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Credit: Shafiqul Alam Kiron/IPS

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Jan 24 2022 (IPS)

“Unless we take action, the share of children leaving school in developing countries who are unable to read could increase from 53 to 70 percent.”

The alarm bell has been rung by the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, in his message on the International Day of Education, marked on 24 January 2022.

In fact, some 1.6 billion school and college students had their studies interrupted at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic — and it’s not over yet, said Guterres, adding that today, school closures continue to disrupt the lives of over 31 million students, “exacerbating a global learning crisis.”

“This generation of students now risk losing 17 trillion US dollars in lifetime earnings in present value, or about 14 percent of today's global Gross Domestic Product (GDP), as a result of COVID-19 pandemic-related school closures.”

The UN Education, Sciencia and Culture Organisation (UNESCO), the World Bank and the UN Children Fund (UNICEF) have quantified the economic dimension of this drama.

 

Giant losses

“This generation of students now risk losing 17 trillion US dollars in lifetime earnings in present value, or about 14 percent of today’s global Gross Domestic Product (GDP), as a result of COVID-19 pandemic-related school closures.”

The State of the Global Education Crisis: A Path to Recovery report,  released in December 2021, shows that in low- and middle-income countries, the share of children living in Learning Poverty – already 53 percent before the pandemic – could potentially reach 70 percent given the long school closures and the ineffectiveness of remote learning to ensure full learning continuity during school closures.

According to the three world bodies’ report, simulations estimating that school closures resulted in significant learning losses are now being corroborated by real data.

And it provides some specific examples: regional evidence from Brazil, Pakistan, rural India, South Africa, and Mexico, among others, show substantial losses in maths and reading.

Analysis shows that in some countries, on average, learning losses are roughly proportional to the length of the closures. However, there was great heterogeneity across countries and by subject, students’ socioeconomic status, gender, and grade level.

“For example, results from two states in Mexico show significant learning losses in reading and in maths for students aged 10-15. The estimated learning losses were greater in maths than reading, and affected younger learners, students from low-income backgrounds, as well as girls disproportionately.”

 

Inequities of education, exacerbated

Learning to read is a milestone in every child’s life. Reading is a foundational skill, the report explains, adding that all children should be able to read by age 10. Reading is a gateway for learning as the child progresses through school – and conversely, an inability to read constraints opportunities for further learning.

“Beyond this, when children cannot read, it’s usually a clear indication that school systems aren’t well organised to help children learn in other areas such as maths, science, and the humanities either.”

And although it is possible to learn later in life with enough effort, children who don’t read by age 10 – or at the latest, by the end of primary school – usually fail to master reading later in their schooling career.

Even before COVID-19 disrupted education systems around the world, it was clear that many children around the world were not learning to read proficiently, according to the report. Even though the majority of children are in school, a large proportion are not acquiring fundamental skills.

“Moreover, 260 million children are not even in school. This is the leading edge of a learning crisis that threatens countries’ efforts to build human capital and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).”

 

No human capital

Without foundational learning, students often fail to thrive later in school or when they join the workforce.

“They don’t acquire the human capital they need to power their careers and economies once they leave school, or the skills that will help them become engaged citizens and nurture healthy, prosperous families. Importantly, a lack of foundational literacy skills in the early grades can lead to intergenerational transmission of poverty and vulnerability.”

As a major contributor to human capital deficits, the learning crisis undermines sustainable growth and poverty reduction.

To spotlight this crisis, the World Bank and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics jointly constructed the concept of Learning Poverty and an accompanying indicator.

“Learning poverty means being unable to read and understand a simple text by age 10.”

 

Aggravating global learning crisis

COVID-19 is now wreaking havoc on the lives of young children, students, and youth. The disruption of societies and economies caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is aggravating the global learning crisis and impacting education in unprecedented ways.

 

Learning poverty to rise

With more than a complete year of schooling lost in many parts of the world, learning poverty is estimated to rise to 63 percent in developing countries.

 

Gaping inequalities

UNESCO says that this fourth International Day of Education is marked “as our world stands at a turning point: gaping inequalities, a damaged planet, growing polarisation and the devastating impact of the global pandemic put us before a generational choice: Continue on an unsustainable path or radically change course.”

Education is key to charting the course towards more justice and sustainability, but it is “failing millions of children, youth and adults, increasing their exposure to poverty, violence and exploitation,” adds UNESCO.

 

Education, a human right

And here goes a needed reminder: the right to education is enshrined in article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The Declaration calls for “free and compulsory elementary education.”

The Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted in 1989, goes further to stipulate that countries “shall make higher education accessible to all.”

 

Challenges

“Education offers children a ladder out of poverty and a path to a promising future.”

But about 258 million children and adolescents around the world do not have the opportunity to enter or complete school, and 617 million children and adolescents cannot read and do basic maths…

And less than 40% of girls in sub-Saharan Africa complete lower secondary school and some four million children and youth refugees are out of school.

“Their right to education is being violated and it is unacceptable,” warns the United Nations.

“Without inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong opportunities for all, countries will not succeed in achieving gender equality and breaking the cycle of poverty that is leaving millions of children, youth and adults behind.”

A mother and her children fled conflict in Lashkargah and now live in a displaced persons camp in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan. Credit: UNICEF Afghanistan

By Sultan Barakat and Richard Ponzio
DOHA / WASHINGTON DC, Jan 24 2022 (IPS)

On December 22, 2021, the UN Security Council voted unanimously to allow for more humanitarian assistance to reach vulnerable Afghans, while preventing the abuse of these funds by their Taliban rulers.

With more than half of Afghanistan’s 39 million citizens—afflicted by drought, disease, and decades of war—depending upon critical life-saving aid to survive the harsh winter months, the decision to carve out an exception in UN sanctions against the ruling regime is timely.

All the more so as Afghanistan quickly becomes ground zero for United Nations humanitarian operations worldwide.

At the same time, addressing the underlying political, cultural, and socioeconomic challenges that continue to fuel widespread deprivation, violence, and corruption in Afghanistan requires a strategy and targeted investments in development and peacebuilding too.

Fortunately, these are also areas where the UN maintains a decades-long track record in Afghanistan (including from 1996-2001, the last period of Taliban rule) and elsewhere.

Moreover, the Security Council’s recent request to Secretary-General António Guterres to provide “strategic and operational recommendations” on the future of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), by January 31, 2022, offers an opportunity to adapt the world body to the country’s fast-changing political, security, social, and economic context.

To channel fresh ideas and critical observations in advance of the Secretary-General’s presented proposals to the Security Council on Wednesday, January 26 and subsequent UNAMA mandate review in March, we convened this past October a group of experts and former Special Representatives of the Secretary-General to Afghanistan at our institutes, the Centre for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies in Doha and the Stimson Center in Washington, D.C.

Inspired by this thoughtful, unfiltered exchange, we personally arrived at several, time-sensitive recommendations elaborated upon in our new policy brief A Step-by-Step Roadmap for Action on Afghanistan: What the United Nations and International Community Can and Should Do:

First, the United Nations should aid in negotiating some conditionalities put forward by Western powers. Whilst a step-by-step roadmap for cooperation is needed, vital life-saving humanitarian aid should never be made conditional on the Taliban taking certain actions.

Given the acute differences between the Taliban and the international community, diverse mechanisms are needed for addressing distinct humanitarian and non-humanitarian issues alike. Both sides have made opposing demands that essentially negate one another, while the needs of millions of innocent, vulnerable Afghans continue to grow.

In direct immediate support of malnutrition, urgent health services, and other kinds of emergency, life-saving support detailed in a new Humanitarian Response Plan, donor countries should take careful heed of the UN’s largest-ever humanitarian appeal for a single country, announced on 11 January 2022, requesting more than USD $5 billion this year for Afghanistan.

This follows from the USD 1.2 billion pledged by nearly 100 countries at a United Nations Secretary-General convened ministerial, on 13 September 2021 in Geneva, as well as subsequent additional pledges of humanitarian aid through international organizations, such as the World Food Program and UNDP, by South Korea, France, and Norway.

Second, there is a need to remain focused on the intersections of humanitarian, developmental, and peace challenges, rather than roll-out humanitarian-only models of response in Afghanistan. To advance more integrated approaches that break down the traditional siloes of the international aid system in responding to the Afghan crisis, the humanitarian-development-peace nexus offers a powerful framework.

The United Nations and other actors have implemented Triple Nexus programming in Afghanistan in recent years, including refugee return and reintegration, asset creation, and social safety net programming.

The world body can play a vital role as a convening power and knowledge broker, facilitating local-international and whole-of-society dialogue on how to adapt nexus programming concepts and approaches in the uncharted territories of Afghanistan’s fast evolving and highly challenging operating environment.

As bilateral aid likely recedes among most major donors, the UN could also serve as a chief oversight body and conduit of international assistance through multiple emergency trust funds. In doing so, it will provide de facto international development coordination assistance, with an eye to maintaining for all Afghan citizens the delivery of basic public services in such critical areas as healthcare, education, and power generation.

The world body is also well-placed to support the new Islamic Development Bank humanitarian trust fund and food security program for Afghanistan, announced on December 19, 2021 at a gathering of thirty Organization of Islamic Cooperation foreign ministers and deputy foreign ministers in Islamabad.

Third, durable peace in Afghanistan can only be reached through high-level political will that is best expressed through an empowered mandate and sufficient resources for UNAMA (ideally led by a Muslim diplomat with the gravitas and skills demonstrated by the UN trouble-shooter Lakhdar Brahimi).

For the UN to be truly catalytic, it is vital that it is entrusted with a comprehensive mandate to perform its full suite of well-known and field-tested functions, including in the areas of reconciliation, development coordination, and humanitarian action.

To get beyond the blame game and build trust between the Taliban and other Afghan parties, the world body must be allowed to provide its good offices and other peaceful settlement of dispute tools to resuscitate an intra-Afghan dialogue toward reconciliation and political reform.

At the same time, the Afghan Future Thought Forum, chaired by Fatima Gailani, continues to be the only independent platform that brings together influential and diverse Afghan stakeholders (men and women), including Taliban and former government officials, to produce practical solutions for long-term peace and recovery in Afghanistan.

With the support of the UN, this Afghan owned and led initiative can be leveraged to work toward a more representative governing structure that safeguards, for example, girls and women’s rights, freedom of moment, and against reprisals toward those who previously fought the Taliban.

Finally, the greatest obstacle to functioning relations between the Taliban and international community is the non-recognition of the new ruling regime in Kabul, which requires a medium to long-term vision to resolve. Although the Taliban are publicly seeking international recognition, these efforts are unlikely to bear fruit immediately.

Rather than continually seeking recognition, the Taliban interim administration should instead focus on governing Afghanistan and averting an economic and humanitarian catastrophe. Demonstrating some level of governing competence—as well as a desire to reconcile and share some governing authorities with past political rivals —through concerted action is the best way for the movement to gain slowly widespread international legitimacy and eventual recognition.

To avoid Afghanistan becoming once again an operating base for international terrorist groups or an even greater source of refugees—both vital interests of the international community, including the Western powers—a multi-faceted strategy that also deploys targeted resources beyond solely humanitarian aid is needed urgently.

With thousands of staff dedicated to alleviating human suffering across Afghanistan, coupled with the West’s almost non-existent political leverage with the Taliban regime, the United Nations must resume its central development and peacebuilding roles, in addition to delivering and coordinating immediate life-saving humanitarian aid.

With the backing of major global and regional powers and the cooperation of both Taliban and non-Taliban factions alike, the UN can help to place Afghanistan on a new development and political path toward a more stable country that, over time, improves the prospects for all Afghan citizens.

Sultan Barakat is Director of the Centre for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies in Doha, Qatar and Honorary Professor of Politics at the University of York. He also taught at York University (U.K.). Richard Ponzio is Senior Fellow and Director of the Global Governance, Justice & Security Program at the Stimson Center in Washington, D.C.

The authors wish to thank Muznah Siddiqui for her helpful research assistance for this commentary.

 

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South Asian countries grappling with the erosion of democratic norms, growing authoritarianism, the crackdown on freedom of press, speech and dissent, a report by Human Rights Watch says. Credit: 2017 Paula Bronstein for Human Rights Watch

By Sania Farooqui
New Delhi, Jan 21 2022 (IPS)

As countries across South Asia continue to battle the deadly Covid-19 pandemic, causing serious public health and economic crisis, this region, which is home to almost 2 billion people, is also grappling with the erosion of democratic norms, growing authoritarianism, the crackdown on freedom of press, speech and dissent.

Despite the committed efforts of human rights defenders across South Asia, achieving human rights objectives remains a challenging task. Almost all countries in the region – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka – face a common trend of human rights violations and a culture of impunity.

Afghanistan 

In Afghanistan, the Taliban rule has had a devastating impact on the lives of Afghan women, girls, journalists and human rights defenders. “The crisis for women and girls in Afghanistan is escalating with no end in sight. Taliban policies have rapidly turned many women and girls into virtual prisoners in their homes, depriving the country of one of its most precious resources, the skills and talents of the female half of the populations,” said Heather Barr, associate women’s rights director at Human Rights Watch in this report.

This report states, “the Taliban’s return to power has made members of some ethnic and religious minorities feel more vulnerable to threats even from those not affiliated with the Taliban. Taliban authorities have also used intimidation to extract money, food, and services. Fighting has mostly ended in the country, but people expressed fear of violence and arbitrary arrests by the Taliban and lack of the rule of law and reported increased crime in some areas.”

A group of three dozen Human Rights Council appointed experts in this report said, “waves of measures such as barring women from returning to their jobs, requiring a male relative to accompany them in public spaces, prohibiting women from using public transport on their own, as well as imposing a strict dress code on women and girls. Taken together, these policies constitute a collective punishment of women and girls, grounded in gender-based bias and harmful practices.”

The UN high commissioner for human rights, Michelle Bachelet, has urged the UN security council to hold all perpetrators of human rights violations accountable, “I ask the security council to ensure that the perpetrators of these violations are accountable, I ask all states to use their influence with the Taliban to encourage respect for fundamental human rights. Denial of the fundamental rights of women and girls is massively damaging to the economy and the country as a whole,” Bachelet said.

The Taliban victory propelled Afghanistan “from humanitarian crisis to catastrophe”, with millions of Afghans facing severe food insecurity due to lost income, cash shortages, and rising food costs. Afghan refugees constitute one of the world’s largest refugees population, with more than 2.2 million refugees. “Afghanistan’s displacement crisis is one of the largest and most protracted in UNHCR’s seven-decade history,” says UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi.

Bangladesh

While Bangladesh, despite making economic progress and getting upgraded by the United Nations from the category of least developed country to developing country last November, the country continues to be in the news for enforced disappearances, abductions, torture and extrajudicial killings by its security forces with impunity.

In this letter written by 12 organizations to Under-Secretary-General Jean-Pierre Lacroix, urging the United Nations Department of Peace Operations to ban Bangladesh’s notoriously abusive paramilitary Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) from UN deployment.

