Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

A lockdown closer home. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres walking the empty corridors of the UN Secretariat building in New York in 2020. Credit: United Nations

By Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, Jan 7 2021 (IPS)

The currently available Covid-19 vaccines have been authorized for ‘emergency use ‘in Europe and North America. This is due to an apparent spike in Covid-19 flu cases in the northern hemisphere as winter advances. Highly advertised vaccines are being produced and rolled out at ‘warped speed’ by powerful pharmaceutical and bio-technology companies headquartered in Euro-America although their efficacy including how long their immunity lasts is not clear.

Global media and news channels like Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN and India’s NDTV have been marketing vaccines to the world with images of Prime Ministers, Vice President elects, and a Crown Prince in the Middle East taking the jab live on television– seemingly to encourage vaccine skeptics. Vaccine nationalism is growing with is intense competition among Pharmaceutical Corporations and countries that manufacture vaccines and their local partners.

However, the country-specific quantitative and qualitative data now available for many hot and humid tropical South East Asian and African countries for the year 2020, indicate that there is NO Covid-19 emergency in a vast majority of countries in the Global South, and hence little need to rush to buy vaccines.

In Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Tanzania there is a very low incidence of Covid-19 mortality when compared to average annual rates of influenza related deaths.1 In Cambodia and Laos there was not a single Covid-19 death in 2020, while Vietnam had 34 deaths and Thailand a country of 70 million there were 26 deaths due to the virus in the year 2020 according to the Johns Hopkins University official Covid-19 Data base.

Nor have doctors, nurses, PHIs, frontline health workers in quarantine centers lost lives in these Southeast Asian countries, indicating low severity of the disease when compared to Euro-America where lockdowns and curfews did not limit high mortality rates. Nor have industrial, manufacturing or agriculture sector workers died in numbers due to Covid-19 in Southeast Asian countries. Nor were hospitals and intensive care units (ICU), overwhelmed in these countries, where there have been fewer patients in hospitals in 2020 than previous years.

While the Covid-19 virus has spread to all parts of the Global South, it clearly has far less traction in tropical countries than in the so-called ‘first world’ (Euro-America): In Sri Lanka, a country of 22 million there were 204 Covid-19 comorbidities deaths recorded with 35,300 Covid-19 positive tests, although in a normal year between 4,000 and 6000 people die of influenza co-morbidities

The luxury 14 floor Asiri Central Hospital in the capital Colombo was closed for weeks during the first Covid-19 lockdown. In India according to WHO data published in 2018, Influenza and Pneumonia Deaths reached 616,531 or 6.99% of total deaths, while lung Disease Deaths were 819,570 or 9.30% of total deaths in 2018, but there were fewer than 150,000 Covid-19 deaths in India in 2020. 2

Given significant differences in health infrastructure between tropical countries in Global South and Euro-America, the 2020 qualitative and quantitative data clearly shows that Covid-19 is mild in the Global South, since the ‘metric that matters’ to determine the severity of an illness and make effective, targeted policy, national policy is the infection fatality rate (IFC).

However, economically, socially and politically devastating curfews, lockdowns and isolation policies were introduced in these tropical countries on the ‘advice’ of the WHO, resulting in fear, isolation, stigmatization of patients living in crowded and poor neighborhoods, and increasing poverty and inequality.

Many low income and poor countries fell into bigger debt traps and Governments were urged to sell off strategic assets while giving ‘tax relief’ to various international corporations, investors and airlines.

Low Severity of virus but a deadly policy response

The relatively low severity of Covid-19 flu in tropical Asian and African countries compared to Euro-America where the disease is severe is arguably due to several interrelated, region and country-specific contextual factors such as year round hot and humid tropical weather (above 20 degrees Celsius), that degrades the virus and its transmission; more or less universal BCG vaccination that confers innate and trained immunity against respiratory illnesses in tropical countries; national health infrastructure including BCG monitoring; and local diet and food habits.

In the temperate regions of the industrialized world, larger volumes of processed food are consumed and non-communicable diseases that constitute the co-morbidities profile for Covid-19 are more widespread than in tropical countries, especially those where rice is a staple food.

The WHO appears to have used questionable epidemiology models, metrics and as several scientists have showed flawed PCR tests that inflate the numbers and create fear psychosis while recommending lockdown in countries in the Global South rather than use country-specific data and the tried and tested Infection Fatality Rate (IFR). The WHO’s Covid-19 global pandemic narrative has been crafted on the Case Fatality Rate (CFR), rather than the IFR which is much less by orders of magnitude as the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration note.

Treat Covid 19 like a health issue and not a disaster, wrote Jay Battacharya and Sanjiv Agarwal, in July 2020. 3 Many international scientists have exposed the fact that high numbers of false positive PCR tests account for high rates of supposedly asymptomatic cases and question the Covid-19 data presented by the WHO and the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) data base.

In India highly flawed PCR tests gave up to 80 per cent false positives and a community survey was abandoned 4 Sri Lanka and many other impoverished countries in the South have been locked down and economically devastated based on false positive tests and a global media narrative that exaggerated the number of Covid-19 cases. This is in a nutshell is the Covid-19 scam.

‘Test, test and trace’ using flawed tests has been the mantra for a global policy of economically, socially and politically devastating lockdowns and isolation, implemented by government and military in many countries. However, these policies were not based on country specific, quantitative and qualitative Covid-19 data analysis and were counter-productive to the mental and physical health and well-being of the population.

In many countries in Southeast Asia, constantly shifting announcements of Covid-19 cases without context or comparison with new lockdowns keeps up the fear psychosis, confuses workers who worry about their and their family’s safety if they return to work. Constant uncertainty and unavailability of public transport has devastated economies, social and political activity, while distracting from analysis of the relevant data.

Hunger Virus: The deadly policy response in the Global South

It is not Covid-19 virus, but the Covid-19 infodemic, as well as, WHO-led international policy that has triggered a deep economic, social and political crisis in the Global South at this time. The call for lockdowns, curfews and stoppage of public transport systems, often implemented by militaries based on the “Global pandemic” narrative and infodemic of Covid-19 infection figures form the John’s Hopkins University data base with contradictory messages resulted in creation of Covid-19 fear psychosis and anxiety in many tropical countries where the Corona virus is mild. As a result, millions have not been able to go to work and have lost jobs and livelihoods in countries like Sri Lanka and Thailand.

As OXFAM’s ’Hunger Virus” Report noted: COVID-19 is deepening the hunger crisis in the world’s hunger hotspots and creating new epicentres of hunger across the globe. By the end of the year 12,000 people per day could die from hunger linked to COVID-19, potentially more than will die from the disease itself.

The pandemic is the final straw for millions of people already struggling with the impacts of conflict, climate change, inequality and a broken food system that has impoverished millions of food producers and workers.

The Covid-19 narrative and WHO led global policy response has increased poverty and inequality across the world and widened disparities between the Global South and north, while eroding democratic space and practices, and militarizing public life and health systems: In Sri Lanka a punishing military curfew with just 4-hours prior notice was imposed in March 2020, after which the WHO head, Tederos, called the President of Sri Lanka to congratulate him. This same policy was implemented in India a few weeks later in India, where millions of migrant workers lost jobs and many died walking hundreds of miles to get home.

Meanwhile, as OXFAM noted “those at the top are continuing to make profits: eight of the biggest food and drink companies paid out over $18 billion to shareholders since January even as the pandemic was spreading across the globe – ten times more than has been requested in the UN COVID-19 appeal to stop people going hungry.” 56 new billionaires were created in 2020.

Covid-19 reveals a deep crisis in the International Aid and Governance System

Economically, socially and politically devastating lockdowns in 2020 have wiped out development and poverty reduction gains in some of the poorest countries in the world where Covid-19 is demonstrably milder than seasonal flu. Meanwhile, all the plastic and sanitary sprays and disposable masks further contribute to the global plastic garbage and toxicity environmental crisis.

Fundamental questions arise about the integrity of data, analysis and policy “advice’ provided by WHO, the John’s Hopkins University Covid-19 Global Data base and other UN agencies. It is increasingly apparent that many of the WHO’s recommendations and policy response on Covid-19 has marginalized data, perspectives and voices from the Global South.

As Debapriya Bhattacharya and Sara Khan noted in a recent paper: “the narrative on the post-COVID world seems to be once again characterised by the usual dearth of inputs from the global South. “Even though it has been accepted time and again that actors from the Global South will be critical in shaping the emerging international development landscape, gatekeepers are yet to come out of their comfort zones and make credible space for more Southern perspectives and initiatives. The current discourse continues to have a top-down view of issues that demand more local level contextualisation and substantiation…”. 5

The international development policy response to Covid-19 in the global south has exposed a deep crisis in the UN led international Development Aid system dominated by OECD DAC countries and continuing structures of colonial domination in the UN system. The deliberately hyped “global pandemic” media narrative coupled with the WHO’s and JHU’s daily ‘infodemic’ of Covid-19 numbers of infections, has distracted from the metrics that matter to determine the severity of a disease in a particular county.

Science has been turned on its head, as Scientific Principles like regional Context and Comparison, and country-specific data analysis are important for evidence-based policy making, seem to have been be dis-regarded amidst the JHU infodmeic, enabling hi-jacking of national and local level policy processes in countries in the Global South, by so-called international development agencies and related Corporate actors and interest. The quarantining of healthy people in counties where data shows that there is no Covid-19 health emergency is counter to science and common sense!

Low Covid-19 rates and vaccine Colonialism: BCG versus mRNA

The WHO has promised to provide 20 percent of vaccines free to the Government of Sri Lanka, but questions are now being raised as to why national health authorities in many Southeast Asian and African countries where there is NO Covid-19 health emergency, are being urged by the WHO and UNICEF, with the World Bank and Asian Development Bank (ADB), providing loans to buy vaccines at this time, especially when it is claimed that there may not be sufficient doses for populations in North America and Europe where there appears to be a Covid-19 emergency?

As these vaccines have not gone through an adequate trials process and their long term impacts on populations in the Global South (where the health and nutrition statuses of people are different than in the northern hemisphere), are unknown, would it not be prudent for governments in countries where the 2020 data shows that there is no Covid-19 health emergency to await non-emergency authorization of use of these vaccines? Moreover, would not the WB and ADB loans be better spent to build back livelihoods lost due to Covid-19 curfews and lockdown policy?

On average, it takes over 5 to 10 years to systematically trial vaccines. The ultra-costly Pfizer and Biontech and Moderna mRNA vaccines, that use brand new, never before used technology, were the first to be authorized in the UK and US. The WHO’s subsequent first authorization of the Pfizer vaccine for use throughout the world has conferred ‘first mover advantage” or strong brand recognition and product loyalty on the US Govt. allied Pfizer Pharmaceutical company before other cheaper vaccine come to the market.

However, there are questions about these mRNA vaccines and suggestions that the anti-bodies they trigger may last less than 10 months, while a US nurse tested Covid-19 positive after receiving a vaccine, and another nurse in Portugal died a week after taking the vaccine.

At the beginning of the Covid-19 epidemic in Euro-America in March 2020, the WHO, contrary to many scientific studies denied outright the hypothesis that the 100-year-old BCG vaccine may be protecting populations in tropical countries with universal BCG vaccination where there were low rates of Covid-19 infections and death.

This despite the fact that numerous studies had shown that the COST-EFFECTIVE tried and tested Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG), may be useful against Covid-19 as a bridging vaccine as it protects against a broad range of respiratory tract illness in many parts of the Global South. Early BCG trials for Covid-19 adaptation seem to have disappeared from radar screens to be trumped by mRNA vaccines, as WHO contrary to many scientists had affirmed that there was ‘no evidence’ the BCG could fight Covid-19?

Are we not seeing what Naomi Klein termed “Disaster Capitalism” in her book titled “The Shock Doctrine” unfolding in Real Time? Klein uses the terms to describe the “brutal tactic of using the public’s fear and disorientation following a collective shock, be it, bio-terrorism, war, coups, market crashes or natural disasters to push through radical pro-corporate measures often called “shock therapy”. Thus, by accident or design, a disaster occurs and then the “humanitarian” business solution or cure is provided, as a total solution and complete business and profit cycle.

The WHO’s Covid-19 vaccine authorization process may reveal its cozy relationship with some big Pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer that are also backed by vaccine Czar, Microsoft’s Bill Gates. Gates Foundation is now WHO’s second largest funder, after China, since Donald Trump withdrew US funding from WHO. Gates is also promoting a shift to the digital economy and surveillance that enable gaming data analytics the world over — in competition with China’s Huawei.

The WHO-led Covid-19 policy response reveals a deep crisis in the UN and International “Aid” system that is increasingly captive to Corporate interests and great power rivalry. This issue is not new as a Transparency International’s British Branch Report has noted some years ago: “Within the health sector, pharmaceuticals stands out as sub-sector that is particularly prone to corruption.”

“There are abundant examples globally that display how corruption in the pharmaceutical sector endangers positive health outcomes. Whether it is a pharmaceutical company bribing a doctor for prescribing its medicines irrespective of a health need or a government employee facilitating the infiltration of substandard medicines into the distribution system, public resources can be wasted and patient health put at risk.”

Finally, it is highly likely that in many Tropical Asian countries may have achieved a degree of ‘herd immunity’ as the flu season at the end of 2019 had all the signs of Covid-19, also given high levels of travel and tourism to and from China in the region, but since there is no systematic anti-body testing, we do not know if this is the case.

Rather than buying vaccines it would be appropriate to conduct anti-body tests to assess how many in the population have immunities and if herd immunity has been achieved as the country-level data and statistics seem to indicate. Those who would like a vaccine may take a BCG booster.

1 Source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries and also Johns Hopkins University CSSE COVID-19 Country-specific Data.
2 https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/india-lung-disease
3 https://theprint.in/health/lift-lockdowns-protect-the-vulnerable-treat-covid-like-a-health-issue-and-not-a-disaster/466786/
4 The COVID-19 RT-PCR Test: How to Mislead All Humanity. Using a “Test” To Lock Down Society by Dr. Pascal Sacre https://www.globalresearch.ca/covid-19-rt-pcr-how-to-mislead-all-humanity-using-a-test-to-lock-down-society/5728483
5 COVID-19: A game changer for the Global South and international co-operation? https://oecd-development-matters.org/2020/09/02/covid-19-a-game-changer-for-the-global-south-and-international-co-operation/

 

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The post If Covid-19 is Primarily a ‘First World’ Virus, Why is the Global South in Lockdown? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Dr. Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake is a Social and Medical Anthropologist, at the International Center for Ethnic Studies, based in Colombo. Sri Lanka.

The post If Covid-19 is Primarily a ‘First World’ Virus, Why is the Global South in Lockdown? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Patients arrive at a health centre in Gaza. Credit: UNRWA

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 7 2021 (IPS)

If the coronavirus is not deemed a biological weapon, is the heavily-publicized Covid-19 vaccine in danger of being weaponized when over 159,000 Palestinians who have tested positive in Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) are being denied treatment during a deadly pandemic?

The London-based human rights organization Amnesty International (AI) says Israel’s vaccine roll-out plan excludes the nearly 5 million Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip under Israeli military occupation.

Since the beginning of the pandemic last March, nearly 1,600 Palestinians in the OPT have died of the virus.

AI says the Israeli government must stop ignoring its international obligations as an occupying power and immediately act to ensure that COVID-19 vaccines are equally and fairly provided to Palestinians living under its occupation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip,

Saleh Higazi, AI’s Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa points out that Israel’s COVID-19 vaccine programme highlights the institutionalized discrimination that defines the Israeli government’s policy towards Palestinians.

“While Israel celebrates a record-setting vaccination drive, millions of Palestinians living under Israeli control in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip will receive no vaccine or have to wait much longer – there could hardly be a better illustration of how Israeli lives are valued above Palestinian ones.”

