asia being a major market for tobacco companies, it is tactical for them to defeat or undermine effective tobacco tax increases in Asian countries.

Tobacco industry-commissioned studies routinely link high levels of smuggling to tax increases. One such report is the Asia Illicit Tobacco Indicator 2017 report sponsored by Philip Morris International (PMI) and done by Oxford Economics (OE), a U.K. based think tank.

The study, for example, shows Malaysia having among the highest tobacco smuggling in the world at 56%, followed by Pakistan at 42%. However, alternate studies on illicit trade in both countries show significantly lower levels at 27% and 16% respectively.

Many governments have been fed data from this PMI-funded report by OE, which has been described as severely flawed in a critique recently released by the Southeast Asia Tobacco Control Alliance (SEATCA). The critique uncovers the report’s poor data quality, identifies multiple deficiencies in the methodology, and exposes the deceptive presentation of study results, underlining the fact that industry-commissioned reports do not provide scientifically sound information to policy makers and are biased to the interests of the tobacco industry.

Previous critiques, More myth than fact and Failed, already identified similar flaws of industry-funded OE reports on illicit trade in 2012 and 2013.

Using think tanks to conduct industry-friendly research is a known tactic of the tobacco industry. These research reports are launched using high profile spokespersons to promote the report findings.

This was clearly seen in Malaysia when the report was referred to by a criminologist and used as a launching pad for tobacco company activities to counter smuggling. The industry continues to use this tactic because of its impact on governments that are vulnerable to economic downturn and lack resources to curb illicit trade.

The illicit trade factoid is a key “go-to” narrative used repeatedly by the tobacco industry to undermine tobacco control efforts across countries in Asia and globally, whether tax increases, standardized packaging, large pictorial health warnings, advertising bans, public smoking bans, or bans/regulations on new and emerging tobacco products, such as e-cigarettes and heated tobacco products.

During the current global economic slowdown, despite a recognized link between smoking and COVID-19, tobacco companies continue to manufacture and profit from tobacco products.

Governments must therefore use this COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to level up their tobacco control policies and programs and redouble their efforts to protect public health policies from tobacco industry influence, as there is an irreconcilable conflict of interest between public health and the commercial and vested interests of the tobacco industry.

Governments must recognize that tobacco is a harmful and unessential product and should reject partnerships with the tobacco industry and fully scrutinize any information provided by tobacco companies. Governments must seek to eliminate the problem of illicit tobacco trade, but they shouldn’t be intimidated by the tobacco industry’s illicit trade factoid.

*SEATCA is a multi-sectoral non-governmental alliance promoting health and saving lives by assisting ASEAN countries to accelerate and effectively implement the tobacco control measures contained in the WHO FCTC. Acknowledged by governments, academic institutions, and civil society for its advancement of tobacco control in Southeast Asia, the WHO bestowed on SEATCA the World No Tobacco Day Award in 2004 and the WHO Director-General’s Special Recognition Award in 2014.

The Economics of Tobacco Control Project (ETCP) is housed in the Research Unit on the Economics of Excisable Products (REEP) at UCT’s School of Economics. The ETCP aims to expand current research efforts in the economics of tobacco control and to enhance the knowledge of economic and tax issues among tobacco control advocates and policymakers to strengthen support for tobacco tax and price increases in sub-Saharan Africa. These expanded efforts will increase the quantity and quality of research on the economics of tobacco control in the region, facilitate the growth of a new generation of tobacco control economics researchers and contribute to the creation of a centre of research excellence in sub-Saharan Africa.

 

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Excerpt:

Sophapan Ratanachena-McWhortor is Tobacco Tax Program Manager of SEATCA* & Dr Hana Ross is the Principal Research Officer of Economics of Tobacco Control Project (ETCP) at the University of Cape Town.

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By Vladimir Popov and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
BERLIN and KUALA LUMPUR, Jul 21 2020 (IPS)

GDP has been increasingly challenged on many grounds as a measure of economic and social progress. Clearly, GDP does not take account of other dimensions of wellbeing, natural resource depletion or environmental damage.

What increases GDP?
There is a humourous economic fable instructive about money-metric measures of economic progress. Two economic professors find a dead rat while on a long stroll. In disgust, the older don dares his younger colleague: “if you eat it, I’ll pay you $10,000”. The younger economist makes a quick cost-benefit analysis in his head, then accepts the challenge, to his colleague’s surprise.

Vladimir Popov

Sometime later, realizing the enormity of his financial loss, the older man offers to reciprocate to get his money back. Feeling ashamed of being the only one to eat a dead rat, his younger colleague quickly agrees.

A few days later, feeling quite foolish about what happened, the younger don laments: “Looks like we both ate dead rats for nothing”. The more senior professor reassures him, “Yes, but remember we increased GDP by $20,000”.

Did gross domestic product (GDP) really increase? From a national income accounting perspective, the two ‘meals’, requested and paid for by the other, constitute paid services unlike, say, much care work by family members which goes unremunerated.

Indeed, there are many other controversies over measuring GDP.

Lower GDP better?
At the end of the 20th century, similar arguments were made regarding ‘transformational recessions’, i.e., the deep and protracted GDP contractions with the transition in former communist countries from largely collectively owned, centrally planned to much more privately-owned market economies in the 1990s.

The sharp declines were unprecedented in peacetime. The recessions lasted several years, and output fell by more than half in some countries!

‘Shock therapy’ was said to be necessary to overcome interrelated obstacles to progress in one fell swoop. Slogans such as ‘no pain, no gain’ were bandied around to justify and explain the hardship caused.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

However, for some economists in the West, such falling ‘redundant output’, e.g., of tanks and Lenin statues, did not adversely affect the populations’ welfare.

If only such redundant output was excluded from GDP measures, it could be shown that welfare did not decline.

Thus, for Åslund, the actual output decline was much less as “Socialism was a system of waste. Soviet production usually needed three times more inputs than a Western factory since costs were irrelevant to managers. Some of these losses represented inefficiency, others theft … The investment that was sheer waste should preferably be deducted from GDP”.

