Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

A mother and daughter in Kenya. The daughter was a victim of sexual violence. Credit: Tara Carey, Equality Now

By Tsitsi Matekaire
LONDON, Jun 26 2020 (IPS)

In Malawi, Mary* was only 14 years old when she was recruited and trafficked to the city of Blantyre and sold for sex in a bar. A man had arrived in her village looking for girls to work as domestic helpers for families.

He appeared genuine and for Mary – and many girls who are out of school and living in poverty – this seemed a way out and a chance to earn money to support her family. She was living with her grandmother, who had hardly enough to buy food.

When Mary arrived in Blantyre, the promised work never materialized. Instead, the man sold her to a bar owner who in turn sold her for sex to his customers. Isolated and traumatized, Mary was trapped for over three months, and only escaped when the bar owner went away one night.

Although it has now been over two years since his arrest, the case is still pending in court. With no fixed time limit, the legal process has dragged on, leaving Mary waiting indefinitely and stuck in limbo. Meanwhile, the man who recruited her from the village has never been arrested.

Mary would have abandoned her fight for justice long ago had it not been for the support of Equality Now and our partner People Serving Girls at Risk, who have been providing psycho-social assistance to help Mary rebuild her life and navigate the difficult legal process.

This includes covering her transport costs and accompanying her to numerous court hearings that to date have resulted in only postponements, disappointment, and upset.

Worryingly, the many legal obstacles faced by Mary are neither uncommon in sex trafficking cases, nor are they unique to Malawi. Across Africa, traffickers who recruit, abuse, and sexually exploit vulnerable and impoverished women and children are going unpunished because governments and criminal justice systems are failing in their duty to hold perpetrators to account.

Take for instance, the horrific case of German national Bernhard Glaser, who was arrested in Ugandan in February 2019 and charged with multiple counts of sex trafficking and abusing girls aged 10 to 16 who were living at an unlicensed shelter Glaser had established ostensibly to “help” vulnerable children.

The story made international headlines and caused huge public uproar amongst Ugandans who were appalled at how this predator had betrayed the community’s trust and abused his position of power to sexually exploit many girls over a long period of time.

Despite widespread public outrage, more than a year after Glaser’s arrest, the case was still pending, delayed by multiple adjournments, with Glaser yet to even enter his plea. He died from cancer in April 2020, a day after being granted bail.

The girls never got their day in court. Nor has the Ugandan state addressed the issues making them vulnerable to exploitation or provided assistance to help them overcome their ordeal, instead leaving them at risk of further abuse.

Meanwhile, 61-year-old American Christian missionary Gregory Dow has pleaded guilty in a US court to sexually abusing girls in Kenya. Back in 1996, he was convicted in America for assault with intent to commit sexual abuse against a teenager and was sentenced to two years’ probation and ordered to register as a sex offender.

He later travelled to Kenya and in 2008 established a home for orphaned children where he violated girls in his care.

In 2017, Dow fled back to the United States after Kenyan authorities attempted to arrest him. He was eventually taken into custody after being located by FBI agents and US police.

A statement by the US Department of Justice said: “The defendant purported to be a Christian missionary who cared for these children and asked them to call him “Dad.” But instead of being a father figure, he preyed on their youth and vulnerability.”

Sexual exploitation is both a cause and a consequence of discrimination and the unequal status of women and girls. Adolescent girls are in an especially disadvantaged position, which is underpinned by multiple layers of discrimination directed at them for being young, female, and sexualized by society.

These structural inequalities exist across Africa, as they do in all the regions of the world. High levels of poverty alongside harmful cultural practices make girls particularly susceptible to sexual predators and traffickers, who take advantage of shortcomings in social safety nets, local child protection systems, law enforcement, and judicial processes.

The current pandemic exposes and exacerbates deep-rooted structural inequalities that run along the cultural fault lines of gender, sexuality, race, disability, and class. In the wake of COVID-19, an economic crisis is placing further burdens on underprivileged communities, with many suffering severe financial hardship.

The United Nations has warned human traffickers are becoming increasingly active, targeting impoverished women and children who have lost their income as a consequence of lockdown and social distancing measures introduced to limit the spread of coronavirus.

Meanwhile, school closures have interrupted the education of over 1.5 billion students worldwide, and protection systems have been severely disrupted. Predators are seeking to take advantage of youngsters spending more time unsupervised on the internet.

Across Africa, the expansion of inexpensive, high-speed internet and the growth in smartphone, tablet, and laptop ownership is swelling the number of children who can be targeted in the digital realm. Girls are particularly vulnerable to online grooming, sexual coercion, and sextortion, accounting for 90% of those featured in online child abuse materials.

Coupled with this is a disturbing global surge in demand for child abuse content. The worldwide impact of COVID-19 means people have been spending more time online, fuelling what was already a vast and rapidly expanding form of cybercrime intersecting national boundaries.

Exponential growth in the volume of digital content is making the cybersphere harder to police, and emboldened distributors of child sexual exploitation material are targeting mainstream platforms to reach wider audiences.

It is commendable that numerous African governments, including those in Kenya, Malawi, and Uganda, have enacted anti-trafficking and child protection laws that can be used to safeguard children and punish offenders. It is an important step. However, implementation is often very weak. Sex trafficking and sexual exploitation cases are not prioritized.

In many African countries, courts have closed, reduced, or adjusted their operations, making the situation even worse for girls seeking justice. Mounting backlogs of legal cases will further prolong judicial and administrative proceedings.

Without functioning judicial oversight, girls’ access to justice and protection from sexual exploitation will be undermined to an even greater extent.

It is more urgent than ever that the justice system responds to the realities of children whose rights have been violated. States must put in place measures to ensure that girls have access to protection and justice in meaningful ways during and after the pandemic.

Governments need to do more to ensure survivors of sexual exploitation are protected and supported in their recovery. When victims and their families cannot trust the courts to deliver justice, it undermines the power of the law and emboldens offenders to continue exploiting and abusing with impunity.

 

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The post African Governments Failing Survivors of Child Sexual Exploitation appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Tsitsi Matekaire is a London-based human rights lawyer and Global Lead for Equality Now’s End Sex Trafficking program

The post African Governments Failing Survivors of Child Sexual Exploitation appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By External Source
Fiji, Jun 25 2020 (IPS-Partners)

Standing in the middle of a field around a withered plant, the Pacific Community’s Plant Health Doctors conducted their first virtual meeting as they continue their work on the frontline by providing vital support for farmers in Fiji and the region.

Plant Health Doctor Mr Mani Mua conducted the virtual meeting from a farm located in Baulevu, in the Province of Naitasiri in Fiji accompanied by the Fiji Ministry of Agriculture Extension Officers and farmers from the area, linking up with the regional plant health doctor network and plant health experts from Australia and New Zealand.

SPC, through its Land Resource Division (LRD) has been training plant health doctors and conducting plant health clinics since launching the pilot program in the Solomon Islands in March 2012 as Agriculture Extension officers continue to face challenges in delivering effective services to large volumes of farmers in rural and remote communities.

To overcome these challenges, a new, free phone application, the Pacific Pest and Pathogens app was developed for use by agriculture extension officers and farmers which enables them to quickly diagnose and get treatment advice for pest and disease threats to horticulture in Pacific Island countries and territories (PICTs). Adding to the app’s capacity to provide instant assistance to farmers is the addition of a new “WhatsApp” social media group in late 2017. Using WhatsApp, owned by Facebook, an extension officer – or farmer – can instantly send a text message or photo seeking assistance from the group’s growing number of experts.

“Agriculture extension officers are helping farmers to identify diseases and fight pests with the help of the handy mobile phone app which contains 350 factsheets and is particularly helpful in providing information to people in remote locations. In other words, using the app and WhatsApp, we as extension and research officers can be in many places at one time and more useful to farmers than ever before,” explained Mr Mua.

With exchange of real time information and visual inspection of diseased plants from the farm, plant health doctors and extension officers are able to provide remedies to the farmers and collect samples for testing and analysis. During the plant health clinics, farmers from the local area bring samples of plants from their farm which are infected by disease or infested with pests, for diagnosis and ideas for management.

“At the same time, we are also building our data base on local farmers and their needs. During the clinics, farmer information is collected and pests and pathogens within the locality can be identified, isolated and treated before it spreads or ruins entire seasonal crops. This is a life line for farmers,” added Mr Mua.

For a farmer like Mr Saqa Dewan whose livelihood is dependent on his seasonal crops, having plant health doctors at his door steps and providing their service has been a game changer.

“We often continue to experiment with various remedies when our crops are infested and diseased, but it is expensive and doesn’t work. Now, for the first time, we are able to learn from the extension officers, be involved in diagnosis and lean the use of proper pesticides and other remedies we can use so that our hard work does not go to waste,”Mr Dewan.

Implemented by the Pacific Community, the project focuses on integrated crop management (ICM) and identifying plant health management strategies, which has been funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) with support from the University of Queensland.

Source: South Pacific Community SPC

The post Field Connections- How technology is supporting Pacific agriculture appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Jun 25 2020 (IPS)

Katharina Pistor’s recent book, The Code of Capital: How the law creates wealth and inequality shows how law has been crucial to the creation of capital, and how capital continues to survive, evolve and enhance its ability to ‘make money’, or secure wealth legally, i.e., through the law.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Legal coding makes capital
In her magnum opus, the Columbia Law School professor explains how legal systems create capital and how law enables wealth creation through what she terms ‘legal coding’. Notions of property and property rights have changed over the ages, reflecting and redefining social and economic relations more generally.

Pistor sees ‘legal coding’ — e.g., via collateral, trust, corporate governance, bankruptcy, contracts and other property laws — as means for assets to become capital, creating wealth for their holders. When “coded in law”, even “dirt” can become a valuable asset, capable of enriching its owners.

For her, institutions of private law privilege those with capital by ensuring: priority, against competing claims; durability, enabling capital to grow in value; convertibility, ‘locking in’ earlier gains; and universality, ensuring that such privileges extend transnationally.

With the emergence and growing significance of new financial products and services, intellectual property and data access in the early 21st century, the evolution of capital increasingly involves new, especially intangible assets, including debt.

New combinations and prioritization of property rights and contracts have created complex debt products, including collateralized debt obligations and credit debt swaps, the bases for much contemporary ‘financialization’.

Private interests’ flexible use of such legal institutions has been crucial to capital accumulation, but Pistor notes that the increasing private use of law also undermines its role and legitimacy as a public good, and hence, the very ‘rule of law’ itself.

Legal coding is therefore not only about how assets become capital, but also about how capital creates wealth, and laws enable such transformations involving property, ownership and entitlements.

As “capital is created behind closed doors in the offices of private attorneys”, codifying capital in law worsens inequality between capital and others, especially labour.

Role of states
State sanctioned judicial processes transform assets into capital. Legal coding thus “owes its power to law…backed and enforced by a state”. The state has thus been crucial to legally coding assets as capital, using existing as well as new laws and judicial precedents so crucial to common law.

States and other relevant legal institutions also redefine the law — e.g., through the legislative process, catering to the evolving nature and needs of capital, especially its most successful lobbyists — by amending existing laws and creating new laws.

The state and other social institutions ensure the legitimacy of the ‘rule of law’ by mitigating and managing its adverse effects, as well as by resolving problematic ambiguities and uncertainties.

The legal profession has been the main agency of legal coding, ‘making’ the law. Lawyers contribute to its evolution — by drafting and thus determining the nature, scope and impact of law — and defend the law by legitimizing it, even when challenging, criticizing and reforming the law.

Despite relying on the authority of law, common or legislated, many lawyers go to great lengths to avoid taking disputes to courts, the traditional guardians of the law, instead preferring or even insisting on private settlements or arbitration.

Crossing borders
The accumulation of capital has long been transnational, closely interlinked with the globalization of recent decades. However, legal coding is primarily national, within the realms of particular states.

Hence, the legal reach of capital does not extend to other jurisdictions except when provided for by imperial or colonial jurisdiction, and by international treaty, convention and coercion, including the use of military force, in the post-colonial era.

With globalization, private interests can increasingly choose legal systems to suit their needs, i.e., engage in jurisdiction or ‘forum shopping’. Limiting the ability to opt in and out of legal systems is hence vital for state legitimacy and societal capacity for collective self-governance.