As many as 600 people, including opposition leaders, activists, journalists, business people, and others, have been subjected to enforced disappearance since 2009. In this report, Dhaka–based rights organization Odhikar said that “some of the disappeared persons resurfaced in government’s custody after being arrested under the draconian Digital Security Act 2018.”

“Human rights defenders, journalists, and others critical of the government continue to be targeted with surveillance, politically motivated charges and arbitrary detention,” says this report. Earlier in November 2021, the United States slapped sanctions on elite Bangladeshi paramilitary force, Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), stating it threatens US national security interests by undermining the rule of law and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the economic prosperity of the people of Bangladesh. Bangladesh is the only South Asian country other than Afghanistan to receive US sanctions since 1998.

India

In 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government in India was downgraded from a free democracy to a “partially free democracy” by global political rights and liberties US-based nonprofit Freedom House. Following this, a Sweden based V-Dem institute said, India had become an “electoral autocracy”. The country has slid from No. 35 in 2006 to No. 53 today on The Economist’s list.

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) recommended India be designated as a “country of particular concern, or CPC, for engaging in and tolerating systematic, ongoing and egregious religious freedom violations, as defined by the International Religious Freedom Act in its report.

In its World Report 2022, Human Rights Watch said, “Indian authorities intensified their crackdown on activists, journalists, and other critics of the government using politically motivated prosecutions in 2021. “Attacks against religious minorities were carried out with impunity under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Hindu nationalist government.”

Indian authorities have continued to press charges against students, activities, journalists, including counter-terrorism and sedition laws. To undermine rights to privacy and freedom of expression, reports of Pegasus spyware, developed and sold by Israeli company NSO group, were used to target Indian human rights defenders, journalists, and opposition politicians.

The ongoing harassment of journalists, including particularly those reporting from and in Kashmir, including the recent crackdown on Kashmir’s independent press club being shut down, arbitrary detention of journalists, alleged custodial killings, and a broader pattern of systematic infringement of fundamental rights used against the local population,” the report said.

According to this report, calls for genocide have become more common than ever, “where Hindu extremists organized 12 events over 24 months in four states, calling for genocide of Muslims, attacks on Christian minority and insurrection against the government. In this interview, the founding president of Genocide Watch, has warned: “Genocide could very well happen in India.”  

Nepal

In Nepal, lack of effective government leadership, inadequate and unequal access to health care, and a ‘pervasive culture of impunity’ continue to undermine the country’s fundamental human rights. “A lack of effective government leadership in Nepal means that little is done to uphold citizens’ rights, leaving millions to fend for themselves without adequate services such as for health or education, said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director, Human Rights Watch.

“Systemic impunity for human rights abuses extends to ongoing violations, undermining the principles of accountability and the rule of law in post-conflict Nepal. The report states that the authorities routinely fail to investigate or prosecute killings or torture allegedly carried by security forces,” the report states.

In October 2020, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) published 20 years of data, naming 286 people, mostly police officials, military personnel, and former Maoist insurgents, “as suspects in serious crimes, including torture, enforced disappearance and extrajudicial killings”.

Along with this, the situation of women’s and girls’ human rights continues to be alarming in the country. According to this report, Nepal has the highest rate of child marriages in Asia, with 33 percent of girls marrying before 18 years and 8 percent by 15. Reports also indicate there has been an increase in cases of rape in 2021, with widespread impunity for sexual violence.

Patriarchal Citizenship Law in Nepal which does not treat men and women unequally, has been criticized for undermining Nepali women’s identities and agency, subordinating them to the position of second-class citizens – also impacting children.

Pakistan

The Pakistan government, on the other hand, “harassed and at times persecuted human rights defenders, lawyers, and journalists for criticizing government officials and policies,” said this report by Human Rights Watch. Significant human rights issues include freedom of expression, attacks on civil society groups, freedom of religion and belief, forced disappearances by governments and their agents, unlawful or arbitrary killings, extrajudicial killings, torture, arbitrary detentions, terrorism, counter-terrorism and law enforcement abuses.

“Pakistan failed to enact a law criminalizing torture despite Pakistan’s obligation to do so under the Convention against Torture,” the report said.  The country’s regressive blasphemy law provides a pretext for violence against religious minorities, leaving them vulnerable to arbitrary arrests and prosecution.

According to this report by Human Rights Without Frontiers, 1,865 people have been charged with blasphemy laws, with a significant spike in 2020, when 200 cases were registered.

This piece highlights the plight of thousands of Pakistan’s Baloch who security forces have abducted. International human rights law strictly prohibits enforced disappearances, in Pakistan, Prime Minister Imran Khan vowed that a draft law to criminalize enforced disappearances would be “fast-tracked”. A bill about enforced disappearances, which the National Assembly passed, mysteriously went missing after it was sent to the Senate.

The continued attack on journalists and activists for violations of the Electronic Crimes Act, the use of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), an anti-corruption agency to target critics, attacks and well-coordinated campaigns and attacks on women journalists on social media, and reported intimidation of nongovernmental organizations, including harassment and surveillance are all crackdowns which are only getting worse.

Sri Lanka

In Sri Lanka, the government continued to ‘suppress minority communities and harassed activists, and undermined democratic institutions.’ According to Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2022, “President Gotabaya Rajapaksha seems determined to reverse past rights improvements and protect those implicated in serious abuses. While promising reforms and justice to deflate international criticism, his administration has stepped up suppression of minority communities,” Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said.

The report highlights the harassment of security forces towards human rights defenders, journalists, lawyers and the families of victims of past abuses and suppression of peaceful protests. As covid-19 cases surged in the country, military-controlled response to the pandemic “led to serious right violations”.

A major concern from the minority Muslim and Christian communities in Sri Lanka was the government’s order not to allow the bodies of Covid victims to be buried. According to this report, “several bodies were forcibly cremated, despite experts saying that bodies could be buried with proper safety measures.” This order, which rights activists said was intended to target minorities and did not respect religions, after much criticism was reversed.

A leading British religious freedom advocacy group, CSW, in its report titled, “A Nation Divided: The state of freedom of religious or belief in Sri Lanka,” said the Muslim community experiences “severe” religious freedom violations. A key factor in the violations is the perception by Sinhalese-Buddhist nationalists that Muslims are a threat to both Buddhism and the Sinhalese. The report also noted attempts to “reduce the visibility of Islam through the destruction of mosques and restrictive stances on religious clothing.

 

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The peacekeepers of the UN’s Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) on patrol in Aguelhok, Mali. Credit: MINUSMA/ Harandane Dicko

A decade after civil conflict erupted in Mali, hopes for an early resolution to insurgency and strife have not materialized, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for the country, El-Ghassim Wane, told the Security Council January 11 2022.

By Adam Dicko
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 21 2022 (IPS)

Last week, I was delighted to speak to the United Nations Security Council. In the ten years that my country has been experiencing conflict, violence, and instability, dozens of conferences and other international summits have been held without ever really making room for those who are mobilized on a daily basis for more social justice, the defense of human rights and achieving Malian peace.

My country – and the Sahel as a whole – are rich with dynamic and innovative civil societies and youth. After 10 years of failed strategies to resolve the Sahelian crises, it is time for a change in strategy, a more humble approach, and the development of common solutions in which the local populations feel truly reflected.

I am speaking out to make that a reality, in the name of Anta, a young girl from the center of Mali who was the first victim of the security crisis, forced to flee her village to find refuge in an IDP camp, and who witnessed the killing of her parents by terrorist groups.

And in the name of Amadou, a young man from the south who is seeking economic opportunities, who is barely out of his teens, and who has to leave his homeland and venture out to sea, risking his own life to seek a better life. I speak on behalf of all those young Malians who aspire for a better tomorrow.

Two years of fighting Covid-19, there is another virus which has been spreading in Mali and the Sahel and whose many variants are dangerously feeding the crises and instability that have brought us together today: it is the virus of social, economic, political, and environmental inequality.

This virus has triggered glaring disparities, particularly in access to essential services. In Mali alone, just 2-3% of the pastoralist nomadic children attend school and healthy life expectancy is just 50 years. This virus robs millions of young Malians of happiness and forces most of them to live in poverty.

Adam Dicko. Credit: Sylvain Cherkaoui/Oxfam

It mutates and adapts itself by profiting from a system corrupted by bad political governance, lack of transparency, and a lack of democracy, which means that many of my fellow Malians do not feel part of a society that, at best, ignores them and at worst, excludes them.

This inequality virus is insidious. When power and wealth are monopolized by a small minority, trust in the very system that allows this to happen is broken.

The deterioration of the Malian crisis has laid bare the inadequacy of the current military response, which has been unable to overcome or even contain the threat. Young people are turning against the state – the most fragile joining extremist groups for financial and security reasons.

Young Malians are watching the media in bewilderment as they see global leaders feign support for Mali, while acting in their own best interest, just like what happened in Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, to name a few.

Mali must not become a new site of clashes between global powers – and the UN Security Council can ensure this. Mali deserves better than to become a place for settling political scores.

Unfortunately, Mali is now facing the consequences of poor political and economic governance which is feeding into despair, hunger, and poverty, and young people are the main victims. This crucial governance issue has been downplayed for too long by those who claim to be trying to solve the Sahelian crises. Yet it is at the core of the challenges we face in Mali.

Currently, there has been some talk of bringing back the state to areas where it has been absent for years and which have been taken over by so-called jihadist groups. But we never question the type of state we are talking about reinstating. Is it really a solution to bring back a state which is often perceived by young people as indifferent to their fate, or even a predator? Mali is suffering from a broken social contract. Our challenge is not only to bring back the state, but to transform the state and its public actions so that they benefit all Malians.

Our problems are rooted in this pyramid of inequalities. Whilst inequality is like a virus that spreads, mutates, and kills, there are vaccines to combat this epidemic.

Fighting inequality is well within our reach. This is about massive reinvestment in high-quality social policies that benefit everyone.

MINUSMA has an important role to play in this respect, provided that it integrates local conflict management solutions and local communities. It is time to stop with “top-down” decisions; budgets voted on in New York must no longer determine the needs on the ground.

Given the prevailing political situation in my country, I repeat my call for the Security Council to lead in finding rapid solutions to the political situation between the Malian Government and ECOWAS for the benefit of citizens, especially the young people, whose future looks increasingly bleak. The Malian population is the first victim of the sanctions and yet they have already suffered enough.

Young people are already committed to renewing mindsets and behaviors that ensure true hope and renewal can be reborn in our country.

Adam DICKO is the Executive Director of AJCAD, Association des Jeunes pour la Citoyenneté Active et la Démocratie, an organization active throughout Mali to promote social justice and democratic values.

 

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Delivery of syringes for the vaccination campaign in El Salvador. Latin American countries have made steady progress in immunizing their populations, partly through direct negotiations between their governments and suppliers and partly through international cooperation. CREDIT: PAHO

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Jan 20 2022 (IPS)

The Covax initiative, the hope of the countries of the developing South to immunize their populations against COVID-19, only met half of its goals in 2021. And as 2022 begins, and the omicron variant of the virus is spreading fast, the scheme still depends on the decisions of pharmaceutical companies and the goodwill of donor governments.

José Manuel Durão Barroso, president of the Gavi Vaccine Alliance, one of the entities leading the Covax initiative, warned at the outset that “as long as a large part of the world’s population is unvaccinated, variants will continue to emerge and the pandemic will drag on.”

“We will only prevent variants from emerging if we are able to protect the entire world population, not just the rich areas,” added Durão Barroso, former prime minister of Portugal (2002-2004) and former president of the European Commission (2004-2014), in an email interview with IPS.

Covax, a global access fund for COVID-19 vaccines established in April 2020 as an alliance of countries, multilateral organizations and private foundations, had brought together 184 countries by October that year and set out to procure and distribute hundreds of millions of vaccines against the disease equitably in countries of the developing South.

Under the scheme, one group of countries self-funds and pays for the vaccines sent to it by Covax, while another, the poorest, are to receive the immunizations free of charge.

Shortly after the first vaccines were applied in industrialized countries in late 2020, an encouraging first shipment of 600,000 doses of the British Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine arrived at the international airport in Accra, Ghana, the first country to benefit from the Covax mechanism, on Feb. 24, 2021.

The initiative was launched to distribute and apply, in more than a hundred countries, two billion doses throughout 2021, to ensure equitable immunization of 40 percent of the world’s population, before reaching 70 percent in the first half of 2022 – figures aimed at curbing the pandemic"As long as a large part of the world's population is unvaccinated, variants will continue to emerge and the pandemic will drag on. We will only prevent variants from emerging if we are able to protect the entire world population, not just the rich areas." -- José Manuel Durão Barroso

But disaster lurked around the corner. India was hit by a sudden, devastating wave of COVID-19 infections, and the overcrowded country stopped exporting vaccines. And the Serum Institute of India (SII), the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, was to be the source of the vaccines for the Gavi-Covax mechanism.

While high-income countries such as the United States, Canada, European nations and Israel purchased large quantities of vaccines from pharmaceutical transnationals, sometimes in excess of their populations, it was logical for Covax to seek supplies from India’s SII, where doses were also cheaper.

A dose prepared by the SII could cost three dollars, compared to 50 or 100 percent more in a Western pharmaceutical company.

Thus, while its recipients in the South awaited vaccines under great pressure from their local populations, Covax had to announce in April and May that there would be delays, which occurred in the following months, placing many countries in an uncertain and impotent wait while the virus variants raged.

By early January 2022, the number of infected cases exceeded 300 million worldwide and deaths surpassed 5.5 million, with two populous countries in the South, India and Brazil, following the worst-hit country in absolute numbers: the United States.

Instead of two billion doses, Covax distributed less than half of that – 900 million – throughout 2021. And as of November 2021 it had delivered less than 600 million doses, although it reached 900 million thanks to donations of 310 million doses in December.

What went wrong?

Durão Barroso explained that “the unfortunate epidemiological situation in India, combined with the fact that only a few vaccines had received the WHO emergency use listing and were available for global supply at that time, significantly delayed the launch of Covax.”

This situation “together with export restrictions, the hoarding of vaccines by many richer countries, and manufacturers who do not prioritize vaccine equity, meant that we could not access as many doses as we expected in the second and third quarters of the year,” added the head of Gavi.

When the race against the clock for vaccines began, “many governments in high-income countries made reference to global solidarity,” so that all nations would have access to immunizations, recalled Kate Elder, senior vaccines policy advisor at the humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

“Pharmaceutical companies said they would do their part to ensure that the mistakes of the past were not repeated and that it was not just high-income countries that would have access to medical innovations,” Elder said in her response to a list of questions from IPS.

“However, this did not happen and calls to move away from the business-as-usual approach were ignored. High-income countries started buying up COVID-19 vaccine doses even before they were available,” she said.

The corporate behavior contradicted earlier assertions that antiviral vaccines should be global public goods, and pharmaceutical corporations, as in other circumstances in the past, prioritized sales to the highest bidder and sought primarily their own financial gain, according to MSF.