Similarly, Gaddy and Ickes insisted that “value added can rise…even as domestic consumption, investment, and standards of living appear to decline”. They argued that “measured GDP” in transition economies should, but do not accurately reflect “true value produced in the economy”.

Military spending, armaments production
Åslund dismissed the recorded output contractions during the transformational recessions as “a myth”, partly due to the unusually high share of defence spending in many ‘socialist’ countries (estimated at 15~17% of Soviet GDP in the 1980s), and its reduction during the transitions.

With the transitions, these shares were brought down closer to the “internationally normal level of about 3 percent of GDP”. Åslund therefore recommended deducting 10% of GDP from statistical output losses due to transformational recessions.

For Gaddy and Ickes, less measured output due to lower defence spending represents a welfare gain, not loss, at least in such ‘communist’ economies: “This is an output fall, but welfare is certainly higher with lower defence production”.

Åslund invokes a variant of this logic to recommend deducting the excess over “the internationally normal level of about 3 percent of GDP” from total output.

As these methodologies are quite arbitrary, one may well ask why not zero or the newly recommended 2% of GDP threshold for NATO member countries? And what about military spending and armaments production in other economies?

Defence spending has long been counted as part of GDP. Defence expenditure’s share of GDP in the US was 40% in 1945 at the end of the Second World War, 15% in 1953 during the Korean War, and 10% in 1968 during the Vietnam War.

Arbitrary criteria
Soviet production may well have been inefficient, but so is most protected economic activity throughout the world. Soviet monuments may be dismissed as value subtracting, but what about those erected elsewhere, whether or not politically controversial?

Such arguments also largely ignore evidence of welfare declines due to such transformational recessions, e.g., of much reduced life expectancy.

Also, unlike much else produced in the former Soviet Union, armaments were among the few internationally competitive exports, bringing in valuable foreign exchange.

Excluding some economic activities, but not others, when calculating a country’s national income is also problematic as it is difficult to agree on what economic activities should be included to enhance welfare.

Clearly, setting criteria for what to include or exclude when calculating national income is typically a quite arbitrary exercise.

Measuring progress
Unsurprisingly, there is now a large and growing literature on the shortcomings of national income accounting, proposing many alternative indicators of economic and social progress.

Interestingly, US and European statistical offices only started national income accounts after the Second World War using Simon Kuznets’ pioneering work for the Roosevelt administration.

The Soviet Union had introduced an accounting system in the 1920s to compute its national income. This differed from GDP, e.g., by not recognizing value added by services, or by not depreciating fixed capital stock, but otherwise included data needed for computing GDP.

Undoubtedly, GDP related measures have long been criticized, and we should strive to do better to measure and improve human progress. After all, as Robert F. Kennedy famously quipped over half a century ago, GDP “measures everything, except that which makes life worthwhile”.

 

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Extraordinary session of the Senate of the Republic of Mexico, June 29, 2020. Credit: Senado de Mexico.

By Leonardo Beltran and Andrés Chambouleyron
LA JOLLA, California, United States, Jul 20 2020 (IPS)

On June 10, 2020, Senator Ricardo Monreal, President of the Political Coordination Board of the Senate of Mexico, presented a legislative initiative to reform Article 28 of the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States, in order to cluster in a single regulator of economic competition, the Telecommunications, Broadcasting and Energy sectors.

The initiative contemplates the creation of the National Institute of Markets and Competition for Social Well-being “INMECOB” as an autonomous constitutional body with legal identity, technical, operational and management autonomy that would replace the following institutions:

1. The Federal Commission of Economic Competition (“COFECE”)
2. The Energy Regulatory Commission (“CRE”)
3. The Federal Telecommunications Institute (“IFT”)

The main purpose of the initiative is to contribute to the austerity policy of President López Obrador administration, with the integration of these three regulators that, although they share some general characteristics and objectives, the final goods and/or services they provide are different.

The three regulators are intended to ensure that social welfare is maximized through economic competition in each sector, for example, by ensuring free access for competitors in cases where due to the characteristics of the infrastructure they naturally tend to become monopolies (i.e. electrical networks or gas pipelines, where duplicating the infrastructure would result in a much higher cost to the final consumer).

Although the legal framework of the three regulators, in terms of competition, is the same, each institution applies a different set of processes, which can result in different evaluation standards that could penalize or benefit individuals simply due to the interpretation and organizational culture of each entity in question.

Likewise, administrative management in terms of procurement of goods and services, material and equipment, social communication, among other functions, could be optimized by integrating them into a single institution.

The initiative estimates that from the merger of the three institutions, savings of 500 million pesos per year (22 million dollars) could be obtained, as a result of the reduction in the workforce and operating budget of both COFECE and IFT, where 79.6% is represented by cutting out 440 positions (1 in 5 employees) and the rest would come from general services or operating expenses.

The initiative also argues that in addition to the financial benefit, there will be a lower risk in the capture of the regulator by the private sector, as the relative importance of a certain sector would be reduced within the activities of the regulatory body.

Considering that Senator Monreal’s project cites the National Commission of Markets and Competition of Spain as a precedent for consolidating competition authorities and sector regulators in a single body, we analyzed in detail this particular case and its potential application to the Mexican case.

 

The role of the National Commission of Markets and Competition in Spain

According to its own internet portal, the recently created (2013) National Commission of Markets and Competition (CNMC) aims to guarantee, preserve and promote the proper functioning and transparency of markets, ensuring the existence of effective competition and defending the interests of consumers and companies.

It is a public body with its own legal personality under parliamentary control, which guarantees its independence from the government and legal certainty.

The CNMC is the result of merging the former National Competition Commission (CNC) created in 2007 with sector regulators – the National Energy Commission (CNE), the Telecommunications Market Commission (CMT), the Committee of Railway Regulation (CRF), the State Council for Audiovisual Media (CEMA), the National Commission of the Postal Sector (CNSP) and finally the Airport Economic Regulation Commission (CREA).

The functions of the National Competition Commission (CNC) were essentially three, a) the prosecution of anticompetitive behaviors such as collusive behaviors and abuses of dominant positions, b) the control of operations with economic concentration (prior control of mergers or acquisitions), and c) the promotion of competition in those concentrated markets through liberalization or a greater opening.