Inter-state collaboration, among ‘independent’ central banks not beholden to national governments, or through multilateral institutions — such as the World Trade Organization, trade agreements, investment and other treaties — have thus become crucial means for extending legal coding beyond national jurisdictions.

As national judicial decisions are not typically considered extraterritorial in scope, the legal community has extended arbitration transnationally while trying to ensure — through convention as much as legislation — that national laws and courts recognize, uphold and enforce the outcomes of such private arrangements.

With new technology, capital is trying to protect and extend its privileges without conventional legal coding, e.g., new blockchain applications suggest that some digital innovations can provide attributes required by capital.

Pistor observes that ‘digital coders’ — those who develop digital code — have set their own rules, transcending national boundaries, without recourse to the law. Until now, however, digital code is still far from an adequate substitute for legal code, with digital ownership, rights and conflict resolution still based on existing laws.

Law as history
Pistor’s own academic background in comparative law appears crucial to her appreciation of how various societies have coped with different challenges, including the normative or ethical choices involved.

Her legal history of capital considers different perspectives and influences. While legal coding has been mis-used by asset owners, lawyers and states, it can also help address such abuses.

The future of capital rests on evolving complex relations and interlinkages among laws, the stakeholders involved as well as related ideologies and perspectives.

Professor Pistor has greatly advanced our shared dialectical understanding of how legal codes — essentially ideological constructs — consolidate, define and transform social relations in order to advance, extend and accelerate capital accumulation, in other words, make history.

The post The Best Law Capital Can Buy appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Poor families can seldom afford the cost of private pre-schooling. They rely on free education provided by NGOs like BRAC to give their children a leg-up in life. Credit: Mahmuddun Rashed Manik / IPS

By Asif Saleh
DHAKA, Bangladesh, Jun 25 2020 (IPS)

Nazia has a herd of 5 cows. She has two daughters in secondary education, a seat on the Village Council, a savings account and a permanent home. Nazia has dignity, security and prospects beyond poverty. This is Nazia’s story because alongside her commitment and conviction to create a better life, she benefited directly from the UK government, and its global leadership in the drive to end extreme poverty.

Nazia is no longer Left Behind. And neither are millions of fellow Bangladeshis, previously struggling to survive, far below the international poverty line. Over the last two decades, the UK government, in partnership with BRAC, one of the world’s foremost NGOs, has directly enabled over 2 million of the very poorest families on the planet to graduate from poverty. And for the long-term; 97% of households continue to show dramatically improved lives and livelihoods 5-7 years after they leave poverty. We are immensely proud of this innovative, impactful Partnership – which delivers equally for the UK taxpayer and the poorest families across Bangladesh.

In fact, this ‘Ultra Poor Graduation’ approach is, this week, receiving the Audacious Award, and over 60 million USD, in recognition of its truly transformative potential. Without support from the UK government, with their laser-like focus on impact, appetite for innovation and determination to Leave No one Behind, there would be no Audacious Award for this Initiative. In fact, without support from the UK government, BRAC wouldn’t have the audacious ambition of reaching out beyond Bangladesh, to millions more of the world’s poorest people.

Much has been written in recent days on the merger of the Department for International Development (DFID) and the Foreign Office. Undoubtedly, an independent DFID has delivered. Generation-changing impact on the global issues that matter most. But the new Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) can too. It must. The progress on ending extreme poverty, preventable child deaths, gender equality and climate change, as well as DFID’s world-class reputation on these issues, was too hard won to be side-lined. As an organisation born in the Global South and one of the UK government’s largest development partners, BRAC has seen first-hand the ability of UK Aid to make transformative change.

We choose to believe that the UK government takes incredibly seriously, and won’t consider reneging on, its commitment to Agenda 2030. We choose to believe that this merger could result in greater impact on poverty, combining the best of DFID and FCO expertise, ideals and standards to reaffirm, rather than reduce, the UK government’s contribution to the international community.

In announcing the creation of the new FCDO, the Prime Minister has continued to commit to 0.7% of GNI being used to drive development. The need to invest this budget – which, as a result of global recession, will be significantly less than in recent years – with a focus on impact, value for money and the most vulnerable, is more important than ever before. DFID has rigorous analysis of the ‘best buys’ for development. The new FCDO should trust the evidence, embrace the expertise and lean into the legacy of the UK government as a world-leader in saving, and changing, the lives of the world’s poorest people. Supporting the governments and communities of the Global South to enable families to survive, and thrive, should always be a central, and celebrated, component of the UK’s international leadership.

The COVID-19 crisis represents a moment of reckoning for our shared global commitment to ‘Leave No one Behind’. It also represents the perfect opportunity – and responsibility – for the new FCDO to prove its intent and impact in ‘Building Back Better’ with a priority on the poorest. The international community – both government and civil society – will expect, and require, no less, in line with DFID’s track record, and the true ideals of ‘Global Britain’.

This story was originally published by Thomson Reuters Foundation.

 

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The post Looking Beyond the Lowest-common Denominator? DFID/FCO Merger appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Asif Saleh is Executive Director of BRAC Bangladesh

 
The progress on ending extreme poverty, preventable child deaths, gender equality and climate change was too hard won to be side-lined

The post Looking Beyond the Lowest-common Denominator? DFID/FCO Merger appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Sabina Devkota
DOLAKHA, Nepal, Jun 25 2020 (IPS)

While growing up in Lele village in southern Lalitpur, Pratap Thapa watched his parents plant maize on their terrace farm and wait for the rains. He often wondered how much of their drudgery could be reduced if water could be brought up from a nearby river.

Thapa went on to study engineering at Delft University in The Netherlands, where he obsessed about how to solve the problem of irrigation for his family in the mountains of Nepal in a cheap and sustainable way.

With his Dutch classmate, he invented a unique pump that derived its energy from the kinetic energy of the flow of water, and used it to pump water up. Like all breakthroughs, it was the sheer simplicity of the technology that made it so applicable.

Called Barsha Pump (after the Nepali word for ‘rain’) Thapa’s invention won him several awards, including the Phillips Innovation Award and Bearing Point Award. This was followed by the registration of the company aQysta in the Netherlands in 2013 to promote the pumps.

It quickly caught on in Europe, but despite success there, Thapa had designed it with Nepal in mind. So, six years ago he brought a couple of prototypes and successfully tested them to irrigate nearly 130 hectares of flats above the Indrawati, Trisuli and Tama Kosi rivers.

 

 

“It’s ironic that almost two-thirds of Nepal’s farms depend on the rains when we are a country of 6,000 rivers,” says Thapa, who studied industrial engineering in India and did his Masters at the Institute of Engineering in Lalitpur.

Today, 131 Barsha Pumps have been deployed across 30 districts with subsidies to farmers from the government’s Agriculture Engineering Directorate, District Agriculture Development Office, and international agencies. Depending on capacity, the pump costs between Rs160,000 – 280,000.

The beauty of the Barsha Pump is that it uses the natural flow of water and doesn’t need fuel. Therefore it does not emit greenhouse gases, and has zero operating cost.

The pump has a special spiral pipe where the water helps compress the air, which in turn lifts water up to a maximum height of 20m or a distance of 2km.

Yuvaraj Shrestha owns a one-hectare farm on a flat above the Tama Kosi River in Ramechhap, and used to make Rs500,000 a year selling vegetables. His main problem was dependance on the rains, even though a glacier-fed river flowed just below the farm.

But in the year after he installed a subsidised Barsha Pump, he made more than Rs3 million in profit from his farm. The pump brings up 12,000 litres of water a day from the Tama Kosi. The flats along the Tama Kosi that used to be fallow in the dry season are now lush green all year round.

“It all started with this pump, this is the key to my success,” said Shrestha.

In Sindhuli district, Arjun Kumar Khatri from the village of Ratomate was practicing subsistence rain-fed agriculture. Now, he is lifting water from Sun Kosi River, 14m below his farm, with a Barsha Pump. “I didn’t believe a pump could lift water without electricity until I saw one myself, our lives are transformed,” he says.

Barsha Pumps are now bringing this miracle to 12 countries including Indonesia, Spain, Turkey and Zambia. Thapa keeps modifying the design with feedback from farmers.

 

 

This story was originally published by The Nepali Times

The post Lifting Livelihoods by Lifting Water appeared first on Inter Press Service.

the ongoing conflict and continued prevalence of female genital mutilation (FGM) in Mali, creates a worrying picture for the West African nation. Credit: William Lloyd-George/IPS

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 25 2020 (IPS)

The current coronavirus pandemic is having a profound affect on children in conflict zones — with girls especially being at higher risk of violence and sexual health concerns.

“For adolescent girls specifically, these disruptions can have profound consequences, including increased rates of pregnancy and child, early, and forced marriage,” Shannon Kowalski, director of advocacy and policy at the International Women’s Health Coalition (IWHC), told IPS. 

Kowalski shared her concerns this week after an open debate on children and armed conflict at the United Nations, where experts shared the progress made in the efforts to pull children out of conflict-ridden circumstances, as well as how the current pandemic has made the issue more complex.

Virginia Gamba, special representative of the secretary-general for children and armed conflict, said her team had documented 25,000 grave violations against children. 

Henrietta Fore, executive director of U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF), said at the Jun. 23 briefing that although the organisation had rescued almost 37,000 children in the past three years, there remains massive concerns about the number of children still in dire situations. 

She cited UNICEF’s monitoring and reporting mechanism statistics over the last 15 years that reflect this reality.

UNICEF documented a total of 250,000 cases of grave violations against children in armed conflict, including:

• the recruitment and use of over 77,000 children;
• killing and maiming of over 100,000 children;
• rape and sexual violence against over 15,000 children;
• abduction of over 25, 000 children; and
• nearly 17,000 attacks on schools and hospitals. 

The numbers reflect a grave — and timely – reality. On May 12, terrorists blew up a hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan, killing 24 people, including two infants. Médecins Sans Frontières‎ (MSF) has since pulled out from the hospital citing security concerns.  

This only deepens the problem for marginalised populations such as women and children. Fore said children in conflict zones who are now further caught in the pandemic are at a “double disadvantage”, given that they’re likely finding themselves at “increased risk of violence, abuse, child marriage and recruitment to armed groups”.

A general increase in conflict

Experts say there has been a general increase in organised violence in various parts of the world under the pandemic. Sam Jones, communications manager at Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), a data collection and crisis mapping project, told IPS that they’ve documented state repression and consequential violence in some places under the pandemic, while in some other cases, “warring parties have used the pandemic as an opportunity to escalate campaigns or push the advantage”.

Jones’ concern was reflected in Fore’s speech on Jun. 23, where she pointed out that when states manipulate this kind of crisis, it’s the children who are hardest hit. 

“Far too often, parties in conflict are using the pandemic and the need to reach and support children…for political advantage,” she said. “Children are not pawns or bargaining chips – this must stop.” 

Certain areas have seen what Jones said is the largest increase in organised violence since the pandemic broke out around the world: Libya, Yemen, India, Mali and Uganda. 

For all the countries, except Uganda, it was a mere intensification of already existing violence; in Uganda, the violence came in the form of government restrictions. 

“By mid-April, ACLED had already recorded more than 1,000 total fatalities from conflict in Mali. Over the first three months of the year, we recorded nearly 300 civilian fatalities specifically, a 90 percent increase compared to the previous quarter,” he said. 

“At best, violence has continued despite the pandemic, while at worst both armed groups and state forces could be using it as an opportunity to ramp up activity and target civilians,” he added. 

How conflict affects children and girls

The crisis in Mali is especially of importance as human rights advocates released a statement of concern just a day after the briefing, about Mali’s failure to curb female genital mutilation (FGM). 

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) raised alarms about the report released by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, which stated more than 75 percent of girls under the age of 14 had gone through the practice as of 2015. 

Among other findings, the committee found that government has “failed to guarantee victims of female genital mutilation access to adequate and affordable health care, including sexual and reproductive health care”. 

Concerns raised by experts such as Fore and Kowalski, when put next to the data about the ongoing conflict and continued prevalence of FGM in Mali, creates a worrying picture for the West African nation.  

The committee report found that the women and girls in Mali already had limited access to sexual and reproductive health.

Meanwhile, Fore pointed out that the pandemic has exacerbated the lack of access for women and girls in countries that were already struggled to provide access. This raises the questions about how, on top of being a country in conflict, the pandemic is further exacerbating the health of girls who suffered FGM in Mali.

Fore said the current pandemic further adds layers to the crisis surrounding children in armed conflict.