Dr Ramzy Baroud, a journalist and Editor of The Palestine Chronicle, told IPS Israel’s exclusion of the occupied Palestinian people from having access to vaccines is entirely consistent with Israel’s trajectory of racism, where Palestinians are exploited for their land, water and cheap labor, while never factoring in as an item on Israel’s list of priorities, even during the time of a deadly pandemic.

“Frequently we speak of Israel’s apartheid, often illustrating that in terms of giant walls, fences and military checkpoints that cage in Palestinians. But in Israel, apartheid runs much deeper as it reaches almost every facet of society where Israeli Jews, including settlers, are treated far better than Palestinians, whether those living in Israel or in the occupied territories,” he pointed out.

“Excluding Palestinians from a vaccine that is necessary to save the lives of thousands is part of protracted and systemic Israeli apartheid and racial discrimination”, said Baroud, a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) and also at the Afro-Middle East Center (AMEC).

As of 3 January 2021, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), 159,034 Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), including East Jerusalem, have so far tested positive for coronavirus since the first confirmed case was reported in March 2020.

As the Palestinian authorities in the West Bank and de facto Hamas administration in the Gaza Strip cannot independently fund vaccines and their distribution among the Palestinian population, they depend on global co-operation mechanisms such as COVAX, which still has not begun distributing vaccines, said Amnesty International.

“Israel must provide full financial support to ensure that the vaccine is promptly distributed to the Palestinian population without discrimination. Israel must also lift the blockade on the Gaza Strip to enable the proper functioning of its health system in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic”.

Gaza’s health care system –- subjected to half a century of occupation and more than a decade of blockade -– is already unable to meet the needs of its population. The COVID-19 pandemic and lack of fair access to vaccines have only magnified the discrimination and inequality faced by the Palestinian population, said Amnesty International.

Meanwhile, 10 human rights and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are urging the Israeli authorities to live up to their legal obligations and ensure that quality vaccines be provided to Palestinians living under Israeli occupation and control in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as well.

The 10 organizations include Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, Amnesty International Israel, B’Tselem – the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, Gisha – Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights, Medical Human Rights Network IFHHRO, MEDACT, Physicians for Human Rights, Israel and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights.

Dr Baroud said even before the vaccines arrived in Israel, Tel Aviv has greatly mishandled the crisis from the onset.

In the West Bank, Israeli soldiers repeatedly demolished Palestinian makeshift clinics, which aimed at testing people for COVID-19, confiscated equipment and restricted movement essential to making testing kits available to hard-hit areas, he added.

In Gaza, which has been under Israeli siege for many years, he noted, the problem was much more severe, as the population of two million people had to cope with the ravages of the disease without any tools to test for the virus, let alone to contain it.

“While Israel’s behavior is expected, it is also self-defeating, as Israelis and Palestinians are constantly in contact through the military occupation, the prison system and other forms of such repugnant interactions”.

There can be no containing the pandemic in Israel if it continues to spread in Palestine. The Coronavirus doesn’t respect Israel’s matrix of control, of walls, checkpoints and the likes, said Dr Baroud, author of five books, including “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press). www.ramzybaroud.net

“The views of marginalized groups must be at the forefront of any decision-making to ensure that national vaccine policies aren’t exclusionary or discriminatory. All states must confront existing inequalities to ensure everyone has access to vaccines,” said AI’s Higazi.

In early December, Israel reached an agreement with Pfizer pharmaceutical company to supply 8 million doses of its newly approved COVID-19 vaccine – enough to cover almost half of Israel’s population of nearly 9 million since each person requires two doses.

Israel also reached a separate agreement with Moderna to buy 6 million doses of its vaccine – enough for another 3 million Israelis, according to AI.

As the race to distribute COVID-19 vaccines gathers pace, Amnesty International calls on states and companies to ensure that no one is denied access to health care, including vaccines, because of where they live, who they are or what they earn.

 

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The post Is the COVID-19 Vaccine a Potential Biological Weapon in Reverse? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Meanwhile,” the COVID-19 pandemic has worsened the already dire humanitarian and socio-economic situation” Secretary-General António Guterres said at a meeting online last November, marking the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.

The post Is the COVID-19 Vaccine a Potential Biological Weapon in Reverse? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM / ROME, Jan 6 2021 (IPS)

 

Oh, Lord won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz.
My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.
Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends.
So, oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz.
                                             Janis Joplin, 1970

COVID-19 has made several of us aware of the frailty of our bodies, the certainty of death and how valuable health, companionship and compassion are. Such insights are not uncommon in poor societies where a person’s main and perhaps only asset is her/his body and what s/he is able to do with her/his hands. However, wealthy and privileged people are surrounded by, dependent on, and even integrated with an ever more sophisticated technology, which increasingly, for better or worse, is separating us from what human existence has been for thousands of years.

James Dean accident.

Once technology has made its entry into the human sphere; from fire and wheels, to printing presses, trains, radio, aircraft, TV, the Intranet, sophisticated weaponry and … cars, everyone’s life, even unprivileged ones, has changed to an extent that it is difficult to fathom. For example, cars were invented as an effective and comfortable means of transport, but they soon became so much more.

Our cities, the entire landscape, has utterly been changed to accommodate motor vehicles. An ongoing change that has been far from accomplished. I have been stuck in endless traffic jams in places as different as Kinshasa and Bangkok. Traveling by car through Europe has become a nightmare with hordes of enormous trucks clogging traffic everywhere and menacing lives and limbs of other road users, whose lives already are at risk by the behaviour of reckless drivers. Each year approximately 1.35 million people are killed on roadways around the world, meaning that each day more than 3,700 people are killed in clashes involving cars, buses, motorcycles, bicycles and trucks. Traffic accidents are currently the leading cause of death for children and young people 5–29 years of age. Not counting the millions of persons becoming seriously maimed for life.

Motor vehicles fill the atmosphere with smog, carbon monoxide, and other toxins, something that on top of the damage wrecked to the entire biosphere is especially troubling since this poisonous air leave tailpipes at street level, where humans and animals breathe the polluted air directly into their lungs.

Don’t get me wrong – I own a car and it has given me an unprecedented freedom and brought me to places and experiences I would neither had the time, nor the possibility to reach without my car. Nevertheless, advancing age and the COVID-19 pandemic, which I assume is to a great extent caused by our manipulated natural environment and advanced communication means, have made me think of how amazingly fast, mind changing and even dangerous technological change has become.

In my youth, a telephone was a device with a round number dial, which through landlines was hooked up to switchboards. An interurban call could be both cumbersome and expensive. Nowadays a telephone combines cellular and mobile computing into one, small unit that takes photos, shows the person you are talking to, stores and provides a wealth of information, tells you were you find yourself and within a second, and at a low cost, connects you with people anywhere in the world. How could I even dream about this in the 1990s when I first encountered a mobile phone?

It all started 1957, when an Egyptian engineer named Mohamed Atalla proposed a metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) process, based on the use of silicon. In 1983, the first commercially available handheld mobile phone was introduced and in 2014, worldwide mobile phone subscriptions had grown to over seven billion; enough to provide one for every person on Earth. In 2019, the majority of smartphones released have more than one camera, are waterproof and unlock using facial recognition, or fingerprint scanners. I own a much simpler device, but it has become an integrated part of my life. Friends and family become upset if I don’t carry it with me.

The car took longer time to become what it is now, approximately a hundred years. However, like the smart phone it has in many parts of the wold become an integrated part of an individual’s life and personality. When I more than twenty years ago visited a relative in Miami I found there were no sidewalks and how I during my morning strolls felt how her neighbours suspiciously watched me, brooding behind their curtains, or while mowing their implacable lawns. A pedestrian! It must be a shady character, even if he is reasonably well-dressed.

A friend of mine living in the USA once told me he was going to invest his hard-earned money in a new, luxurious car, even if he actually could not afford one. When I asked why he made such a stupid investment, he replied: “I have to be able to look my children straight into their eyes. I do not want them to be ashamed of having a loser as a dad. A bastard who cannot even afford a proper car.”

There is no way of avoiding the fact that the car has become part of “Western mentality”. Pixar Animation Studios have made highly successful films, Cars 1, 2 and 3, about humanized motor vehicles, and horror book writer Stephen King has written several captivating novels about demon cars possessing their owners. The UK author J.G. Ballard wrote a disgusting novel, Crash, about symphorophilia, a form of pathological car-crash fetishism where humans and cars intermingle in an inseparable manner.

A comfortable, beautiful car may envelop us in soothing comfort and impart a sense of well-being and confidence, as in Bruce Springsteen’s Pink Cadillac:

I love you for your pink Cadillac.
Crushed velvet seats.
Riding in the back,
Oozing down the street.
Waving to the girls,
Feeling out of sight.
Spending all my money
On a Saturday night.

Quite a number of American songs pay homage to the freedom of Open Higways, rides into the wilderness and freedom of the unknown. However, this does not prevent such rides from being journeys mixed up with anxiety, and perhaps even fear. Springsteen again – Stolen car:

And I’m driving a stolen car
On a pitch black night.
And I’m telling myself I’m gonna be alright
But I ride by night and I travel in fear
That in this darkness I will disappear.

Accordingly, cars have for many become incarnations of more or less hidden desires, as well as part of their personality. The main technological surrogate and an easy manner for obtaining life-affirming adrenaline rushes and endorphin kicks might still be car driving, preferably in luxury vehicles and at a high speed. A pleasure that for commercial reasons often has become associated with sex. Advertisements and popular culture tell us that luxury vehicles attract sexual partners and enhance our personal prestige.

In 2019, almost 92 million motor vehicles were produced worldwide, with China, Japan, and Germany as the largest producers of private cars and commercial vehicles. An estimated 1.4 billion cars and trucks are currently moving on the roads of the world, every year consuming more than a thousand billion litres of fossil fuel.

However, a paradigm shift might lie ahead. Self-driving and electrical cars will with all probability take over the roads and consumers may be inclined to chose more environmentally friendly means of transportation than expensive and prestigious luxury cars. European car manufacturers have discerned a trend among young consumers indicating that several of them like to purchase small, eco-friendly vehicles, or prefer to use common means of transport instead of owning a car of their own.

However, this does not mean that humanity will be liberated from its possibly fatal dependence on technology. In order to survive we have to be aware of the dangers this mentality implicates for the survival of our biosphere and thus human life. If we had been better intellectually equipped, more morally oriented, we might have been able to use our sophisticated technology for better purposes. Now it seems to threaten us instead, as though we were stuck in a car while traveling at high speed towards a final accident, a crash. A dangerous and incomprehensible world.

Jan Lundius holds a PhD. on History of Religion from Lund University and has served as a development expert, researcher and advisor at SIDA, UNESCO, FAO and other international organisations.

 

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The post Is High Tech a Danger to Humanity? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Women producing facemasks in Ghana. Credit: World Bank

By Angela Lusigi
Jan 6 2021 (IPS)

On 1st January 2021, trading under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Agreement commenced after months of delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The AfCFTA aims to bring together 1.3 billion people in a $3.4 trillion economic bloc, making it the largest free trade area since the establishment of the World Trade Organization. Ghana is hosting the AfCFTA Secretariat in its capital city, Accra.

A pathway to achieving development goals

If African countries enhance competitiveness through trade and create more efficient regional value chains and labour markets, as envisaged in the AfCFTA Agreement, they would increase momentum towards implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Poverty and inequality would be greatly reduced through sustainable structural transformation that prioritizes reaching those farthest behind.

In addition, the expansion of choices and capabilities for women and youth through intra-Africa trade and interconnectivity would help to achieve several goals under the Agenda 2063 of the African Union, including Goal 4 on transformed economies through sustainable and inclusive economic growth, Goal 17 on full gender equality in all spheres of life and Goal 18 on engaged and empowered youth and children.

The AfCFTA as a driver of structural transformation and job creation

The AfCFTA could transform Africa’s economic landscape and create productive opportunities. The potential increase in manufacturing jobs, commercial enterprises and agribusinesses could change the lives of millions of women and youth who often face higher levels of unemployment and are overrepresented in vulnerable jobs.

According to the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), the AfCFTA could become the largest regional free trade zone in the world, with a combined business and consumer spending of US$6.7 trillion by 2030.

The Commission also estimates that intra-African trade would increase by 15 to 25 percent, or US$50 billion to US$70 billion, by 2040. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development has estimated an increase of up to 33 percent.

The extreme vulnerability of women’s enterprises

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has disrupted the movement of goods, services and people, which has most impacted the poorest and most vulnerable. Workers and entrepreneurs in the informal sector, comprising 85.8 percent of Africa’s workforce, were particularly affected by social distancing and stay-at-home orders that saved lives but decimated livelihoods. In addition, 9 of 10 African working women are in the informal sector, and most are self-employed or contributing to a family business.

Strengthening women’s enterprises through stronger trade and value chains creates opportunities for wealth and empowerment that could lift millions out of poverty. These entrepreneurs are often engaged in services, agriculture and natural resource-based sectors, for which there is significant potential to increase productivity by enhancing skills, increasing investment and promoting innovation.

Women and youth in decision-making

Current estimates of intra-African trade undervalue the contribution of informal traders in border regions and small enterprises run primarily by women and youth. Estimates of intra-African trade are quite low—approximately 16 percent of imports and exports in 2018; however, between 50 and 60 percent of total intra-African trade is carried out by unregistered traders or firms. Women are the face of informal cross-border trade in Africa and account for up to 70 percent of informal cross-border traders.

Angela Lusigi, UNDP Resident Representative in Ghana

Workers and entrepreneurs in the informal sector, comprising 85.8 percent of Africa’s workforce, were particularly affected by social distancing and stay-at-home orders that saved lives but devastated livelihoods.

And yet, women traders and their organizations are often excluded from programmes and decision-making on trade issues. Furthermore, research shows that women are not reached by development interventions to facilitate trade, increase productivity and improve competitiveness in export-oriented sectors.

Many women traders and entrepreneurs do not have access to the information and training opportunities available through trade networks. Their voices and needs, particularly those of women in the informal sector, are absent in AfCFTA negotiations, policymaking and decision-making.

Prioritizing women and youth for prosperity for all

Only resilient, prosperous and sustainable livelihoods can withstand future crises in a post-COVID-19 world. More equitable access to the opportunities arising from the implementation of AfCFTA could create shared prosperity and reduce vulnerability to future shocks.

This includes increasing the participation of women and youth-led enterprises in agricultural and food trade, which is expected to increase by 20 to 35 percent (US$10 billion to US$17 billion).

These opportunities are not gender or scale neutral. Overlooking the specific challenges faced by women and youth in business may result in many being left behind. African women who work as informal traders often face harassment, violence, confiscation of goods and even imprisonment.

The operationalization of the AfCFTA and the development of institutional mechanisms and support infrastructure must be guided by their potential impact on women and youth, as well as the potential contributions these groups can make.

In order to leverage Africa’s rich human assets in the AfCFTA, the needs and priorities of women and youth must be reflected in the legal and technical frameworks currently being established. Including their voices will ensure more equitable and sustainable opportunities, which is critical to the effectiveness of the ongoing liberalization of the services trade.

This includes facilitating cross-border investment, protecting intellectual property rights, collaborating on customs and taxation, and implementing trade facilitation measures. In particular, innovative solutions and new technologies must be applied to offset the uneven distribution of benefits from liberalization, which stems from differences in resource availability and levels of industrialization.

Moving forward, women must drive the agenda

Women in business should be fully engaged in the implementation of the AfCFTA in order to improve the distribution of benefits and accelerate the Agreement’s impact on jobs, livelihoods and economies. Boosting productivity and closing the gap in resources between women and men in trade could change the trajectory of the AfCFTA, leading to faster implementation and shared prosperity.

Governments, regional institutions and trade associations and networks must take three bold policy actions to ensure that micro and small enterprises owned primarily by women and youth are not left behind.

First, Governments should support real citizen engagement in the design and implementation of legislation and the development of hard and soft infrastructure for the free movement of goods and services. They must promote advocacy, raise awareness and create space for consultations. This includes engaging with empowered and capable women’s business associations and networks.