Similarly, the National Energy Commission (CNE) created in 1998 had as its essential mission to ensure effective competition in energy systems, which would include the electricity market, as well as the markets for both liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons (natural gas and oil).

The CNE regulated tariffs and service quality in natural monopolies (electricity and gas distribution and transport networks), but also promoted competition in those segments where competition was not effective (gas and electricity commercialization) and resolved conflicts or disputes between different market agents (access to transport networks).

On the other hand, the objectives of the Telecommunications Market Commission (CMT) created in 1996 were a) to be the arbitrator between operators in the face of conflicts such as network interconnection, b) to control compliance with universal service obligations, c) to assign numbering to the operators, d) to adopt measures to ensure free competition between operators, e) to set rates for regulated services, f) to set interconnection charges between networks, g) to exercise sanctioning power, h) to carry out analysis and definition of markets and finally i) to coordinate its functions with the National Competition Commission.

Lastly, the objectives of the Committee for Railway Regulation (CRF), the State Council for Audiovisual Media (CEMA), the National Commission for the Postal Sector (CNSP) and the Commission for Airport Economic Regulation (CREA) were to regulate each of the markets by setting tariffs where competition was not possible and deregulating and promoting competition where it was technically feasible and desirable.

The creation of these regulatory bodies was due to the privatization of state-owned public service companies, the end of state monopolies and the need for Spain to adapt to European regulations.

 

Operation of the CNMC

The CNMC exercises its functions through two governmental bodies: the Council and the President, who is also the Council’ president. The Council is a collegiate decision-making body made up of ten members appointed by the Government with the proposal of the Economy and Competitiveness Minister, and includes persons of recognized prestige and professional competence, after the candidate appears before the corresponding Commission of the Congress of Deputies. Their mandate is for 6 years, non-renewable and is subject to a strict incompatibility regime.

The Council can act in Plenary or in Room. To this end, it is organized into two rooms: one dedicated to competition issues (Competition Room) and the other to supervision of regulated sectors (Regulatory Supervision Room). The Plenary is made up of all the members of the Council and chaired by the President.

In addition, the CNMC has four directions of instruction: Competition; Energy; Telecommunications and the Audiovisual Sector, as well as Transport and the Postal Sector, as illustrated in the following table.

 

 

What are the advantages of a consolidated body?

The arguments used by the Spanish government to justify the consolidation process of the competition authority and the sector regulators in a single body are basically the following: 1) guarantee legal certainty and institutional trust, 2) avoid unnecessary duplication of control of each operator and contradictory decisions in the same matter, 3) take advantage of economies of scale and regulate the administered sectors, establishing an integrating vision in terms of regulation and the defense of competition to adapt it to the changes that have occurred in the economic environment for the benefit of consumers, 4) aim at effectiveness, efficiency, rationalization, agility, objectivity and transparency, 5) unify criteria to offer a balanced and comprehensive solution to consumer problems, 6) adjust the operation of the regulatory authority to the regulations of the European Union, especially in the telecommunications and energy sectors, seeking a greater market integration of the European Single Market.

In summary, what they were looking for was to save administrative costs, streamline and make management more transparent, avoiding duplication and preventing potentially contradictory opinions by unifying criteria in a single agency.

 

Economic analysis and application to the Mexican case

The creation of the original sectoral regulators that regulated energy, telecommunications, railways, ports and the postal market occurred due to the need generated after the privatization of the former state monopolies by becoming private monopolies.

Sector regulation in this case is essentially an ex-ante regulation that is applied to those segments of the markets considered natural monopolies, which are unable to compete due to their technology. These segments are normally electricity and gas distribution and transport networks as well as the old landline network before the irruption of mobile and internet.

In these cases the regulation is ex-ante because it is applied before observing how the market behaves, since it is assumed that natural monopolies (by definition) cannot compete and therefore their rates must be regulated and they must provide their services with a minimum acceptable level of quality.

The body in charge of defending and promoting competition, on the other hand, exercises supervision and eventually also regulation, but of an ex-post type, on those markets in which anti-competitive behavior is observed. In this case the remedy (e.g. sanctions or prohibitions, obligations etc.) is applied after observing how competitive the market is, not before, because it is not possible to predict how competitive a market will be before observing how the companies behave in that market.

The eventual state intervention in a market is normally subsequent to the observation and verification of anti-competitive behavior by the authority.

It is for these two reasons that both types of agencies (competition and sector regulator) are normally separate: their nature is different because they serve markets and/or companies with different characteristics or technologies. Some are natural monopolies that require ex-ante regulation of rates and quality due to their technological impossibility of competing and the others operate in markets that are not competitive enough and that require supervision and (eventually) ex-post regulation to inject more competition, which is, by nature, impossible to achieve in the first group.

While there are segments within regulated sectors that are potentially competitive, such as the production, generation, and commercialization of natural gas and electricity, where sector regulators normally have the power to make ex-post regulation by deregulating potentially competitive markets, the competition agencies are the natural authorities to apply such policies.

Having said all this, there is no argument (economic at least) that justifies the adoption of a super regulatory body that consolidates the competition authority and the sector regulators.

Reviewing the arguments put forward by the Spanish authorities in the previous section, it can be easily verified that: 1) All the advantages that a single regulator supposedly has would also be shown by two separate regulators: one competition authority on the one hand and another multi-sector regulator on the other that regulates natural monopolies, 2) In fact, the CNMC works with 2 suites, the Competition Suite and the Regulatory Supervision Suite, each suite with its directions of instruction that operate separately.

Apparently, and judging by the arguments wielded by the Spanish authorities, the only advantage that the creation of a single authority would offer (in addition to complying with some European regulations) would be to have a single board of directors and a single president, avoiding duplication and reducing administrative costs.

It is clear that for the Mexican case, neither of the two apparent advantages put forward by the Spanish authorities would apply, since, on the one hand, there are no USMCA regulations obligating to adopt a similar measure (Canada and the United States have separate authorities) and there is no assurance that consolidating the current competition authority and sector regulators into one body will result in lower administrative costs.