“As the pandemic spreads, healthcare facilities have been damaged or destroyed by conflict, services have been suspended, children are missing out of basic medical care including vaccination, and water; sanitary systems have been damaged or destroyed altogether making it impossible for children to wash their hands,” she said. 

Meanwhile, Kowalski of IWHC raised concerns about U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent decision to pull funding from the World Health Organisation, and what that means for girls caught in conflict. 

“In addition, in most countries affected by COVID-19 we are experiencing increases in gender-based violence, reduced access to contraception, abortion, and other reproductive health services, and a decrease in the quality of maternal health care — all which are intensified for women and girls in conflict,” she said. 

Gamba, after sharing the statistics of children suffering in conflict, ended her speech on an important note. 

“Behind these figures are boys and girls with stolen childhoods and shattered dreams, and there are families and communities torn apart by violence and suffering,” she said. “The only thing children and communities have in common today is their hope for peace, a better life and a better future. We must rise to meet that expectation.”

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The post COVID-19 Increases Suffering of Children in Conflict appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By External Source
Jun 25 2020 (IPS-Partners)

UNESCO launches a global campaign challenging our perception of normality. The 2’20” film relies on facts to prove its point – facts about the world before and during the Covid-19 pandemic. Put together, these facts make us question our ideas about what is “normal”, suggesting that we have accepted the unacceptable for far too long. Our previous reality cannot be considered normal any longer, now is the time to make a change. It all starts with Education, Science, Culture and Information.

The post UNESCO Campaign – The next normal appeared first on Inter Press Service.

”As a New Yorker and first-generation American, I have the pleasure and great honor to serve as the Commissioner for International Affairs for the most global city in the world. New York City is home to the largest diplomatic community in the world – 193 Permanent Missions, 116 Consulates and the headquarters of the United Nations”-- Penny Abeywardena, Commissioner.

By Dr. Palitha Kohona
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, Jun 25 2020 (IPS)

The recent approach of the US to the UN and its agencies has left many shaking their heads. The US, under President Roosevelt, played a seminal role in creating the UN and its key agencies after World War II and subsequently nurturing them.

But the Organization that Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold once said was created not with the intention of taking mankind to heaven but to prevent it from going to hell, is today itself mired in hellish doubts about its future, particularly with the US, its physical host.

The biggest funder and the one remaining global super power, the US has been in a foul mood, pulling out of the Human Rights Council (HRC), the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and ceasing cooperation with the World Health Organization (WHO) while threatening funding cuts.

Despite the many criticisms leveled against it, the UN has chalked up many global successes. To begin with, despite being unable to eliminate regional conflagrations, it has, inter alia, succeeded in avoiding a global war, contributed to improving living standards and advanced the rule of law and respect for human rights.

The US for its part, a key architect of the UN, has successfully maneuvered the Organization on countless occasions to achieve its global agenda and policy goals, while maintaining a mantle of legal legitimacy and moral justification.

Following the decolonization process and the emergence of other economic and military power centres, especially China, the Organization has not always been at the beck and call of the Western alliance that has irked the West, in particular the US.

While using the UN and its agencies to castigate others, e.g., Sri Lanka, North Korea, Iran, etc over human rights issues, the US has had no qualms about using its muscle to block a recent resolution tabled by the 54 member African Group at the Human Rights Council on black deaths at the hands of the police in the US. Some of its allies, including Australia and the Netherlands supported the US, as it sought to suppress the international criticism.

This precedent set at the HRC may be difficult to manage in the future even when trying to raise genuine human rights issues. In addition, the US has studiously used its long arm to block any action by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on violations of humanitarian standards by US or Israeli military personnel while readily supporting such action in the case of African leaders.

The UN Impact Report 2016 is a cost-benefit analysis of hosting the UN in New York City. Credit: Office of the Commissioner for International Affairs, New York City

The Security Council, with US support, has referred the leaders of Libya and Sudan to the International Criminal Court. The targeting of African leaders caused some African countries to threaten to leave the ICC.

We are reminded that the US insisted on Article 98 of the Rome Statute which prohibits the ICC from requesting assistance or the surrender of a person to the ICC, if to do so would require the state to “act inconsistently” with its obligations under international law or international agreements unless the state or the third-party state waives the immunity or grants cooperation.

The U.S., having concluded over 120 bilateral immunity agreements (BIA) prohibiting such a transfer, even if the state is a member of the Rome Statute, has interpreted this article to mean that its citizens cannot be transferred to the ICC even if the state is a member of the Rome Statute.

The Bush Administration claimed that the BIAs were drafted out of concern that existing agreements—particularly the status of forces agreements or status of mission agreements (SOFAs or SOMAs)—did not sufficiently protect Americans from the jurisdiction of the ICC.

The United States, along with Israel and Sudan, having previously signed the Rome Statute has formally has given notice of its intention not to ratify the Rome Statute while United States policy concerning the ICC has varied widely.

The Clinton Administration signed the Rome Statute in 2000, but did not submit it for Senate ratification. The George W. Bush Administration, the U.S. administration at the time of the ICC’s founding, stated that it would not join the ICC.

President Trump has said, “As far as America is concerned, the ICC has no jurisdiction, no legitimacy, and no authority. The ICC claims near-universal jurisdiction over the citizens of every country, violating all principles of justice, fairness, and due process. We will never surrender America’s sovereignty to an unelected, unaccountable, global bureaucracy.”

In April 2019, the United States revoked the visa of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Fatou Bensouda, in anticipation of a later investigation into possible war crimes committed by U.S. forces during the War in Afghanistan. The investigation was authorized in March 2020. In June 2020, Donald Trump authorized sanctions against ICC in retaliation.

In 2002, the U.S. Congress passed the American Service-Members’ Protection Act (ASPA), which contained a number of provisions, including authorization for the President to “use all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court”, and also prohibitions on the United States providing military aid to countries which had ratified the treaty establishing the court.

The US has also denied entry visas to certain individuals to attend meetings of the world body, including senior officials from Iran, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Venezuela, North Korea, Russia and Cuba, among others.

The US will be severely challenged if it seeks to justify its actions as being consistent with its obligations under the Head Quarters Agreement with the UN. (HQ Agreement, 11 UNTS 1).

With the US in the present confrontational mood, and the real risk of an intractable conflict between the UN and the US, Covid19 provides a convenient way out with which the UN will be comfortable.

The members of the world body can now opt to address the organization through video link. An entry visa will no longer be sine qua non for the purpose of entering the US and addressing the UN.

This mechanism, of course, will not sit comfortably with the New York hotels and restaurants, not to mention the hire car companies.

The post The US & the UN — A Looming Confrontation appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Dr Palitha Kohona is a former Chief of the Treaty Section in the UN Office of Legal Affairs; a one-time chairman of the General’s Assembly’s Legal Committee; and former Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the United Nations

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Gita Gopinath is Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF)

By Gita Gopinath
WASHINGTON DC, Jun 24 2020 (IPS)

The COVID-19 pandemic pushed economies into a Great Lockdown, which helped contain the virus and save lives, but also triggered the worst recession since the Great Depression. Over 75 percent of countries are now reopening at the same time as the pandemic is intensifying in many emerging market and developing economies. Several countries have started to recover. However, in the absence of a medical solution, the strength of the recovery is highly uncertain and the impact on sectors and countries uneven.

Compared to our April World Economic Outlook forecast, we are now projecting a deeper recession in 2020 and a slower recovery in 2021. Global output is projected to decline by -4.9 percent in 2020, 1.9 percentage points below our April forecast, followed by a partial recovery, with growth at 5.4 percent in 2021.

These projections imply a cumulative loss to the global economy over two years (2020–21) of over $12 trillion from this crisis.

The downgrade from April reflects worse than anticipated outcomes in the first half of this year, an expectation of more persistent social distancing into the second half of this year, and damage to supply potential.

High uncertainty

A high degree of uncertainty surrounds this forecast, with both upside and downside risks to the outlook. On the upside, better news on vaccines and treatments, and additional policy support can lead to a quicker resumption of economic activity. On the downside, further waves of infections can reverse increased mobility and spending, and rapidly tighten financial conditions, triggering debt distress. Geopolitical and trade tensions could damage fragile global relationships at a time when trade is projected to collapse by around 12 percent.

A recovery like no other

This crisis like no other will have a recovery like no other.

First, the unprecedented global sweep of this crisis hampers recovery prospects for export-dependent economies and jeopardizes the prospects for income convergence between developing and advanced economies. We are projecting a synchronized deep downturn in 2020 for both advanced economies (-8 percent) and emerging market and developing economies (-3 percent; -5 percent if excluding China), and over 95 percent of countries are projected to have negative per capita income growth in 2020. The cumulative hit to GDP growth over 2020–21 for emerging market and developing economies, excluding China, is expected to exceed that in advanced economies.

Second, as countries reopen, the pick-up in activity is uneven. On the one hand, pent-up demand is leading to a surge in spending in some sectors like retail, while, on the other hand, contact-intensive services sectors like hospitality, travel, and tourism remain depressed. Countries heavily reliant on such sectors will likely be deeply impacted for a prolonged period.

Third, the labor market has been severely hit and at record speed, and particularly so for lower-income and semi-skilled workers who do not have the option of teleworking. With activity in labor-intensive sectors like tourism and hospitality expected to remain subdued, a full recovery in the labor market may take a while, worsening income inequality and increasing poverty.

Exceptional policy support has helped

On the positive side, the recovery is benefitting from exceptional policy support, particularly in advanced economies, and to a lesser extent in emerging market and developing economies that are more constrained by fiscal space. Global fiscal support now stands at over $10 trillion and monetary policy has eased dramatically through interest rate cuts, liquidity injections, and asset purchases. In many countries, these measures have succeeded in supporting livelihoods and prevented large-scale bankruptcies, thus helping to reduce lasting scars and aiding a recovery.

This exceptional support, particularly by major central banks, has also driven a strong recovery in financial conditions despite grim real outcomes. Equity prices have rebounded, credit spreads have narrowed, portfolio flows to emerging market and developing economies have stabilized, and currencies that sharply depreciated have strengthened. By preventing a financial crisis, policy support has helped avert worse real outcomes. At the same time, the disconnect between real and financial markets raises concerns of excessive risk taking and is a significant vulnerability.

We are not out of the woods

Given the tremendous uncertainty, policymakers should remain vigilant and policies will need to adapt as the situation evolves. Substantial joint support from fiscal and monetary policy must continue for now, especially in countries where inflation is projected to remain subdued. At the same time, countries should ensure proper fiscal accounting and transparency, and that monetary policy independence is not compromised.

A priority is to manage health risks even as countries reopen. This requires continuing to build health capacity, widespread testing, tracing, isolation, and practicing safe distancing (and wearing masks). These measures help contain the spread of the virus, reassure the public that new outbreaks can be dealt with in an orderly fashion, and minimize economic disruptions. The international community must further expand financial assistance and expertise to countries with limited health care capacity. More needs to be done to ensure adequate and affordable production and distribution of vaccines and treatments when they become available.

In countries where activities are being severely constrained by the health crisis, people directly impacted should receive income support through unemployment insurance, wage subsidies, and cash transfers, and impacted firms should be supported via tax deferrals, loans, credit guarantees, and grants. To more effectively reach the unemployed in countries with large informal sectors, digital payments will need to be scaled up and complemented with in-kind support for food, medicine, and other household staples channeled through local governments and community organizations.

In countries that have begun reopening and the recovery is underway, policy support will need to gradually shift toward encouraging people to return to work, and to facilitating a reallocation of workers to sectors with growing demand and away from shrinking sectors. This could take the form of spending on worker training and hiring subsidies targeted at workers that face greater risk of long-term unemployment. Supporting a recovery will also involve actions to repair balance sheets and address debt overhangs. This will require strong insolvency frameworks and mechanisms for restructuring and disposing of distressed debt.

Policy support should also gradually shift from being targeted to being more broad-based. Where fiscal space permits, countries should undertake green public investment to accelerate the recovery and support longer-term climate goals. To protect the most vulnerable, expanded social safety net spending will be needed for some time.

The international community must ensure that developing economies can finance critical spending through provision of concessional financing, debt relief and grants; and that emerging market and developing economies have access to international liquidity, via ensuring financial market stability, central bank swap lines, and deployment of a global financial safety net.