Donations arrive

The result of the first few months was that Covax only delivered one million doses in February 2021, 23 million in March, 15 million in April, and 30 million in May. From early on it was clear that reaching the goal of two billion doses in 10 months was impossible.

Confidence in vaccine delivery mechanisms, and in immunization itself, eroded, for example in Gambia, Namibia or Nigeria in Africa, or in Afghanistan and Pakistan in Asia. Anxiety also escalated because, having received the first dose of a vaccine, people demanded the second even more loudly

The first shipment of vaccines by Covax to a developing country arrived at the international airport in Accra, Ghana on Feb. 24, 2021. CREDIT: Krishnan/Covax

The countries of the developing South then began or intensified their search for vaccines outside of Covax. And, in parallel, some made progress in the production of their own vaccines, as was the case of Saudi Arabia, India and Singapore in Asia, Egypt in Africa and Argentina, Brazil, Cuba and Mexico in Latin America.

In the second half of 2021, donations began to appear, like a lifeline. Rich countries, having vaccinated large segments of their population and with vaccines or supplies such as syringes available, began to donate, often under the Covax umbrella, millions of doses to countries in the developing South.

Donor countries have so far offered Covax 591 million doses to be delivered in 2021 and the first half of 2022, and the scheme has sent 259 million doses to recipient countries, which partially explains the acceleration of deliveries in November (155 million) and December (310 million) 2021.

The main donors to Covax have been the United States (145 million doses), a group of 16 European Union members (81 million), the United Kingdom (11.5 million) and Canada and Japan (8.4 million doses each).

However, in some cases the doses arrived very close to their expiration date – or with a shortage of syringes or freezers to preserve them, as in Somalia and East Timor – forcing them to be discarded or sometimes sent back, as happened in the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan.

The road ahead

Covax, in Elder’s view, was “naively ambitious,” and its success “was tied to unsound assumptions. Foreseeable challenges were not factored into the design of the mechanism and some poor policy decisions were made.”

“From its design to its governance and accountability mechanisms, the exclusion of meaningful participation of key stakeholders has undermined Covax’s ability to succeed,” the MSF vaccines policy expert argued.

The hoarding of vaccines and medicines by high-income countries has already happened on other occasions, such as during the HIV/AIDS epidemic or with regard to access to vaccines against pneumococcus, human papillomavirus or rotavirus.

For Elder, “if we want to learn from this experience to improve access to vaccines, the first step is to make a radical change. This basically means making the technology and innovation of medical tools public to guarantee an equitable model and decentralize production.

“Technology born of public investment cannot be owned by corporations, it must be a global public good,” she said.

In addition, “it is necessary to strengthen multilateral organizations and regional platforms, since each region knows best what its needs are, instead of public-private alliances based on the goodwill of pharmaceutical companies, which, at the end of the day, we already know what their interests are going to be.”

Durão Barroso said that Covax “has reached a point where it can now meet the demand of the countries it serves. However, there is a real risk that the supply disruption will continue in 2022.”

So “we have asked manufacturers to be more transparent about when they will make doses available, and from donor governments we have asked for larger and more predictable donations. This is finally happening,” added the head of Gavi.

Durão Barroso stressed that in the face of the spread of different variants “it is absolutely critical that we avoid a scenario of vaccine nationalism 2.0, where rich countries immobilize the supply of new vaccines.

“We depend on countries’ commitment to multilateralism and manufacturers’ commitment to transparency to ensure that we don’t fall behind again,” he stated.

Yohei Sasakawa, WHO Goodwill Ambassador for Leprosy Elimination and Chairperson of the Nippon Foundation, thanks participants at a webinar ‘Raising Awareness about Leprosy, Role of Health Professionals at the Grassroots Level’ organized by the Sasakawa Leprosy Initiative. He is with other participants from Japan, India and Nepal in the “Don’t Forget Leprosy” campaign event.

By Joyce Chimbi
Nairobi, Kenya, Jan 20 2022 (IPS)

The human rights of people affected by leprosy are central to Yohei Sasakawa’s concept of a leprosy-free world.

Sasakawa, the WHO Goodwill Ambassador for Leprosy Elimination and Chairman of the Nippon Foundation, was speaking at a webinar ‘Raising Awareness about Leprosy, Role of Health Professionals at the Grassroots Level’ organized by the Sasakawa Leprosy Initiative.

A leprosy-free world was one where “patients and those cured of leprosy live free of discrimination and, people around them will be free of the misunderstanding, ignorance and fear that perpetuate discrimination”, he told the webinar.

Sasakawa Leprosy Initiative is a strategic alliance between WHO Goodwill Ambassador for Leprosy Elimination, the Nippon Foundation and Sasakawa Health Foundation for achieving a world without leprosy and problems related to the disease. The initiative spearheaded a campaign, “Don’t Forget Leprosy”, to raise awareness about the condition in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.

The WHO Goodwill Ambassador envisions a post-COVID world where those affected by leprosy will be liberated from such stigma and discrimination in keeping with human rights.

Sasakawa says this world is now at risk of delaying leprosy elimination due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as there was a 37 percent drop in reported new cases and leprosy programs in many countries have stalled or scaled back.

Participants heard about the role of health professionals in combating leprosy, recognition of this role and the successes and challenges faced in addressing leprosy during the ongoing health pandemic.

Their role, Sasakawa said, was a central pillar to the vision of a leprosy free world as it helps reduce transmission and disability.

An estimated three to four million people live with some form of disability caused by leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease.

“The ‘Don’t Forget Leprosy’ is a global campaign because our voices alone are not enough. Stopping leprosy requires (the involvement of) all of us, from India and Nepal to all other countries around the world,” he said.

Dr Rashmi Shukla outlined efforts in India to identify and treat patients with leprosy. He was speaking at a webinar ‘Raising Awareness about Leprosy, Role of Health Professionals at the Grassroots Level’ organized by the Sasakawa Leprosy Initiative. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

Dinesh Basnet, Central President of the International Association for Integration, Dignity and Economic Advancement (IDEA) in Nepal, said he was happy to see progress in recent years.

“More so Nepal’s efforts to track and eliminate leprosy. Even during the pandemic, detection and treatment interventions were uninterrupted, and this has been possible due to government commitment and unrelenting efforts of health professionals,” said Basnet.

“People affected by leprosy were not forgotten as communication continued through WhatsApp groups, and this was critical during the lockdown.”

Dr Indra Napit, a senior Orthopedic Surgeon at Anandaban Hospital, Nepal, spoke about innovative technology in the trial of Autologous Blood products to promote ulcer healing in Leprosy. He added that a new drug was on trial to manage reactions to this form of treatment at this leprosy mission.

In a video message, Birodh Khatiwada, Nepal’s Minister of Health and Population, spoke of Nepal’s undisrupted program to address leprosy, including the continued supply of leprosy medication despite the pandemic.

He says Nepal has already prepared the National Leprosy Roadmap, 2021-2030, National Leprosy Strategy 2021-2025, in line with the Global Leprosy Strategy, Neglected Tropical Diseases Roadmap and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Sasakawa emphasized that it was indeed the ultimate goal for India and other affected countries worldwide to reach zero leprosy cases by 2030.

Despite challenges in the fight to eliminate leprosy, a ray of hope shines through, with Anju Sharma sharing good practices in case finding in India amid the ongoing health pandemic.

Sharma is an accredited Social Health Activist and is considered a driving force behind India’s public health system and an essential link between the community and the public health system.

“Screening for leprosy during the pandemic is much more difficult. As COVID-19 cases increase, so does my responsibilities because I have to strictly follow COVID-19 protocols, and this takes a lot of time,” Sharma explained.

“Due to the pandemic, people are hesitant about getting screened. But I reassure them that protocols will be observed and remind them that failure to detect and treat leprosy can lead to disability.”

Dr Venkata Ranganadha Rao Pemmaraju, acting team leader, WHO Global Leprosy Programme, emphasized that discussing the role of health workers was critical, and hearing from those in the frontlines helps efforts to eliminate the pandemic move forward.

WHO, he said, subscribes to the Don’t Forget Leprosy campaign. He lauded ongoing efforts to sustain counselling for those affected by leprosy and those who tracked and managed Nepal-India cross border leprosy cases despite challenges COVID-19 protocols like restrictions on movement and lockdowns.

Dinesh Basnet, a person affected by leprosy thanked health care workers and others for their efforts in eliminating the disease. He was talking at a webinar ‘Raising Awareness about Leprosy, Role of Health Professionals at the Grassroots Level’ organized by the Sasakawa Leprosy Initiative. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

Similarly, Dr Rabindra Baskota, the Leprosy Control and Disability Management Section director in Nepal’s Ministry of Health and Population, confirmed that health workers had been relentless to find new cases, raising awareness on leprosy and treating patients despite ongoing challenges.

“Still, there is a need to train community health workers to detect new cases and manage reactions to leprosy treatment even as older and more experienced health workers retire,” he said.

Dr Anil Kumar, the deputy director-general (Leprosy) in India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, who spoke about good practices in combating leprosy said that a leprosy-free India was not very far off.

Despite a notable decline in screening and detecting cases due to COVID-19, he said critical interventions were nonetheless rolled out, and that leprosy-related services continued at the grassroots level.

“Migrant labourers were screened for leprosy at point of return to home districts and patients on treatment tracked. Treatment defaulters were cross notified based on the address in treatment record,” Kumar said.

“A WhatsApp group titled Leprosy Action Group was created for cross notification, and members included state leprosy officers and partners. Supportive supervision and monitoring up to sub-district level using virtual platforms continues.”

Executive Director of the Sasakawa Health Foundation, Dr Takahiro Nanri, moderated a panel discussion that included a session to further shed light on additional support needed to achieve leprosy elimination milestones.

Sasakawa suggested that health workers’ training included human rights, and the panel lauded health workers for their passionate and proactive steps to eliminate the disease.

 

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The organization “Mujeres con Capacidad de Soñar a Colores” during one of their awareness-raising performances. Credit: Diana Alvarado (@alvaradodii) and Mujeres con Capacidad de Soñar a Colores , UNDP

By Peride Blind
GUATEMALA CITY, Jan 20 2022 (IPS)

“Persons with disabilities are capable and equal. It is time the world understands that,” says Antonio Palma, a UN Volunteer at the Resident Coordinator’s Office in Guatemala. Antonio, who has a visual impairment, expresses what many other persons with disabilities feel. Ignored, mistreated, misunderstood, underestimated, condescended to.

People with disabilities are diverse, and they experience exclusion and marginalization in different ways and to different degrees.

About 1 in 10 Guatemalans has a disability. That’s one out of every ten neighbours, friends, relatives, co-workers, passers-by, or distant strangers.

You might think that ten per cent of the population would get some recognition. But the country has little data on persons with disabilities, making them less visible in public policy and often left with little or no access to basic services in health, education, work, among other areas.

Some people might think that providing such services is a charitable gesture. What that perspective ignores is that persons with disabilities are people, and as such they have human rights.

Fulfilling the human rights of persons with disabilities requires certain steps so that they can participate and be fully included in society.

The UN Country Team (UNCT) in Guatemala recognizes this basic principle. We are a proud pioneer of the Disability Inclusion Strategy of the Secretary General and a two-time implementer of the United Nations Partnership on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Indigenous Guatemalan woman with physical disability. Credit: Huayra Bello (@huaybello) and Mujeres con Capacidad de Soñar a Colores , UNDP

To advance our work in this area, we at the UNCT in Guatemala recently conducted an in-depth analysis of disability inclusion in the country. Through interviews, focus groups, and surveys, we identified some concrete gaps and challenges, for example in terms of the legal and public administration system. Our ultimate goal: end exclusion and leave no one behind.

Here’s what we found, and what we’re doing about it.

• DATA: Persons with disabilities are not consistently included and counted in mainstream data collection. This hampers access to important information about the quality and access of persons with disabilities to key services, thus leading them to be further excluded from already precarious social protection systems for example. To help correct this situation, the UNCT in Guatemala will, in the next two years, will support measures to create a national database of persons with disabilities and how mainstream data is gathered and utilized.

• RESOURCES: The National Council for the Attention of Persons with Disabilities (CONADI) has a mandate to implement the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. But their budget is very limited so the UNCT provides additional training to boost the capacity of organizations of persons with disabilities to help ensure they can support CONADI and lead the way on inclusion.

• PRACTICES: The more that the many forms of exclusion and discrimination are rooted out, the more room is made for the positive inclusion of persons with disabilities. With this aim, the team in Guatemala supported the creation of the first Consultative Council of Organizations of Persons with Disabilities bringing the urban and the rural together, with a gender focus. The Council, once operationalized in 2022, will vet all projects and programmes of the UN System in Guatemala to ensure inclusion and accessibility.

• COMMUNICATIONS: Noting the importance of persons with disabilities advocating for their rights, the UN Team in Guatemala launched a fifteen-day communications campaign #YoMeSumo prior to the International Day of Persons with Disabilities 2021. Each day of the campaign features the story of a Guatemalan with disability and how they are advocating for their rights. See all the videos on our YouTube channel.

The UN Team in Guatemala believes in leading by example. Having recently signed our first UNCT-wide non-discrimination declaration, all 22 members now encourage persons with disabilities to apply in their job vacancy announcements and have adopted the practice of hiring personnel with disabilities.

In 2021, the UN Team provided additional training on disability inclusion to staff to create a more inclusive and welcoming environment. To this end, the UN Guatemala carried out a review of employment practices and office accessibility, and adopted a Manual on Accessible Communication.

In all these efforts, the UN Team is fostering collaboration between the UN, government, and persons and organizations of persons with disabilities.

Antonio Palma, the UN Volunteer, has long dreamed of working at the world’s most influential human rights organization. He is excited to help shift perceptions about persons with disabilities in Guatemala from within the UN by using strategic and inclusive communication.

Working together, we may increase inclusion and unity. Antonio Palma offers his vision for building unity: “All Guatemalans are one, regardless of any differences.”

Adds the UN Resident Coordinator in Guatemala, José Miguel Barreto: “COVID-19 has taught us yet again that we all need one another. The world is more beautiful, more secure, and more just when everyone is included, including persons with disabilities. Each one of us can do something to make that happen.”

Source: UNDP

Peride Blind is Strategic Planning officer/RCO Team Leader, UNCT in Guatemala. The article was written with editorial support from Paul VanDeCarr, Development Coordination Office. To learn more about the work of the UNCT in Guatemala, visit: https://guatemala.un.org/.

 

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A wind farm in Curacao. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By External Source
Jan 19 2022 (IPS)

Not for the first time, global energy markets are in turmoil. Internationally traded gas prices more than quadrupled in 2021. In their wake, many energy suppliers have gone bust and household bills across Europe are set to soar. Energy prices are driving up the cost of living and inflation, but this is also a moment to realise the old saying: “never waste a good crisis”.