The CRE of Mexico also has the power to dispose of the income derived from the rights and uses that are established for its services to finance its total budget and a public trust in which it will contribute the remainder of the excess income that it has to accumulate the equivalent to three times its annual budget and if there are additional resources, these will be transferred to the Treasury of the Federation.

This means that CRE’s operation does not represent a burden for public finances and that the cost is self-sustaining from the payment of those regulated by the reception of the service. The CRE, in addition to the regulatory mandate in economic matters, has the mandate to establish technical regulations to address the reliability, stability and security in the supply and provision of electrical energy services, a technical attribute that does not share with the other two Mexican institutions.

In summary, the consolidation project presented does not seem to be able to guarantee any of the objectives it pursues, neither reduction of administrative costs nor less capture power by the authorities. In fact, consolidation into a single agency could generate a superstructure with greater duplications than those that exist today, and nothing guarantees that the new agency will be less prone to capture by the regulated sectors.

The post Pros and Cons of a Super Regulator – The case of the Spanish Regulator appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Leonardo Beltrán and Andrés Chambouleyron are non-resident Fellows at the Institute of the Americas located in La Jolla, California.

The post Pros and Cons of a Super Regulator – The case of the Spanish Regulator appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Credit: UN Women.

By Mamello Makhele
THABA-TSEKA, Lesotho, Jul 20 2020 (IPS)

The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed and given rise to a new, deeply concerning wave of rape culture in Lesotho. Although the true extent is not known yet, we have noticed concerning reports that the onset of the pandemic has worsened sexual violence with more women and girls being confined to small living places whilst social tensions are exacerbated.

According to Senior Inspector ‘Malebohang Nepo from the Child and Gender Protection Unit under the Lesotho Mobile Police Service (LMPS), two weeks into the lockdown she said 18 cases of sexual assault had been reported, which was unusually high.

This new wave includes distressing reports of many Basotho women who, when the lockdown restrictions came into place, had to leave their roles as domestic workers in South Africa entrenching them back into a system of poverty that forced them to return to Lesotho.

However, after having to illegally return to the country, the majority were raped and tortured by security and border officials.

Mamello Makhele.

Most of these distressing accounts have not been officially reported due to fear, prejudice and societal stigma – the same reasons why many rapes in our country go unseen. In the few cases where reports have been made, no action has been taken against the perpetrators. These are the same men entrusted by the government to provide security to our nation.

But let’s be clear, this is not a new issue or phenomenon. Even prior to the pandemic, the prevalence of rape in Lesotho was extremely high. Last year, Gender Minister Dr Mahali Phamotse noted that 90% of male prison inmates had been imprisoned for sexual offence charges (a survey conducted whilst she was Justice Minister) and a report by NGO Gender Links in 2014 found that 62% of women surveyed had experience intimate partner violence, with 8% reporting that they had been raped by a non-partner in their lifetime.

Whilst the pandemic has served to expose and exacerbate this problem, rape culture has existed throughout generations and societies. It is a culture that typically permits men to exercise power and masculinity over women to ultimately deny their basic right to bodily autonomy. It is language and behaviours that encourages men to justify sexual violence. For decades, rape has been viewed as a weapon of oppression to silence and degrade women.

As a midwife, I know only too well the far-ranging consequences that sexual and physical violence has on the lives of women and girls. Only a few weeks ago, a twenty-year-old woman who was nine months pregnant was admitted in my facility with bruises on her back and shoulders, indicating that her husband had physically abused her.

The increasing prevalence of rape in our society means we have to act now. Education and awareness are key to tackling this problem head on. Technology is an especially powerful mobilisation tool to achieve this, especially during a pandemic, and I have been using social media to highlight the pandemic’s impact on women’s rights. It gives me the opportunity to amplify women’s stories of sexual violence and spread awareness of the issue to a wider audience.

Most importantly however, I’m currently hosting online education and awareness sessions with men in rural communities who are largely illiterate and have patriarchy deeply rooted in their behaviour and thoughts. This attitude is highlighted during our conversations when many say that rape is the victim’s fault and that her choice of clothing “forced” her to be raped.

Concerningly, the 2014 Gender Links report found that 39% of men said rape survivors could be seen as responsible because they may have been promiscuous.

These sessions, which will take place in person later on in the year, are designed to challenge this thinking and encourage men to uproot their traditional masculine attitudes and behaviours. I’ve also had informal conversations about rape with men whilst on duty as part of my role as a midwife, where many don’t understand the concept of women’s rights.

If we are to bring about change, we need men to start respecting a woman’s right to choose and to realise that her choice of clothing is by no means an invite for her to be raped.

However, my actions and those of my peers alone are not enough, more is needed. To truly remove entrenched rape culture from our societies, we need a unified approach between governments, justice systems and community organisations that will ensure sexual violence perpetrators are held accountable.

We need to work together so that women are not afraid to come forward and share their stories. We need change in the perceptions of what traditional masculinity is so that victims are not blamed. We need allies to mobilise political and financial support.

Covid-19 has presented many challenges of our country and the fight to defeat this destructive disease is not over yet, but throughout this a woman’s right to decide must be prioritised, maintained and respected. She must have the right to safety, information and healthcare. These are basic human rights. Without Question.

 

Mamello Makhele, midwife and SheDecides 25×25 young leader

The post Challenging Cultural Norms and Removing Stigma is Key to Confronting Lesotho’s Rape Culture appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Mamello Makhele is a midwife and SheDecides 25x25 young leader

The post Challenging Cultural Norms and Removing Stigma is Key to Confronting Lesotho’s Rape Culture appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Yasmine Sherif is Director, Education Cannot Wait

By Yasmine Sherif
NEW YORK, Jul 20 2020 (IPS)

“We may all come on different ships, but we are in the same boat now,” Martin Luther King Jr once said. His timeless wisdom rings truer than ever today for the many challenges the world is facing. COVID-19, continued armed conflicts and forced displacement, climate-change induced disasters, deep divides and widespread discrimination mark the human family in the 21st century.

Yasmine Sherif

While COVID-19 is indeed a health crisis, the state of the world is in a bigger, multi-dimensional crisis. The one safe solution is education. Not just any education, but a quality education. One that is holistic and empowers the young generation, especially girls, to realize their potential, be productive and bring lasting peace to their communities and the world. Without a quality education, we will succumb to a spiral of crisis, as a human family.