This crisis will also generate medium-term challenges. Public debt is projected to reach this year the highest level in recorded history in relation to GDP, in both advanced and emerging market and developing economies. Countries will need sound fiscal frameworks for medium-term consolidation, through cutting back on wasteful spending, widening the tax base, minimizing tax avoidance, and greater progressivity in taxation in some countries.

At the same time, this crisis also presents an opportunity to accelerate the shift to a more productive, sustainable, and equitable growth through investment in new green and digital technologies and wider social safety nets.

Global cooperation is ever so important to deal with a truly global crisis. All efforts should be made to resolve trade and technology tensions, while improving the multilateral rules-based trading system. The IMF will continue to do all it can to ensure adequate international liquidity, provide emergency financing, support the G20 debt service suspension initiative, and provide advice and support to countries during this unprecedented crisis.

 

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The post Reopening from the Great Lockdown: Uneven and Uncertain Recovery appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Gita Gopinath is Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF)

The post Reopening from the Great Lockdown: Uneven and Uncertain Recovery appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Cloud forest in Costa Rica. Credit: Germán Miranda/IPS

By René Castro Salazar and Brian Harris
ROME/SANTIAGO, Jun 24 2020 (IPS)

The lack of a coordinated international response had led to varying results worldwide in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. Two countries that have long coordinated their response to global goals like promotion on democracy, human rights and environmental issues, Sweden and Costa Rica highlight how public policy matters. While with their similar approaches to climate change the two walk together, their different approaches to COVID-19 have reaped disparate results, and death tolls.

Using Gompertz mathematical modelling, we have analysed both countries’ responses to COVID-19 and found that the human and economic impact of COVID-19 will be greater in Sweden than in Costa Rica. Through May, Costa Rican public policies have resulted in fewer deaths and positive cases (in both absolute and per capita terms) than the much more economically developed Sweden.

The different results through June 21– Sweden attributing 5,053 deaths to COVID-19 compared to Costa Rica’s 12, according to John Hopkins University, cannot be attributed to geography, ethnicity or even Sweden’s slightly older population.

With the impact of COVID-19 estimated at reducing Sweden’s GDP in 2020 by 9.7 percent and Costa Rica’s by 3.6 percent, attending to the immediate impact of the virus will be a higher political priority than the high levels of investment needed for mitigating climate change over the coming decades

Additionally, Sweden’s economy is much bigger and spends more on health care than Costa Rica, dedicating 11.1 percent of its larger GDP to public spending on its health care system compared to Costa Rica’s 7.3 percent of GDP. In both cases, these countries’ universal public health systems are often cited as exemplary models in terms of the breadth and quality of services provided to their populaces, especially in comparison to countries with comparable levels of development.

The crucial element of distinction between the impact of COVID-19 in the two countries can mainly be laid at the feet of their public policies.

Sweden recorded its first COVID-19 case on January 22 and did not record a second until February 26, when its infection “curve” began its upward trend that our models indicate will reach its peak in late July with around 46,000 infections over 190 days. Costa Rica’s first case was detected March 6, but given its policy response we project its curve began to flatten in mid-April, just 35 days after the outbreak was detected. Both countries host large migrant population that appear to be less integrated in to the health systems and have higher rates of infections than citizens.

It is also noteworthy that, while Costa Rica’s initial COVID-19 testing policy was to test patients showing potential symptoms, Sweden restricted its testing only to patients showing severe symptoms. Undetected cases not reflected in national data are likely in both countries, but are not reflected in our mathematical models. In any case, given how new COVID-19 is, no universally accepted standard for testing exists.

Despite this, the wide gap in confirmed cases and deaths between the two countries clearly shows a greater and more prolonged impact in Sweden.

Although we should be cautious in drawing conclusions, Costa Rica’s more interventionist response and actions to control the spread of the pandemic may very well explain the shorter time period and flatter curve the lesser developed nation has recorded compared to its highly developed counterpart.

Costa Rica’s COVID-19 response was to take quick action in an orderly manner, starting with preventative public information campaigns and the prompt introduction of restrictive measures including the isolation of patients and the implementation of social distancing which culminated in a nationwide quarantine that saw borders and schools closed and movement within the country highly restricted.

Notoriously, Sweden went for a very different approach emphasizing individual responsibility by advising citizens to practice social distancing without restricting movement, only closing borders to non-Europeans and barring gatherings of more than 50 people. The architect of Sweden’s COVID-19 policies has since conceded this response disproportionally affected most vulnerable people like the elderly.

While the two countries enjoy very different development levels, both are seen as leaders in their regions in the areas of social services and health care—both provide their citizenry universal health coverage with infrastructure available nationwide. And both follow similar policy goals and approaches to issues facing future generations, especially with regard to climate change.

Both countries have enthusiastically joined 121 other nations in a concerted and coordinated strategy to attain so-called “carbon neutrality” by 2050—in 2019 Costa Rica’s net per capita emissions were 1.61 tonnes while Sweden’s were 4.03 tonnes; the United States’ net per capita emissions were 16.5 tonnes. Sweden has focused its emissions reduction policies on its energy and transport sectors, while Costa Rica (with its abundant hydroelectric resources) is focusing on its diesel-dependent transportation sector.

In both countries, the forestry sector- and its ability to remove or “sequester” carbon from the atmosphere- plays a fundamental role in the short- and medium-term efforts. But for both, the long-term solution lies in energy efficiency by adopting measures to reduce emissions per kilowatt hour generated and per kilometres travelled to decrease their use of fossil fuels.

Sweden has focused on emissions reductions in the energy sector, specifically by reorienting production to so-called renewable sources including hydroelectric and reducing fossil fuels and nuclear dependency. By 2030, Sweden’s energy sector aims to reduce its emissions by 44 percent and its transportation sector by 30 percent from 1990 levels.

With an emphasis on the forestry sector to attain their net emission goals, both have been implementing parallel fire-prevention and control policies to avoid the devastation wrought in other forest-dependent countries of late.

Fires in both Sweden and Costa Rica have occurred with less frequency and intensity over the last decade as a result, according to NASA observations. That is no guarantee that fires will not pose a threat in the future, but with forestry potentially sequestering 37 percent of total emissions in Costa Rica and projected to capture 18 percent in Sweden, both countries have established similar fire prevention policies and administrative structures.

In Costa Rica, succeeded in phasing out fossil fuels in its electricity generation and legal reforms helped push forest cover from 21 percent of the country’s territory in 1996 to 54 percent in 2018 and its sequestration needs will fall to 33 percent of emissions by 2050 or roughly one tonne or carbon per person per year. Now, the country needs to transform its transportation into a cleaner and more efficient one.

Sweden and Costa Rica can both attain carbon neutrality by 2050 if political consensus remains unchanged. But with the impact of COVID-19 estimated at reducing Sweden’s GDP in 2020 by 9.7 percent and Costa Rica’s by 3.6 percent, attending to the immediate impact of the virus will be a higher political priority than the high levels of investment needed for mitigating climate change over the coming decades.

Combatting COVID-19 in the absence of a vaccine, as with confronting climate change, will require international cohesion. The wide gap in cases and deaths between Costa Rica and Sweden tragically highlights that, as well as how real global public challenges like health and environmental crises need government interventions.

 

Doctor Rene Castro graduated from Harvard University and is currently ADG for FAO on climate change and biodiversity; he served as a minister in the ministries of foreign affairs and environment and energy of Costa Rica between 1994-2014.

Brian Harris is a Chilean-American consultant with extensive experience as a foreign correspondent and in the global coffee industry as the former president of Chile’s coffee association ANAPAC

The post Sweden-Costa Rica: Same Paths on Climate Change, Different on COVID-19 appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

By Gaudiose Mujawamariya
ANTANANARIVO, Madagascar, Jun 24 2020 (IPS)

As infections with Covid-19 appear to be intensifying in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), fears of severe food shortages have prompted experts to warn that the region may be “on the brink of a hunger pandemic.” Efforts are intensifying to rally a major global response.

But averting what some experts believe could be a food crisis of immense proportions requires paying close attention to an often overlooked feature of food security in the region: African women play a large and growing role in all aspects of the region’s food systems—whether it’s growing crops and raising livestock, selling and purchasing food in local markets, or dealing with the nutritional needs of their households.

African women often assume this burden while laboring with key disadvantages due to long-standing gender roles that can limit their access to economic resources—both within their households and communities. To be effective, any intervention to avert a food crisis caused by the pandemic will need to navigate a fraught terrain of gender inequality—and not just in the interest of social justice. Women are critical to feeding all Africans. The more they suffer, the more the continent will suffer.

Most of the food consumed in sub-Saharan Africa is produced on small-scale family farms where, in many countries, 40 to 60 percent of farmers are women. Yet these women often lack equal access to quality seeds, fertilizers, good land, credit, technical advice and new technologies

Most of the food consumed in SSA is produced on small-scale family farms where, in many countries, 40 to 60 percent of farmers are women. Yet these women often lack equal access to quality seeds, fertilizers, good land, credit, technical advice and new technologies.

I work with a non-profit international research consortium that is mobilizing a global network of experts who understand how gender equality can be a powerful force in revitalizing rural economies–increasing their food security and making them more resilient to a number of challenges.

My colleagues and I realize that in the face of this unprecedented crisis, the work of the gender researchers that make up our new CGIAR GENDER Platform is more urgent than ever. The lessons that have emerged from past research conducted by GENDER’s partners can be illuminating as we seek ways to stop the fight against COVID-19 from producing an outbreak of hunger and malnutrition.

One important lesson is the need to develop solutions that account for the limited mobility many women face. Long before COVID-19, it was challenging for African women farmers to carve out time to get their goods to market, where the money they earn is often used to purchase additional food for their families.

In Western Kenya, for example, one reason women dairy farmers have not earned and produced as much as men is because their household work makes it very difficult to travel to central cooling facilities to sell their milk. In response, the New Kenya Co-operative Creameries (NKCC) promoted the use of small coolers in local neighborhoods where women can easily deliver milk for pick-up. Creating this type of last-mile linkage—for a number of commodities— can help build bridges between women producers and consumers in the midst of restrictions imposed to stop the spread of COVID-19.

Secondly, tailoring how we deliver information will be critical for women farmers. For example, as primary food vendors, women will need to be informed about when local markets will be open for business.  But information access has been a perennial challenge.

A study in Ghana, for example, found that, despite enthusiasm around Africa’s widespread adoption of mobile phones, using text messaging and smartphone apps to deliver climate forecasts to farmers might miss a lot of women farmers. Compared to men, women are less likely to own a cell phone or have the finances to purchase air time. Literacy may also be lower for women. Moreover, the social network many women use to overcome these barriers could be closed-off by the COVID-19 clampdowns.

The solution to dealing with the gender inequality around climate forecast services holds true for delivering information to farmers during this pandemic: conveying information via multiple channels, such as radio or videos, was found to be effective in reducing this technology-related gender gap.

Finally, giving women an equal voice in making decisions about the food produced on their farms can lead to better nutrition.

In Malawi, outreach to women proved decisive in community adoption of new varieties of orange-fleshed sweet potatoes that are naturally high in vitamin A. Women farmers were swayed by the nutritional benefits they offered for their children—even though men traditionally have been in charge of sweet potato crops.

In Tanzania and Ghana, women who had greater access to irrigation were more likely to use it to grow nutritious crops for household consumption. In the face of COVID-19 and its potentially devastating effects on hunger and malnutrition, any kind of aid focused on improving household nutrition must be directed towards women.

Today, there is a lot of discussion in the development community that confronting the food-related problems caused by this pandemic presents an opportunity for “building back better.” That means designing interventions that can also help address problems that pre-dated the current crisis and will be here long after it’s over.

Subjecting emergency food interventions now being planned for SSA to something of a gender stress-test is one way we can address the immediate challenge before us while helping communities emerge from the crisis on even firmer footing.

Gaudiose Mujawamariya is an economist and gender researcher, and she contributes to the CGIAR GENDER Platform as a representative of Africa Rice Center (AfricaRice) in Madagascar.

 

The post The Critical Role of Women in Avoiding a Covid-19 “Food Pandemic” in sub-Saharan Africa appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Aïssata Ba is amongst several rural women selected by Energy 4 Impact to participate in an economic empowerment programme, which provides women entrepreneurs with access to renewable energy technologies. Courtesy: Energy 4 Impact Senegal

By Neena Bhandari
SYDNEY, Australia, Jun 24 2020 (IPS)

Aïssata Ba, 45-year-old widow and mother of seven children, has been practising market gardening for the past 30 years in Lompoul Sur Mer village in the Niayes area of north-west Senegal. For many women in the village, endowed with fertile soil and favourable climate, it is the primary source of income throughout the year.