Second, regional institutions should help countries to collect and share trade-related data that captures the informal sector. Realtime monitoring of the Agreement’s impacts on economic, social and environmental indicators is essential for compensating losers and convincing late adopters.

Mapping and connecting trade observatories across countries and employing digital technology could provide real-time, disaggregated data to aid in negotiations and dispute settlements, as well as promote transparency and accountability.

Third, more public and private partnerships are needed to support gender-sensitive financing and business development services. It is necessary to scale up and sustain investment in women’s enterprises and provide skills business development services in order to grow viable women’s businesses and value chains that transition from the informal sector and respond to opportunities emerging from the AfCFTA.

 

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Excerpt:

Angela Lusigi is, UNDP Resident Representative in Ghana

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Only a united Africa can defeat COVID-19. Credit: WHO

By Sam Otieno
NAIROBI, Kenya, Jan 5 2021 (IPS)

The ANTICOV COVID-19 clinical trial, aimed at identifying treatments that prevent mild cases from progressing to severe forms of the disease, is crucial to Africa, researchers say. The trial will investigate home-based treatments to help prevent local health systems from being overwhelmed.

Borna Nyaoke-Anoke, Senior Clinical Project Manager & Medical Manager for DNDi, says that the studies target mild and moderate cases of COVID-19 and are important to Africa because lower-income countries remain under-represented in COVID-19 studies. The vast majority of COVID-19 clinical trials are being conducted in Europe, the US, and East Asia – testing treatments in contexts with considerable access to equipment and trained staff.

Launched late last year, the coalition comprises clinical experts, policymakers, and others from institutions such as ministries of health, universities, not-for-profit development research and development organisations, donor agencies and international organisations.

The ANTICOV trial will treat patients with mild to moderate symptoms through home-based care across Africa. This will prevent congestion of healthcare facilities with patients with mild symptoms who do not require respiratory support or critical care management.

He adds it will also prevent progression of mild to moderate disease-preventing healthcare facilities from being overwhelmed.

Nyaoke-Anoke says that while all eyes are on vaccines as the panacea, vaccines alone won’t be enough to stop the pandemic. Treatments are just as crucial, especially as they could prevent transmission to household contacts of infected patients required to self-isolate – something that may not be possible in many African communities.

“We hope that conducting these studies locally will facilitate prompt adoption of new evidence into medical treatment guidelines, enabling faster access to new medical tools and the trust of affected communities,” Nyaoke-Anoke tells IPS.

Nyaoke-Anoke says that the ANTICOV study will mobilise a collaboration of African and global science and public health leaders to respond to the urgent unmet medical needs on the continent. It will provide much-needed answers to enable countries in Africa and beyond to adopt effective therapeutic strategies adapted to resource-constrained settings.

“ANTICOV clinical trial, which is currently being rolled out in 13 African countries, will test multiple COVID-19 early treatment options identifying treatments adapted to Africa’s specific needs,” says Nyaoke-Anoke.

Hence, it will position the continent as a critical player in providing quality data on effective therapeutics, immunology, and epidemiology of mild to moderate COVID-19 disease, invaluable to the ongoing pandemic.

Babatunde Salako, director-general of the Nigerian Institute of Medical Research, welcomed the development. It provides an opportunity for Africans and African researchers to be part of this crucial trial, yielding specific information for African patients in terms of treatment and disease progression.

Salako, in an interview with IPS, says that it creates an opportunity for the continent to be involved in clinical trial targeted at African populations when they are often left out of such large trials. Experience in clinical trials would be enriched through participation with the opportunity to form new networks and collaborators.

“African researchers will be contributing data and scientific information for global decision making concerning COVID-19 and may provide an opportunity for the world to examine the peculiarity of Africa’s response to COVID-19 infection and control,” says Salako.

Benjamin Kagina, senior research officer at the Vaccines for Africa Initiative, University of Cape Town, South Africa, says the clinical trials were a great initiative. The clinical trial would generate locally relevant evidence that can be used together with other promising interventions, such as vaccines, to mitigate the pandemic’s negative impacts.

He explained that collaborations were critical in strengthening research capacity in Africa. More importantly, the trial will generate context-specific data that can inform practices and policies in Africa.

“It will enhance research collaboration and networking among African researchers. This will advance medical research in the continent that addresses the needs of Africans,” says Kagina.

 

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By Trevor Page
LETHBRIDGE, Canada, Jan 5 2021 (IPS)

Most people around the world were glad to see the back of 2020: From the devastating bushfires in Australia to the plagues of locusts through East Africa stretching across Arabia to Pakistan, extreme weather, melting ice sheets at the poles, and Covid-19 that still engulfs the globe.

Trevor Page

But 2021 threatens to be even worse than 2020: The economic impact of lockdowns, inward-looking, wall-building governments with self-interest trumping internationally agreed values. And then to quote David Beasley, Executive Director of the World Food Programme: “We could be facing multiple famines of Biblical proportions” and “We’re on the Titanic and the iceberg is ahead”. He was referring, of course, to the world’s hotspots in Africa and Asia. But like the pandemic, we’re all in this together. No one is safe till everybody’s safe. We live in a totally interdependent world.

But how prepared is the world for the year ahead? Not very well, is the short answer. The change of the Administration in the U.S. will not close the gaping hole it has torn in world order. Despite a last-minute Brexit trade deal, Europe is still unravelling. Russia is no longer a major actor on the international stage. But China marches on relentlessly, implementing its traditionally long-term plans.

And what of the United Nations: the UN Charter to which nations subscribed after World War II to preserve peace, as well as the organizations they created to make the world a better place for all? Don’t expect any change from recent years in the Security Council, the UN’s principal organ to prevent war and armed conflict. Governments are preoccupied with domestic issues. 2021 is not the time they will want to see a shift in world order, nor start tackling the fundamental change required to bring that about.

On the humanitarian front, the Norwegian Nobel Committee seemed to be pushing the envelope in awarding its 2020 Peace Prize to the World Food Programme. For more than 50 years, WFP has been combatting global hunger. And it has certainly contributed to bettering conditions for peace in conflict areas. But to declare that it has it been acting as the “driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict” is a bit of a stretch. Yes, it was the “driving force” in the 90s with Operation Lifeline Sudan, before South Sudan became independent. And it has been the “driving force” in Yemen since the outbreak of civil war in 2014. But what about the numerous other armed conflicts that are raging in Africa, Asia and Latin America?

And what about the other parts of the UN System that were established to deal directly with war and armed conflict, including its cause and effect: the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees? And then there’s the UN Special Rapporteurs and the army of Special Representatives of the Secretary General who are assigned to conflict countries to lead UN action. Well, nothing has happened to that part of the UN System to suggest that any significant change is on the horizon. But each conflict situation is different and so are the actors involved. Individuals are always the ones that can make a difference, so surprises are always possible.

What is largely misunderstood by the general public is that whatever the UN and its agencies are involved in, be it conflict resolution or famine relief, they are never fully in the driving seat. They’re the foot soldiers, given their marching orders by the member states. And for the work that they do, they’re funded by and are accountable to the member states. So, at a time when governments don’t want to shift the goalposts, major forward momentum by the UN System would not normally be in the cards.

But there are other significant forces at play here. First, in a growing number of countries, the general public are ahead of their governments. People do not want to see a child dying of starvation, no matter where that child is from. Public opinion can quickly be mobilized to cause cash-strapped donor governments to increase contributions to help deal with the effects of natural disasters in a stricken country. Second, the media play a vital role, not just in sensitizing the general public to the problem, but also in exposing overly stingy donor governments and inept aid organizations in addressing it adequately. Government representatives in developing countries are often reluctant to admit the seriousness of a natural disaster or the risk a civilian population face by armed conflict. A free press remains the world’s best watchdog.

Third, it’s disquieting that there seems to be a growing number of UN officials that are reluctant to speak up, and sound the alarm when danger signals appear. “Why are some such scaredy-cats?”, a colleague who just returned for a famine-struck area asked me recently? He knew exactly what he’d seen and what it meant for the population in the months ahead. But his seniors were nervous to admit it, lest it upset the government officials with whom they worked. It can be dangerous when well-paid senior UN humanitarian officials are unwilling to speak up and sound the alarm to prevent insipient situations from turning into disasters. The underlying problem may be the proliferation of short-term Uber-style contracts that UN staff are hired on these days. Many don’t want to run the risk of offending anyone for fear of losing their job. For the UN to work effectivly, its staff must be able to stand up for UN principles, speak up when need be and do their jobs with impunity. They need to be playing a supportive role right at the forefront of the action. UN humanitarians must stand tall.

So, in 2021 the humanitarian agencies may well take the lead in upholding the reputation the UN System still enjoys in some parts of the world. David Beasley and his World Food Programme will certainly be in the spotlight. On preventing hunger from being used as a weapon of war, WFP’s progress will be slow and uneven. The dynamics of each conflict are different and so are the actors involved. Don’t expect widespread results soon. But WFP has been rising to the challenge and delivering the goods for over 50 years. Forging a closer relationship with the UN’s political, peacebuilding, human rights and refugee agencies will be crucial to the new challenge. But in the difficult years ahead, the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision to award the 2020 Peace Prize to WFP may be just what the UN System needs to make life more tolerable for the millions still caught in the crossfire of war.

Trevor Page, resident in Lethbridge, Canada, is a former Director of the World Food Programme. He also served with the UN refugee agency, UNHCR and what is now the UN Department of Political and Peace Building Affairs

 

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Expressing his deep sadness over Sir Brian’s passing, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres offered his condolences to the family of the “legendary long-time United Nations official” as well as to his “legions of admirers within and beyond” the UN. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

By James A. Paul
NEW YORK, Jan 5 2021 (IPS)

Sir Brian Urquhart, who died on January 2 at the age of 101, served the United Nations in high posts for four decades, beginning in the organization’s earliest days.

Celebrated for his diplomatic skills and his creative organizing abilities, he has often been seen as the embodiment of the UN and its most respected civil servant. After his retirement he lived in New York City, advising Secretaries-General, giving lectures, and writing articles and books. He often appeared at UN-related functions, well into an advanced age.

I heard him quip once, when he had reached the age of eighty-five, that he had become a holy relic, brought out on occasion to add gravity to the proceedings. In reflecting on his death, we should learn from his self-awareness and his skepticism about relics – and we should take his words to heart. The uncritical worship of Urquhart is not a useful activity, even in such a moment.

The UN is understandably seeking to spotlight him, to treat him precisely as a relic in hard times, as a way to celebrate the organization’s history and rally support for its work. But we should see Urquhart as he really was, shortcomings as well as achievements, not as some invented icon from a falsely idealized past.

Urquhart was born in England and trained in two of the most prestigious institutions of the British education system – Winchester school and Oxford University. His was a recruitment path of those who were expected to take important positions in finance and government and to act as managers of the British Empire.

He left university early and enlisted in the army in 1939 at the outset of World War II, joining British intelligence and apparently serving in various secret service capacities throughout the conflict. Late in the war, at the age of just twenty-five, he participated in postwar planning operations at the highest levels of government, including plans for the newly-created United Nations.

Urquhart’s talents were recognized. He was soon brought into the small cadre of top British civil servants assigned to staff the upper echelons of the UN. He is credited with working diligently and effectively to establish the new organization, aided by a keen intellect and a self-effacing humor. When the UN got under way in 1945, he was only 26 and already in a high and influential position.

However “internationalist” Urquhart’s work may have been, his perspective on the world was very different than how we might see things today. He was deeply influenced by conservative British values about the international order and Britain’s place in it.

This included a strong anti-Communist commitment, skepticism about calls for colonial independence, and a determination that the world would be safer in the hands of the great Anglo-Saxon partnership. At the top of the world body, he worked closely with hard-nosed US nationals, including Ralph Bunche, and he shared much with them, including quite likely an ongoing secret service connection.

Though Urquhart was working in a global political context, he had little sense of the personality and geography of the colonial world – “cultural ignorance” says one definitive book on the Congo conflict. Urquhart later confessed that he didn’t know where Congo was located when he first arrived as a key representative of the Secretary General.

“I didn’t even know which side of Africa it was on,” he said later, “I thought it was on the Indian Ocean and I was much surprised to learn that it was on the Atlantic.” Though responsibility for the Congo crisis is shared by many others, Urquhart participated in the dangerous mindset of decision-makers in Washington, London and New York that led to tragedy. He was an influential voice and he helped shape policy that produced awful results.

The Congo crisis saw the first, step towards the militarization of UN peacekeeping. Urquhart is often credited with setting up the earliest peacekeeping missions in the 1940s and 50s, operations that involved interposition of very lightly-armed UN forces between two sides in a conflict. He deserves praise for this.

But in the early 60’s, under pressure of the crisis in the Belgian Congo, peacekeeping went off the rails, setting a dangerous precedent that continues to this day. Urquhart must be held partly accountable for this negative development.

In Congo, the Western powers sought to rein in the country’s first Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba. A militarized UN peacekeeping force was formed and deployed into the resource-rich territory in response to Lumumba’s own pleas for assistance.

As it turned out, the UN proconsuls showed little respect for the elected government. Urquhart was part of the inner circle around Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold that promoted the ouster of Lumumba, the one leader who might have held the country together.

Urquhart and the UN top brass knew almost certainly that the CIA was working all-out in this regime-change operation, bribing Congolese politicians and even (we now know) seeking to poison Lumumba. Sadly, the UN failed to prevent the nightmare outcome. Congolese army leader Joseph Mobutu seized power with US backing and long ruled over a broken land.

Lumumba was brutally assassinated by Congolese enemies not long after his ouster, a process for which the UN also bears indirect responsibility. Tragically, the bloodshed did not stop there. Secretary General Hammarskjold himself was later to die in an attack on his airplane, while he sought to broker a Congo peace.

Urquhart, who was an admirer and friend of Hammarskjold, later played the loyal guardian of the secrets. He constantly rejected substantial evidence that the Secretary General had been assassinated – not killed in an unfortunate air accident as the official story insisted.

In his noted biography of Hammarskjold and his many lectures and articles on the subject, Urquhart (more than anyone) closed off serious discussion and investigation of the crime for nearly six decades. The hand of the Western secret services in this infamous murder is now increasingly clear. Did Urquhart know the truth?

Urquhart was a tenacious player in the game of survival at the top of the UN. While Secretaries-General came and went and other top staff faded away, he continued his grip on the top posts. That meant that he had to please the most powerful countries, of course, but it also meant that he had to know how to work diplomatically with all the member states and to keep his friendships among the senior staff too. His wit and his understatement helped him survive in the UN’s complex personal and national rivalries and to maintain friends in every quarter.

During Urquhart’s many active years of retirement he wrote widely on the reform of the UN. The Ford Foundation gave him a special post to carry out this work and to burnish his image. He was certainly extremely knowledgeable on the UN’s inner workings, as was his principal collaborator, the radical Irishman Erskine Childers.

Many observers like to point to these writings, especially the three books they wrote together, as a sign of Urquhart’s more enlightened, “multilateral” and democratic views when free from the constraints of UN office. While he did mellow in later years, it should be said that he never abandoned his basic conservative persona.

The progressive current in the books, their bid for a more “democratic” UN, is due almost entirely to the influence of Childers, who complained bitterly in private at the brakes that Urquhart put on their work and the traditionalism that Urquhart brought to the project. Urquhart deserves our thanks, though, for allowing Childers, here and there, to propose inventive and far-sighted ideas.

Much will of course be said about Urquhart’s intelligence, his diplomatic skill, and his many positive accomplishments. We would do UN history a disservice, however, if we do not see him (and the early UN) as they really were – not as relics of an idealized past but as real, often-flawed actors in a contested and still unfinished drama.

 

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Excerpt:

James A. Paul served as Global Policy Forum Executive Director, from its foundation in late 1993 through the end of 2012. As Executive Director, he was a prominent figure in the NGO advocacy community at the United Nations and a well-known speaker and writer on the UN and global policy issues. He is the author of “Of Foxes and Chickens”—Oligarchy and Global Power in the UN Security Council.