Indeed, we are all in the same boat. However, those left furthest behind in conflicts and forced displacement may never have the chance to recover and bounce back. COVID-19 risks plunging them further into the abyss of disempowerment and hopelessness. Without education, there is no hope for them. Tragically, COVID-19 is but one crisis in their abnormal world of widespread violence and systematic violations, dispossession and extreme poverty. All impacting them at the same time.

To tell them that the world is in a health-crisis, but not in an education crisis, implies a failure to recognize their world and their suffering. They amount to 75 million today, of whom 39 million are girls, though the numbers are predicted to rise due to COVID-19. Absence from school or structured remote learning will culminate in millions never returning to school. As many recent reports show (Save the Children, UN Women, to mention a few), they risk being forced into child marriage, early pregnancy and child labor, or being recruited into violent forces and terror groups. These very real protection threats are now escalating and making their way into the daily life of millions of vulnerable children and youth in countries already affected by emergencies and protracted crisis.

Their education cannot wait until COVID-19 has passed, until peace has arrived or until the financial recession is over. On the contrary, as Canada’s Minister of International Development Karina Gould says in her interview in this month’s ECW Newsletter: “The world needs you to keep studying, to keep dreaming, to keep pushing for what you want to see in the world.”

It is now incumbent on the rest of us to move. We must sprint with speed, and we must do it together.

Since WHO declared COVID-19 as a pandemic, Education Cannot Wait has invested in over 100 grantees (partners) across 35 different countries/contexts in multiple phases of our First Emergency Response. This includes the second phase of our COVID-19 response dedicated exclusively to refugees, internally displaced and their host-communities, as well as consolidated efforts to deepen our support to the Sahel.

Across these countries, ECW supports collaboration between host-governments, UN agencies, international NGOs and local organizations through established education in emergency coordination mechanisms. In Mali, UNICEF is working alongside Save The Children, Humanity and Inclusion, Plan International and World Vision International as a result of ECW’s continued prioritization of support to the Sahel. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, UNHCR facilitated a joint application from international organizations AVSI and Terre Sans Frontieres, both of whom had formed consortia with local NGOs. In South Sudan, UNHCR played a similar role, supporting the submission of successful applications from Lutheran World Federation, World Vision International and the local NGO ACROSS. In Iraq, three international NGOs, INTERSOS, Save the Children and the Norwegian Refugee Council are partnering with two local NGOs, People in Need and Public Aid Organization. In Cameroon, UNESCO and UNICEF, collaborated to develop a joint COVID-19 application. In Chad, WFP is partnering with UNHCR and a consortium led by Humanity and Inclusion on interventions in support of the national COVID-19 response.

“At first I was in shock at the closure of the schools which had also led to the suspension of the meal,” said one mother in Niger. “But when I heard of the resumption of school meals and remote learning, I felt joy. The school meal that WFP (World Food Programme) offered to my children, allowed me to keep my children learning despite my meagre resources.”

“The massive mobilization of parents and the massive attendance of children (2,300 children in classes including 150 refugee children) in this COVID-19 learning project is a remarkable success,” said a chief of the village in Niger, in response to a complementary intervention by World Vision.

These examples highlight the diversity of these partnerships and demonstrate ECW’s commitment to joint planning as well as the localization agenda. We are grateful to our partners who work together in-country to deliver in the most difficult of circumstances. Their work is what makes the difference. As a lean global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crisis, Education Cannot Wait’s objective is to be useful to them and to the crisis-affected children and youth we serve.

But we can’t be in an emergency mode forever. There is a “new normal” and we need to adjust to this reality. Consequently, Education Cannot Wait is now also resuming its investments in multi-year resilience programmes (MYRPs), which are designed to support coordinated joint programming across the humanitarian and development community to advance humanitarian-development coherence, national ownership, recovery and sustainability.

As a cost-effective fund, ECW urgently needs $310 million to support our partners to reach the target of 25 multi-year resilience programmes by 2021. Indeed, $310 million is our immediate funding gap and we call on our strategic partners to support our collective efforts to prevent a total disruption to the education of millions of children and youth impacted by conflicts and forced displacement.

We are all in the same boat. But some may not make it through the storm. We need to prevent losses in the progress made and we need to prevent the loss of hope when all else has been taken away. We can only save this world if we first save the lives of those left furthest behind. They need an education and the world needs them. We need you to make it happen.

 

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The post The World Needs You. Now. appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Yasmine Sherif is Director, Education Cannot Wait

The post The World Needs You. Now. appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The “Non-Violence” (or “Knotted Gun”) sculpture by Swedish artist Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd on display at the UN Visitors’ Plaza. Credit: UN Photo

By Siddharth Chatterjee
NAIROBI, Kenya, Jul 20 2020 (IPS)

“The vision and promise of the United Nations is that food, healthcare, water and sanitation, education, decent work and social security are not commodities for sale to those who can afford them, but basic human rights to which we are all entitled.” Those were the poignant words of the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, in a hard hitting speech on 18 July 2020 to mark Mandela Day.

For every staff of the United Nations family the Mandela speech by Mr. Guterres was powerful and inspirational. Speaking about the scourge of inequality, he said, “while we are all floating on the same sea, it’s clear that some are in superyachts while others are clinging to the drifting debris.”

For me, the United Nations (UN) is personal. Coming from a family rendered refugees due to the partition of India in 1947, as a child I benefited from its immunization programmes- I actually survived polio. The UN’s work with the Government of India helped to eradicate smallpox and polio in my home country, where these diseases used to take a huge toll on lives and livelihoods.

Although forged in the crucible of wars and crippling ideological rivalries between East and West, the United Nations has since managed to convince the world of the need to compromise and to take each other’s views into account and to listen to others while facing humanity’s enduring challenges. That this has been achieved in just 75 years is remarkable.

In the narrative of the period when humanity made great social, cultural, and economic advances, the UN takes centre stage. For more than two decades during my service in the UN system, I have been part of this story and am convinced that the UN still matters, perhaps now more than ever.