Some of the causes of sky-high energy bills are unavoidable – there is little that most governments can do about the wholesale price of gas itself. Fossil fuel companies make huge investments that take years to mature, breeding periods of moderate prices followed by supply squeezes when prices rocket. Gas prices softened over the previous decade and the arrival of the pandemic in 2020 depressed demand.

The design of electricity systems has failed to catch up with the revolution in renewable energy. Competitive electricity markets, established in many countries to try and minimise costs, are actually suffering the greatest price rises

Regions without domestic gas supplies or which have depleted most of their gas reserves in recent decades get a lot of their gas by importing it. European periphery countries, including the UK and many parts of the Mediterranean, assumed they could rely on global supplies of liquefied natural gas.

But tankers from the big gas producers such as Qatar can turn to Europe or Asia depending on who pays the highest price. Now there is a scramble, and Asian demand dominates.

The knock-on effect to energy bills is amplified in the UK and other countries in Europe where electricity is organised through wholesale markets (in which generators bid to operate if the price is right) and in which most homes rely on gas for heating.

Average home energy bills in the UK, which rose to over £1,200 (US$1,630) in 2021, are predicted to shoot up by around 50% in 2022. Up to half of the rise will come not from the gas you burn, but from the impact of gas on electricity prices.

So why is a gas price crunch being felt just as strongly in electricity bills? After all, gas generates less than half of electricity – under 40% in the UK and only about 20% across the EU.

Renewables generate over a quarter of UK power, nuclear and imports another quarter. The cost of generating power from wind and solar has tumbled over the past decade globally, falling by over 40% for onshore wind and by far more for solar and offshore wind.

The last fixed-price government contracts offered for offshore wind energy in Britain – hardly the cheapest of renewables – were under 5p per kilowatt hour (kWh). That’s less than a quarter of the typical domestic tariff (what most people pay for electricity at home) that consumers are set to face in 2022. Households are paying for their electricity several times what it now costs to generate and transmit it from the cleanest energy sources at scale.

The design of electricity systems has failed to catch up with the revolution in renewable energy. Competitive electricity markets, established in many countries to try and minimise costs, are actually suffering the greatest price rises. This is not because governments elsewhere use taxes to subsidise electricity (though some do), but because in wholesale electricity markets, the most expensive generator sets the price.

Since renewables and nuclear will always run when they can, it is fossil fuels – and at present, unequivocally gas, plus the cost of taxes on CO₂ pollution – which set the price almost all the time, because some gas plants are needed most of the time, and they won’t operate unless the electricity price is high enough to cover their operating cost. It’s a bit like having to pay the peak-period price for every train journey you take.

If renewables are now so much cheaper, why can’t consumers buy electricity directly from them and avoid paying the gas and carbon costs?

 

A new golden age

Energy markets aren’t designed to cope efficiently with sources like renewables which cost a lot to build but far less than fossil fuels to run. Governments offer long-term, fixed-price contracts to generators for their output of renewable energy. This has been the biggest driver of investment, while competitive auctions of these contracts, to companies keen to build renewables, have slashed building costs the most.

In contrast, households and other small consumers can rarely buy fixed-price contracts more than a year or two ahead, given the uncertainties in wholesale prices along with governments encouraging competitive switching between suppliers.

The electricity generated from renewables contracts is fed into the rest of the system, which balances the variable output from renewables by generating more or less from conventional sources.

That adds about around 1p per kWh to the cost of renewable electricity in the UK and Europe. Even accounting for this, the gap between cheap renewables and expensive final electricity is becoming unconscionable.

A decade ago, many energy experts projected a “golden age of gas”. Countries are likely to continue burning gas for some years. But with the drive to cut emissions and the advent of cheap renewables, electricity is likely to dominate the energy system in future, powering heat pumps, electric vehicles and more.

This golden age of electricity cannot arrive as long as the price of electricity is decided by fossil fuels and their carbon costs.

What would electricity markets appropriate for renewable energy look like? In research I led with colleagues on electricity prices, we proposed a green power pool which would aggregate long-term contracts with renewable energy generators and sell the power on to consumers. The price would mainly be set by the actual investment costs of generators, rather than gas-driven wholesale markets.

When there isn’t enough renewable power being generated or stored – like on cold and calm winter days – the green power pool would buy electricity from the wholesale market for limited periods and quantities.

To minimise those costs (and emissions), contracts could give discounts to customers who can use electricity outside of peak times, or those with two-way electric vehicle connections who can sell power back to the grid.

It won’t happen overnight. It won’t cut bills tomorrow. But new electricity needs a new market – one which cuts energy bills at the same time as decarbonising the energy system.

Michael Grubb, Professor of Energy and Climate Change, UCL

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

A woman hides her face with the poster protesting forced conversions during the Aurat March (Women's March) in 2021. Experts say ‘forced conversions’, usually of underage girls, involve abduction, rape, human trafficking and other serious offences. Activists and experts have called improved legislation. Credit: Aurat March Karachi

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Jan 19 2022 (IPS)

Two years after Michelle, 15, was kidnapped, sold, forced to convert to Islam and married to a stranger, relatives still ostracise her.

“My aunts and uncles have left us, and my two older brothers, till a few months ago, were not even talking to me,” said Michelle, talking to IPS over the phone from Faisalabad, in the Punjab province of Pakistan. They believe she has brought dishonour to them.

Her captors and even the cleric who officiated the marriage are free despite committing multiple offences, including abduction, trafficking and rape.

“There are several laws that can be invoked for tackling offences, such as kidnapping and abductions,” lamented Peter Jacob, executive director of the Center for Social Justice (CSJ), a research and advocacy organisation. “But the prosecution has failed to do so.”

Most of the young, female victims belong to the Christian (in Punjab) and Hindu (in Sindh) minorities and followed the same pattern.

Experts and activists demand legislation to prevent ‘forced conversions’ that are often associated with human trafficking, abduction and rape. The white poster on the left says: ‘Forced conversion unacceptable’. The blue poster says: ‘Underage marriage is a crime’. Credit: NCJP.

“This year, at least 62 such cases have been reported,” he told IPS over the phone from the eastern city of Lahore, in the Punjab province.

In the predominantly Muslim nation of 220 million people, the Christians and Hindus in Pakistan are estimated to be 1.27% and 2.14%, respectively, according to the 2017 census.

Dr Ramesh Kumar Vankwani, a member of the national assembly from the ruling Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, also the patron-in-chief of the Pakistan Hindu Council, told IPS “hundreds of cases” remain unreported.

Rukhsana Khokhar, senior project manager at the Karachi-based non-profit, Legal Aid Society, agreed with Vankwani.

“The victim’s family is hesitant to approach the police because of their harsh attitude,” she said.

“The affected family is diffident to report the crime because of the repercussions from the powerful and influential another side.”

Moreover, Khokhar said, the road to justice was tedious and complicated, but it was also expensive and often beyond their means.

In a majority of the cases, the adolescent girls from Hindu communities are uneducated, belong to poor families and are “surrounded by misogyny and patriarchy,” she said.

However, the reason for the conversion of educated Hindu girls belonging to well-off families was different. They want to seek escape from being forced into marrying uneducated Hindu men from their community. The only way out is for them is to convert to Islam.

Khokhar, who has been studying this issue for over a decade, believed that sensitisation was one way of overcoming the issue since societal prejudices remained the most significant barrier. This should include the clerics who officiate the nikah (the ceremony where the couple is legally wed under Islamic law), the investigating officers working on such cases and the district administration.

According to Vankwani, many parliamentarians concede the issue persists, but it is not as rampant as to be of concern.

“I say, even if it’s just one person who is forcibly converted, it becomes our responsibility to stop this practise through legislation,” he says.

Over the years, there have been several attempts to regulate conversions through legislative means without success.

In 2019, the Sindh assembly, for the second time, rejected a bill criminalising forced religious conversions. The first attempt was in 2016.

Safina Javed, Vice President Pakistan Minority Rights Commission, Sindh chapter, holding a poster. Credit: Safina Javed

In 2020, the Standing Committee on Religious Affairs and Interfaith Harmony had rejected the Protection of Rights of Minorities Bill, 2020, which recommended an age limit of 18 years for conversion.

The parliamentary committee shot down a draft of yet another anti-forced conversion bill opposed earlier in the year by the ministry of religious affairs even before it could be tabled in the national assembly.

The excuse made by the minister for religious affairs, Noorul Haq Qadri, was the “unfavourable” environment.

According to political and integrity risk analyst Huma Yusuf, the current “social, religious and political environment” was too oppressive in a Talibanized Pakistan for the law to find favour from any quarter.

“A key problem is that the term ‘forced conversion’ glosses over what’s really at stake. Reportedly, some 1,000 girls from religious minorities, primarily Hindus, are forced to convert each year,” Yusuf says.

“These conversions can involve abduction, rape, violence, human trafficking and extortion. They also enrich clerics who receive payments for solemnising such marriages, corrupt police officials who take bribes instead of investigating, and magistrates who look the other way. By rejecting the bill, our lawmakers are condoning these other activities. How does this serve Islam?”

The reasons for rejecting the most recent bill by the ministry and the parliamentary committee were the minimum age (set to be 18 years) kept for converting to another religion, a 90-day contemplation period before conversion and testifying before a judge.

The bill stated that the “age will be ascertained based on the child’s birth certificate, school enrolment certificate, or the official database. In the absence of all, the person’s age may be determined through a medical examination”.

“There are about 20 laws that place some or the other restrictions on a person below 18 years of age,” pointed out Jacob, including getting a driver’s license, voting or seeking employment.

“These are reasonable restrictions and enhance the scope of freedoms and protect the rights in those specific areas.”

He also found the 90-day contemplation period logical for a “matter that is individually and socially important and should not be dealt with casually or hastily”.

Further, says Jacob, testifying before a judge eliminates the possibility of covering the crime of kidnapping by marriage and will ensure that conversion is not under any duress, deceit, threat or fraudulent misrepresentation.

Terming the bill a “dam” that was drafted to “restrain the spread of Islam,” Pir Abdul Khaliq, 66, who heads the century-old madressa Ahya Darul Uloom, in Dharki, in Sindh province’s Ghotki district, was happy it was “rejected”.

This madressa (a “hotbed” for alleged conversions), next to the shrine of Khanqah-i-Aalia Qadria Bharchundi Sharif, has a chain of nearly 200 seminaries spread across Sindh (140), Punjab (30) and almost two dozen in Balochistan.

Since he took over the reins of the seminary from his father 50 years ago, he says, he has converted scores of men and women of their “free will”. Talking to IPS over the phone from Dharki, he conceded he was among those who had threatened the ministry that his followers would “come on the streets and hold protests” if the bill was passed.

Having converted entire families, “from 80-year-olds to some as young as eight”, he says no one ever objected to that, so why the need for a law.

“If an underage child converts alongside the parents or guardians, there is no objection,” responded Khokhar. The objection raised was of the conversion of single adolescents like Michelle.

“Why are they never elderly women, why do they have to flee to another city to convert and why are the parents not allowed to meet them?” she asked.

“There is no age to conversion,” responded Khaliq, but insisted he “respected the age of marriage”, which is 18 in Sindh.

However, many underage Hindu girls from Sindh are taken to Punjab, where the legal age of marriage is 16, says Khokhar. She believes it would help halt forced conversion if the age restriction of 18 years for conversion and marriage was “enforced uniformly” throughout the country.

In 2019, two Hindu sisters, Raveena and Reena, made headlines by going to the court seeking protection from their family, saying they had wilfully accepted Islam. The family insisted they were abducted.

The sisters were converted before their marriage in Sindh (where the age for marriage is 18) but married in Punjab (where the age for marriage is 16).

However, the court allowed the sisters to go to their husbands but sent a five-member fact-finding team to ascertain this was not a forced conversion.

The report recommended religious conversion be carried out through a “proper process and be formalised or registered in a court of law”.

At times, says Khaliq, girls eloped and converted to Islam because they had fallen in love with Muslim men and “not for the love of religion”.

In that case, says the cleric, the woman is given “a day or two to think over her decision”. But if she still insists on conversion, he performs the ceremony. “Marriage between a Muslim and Hindu is not permissible in Islam,” he says, and so she converts.

He also pointed out that there are times the woman realises she has made a wrong judgement, but after having fled her parent’s home, the chances of her being accepted by her family are very slim on her return.

“She has little recourse but to follow the original plan of converting to Islam”.

However, he reiterated, his seminary would not perform the nikah if the girl was underage.

“We will convert her only, and then she can go back to her parents till she attains the age of marriage. If her family won’t accept her new religion, and which happens in most cases, we provide her shelter, till she attains the legal age of marriage,” says Khaliq.

Responding to Khokhar’s query of moving to another city to convert, Khaliq explains: “Once the girl elopes with the man and the parents go to the police, many forces come into play, including the feudal lord of the area and the police. Fearful of their life, their first thought is to find a safe place.”

If it were passed, the bill would have effectively addressed this issue by restricting the person applying for a conversion certificate to get it issued from the judge of the area where the non-Muslim resided, says Jacob.

He, however, refuses to let the rejection dampen his spirit. “We have no other option but to fight taking the legal route to ensure a fixed process for conversion is followed,” says Jacob.

Along with Dr Vankwani, he is working with the Council of Islamic Ideology (tasked with giving legal advice on Islamic issues to the government and the parliament) to develop a draft bill that would be acceptable to all faiths.

This article is part of a series of features from across the globe on human trafficking. IPS coverage is supported by the Airways Aviation Group.

The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN ) is pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 8 with a special emphasis on Goal 8.7, which ‘takes immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms’.
The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalization of indifference, such as exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking”.

 

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Factory workers producing garments for overseas clients, in Accra, Ghana. Credit: World Bank

By Kingsley Ighobor
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 19 2022 (IPS)

The official start of free trading under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) in January 2021 moved a major continental aspiration closer to reality.

One year later, cross-border trade in goods and services may not exactly be in full swing as had been anticipated, but indications are that there is some progress—the cup is half-full, not half-empty.

A major hurdle is ongoing negotiations on the remaining crucial elements of the trade pact, particularly rules of origin.

However, in an interview with Africa Renewal last month, the Secretary-General of the AfCFTA Secretariat, Wamkele Mene, sketched an optimistic vision of 2022.

In sum, AfCFTA’s implementation will rev into higher gear, traders would be delighted, and the push toward accelerated industrialization of the continent should begin in earnest.

Concluding negotiations on rules of origin, which is basically to determine the “nationalities” of thousands of products to prevent dumping, will be key to success.

Already, negotiators have reached an impressive 87.8 per cent agreement on rules of origin. That includes more than 80 per cent of the about 8,000 products listed under the World Customs Organisation’s Harmonized System of rules of origin and tariffs. Such a high threshold of consensus guarantees that the vast majority of products can be traded.

“What is outstanding are automobiles, textiles, clothing and sugar. These account for about 12-15 per cent of what we call the tariff book. We want to conclude negotiations on these so that we can reach a 100 per cent rules of origin convergence,” Mene said.