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By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Jan 5 2021 (IPS)

Goodbye 2020, but unfortunately, not good riddance, as we all have to live with its legacy. It has been a disastrous year for much of the world for various reasons, Elizabeth II’s annus horribilis. The crisis has exposed previously unacknowledged realities, including frailties and vulnerabilities.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

For many countries, the tragedy is all the greater as some leaders had set national aspirations for 2020, suggested by the number’s association with perfect vision. But their failures are no reason to reject national projects. As Helen Keller, the deaf and blind author activist, noted a century ago, “The only thing worse than being blind is having sight, but no vision.”

After JFK’s assassination in November 1963 ended US opposition to Western intervention in Indonesia, President Sukarno warned his nation in August 1964 that it would be ‘living dangerously’, vivere pericoloso, in the year ahead. A year later, a bloody Western-backed military coup had deposed him, taking up to a million lives, with many more ruined.

Further economic slowdown
Lacklustre economic growth after the 2009 Great Recession has been worsened in recent years by growing international tensions largely associated with US-China relations, Brexit and slowing US and world growth although stock markets continued to bubble.

Economic growth has slowed unevenly, with Asia slowing less than Europe, Latin America and even the US. With effective early pre-emptive measures, much of East Asia began to recover before mid-2020. Meanwhile, most other economies slowed, although some picked up later, thanks to successful initial contagion containment as well as adequate relief and recovery measures.

International trade has been picking up rapidly, accelerating rebounds in heavily trading economies. Commodity prices, except for fossil fuels, have largely recovered, perhaps due to major financial investments by investment banks and hedge funds, buoying stock and commodity prices since late March.

Very low US, EU and Japanese interest rates have thus sustained asset market bubbles. Meanwhile, new arbitrage opportunities, largely involving emerging market economies, have strengthened developing countries’ foreign reserves and exchange rates, thus mitigating external debt burdens.

Unbiased virus, biased responses
The pandemic worsened poverty, hunger and vulnerability by squeezing jobs, livelihoods and earnings of hundreds of millions of families. As economic activities resumed, production, distribution and supply barriers, constrained fiscal means, reduced demand, debt, unemployment, as well as reduced and uncertain incomes and spending have become more pronounced.

While many governments initially provided some relief, these have generally been more modest and temporary in developing countries. Past budget deficits, debt, tax incentives and the need for good credit ratings have all been invoked to justify spending cuts and fiscal consolidation.

Meanwhile, pandemic relief funds have been abused by corporations, typically at the expense of less influential victims with more modest, vulnerable and precarious livelihoods. Many of the super-rich got even richer, with the US’s 651 billionaires making over US$1 trillion.

On the pretext of saving or making jobs, existing social, including job protection has been eroded. But despite hopes raised by vaccine development, the crisis is still far from over.

Don’t cry for me, says Argentina
Meanwhile, intellectual property blocks more affordable production for all. Pharmaceutical companies insist that without the exhorbitant monopoly profits from intellectual property, needed tests, treatments and vaccines would never be developed. Meanwhile, a proposed patent waiver for Covid-19 vaccines has been blocked by the US and its rich allies at the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Hence, mass vaccination is likely to be very uneven and limited by intellectual property, national strategic considerations (‘vaccine nationalism’), prohibitive costs, fiscal and other constraints. Already, the rich have booked up almost all early vaccine supplies.

The main challenge then is fiscal. Economic slowdowns have reduced tax revenues, requiring more domestic debt to increase spending needed to ensure the recessions do not become protracted depressions. Meanwhile, rising debt-to-GDP ratios and increased foreign debt have long constrained bolder fiscal efforts.

But despite the urgent need for more fiscal resources, we are told that if the richest are required to pay more taxes, even on windfall profits, they will have no incentive to ‘save’ the rest of us. Nevertheless, new wealth taxes have just passed in Argentina.

This time is different
As the pandemic economic impacts began to loom large, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva quickly offered debt relief for low-income countries on terms much better than the G20’s miserly proposal.

Unlike well-meaning debt-fixated researchers and campaigners, even new World Bank chief economist, erstwhile debt hawk Carmen Reinhart has urged, “First you worry about fighting the war, then you figure out how to pay for it”.

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen is concerned that “in the policies against the present pandemic, equity has not been a particularly noticeable priority… Instead, the focus has been on drastic control and sudden lockdowns…with little attention paid to labourers who lose their jobs or the many migrant workers, the poorest of the poor, who are kept hundreds of miles from their homes”.

COVID-19 may still bring major reforms, such as Roosevelt’s New Deal response to the Great Depression. But now, it seems likely to usher in a world where insecurity and unpredictability define the new normal. While professing to protect victims’ interests, ethno-populism blames ‘Others’ as the enemy responsible.

Still, many hope for a silver lining. Sen suggests that “a better society can emerge from the lockdowns”, as happened after World War Two, with greater welfare state provisioning and labour protections in much of the West and agrarian reforms in East Asia. But there is nothing to guarantee a better ‘new normal’.

Beyond neoliberalism?
For many, Joe Biden’s election to succeed Trump is being celebrated as a resurgent triumph for neoliberalism, enabling the US and the rest of the world to return to ‘business as usual’.

Incredibly, another Nobel laureate Michael Spence has even called for structural adjustment programme conditionalities for countries seeking help from the Bank and Fund, repudiating the Bank’s Growth Commission he once chaired, i.e., which found that seemingly fair, often well-intentioned conditionalities had resulted in “lost decades” of development.

But thankfully, there is widespread recognition that all is not well in the world neoliberalism and Western dominance created. Incredibly, Klaus Schwab, transnational capitalism’s high priest, has conceded, “the neoliberalist … approach centers on the notion that the market knows best, that the ‘business of business is business’…Those dogmatic beliefs have proved wrong”.

Instead, he advised, “We must move on from neoliberalism in the post-COVID era”, recognising: “Free-market fundamentalism has eroded worker rights and economic security, triggered a deregulatory race to the bottom and ruinous tax competition, and enabled the emergence of massive new global monopolies. Trade, taxation, and competition rules that reflect decades of neoliberal influence will now have to be revised”.

Will we ever learn?
The philosopher Santayana once warned, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Hegel had observed earlier that history repeats itself, to which Marx added, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”. Nevertheless, hope remains an incurable disease that keeps us all striving and struggling.

As FDR reminded his supporters, no progressive policies will come about simply by relying on the goodwill of those in authority. Instead, they will only be enacted and implemented thanks to popular pressure from below. As Ben Phillips has put it, “the story of 2021 has not yet been written: we can write it; we can right it”.

 

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Siddharth Chatterjee with CS Eugene Wamalwa, Heads of Missions from the United Nations Mission and other development partners visited the Frontier Counties Development Council Counties with a view of leveraging on opportunities considering geographic proximities in addressing shared developmental challenges in the marginalized Counties. Credit: West Pokot County, February 2020

By Siddharth Chatterjee
NAIROBI, Kenya, Jan 4 2021 (IPS)

 

Happy New Year, Kenya.

Several milestones in my personal and professional life have made Kenya a cherished place for me. I started my UNICEF career in Rumbek, South Sudan in June 2000, and my rest and recuperation breaks were in Nairobi. In fact Kenya was the first African country I had ever visited and, frankly, it was love at first sight.

I came back in November 2004 to serve with UNICEF Somalia based out of Nairobi, and in 2006 I got married in Kenya. My son who was 3 years old in 2014, has had his formative years growing up in Kenya, and considers himself Kenyan.

The following year I left to serve in Iraq, and I wondered if I would get an opportunity to return to Kenya. Seven years later, it happened: in April 2014 I came back as the United Nations Population Fund Representative (UNFPA) Representative and in August 2016, I was selected to lead the UN Country Team in Kenya as the UN Resident Coordinator and the UNDP Resident Representative.

Over the years, my bond with the country has been forged through jubilation and the shared suffering of tragedy. I have rejoiced at improvements in many health indicators in counties such as Mandera, Wajir, Garissa, Marsabit, Isiolo and Lamu where an unconscionable number of women used to die in childbirth, but where great progress has been made. I have also mourned in horror at the number of lives lost to terror attacks, the murder of 36 quarry workers by terrorists in Mandera county (I was in Mandera the same day), the slaughter of innocent students in Garissa University and the dastardly attack at Nairobi’s DusitD2 hotel.

The end of my tenure as UN Resident Coordinator to Kenya falls on 13 January 2021, with new experiences and challenges awaiting me as I prepare to take up my next position as the United Nations Resident Coordinator (designate) to China.

This is not the end of my relationship with Kenya, but rather an opportunity to strengthen my ties with the country, and for sharing my knowledge and first hand insights about its great potential. It is also a chance to entrench South-South-Cooperation, a crucial part of the answer to Kenya’s, and more broadly Africa’s, unique opportunities to accelerate growth.

I realize that Kenya still faces formidable challenges, and the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to deepen this even more. Devolution has brought considerable resources and autonomy to counties, and yet lack of capacity, weak financial and regulatory oversight, will continue to hinder efforts to combat the asymmetry of wealth and human prosperity which will be a major obstacle to Kenya’s rise.

I am delighted with the country’s progress towards its Vision 2030 aspirations and the SDGs goals. School enrolment rates are up; more families are accessing maternal and child health services; social, economic and political opportunities for women have increased; major inroads have been made against child marriage and FGM, with President Kenyatta personally leading on this.

My experiences as the UN Resident Coordinator in Kenya have reiterated that by prioritizing investments in women and youth, Africa’s real potential can be unleashed, and I am proud of the support on this that we have been able to provide through the entire UN Kenya Country Team.

By 2030 agri-business will be US$ 1 trillion worth in Africa. Almost two-thirds of Kenya’s population is below the age of 30, and the future of food production rests in their hands. Kenya’s economy is anchored in agriculture, where 70% of the population earns its livelihood.

In most parts of the world, crop yields have grown ahead of population increases, helping to free them from hunger and famine, but not in Africa. We looked for creative and sustainable ways to harness Kenya’s strong internet penetration to exploit information technology that adds value and strengthens the economic appeal of agri-business for young people and creates digital jobs as well.

President Kenyatta has noted that “the current generation of young people has the potential of expanding Africa’s productive workforce, promoting entrepreneurship and becoming genuine instruments of change to reverse the devastation caused by climate change.”

Africa’s demographic boom has been hailed as its biggest promise for transforming the continent’s economic and social outcomes, but only if the right investments are made to prepare its youthful population for tomorrow’s world. Kenya launched the Generation Unlimited initiative spearheaded by the Head of State, and can serve as a blueprint to harness the demographic dividend that Africa’s youth represent.

Women’s empowerment was our other key pursuit, with special emphasis on access to sexual and reproductive health information and services. Without this, Kenya’s population is likely to continue its rapid increase, putting pressure on land and water resources, threatening livelihoods, food security, and straining already weak health systems. Gains made in women’s sexual reproductive health and rights took several steps backward in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Reproductive rights must be a critical part of our arsenal to fight future pandemics.

It is in Kenya also that I witnessed creative ways of overcoming bureaucracy. Large organisations are often accused of responding too late or with too little in times of crisis, and my tenure saw many. Drought, floods and the worst locust invasion in 70 years, plus the Covid-19 pandemic, all upended much hard-earned progress. As a team however, we went beyond individual UN agency mandates in partnership with the Government of Kenya to quickly establish rapid responses to these emergencies, reducing the socio-economic impact, earning the confidence of the Government and overturning the common perception of the UN as an unwieldy bureaucracy.

The Government’s leadership was meritorious on all counts and that is why I have stated unequivocally why Kenya deserves an A+ for its response to the triple humanitarian crisis.

I am proud to have been part of many milestones in the partnership between both levels of the Government of Kenya and the UN, and to count on the unfailing support of the leadership of Kenya at all levels of Government. Kenya’s potential is boundless, and the country now offers stronger platforms for new shared-value investments than ever before.

I also express my sincere appreciation to the entire UN family in Kenya, the development partners, our donors and well-wishers and civil society partners and, most of all, the wonderful people of Kenya.

With a firm belief in a common destiny, I intend to keep telling the story of the emerging powerhouse that is Kenya.

My wife, son and I carry Kenya in our hearts.

Thank you for everything. Your generosity and friendship is nonpareil.

God Bless, Kenya.

Asante, Kenya, na kwaheri hadi tutakapo kutana tena!

Siddharth Chatterjee is the United Nations Resident Coordinator to Kenya. Follow him on twitter @sidchat1

 

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Women’s empowerment is a crucial aim of the social networking site Fuzia. Credit: Fuzia

By Fairuz Ahmed
NEW YORK, Jan 4 2021 (IPS)

A cherished snapshot of a happy mother and a smiling grandmother is universally associated with a good childhood. In the movies, TV, or media, a broken or depressed mother’s face is hardly seen. But the reality is somewhat different. The measures communities and society take to ensure that women and girls are protected and supported are often questioned.

Shraddha Varma, co-founder, and director of social networking site Fuzia believes in enhancing women’s lives.

“Women empowerment is incomplete without key aspects like health, wellness, education, financial independence. Fuzia, being a leading women’s networking platform, is constantly taking initiatives to touch on these aspects. We understand during and post COVID-19, and females must amp up their self-care and approach for an all-rounded approach for health and happiness.”

Fuzia takes advantage of the growing population of women who turn to social media for inspiration and knowledge, especially in the Indian subcontinent. According to Statista, with over 560 million internet users, India is the second-largest online market globally, ranked only behind China. It was estimated that by 2023, there would be around 650 million internet users in the country. In the United States, 91% of women use the internet, and in 2019, 22.6 percent of Africa’s female population had online access, compared to 33.8 percent of men.

With COVID-19 lockdowns, schools and businesses moving online, the numbers of users have also skyrocketed in many parts of the globe. Even people, like the elderly and homemakers, who only used technology for communication or entertainment, are using it differently. People in this demographic are now rapidly adapting to using digital technology as an everyday activity for education, teaching, shopping, communication, and skills-building.

Riya Sinha, the co-founder of Fuzia (https://www.fuzia.com/), in an exclusive interview with IPS, said that she had come to understand society and culture from travelling extensively.

“As I have worked on Fuzia, I think my background played a big part in forming my vision for Fuzia. From a young age, I have had the privilege to travel to India and all around the world, experiencing different cultures and types of people,” she said.

“This variation of experiences, cultures, societies paired up with technology has enabled us to grow Fuzia to what we are today. Using our platform anyone from any part of the world can have access to lessons and workshops on skill-building, communicating, art, literature, learning and more.”

Fuzia tackles taboo subjects. Credit: Fuzia

It is giving access to these resources at the heart of the social networking sites brand: “Happiness is Fuzia”.

Varma echoes the comments and adds: “With Fuzia lounge and mobile app the world has become accessible for many women right from the palm of their hands. You do not need to pay a fee to be a member, and there are no restrictions to the content we publish for access.”

The co-founders are proud of their platform’s track record of ensuring that people can express themselves without being judged.

“With the security of no-bullying policy and judgment-free usage at our platform, many topics are discussed which otherwise would go untold. We strictly monitor content, and professional advice is often given as live sessions and information board posts from experts,” Varma said.

Women, who often use online platforms for information on every topic from religion to subjects seldom spoken about find easy access to reliable data on the Fuzia website.

Fuzia ensures that subjects often considered taboo are included in their daily content. This includes menstruation, sexual issues, safe sex, LGBTQ matters, teen and tween topics, sexual harassment, and domestic abuse.

They ensure that people know how to seek help if they require it and substantially impact helping those who are suicidal or are seeking help for mental health issues.

The website hosts regular live sessions where industry experts take live questions and give their inputs.