While the calamitous cost of two World Wars and subsequent ideological fault-lines convinced humankind of the need for a body like the UN, the challenges facing us today remain just as formidable. As the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, it does not take much to upend not only individual lives, but entire societies and economies. There are numerous reasons for people to feel insecure in today’s world.

Among these are strong indications of resurgent nationalism and warning signs of ethnic and religious isolationism that not only threaten states, communities and individuals. Combined with humanitarian and climate disasters, these challenges have been articulated and framed for action as the Sustainable Development Goals that the UN is spearheading everywhere in the world.

Just as diplomacy was the basis for the establishment of the UN, my experience in the frontlines of combat operations when I served in the Indian Army convinced me that there is a better way to solve conflicts. My early career in the UN was spent in countries almost defined by war and instability, such as Iraq, Sudan, South Sudan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Somalia. The images of men, women, and children driven from their homes by murder, rape, and the burning down of schools and homes is seared in my mind.

I am proud to have been part of the United Nations response to complex humanitarian challenges. In Indonesia, for example, an innovation by the UN called a “school-in-a-box” helped children return to their regular school routine as quickly as possible during the conflict in Aceh when schools were being burned down. We helped maintain immunization, reproductive health services, education as well as nutrition services, working in difficult and life-threatening situations in Darfur, Somalia, and Iraq. We demobilized child soldiers in the midst of a conflict in South Sudan.

Child soldiers of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army march away after surrendering their weapons during a demobilization ceremony at the army barracks in Malou, South Sudan, in Feb. 25, 2001. Under an agreement with UNICEF, the SPLA demobilized 3551 child soldiers aged between eight and 18. UNICEF airlifted them away from combat zones to safe havens in Rumbek, South Sudan. Credit: UNICEF/OLS

With the Coronavirus pandemic raging, UN country teams all over the world are working tirelessly with their respective host governments to flatten the curve.

In various countries today, internecine conflicts, hunger, and disease continue to take a tragic toll, especially among the world’s children. The malignant neglect of our global environment threatens all of us. The UN retains unprecedented respect, acceptance, and mobilizing capacity to rally member states to act together to solve these problems.

The nature of today’s challenges compels us towards integration and collaboration. Humankind must find new ways to work together more effectively in pursuit of our collective interests and to think anew about how our institutions of international cooperation can be strengthened.

The UN has enabled many member states to embark on transformational journeys; life expectancy is rising, jobs being created, and people lifted out of poverty. Yet in many others, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, progress is fragile and unequal. The UN constantly seeking new models that are inclusive and sustainable, and is opening up new opportunities to harness big data, technology and innovation to leapfrog development, through ground breaking partnerships with the private sector.

Many factors have sometimes stymied the United Nations’ work. These range from reliability of funding to the difficulties of achieving consensus between diverse member states on complex topics. Such factors have sometimes made us slow and limited our impact.

Antonio Guterres has said that “worldwide consultation process around the 75th anniversary of the United Nations has made clear that people want a global governance system that delivers for them”. Therefore the bold reforms underway, led by Mr Guterres, will make the organization more nimble, better equipped and prepared to deal with contemporary challenges.

UN country teams are adapting to new realities in their programmes, reflecting the shifts (such as peacekeeping to peace-building) through social and economic development support and humanitarian relief.

In Kenya, the country’s President, Uhuru Kenyatta is spearheading the charge to eradicate female genital mutilation supported by the United Nations. I have seen firsthand the reduction in maternal and infant mortality due to complications at childbirth, universal access to primary education and better a collective push to achieve universal health coverage.

Aisha Hussein and her team pose for a picture during the youth caravan in Isiolo as part of a joint UNFPA-UNICEF initiative to eradicate FGM. Credit: UNICEF Kenya

I continue to see the promise of peace and prosperity for the most vulnerable marginalized that comes with the UN’s work, such as the Kenya Uganda cross border initiative to promote peace and development in the Karamoja area, mired in rivalry over scant resources and experiencing the debilitating impact of climate change. Amina Mohammed the UN Deputy Secretary General said, “It’s exciting to see the new ways in which governments, communities and partners are coming together with UN teams to mobilize across borders especially when it comes to taking climate action”.

COVID-19 has confirmed that the era of national problems is receding fast, by revealing national and global fragilities to an invisible virus. The pandemic is a stark reminder of the need for cooperation across borders, sectors and generations.

Today we can see that most challenges are global and interconnected, and can only be tackled through global action coordinated through global institutions.

At the signing of the United Nations Charter, in San Francisco in 1945, the President of the United States America, Harry Truman said, “If we fail to use it, we shall betray all those who have died so that we might meet here in freedom and safety to create it. If we seek to use it selfishly – for the advantage of any one nation or any small group of nations — we shall be equally guilty of that betrayal”.

Those farsighted leaders who founded the United Nations 75 years ago gave us the momentum to propel humanity to greater security and prosperity. Today, the UN continues to be a sound investment, a real beacon of hope.

Siddharth Chatterjee is the United Nations Resident Coordinator to Kenya. This OPED was first featured in Forbes Africa.

 

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Credit: Nepali Times.

By Nunuta Rai
KATHMANDU, Jul 20 2020 (IPS)

Nepal’s education system was in crisis long before the pandemic hit. But with schools closed now for four straight months, remote learning has also exposed the class divide in access to education.

There was already poor quality of instruction in government schools, and parents were sending their children to more expensive private institutions. But this inequity in schooling has been further exacerbated by the need for remote instruction due to the COVID-19 crisis.

While better endowed schools are conducting online classes, the digital divide has meant that a majority of schools and students in the country have been left out.

“It is difficult to conduct online classes even in households that have equipment. Some families have only one smartphone or laptop and there are up to three children taking online classes simultaneously”

By making self-contradictory rules, the government has sowed further confusion. It announced classes would be conducted through ‘alternative’ systems, but did not ensure that students had tv sets, mobile data, laptops, and did not train teachers in distance learning.

Even in Kathmandu Valley, many students do not have access to computers and WiFi to take online classes, so the situation in the remoter districts are much worse. Meanwhile the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology just issues directives, tells schools conducting regular online classes not to charge fees, but without making alternative provisions for teacher’s salaries.