But lack of infrastructure, access to sustainable energy, financial support, equipment and knowledge of modern practices makes it a hard toil for these women engaged in market gardening, which is small-scale production of fruits, vegetables, flowers and cash crops during the local growing season and sold directly to consumers.

Aïssata had to manually prepare seedbeds, remove weeds and irrigate her 0.15 hectare plot by drawing water from the well, a bucket at a time, with the help of her two sons 17 and 23 years old.

“It was physically draining and time consuming. It limited our production capability,” Aïssata told IPS via Mariama Traore, Energy 4 Impact’s (E4I) Gender and Advocacy Officer and Co-Leader of Deliver for Good Senegal Campaign, powered by global advocacy organisation Women Deliver.

Energy 4 Impact, a non-profit organisation working with local businesses to extend access to energy in Africa, and Siggil Jigeen, an NGO that promotes and protects women’s rights in Senegal, are steering the Deliver for Good Senegal Campaign to invest in girls and women for achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The focus priorities of the campaign, a coalition of local representatives of civil society organisations, government leaders, U.N. agencies, and the private sector, include increasing women’s access to resources – clean and renewable energy.

In 2018, only 42.3 percent of households in rural areas had access to electricity, according to Senegal Energy Ministry’s 2019-2023 Energy Sector Policy Paper. Most rural households, institutions and small businesses in Senegal currently rely on hazardous, traditional and inefficient energy sources, such as wood, for lighting, cooking and other energy needs.

“This low availability, adoption and use of welfare-enhancing electrical appliances, especially in poor and rural communities, specifically impacts the time women spend in poverty and the drudgery of labour-intensive activities,” Traore told IPS, adding that “Women’s paid and unpaid labour status and power relations, gendered social norms related to land and asset ownership and independent income, dramatically influence their ability and incentive to access modern energy services and appliances.”

Aïssata is amongst several rural women selected by Energy 4 Impact to participate in an economic empowerment programme, which provides women entrepreneurs involved in farming, dairy production, agriculture and shop owners access to renewable energy technologies, such as solar-powered pumps, freezers, solar systems, and equipment for drying, milling, and processing crops.

Since installing the solar pump, Aïssata’s production has increased from 900 kg to 1,428 kg of vegetables and her six-monthly turnover has shot up to $617 from $350. 

“It has not only improved my productivity and income, but also our living conditions. I also received technical knowledge to evaluate the profitability of crops, support with accessing finance for the pump and learning modern business skills,” she said.

“Last year, my onion crop was the first to arrive on the market, giving me a competitive edge to sell it at a premium price. Since then, I have had a good cycle of crops – tomatoes and cabbages, turnips and onion seeds. This phenomenal transformation in such a short time has inspired me to invest in more land and install a solar sprinkler system in the future,” Aïssata added.

Limited access to energy has been impeding the country’s socio-economic development. The campaign is ensuring that women are being locally recognised as key actors within the energy sector.

Earlier this year, 43-year-old Assy Ba was helped with a loan to buy a solar freezer for her restaurant in the small town of Manda in Tambacounda region, south-east of the national capital Dakar. This made it possible for her to sell cold food products in her off-grid electricity village. Her restaurant had a steady stream of customers stopping for refreshments as Manda is located at the crossroad of two main routes leading to the southern part of Senegal bordering Gambia and Guinea-Bissau. She also had regulars from the large weekly markets.

“My monthly turnover increased to around $400 from a mere $60 or 65 and I could also save food wastage. But since the COVID-19 travel lockdowns have been imposed, we only get very few local customers. I am eating into my savings. My husband is too old to work. Every day, I worry about feeding our eight children and repaying the business loan,” Assy told IPS via Traore.

Energy 4 Impact studied the impact of COVID-19 on 20 women entrepreneurs it supports.

• 95 percent said they were very worried about their financial future and the future of their businesses and how that will impact access to food and health.
• 70 percent of them said that their business was strongly impacted, mainly by the loss of customers and the supply of raw materials, and they had difficulty in repaying their loan.

“We believe it is crucial, more than ever before, to focus on expanding energy access to power economic activities, as this has a very tangible impact on women’s welfare and opportunities,” Energy 4 Impact’s West Africa director Mathieu Dalle told IPS.

• In Senegal, women comprise almost 50 percent of the population.
• 47 percent of the 15 million Senegalese live below the poverty line and half the population is food insecure, according to the National Agency of Statistics and Demography of Senegal.

For rural women, involved in agriculture, food security is a major challenge and that is the reason they need sustainable energy sources to improve and increase the production, preservation and processing of food.

With funding support from ENERGIA, an international network on gender and sustainable energy, and other development partners, Energy 4 Impact’s Foyré Rewbé2 – Empowering Women, Engendering Energy project is assisting women with solar energy. In its sixth phase (April 2019 to March 2022), the project aims to increase the number of rural women entrepreneurs – involved in cereals and peanut farming, fisheries and aquaculture, livestock production, light industry and agro-processing, trade and services – in sustainable Productive Uses of Energy (PUE).

“We are advocating that part of the revenue from oil and gas should fund the development of renewable energies, especially for women’s income generating activities,” Traore told IPS.

The solar resources in Senegal are characterised by 3,000 hours of sunshine per year, and average overall daily solar irradiation of 5.8 kWh / m2 / day. These resources have been harnessed through photovoltaic and thermal solar systems.

The campaign’s advocacy work has led to gender being integrated into national energy policies and programmes. “Women are the heart of society and any progress is only possible through their participation,” said Fatou Thiam Sow, gender focal point and coordinator of studies and planning unit at the Senegalese Ministry of Energy.

Women’s empowerment, including economic empowerment through expansion of renewable energies, has to be at the core of reducing carbon emissions and building climate-resilient societies.

Since the Women Deliver for Good Senegal Campaign began, many women organisations are today more aware of and they are defending their right to access clean and sustainable energy for their domestic and productive uses.

COVID-19 has significantly impacted women-led businesses across Africa. “Women are disproportionately represented in most of the economic sectors hit by the pandemic. Ensuring that stimulus packages and post COVID-19 policies are gender-sensitive will be critical to getting African women entrepreneurs back on their feet,” Esther Dassanou, coordinator of the Affirmative Finance Action for Women in Africa programme, told IPS.

 

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By External Source
Jun 24 2020 (IPS-Partners)

This guidance note highlights the emerging impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on women migrant workers, focusing on the key challenges and risks they face. It makes recommendations in the context of the economic and social response and recovery packages that governments are putting forward, supported by examples of existing good practices from around the world.

View online/download

• Publication in full (PDF, 272KB)

 
Source: UN Women

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Blackened waters in the Makoko neighbourhood of Nigeria’s commercial capital mirror the harsh reality of lockdown. Photo: Damillola Onafuwa

By Kevwe Okporua
LAGOS, Nigeria, Jun 24 2020 (IPS-Partners)

A riot of canoes bumping into each other in narrow waterways — paddlers yell a chorus of instructions to other boats: “Move! Shift! Stop!”

Expletives are thrown in for good measure in one of three languages spoken here — Egun, Yoruba and French. Children can be seen floating by in large plastic basins, joining the hustle and bustle of traffic.

The Nigerian Government is reaching out to vulnerable urban areas, with some technical advice from WFP. Photo: Damillola Onafuwa

Makoko, an informal waterfront settlement in Lagos, the commercial capital of Nigeria, is often referred to as the ‘Venice of Africa’, if also ‘the world’s largest floating slum’ where thousands live cheek by jowl in stilt houses nestled deep in murky black waters.

One participant in the daily chorus is Owolabi James. He’s ferried residents and visitors around these waterways for almost 20 years — yet he’s only 25. “I was born and bred here,” Owolabi says with a smile. “I started doing this work when I was a child, and now I own the canoe that I work with.”

With the shortage of boats, getting a ride is difficult at the best of times. Photo: Damillola Onafuwa

At first glance, Makoko’s population could be considered at extreme risk from coronavirus — hygiene and social distancing pose a serious challenge in these crammed conditions. On closer inspection, however, the global pandemic, which has infected more than 14,500 people and resulted in 387 deaths in Nigeria, is the least of their worries.

Fishermen and fish sellers who account for most of the 100,000-odd people who live here in poverty — there’s never been a census — have bigger concerns. Hunger and the ever-looming threat of eviction pose a bigger risk to residents’ way of life than disease or infection.

The stay-home message is being widely observed. Photo: Damillola Onafuwa

Families who live on the water also depend on it for their livelihoods. “I work between five to six canoe trips in a day,” says Owolabi. “But since the coronavirus came and everyone was told to stay at home, I’ve only been doing about three trips daily.”

Nigeria is Africa’s biggest economy and, with 182 million people, the continent’s most populous country — the food security of millions of people is at stake as coronavirus wreaks havoc with incomes.

Government is ramping up support for some of the most vulnerable groups in the country — the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, for instance, provides food rations to schoolchildren with the technical support of the World Food Programme (WFP)in Abuja and Lagos.

In Mokoko, people must maintain multiple incomes to survive. Sarah Tinsheme is a tailor. The 24-year-old also helps her mother sell basic non-perishable food items such as bottled water, dry pasta and seasoning cubes. Most of her time is taken up in another way, however.

Good fishing nets are a priceless asset in Makoko because fishing is the main source of income. Photo: Damillola Onafuwa

“My main occupation is selling fish,” says Sarah. “We smoke the fish beforehand.”

The task of smoking usually falls to women while men are occupied with sewing fishing nets, building and mending their canoes and then wading into the deep parts of the water to cast, as motorists zipping past on Lagos’s Third Mainland Bridge look on.

Everyone here — be they fish sellers, commercial canoe riders, canoe builders or canoe repairmen — relies on daily takings to survive. Mokoko’s fish market, one of the largest in Lagos, is the beating heart of the community. It’s where families buy the food they need to eat, where they earn their living, and where most socialising is done.

With markets shut because of COVID-19, however, life as people knew it has stopped.

‘It’s very difficult to move around if you don’t own a canoe’. Photo: Damillola Onafuwa

Jutin Segodo Avlanwhen owns a hair salon. Her customers, market traders, have stopped coming. The 38-year-old mother of five says rationing meals for her children has become her new normal.

Another challenge for people living here is the shortage of canoes for ferrying people around, not to mention social distancing.

“It’s very difficult to move around if you don’t own a canoe,” says Jutin. “It’s one of the biggest difficulties we face here. If the canoe riders don’t come on time, the children are late for school.”

Many children whose families do not have access to canoes or cannot afford canoe-rider fees, simply don’t have access to education.

The Makoko community both sits and floats in the Yaba local government area of Lagos State. Sits because although the area is mostly covered in water, one-third of it is on dry land. It was first inhabited by migrant fishermen from the neighbouring Republic of Benin and Togo, who settled in the area and made it theirs.

A view of Lagos’s Third Mainland Bridge from Makoko. Photo: Damillola Onafuwa

The relationship between the Government and the community can be an uneasy one. For locals, attention from the government can often only spell one thing: eviction. Any government presence is given a cold reception, so perhaps unsurprisingly they tend to stay away.

In 2012, the Government forcefully evicted thousands of residents from their homes, with only 72 hours’ notice, rendering them suddenly homeless. The intention was to get rid of what many call ‘Lagos’s Shame’ — Makoko’s sprawl of labyrinthine waterways clearly visible from Third Mainland Bridge which almost 100,000 drive across daily.

Evictions were abruptly suspended after indiscriminate gunshots fired by police officers killed a resident. Since then the residents whose living quarters comprise the ‘dirty linen’ of Lagos State have managed to keep their homes.

It’s not all doom and gloom in Makoko: life floats on via its resilient residents. Photo: Damillola Onafuwa

Today, for Sarah Tinsheme, and many like her, life in Makoko isn’t necessarily all gloom, doom, and dirty black water.

“I like our life here,” she says. “We often have parties here in Makoko. All we need to do is find a venue where there is a lot of sand, like the church. The church is located on the part of Makoko that is on land. But we can’t have too many people at our parties because there isn’t much dry land.”