Mene is convinced that traders in Africa deserve an enabling environment, including robust market information and other incentives to power their businesses.

The Futures Report 2021 launched last December in New York provides traders with valuable business information, making it one more item in the AfCFTA’s toolbox to catalyze intra-African trade.

Kingsley Ighobor

Jointly produced by the AfCFTA Secretariat and the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the report, titled “Which Value Chains for Made in Africa Revolution”, highlights for market participants value chains with lucrative opportunities in goods and services for value addition.

Noting rising inequalities, the report states that, “Africa is the only continent where the number of poor people increased, up from 392 million in 2000 to 438 million in 2017.”

Africa must “diversify into other commodities… beyond the current commodity cycle traps into different high technology-content industries,” comments Mene, in the foreword to the report. “Africa has 42 of 63 elements for the fourth industrial revolution (4IR), including coltan, cobalt, copper, nickel and graphite, for which global demand will increase by 1,000% by the year 2050.”

UNDP Africa’s Regional Director, Ahunna Eziakonwa, is urging Africa to stop exporting raw materials, but to “industrialize its economies, produce goods rich in African content, and create decent jobs for generations to come.”

One year of free trading in Africa calls for celebration despite teething problems

AfCFTA: Traders to have opportunities to scale up and expand their markets in 2022

In addition to completing 100 per cent negotiations on rules of origin, Mene’s sunny optimism for free trade in Africa in 2022 will depend on other supporting pillars:

• The first is establishing a Trade Finance Facility to support SMEs, especially those managed by women and young people. The timing for bringing this initiative to fruition is less certain given the involvement of commercial banks.
• That conversation [with commercial banks] is going slower than I would have hoped because there are several technical issues that we have to iron out,” says Mene. “It may take a bit longer.”
• The second pillar is launching the African Trade Gateway, which is a one-stop digital platform with information on rules that apply to thousands of products, customs procedures, market information and trends, and payment transfers. Mene said: “The African Trade Gateway is within our control. We can roll that out relatively quickly.”
• The third pillar is an AfCFTA Adjustment Facility, which is expected to cushion the fiscal effects of tariff loss in countries. Mene was quick to point out that this facility is not intended to address budgetary shortfall; rather, “it will be to support specific value chains in specific productive sectors of the economy, for example, textiles and agro-processing.”

The AfCFTA Secretariat and Afreximbank have raised $1 billion for the Adjustment Facility, a good start, although the startup liquidity estimate is between $7 billion and $10 billion.

• The fourth pillar is rolling out the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), a platform that facilitates cross-border payments in local African currencies and is expected to save African traders about $5 billion annually in currency convertibility. The PAPSS was officially launched on 13 January 2022 while a continent-wide rollout and awareness-raising campaign among traders is expected to be ramped up in the coming weeks.

“We have over 42 currencies in Africa. We want to reduce and eventually eliminate that cost [$5 billion] because it constrains our SMEs’ competitiveness and makes trade costly and inaccessible to many SMEs and young entrepreneurs,” explained Mene.

• The last pillar is ensuring that Africa’s Special Economic Zones (SEZs) are compatible with AfCFTA. Countries that establish SEZs subject such zones to special trade laws, such as tax breaks, to attract investments and boost employment.

The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), a champion of AfCFTA’s success and SEZs, reports that there are 237 SEZs—and counting— in 38 African countries.

In anticipation of increased activities in Africa’s free trade area, UNCTAD recommends appropriate policies to enable SEZs to adjust to both “new trade and investment environment in Africa” and “future changes in global value changes and investment patterns.”

Source: Africa Renewal, January 2022

 

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Elisha Arunga Odoyo, a clinical officer within the PMTCT program at the Homabay County Referral Hospital. There is increasing fear that adolescents will be left behind in the efforts to reduce HIV infections. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

By Joyce Chimbi
Nairobi, Kenya, Jan 18 2022 (IPS)

The ominous warning came in 2019 through an anonymous message on her mobile phone to stay away from a man she met on social media.

At 18 years and freshly out of high school, *Nicole Kisi was in a relationship with a 45-year-old businessman.

“The message was clear. It said to be careful because of a rumour that the man’s wife died of HIV/Aids. I was shocked. I forwarded the message to my boyfriend, and he told me the person was jealous of him because he is successful,” she tells IPS.

“He looked healthy to me, and I believed that the message came from one of those jealous people.”

One year into the relationship, Kisi was in and out of hospitals. At first, she was treated for severe malaria, but her condition only worsened. Eventually, her HIV positive status was discovered.

As with other sub-Saharan Africa countries, government data shows AIDS is the leading cause of death and morbidity among adolescents and young people in Kenya.

Over the past decade, Africa’s fight to combat HIV has seen new HIV infections reduced by 43 percent and nearly halving AIDS-related deaths.

However, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) shows the continent is not on track to end AIDS by 2030 because key elimination milestones have not been met.

“There are 18,004 new infections and 2,797 deaths among adolescents 10-19 years annually in Kenya. Overall, 40 percent of new HIV infections in the country are among adolescents and young people 15 to 24 years,” says Damaris Owuor, an HIV activist based in Nairobi.

“The Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission (PMTCT) of HIV is extremely successful, and so we are greatly concerned about the HIV risk that our young people now face from cross-generational sex.”

More than 90 percent of HIV infections in children result from mother-to-child-transmission, says Elisha Arunga Odoyo, a clinical offer within the PMTCT program at the Homabay County Referral Hospital.

UNAIDS data shows that East and Southern Africa has significantly reduced this risk. Between 2010 and 2018, new HIV infections among children 0 to 14 years declined from 1.1 million to 84,000 across the region.

Odoyo points to Kenya’s Homabay County. Despite having the highest HIV prevalence in Kenya at 20.7 percent, over four times the national prevalence of 4.8 percent, mother-to-child transmission of HIV reduced from 16.8 percent in 2015 to 9.1 percent in 2019.

Owuor says poor sex and reproductive health education and, lack of access to adolescent-friendly reproductive health services is primarily to blame.

Further, UNICEF research shows transactional and age-disparate sex, peer pressure, stigma and discrimination, harmful social and gender norms, and unequal power dynamics contribute significantly to the bulging number of adolescents living with HIV.

The most recent Kenya Demographic and Health Survey shows three out of 10 girls have sex before age 15 and that one in every five girls, 15 and 19 years is either pregnant or already a mother.

Still, Owuor tells IPS that significant strides are needed to address the adolescents’ risk of acquiring HIV. Girls account for six in every seven new HIV infections among adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa.

“My friends and I worried more about getting pregnant than HIV. When you are young, you think about HIV as something that happens to older people. None of my friends has ever bought a condom, but we have bought P2 (morning after pill) so many times for fear of getting pregnant,” she tells IPS.

UNAIDS research shows adolescents and mothers are still disproportionately affected by HIV and left behind the global AIDS response.

Within this context, Owuor cautions that the youth bulge could significantly increase new HIV infections without a targeted approach to increase access to HIV prevention, HIV testing, care and treatment among adolescents and young people.

To achieve the 2030 global target to end AIDS, an analysis by the World Health Organization (WHO) indicates that by 2025, 95 percent of all people living with HIV know their status, 95 percent of those who know their status are on treatment, and 95 percent of those on treatment have a suppressed viral load.

In Africa, 87 percent of people living with HIV knew their status. Of those, 77 percent were on treatment, and 68 percent had a low viral load, according to statistics released in December 2021.

Only nine countries, including Kenya, Botswana, Cabo Verde, Lesotho, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, were on track to reach the 95-95-95 fast track target to end AIDS.

Nonetheless, Owuor says while progress has been commendable, the ambitious target will not be achieved if crucial HIV/AIDS elimination milestones among adolescents are missed.

According to Kenya’s ministry of health, access to and uptake of HIV testing and counselling by adolescents is significantly low, as is antiretroviral therapy coverage compared to any other age group of persons living with HIV.

UNICEF research finds while there is increased awareness of HIV in general, adolescents still lack comprehensive knowledge of HIV and condom use remains low in the age group.

“Young people are among the least tested, and without targeted intervention, they also do not adhere to treatment and are often virally unsuppressed. A high viral load, or the amount of HIV in the blood, increases the risk of an adolescent transmitting the virus, so we have to break this cycle,” Owuor says.

Kisi agrees, adding that an adolescent’s journey to accepting a positive HIV result is a long road marred with denial, anger, and bitterness.

“Seeing your friends living a carefree life as you die inside is very painful. The biggest problem is that you lose hope and start to believe that there is no future,” she says.

“Even today, I struggle with accepting my status. I recently joined a peer support group, and I am smiling again. I feel more hopeful than I have ever before.”

 

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By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Jan 18 2022 (IPS)

The Asia-Pacific region is experiencing growing inequality even while registering impressive economic growth and poverty reduction. Such sharp inequalities continue to be persistent in the region, with nearly 2 in 4 people still unable to afford a healthy diet.

“The gains from socioeconomic development have favoured the wealthiest, with the wealthiest 5% of the population controlling close to 70% of total wealth in the region,” reports the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP).

The Asia-Pacific region, comprising 58 countries and territories, has over the past few decades registered the fastest rate of economic growth globally and achieved gains in human and social development, informs the Commission.

"In the Asia and Pacific region, 1.9 billion people are unable to afford a healthy diet, driven by high prices of fruits, vegetables and dairy products, making it impossible for the poor to achieve healthy diets”

And it provides some examples: life expectancy has increased significantly. While poverty eradication efforts have released approximately a billion people from poverty, both income poverty and multidimensional poverty continue to exist alongside affluence within and between countries.

Despite these gains, “inequalities persist, with income, consumption and wealth concentrated among the top deciles of the population. Non-monetary inequalities exist between regions, gender, race, ethnicity, geography and age, as well as in access to services, including sexual and reproductive health services.”

The Asia-Pacific region is home to approximately 4.5 billion people, and its demographic landscape is diverse in terms of population growth and size, composition by age and sex, and spatial distribution, ESCAP explains in report about this region.

The largest world’s region’s multidimensional poverty is made up of several factors that constitute poor people’s experience of deprivation, such as poor health, lack of education, inadequate living standards, lack of income, disempowerment, poor quality of work and threat from violence.

 

Perpetuating inequality

“These circumstances often shape, accentuate and perpetuate inequalities in income and wealth.” For example, the outcome can be influenced by efforts made in education or the labour market.

The last category, inequality of impact, relates to the differential impact of certain events or phenomena, such as a natural disaster, on different groups.

The impact has often been greater on poor people, women, older persons, persons with disabilities and other marginalised groups.

 

High fertility

The report also explains that poverty, inequality and high fertility are closely associated. Poor households tend to have many children owing mainly to lack of access to and knowledge of contraceptives, low autonomy among women, and the demand for children for economic or household support.

Contraception is less accessible to women who are poor, less educated and living in rural areas. These fertility differentials perpetuate intergenerational poverty and inequalities.

 

No decent jobs for the young

In countries where the number of youths seeking jobs is high relative to employment opportunities, and where their skills do not match market requirements, young people often cannot find decent jobs, ESCAP adds.

“The share of workers in unpaid jobs in Asia is twice as high for young people aged 15–24 as for adults aged 25–29 years.

For example, youth unemployment rates in 2016 were as high as 39% in Armenia, 30% in the Islamic Republic of Iran and 18.8% in Fiji.

 

Human trafficking

“Workers’ fundamental rights, especially those of women and marginalised populations, have also been challenged by the rise in vulnerable employment, especially concentrated in agriculture, and affects women more than men.”

In South Asia and East Asia, approximately 40% and 30%, respectively, of identified victims of human trafficking and forced labour are children, the report alerts. Vulnerable employment covers jobs involving inadequate pay, low productivity and adverse working conditions.

 

Migration, an escape from inequalities

“Migration often occurs as an escape from inequalities of opportunity, including decent work in home countries, or a flight from persecution, climate change, conflict or poverty. There is migration for marriage and domestic work too.”

Many migrants, however, face other forms of inequalities such as precarious working conditions, human rights abuses and irregular employment in their countries of destination. A considerable proportion of international migration within and from the Asia-Pacific region is irregular.

 

Discriminated, Exploited…

“Migrants are also vulnerable to coercion, discrimination, exploitation and substandard labour conditions and benefits.”

Female migrants are often victimised on the grounds of both being female and being migrants. They face labour exploitation, including confinement, lack of pay and lack of rest days. Undocumented female migrants also have no access to sexual and reproductive health services, explains ESCAP.

 

Internal migration

Another defining megatrend is internal migration, which has increased in volume in the past few decades.

Increased internal migration has been due to fewer work opportunities in traditional agriculture and better employment opportunities in urban areas, manufacturing in urban areas and high-production agriculture.

 

Unprecedented urbanisation

According to the report, there has been unprecedented urbanisation as a result of a combination of natural population increase, rural-urban migration and reclassification.

“By 2050, two out of three people are expected to live in urban areas, with about 10% of the urban population living in megacities, and the rest living in medium-sized and small cities.”

Meanwhile, “approximately half of all urban dwellers in South Asia live in slums. In large countries such as Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand and Viet Nam, 30 to 60% of the urban population lives in slums.”

People in slums face such challenges as poor health conditions, lack of sanitation and risk of exposure to pollution, including high carbon emissions.

 

The COVID factor

The Asian Development Bank reports that according to its Outlook 2020 report, tourism-driven economies—including the Cook Islands, Fiji, Palau, Samoa, and Vanuatu—were the hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Asia and Pacific region, alone, was expected to lose almost 70 million jobs and 1.1 trillion US dollars in GDP—more than any other region in the world.

 

Gender inequalities persistent

Meanwhile, gender inequalities continue to be persistent in Asia and the Pacific. In particular in the Pacific, women and girls face fewer opportunities for development.

Gender inequalities also intersect and overlap with age, ethnicity, wealth status, and residence, inter alia. Many of these inequalities have been discussed earlier, such as the differential access to maternal health services by less educated, rural and poorer women.

 

Hunger, malnutrition

For its part, the 2020 report: Asia and the Pacific – Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition provides an update on progress towards the 2030 targets at the regional and country level.

While the region continues to work towards ending all forms of malnutrition and achieving Zero Hunger, progress on food security and nutrition has slowed, and the Asia and Pacific region is not on track to achieving 2030 targets, warns the report, elaborated by the UN Food and agriculture Organisation (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP), and the World Health Organisation (WHO).

About 350.6 million people in the Asia and Pacific region are estimated to have been undernourished in 2019, about 51% of the world’s total of undernourished people.

 

Children stunted, wasted

“An estimated 74.5 million children under five years of age were stunted and a total of 31.5 million were wasted in the Asia and Pacific region. The majority of these children in the region live in Southern Asia with 55.9 million stunted and 25.2 million wasted children.”

Estimates predict a 14.3% increase in the prevalence of moderate or severe wasting among children under 5 years of age, equal to an additional 6.7 million children, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

Two billion people unable to afford healthy diet

With basic food prices and disposable incomes influencing household decisions on food and dietary intake, they are critical to improve food security and nutrition in the region, the joint report adds.