The developers at Fuzia have pinpointed what women want from a digital platform. They have developed technologies that focus on creating products and virtual environments where women feel included and safe. As a by-product, it has assisted with women becoming employed and skill sharing. Fuzia’s platforms include training – it is here that may of Fuzia own staff have been recruited. Others have found ways to turn their hobbies into livelihoods with the platform’s support in terms of shoutouts and campaigns and Fuzia provided a stepping-stone for them to explore new career paths.

The World Economic Forum’s founder, Dr Klaus Schwab, remarked: “Achieving gender equality is necessary for economic reasons. Only those economies (that) have full access to all their talent will remain competitive and prosper. But even more important, gender equality is a matter of justice. As a humanity, we also have the obligation to ensure a balanced set of values.”

When women are locked out of digital products, businesses lose customers, and product development gets hampered. The founders of Fuzia believe that Fuzia can lessen the gap in the digital divide and gender inequality.

This article is a sponsored feature.

 

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Contamination of rivers and streams by mine waste in the vicinity of the Panguna copper mine in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea. Credit: Catherine Wilson

By Catherine Wilson
CANBERRA, Australia, Jan 4 2021 (IPS)

Local communities in the vicinity of the abandoned Panguna copper mine, have taken decisive action to hold the global mining multinational, Rio Tinto, accountable for alleged environmental and human rights violations during the mine’s operations between 1972 and 1989.

The mine operated in the mountains of central Bougainville in Papua New Guinea until 1989.

The complaint by 156 residents was lodged with the Australian Government in September by Australia’s Human Rights Law Centre and subsequently accepted in November, paving the way for a non-judicial mediation process.

“We and the communities we are working with have now entered into a formal conciliation process with Rio Tinto facilitated by the Australian OECD National Contact Point and talks with the company will begin very shortly,” Keren Adams, Legal Director at the Human Rights Law Centre in Melbourne told IPS.

Rio Tinto was the majority owner of the Panguna mine through its operating company, Bougainville Copper Ltd, with a 53.8 percent stake. However, 17 years after it began production in 1972, anger among indigenous landowners about contaminated rivers and streams, the devastation of customary land and inequity in distributing the extractive venture’s profits and benefits triggered an armed rebellion in 1989. After the mine’s power supply was destroyed by sabotage, Rio Tinto fled Bougainville Island and the site became derelict during the decade long civil war which followed.

The mine area, which is still controlled by the tribal Mekamui Government of Unity, comprising former rebel leaders, hasn’t been decommissioned and the environmental legacy of its former operations never addressed.

Now, according to the complaint, “copper pollution from the mine pit and tailings continues to flow into local rivers … The Jaba-Kawerong river valley downstream of the mine resembles a moonscape with vast mounds of grey tailings waste and rock stretching almost 40 km downstream to the coast. Levees constructed at the time of the mine’s operation are now collapsing, threatening nearby villages.”

Gutted mine machinery and infrastructure are scattered across the site of the Panguna mine in the mountains of Central Bougainville, an autonomous region in Papua New Guinea. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

There are further claims that contamination of waterways and land is causing long-term health problems amongst the indigenous population, such as skin diseases, diarrhoea, respiratory illnesses, and pregnancy complications.

Helen Hakena, Director of the Leitana Nehan Women’s Development Agency in Bougainville’s main town of Buka, fully supports the action taken by her fellow islanders.

“It is long overdue. It is going to be very important because it was the big issue which caused the Bougainville conflict. It will lay to rest the grievances which caused so much suffering for our people,” Hakena told IPS.

The Bougainville civil war, triggered by the uprising at the mine, led to a death toll of 15,000-20,000 people.

The people of Bougainville believe that Rio Tinto has breached the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises by failing both to take action to mitigate foreseeable environmental, health and safety-related impacts at the mine and respect the human rights of the communities affected by its extractive activities. The Human Rights Law Centre claims that “the mine pollution continues to infringe nearly all the economic, social and cultural rights of these indigenous communities, including their rights to food, water, health, housing and an adequate standard of living.”

“While we do not wholly accept the claims in the complaint, we are aware of deteriorating mining infrastructure at the site and surrounding areas and acknowledge that there are environmental and human rights considerations,” Rio Tinto responded in a public statement.

“Accepting the AusNCP’s ‘good offices’ shows that we take this complaint seriously and remain ready to enter into discussions with the communities that have filed the complaint, along with other relevant communities around the Panguna mine site, and other relevant parties, such as Bougainville Copper Ltd, the Autonomous Bougainville Government and PNG Government,” the statement continued.

In 2016, Rio Tinto divested its interest in Bougainville Copper Ltd, the operating company, and its shares were acquired by the PNG and Bougainville governments. Simultaneously, the corporate giant announced that it rejected corporate responsibility for any environmental impacts or damage.

Panguna mine’s copper and gold await political settlement before extraction can resume. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

Mineral exploration in Bougainville in the 1960s, followed by the construction of the Panguna open-cut copper mine, occurred when the island region was under Australian administration. It would subsequently become a massive source of internal revenue Papua New Guinea, which was granted Independence in 1975. During its lifetime, the Panguna mine generated about US$2 billion in revenue and accounted for 44 percent of the nation’s exports.

The mining agreement negotiated between the Australian Government and Conzinc Rio Tinto Australia in the 1960s didn’t include any significant environmental regulations or liability of the company for rehabilitation of areas affected by mining.

There has been no definitive environmental assessment of the Panguna site since it was forced to shut down. However, about 300,000 tonnes of ore and water were excavated at the mine every day. In 1989, an independent report by Applied Geology Associates in New Zealand noted that significant amounts of copper and other heavy metals were leaching from the mine and waste rock dumps and flowing into the Kawerong River. Today, the water in some rivers and streams in the mine area is a luminescent blue, a sign of copper contamination.

Bougainville residents’ action comes at the end of a challenging year for Rio Tinto. It is still reeling from revelations earlier this year that its operations destroyed historically significant Aboriginal sacred sites, estimated to be 46,000 years old, in the vicinity of its iron ore mine in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. The company’s CEO, Jean-Sebastien Jacques, has subsequently resigned.

Nevertheless, Adams is optimistic about the corporate giant’s willingness to engage with Bougainville and PNG stakeholders.

“In the first instance, we hope that this non-judicial process will help to facilitate discussions to explore whether Rio Tinto will make these commitments to address the impacts of its operations. If not, then the communities will be asking the Australian OECD National Contact Point to investigate the complaint and make findings about whether Rio Tinto has breached its human rights and environmental obligations,” the Human Rights Law Centre’s Legal Director said. A full investigation, if required, could take up to a year.

Ultimately, the islanders are seeking specific outcomes. These include Rio Tinto’s serious engagement with them to identify solutions to the urgent environmental and human rights issues; funding for an independent environmental and human rights impact assessment of the mine; and contributions to a substantial independently managed fund to enable long term rehabilitation programs.

Otherwise, Australia’s Human Rights Law Centre predicts that “given the limited resources of the PNG and Bougainville governments, it is almost inevitable that if no action is taken by Rio Tinto, the environmental damage currently being caused by the tailings waste will continue and worsen.”

 

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Only positive discrimination can help persons with disabilities and other vulnerable groups to access to the job market. Credit: UNDP, Nepal

By Krishna Gahatraj and Simone Galimberti
KATHMANDU, Nepal, Jan 4 2021 (IPS)

In Nepal, a dominating culture traditionally representing the elites, the so-called higher castes of the society according to the Hindu culture, still endures and prevails.

As consequence access to power is escaping those who really need a chance to get it most, those disenfranchised and disempowered.

Persons with disabilities, members of the dalits that according to the Hindu mythology are considered lower castes and often treated as ‘untouchable’, together with indigenous communities and certainly women have considerable fewer chances.

The ongoing pandemic is surely exacerbating this divide with even less job opportunities being available, pushing them furthest behind at the bottom of the society. How can we change such inequitable status quo from the perspective of someone so far excluded from power?

A comprehensive quota system applicable also in the job market would offer an important steppingstone towards a truly inclusive and just nation. If you are one of them your chances at getting employment are truly slim.

This is mainly because of structural discrimination that is still prevailing in our society that blocks you from emerging through multiple barriers: lack of quality education and accessibility, a constant sense of not belonging together with other invisible constraints that make your journey towards self-empowerment daunting if not impossible.

If against all odds a person from a disadvantaged group happens to get good education and develop her skills, her chances at getting a well-qualified job will be incredibly small in comparison to others from dominant groups. We should not be surprised after all.

Despite having their rights now enshrined in a new constitution nominally founded on inclusion and equality, persons from such groups are still systematically discriminated on daily basis. As consequence, persons with disabilities like other vulnerable groups are always left behind from accessing the same opportunities comparing to other privileged counterparts.

Credit: UNDP, Nepal

In some cases, the discrimination is overt and consciously made, but in many others, it happens unconsciously, based on old prejudices that fuels peoples’ mindsets. As baffling as it can be citizens from vulnerable groups are never able to meet all the expectations and requirements. The bar is always higher for them.

A major issue is that disability and caste are still viewed as uncomfortable subjects to be dealt with at work place no matter the qualification, skills and potential of candidates from minority groups traditionally discriminated.

Hence, the institutional barriers set by employers, and overall by society, must be challenged, assuring equal access for those citizens whose rights to equality have been systematically discriminated.

The prevailing tokenistic approach for improving works force diversity and inclusion will never bring a transformative change in our structures, systems and behaviors and we cannot just wait for a more sensitive corporate leadership to emerge. When the leadership does consciously discriminate, evidence-based grievances and complaints cannot find a safe channel of readdress.

As consequences many job prospects from marginalized groups stop even applying.
How can we question, challenge and reverse these discriminatory attitudes at work place? A well designed affirmative legislation framework is the only option available together with the right economic and social policies uplifting the economy and the society.

The existing quota for minorities groups are exclusively applicable to public sector and often are not enforced and disregarded.

For example, legal provisions to ensure adequate representations of persons with disabilities in the elected legislatures were never enforced and the mandatory employment quota of five per cent for persons with disabilities as per the Civil Service Act is scarcely implemented.

First, we need to ensure such existing protections are going to be fully applied but this won’t be enough. We also need an affirmative framework for the private sector, including not for profit and developmental work, that rather than been seen as a drag to the recovery, can be a propeller for more dynamic job market.

An economy that will be more open and welcoming to minorities will be a stronger one, that will help the country to graduate to middle income country by 2030. Positive discrimination laws that takes due account of the intersectionality nature of the problem are needed if we want to change the society and ensure that even the most marginalized citizens, can have a fair shot at life.

A more inclusive economy is not a zero-sum game. A stronger and more inclusive economy means that there will be more opportunities for everybody but achieving that also implies a recognition that we need to address and revert the recurrent barriers.
The dominating class must accept their responsibilities and play their part.
It might be hard to believe the fact that the decision to hire someone might at the end depend on your family name or disability.

Turning the country into a more diverse and inclusive nation is choice that will have long term benefits. A stronger quota system enforceable also in the private and not for profit job market can make this happen.

 

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Excerpt:

Krishna Gahatraj is a disability and social inclusion expert and activist; Simone Galimberti is Co-Founder of ENGAGE, a not-for-profit NGO working on youth’s social inclusion with a focus on disability rights in Kathmandu.

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Agricultural mechanisation can reduce work burden, increase prosperity and enhance diets. Credit: Marc-André Boisvert/IPS

By External Source
Dec 29 2020 (IPS)

Agricultural mechanisation is on the rise in Africa, replacing hand hoes and animal traction across the continent. While around 80-90% of all farmers still rely on manual labour or draught animals, this is changing, driven by falling machinery prices and rising rural wages. During the last couple of years, tractor sales grew by around 10% annually.

A look at the history of today’s mechanised countries shows that a widespread replacement of manual labour with mechanical power can have large socioeconomic and environmental implications.

In our latest study, we explored how mechanisation could change the face of African farming and rural areas. It’s important to ensure that mechanisation can be accompanied by policies that harness its potential and minimise potential negative effects.

Mechanisation can reduce work burden, raise prosperity and enhance diets. But there are also challenges such as soil erosion, deforestation and women’s access to tractor services. Identifying these challenges provides an opportunity to prevent them from arising, through agricultural research and appropriate policy action

To understand the effects of mechanisation, we collected data in 87 villages in Benin, Nigeria, Mali and Kenya. These villages were chosen as examples because they’ve already experience mechanisation. We conducted 129 focus group discussions with 1,330 rural residents. They identified various ways that mechanisation affected farming, rural life and nature.

The insights from the 87 villages revealed the great transformative power of agricultural mechanisation. Mechanisation can reduce work burden, raise prosperity and enhance diets. But there are also challenges such as soil erosion, deforestation and women’s access to tractor services.

Identifying these challenges provides an opportunity to prevent them from arising, through agricultural research and appropriate policy action.

 

Consequences of using tractors

Our study focused on the use of tractors for land preparation as this was the most commonly mechanised activity across the case study countries. Preparing land is labour-intensive and is usually the first activity to be mechanised. Participants were asked to mention positive changes directly related to mechanisation. They then identified subsequent changes. What they told us formed a picture of a chain of impacts.

Overall, we found that mechanisation has more far-reaching agronomic, environmental and socioeconomic consequences than commonly assumed.

On the upside, it frees men, women and children from heavy agricultural work. This gives them time to do other things, like running non-agricultural businesses or going to school.

Mechanisation also helps to overcome labour bottlenecks, a well-recognised constraint to rain-fed agriculture. This allows people to cultivate more land, as 61% of the respondents reported. In Mali, one farmer said:

Many farmers have land that they can’t farm, it is let as fallow. With the tractor, the land is farmed and produces volumes of crops beyond the consumption capacity of the household.

Using a tractor also improves the timeliness of agriculture. Farm activities can be completed at the optimal time, which raises yields. This was noted by 72% of all respondents. The overall increase in agricultural production contributes to enhancing food security and reducing poverty.

On the other hand, 58% of the respondents noted that mechanisation can undermine long-term soil fertility, in particular when the disc plough is used. They said the use of heavy tractors can trigger soil erosion and compaction. In Benin, one farmer reported:

Tractor increases soil compaction given the weight… This is followed by the problems of flooding and erosion, which considerably reduce fertility and consequently the yield.

Another concern is deforestation. Cultivating more land can mean losing trees on a large scale. Even clearing trees from fields so that tractors can operate there reduces biodiversity and makes the soil more susceptible to rain and wind erosion. In Mali, one farmer reported:

Trees are destroyed to enable the tractor to work comfortably. This exposes the land.

Some effects are highly context-specific, such as employment effects. In Benin, where mechanisation was associated with area expansion, this greatly raised the demand for labour to carry out the non-mechanised parts of farming. Here, no unemployment effects were reported, confirming a pattern from countries such as Zambia.

In Nigeria, where fewer farmers expanded land sizes, 48% reported job losses. Employment effects can be non-direct as well. Many rural residents reported that the rising prosperity of farmers due to mechanisation leads to positive spill-overs to non-farmers such as blacksmiths, carpenters and hairdressers.

As with most new technologies, mechanisation has benefits for some but not for others. While other studies have found that smallholder farmers have less access to mechanisation, this was only mentioned by 15% of the respondents. But mechanisation is less accessible for women compared to men. This was reported in all countries but it varied: 71% of women in Mali shared this perception but only 5% of women in Benin.

 

Managing the consequences

Most negative effects are not inherent to farm mechanisation and can be addressed with complementary agronomic practices and adequate policies. Soil erosion can be reduced with conservation agriculture, which protects soils by replacing heavy disc ploughs with less soil-disturbing rippers or direct seeders and continuous soil covers.

Deforestation can be minimised with careful land-use planning, for example, by protecting land that is particularly valuable for climate change mitigation, biodiversity, and wildlife.

Entry points to ensure that women benefit from mechanisation may comprise campaigns showing women role models using tractors, supporting women’s mechanisation groups and developing knowledge and skills.

With the right policies, countries can harness the potential of mechanisation and manage challenges. This can ensure that mechanisation contributes to an African agricultural transformation that is sustainable from a social, economic, and environmental perspective.