Despite all the poverty, Owolabi James would not want to live anywhere else. “I like living here on the water,” he says. “When I’m not working and I want to relax, I call my friends so we can hang out and chill and just enjoy each other’s company. I don’t have any plans to leave because I enjoy it here. I have my peace of mind, the cool breeze, and fresh air.”

Even in lockdown, life floats on in the muddy, murky waters of Makoko.

Source: World Food Programme

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‘I am my brother’s keeper’, Philonise Floyd tells UN rights body, in impassioned plea for racial justice. Credit: United Nations

By Kwame Akonor
SOUTH ORANGE, New Jersey, Jun 24 2020 (IPS)

Racism is not only an American problem but a plague that people of African descent have had to endure since time immemorial.

Rather than seizing this historic moment to act decisively, the United Nations, the world’s highest platform for human rights, dithered on the issue when it was called on to establish a full commission of inquiry on race following the outrageous killing of George Floyd on May 25 2020.

That the African countries on the 47-member UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) were cajoled by more powerful UN member states to soften its demand for such a commission should come as no surprise. African states are the largest regional group at the UN, yet it continues to play a peripheral role in global affairs.

In 1945, four African countries (Egypt, Ethiopia, Liberia, and the Union of South Africa) attended the San Francisco Conference and signed the UN Charter. Since then the number of African countries has increased, mainly due to decolonization, to 54 (28% of UN members).

Despite its current representation, Africa remains marginalized and powerless in the world body. As any student of international relations knows, real power in UN lies with the veto wielding five permanent members of the Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States).

African countries have a common vision for inclusion and expansion for two permanent and five non-permanent security council seats for Africa. Though it is not wedded to idea of a veto and would prefer its abolition, the African group maintains that for the sake of efficiency and equitable distribution of power all admitted permanent members should possess it.

The collective, however, cannot agree on which countries to recommend for permanent seats let alone those to be assigned veto powers. The three potential candidates mentioned as permanent members with veto rights are South Africa, Nigeria, and Egypt.

The inability of Africans to agree on the composition and mandate of its reform proposals have made it susceptible to the dictates and influence of western donor countries.

Be that it is, one can make the case that a meaningful structural reform of the Security Council that accords agency to Africa at the UN will not only be a pragmatic reflection of contemporary geopolitical realties but more importantly it will serve as a correction of the historic injustice done to Africa.

The UNHRC urgent debate opened in Geneva on June 15, 2020 and discussion on the Africa resolution began in earnest on June 17, 2020. The original proposal by the Africans specially called for an international investigation into the unarmed killing of blacks in America and the lack of accountability of police violence that results from such crimes, including police brutality against protesters.

In the end, a watered-down version of the resolution was adopted unanimously on June 19, 2020. Mention of the creation of full-fledged commission of inquiry was dropped and the scope of inquiry was broadened to go beyond America.

The final resolution recommended a mere fact-finding report on systemic racism and discrimination against black people to be prepared by the UNHRC chairperson and other experts and delivered in a year’s time.

Though the US withdrew from the UNHRC in 2018, the final resolution passed because the US, the UN’s biggest financial donor, was “the elephant in the room” calling the shots.

The US argued that while it was not above scrutiny, the UNCHR’s attempt to single it out was hypocritical since authoritarian regimes in the world like Cuba, China, and Iran have systemic racial disparities in countries.

The western allies on the UNCHR, including Australia, Germany, Poland, and the European Union, were swayed by the US argument and thwarted the Africa efforts.

The adopted resolution is a disingenuous face-saving outcome: how can the UNHRC back away from its most intrusive scrutiny mechanism, the creation of commission of inquiry, to that of a report.

To make matters worse, the UNHRC assigned itself a full year for the completion of the report. It took just a week (June 22, 2020) for the reputable advocacy group Amnesty International to put together a comprehensive report “USA: End unlawful police violence against Black Lives Matter protests” on police brutality and the protest movement in America following the death of Mr. Floyd.

Credit however must be given to the African states for initiating the “urgent debate” on Mr. Floyd’s murder and racial injustice and police impunity in the United States.

It is only the fifth time in the UNHRC 14-year history that such a debate has been convened: the first one against Israel over the flotilla incident in June 2010; and the other three on Syria, in February 2012, May 2013 and March 2018.

For a moment, it appeared the debate might not happen despite worldwide protests. First, UN activities had been suspended since the Covid-19 pandemic first struck in early March 2020.

Second, senior UN leadership vacillated on how to respond and sent conflicting messages to UN staffers on what role, if any, they could play.

Beyond using tweets, António Guterres, the current UN Secretary-General made no media appearance or formal remarks on the subject. Through his surrogates some guidance was provided.

On June 3, the UN effectively banned UN staff from engaging in peaceful protest stating that UN staff regulations makes the “participation in public demonstrations in the current circumstances may not be consistent with the independence and impartiality required of . . . international civil servants.”

The contradiction between the UN ideals for civil rights and the prohibitive guidance that discourage action toward such ideals became evident.

Sensing the civil rights disconnect and dissatisfaction of the UN staff, the UN reversed course. Secretary-General Guterres on June 9, sent a letter to the UN staff and maintained that the earlier guidance was not a prescription for neutrality or impartiality on the matter at hand but rather that “the guidance was meant to emphasize the need to balance [protest] activities with one’s best judgement as international civil servants and our official duties.”

In order words, protest engagements could be carried out but in a solely private capacity. The guidance provided is quite timorous and stands in stark contrast to efforts by UN staffers who participated in protest movements of yesterday.

One such person is Ralph Bunche, a co-drafter of the UN Charter, the first African-American Nobel Peace laureate, in 1950, and an UN Under Secretary-General for Special Political Affairs who joined several civil rights protest marches, sometimes donning the UN flag and publicly pledging the UN support for the movement.

While not a panacea, a formal international investigation would have served as a clarion call to end and repair racial injustice and projected the UN as an agent of change to institutional racism.

It also would have signaled a firm commitment by the world organization to the promotion of fundamental freedoms for all persons as enshrined in the UN charter, the organization’s constitution which was signed some seventy-five ago this month.

 

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Excerpt:

Kwame Akonor is an associate professor at Seton Hall University, where he teaches international relations and human rights.

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UN Photo/Loey Felipe.

By Manos Antoninis
PARIS, Jun 23 2020 (IPS)

Many countries in sub-Saharan Africa get bad press for their progress in providing inclusive education. Just two in three children complete primary school on time, while the number of out-of-school children and youth is 97 million and growing. Less is said, however, about the range of tools many countries in the region are deploying to include some of those furthest behind in mainstream schools: students with disabilities.

These efforts should be celebrated and there seems no better time to think about inclusion than now. Inequalities in education are always blatant, but the new 2020 Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report by UNESCO shows that the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated exclusion. About 40% of countries in sub-Saharan Africa have not been able to support disadvantaged learners during school closures, notably students with disabilities.

Many of the countries looking to move from segregated towards inclusive systems need to overcome management challenges. They need to think how to better share specialist resources between schools so that all children can benefit

Prior to the pandemic, countries in the region were taking different approaches to inclusion. Data from the continent shows that 23% of countries have laws calling for children with disabilities to be educated in separate settings. Most countries, however, combine mainstreaming with separate arrangements, usually for learners with severe disabilities.

Many of the countries looking to move from segregated towards inclusive systems need to overcome management challenges. They need to think how to better share specialist resources between schools so that all children can benefit. Examples of this can be found across the continent.

Angola and Nigeria, for instance, are looking at transforming special schools into support bases for children with disabilities in mainstream schools, as well as providing training for teachers. Angola set a target in 2017 of including 30,000 children with special education needs in mainstream schools by 2022.

Kenya also recognizes special schools’ pivotal role in the transition towards inclusive education. At present, almost 2,000 primary and secondary mainstream schools provide education for students with special needs.

Malawi tries a twin-track approach. Those with severe disabilities are educated in special schools or special needs centres, while those with mild disabilities are mainstreamed. Special schools at each education level are being transformed into resource centres.

Instead of resource centres, Tanzania is mobilising itinerant teachers offering specialist services. These teachers are trained and managed by Tanzania Society for the Blind and provided with a motorbike. They also perform vision screening, refer children to medical facilities and organize community sensitization and counselling
While the political will for change seems clear, there is often a gap between theory and practice. This is where the emphasis between now and 2030 must lie. Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, teachers mention that implementing inclusive education is hard because they lack resources.

Take Malawi for instance. While it is increasingly encouraging learners with special needs to enrol in mainstream schools, a lack of facilities forces many to transfer to special schools. In Namibia, the shortage of resource schools in rural areas, a lack of accessible infrastructure and unfavourable attitudes towards disability are just some of the barriers to successfully implementing its inclusive education policy. Similarly, in the United Republic of Tanzania, only half of children with albinism complete primary school. Because they lack support, they often end up being transferred to special schools.

The same story can be found in South Africa. It has a law from 1996 stating that the right to education of children with special needs is to be fulfilled in mainstream public schools. But recently it reported back to the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities that it had new segregated schools in basic education and a lack of provisions for children with severe intellectual disabilities.

Ghana is another case. It is the only country in the region to make provisions for all learners in its education law. Its 2015 inclusive education policy framework envisages transforming special schools into resource centres, while maintaining special units, schools and other institutions for students with severe and profound disabilities. But children with intellectual and developmental disabilities must perform the same tasks within the same time frame as their peers without disabilities, occupy desks placed far from teachers and are often physically punished by teachers for behavioural challenges, even in inclusive schools in Accra.

While all these efforts are commendable, simply laying the groundwork for inclusion in education will not suffice. Implementing the ambitions spelled out in education policies will take a new wave of efforts. The 2020 GEM Report looks at the different steps needed to provide disability-inclusive education, providing ten recommendations for policy makers, teachers and civil society over the next ten years. We hope it will prove a useful resource for countries in the region to move to the next stage.

Related Articles

• E-learning Divide Places World’s Disadvantaged Children at Risk of Dropping Out
• COVID-19 has Further Marginalised Persons with Disabilities

The post It is a Challenge to Provide Disability-Inclusive Education. But it is Worth it appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Manos Antoninis is the Director of the Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report, UNESCO

The post It is a Challenge to Provide Disability-Inclusive Education. But it is Worth it appeared first on Inter Press Service.

A girl in Bhubaneswar slums, India checks her e-learning assignments on a computer tablet. Courtesy: John Marshall/Aveti Learning

By Manipadma Jena
BHUBANESWAR, India, Jun 23 2020 (IPS)

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought a new layer of challenges to inclusive education. As many as 40 percent of low and lower-middle income countries having not supported disadvantaged learners during temporary school shutdowns, finds United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s 2020 Global Education Monitoring Report  released today, Jun. 23.

Social, income and digital divides have put the most disadvantaged at risk of learning losses and dropping out. Lessons from the past have shown that health crises can leave many behind, in particular the poorest girls, many of whom may never return to school, the report says.

While at the infection’s April peak, over 90 percent of the global student population in 194 countries were affected by related school closures, pushing the world into the throes of the most unprecedented disruption in the history of education. As of Jun. 20, 62 percent of total enrolled students still remain impacted.

In India, according to UNESCO, the countrywide school closure has affected 320 million children enrolled from pre-primary to post-high school levels of education. About 158 million are female students.

India as other countries has decided that its schools will remain shut till the end of July and syllabus must be completed through e-learning, even as the COVID-19 infection curves sharply upwards with 440,215 positive cases.

Not all students and teachers have access to adequate internet connection, equipment, skills and working conditions to take advantage of available platforms. Also, not all available internet connections are strong enough to download data or take part in video calls. Most teachers and school administrators had to switch overnight to new tools to deliver lessons, distribute content, correct homework and communicate with students and their parents, the GEMR says. 

“The key to ensuring no one is falling behind during this crisis – and beyond – is to understand and cater for all the various different needs that students may have. Online learning might be a brilliant solution for some; radio broadcasts (and lessons through television) may be a more appropriate solution for others,” Manos Antoninis, Director of UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report (GEMR) 2020, told IPS via email from France.

“But no one single solution is perfect for all and there are some disadvantaged students – those who we are the most concerned about during today’s shut downs – who will not be served well by any current solution on offer. Their learning will suffer. Their attachment to school may weaken. Their families are likely to be plunged into poverty,” he added.