“However, in the Asia and Pacific region, 1.9 billion people are unable to afford a healthy diet, driven by high prices of fruits, vegetables and dairy products, making it impossible for the poor to achieve healthy diets.”

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Jan 18 2022 (IPS)

Governments must innovatively develop progressive means to finance the large-scale social spending needed to improve lives and livelihoods, especially following the COVID-19 pandemic. More egalitarian tax reforms should enable governments to equitably mobilize desperately needed revenue to advance sustainable development for all.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Fiscal policy challenges
To respond to the pandemic and its economic fallout, massive resource mobilization has been necessary to protect people’s health and livelihoods, stem economic decline and stagnation, and ensure sustainable progress.

Fiscal policy involves governments harnessing and deploying resources. But modes of state financing and spending impact economic inequalities. Monetary policy measures can be supportive, but they cannot replace fiscal efforts.

However, the economic slowdown requires much more state spending, largely financed by sovereign debt, i.e., government borrowing. This has undoubtedly been necessary to deal with the pandemic, but fiscal policy should be consistently countercyclical: expansionary to counter downturns, and conservative in good times.

Rich countries have generally been fiscally bolder by running deficits to spend since the global financial crisis, but especially in response to the pandemic. Massive economic relief and recovery packages have tried to protect incomes and failing businesses, albeit unevenly.

Taxation regressive
Regressive colonial taxes were levied on subject populations, but tax incidence became more progressive after independence in most, though not all post-colonial societies. In the last four decades, most governments have reformed tax policies for the worse, reducing tax revenue shares and shifting the tax burden from the better off to the public at large.

Policy advice from international financial institutions and political pressure from powerful elites and foreign investors have reduced taxation’s progressive aspects. With Trump, laughable arguments such as Arthur Laffer’s curve – without any sound theoretical or empirical bases – are still being invoked to justify regressive tax reforms.

Rich corporations and individuals paid less and less in direct taxes, as the public paid more and more in indirect taxation, typically on consumption. Most countries still tax income, but tax rates on corporate income, high income individuals, property and inheritance have declined in most countries in recent decades.

The wealthy’s assets are mainly held as stocks, shares and real property. Their incomes are mainly from such assets, rather than earned as wages. Taxing excess profits and wealth can raise considerable revenue to finance development policies and measures, besides narrowing gaps between the beneficiaries and others.

Instead, wealth is typically taxed at low rates, while huge loopholes allow such assets to be hidden, typically abroad. Many trillions are hoarded in often secret accounts in tax havens, both off- and on-shore. All this has accelerated wealth concentration and economic inequality.

Making taxation more progressive
Governments mainly get fiscal resources from tax revenue or by borrowing. Taxation is undoubtedly the most sustainable, effective and accountable means for states to raise funds. Progressive taxation and government expenditure can both reduce inequalities, albeit in different ways.

Windfall profit taxes
A few individuals and businesses are reaping huge rewards from the pandemic while most have been hurting. Many billionaires have reportedly become much more affluent, with the ten richest more than doubling their wealth from US$700 billion to US$1500 billion since March 2020!

Windfall taxes at high rates are easily justified. After all, most who have gained much owe their newfound wealth to circumstances largely not of their own making. Windfall incomes or profits during the pandemic can be ascertained by comparing recent with previous profits. Such gains should be heavily taxed for the same reason.

Wealth taxes
Wealth taxation has diminished significantly in recent decades due to successful lobbying by the rich. The introduction or reintroduction and extension of progressive wealth taxation will raise considerable revenue if loopholes can be closed, not only domestically, but also internationally.

Perhaps even more than income taxation, wealth taxes are a progressive means to raise revenue. They also have greater potential to address other inherited privileges and inequalities, including those associated with culture, lineage, ethnicity and gender.

Conditional support
Government spending – including subsidies and relief measures – should not benefit businesses paying taxes abroad or not paying them at all. Many companies resort to tax havens and other loopholes to pay less tax where they operate and profit from.

More progressive systems
Tax systems should get much more from those most liable and able to pay. Concretely, this should include:

• Introducing or increasing taxes on assets like real property, wealth, inheritance and investment income (‘capital gains’).
• Raising the rates and progressivity of personal and business income taxes.
• Shifting relative reliance from indirect taxes – e.g., on value-added or sales or consumption – which tend to be regressive to more progressive direct taxation.
• Cracking down hard on tax avoidance and evasion – especially by the wealthy, however politically influential.
• Enhancing international cooperation on taxation to enhance and distribute tax revenue progressively.

Such systemic reforms are essential for progressive fiscal redistribution, e.g., by financing sustainable development in the medium and long-term. Of course, an immediate priority in the near term is financing a forward-looking recovery from the pandemic and its aftermath.

Coordinating fiscal policy
Governments are expected to raise enough revenue to finance the services, goods, facilities and infrastructure they are supposed to provide, i.e., to fulfil public expectations of citizens’ entitlements. The popular presumption is that tax incidence is not only progressive, but has also become increasingly so, although the converse is more likely to be true.

Taxation is widely expected to reduce, if not remedy inequalities. If well-designed for effective implementation and enforcement, the international record suggests this is achievable. In line with the public’s progressive redistribution expectations, the government is expected to be Robin Hood-like, i.e., to take from the rich to give to the poor.

Of course, whether taxation is progressive depends on how it is collected and spent. Hence, tax and spending policies should be considered together. But it is now clear that some pandemic relief packages have mainly benefited influential businesses, with crumbs going to the most needy.

International cooperation is needed to for appropriate tax reforms in this age of financial globalization, and to prevent increasing capital outflows from developing countries. For the time being, minimizing tax evasion depends on equitable and effective international cooperation on terms fair to all, rather than conditions imposed by the rich countries, as has been the case.

 

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A Somali woman goat-seller in Hargeisa livestock market. Photo: Credit: UNDP / Said Fadhaye

By Adam Abdelmoula
MOGADISHU, Somalia, Jan 18 2022 (IPS)

I arrived in Somalia in September 2019, two decades after having worked here previously. I knew that I was taking up a challenging assignment, but I was also looking forward to seeing Somalia’s progress.

Afflicted by decades of conflict, recurrent climatic shocks, disease outbreaks and poverty, Somalia was often called a ‘failed state.’ The narrative is now changing, and although fragile, Somalia is on a path to stability and the resilience of the Somali people is second to none.

That said, we are not under any illusion: significant challenges remain, and we must work even harder to preserve the gains made to date.

Somalia’s upward trajectory is evident in the construction boom, as one analyst noted — the sound of the hammer is replacing the sound of gunfire in Somalia’s capital.

The UN has been closely supporting the Somali people since the birth of the Republic in 1960. Currently, the UN’s various mandates are implemented through 26  Agencies, Funds and Programmes (both resident and non-resident), one political mission (UNSOM) and one logistical support mission (UNSOS). 

The UN’s commitment towards the Somali cause is articulated in detail in the UN Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework (UNSDCF 2021-2025), mirroring the priorities of Somalia’s Ninth National Development Plan (NDP-9).

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the UN marshalled support to help the Somali government respond to the virus outbreak. We continue to support the Somali authorities in seeking to defeat this pandemic and encouraging people to get vaccinated.

Elections are also on-going in Somalia. The UN is supporting the process to ensure that elections are held in a peaceful and transparent manner, while at the same time advocating for 30 per cent women’s quota in the Somali legislature.

While these are encouraging signs of progress, we must not forget Somalia’s long-standing challenges. According to UN’s projections for next year, an estimated 7.7 million Somalis (nearly half of the country’s population) will require humanitarian assistance and protection.

Women and children continue to bear the brunt of Somalia’s complex humanitarian crises, especially among the internally displaced communities. In light of the current serious droughts, the Somali government declared a humanitarian state of emergency on 23 November.

Yet, neither the government nor the humanitarian community has adequate resources to respond. With a few days remaining in the year, the 2021 Humanitarian Response Plan which seeks US$1.09 billion remains only 70 per cent funded. Additional resources are urgently needed to prevent the dire humanitarian situation from becoming a catastrophe, so we continue to engage partners on this subject.

In this regard, I undertook missions to Europe in October and to the Gulf in September. Throughout my interactions with partners, I stressed the need for additional funding to address Somalia’s escalating humanitarian crisis and elaborated on how inaction not only risks a reversal of the gains but puts the lives of millions of Somalis in jeopardy.

Through my field visits in Somalia, I have also seen first-hand the grim realities of adverse climate conditions. Somalia is no doubt on the frontline of climate change. The recurrent droughts and floods are driving widespread displacement, rapid urbanization, hunger, malnutrition and poverty.

Climate change is also increasingly seen as the driver of conflict and a threat to the country’s security as the struggle over meagre resources deepens divisions. In addition, the loss of traditional livelihoods makes people vulnerable to recruitment by armed groups such as Al-Shabaab.

Somalia is currently experiencing a third consecutive season of below-average rainfall, with nearly 80 per cent of the country experiencing drought conditions, water shortages and livestock deaths. One in five Somalis does not have enough water to cover his/her basic needs.

On a positive note, as part of the efforts to mitigate the climate emergency, the government, with the support of the United Nations, has recently adopted an ambitious Nationally Determined Contribution to achieve global climate targets, in which Somalia committed to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 30 per cent by 2030.

Somalia’s crises are multifaceted, and they require comprehensive solutions from all stakeholders. It is our collective responsibility to support the efforts of the Somali people to cope with these crises and find lasting solutions that build resilience against future shocks. We must not fail the people we pledged to serve.

Adam Abdelmoula is Deputy Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General, Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia. He told a press conference in December that the UN and its partners have launched a nearly $1.5 billion Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP). Roughly 7.7 million people in the country will need assistance and protection in 2022, a 30 per cent rise in just one year.

 

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By Patricia Scotland
GEORGETOWN, Guyana, Jan 17 2022 (IPS)

If the ocean is the lifeblood of the Commonwealth, then forests are the lungs that breathe life into its whole system. From the vast boreal woodlands of Canada to the rich primary forests of Papua New Guinea, the Commonwealth covers nearly a quarter of all forest land in the world – an estimated 900 million hectares. These biodiversity havens not only house about half of all animal species on earth, they also give us clean air, water and food, supporting the livelihoods of millions of people while tackling climate change.

Last weekend, I had the privilege of trekking the stunning Amazonian rainforests of Guyana. It was my second time to do so since visiting the Iwokrama Reserve in 2016, but I was still left awestruck by the sight of rolling jungle-shrouded mountains that stretched far as the eye could see, home to jaguars, anacondas and hundreds of exotic bird species. Listening to the thunderous vibrations of the Potaro River plunging 250 metres in the world’s largest single drop waterfall, Kaieteur Falls, I wondered how so much of humankind had become distanced from these wonders of nature.

Globally, forests such as the Amazon are being destroyed at alarming rates, placing increasing pressure on the wildlife and driving many species into extinction. The UN estimates that 420 million hectares of forest – roughly the land area of the entire European Union – have been lost since 1990, despite the rate of deforestation dropping in recent years. The main driver is no surprise: rapid agricultural expansion is needed to feed the demands of an ever-growing global population, whether through large scale commercial farming or local subsistence agriculture.

Fortunately, in Guyana, where more than 80 percent of the total land area is forest, deforestation rates are extremely low – less than one percent – thanks to strong government policies and international support. However, the lucrative mining of bauxite and gold as well as the recent discovery of oil, which has propelled the country to become one of the fastest growing economies on the planet, still presents a common dilemma for developing nations. This is the balancing act of delivering a healthy economy, social cohesion and equality, while protecting the environment and fighting climate change fuelled by the burning of fossil fuels.

Just a few months ago, I was in Glasgow for the UN Climate Change Conference known as COP26, meeting with countless negotiators, experts and world leaders about how the international community should respond to the climate crisis. In a world where we are already grappling with the frightening effects of a heating planet, I observed a growing awareness amongst decisionmakers of the need to shift to sustainability in order for human civilisation to survive. At the same time, it was clear that almost all countries were also motivated by the drive for economic growth, job creation and enhancing their so-called standard of living.

In this regard, it was a statement by Guyana’s President Irfaan Ali during a high level event held at the Commonwealth Pavilion at COP26 that resonated with me: “Whatever plan we come up with at the national, regional and international levels must be comprehensive in its outlook. We cannot only look at climate change in isolation of food security, or debt security, or national prosperity. We have to find an integrated way which leads to an integrated solution.”

It is precisely this line of thinking that has spurred an increasing number of Commonwealth member countries to support the ‘Call to Action on Living Lands’, which I announced more than a year ago. This call to action lays the groundwork for a Commonwealth Living Lands Charter to be proposed for adoption at the forthcoming meeting of Commonwealth Heads of Government scheduled for later this year in Kigali, Rwanda. The proposed Charter recognises those valuable links between different and sometimes conflicting interests of member countries. It will seek to catalyse the global political momentum to address climate action and resilience, biodiversity loss and land degradation, in a coordinated and cohesive approach. Commonwealth countries will be able to share learning and cooperate in developing and implementing solutions. When implemented successfully, this will transform the climate, biodiversity and development agendas.

But what does that mean for ordinary Commonwealth citizens? In a word, hope. The Call for Action on Living Lands enables governments to cooperate and pave the way to learn about and access more sustainable, inclusive, innovative and efficient ways of growing food, making a living off the land and adapting to climate change. Focus areas to be explored within the Charter include climate resilient agriculture, soil and water conservation and management, sustainable green cover and biodiversity, and the active engagement of indigenous people. These are standing topics of discussion when I meet with Commonwealth leaders, including Guyana’s top decision makers with whom I convened this week.

My visit to Guyana was both rewarding and deeply moving. However, it was when I called on the Santa Aratak community, a village of around 3,000 indigenous Arawak located 25 miles from the capital city of Georgetown, that the significance of the trip came full circle. Like most indigenous groups, Amerindians make the best land stewards because of their traditional values and principles around living sustainably, understanding natural ecosystems and maintaining the pristine state of the environment. Their world view is similar to indigenous cultures elsewhere in the Commonwealth, including parts of Africa and the Pacific Islands. Perhaps as we embark on this new year, we should take their vision as an inspiration – we should all see ourselves as stewards of our living lands.

The Right Honourable Patricia Scotland is the sixth Secretary-General of the Commonwealth and the first woman to hold the post. She leads an organisation of 54 countries working together to promote democracy, peace and sustainable development. Born in Dominica and raised in the United Kingdom, she was also the first woman to be named Attorney General for England and Wales and served in various ministerial roles.

This piece was first published on Stabroek Sunday.

 

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By Joseph Chamie
PORTLAND, USA, Jan 17 2022 (IPS)

Yes, it’s unequivocally true: Americans are the most likely to be in the jailhouse now. The United States is the world’s leader in incarceration both in terms of the total number of people in prisons and jails and the rate of prisoners per capita.