Thomas Daum, Agricultural Economist, University of Hohenheim

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

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Miscarriage is the most common reason for losing a baby during pregnancy. It happens for up to 15% of women who knew they were pregnant.. Credit: UNSPLASH/Claudia Wolff.

By Ifeanyi Nsofor
ABUJA, Dec 29 2020 (IPS)

Recently, Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, wrote a piece sharing about her miscarriage. I knew, as I clutched my firstborn child, that I was losing my second, she wrote. She is part of a growing list of celebrities who have publicly shared their experiences with miscarriages.

Model Chrissy Teigen also recently shared the pain she and her husband singer John Legend felt about the miscarriage of her third pregnancy. While celebrities may make news for sharing their personal grief, they are not alone in experiencing it.

Miscarriage is the most common reason for losing a baby during pregnancy. It happens for up to 15% of women who knew they were pregnant. According to World Health Organization, a baby who dies before 28 weeks of pregnancy is referred to as a miscarriage, and babies who die at or after 28 weeks are stillbirths. Most miscarriages are due to chromosomal anomalies. The risk of miscarriages increases with age.

No matter when it occurs, however, nor how old the pregnant woman is, a miscarriage exerts huge mental stress on the women and their families.

"This is one part many women who have gone through loss are never asked or speak of. Reading hers, I remember mine. We all just learn to live with it. If I will ever write a book, I will of mine"

When I tweeted about Markle’s piece,  Abuja-based Martha Ngodoo responded to my tweet – “This is one part many women who have gone through loss are never asked or speak of. Reading hers, I remember mine. We all just learn to live with it. If I will ever write a book, I will of mine”.

After reading Ngodoo’s tweet, I was compelled to reach out and hear her story. She said she experienced both miscarriage and stillbirth. She is now a 40-year-old mother of three.

Her first experience was a stillbirth that happened 16 years ago during her first pregnancy when she was 24 years old. This was a case of a poorly managed preeclampsia (high blood pressure in pregnancy). She went into labor and was rushed to the hospital. She was in labour for 72 hours. The medical team tried to induce labour using oxytocin but was unsuccessful. Her dead baby was eventually pulled out by hand in an assisted delivery.

Her second experience was a miscarriage which happened five years after. She was aged 29 years then and the miscarriage took place at her twenty-second week in pregnancy. She had a fever during this pregnancy. One night, she woke up with the urge to urinate. When she attempted, her baby came out in bits. She was then rushed to the hospital and the baby was completely expelled. It was a horrible experience, she said.

Both experiences made Ngodoo wonder what she had done to deserve such pain, twice. Though her husband was very supportive, she was worried about giving him dead babies from her pregnancies. Some cultural beliefs made this more difficult. Her husband suggested they move into his parent’s home so she could get additional support. However, this turned out to be very unhelpful. For instance, her father-in-law wanted her to continue life as if nothing happened after the stillbirth.

Ngodoo is stronger now and after many years and three successful pregnancies, she is able to talk about her experiences without feeling sad. When I asked her what she recommended for helping women deal with the pain of miscarriages and stillbirth, she shared three suggestions.

First, don’t tell a woman that it is “okay” when she loses a pregnancy and dismiss what she’s been through. Women undergo physical and psychological changes during pregnancy. They develop deep attachments to their unborn babies and losing one is painful. It is okay for a woman who has lost a pregnancy not to feel okay.

Fourteen years after, Ngodoo still wonders what her daughter would be like now if the pregnancy did not end in a stillbirth.  She still does not know where her daughter was buried. These are thought that still plague her mind, even though she is not as devastated as she once was. She has learnt that talking about such experiences allows victims to exhale and then allow the healing process to begin.

Second, women that lose pregnancies need mental health support. Ngodoo wants more women to receive the kind of mental health support that would enable them to speak about their experiences.  A way to achieve this is through training counsellors to lead support groups for victims.

These support groups could be at communities, health facilities or embedded within professional associations. There are lessons from the UK-based Miscarriage Association. The association has a network of support volunteers, who have been through the experience of pregnancy loss themselves and can offer real understanding and a listening ear. This is done physically or virtually, through Zoom meetings.

Third, families of victims of miscarriage should be safe havens, especially when others may not have even known about the pregnancy, let alone the loss. Sadly, this is not always the case.

Ngodoo lived with her in-laws (in the family house) after her wedding. She feels her in-laws should have understood her loss better and not attempted to get her to resume normal activities immediately. She wishes visitors to the house wouldn’t have told her that she should carry on with her life because she is not the first woman to lose a pregnancy.

Ngodoo is now a mother to a daughter and two sons. Her daughter is 7 years old and her sons are 13 years and 10 years respectively. She describes her two sons as rainbow babies – born immediately after miscarriages. They are the sunshine that we are blessed with after a loss, she said.

With support, women can begin to heal after miscarriage. When women feel strong enough to share their miscarriage stories, it inspires others. The Duchess of Sussex is inspiring women by sharing her story. This should be the norm.

 

Dr. Ifeanyi McWilliams Nsofor is a graduate of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. He is a Senior New Voices Fellow at the Aspen Institute and a Senior Atlantic Fellow for Health Equity at George Washington University. Ifeanyi is the Director Policy and Advocacy at Nigeria Health Watch.

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The main plant of the Belo Monte hydroelectric power plant has a capacity of 11,000 megawatts, to which 233 more megawatts are added from the secondary plant. The complex cost twice the initial budget, equivalent to more than 10 billion dollars when it was built. It also faces difficulties such as the delay in the construction of the transmission line that will carry energy to the southeast of Brazil, inefficiency in generation and higher than expected social and environmental costs. CREDIT: Marcos Corrêa/PR-Agência Brasil

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec 28 2020 (IPS)

“We are no longer familiar with the Xingú River,” whose waters govern “our way of life, our income, our food and our navigation,” lamented Bel Juruna, a young indigenous leader from Brazil´s Amazon rainforest.

“The water is no longer at its normal, natural level, it is controlled by the floodgates,” she explained. The giant floodgates are managed by Norte Energia, a public-private consortium that owns the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant whose interest is using the river flow for profit.

Built between the middle and lower sections of the Xingú River, in the eastern Amazon, Belo Monte takes advantage of a 130-kilometre U-shaped curve in the river, called the Volta Grande."For the Juruna people, the impact is not only on food, but there has also been a heavy impact on our culture, which is fishing, taking care of the river that offers food, income and navigation to go to the cities, visit neighbouring communities and have fun. It is what brings joy to our lives." -- Bel Juruna

A 20-km artificial channel diverts most of the flow, in a shortcut that connects to the end of the curve, at an 87-metre waterfall. The shortcut kept the Volta Grande – where there are 25 communities, including two legally protected indigenous territories – from flooding.

The new project replaced the initial idea dating to the 1970s – which would have created a conventional 1,225-square-kilometre reservoir that would have submerged the entire Volta Grande – with two smaller reservoirs totalling 478 square kilometres. The first retains water before the curve and diverts it to the channel that forms the reservoir that feeds the main power plant, which produces 11,000 megawatts of electricity.

The second dam, with a plant that generates up to 233 megawatts, holds the floodgates that release water into the Volta Grande, which almost dried up, bringing other types of impacts for the riverbank population.

The Belo Monte complex, with the third largest power plant in the world, is planned to generate just 4,571 megawatts of firm energy on average.

This low level of productivity, of only 40 percent of installed capacity, is explained by the fact that it is a run-of-river plant whose flow varies from more than 20,000 cubic metres per second in the rainy season – which lasts a few months in the first half of the year – to less than 1,000 metres per second in some of the driest months.

The waters of the river, divided between its natural course and the channel, proved to be inefficient when it came to maintaining the level of electricity generation intended by Norte Energia and the energy authorities and at the same time meeting the vital needs of the people of the Volta Grande.

“We no longer know how to navigate the Xingú River, which channels to pass through, because Belo Monte closes and opens the floodgates whenever it wants to,” said Bel, a member of the indigenous people known as Juruna, who call themselves Yudjá, which means “the indigenous people of the river.”

A group of workers looked like ants given the size of the site, in 2015, during the construction of the main plant of the Belo Monte hydroelectric power plant, when the machines and turbines were installed to generate 11,000 megawatts of electricity. The plant produces only 40 percent of its installed capacity and could further limit its productivity in the face of the deforestation of the Xingú River basin, which covers some 531,000 square kilometres. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

The Xingú, one of the largest Amazon tributaries, 1,815 kilometres in length, is particularly rough in its middle section, with many visible and submerged rocks, islands and islets, and both deep and shallow channels. Navigation is dangerous and requires practical knowledge and familiarity, which have been thrown into chaos by the low water levels and the changes in the natural low and high-water cycles.

“We want enough water to flood the ‘igapós’ (blackwater swamp forests seasonally inundated with freshwater) where fish and turtles can breed and feed during the winter, to fatten up and maintain their weight in the summer,” demanded Bel, who took her ethnic group’s name as her surname, a common custom among indigenous people in Brazil.

Fish and the yellow-spotted river turtle (Podocnemis unifilis), a species of freshwater turtle abundant in the Amazon, are important sources of protein for the people of the Volta Grande, especially the Juruna people, fisherpersons and people who work on boats.

“But it is life itself that is at risk, not just us indigenous people; it is nature that is deprived of the water cycle – the trees, the fish and other animals,” Bel told IPS in a Whatsapp dialogue from her village, Miratu, on the left bank of the Volta Grande.

The struggle of the Juruna people, which they say they are waging for humanity as a whole, was given a boost thanks to a new assessment by the government’s environmental agency, IBAMA, in December 2019.

The agency acknowledged that the scant water released by the hydroelectric plant does not ensure “the reproduction of life” in the Volta Grande ecosystem or “the survival of the local population.”

A chicken coop in the Miratu village, inhabited by Juruna indigenous people, was flooded along with other buildings when the Norte Energia company, owner of the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant, released excess water into the Volta Grande section of the Xingú River. “Today the floodgates control the flow,” rather than the natural cycles of the river, explains indigenous leader Bel Juruna. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

For that reason, IBAMA wants to increase the water in the “reduced flow section”, where it is about 20 percent of the previous normal flow as outlined in the so-called “consensus hydrograph”, which defines the monthly flows in the river’s natural channel, based on what was considered necessary to keep the ecosystem alive in 2009.

Citing data analysed since 2015, when Belo Monte filled its reservoirs, Ibama technicians pointed to the need for a better distribution of water between the production of electricity and the sustenance of life.

Ibama’s environmental analysts recommended a provisional hydrograph for this year with a major increase in volume for the Volta Grande in the period from January to May, especially in February (from 1,600 to 10,900 cubic metres per second), March (from 4,000 to 14,200 m3/s) and April (from 8,000 to 13,400 m3/s).

For the future, Norte Energia is to present studies to create a definitive hydrograph.

But the top officials in IBAMA delayed the proposed measures, and after that the company challenged them in court. It lost in the first and second instance and failed to comply with the demands in force in October and November.

The attorney general’s office decided to intervene and ordered IBAMA to draft sanctions against Norte Energía for non-compliance with the provisional hydrograph, the flows required for 2021 to enforce the precautionary principle, and measures to ensure that the company carried out the complementary studies to create the long-term hydrograph.

A strong water flow in the first months of the year and “for at least three months” is necessary for fish and turtles to be able to breed and feed, said Juarez Pezzuti, a professor of biology at the Federal University of Pará who is an expert on turtles.

Bel Juruna is a leader of the Miratu village, belonging to the Juruna people, in the Volta Grande of the Xingú River in the eastern part of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. The young woman protests the changes in the river that have disrupted the life of the riverbank communities since the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant was built. And ironically the plant has begun to show that it is energy inefficient. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

“Increasing the flow only in April is not a solution. It is essential to have a volume of water that floods extensive forest areas, to the necessary level and at the proper time, for example, for the larvae to become fry and for the food chain to develop normally,” he explained to IPS by phone from Ananindeua, where he lives, in the Amazonian state of Pará.

For life along the Xingú River, more serious than severe droughts in the dry season, or “summer” in the Amazon, is “a low level of rainfall in the winter,” he said.

The battle is facing a crucial moment, because the actions taken by IBAMA – unexpected under the far-right government of President Jair Bolsonaro, which has worked against environmentalism – have been opposed by the power industry’s regulatory agency and by the Ministry of Mines and Energy, which claim that modifying the hydrograph would cause energy insecurity and higher costs for consumers.

Pezzuti believes that whatever the outcome of this dispute, Belo Monte is doomed to face increasing difficulties in terms of economic viability due to the worsening of droughts in the Xingú basin caused by climate change and intense deforestation upstream.

The crisis of 2016, when the Juruna indigenous people complained that there were fewer and fewer fish and that they were “skinny” due to the drought caused by the El Niño weather phenomenon, was a warning for the future, he said.

Since the approval of the mega hydroelectric project in 2009, numerous critics, including environmental authorities, indigenous people, university researchers and energy experts, have warned about the risks of the business itself, in addition to the social and environmental damage.

The project, which was inaugurated on Nov. 27, 2019, once the 18 generating units of the main plant were completed, has been highly praised for the innovative channel. But it turned out to be a deceptive solution, both for the company and for the affected population, which has suffered irreversible damage.

“For the Juruna people, the impact is not only on food, but there has also been a heavy impact on our culture, which is fishing, taking care of the river that offers food, income and navigation to go to the cities, visit neighbouring communities and have fun. It is what brings joy to our lives,” said Bel Juruna.

Related Articles

• Indigenous People in Brazil’s Amazon – Crushed by the Belo Monte Dam?
• Belo Monte Dam Marks a Before and After for Energy Projects in Brazil
• Fishing Families Left High and Dry by Amazon Dams

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By Anis Chowdhury
SYDNEY, Dec 24 2020 (IPS)

What a challenging year 2020 has been! A year of living dangerously – “Tahun vivere pericoloso”- perhaps these words of late President Soekarno of Indonesia are the best description.

Fortunately, I managed to remain sane, reading and writing op-eds (mostly about the pandemic, here, here).

Anis Chowdhury

I began the year 2020 with an interview with New Age (Dhaka, 12 Feb.), headlined, “We need to Democratise Politics” where I highlighted the perils of growing inequality and how it could be a greater threat than the evolving pandemic for the human race, interacting with the climate crisis and advancements in biotechnology and artificial intelligence. The pandemic seems to have accelerated the process.

The Economist described the year of “Great Lockdown”, when the entire world was shut down, as “the year when everything changed” – the lead title of The New York Times columnist, Gail Collins’ book When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present (2009).

When the facemask not only became an emblem of the year, but also of a frightening new age, many pointed to fatal flaws in the neoliberal paradigm that came to dominance since the early 1980s with the Thatcher-Reagan onslaught on the post-World War II social contract that respected workers’ right and promised full employment and universal provisioning of essential public goods, and unleashing of greed (recall the 1987 movie “Wall Street”, where Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko captured the essence of neoliberalism, “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good”).

It was refreshing to hear the torch-bearer of corporate capitalism, Klaus Schwab, say to TIMES, “the neoliberalist … approach centers on the notion that the market knows best, that the ‘business of business is business,’ and that government should refrain from setting clear rules for the functioning of markets. Those dogmatic beliefs have proved wrong”.

Hence, Schwab argued, “We must move on from neoliberalism in the post-COVID era”, and acknowledged, “Free-market fundamentalism has eroded worker rights and economic security, triggered a deregulatory race to the bottom and ruinous tax competition, and enabled the emergence of massive new global monopolies. Trade, taxation, and competition rules that reflect decades of neoliberal influence will now have to be revised”.

Agreed Francis Fukuyama, who celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of socialist experiments with his The End of History and the Last Man. “a certain set of ideas about the benefits of unregulated markets … had a disastrous effect… it’s led to a weakening of labour unions, of the bargaining power of ordinary workers, the rise of an oligarchic class …that … exerts undue political power”. Thus, he thought, “socialism ought to come back”, meaning “redistributive programmes that try to redress this big imbalance in both incomes and wealth. He further said, “if there’s anything we learned from the financial crisis it’s that you’ve got to regulate the sector like hell because they’ll make everyone else pay”.