While private schools in India lost no time in providing their students with e-learning from March through Skype, email, power point presentations, YouTube and WhatsApp groups, it helped greatly that these generally better-income families had immediate access to electricity, internet, laptops or smartphones. For them e-learning was just one click away.

G. Lela Reddy, a rag-picker’s eldest daughter got admission and excelled in a mainstream school after she gained access to an e-learning platform. Courtesy: Ratnakar Sahoo/Ashayen.

At the other end are millions like 13-year-old’s like G. Lela Reddy, the eldest child of a single mother, who works as a rag-picker, in Bhubaneswar, in India’s eastern State of Odisha. Six years ago, a substance abuse rehab centre Ashayen (meaning Hopes) for children of rag pickers and beggars spotted Reddy and she began the bridging course that helped children join mainstream schools.

While studying she still works, daily segregating the waste her mother collects and minding her young brother at the centre while her mother goes out.

Before COVID-19 struck, Reddy had made it to 8th grade in a government school, making a mark as a good debater, and a singer and dancer to Bollywood songs.

“In 2016, when we introduced a digital learning platform to these street children in our informal centres, we realised to our surprise that the drop-out rate was reducing exponentially,” Ratnakar Sahoo who heads Ashayen told IPS. “The deep disparity they hitherto had felt about not being able to hold and operate a mobile phone which they saw other better-off kids doing, was the motivation to come to school and to study,” he added.

Reddy mastered digital learning, and was soon helping others log in and guiding them with e-learning.

“What we tried to do is help bridge the digital divide in India,” Biswajit Nayak, California-based founder of the digital platform Aveti Learning, told IPS over phone. The social enterprise develops and provides digital learning content for under-served student communities in villages and urban slums of India.

“The real need for e-learning was never before more apparent than during the COVID-19 lockdowns,” he said.

Worst hit by school lockdowns are children of commercial sex workers who study through informal tutorials like these children in Kolkata city. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

Since schools in India lockdown from Mar. 27 till Jun. 16, Aveti’s digital channel analytics shows that during the lockdown they had 2.2 million views, 250,000 hours of streaming, 232,000 unique users from all 30 districts of Odisha, according to Nayak, an IT professional.

“Quickly upgrading technology and synchronising our content to government-announced online weekly curriculum for secondary classes, we lost no time. Even when the lockdown was lifted, we retained flexibility pushing online streaming to 5pm onwards, so that working parents in single-phone households would be back home and share their phone for lessons,” Sibabrata Choudhury, director of Aveti Learning, told IPS.

Among several other e-learning mobile phone apps is Odisha government’s own Madhu App.

Choudhury assesses not only is mobile phones with internet penetration low, 1 in 5 villages, particularly tribal villages lack grid connection while a dependable power supply eludes large rural tracts. This makes access to e-learning difficult.

“Two days after lockdown in March when I visited the Ashayen students, none of them had eaten since two days, let alone keep up with studies,” Sahoo told IPS adding, “ neither could we get them to the centre nor had sufficient computer tablets to provide them at home.”

Reddy’s chances of lifting herself out of a life of poverty has been on pause as it has for millions of adolescent girls marginalised by the growing divide during lockdown. A mid-May 2020 rapid assessment by Delhi-based non-profit Praxis India in three Indian states finds 4 in10 girls could not attend e-learning, while over half spent less time on studies compared to before lockdown, owing to economic demands.

“Indeed, India’s 2017-18 National Sample Survey reported only around a quarter of households had internet access, and this is without looking at rates in rural areas. Once schools reopen after these shutdowns, they must take into account the learning hiatus just experienced, which will have affected the poorest most. Cutting syllabuses shorter is likely to be an inevitable but also appropriate solution,” UNESCO’s Antoninis said.

“India has useful (and replicable) lessons though,” he said. “Odisha introduced multilingual education in 21 languages since the mid-2000s, covering 1,500 primary schools for which online dictionaries have been published, with positive learning outcomes. Maharashtra revised many textbook images in 2019 to promote gender equality. But there is still a long way to go. Tribal people are seldom depicted in curricula, and, when they are, the material often provokes a sense of inferiority among tribal students.”

Antoninis said that COVID-19 has given everyone an “opportunity to think afresh about our education systems”.

“India (too) is presented with a chance for re-imagining syllabuses after this crisis to be more inclusive, less formulaic,” the director of the GEMR added.

Related Articles

• Children in Out-of-Home Care: Lessons from the Pandemic
• COVID-19 has Further Marginalised Persons with Disabilities
• The Foundation to Build Back Better: Education
• Education Cannot Wait Interviews Amina J. Mohammed, Deputy Secretary-general of the United Nations

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Scene from the racial justice protests in Washington, DC following the death of a Black man named George Floyd during a violent police encounter in Minnesota, USA. Credit: Amnesty International, Alli Jarrar

By Brian Castner
BUFFALO, New York, Jun 23 2020 (IPS)

Police forces across the United States have committed widespread and egregious human rights violations in response to largely peaceful assemblies protesting systemic racism and police violence, including the killing of Black people.

Amnesty International has documented 125 separate incidents of police violence against protesters in 40 states and the District of Columbia between 26 May and 5 June 2020.

These acts of excessive force were committed by members of state and local police departments, as well as by National Guard troops and security force personnel from several federal agencies.

Among the abuses documented are beatings, the misuse of tear gas and pepper spray, and the inappropriate and, at times, indiscriminate firing of less-lethal projectiles, such as sponge rounds and rubber bullets.

To evaluate these incidents, Amnesty International’s Crisis Evidence Lab gathered nearly 500 videos of protests from social media platforms. This digital content was then verified, geolocated, and analyzed by investigators with expertise in weapons, police tactics, and international and US law governing the use of force.

In some cases, researchers were also able to interview victims or confirm police conduct using local police department statements.

These human rights violations by US police against peaceful protesters – which were neither proportionate nor necessary to achieve a legitimate law enforcement objective – are particularly egregious as they have occurred at demonstrations denouncing just such police behavior.

Most of these protests have been peaceful, but in some a minority of protesters have committed unlawful acts, including acts of violence. In such cases, security forces have routinely used disproportionate and indiscriminate force against entire demonstrations – without distinguishing, as legally required, between peaceful protesters and individuals committing unlawful acts.

Credit: Amnesty International, Alli Jarrar

Besides the severity of the abuses, what is most striking about the incidents Amnesty International documented is their broad geographic scope, indicating the national scale of the problem of police violence.

On 30 May, a joint patrol of Minneapolis police and Minnesota National Guard personnel unlawfully shot 37/40mm impact projectiles at people peacefully standing on the front porches of their homes. The security forces yelled “light them up” before firing.

The attack appears to have been done in retaliation for the people being outside after curfew and videotaping the forces with their smartphones.

On 1 June, Pennsylvania State Police and City of Philadelphia police confronted a group of protesters on a highway that runs through the city center. Even after the protesters left the road bed, police continued to use pepper spray and tear gas to drive the crowd up a steep embankment and against a high fence.

Lizzie Horne, a rabbinical student who was in that group, described the experience:

“Out of the blue, they started breezing pepper spray into the crowd. There was one officer on the median who was spraying as well. Then they started with tear gas. Someone who was right in the front – who had a tear gas canister hit his head – started running back … We were against a big fence that people had to jump over up a steep hill. The fence was maybe 6 feet tall.

People started putting their hands up – but the cops wouldn’t let up … We were drooling and coughing uncontrollably … The police started coming up the hill and continued to harass people who were still on the hill – they were hitting and tackling people. They were dragging people down the hill and forcing them down on their knees, lining them up kneeling on the median on the highway with their hands in zip ties – and pulling down their masks and spraying and gassing them again.”

In Washington, DC, also on 1 June, security personnel from a variety of federal agencies, including National Park Police and the Bureau of Prisons, plus DC National Guardsmen, committed a range of human rights violations against protesters in Lafayette Park.

These included misusing a variety of riot control agents, and tossing “stinger ball” grenades, which contain pepper spray and explode in a concussive flash-bang effect, throwing rubber pellets indiscriminately in all directions.

The violations were not limited to the largest cities, however. Local police inappropriately used tear gas against peaceful protesters in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Conway, Arkansas, among others.

In Iowa City, Iowa, police fired tear gas and threw flash bang grenades at protesters kneeling and chanting “Hands up, don’t shoot.” In Huntington Beach, California, police fired pepper balls at protesters lying prone in the street on their stomachs.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, police used tear gas to trap protesters between two tall buildings, and then shot pepper balls at them from above. During a protest in Salt Lake City, Utah, police held down a homeless man and shot him in the back with a 37/40mm impact projectile.

In Fort Wayne, Indiana, a local journalist lost his eye when police shot him in the face with a tear gas grenade.

Less-lethal weapons—such as tear gas and pepper spray grenades, and impact projectiles such as sponge rounds, baton rounds, and rubber bullets—should never be shot at close range or aimed at the head, as serious injury or death is possible.

There is no legitimate use for projectiles that cause a blinding flash of light in public order policing operations, such as the policing of a protest.

Such weapons are designed to disorientate their targets, which is antithetical to the purpose of weapons such as tear gas, which are only to be used to disperse crowds where violence is so widespread that no other less harmful means will disperse them.

For this reason, weapons that combine a gas and a flash, such as ‘stinger balls,’ can never be legitimately used in the policing of assemblies.

The US government is obligated under the US Constitution and international human rights law to guarantee the right to freedom of peaceful assembly. Law enforcement agencies—at the federal, state, and municipal levels—have a responsibility to respect, protect, and facilitate peaceful assemblies.

As such, law enforcement authorities are only permitted to use force at public assemblies when it is absolutely necessary and in a proportionate manner to achieve a legitimate law enforcement objective.

Any restrictions of public assemblies, including the use of force against demonstrators, can never be discriminatory toward any race, ethnicity, political ideology, or other social group.

The enforcement of a curfew is not, in and of itself, reasonable grounds to use force, nor do curfews supersede the human right to peaceful assembly or First Amendment freedom-of-expression protections.

Law enforcement authorities’ main objective in policing demonstrations should always be to effectively facilitate peaceful assemblies.

If it does become necessary for law enforcement to disperse a protest—for example, as a result of individual protesters perpetrating acts of serious violence—law enforcement officials can use force only if non-violent means are unlikely to be effective.

In the use of force, law enforcement officials must seek to minimize harm and injury, and ensure it is proportionate to the level of resistance by the demonstrators. Even then, authorities must strictly distinguish between peaceful demonstrators or bystanders, and any individual who is actively engaged in violence.

The violent acts of an individual never justifies the use of force against peaceful protesters generally, and force is only justified for the minimum duration necessary.

In order to prevent impunity and the repetition of abuses, authorities in the US must investigate, prosecute, and punish the unlawful use of force by police or others, and provide full reparations to the victims of such violence.

To date, there is little indication that these obligations have been taken seriously across the US.

 

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The post Unlawful Use of Force by Police at Protests Across the US appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Brian Castner is Senior Crisis Advisor on Arms and Military Operations, Amnesty International

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

Over the course of his presidency, US President Donald Trump’s racism has become more evident with more leaks of his private remarks, which he has been generally quick to deny, qualify and explain away.

Despite his thinly disguised contempt for women, ‘non-white’ ethnic minorities, and most foreigners, unsurprisingly, he is respectful of power and privilege, especially when they may help him. Trump’s version of ‘kiss up, kick down’.

Anis Chowdhury

“Least racist person in the world”
Unsurprisingly, Trump has claimed he is the least racist person in the world. Unsurprisingly too, his record suggests otherwise. Trump has frequently created controversies with racially charged comments and actions, and was even sued for racial discrimination by the US Justice Department in the 1970s.

Trump won the 2016 presidential election with an ethno-populist agenda featuring racist elements. He has infamously promised a wall on the US-Mexico border to stop Mexicans, whom he deemed “criminals” and “rapists”, and imposed bans on Muslims entering the US.

Since entering the Oval Office, Trump continued to insist that he is the world’s least racist person, but frequently loses self-restraint, e.g., repeatedly stereotyping non-white reporters and pandering to white supremacists, even cracking jokes in bad taste. Trump has even tweeted that several non-white Members of Congress should go back to the “totally broken and crime infested places” they came from.