In May, the ministry issued the ‘Student Learning Facilitation Guide for Alternative Systems’ which mentioned radio, television, online and offline lessons, self-learning, and remote teaching as methods to be used. But uneven access to technology has created a divide in the past four months between those who get to learn who does not.

“The main problem with alternative learning systems is the digital divide,” explains Shishir Khanal, co-founder of Teach for Nepal. “The only way to bridge this is to go back to in-person teaching by organising staggered classes with precautions, or for teachers to physically visit students’ homes maintaining distance. Trouble is that many of the schools have been converted to quarantine centres.”

A survey of access to technology in Tulsipur in the western Tarai recently showed that even in the town, only 6% of students in government schools had WiFi access at home. Only 21% in higher education had radio sets at home for FM classes.

Most private schools had been taking online classes for the past two months until the private school organisation PABSON decided to shut all online classes from Thursday to protest the government’s decision not to allow them to take fees from parents.

There is technology gap among students even in Kathmandu Valley. At the Pragati Shiksha Sadan Secondary School in Lalitpur, only a quarter of students are taking online classes. Of the rest, many are stuck outside the Valley because of the lockdown and poorer families cannot afford laptops and Wifi.

Principal Surya Prasad Ghimire says the school is conducting classes for lower grades through radio and television, and higher classes online. He adds: “Students in the Valley studying in government schools are from weaker economic backgrounds, and do not have the equipment to take online classes.”

Students unable to attend online classes are provided with alternative textbooks and class materials, but this is not as effective as online learning. “Some students feel inferior because they do not have the equipment for online classes,” says Ghimire. “It is good that we are able to do remote learning, but this is not accessible to many.”

Professor Ram Krishna Regmi says the digital divide has brought out the class divide in Nepali society. He says: “Focusing only on teaching through the use of technology is discriminatory for people who do not have access to it.”

Ministry of Education, along with local levels and schools, decided to classify students who did not have access to the internet and provide them with resources to aid their learning. They were instructed to categorise students according to access to radio, FM radio,  tv, and access to a computer but no internet.

In Lalitpur, for example, students in 219 government schools who do not have online access have been instructed to listen to radio or tv classes at a specified time. However, Mahendra Chhetri at Lalitpur Municpality admits that alternative learning is inherently unequal unless the technology gap is bridged.

Even before the government decided on alternative instruction Bhaktapur had already started remote learning through a local tv channel in its 33 public school, while many of the 60 private schools are doing online classes.

However, despite this there are problems of access. Hari Parsad Niraula of Bhaktapur’;s education department says while 80% of the students from private schools are taking classes, only 48% from public schools are online.

In Kathmandu, there is a total of 500 private and public schools. According to Ishwar Man Dangol, spokesperson of the Kathmandu Municipality, most schools have effectively implemented an alternative learning system. Apart from using Zoom and Messenger,  schools are broadcasting lessons through radio and tv.

“It is difficult to conduct online classes even in households that have equipment. Some families have only one smartphone or laptop and there are up to three children taking online classes simultaneously,” says K B Karmacharya, a teacher in Wagishwari Higher Secondary School. “The parents are getting fed up.”

One government school in Dharan in eastern Nepal had around 30 students who did not have access to online platforms, radio or tv, says principal Indra Mohan Jha. “Even if families have laptops or phones, they do not have WiFi and cannot afford mobile data.”

 

This story was originally published by The Nepali Times

The post Digital Divide Exposes Class Divide in Nepal Schools appeared first on Inter Press Service.

A woman farmer selling her produce at a local market in Casamence, southern Senegal. In sub-Saharan Africa, 90 percent of those in informal employment, which is typically low-skilled with poor working conditions, are women. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
HYDERABAD , Jul 20 2020 (IPS)

Growing up in the Senegalese capital of Dakar, Siny Samba (28) watched with fascination as her grandmother made snacks for her family, using the fresh fruit from their garden. She would often help her grandma make these snacks to feed the neighbourhood children.

“One day, I am going to have snack parties for children like Granny does,” Samba would tell herself.

But years later, when she visited local stores to buy fruit preserves, she was disappointed to see only expensive, imported products on the shelves. They neither tasted as fresh as her Grandma’s ones, nor where they as high in nutritional value.

So in 2017, armed with a degree in food processing engineering from France, Samba launched Senegal’s first baby food startup – Le Lionceau (The Lion Cub). Her goal: to provide Senegalese mothers and infants with a choice of locally-processed food, made from organic, fresh farm produce.

Initially, she started with three types of fruit jams. But now, three years later, she has expanded to 15 products, including jam, jelly, marmalade, cereal and biscuits. Her company now employs nine people and also trains fruit and vegetable farmers across Senegal in safe harvesting techniques and safer storage methods as well as the organic certification process. 

“We have a very simple philosophy: make the best use of our country-grown fruits and vegetables and sell to people who love feeding their children healthy, nutritional products. So, we are building a business that sustains and improves the local food value chain and organic farmers while providing high quality food to Senegalese people,” Samba tells IPS.

Senegal – a fertile ground for startups

Samba’s Le Lionceau is one of the many startups that have mushroomed up across Senegal in recent years.

According to VC4A — an organisation that provides technical and financial support to startup ventures globally and in Senegal — there are 128 registered startups in the West African nation, over a dozen of which are owned by women.

However, it is often assumed that the number of women-owned startups are much higher as many women entrepreneurs hesitate to register their businesses due to high taxes, which include 18 percent Value Added Tax (VAT) and 30 percent company taxes.

The figures are not unusual for the continent.

“Participation in informal employment that is typically low-skilled and comes with poor working conditions is higher among women than men. In 2018, this was the case in more than 90 percent of sub-Saharan African countries,” states a policy document by Women Deliver, a global advocacy organisation that champions gender equality and the health and rights of girls and women.

However, the introduction of the Senegal Startup Act promises to provide support for startups, while easing their tax burden.

The law was passed in December 2019 after 19 months of intense consultation and discussions among 60 Senegalese innovation enthusiasts, 20 startup supporter organisations and government representatives, including the tax authority, and the education and economy and finance ministries.