Thus, it was encouraging to see the advocates of neoliberalism, such as The Financial Times pen an editorial reminding the readers of the core of the post-WWII social contract, “to demand collective sacrifice you must offer a social contract that benefits everyone”.

It was also heartening to see the IMF’s Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva move swiftly to arrange debt relief for low-income countries in an innovative way which is superior to the G20’s mean offer of debt suspension to be re-paid fully with accumulated interest obligations (no surprise not many takers). It was a music to hear debt hawks, such as Carmen Reinhart, the Chief Economist of the World Bank, advise, “First you worry about fighting the war, then you figure out how to pay for it”. The Bank also “paused” its controversial Doing Business Report that encouraged a “beauty contest” of deregulation in the “race to the bottom” after it could no longer defend its data manipulation in favour of right-wing regimes.

So, “when everything changed”, there was a great hope of change in the way we organise economies and societies, and respond to common threats to humanity; that low-paid workers would be recognised for their essential services; that the rent-seeking activities of the rentier class would be restrained; that the widening disparities in income, wealth and opportunities would be reversed; that there would be inclusive multilateralism recognising differentiated responsibility in collective global response; that no one or country would be left behind; and the list grows.

However, not everyone was so sanguine. Simon Mair of the University of Surry, for example, contemplated four possible post-COVID world: a descent into barbarism, a robust state capitalism, a radical state socialism, and a transformation into a big society built on mutual aid. He believed, “versions of all of these futures are perfectly possible, if not equally desirable”. It all depends on the choice we make and the decisions that our political leaders take.

Amartya Sen believes that “a better society can emerge from the lockdowns” as it happened after WWII; but he is concerned that “in the policies against the present pandemic, equity has not been a particularly noticeable priority…Instead, the focus has been on drastic control and sudden lockdowns … with little attention paid to labourers who lose their jobs or the many migrant workers, the poorest of the poor, who are kept hundreds of miles from their homes”.

Meanwhile Luke Cooper and Guy Aitchison of LSE list four dangers ahead: ‘deglobalisation’ takes a nationalist form; less democratic participation, more centralisation; surveillance state and erosion of human rights; inequality goes unchallenged.

I am not a fan of Tony Blair; but I tend to share his eerie feeling, when he says, “for the first time ever I’m troubled about the future”. He fears, “COVID-19 will usher in a world where insecurity and unpredictability constitute the new normal. Everything that was relevant and present before COVID will be there afterwards, except intensified and accelerated… to produce a lot of hardship with the burden falling often on the most vulnerable”.

I have reasons to be spooky. I list a few:
Vaccine nationalism rules forgetting that we defeated small-pox that has been one of the major causes of death and blindness for centuries in less than a decade through unprecedented global cooperation at the height of the Cold war.

Governments remain beholden to Big Pharmas in opposing the waiver of patent rights, falsely arguing that patent rights are needed for innovation, and ignoring the fact that we won against polio with a vaccine without patent.

Corporate bosses shamelessly paid themselves fat bonuses and used tax-payers’ pandemic relief money to pay dividends, and buy-back shares, while millions lost jobs and livelihoods.

Yet governments are offering more corporate tax cuts and further removing job and wage protections, instead of standing up to corporate interest, ignoring the fact that these are the very policies that contributed to widening disparities, sluggish growth, stagnating productivity and chronic fiscal crises.

Meanwhile billionaires have become richer and millions are pushed back to poverty and precarious living.

Governments have missed the opportunity to reboot and accelerate the achievement of sustainable development goals. The pandemic has shown that we can live on less and do not have to over-crowd cities.

But governments have failed to facilitate the millions of people who moved to villages and rural towns to stay by taking jobs and services there, and designing adjustment measures; governments did not grab the opportunity to fix urban bias and initiate regenerative economies.

Governments and policymakers are refusing to recognise that both existential threats – the climate crisis and the pandemic – although appear to be “environmental” or “natural” problems, they are socially driven.

Climate crisis is caused by society’s decision to over-consume and over-produce, the very factors that are destroying natural habitats of wild-lives and bringing humans in close contact with virus-carrying animals.

Tackling both pandemic and climate crisis would be much easier if we cut or cease our hedonic life-style and nonessential economic activities

Meanwhile, Nobel Laureate economist Michael Spence is advocating the return of structural adjustment era conditionalities for countries seeking help from the Bank and the Fund, ignoring the findings of the Bank’s Growth Commission, he chaired, that fair-seeming, “good-intentioned” conditionalities produced “lost decades” of development.

Another Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz is advocating Brady-style bond buybacks using the IMF and donor money, while these monies are urgently needed for fighting pandemic, ignoring that the debt landscape has changed significantly since Brady with more varied players and that such debt buybacks in the past benefited the creditors.

Sadly, they are not offering a roadmap for a new more prosperous, inclusive and sustainable future.

In my adopted country, Australia, the government is foot-dragging and refusing to take bold and ambitious green-house gas emission targets despite witnessing worst bushfires and extreme weather events in history. It has done nothing to protect gig workers despite four Uber-eat delivery riders killed in road accidents taking food to people in lockdown. It is contemplating reforms of the industrial relations laws that are bound to make the life of essential workers like fire-fighters, nurses, cleaners and food-delivery persons more precarious.

My country of dreaming, Bangladesh, is now listed as new ‘autocracy’ where the government has become intolerant, arresting and harassing journalists and anyone exposing its misdeeds, and corruptions even when it involved fake COVID testings, and relief money and goods. Extra-judicial killings and forced disappearance have become instruments of control, while all the state institutions, including the judiciary, the police and bureaucracy are politicised.

Nevertheless, there are some rays of hope as we welcome 2021 in the spontaneous mass mobilisation in Thailand and Belarus against despots, in Chile’s referendum to meet people’s democratic aspirations, in impulsive resistance in India against the farm laws promoting corporate interest, in Indonesia’s mass protest against the controversial, omnibus bill that assaults workers’ rights; in defeating imperialist plots in Bolivia; in imposing taxes on Argentina’s wealthy and rich; in Zambia’s decision to default that defied debt-hawk’s scare-mongering.

Hope is an incurable disease that keeps us alive and moving. Be safe and well. Let us ponder over the lessons of the crises; the relationship with our governments; social contract and trust; measures of societal progress; and how our economies be more distributive and regenerative or sustainable.

 

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By External Source
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 23 2020 (IPS)

While 2020 will be remembered most for the way COVID-19 changed our lives in nearly every way and in every part of the world, we made some strides for women’s rights and gender equality.

From new laws addressing domestic violence and equality to women’s critical leadership during the global pandemic, join us to celebrate some key moments for gender equality this year.

Women leaders shine in the face of COVID-19

Governments across the world worked to respond to COVID-19, with research suggesting that in countries where women lead, the responses were quicker, more effective and stronger. In countries with women leaders, including New Zealand, Germany, Finland, Bangladesh and more, the quick and decisive actions of the women in charge led to lower cases and lower deaths.

Even though COVID-19 has demonstrated the important role of women in leadership and decision-making, as of December 2020, there are only 22 countries with women serving as Heads of State and/or Government worldwide. As we look ahead to building back better in the future, women’s leadership is critical to success.

US elects first woman vice-president

In November, Kamala Harris became the first woman vice-president-elect of the United States, shattering barriers that have kept men entrenched at the highest levels of American politics for many years. Following her swearing-in in January 2021, she will join the ranks of other female vice-presidents around the world, in countries including Bulgaria, Nicaragua, Liberia, Costa Rica, Venezuela, The Gambia, South Sudan, and others.

US President-elect Joe Biden also announced an all women senior communications team, a first for the White House.

Scotland makes period products free for all

The Scottish parliament voted unanimously in favour of the Period Products bill in November, making Scotland the first country to allow free and universal access to menstrual products –including tampons and pads – in public buildings including schools and universities.

It marks a significant victory for the global movement against period poverty which impacts women and girls in many ways. With 12.8 per cent of women and girls worldwide living in poverty, the cost of menstrual products and added taxes leave many without ways to safely manage their periods.

Mother’s names to be included on children’s IDs in Afghanistan

In Afghanistan, the President signed a new law stating that for the first time, mothers will be named on their children’s birth certificates and identification cards, making it easier for women to get education, healthcare and other documents for their children. The change will especially benefit women who are widowed, divorced or otherwise raising children on their own.

The new law comes after a year-long social media campaign #WhereIsMyName, advocating for women’s rights and empowerment in the country.

World leaders reignite the vision of the Beijing Platform for Action

In October, co-hosted by the President of the General Assembly and UN Women, leaders came together to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for action, the most comprehensive roadmap for advancing gender equality.

Over 100 countries committed to concrete actions that would accelerate the realization of gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls everywhere. Some of the commitments include eliminating discriminatory laws, social norms and gender stereotypes; matching commitments to gender equality with adequate financing; strengthening institutions to promote gender equality; harnessing the potential of technology and innovation to improve women’s and girls’ lives; and regularly collecting, analyzing and using gender statistics.

Looking ahead, all eyes are on the robust actions and commitments to fast-track implementation on gender equality, at the Generation Equality Forum in Mexico and France in 2021, and through the Generation Equality Action Coalitions.

Equal pay for women footballers in Brazil and Sierra Leone

Brazil and Sierra Leone have joined Australia, England, Norway and New Zealand in publicly committing to equal pay for women and men footballers. Globally, the gender pay gap stands at 16 per cent, meaning women workers earn an average of 84 per cent of what men earn. For women of colour, immigrant women, and women with children, the difference is even greater.

In Sierra Leone, the commitment to equality covers appearance fees and winning bonuses for the national women’s team. Similarly in Brazil, female national players will be paid the same as male national players in preparation periods and games.

Kuwait’s domestic violence law signals hope for women

In September, Kuwait issued a new law on protection from domestic violence, following years of activism from Kuwaiti women’s rights groups. The law creates a national committee to write policies to combat domestic violence and protect women. It also establishes shelters and a hotline to receive domestic violence complaints, provides counseling and legal assistance for survivors, and allows for emergency protection orders to prevent abusers from contacting their victims.

Although the new family protection law is a step forward for the country with high levels of domestic abuse, much work remains in implementing the law, filling protection gaps and repealing discriminatory laws.
Worldwide, as the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the ever-present pandemic of violence against women surged dramatically.

Calls to helplines increased up to five-fold in some countries during the first weeks of the coronavirus outbreak. Projections show that for every three months of lockdown, an additional 15 million women could experience violence. Laws and policies matter right now, to curb violence against women and recover from the social and economic fallouts of COVID-19.

TIME’s first Kid of the Year celebrates girl power and women in science

Fifteen-year-old scientist and inventor, Gitanjali Rao, was selected as TIME magazine’s first-ever ‘Kid of the Year’. From an early age, Rao thought about how to use science and technology to create social change, as motivated by her desire to introduce positivity and community to the world around her.

She developed Kindly, an app and a Chrome extension based on artificial intelligence that is able to detect cyberbullying at an early stage. Rao is currently working on an inexpensive and accurate means of detecting bio-contaminants in water.

New Zealand appoints first indigenous woman Foreign Minister

Nanaia Mahuta became the first indigenous woman appointed as Foreign Minister of New Zealand in November. Mahuta, who is Maori, and was first elected to parliament in 1996, previously made history as the first woman member of parliament to wear a moko kauae, or traditional tattoo, on her chin.

New Zealand also has one of the most diverse parliaments in the world, led by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, with almost half of lawmakers being women, and around 10 per cent of incoming parliamentarians being members of the LGBTQ community.

Two women take home Nobel Prize in Chemistry

In October, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on a way of editing DNA, known as Crispr-Cas9. The two scientists led efforts to turn molecules made by microbes into a tool for customizing genes.

Dr. Charpentier and Dr. Doudna’s joint win marks the first time in history that the prize has gone to two women, and they are only the sixth and seventh women to win Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Originally published on UN-Women.Medium.com

 

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Malay hawker prepares satay (seasoned and skewered meat grilled over hot charcoal). © Mohamad Hafiz, contestant of #OurHawkerCulture photography contest 2019, Singapore, 2019

By SWAN
PARIS, Dec 23 2020 (IPS)

Cuisine formed a notable portion of the latest inscriptions on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, with hawker food in Singapore and couscous traditions in North Africa being celebrated.

The two were among 29 elements inscribed when the intergovernmental committee for the safeguarding of the world’s Intangible Cultural Heritage met virtually Dec. 14 to 19, hosted by Jamaica and chaired by the island’s Minister of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport, Olivia “Babsy” Grange.

“This year … the experience that we all had in sharing and experiencing the cultures of different countries made us realize that in spite of the pandemic, in spite of us being apart, we were still able to share in each other’s culture, and what it did for all of us was to bring us closer together,” Grange said at the end of the meeting.

The inscription of Singapore’s “hawker culture, community dining and culinary practices in a multicultural urban context” marks the first time that the Southeast Asian island state has an element inscribed on the List.

Hawker culture is “present throughout Singapore”, with these food centres seen as a kind of “community dining room”, officials said. Here, people from diverse backgrounds dine and mingle, in an atmosphere of conviviality and enjoyment of the scents and flavours on offer.

Hawker centres grew out of street-food culture, housing cooks who provide meals in a bustling communal setting with different stalls. The centres have, however, seen closures and fewer customers because of the Covid-19 pandemic, making the 2020 inscription a bitter-sweet one.

 

Couscous © Centre national de recherches préhistoriques, anthropologiques et historiques (CNRPAH), Algérie, 2018.

 

The couscous submission – which focused on the knowledge, know-how and practices pertaining to the production and consumption of the dish – was made by Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia, and it naturally sparked an online debate about the absence of other countries that are known for this food, and about favourite recipes.

The inscription encompasses “the methods of production, manufacturing conditions and tools, associated artefacts and circumstances of couscous consumption in the communities concerned,” according to UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization).

Originating from the Berber culture of Algeria and Morocco, couscous is now eaten around the world, accompanied by a variety of vegetables and meats – depending on the region, the season and the occasion.

It comes “replete with symbols, meanings and social and cultural dimensions linked to solidarity, conviviality and the sharing of meals,” UNESCO said.

Food was also indirectly highlighted with the inscription of “Zlakusa pottery making, hand-wheel pottery making in the village of Zlakusa”. This comprises the practice of making unglazed food vessels that are used in households and restaurants across Serbia, originating from a tiny village in the west of the country.

Olivia “Babsy” Grange, Jamaica’s Minister of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport.

Some gastronomes claim that dishes prepared in Zlakusa earthenware have a unique taste, and the pottery’s “close association with the village of Zlakusa and its environs reflects its close link with the natural environment,” the inscription stated.

Away from food, several music and art practices were also inscribed, and the meeting saw three elements added to the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding, while another three were added to the Register of Good Safeguarding Practices.

The latter “facilitates the sharing of successful safeguarding experiences” and “showcases examples of the effective transmission of living cultural practices and knowledge to future generations,” UNESCO said. Elements inscribed this year include the Martinique yole (a light boat), whose tradition goes back several centuries in the Caribbean.

The committee stated that a “spontaneous movement to safeguard these boats developed while they faced the threat of disappearing” and that the safeguarding programme has grown over the years. The main purpose is to “preserve the know-how of local boat builders”, transmit expertise on sailing, and create a federation to organize major events.

In a year that has seen the cultural sector hit hard globally by the Covid-19 pandemic, the inscriptions brought some cheer to the 141 countries attending and the more than one thousand people participating in the virtual meeting. During an online press briefing on Dec. 18, committee chairperson Grange noted that Jamaica was of course also affected by the health crisis, but that the population was very “resilient”.