Adding insult to injury
Two years ago, Trump referred to Haiti, El Salvador and some other African countries as ‘shitholes’, sparking unprecedented international outrage. The UN human rights spokesperson described the comments as “shocking and shameful”, and simply “racist”, not that Trump cared.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

To be sure, underdevelopment is not the original condition of Africa before European colonialism, but rather, the historical outcome of various forces, most importantly Western imperialism from about half a millennium ago.

From around 1445 to 1870, Africa was the major source of slaves, especially for the New World, both in North and South America. Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Britain, France and others in the New World and Europe all benefited, albeit differently over time.

The processes and their effects were undoubtedly uneven, creating wealth for exploiters, often from abroad, while many of the exploited were enslaved, dispossessed and otherwise immiserised.

Neo-colonialism
Thus, contrary to the claims of Niall Ferguson, the most prominent contemporary apologist of British imperialism, that colonialism laid the foundations for post-colonial progress, Africa was ruined, irreversibly maiming its development prospects.

A half-century or so after gaining independence between 1957 and 1975, or 1994, if apartheid South Africa is also included, ‘neo-colonial’ policy conditionalities and advice from donors and the Bretton Woods institutions have privileged foreign investment and export markets.

One major casualty of such policy advice was public investment. African countries were told not to invest in food agriculture and to dismantle supportive arrangements. Thus, with trade liberalization, food security suffered as Africa deindustrialized.

The sagas of Trump’s other shithole countries are not very dissimilar. Former US President Bill Clinton, who headed the United Nations’ effort to rebuild Haiti after the devastating earthquake of 2010, expressed regret for having forced Haiti to open its economy to food imports, effectively destroying domestic rice production, while benefiting American farmers.

‘Shitholes’ in Trump’s world view
Trump’s candid ‘shitholes’ comments presumably reflect his world view, in this case, of poor countries unlikely to provide much benefit and advantage to him or his view of American interests.

Even his ambiguous and ambivalent remarks about police and ‘vigilante’ brutality and killings of African-American and other ‘coloured’ minorities, or his dismissive treatment of ‘minority’ and inquisitive journalists should surprise no one.

Trump’s approval hit an all time high early in the year after securing the US-China trade deal. But having badly managed the Covid-19 pandemic, his poll ratings have declined precipitously since.

Despite lavishly praising China’s constructive cooperative attitude and handling of the virus outbreak in January, within months, he was encouraging to politically driven allegations of a Chinese conspiracy behind the outbreak. To add insult to injury, some African countries (e.g., Ghana, Senegal and Ethiopia) seem to have managed the pandemic better than he has.

Using anti-racist protests for re-election
Meanwhile, worldwide anti-racist demonstrations have revived earlier transnational protests against statues of persons identified with imperialism, slavery and the US Confederacy. The latest round of outrage following Floyd’s videoed murder by policemen is already being used by the Trump camp.

White supremacist and other extremist groups have joined some planned peaceful protests, initiating violence and inciting others to loot. The Lancaster, Pennsylvania police chief has confirmed, with “definite evidence”, suspicions that non-violent anti-racism protests have been infiltrated by such agent provocateurs.

US political observers note how the ‘long, hot summer’ of 1968, including the riots at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago hosted by then Mayor Richard Daley, helped Richard Nixon win the 1968 election. Invoking more racial themes, Trump is already recasting himself as the ‘law and order’ President.

The emperor has no clothes
More recently, the Trump administration has sought to suppress his former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s embarrassing new book, The Room Where It Happened, providing considerable evidence of Trump’s ignorance, incompetence, impulsiveness and pursuit of self-interest; even Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reportedly observed “He is full of shit”.

Bolton reports that POTUS asked China to help his re-election prospects by buying more US agricultural exports, which they did. The book’s pre-publication release, widespread dissemination and publicity may nudge Trump to enhance his re-election chances by depicting himself more credibly as a China hawk by becoming even more belligerent in his rhetoric and policy actions.

Trump is likely to paint presidential challenger Joe Biden as too weak and accommodative of China. Democrats may then try to outdo him, or at least not be left too far behind in terms of anti-China rhetoric, by promising to further militarize President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s ‘pivot to Asia’ to ‘contain’ China.

Bolton may help Trump, again
But Trump may also turn Bolton on his head, depicting him as a ‘trigger-happy’, belligerent bully who wanted POTUS to be more aggressive, tying up the US in ‘wars without end’ on many fronts on flimsy pretexts. Most people who know Bolton would testify to this effect, ironically allowing Trump to present himself as a peaceful president carrying a big stick, but refusing to go to war unnecessarily.

The alternative is worse. Just over four months from the early November polls, and anxious about his re-election chances, an increasingly desperate Trump is likely to become more reckless to secure a second mandate.

Trump may even provoke what he intends as a ‘limited’ conflict with China, probably in the South China Sea. Regardless of the original motive, once begun, such conflicts can easily spin out of control, threatening the world and world peace.

George W Bush used fictional ‘weapons of mass destruction’ to start a war with Iraq, famously supported by Tony Blair, at tremendous human and economic cost. Margaret Thatcher also secured re-election by going to war over the Falkland Islands or Malvinas. Trump will be in good company if he resorts to this option.

 

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The post Racism, Shitholes and Re-election appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The Leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Yasser Arafat, arrived at UN Headquarters by helicopter. A view of the helicopter as it approached the North Lawn of the UN campus on 13 November 1974. But Arafat was denied a US visa for a second visit to the UN in 1988. Credit: UN Photo/Michos Tzovaras

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 23 2020 (IPS)

The coronavirus pandemic is beginning to transform the United Nations into an institution far beyond recognition.

The Secretariat building has been shut down since mid-March, and the UN campus will continue to remain a ghost town through end July– and perhaps beyond– with nearly 3,000 staffers, delegates and journalists working, mostly from home.

And most meetings, including Security Council sessions, are taking place via video teleconferencing (VTC) while “informal consultations” are done “remotely,” along with “virtual:” press briefings.

Last week the UN hosted a “virtual ministerial pledging conference” with hardly a minister in sight.

The deadly pandemic has, most crucially, grounded the upcoming session of the General Assembly, an annual event which usually attracts over 150 world leaders. And it has also upended the “live” commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the world body.

And so, perhaps for the first time in the 75-year history of the UN, most world leaders would be invited to address the General Assembly via pre-recorded video statements.

The message particularly to ostracized world leaders – and those “blacklisted” by the US — is clear: You don’t need a US visa to address the UN, come September.

Dr Palitha Kohona, a former Chief of the Treaty Section in the UN Office of Legal Affairs, told IPS the US has denied entry visas to certain individuals to attend meetings of the world body, including senior officials from Iran, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Venezuela, Russia, North Korea and Cuba, among others.

The US will be severely challenged if it seeks to justify its actions as being consistent with its obligations under the Headquarters Agreement with the UN. (HQ Agreement, 11 UNTS 1), he argued.

With the US in the present confrontational mood, and the real risk of an intractable conflict between the UN and the US, COVID-19 provides a convenient way out, with which the UN will be comfortable.

The members of the world body can now opt to address the organisation through video link, he said.

An entry visa will no longer be sine qua non for the purpose of entering the US and addressing the UN, said Dr Kohona, a former chair of the General Assembly’s Legal Committee and Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the UN.

Meanwhile, some key meetings, including those focusing on nuclear disarmament, women’s rights, indigenous peoples and biodiversity – have been postponed, plus the Conference of Parties (COP26) on climate change scheduled to take place late November in Glasgow, Scotland.

The beneficiaries, if they do exercise their right to address the UN, via video conferencing, would include leaders from Iran, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Venezuela, North Korea and Cuba, who are virtually designated persona non grata by the US– even as a growing new political confrontation continues between Washington and Beijing.

Last week Michael Pompeo, US Secretary of State, had an implicit warning: “the United Nations Human Rights Council (in Geneva), now comprised of Venezuela and recently, Cuba and China, has long been and remains a haven for dictators and democracies that indulge them. It is a grave disappointment to those genuinely seeking to advance human dignity.”

Dr. Simon Adams, Executive Director of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), told IPS “I’m not an expert on US visa law, but banning foreign leaders from being able to attend the UN General Assembly would seem to violate the spirit of the UN headquarters agreement”.

The US and Soviet Union were on the brink of nuclear war in 1960, but Khrushchev was still allowed to attend the UN and bang his shoe on the desk, he said.

And Che Guevara, also no friend of the US, was allowed to speak to the UN General Assembly in 1964, although in that case someone tried to fire a bazooka at the UN in retaliation, he noted.

“However, with regard to the International Criminal Court (ICC), it is an independent court and is in a different category. While I think that the United States threatening sanctions against ICC officials is unethical and antithetical to international justice, I guess it is their legal right to do so.”

It just means that the United States has now joined a select club of countries, mostly ruled by dictators and atrocity perpetrators, that threaten ICC officials and their families for doing their jobs and upholding international law, said Dr Adams, who worked with Sinn Féin and former IRA prisoners in support of the Northern Ireland peace process.

In theory, he said, that means even North Korea’s Kim Jung Un could make a speech to the UN General Assembly this year–although given his recent bromance with the US President, he could probably get a visa anyway, he added.

“Personally, I think any leader of a UN member state should always be given the opportunity to address the annual General Assembly, unless they are currently under ICC indictment for war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide,” declared Dr Adams, a former member of the international anti-apartheid movement and of the African National Congress in South Africa.

Last week the General Assembly held its elections by secret ballot without a plenary meeting. Elections were held for 75th President of the General Assembly; new non-permanent members of the Security Council; and new members of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Volkan Bozkir from Turkey was elected President of the seventy-fifth session of the General Assembly. Credit: UN photo

Iftikhar Ali, a longstanding UN correspondent for the Associated Press of Pakistan (APP), who has covered General Assembly sessions since 1971, told IPS the upcoming “virtual high-level debate” with only a small number of diplomats present in the iconic General Assembly hall will be devoid of the excitement, colour and high expectations that has always generated by the physical presence of 100-plus world leaders.

No bilateral meetings between friends or foes, no receptions or dinners where discussions take place in a relaxed atmosphere that help ease tensions in parts of the world, he said.

Also absent will be hundreds of television cameramen and reporters from around the world who push and shove to get closer to action with nervous security men chasing them around, said Ali, who worked for the U.N. in Tehran and Kosovo and is a former President of the UN correspondents’ Association (UNCA) and Chairman of the Dag Hammarskjold Memorial Scholarship Fund from 1984-1993.

“In short, the crucial week-long high-level debate will make very little contribution to advancing the cause of international peace and security,” declared Ali.

In 1988, when Yassir Arafat was denied a US visa for a second visit to New York to address the General Assembly sessions, the United Nations delivered a resounding slap at the United States by temporarily moving the UN’s highest policy making body to Geneva in order to provide a global platform for the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

On his first visit in 1974, he avoided the hundreds of pro and anti-Arafat demonstrators outside the UN building by arriving in a helicopter which landed on the North Lawn of the UN campus adjoining the East River.

But since then several political leaders—mostly antagonistic towards the US or heading regimes under American sanctions– have either been denied visas or implicitly declared persona non grata.

As a result, heads of state from “rogue nations,” including North Korea’s Kim Il Sung and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, never addressed the UN while, more recently, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, have avoided the UN, even though they have a legitimate right to address the General Assembly, as leaders of UN member states.

When former Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, accused of war crimes, was refused a US visa to attend the high level segment of the General Assembly sessions back in September 2013, a Sudanese delegate told the UN’s Legal Committee that “the democratically-elected president of Sudan had been deprived of the opportunity to participate in the General Assembly because the host country, the United States, had denied him a visa, in violation of the U.N.-U.S. Headquarters Agreement.”

Asked if world leaders like Bashar al Assad and Kim Jong un could remotely address the General Assembly, UN Deputy Spokesperson Farhan Haq told reporters last week “arrangements are being finalised”.

“We do expect to have a virtual component, but you’ll have seen what the outgoing General Assembly President said in his briefing last week about this issue”.

“As we get closer to the specific arrangements, the General Assembly President and his office, including our spokeswoman, Reem Abaza, could provide you with more details. But we do expect that there will be some virtual component, and that format is still being decided among the Member States,” he noted.

Pressed further, Haq said he does not want to prejudge what is currently being discussed by Member States.

“We’re working for a mix of virtual attendance and then some limited physical attendance, and it’s been very clear that it will have to be limited,” he noted.

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

The post Message to Ostracized World Leaders: You Don’t Need a US Visa to Address the UN appeared first on Inter Press Service.