The law aims to promote and provide tax breaks and other benefits to innovative new businesses in various fields, ranging from food and agriculture to health and mobile banking. Senegal is only the second African country after Tunisia to have such a law supporting startups.

Perhaps it will create an encouraging environment for women entrepreneurs, but the law itself has no special provisions for them. 

“The new law is really a big ball of hope for all of us who have started without any external help and were struggling to create everything from scratch, like consumer awareness, training of suppliers, creating a conducive market, building infrastructure etc,” says Samba.

Giving the information women need

• In Senegal, 49.9 percent of women of reproductive age have anaemia, says the global nutrition report which profiles the burden of malnutrition at the global, regional, sub-regional and country level.
• In children the rate of acute malnutrition is nine percent, which is higher than the developing country average of 8.5 percent, the report states.

Despite the high burden of challenges, resources are always inadequate, say many experts.

There is never enough credible information available to mothers on malnutrition, nor is there enough funding for those who are working to improve women’s and children’s health, says Fatou Ndiaye Turpin, the executive director of Réseau Siggil Jigéen (RSJ), a women’s rights organisation that aims to promote and protect women’s rights in Senegal.

RSJ is also one of the convenors of the Deliver for Good campaign coalition in Senegal, which is part of a larger, global campaign powered by Women Deliver. The Deliver for Good campaign promotes 12 crucial investments in women and girls, including dramatically reducing gender-based violence; the respect, protection and fulfilment of sexual health and rights; ensuring equitable and quality education as well as boosting women’s economic empowerment.

Seynabou Thiam, a Dakar-based digital entrepreneur and mother of two young children, agrees with Turpin. In Senegal, there isn’t enough credible information in the public domain on issues that mothers need such as childcare, child nutrition, mothers’ health and well-being etc., Thiam tells IPS.

In 2013, Thiam founded Yaay.sn, a social networking group for mothers that aims to close this information gap. The network, Senegal’s first digital social community, has over 12,000 members.

Using blogs, posters, videos and photographs as resources, Yaay.sn offers Senegalese mothers the information they need about childcare, nutrition and health though a platform that allows them to connect, share their problems and seek support from each other.

Thiam  has won several awards for her startup, including the Female Digital Enterprise Award in 2015 and Africa Digital Communication Days Awards 2019.

“We currently have two major platforms – a group page on Facebook and a channel on Youtube. The construction of our website has already started, so technically, we are in a transition phase right now. But I am hopeful that our website will be completed and operational soon,” Thiam tells IPS.

In 2011, only 15 percent of Senegalese had access to the internet, according to World Bank data. But today, less than a decade later, the number has dramatically increased to 58 percent. The rapid digitisation is an encouraging factor for women who have the potential to become digital entrepreneurs, says Thiam.

“Women have a systemic approach to business. Sustainability is always at the back of their mind, even as they create wealth. They also constantly think of the welfare of those around them – including their families,” Thiam tells IPS.

Women sell farm produce in Casamence, southern Senegal. Evidence shows that women’s full participation in the economy drives better performing and more resilient businesses and supports economic growth and wider development goals for nations. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Joining the Fight Against COVID

Gaelle Tall is the co-founder and chief sales officer of Paps, an e-logistics start-up that provides delivery services across Senegal. When the COVID-19 crisis began to effect the country, which has no online grocery stores, Tall quickly added a new service to Pap’s offers: delivery of food, water and hygiene products to people living under lockdown restrictions.

Another health startup which has been quick to join the fight against COVID-19 is SenVitale, which created the Passeport Universelle de Santé.

Launched in 2017 and co-founded by 22-year-old Nafissatou Diouf, the Passeport Universelle de Santé is a QR scan of a patient’s medical data that is integrated on a card, bracelet, or a pendant. Doctors can instantly access patient medical data by scanning the QR code.

When the COVID-19 outbreak reached Senegal, SenVitale created a web platform where citizens can take a coronavirus self-assessment test before approaching a medical facility. So far, over 100,000 people have taken the test, thereby taking some burden off a stressed national health service. Senegal has over 8,000 cases reported. 

“I lost my aunt who died mainly because she couldn’t find enough information on her sickness. So, we wanted to find a system that would help our doctors and health practitioners act faster,” Diouf, who won Best Startup of the Year (Senegal) awards and also the Feminine Coup de Coeur awards in 2019, tells IPS.

Areas awaiting urgent interventions

Senegal’s population, currently 16.7 million, is expected to rise to 22.3 million by 2030.

“In such a context, reproductive health programmes for young and inactive populations are essential for Senegal to capture the demographic dividend and for the country’s economic and social situation to improve,” Turpin tells IPS.
She identified four crucial areas of women’s health that urgently need greater attention: maternal mortality, access to contraception, information on reproductive health and investment.

The current volume of investment and attention to all of these four areas remains inadequate, although some NGOs are providing services, Turpin says.

“The NGOs are closely linked to public health structures and most of the time operate as referral clinics for public sector clients. These NGOs also create digital platforms to facilitate access to information and products on sexual and reproductive health,” she adds, admitting that no start-up business has stepped into the reproductive health area with a bankable service.

Perhaps its time for a woman to take on the challenge. “Evidence shows that women’s full participation in the economy drives better performing and more resilient businesses and supports economic growth and wider development goals for nations,” Women Deliver notes in a policy brief.

Meanwhile, female entrepreneurs like Samba are trying to add value to their current services by making videos on health, food quality, nutrition, organic food and the need for building immunity through the consumption of fresh, healthy food.

The videos in Senegal’s main indigenous language, Wolof, are free and handed to women and girls who purchase her products.

“Working for health, nutrition and food is hard,” she says, explaining that remains a lack of funding and infrastructure, taxes are high and there are many cultural barriers.

“For example, when I go for a business appointment with my male co-founder, people speak to him and ignore me,” Samba says.

But she believes things are changing.

“But (there are) many organisations providing training to women entrepreneurs, there are networking facilities. There is a new law plus the opportunity to improve women and children’s health. So, it’s an exciting time to have a startup.”

 

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