The U.S. national incarceration rate, prisoners per 100,000 population, plainly stands out as the world’s highest at approximately 630. The countries with incarceration rates closest to the U.S. are Rwanda, Turkmenistan and El Salvador at around 575. The incarceration rate for the world at 140 as well as the rates for nearly all developed countries, in contrast, are a fraction of the United States rate (Figure 1).

 

Source: Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research.

 

Moreover, the incarceration rates for the U.S. states are greater than those of most developed democracies. For example, the lowest state incarceration rate of 109 in Massachusetts is significantly greater than the rates for Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, which are below 90 prison inmates per 100,000 population.

Despite having slightly less than one-twentieth of the world’s population, the United States has approximately 20 percent of the world’s prison population

The high incarceration rate is a relatively recent phenomenon for the United States. Between 1925 to 1975, for example, the U.S. incarceration rate was relatively stable at around 110 prisoners per 100,000 population. In the late 1970s the rate increased significantly, more than quadrupling since then, following the get tough on crime movement that swept across the country

Despite having slightly less than one-twentieth of the world’s population, the United States has approximately 20 percent of the world’s prison population. At the end of 2019 the number of prisoners held in the U.S. was the world’s largest at about 2.2 million.

That number of U.S. prisoners is about 10 percent lower than the peak level of inmates in prisons and jails of about 2.3 million in 2008. However, the current number of prisoners is substantially higher than it was in the mid 20th century. Fifty years ago, for example, the number of U.S. prisoners was 200,000, or close to 2 million less than it is today.

Following the United States in a distant second place is China with 1.7 million prisoners, or about 16 percent of the world total. It is followed by Brazil, India and Russia with approximately 0.8 million, 0.5 million and 0.5 million, respectively (Figure 2).

 

Source: Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research.

 

It is important to recognize that while the estimated total global prison population is over 11 million, that number is likely to be an underestimate of the world total. For example, if the numbers of underreported and political prisoners as well as those held in detention centers in various countries around the world, such as China, Eritrea, Indonesia, Myanmar, North Korea and Somalia, are included, the total worldwide prison population is believed to be more than 12 million.

In many parts of the world, prison populations are continuing to rise. For example, since the start of the 21st century, the prison populations have tripled in South America, more than doubled in south-eastern Asia and has nearly doubled in Oceania.

In the United States, in contrast, the number of prisoners in recent years has declined. The U.S. imprisonment rate in 2019 was at the lowest level since 1995. From 2009 to 2019, for example, the number of prisoners under state or federal jurisdiction dropped by 11 percent and the incarceration rate fell by 17 percent.

In some countries, including the U.S., the COVID-19 pandemic has also contributed to declines in prisoner numbers. Court operations, delays in trials and sentencing of persons led to a 40 percent decrease in admissions to U.S. state and federal prisons from 2019 and spurred a 25 percent drop in inmates held in local jails.

As is the case worldwide, the overwhelming majority of prisoners in the U.S. are males. In 2019, for example, females made up about 10 percent of those held in U.S. prisons and jails, or about 0.2 million, and constituted the highest female incarceration rate worldwide. Also, U.S. male prisoners are mostly under age 40, come from disadvantaged communities, are disproportionately minorities and often have drug and alcohol addictions.

U.S. incarceration rates also vary considerably by region and state. The states with the highest incarceration rates are typically located in the south. The top three states, for example, were Louisiana, Mississippi and Oklahoma, all with rates above 600 in 2019. In contrast, the three states with the lowest rates, all around 150 or less, were Massachusetts, Maine and Rhode Island.

At the end of 2019 slightly less than half, or about 46 percent, of sentenced federal prisoners were serving time for drug trafficking and 8 percent for a violent offense. Similarly among sentenced state prisoners, the most common offense was drug-related and about one out of seven, or 14 percent, were serving time for murder or manslaughter.

America’s high level of incarceration has raised various issues, including the civil rights of poor people and minorities, the crowded facilities with health risks and the financial strains on state budgets. Some contend that incarceration dehumanizes individuals, does little to increase public safety and is damaging to marginalized communities.

Also, many prisoners after being released encounter serious challenges. Among those challenges are reentering the labor force, finding suitable housing, reestablishing familial, social and community relationships, accessing public assistance and avoiding criminal activities.

Spending on prisons and jails also varies considerably across the United States. Those costs typically involve providing security, food, housing, recreation, education, maintenance and healthcare for prisoners.

The annual costs per inmate range from lows of below $20,000 in states such as Alabama, Kentucky and Oklahoma to highs of more than $50,000 in Connecticut, New Jersey and New York. Also, invariably across U.S. states, the annual costs of keeping an inmate imprisoned are significantly greater than government monies spent to educate an elementary/secondary school student in an academic year.

Various explanations or factors have been offered for why the United States has the world’s highest incarceration rate. Prominent among those explanations is the war on drugs, which over the years incarcerated a lot of people. Many experts contend that treatment for drug offenders would be a better option than incarceration.

Other factors and practices believed to contribute to the high U.S. incarceration rates include: harsher sentencing laws; longer prison sentences; greater likelihood of imprisonment; higher rates of violent crime; easily available firearms; a legacy of racial discrimination; the U.S. temperament; the lack of a social safety net; inadequate reentry services; employment discrimination; jail time for misdemeanors or low-level offenses; and the lack the funds to cover bail.

Also, most U.S. state judges and prosecutors are elected and consequently tend to be sensitive to public opinion about appropriate responses to crime. In contrast, criminal justice professionals in other developed countries are civil servants who are less likely to be pressured for lengthy jail time.

In sum, little disagreement exists about who are the most likely to be in the jailhouse now: residents of the United States. The reasons behind this lamentable incarceration achievement, however, are less indisputable. Also, the policies, changes and programs needed to address it remain contentious issues among U.S. elected officials, criminal justice professionals, law enforcement officers and the public.

Consequently, it seems that at least for the foreseeable future, the United States will retain its title as the world’s incarceration leader both in terms of the total number of people in prisons and jail and the rate of prisoners per capita.

* Joseph Chamie is a consulting demographer, a former director of the United Nations Population Division and author of numerous publications on population issues, including his recent book, “Births, Deaths, Migrations and Other Important Population Matters.”

 

US President Joseph R. Biden Jr. addresses the general debate of the UN General Assembly’s 76th session last year. In his inaugural address to the annual gathering of world leaders at the UN, Biden called for a new era of global unity against the compounding crises of COVID-19, climate change and insecurity. Credit: UN Photo/Cia Pak

By Norman Solomon
SAN FRANCISCO, USA, Jan 17 2022 (IPS)

The final big legislative achievement of 2021 was a bill authorizing $768 billion in military spending for the next fiscal year. President Biden signed it two days after the Christmas holiday glorifying the Prince of Peace.

Dollar figures can look abstract on a screen, but they indicate the extent of the mania. Biden had asked for “only” $12 billion more than President Trump’s bloated military budget of the previous year — but that wasn’t enough for the bipartisan hawkery in the House and Senate, which provided a boost of $37 billion instead.

Overall, military spending accounts for about half of the federal government’s total discretionary spending — while programs for helping instead of killing are on short rations at many local, state, and national government agencies. It’s a nonstop trend of reinforcing the warfare state in sync with warped neoliberal priorities. While outsized profits keep benefiting the upper class and enriching the already obscenely rich, the cascading effects of extreme income inequality are drowning the hopes of the many.

Corporate power constrains just about everything, whether healthcare or education or housing or jobs or measures for responding to the climate emergency. What prevails is the political structure of the economy.

Class war in the United States has established what amounts to oligarchy. A zero-sum economic system, aka corporate capitalism, is constantly exercising its power to reward and deprive. The dominant forces of class warfare — disproportionately afflicting people of color while also steadily harming many millions of whites — continue to undermine basic human rights including equal justice and economic security.

In the real world, financial power is political power. A system that runs on money is adept at running over people without it.

The words “I can’t breathe,” repeated nearly a dozen times by Eric Garner in a deadly police chokehold, resonated for countless people whose names we’ll never know. The intersections of racial injustice and predatory capitalism are especially virulent zones, where many lives gradually or suddenly lose what is essential for life.

Discussions of terms like “racism” and “poverty” too easily become facile, abstracted from human consequences, while unknown lives suffocate at the hands of routine injustice, systematic cruelties, the way things predictably are.

An all-out war on democracy is now underway in the United States. More than ever, the Republican Party is the electoral arm of unabashed white supremacy as well as such toxicities as xenophobia, nativism, anti-gay bigotry, patriarchy, and misogyny.

The party’s rigid climate denial is nothing short of deranged. Its approach to the Covid pandemic has amounted to an embrace of death in the name of rancid individualism. With its Supreme Court justices in place, the “Grand Old Party” has methodically slashed voting rights and abortion rights.

Overall, on domestic matters, the partisan matchup is between neoliberalism and neofascism. While the abhorrent roles of the Democratic leadership are extensive, to put it mildly, the two parties now represent hugely different constituencies and agendas at home. Not so on matters of war and peace.

Both parties continue to champion what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.” When King described the profligate spending for a distant war as “some demonic, destructive suction tube,” he was condemning dynamics that endure with a vengeance.

Today, the madness and the denial are no less entrenched. A militaristic core serves as a sacred touchstone for faith in America as the world’s one and only indispensable nation. Gargantuan Pentagon budgets are taken for granted, as is the assumed prerogative to bomb other countries at will.

Every budget has continued to include massive outlays for nuclear weapons, including gigantic expenditures for so-called “modernization” of the nuclear arsenal. A fact that this book cited when it was first published — that the United States had ten thousand nuclear warheads and Russia had a comparable number — is no longer true; most estimates say those stockpiles are now about half as large.

But the current situation is actually much more dangerous. In 2007, the Doomsday Clock maintained by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists pegged the world’s proximity to annihilation at five minutes to apocalyptic Midnight.

As 2022 began, the symbolic hands were at one hundred seconds to Midnight. Such is the momentum of the nuclear arms race, fueled by profit-driven military contractors. Lofty rhetoric about seeking peace is never a real brake on the nationalistic thrust of militarism.

With the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, the third decade of this century is shaping up to unfold new wrinkles in American hegemonic conceits. Along the way, Joe Biden has echoed a central precept of doublethink in George Orwell’s most famous novel, 1984: “War is Peace.”

Speaking at the United Nations as the autumn of 2021 began, Biden proclaimed: “I stand here today, for the first time in twenty years, with the United States not at war. We’ve turned the page.” But the turned page was bound into a volume of killing with no foreseeable end.

The United States remained at war, bombing in the Middle East and elsewhere, with much information withheld from the public. And increases in U.S. belligerence toward both Russia and China escalated the risks of a military confrontation that could lead to nuclear war.

A rosy view of the USA’s future is only possible when ignoring history in real time. After four years of the poisonous Trump presidency, the Biden strain of corporate liberalism offers a mix of antidotes and ongoing toxins. The Republican Party, now neofascist, is in a strong position to gain control of the U.S. government by mid-decade.

Preventing such a cataclysm seems beyond the grasp of the same Democratic Party elites that paved the way for Donald Trump to become president in the first place. Realism about the current situation — clarity about how we got here and where we are now — is necessary to mitigate impending disasters and help create a better future. Vital truths must be told. And acted upon.

This article is adapted from the new edition of Norman Solomon’s book “Made Love, Got War,” just published as a free e-book.

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of a dozen books including Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State, published in a new edition as a free e-book in January 2022. His other books include War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

 

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In Malawi, some students have been going to school amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Credit: UNICEF/Malumbo Simwaka

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 17 2022 (IPS)

The numbers are unbelievably staggering: the world’s 10 richest men more than doubled their fortunes from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion —at a rate of $15,000 per second or $1.3 billion a day, according to a new study from Oxfam International.

These phenomenal changes in fortunes took place during the first two years of a Covid-19 pandemic that has seen the incomes of 99 percent of humanity fall, and over 160 million more people forced into poverty—60 million more than the figures released by the World Bank in 2020.

“If these ten men were to lose 99.999 percent of their wealth tomorrow, they would still be richer than 99 percent of all the people on this planet,” said Oxfam International’s Executive Director Gabriela Bucher.
“They now have six times more wealth than the poorest 3.1 billion people.”

“It has never been so important to start righting the violent wrongs of this obscene inequality by clawing back elites’ power and extreme wealth including through taxation —getting that money back into the real economy and to save lives,” she said.

According to Forbes magazine, the 10 richest people, as of 30 November 2021, who have seen their fortunes grow, include Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault & family, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Ballmer and Warren Buffet.

The pandemic has hit the poorest people, women and racialized and marginalized groups the hardest. For example, in the US, 3.4 million Black Americans would be alive today if their life expectancy was the same as White people —this is directly linked to historical racism and colonialism, according to the study titled “Inequality Kills” released January 17, ahead of the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) online Davos Agenda.

The report finds that a new billionaire is created every 26 hours while inequality is contributing to the death of at least 21,000 people each day, or one person every four seconds.

Other findings include:

— The pandemic has set gender parity back from 99 years to now 135 years. 252 men have more wealth than all 1 billion women and girls in Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean combined.

— During the second wave of the pandemic in England, people of Bangladeshi origin were five times more likely to die of COVID-19 than the White British population. Black people in Brazil are 1.5 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than White people.

— Inequality between countries is expected to rise for the first time in a generation. The proportion of people with COVID-19 who die from the virus in developing countries is roughly double that in rich countries.

Asked for his comments, Ben Phillips, author of How to Fight Inequality, told IPS the new report “confirms four vital truths about inequality are now proven beyond doubt.

Firstly, inequality kills. Inequality is not just inefficient and unfair. As the data shows, it is deadly.

Secondly, inequality is spiralling. The driving cause is neoliberalism, but it has now been supercharged by the pandemic.

Thirdly, inequality is a political choice. The rise in inequality is not inevitable. Governments can reduce inequality if they decide to do so.

Fourthly, policy-makers will only shift if we make them do so. A reversal in inequality depends on us, ordinary citizens, organizing to push our leaders to make them do their job and put in place the policies that will deliver a fairer, safer, world.”

Striking a hopeful note, Phillips said: “Though the crisis has made inequality even worse and even harder to bear,” he said, “the crisis also, paradoxically, has generated an opportunity for transformational shift to tackle inequality, if we seize this moment”.

“We know the policy mix needed – get the vaccine to everyone by sharing the rights and recipes, drop the debt, expand public services like free health and education, raise up ordinary people’s wages and worker’s rights, tackle discrimination, put money in the hands of ordinary people, and properly tax, and restrain the economic and political power, of big corporations and the super-rich.”

Change depends on ordinary people, Phillips said. “The myths of equal opportunity and rising tides have been busted, but the truth alone will not set us free. Left to itself, the rigged economy will continue to worsen inequality. Left to themselves, politicians will allow it, even enable it, to do so.

Only pressure from below can secure a reversal of rising inequality. The good news is that around the world, frustration is increasingly being channelled into a resurgence of organizing that has potential to shift the balance of power.