“It impacted aspects of our culture, primarily the entertainment industry, and also various sectors in the creative industry,” she said in response to a question. “It has impacted the economy … and our creative people who depend on their creative works to earn an income. However, we were still able to take our music to the world, through technology.”

Grange said that hosting the huge virtual meeting of the Intangible Cultural Heritage committee posed some technological challenges, but nothing that could not be overcome. She said it showed the importance of working together, of sharing cultures, and of finding ways to overcome obstacles to “ensure that we continue to use culture to unite the world.”

This year saw the highest number of multi-country nominations – 14 inscriptions “testifying to the ability of intangible cultural heritage to bring people together and promote international cooperation,” Grange said.

“These are great achievements for all of humanity,” she declared, recalling her country’s pride and the global celebration when reggae music of Jamaica was added to the List in 2018.

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UN Secretary-General António Guterres briefs the media on the socio-economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

By Farhana Haque Rahman
ROME, Dec 23 2020 (IPS)

Despite its grim record of multiple natural disasters and a deepening climate crisis, one could be forgiven for looking back on 2019 with a degree of nostalgia. There is no disguising the extent of the calamity wrought this year by COVID-19, yet as we approach the end of 2020 we may also draw strength from positive developments emerging.

No review of 2020, as seen through the eyes of IPS reporters and contributors around the world, could begin without paying our respects to the nearly 1.5 million people who have died from the coronavirus, many of them care workers trying to save the lives of others.

But the pandemic, declared as such by the World Health Organization on March 11, has inflicted much wider damage in exposing the frailties of governments, societies, economies and health systems, particularly in those countries that chose to ignore the warnings and advice of the WHO and played down the crisis.

The US administration in particular sought to hide its shortcomings by attacking and ultimately withdrawing from the WHO, while in contrast Rwanda, for example, had set up a COVID-19 joint task force even before the pandemic was declared.

But coming on top of the climate emergency, conflict and economic decline, COVID-19 has brought at least seven countries to the brink of famine, leading the UN to earmark emergency funding for Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, South Sudan and Yemen. But with international solidarity fraying at the seams, the UN is facing a massive funding shortfall for the estimated 250 million people needing humanitarian aid around the world.

Any hopes that the pandemic might persuade warring parties to cease fire have been dashed as well. New conflicts have broken out and old ones have resumed. Thousands are believed to have died in fighting in the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan. The Horn of Africa is being destabilised again as Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, winner of the 2019 Nobel peace prize for making peace with Eritrea, launches an offensive against the region of Tigray, driving refugees into South Sudan where the World Food Program, the 2020 Nobel peace laureate, is struggling to cope.

This year, the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, was to have been a landmark moment for gender equality, but the coronavirus pandemic has instead widened inequalities for girls and women across every sphere. While men are more likely to die from COVID-19, women are facing the full blow of the socio-economic fallout as well as seeing a reversal in equality gains made over the last two decades, according to an all-women panel of international thought leaders, meeting virtually for an IPS Webinar.

Susan Papp, Women Deliver’s managing director for Policy and Advocacy, told IPS: “To achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and have a strong response and recovery to COVID-19, we must apply a gender lens in order to address the unique needs of girls and women, and leverage their unique expertise.”
Instead, violence against women and girls, particularly domestic violence, rose sharply in many countries.

Racism too was back on the front pages with a vengeance, driven by police killings in the US of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor which sparked a wave of mostly peaceful but sometimes violent demonstrations across the world, fuelling the Black Lives Matter movement and demands for an end to racial injustice.

Prompted by the killing on May 25 of George Floyd in Minneapolis, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres made an impassioned speech, saying the values of reason, tolerance and mutual respect were being challenged by nationalism, irrationality, populism, xenophobia, racism, white supremacism and different forms of Neo-Nazism.

With communities under such stress, large economies shrinking and freedom of movement restricted, a fall in harmful global warming emissions was one dividend to be hoped for under lockdown. Alas, not much at all. The World Meteorological Organization, releasing its annual greenhouse gas bulletin in November, said accumulated CO2 levels in the atmosphere had clearly increased despite a cut in emissions of between 4.2% and 7.5%. “The lockdown-related fall in emissions is just a tiny blip on the long-term graph,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.

Against such a dire backdrop, and with hopes of a reprieve dashed by a second wave of COVID cases and the new variant in the final months of 2020, IPS reporters continued to chronicle the valiant efforts of aid workers, activists, scientists and politicians, many well away from the COVID limelight.

In Afghanistan, Education Cannot Wait, a global fund to deliver schooling to vulnerable children in crisis situations, got classes back on track post-lockdown for some 122,000 children, nearly 60 per cent of them girls and many living in remote, hard-to-reach areas, even as violence was increasing in the country.

With Africa acutely aware of the need to establish food sustainability and security for its rapidly growing population, the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) pressed on with its Enhancing Capacity to Apply Research Evidence (CARE) project, with funding from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD),enabling 80 young African scholars to develop workable policies to expand agribusiness and youth involvement.

Improving nutrition is vital to tackling the Non-communicable diseases which have been critical in driving the death toll from the coronavirus. The need to address nutritional challenges through food systems has never been so critical, enhancing the importance of the UN 2021 Food Systems Summit, supported by the Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition which has ranked 67 countries in The Food Sustainability Index developed with the Economist Intelligence Unit.

The battle against communicable diseases goes on too, even tackling persistent and now relatively rare relics such as leprosy. While falling worldwide, cases have increased in Brazil in recent years however, and Yohei Sasakawa, WHO Goodwill Ambassador for Leprosy Elimination, insists he will keep working for a world where people affected by leprosy and all those suffering from various forms of social discrimination all have a place in inclusive societies.

This too should have been the year of COP26, the critical climate crisis conference which thanks to COVID-19 will be staged in 2021 instead, in Glasgow. Some governments have hesitated to step up their Paris Agreement commitments to cut emissions but the Dominican Republic’s President Luis Abinader arrived at his inauguration in August in an electrically driven car as a symbolic gesture of his intentions, working with the support of The Climate Action Enhancement Package (CAEP), an initiative of the NDC Partnership.

Devastating wild fires in Australia which continued into 2020 and the summer eruption of vast blazes from California to Washington state were a stark reminder that whatever happens with the pandemic, the world is still failing to act coherently in tackling the climate emergency.

Which takes us to those year-end signs of hope. Having defeated Donald Trump in the US elections, president-elect Joe Biden appointed former secretary of state John Kerry as climate envoy for when the new Democratic administration takes office in January. Four years ago, on behalf of the US, Kerry signed the Paris climate agreement, which Trump left and Biden has promised to rejoin, along with US membership of WHO. Kamala Harris, a California senator, will become the first female vice president of the US.

Biden’s victory and the news that COVID-19 vaccines by Pfizer are now being being distributed in a number of countries have shown high rates of efficacy leading us to hope that the pandemic will be in retreat within months – though a tough northern winter still lies ahead – and the US will once again soon play a leadership role on the international stage.

High levels of global cooperation are required, not just in ensuring that vaccines are distributed all over the world, but also in preparing for the next pandemic which could prove even worse.

Coverage of Covid-19 naturally dominated the news in 2020 but lockdowns around the world did little to slow the killings of reporters in the most dangerous of countries, with Mexico remaining among the worst. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 40 journalists and media workers were killed around the world in the first 11 months of 2020, compared with 51 in all of 2019.

Globally 274 journalists were jailed in 2020.

The toxic polarisation of US politics, as witnessed by the unedifying spectacle of Trump’s refusal to concede while making unsubstantiated accusations of electoral fraud, may outlive the pandemic, however. Populist-driven politicians like Trump and Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro have also corrupted public faith in scientists and expertise in general, at the risk of undermining a broad take-up of vaccines once approved by regulatory authorities.

This disastrous decline in respect of evidence-based truth came to the boil in 2020, fuelled by a rampant and mostly uncontrolled social media (even if Trump’s tweets did have health warnings attached).

Cynical manipulations of public opinion – be they for political or financial gains – make it even more vitally important that IPS Inter Press Service continues to give a voice to the voiceless and fosters evidence-based reporting of development news with a strong sense of social responsibility. In this IPS plays a unique role among news outlets.

Farhana Haque Rahman

While thanking our network of dedicated reporters around the world and our editors for their work in 2020, special mentions go to IPS correspondent Neena Bhandari who won the NSW Premier’s Multicultural Communciation Award for the Best Print Report for a two-part series for our reports on Modern Slavery/Human Trafficking: http://www.ipsnews.net/2020/05/modern-slavery-asia-pacrific-fuelled-widespread-poverty-migration-weak-governance-part-1/
https://www.ipsnews.net/2020/05/forced-marriage-organ-trafficking-rife-asia-pacific-part-2/
And to Ghana correspondent Albert Oppong Anash for winning the Ghana Journalists Association Science Award for his report on dangerously high levels of aflatoxins in crops:
https://www.ipsnews.net/2019/10/ghanas-grains-groundnuts-face-increasing-contamination-amid-increasing-temperatures/
And finally to our correspondent Jewel Fraser who has produced a number of podcasts for IPS and credits our support for her win of this bursary for emergingproducers: https://www.wcsfp.com/entries/emerging-producers

As we stumble into 2021 preparing to rebuild and relaunch, the UN Secretary General has clearly defined the mission that lies ahead and the science and tools to help us.

“Our planet is broken,” Guterres warned in his State of the Planet speech on December 2, defining the “central objective” of the UN in 2021 to fight the climate and biodiversity crises which will involve building a global coalition to reduce emissions to net zero by 2050.

All nations are called upon to end fossil fuel finance and subsidies, shift the tax burden from tax payers to polluters, integrate the goal of carbon neutrality into all economic and fiscal policies, and help those who are already facing the impact of climate change.

The 2021 agenda has to be ambitious and radical. As Guterres said: “The science is clear…. We face a moment of truth.”

The author, a former senior official of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the International Fund for Agricultural Development, was Director General of IPS Inter Press Service, between 2015-2019. She is Senior Vice President IPS and Executive Director IPS North America.

 

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Yasmine Sherif, Director of Education Cannot Wait

By Yasmine Sherif
NEW YORK, Dec 23 2020 (IPS-Partners)

As Mohammed, a Palestine refugee with impaired vision who attends a specialized UNRWA programme for children with disabilities, told us during our mission to Lebanon a week ago: “I was worried. I was worried that I could not continue my education because the programme was going to be cut. Now I have hope that I can continue to study and make my dream come true.” As 2020 comes to a close and we reflect on Education Cannot Wait’s mission this past year, two things stand out: hope and action. Amidst multiple crises around the globe, exacerbated by the COVID-19 global pandemic, hope has been the fuel driving us all forward to take action to deliver to those left furthest behind. Indeed, while hope is life-sustaining for a young girl or boy enduring conflict, forced displacement and disaster, it cannot be sustained without action.

Yasmine Sherif

With this universal imperative in mind, the entire Education Cannot Wait team and I take this opportunity to express our sincere appreciation and deep gratitude to our all ECW stakeholders – from our Executive Committee and High Level Steering Group to all our in-country host-governments, local communities, UN and civil society partners. Thanks to you, thanks to our strategic donor partners, governments, private sector and foundations alike, and thanks to our partners in-country, we have been able to sustain hope through action.

ECW has delivered crucial financial resources which were quickly translated into real and concrete action to achieve measurable results and sustainable impact at an unprecedent speed. It is thanks to all our partners globally and locally that the ECW community has been able to work so effectively with a spirit of collaboration, cooperation and coordination to deliver on Sustainable Development Goal 4 in the most difficult circumstances.

The ECW community stands for hope and action. In 2020, ECW approved more financing under the First Emergency Window than 2018 and 2019 combined! The entire ECW First Emergency Reserve, coupled with top-up support, totalling $60 million was released from April onwards to respond to COVID-19, reaching 33 crisis-affected countries, supporting 85 different grantees to enable them to deliver on the ground. Of this, $22 million was exclusively dedicated to refugees and internally displaced.

Working together, the ECW COVID-19 response reached over 400,000 girls and boys, including adolescents, who were already affected by conflicts, forced displacements and climate change. If ECW had had more emergency funds at its disposal, many more could have been reached with unprecedented speed in our collective quest to respond with “the fierce urgency of now,” as Martin Luther King Jr once said.

ECW’s investments aligned with national COVID-19 strategies, and financed a broad range of interventions including communications campaigns to help prevent further spread of the virus, enhanced water, sanitation and hygiene facilities, distance education, remote learning and support to get children back into school when facilities re-open. As a priority, it entailed affirmative action to reach girls, provide psychosocial support to both students and their teachers, and target investments for children and youth with disabilities.

At the same time, as the ECW community was responding to COVID-19, we also pursued and reached our targets of 10 new multi-year resilience programme (MYRPs), supporting humanitarian-development coherence in the education sector in protracted crisis countries. At the time of this writing, the ECW Executive Committee has approved five MYRPs: Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nigeria, amounting to almost $70 million in seed funding. A further three MYRPs with a total of over $33 million in seed funding for the Sahel, including Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, are expected to be approved before the end of the year.

This will bring the total to eight countries in 2020 with seed funding amounting to over $100 million, as well as two regional multi-year investments for the Sahel and South America respectively. These investments will reach over 900,000 crisis-affected girls and boys, including adolescents, with over 60% of those being girls and adolescent girls.

More needs to be done though. Since ECW investments serve as seed-funds to leverage additional funds, an additional $233 million is required to fill the funding gaps for these joint programmes in Central Sahel ($117 million) and South America ($116 million), alone. Provided that these are fully funded, the ECW community will be empowered to deliver holistic, ‘whole-of-child’ and inclusive quality education through humanitarian-development coherence and local ownership towards real results and learning outcomes. In this newsletter, we will hear from Colombia’s Minister of Education, H.E. María Victoria Angulo and Burkina Faso’s Minister of Education and National Literacy, H.E. Stanislas Ouaro, our government partners in South America and Central Sahel.

Government partners, communities, local organizations and our multilateral partners in-country are under severe pressure and funding shortage to manage and deliver in already existing crises, in addition to the COVID-19 crisis. It was for this reason that ECW fielded a visit to Lebanon in December 2020 and will visit the Sahel in January 2021.

Our in-country missions help us learn first-hand of the challenges, show solidarity, see the results and plan ahead for deepened support. In Lebanon, we witnessed ECW’s earlier investment together with UNESCO and the Ministry of Education and Higher Education, other UN agencies like UNRWA, UNHCR and UNICEF, as well as the work of a most impressive civil society consortium, composed of Save the Children, the Norwegian Refugee Council, AVSI and SAWA, one of the many local civil society organizations benefiting from ECW’s investments. All of them are working tirelessly close to the refugees and host-communities were serve. All of them bring hope through action.

In Lebanon, the consequences of the blast in Beirut on 4 August this year provided us with another eye-opener. Combined with the hosting of nearly 2 million refugees – the largest per capita refugee hosting country in the world, in addition to a growing number of impoverished Lebanese host-community children and youth – Lebanon suffered a shock with a long-lasting impact. Lebanon requires urgent international solidarity and action. It used to be a middle-income country, but multiple crises have thrust Lebanon into its worst economic crisis in decades. According to the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for West Asia (UNESCWA), 55% of Lebanon’s population now lives below the poverty line.

Lebanon, the Sahel and South America are among the many countries and regions in the world severely affected by either conflict, forced displacement and climate-induced disasters – all further exacerbated by COVID-19. They are in dire and urgent need of international solidarity in the form of financial support, including ECW investments to deliver a quality education and build back better.

As we enter into 2021, the coming year must be the year when we recognize and reward the hope held on to by millions and millions of children in emergencies and protracted crisis, who are now also suffering the added burden of COVID-19. Their stoic and life-sustaining hope must inspire our non-negotiable, uncompromising and ultimate commitment to action in 2021. If not, what is there left to inspire us to action?

 

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The post Hope Thrives on Action appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Yasmine Sherif, Director of Education Cannot Wait

The post Hope Thrives on Action appeared first on Inter Press Service.