Unions, community organizations, women’s groups, progressive faith organizations and social movements are standing up and standing together. This is the source of hope. This is our chance – if enough people join in. Inequality defines this moment but need not be our fate,” declared Phillips.

According to the Oxfam report, billionaires’ wealth has risen more since COVID-19 began than it has in the last 14 years. At $5 trillion dollars, this is the biggest surge in billionaire wealth since records began. A one-off 99 percent tax on the ten richest men’s pandemic windfalls, for example, could pay:

— to make enough vaccines for the world;
— to provide universal healthcare and social protection, fund climate adaptation and reduce gender-based violence in over 80 countries;
— All this, while still leaving these men $8 billion better off than they were before the pandemic.

“Billionaires have had a terrific pandemic. Central banks pumped trillions of dollars into financial markets to save the economy, yet much of that has ended up lining the pockets of billionaires riding a stock market boom. Vaccines were meant to end this pandemic, yet rich governments allowed pharma billionaires and monopolies to cut off the supply to billions of people. The result is that every kind of inequality imaginable risks rising. The predictability of it is sickening. The consequences of it kill,” said Bucher.

Extreme inequality is a form of economic violence, where policies and political decisions that perpetuate the wealth and power of a privileged few results in direct harm to the vast majority of ordinary people across the world and the planet itself.

Oxfam recommends that governments urgently:

— Claw back the gains made by billionaires by taxing this huge new wealth made since the start of the pandemic through permanent wealth and capital taxes.

— Invest the trillions that could be raised by these taxes toward progressive spending on universal healthcare and social protection, climate change adaptation, and gender-based violence prevention and programming.

— Tackle sexist and racist laws that discriminate against women and racialized people and create new gender-equal laws to uproot violence and discrimination. All sectors of society must urgently define policies that will ensure women, racialized and other oppressed groups are represented in all decision-making spaces.

— End laws that undermine the rights of workers to unionize and strike, and set up stronger legal standards to protect them.

— And rich governments must immediately waive intellectual property rules over COVID-19 vaccine technologies to allow more countries to produce safe and effective vaccines to usher in the end of the pandemic.

Antonia Kirkland, global lead for Legal Equality & Access to Justice at Equality Now, told IPS the socio-economic fallout of COVID-19 has disproportionately impacted women, compounding pre-existing inequalities in the home and workplace. Women have been more likely to shoulder an even greater burden of responsibility for unpaid childcare and household chores in comparison to men.

“Women have lost paid work and had to take on more unpaid work, and of particular concern is how mothers have been pushed out of the workforce because of a lack of affordable childcare options. The expectations put on mothers in particular to take on the lion’s share of childcare and manage their children’s remote schooling forced many women to reduce their working hours, be furloughed, or drop out of the labor force altogether. Unequal pay because of gender discrimination means women in heterosexual family households have been more likely to leave employment if their spouse or partner brings in more income.”

She said the unprecedented disruption caused by the COVID19 pandemic should be seized upon as a catalyst for positive change and business recovery planning needs to prioritize attracting and retaining women within the workplace. This includes fostering flexible, inclusive working policies and practices, and supportive hiring and promotion processes that benefit women and families.

“As this startling report – Inequality Kills – shows, income inequality and gender inequality are intimately linked. And to stop COVID related inequality from killing women and other vulnerable people and instead put both gender and income equality first, States must get rid of all discriminatory laws. Sexist laws and gender stereotypes during the pandemic have perpetuated economic violence against women and exacerbated physical domestic violence,” Kirkland declared.

Download the “Inequality Kills” report and summary and the methodology document outlining how Oxfam calculated the statistics in the report.

Oxfam’s calculations are based on the most up-to-date and comprehensive data sources available. Figures on the very richest in society come from Forbes’ 2021 Billionaires List. Figures on the share of wealth come from the Credit Suisse Research Institute’s Global Wealth Databook 2021. Figures on the incomes of the 99 percent are from the World Bank.

 

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Trafficked, kept prisoner in Saudi Arabia Wanjiku Njoki was lucky to escape unharmed. She has since found work serving tea for a government parastatal. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

By Joyce Chimbi
Nairobi, Kenya, Jan 14 2022 (IPS)

Distress calls from vulnerable Kenyan women in Saudi Arabia experiencing mistreatment and torture at the hands of their employers went from 88 in 2019/2020 to 1,025 just one year later.

And this fear is all too familiar for 28-year-old Wanjiku Njoki. The young woman’s whose search for greener pastures in the Gulf landed her in the hands of a physically, mentally, and verbally abusive employer.

In 2018, she travelled to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia.

That year, Wanjiku was one of an estimated 57,000 to 100,000 Kenyans who travel to Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain annually, for unskilled and semi-skilled work, according to the Ministry of Labour, Social Security and Services.

“I heard stories of suffering and death, especially from Saudi Arabia, but the recruiting agent told us they only work with employers who have no history of abuse,” she tells IPS.

“They also lied about the salary. I received $180 per month and not the $700 promised. My employer would pay me, make me sign a document confirming the payment and then steal the money back. When I told them about the missing money, the man and his wife would slap me and refuse to feed me.”

Her life as a shagala, which she says is Arabic for house helper or servant, became a year-long nightmare. With her passport and mobile phone confiscated by her employer, cutting her off from the rest of the world, she saw no way out.

“I worked from 5 am to midnight every day. I spoke only when spoken to and was very depressed. With time, I befriended the gardener who allowed me to secretly use his mobile phone,” she says.

Eventually, she connected with Kenyans in Saudi Arabia through social media, who told her how to escape, get arrested and deported. In 2020, Wanjiku returned to her village in Kagongo, Kiambu County, empty-handed but alive.

Saudi Arabia has a modern slavery prevalence rank index of 138 out of 167 countries as per the Global Slavery Index. The index also estimates that 61,000 people live in modern slavery and that 46 out of every 100 people are vulnerable to modern slavery.

Confronted by unemployment rates that are among the highest in the world as per the UN’s International Labour Organization (ILO), hundreds of vulnerable women like Wanjiku continue to take, more often than not, a doomed voyage to the Gulf.

The parliamentary committee on labour and social welfare indicate the number of Kenyans working in Saudi Arabia has risen from 55,000 in 2019 to 97,000. The number of deaths and distress incidences has also increased.

In 2019, three deaths were reported to the Kenya embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, rising to 48 deaths in 2020 and, as of September 2021, 41 deaths.

Thus far in 2021, three deaths have been reported in Qatar, one in the United Arab Emirates, two in Kuwait, nine in Oman and two in Bahrain.

“There are at least a hundred backstreet agencies linking workers to the Middle East. Only 29 agencies are government approved and licensed. Many agencies are very greedy and are least concerned with the safety and security of their recruits,” says Suzanne Karanja, a Nairobi-based recruitment agent.

“There is money to be made because a prospective employer will pay me $1,800 to $2,000 per head to facilitate travel to their country. Most agents do not intervene when trouble comes. Their work is done once they receive the commission.”

Karanja says the slave and master scenario presents itself among female domestic workers and employers in the Middle East mainly because employers incur the entire cost of processing travel documents, training, and travel.

She tells IPS that a potential employer pays at least $2500, split between a recruitment agent in the country of origin and the destination country.

If the recruited domestic worker leaves before the contract is completed, employers insist on a refund.

She says the government must step up and crack down on backstreet agents for violating terms of operation, not registering their businesses at a cost of $5000 or paying the $5000 to $10 000 once-off bond.

The $5,000, she says, is supposed to be used to rescue distressed women who, so far, are rescued by Kenyans of goodwill when their distress stories circulate on social media.

Additionally, Karanja speaks of Kenyans illegally detained in the Middle East for challenging poor working conditions and others stranded and living on the streets hoping to be arrested and deported.

“All the deaths are among young women, and their employers say they died of cardiac arrest. How is this possible? Young, energetic women who went through and passed mandatory medical tests dying within one to four years of being in the Middle East?” Karanja questions.

Wanjiku says that the Kenya Embassy in Saudi Arabia should be scrapped because it is notorious for turning a blind eye.

“Families of women who died in the Middle East have video and text message evidence of their loved ones crying for help, but the embassy and agents did nothing to rescue them. The women record themselves on mobile phones and send these videos to their families and social media but help only comes through ordinary Kenyans.”

Parliament’s Standing Committee on Labour and Social Welfare travelled to the Gulf region in April 2021 to find solutions to the crisis.

Karanja stresses that the situation is dire, prompting the Foreign Affairs Principal Secretary Macharia Kamau to write to the Ministry of Labour in July 2021, strongly recommending a temporary ban on recruitment and export of domestic workers to Saudi Arabia until protection measures are in place.

Thus far, no concrete actions have come from the recommendation or others made by politicians after the Gulf visit. Meanwhile, blinded by poverty and desperation, vulnerable women continue to make their way to the Gulf.

 

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Credit: Albert Gonzalez Farran / UNAMID

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Jan 14 2022 (IPS)

While absolutely ready to kill, with the biggest military powers spending in 2020 nearly two trillion US dollars on weapons, the world is shockingly unprepared to save the lives of millions of unarmed, innocent civilian victims of wars… and other man-made catastrophes.

The military spending data come from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), which also reports that global nuclear arsenals grow as states continue to modernise, thus sharply increasing the dangers of an unimaginable number of victims of the most devastating death machinery.

"As fighting continues to displace tens of thousands while disrupting access to nutritious food for millions of people, over half the population – 16.2 million people – are facing acute hunger, with 5.1 million people at risk of famine. Half of all children under 5 – 2.3 million – are at risk of malnutrition this year."

Parallelly, the world’s politicians continue to subsidise fossil fuel with six trillion dollars in just one year, being fully aware that such fuels harvest the lives of millions of humans, while devoting a tiny portion of such huge amounts to public health care systems.

In fact, 27 December 2021 marked the International Day of Epidemic Preparedness.

According to the United Nations, “global health crises threaten to overwhelm already overstretched health systems, disrupt global supply chains and cause disproportionate devastation of the livelihoods of people, including women and children, and the economies of the poorest and most vulnerable countries.”

 

Otherwise, more epidemics to come

“In the event of the absence of international attention, future epidemics could surpass previous outbreaks in terms of intensity and gravity.”

The UN adds that “we need to recognise the primary role and responsibility of Governments and the indispensable contribution of relevant stakeholders in tackling global health challenges, especially women, who make up the majority of the world’s health workers.”

 

The poorest, hit hardest

For his part, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO), said “While we have all undoubtedly been impacted by the pandemic, the poorest and most marginalised have been hit hardest – both in terms of lives and livelihoods lost.”

Tedros said scaling up production and equitable distribution remains the major barrier to ending the acute stage of the pandemic. “It is a travesty that in some countries health workers and those at-risk groups remain completely unvaccinated.”

As countries move forward post-COVID-19, it will be vital to avoid cuts in public spending on health and other social sectors. Such cuts are likely to increase hardship among already disadvantaged groups, said the WHO chief.

“Instead, governments should target spending an additional 1% of GDP on primary health care, while also working to address the shortfall of 18 million health workers needed globally to achieve universal health coverage by 2030.”

 

An appeal to the world’s billionaires

“A perfect storm of conflict, climate crises, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and rising costs for reaching people in need is causing a seismic hunger crisis,” the Nobel Peace Laureate World Food Programme (WFP) for its part announced.

And launched a one-time appeal for the world’s billionaires: 6.6 billion US dollars would help stave off starvation for 42 million people across 43 countries.”

 

A breakdown

Of this required funding, 3.5 billion US dollars are needed for food and its delivery, including the cost of shipping and transport to the country, plus warehousing and “last mile” delivery of food using air, land and river transport, contracted truck drivers and required security escorts in conflict-affected zones –fuelled by warlords– to distribute food to those who need it most.

Another 2 billion US dollars are required for cash and food vouchers (including transaction fees) in places where markets can function. This type of assistance enables those most in need to buy the food of their choice and supports local economies.

As well, 700 million US dollars would be devoted to country-specific costs to design, scale up and manage the implementation of efficient and effective programmes for millions of tonnes more food and cash transfers and vouchers – adapted to the in-country conditions and operational risks in 43 countries.

 

The case of Yemen

For its part, UNICEF’s Humanitarian Action for Children has launched an appeal to help support the agency’s work in war-torn Yemen as it provides conflict and disaster-affected children with “access to water, sanitation, nutrition, education, health and protection services.”

Specifically, UNICEF requires 484.4 million US dollars to reach 8 million children among 11.3 million infants in need.

Meantime, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has appealed  for 170 million US dollars in 2021 to meet the increasing needs of displaced, conflict-affected and migrant communities in Yemen.

As of today, only half of these funds have been received. The 3.85 billion US dollars Humanitarian Response Plan for Yemen is also only funded at 50 percent.

Yemen’s grim picture takes place in a moment in which the World Food Programme (WFP) warns that seven years of conflict show no sign of abating, nor does rising hunger.

“As fighting continues to displace tens of thousands while disrupting access to nutritious food for millions of people, over half the population – 16.2 million people – are facing acute hunger, with 5.1 million people at risk of famine. Half of all children under 5 – 2.3 million – are at risk of malnutrition this year.”

 

Infectious diseases: not only COVID

COVID-19 continues to demonstrate how quickly “an infectious disease can sweep across the world”, pushing health systems to the brink and upending daily life for all of humanity, the UN chief said on Monday, marking the International Day of Epidemic Preparedness.

“It also revealed our failure to learn the lessons of recent health emergencies like SARS, avian influenza, Zika, Ebola and others”, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in his message on the World Day.

“And it reminded us that the world remains woefully unprepared to stop localised outbreaks from spilling across borders, and spiralling into a global pandemic”.

 

Halting infectious diseases

Noting that infectious diseases remain “a clear and present danger to every country”, Guterres maintained COVID-19 would not be the last pandemic for humanity.

“Even as the world responds to this health crisis, he spelled out the need to prepare for the next one.”

This means scaling-up investments in better monitoring, early detection and rapid response plans in every country — especially the most vulnerable, he said.

“It means strengthening primary health care at the local level to prevent collapse… ensuring equitable access to lifesaving interventions, like vaccines for all people and…achieving Universal Health Coverage.”

 

Spreading like wildfire

Meanwhile, as cases of the new Omicron variant continue to spread like wildfire, 70% of COVID vaccines have been distributed to the world’s ten largest economies, while the poorest countries have received just 0.8%, according to the UN, calling it “not only unjust, but also a threat to the entire planet.”

To end this cycle, the United Nations underscored that at least 70% of the population in every country must be inoculated, which the UN vaccine strategy aims to achieve by mid-2022.

 

Deaf ears… again

Although this will require at least 11 billion vaccine doses, it is doable so long as sufficient resources are put into distribution.

In short, the three above-mentioned funding appeals represent an astonishingly irrelevant fraction of the giant amount of 2,000,000,000,000 US dollars of the world’s spending on killing machines.

In spite of that, such appeals for saving lives fall, once again, on deaf ears.